Toni Morrison's Research Notes for Beloved

Before entering the ship, the enslaved girl is lifted up by men in order to look over an odd thing—a specially built free-standing door frame that has been set up in the open air. She describes three successive visions of the next world and its inhabitants: a ‘Paradise’ beautiful and green like a garden, where the girl’s dead family is already wait

My plight drove me to the typewriter. I sat before it, overwhelmed with grief for Arturo Bandini. Sometimes an idea floated harmlessly through the room. It was like a small white bird. It meant no ill-will. It only wanted to help me, dear little bird. But I would strike at it, hammer it out across the keyboard, and it would die on my hands.

His mind started to unspool backward;