of her and Sethe, pregnant with child, follows shortly afterwards on foot. As Sethe is running through the woods she gives birth to her fourth child, a baby girl that she names Denver. Eventually Sethe and Denver arrive at 124 and shortly afterward, a party is thrown at 124 by Baby Suggs. The other people in the town appear to be jealous of Baby Suggs' good fortune, and in their jealousy do not tell her, or Sethe, that a white man is coming down the road towards 124. The white man turns out to be Teacher, who has come to take Sethe back to the farm from which she has escaped. In order to protect her children from her prior life (her past) Sethe takes drastic measures and attempts to murder her own children. She kills her second youngest child, and injures the others. When Teacher finds that what she's done he decides that he cannot recover Sethe and heads for home without her stating that she is not valuable to him anymore. After his departure, Sethe is picked up by the local authorities for murdering her child but is eventually released. Consequently, it is under the circumstances of Sethe's determination to avoid her past life that her child departs this world.
             When the reader first comes into the story it is past the event of her Beloved's death. In fact, Sethe does not even remember her daughter's name, but she does remember what the priest said at the funeral. The priest said "Dearly Beloved" hence, the name Sethe now associates with her dead daughter. In addition, the specter of Beloved has taken to haunting the house at 124 and people now experience a sense of depression as they enter 124. Later in the story, the ghost of Beloved inexplicably returns to Sethe as a young woman by appearing outside the house one day. She even uses the name that Sethe has ascribed to the ghost "Beloved." After a while Sethe does eventually makes the connection between the name of her visitor and t...