“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”

In the opening sentence of the novel, the house numbered 124 is personified as the ghost that haunts it. The ghost is Sethe’s dead daughter whom she kills in a shed when her former master and slave catchers come after her. Rather than surrender herself and her children to a life of slavery again, she tries to end her children’s lives and then her own. As a consequence of her violent act, 124 is haunted by the spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter, scaring away Sethe’s two sons who were also victims of Sethe’s actions and isolating Denver from the rest of the Black community.

“She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible—that for twenty minutes, half an hour, say, she could have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral (and all there was to say, surely) engraved on her baby’s headstone: Dearly Beloved. But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered.”

Sethe reflects on the memory of her dead daughter’s tombstone, regretting the brevity of its message. Even after demanding sex for payment, the engraver only agreed to leave a brief inscription. Sethe gave the engraver a single word, “Beloved,” the most important and memorable part of the preacher’s speech at the funeral, even though it actually refers to the people in attendance, not the deceased. Unnamed except for that single word, the spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter calls herself “Beloved” when she takes corporeal form.