Americans live and work in the midst of architecture and abundance made possible by exterminated and enslaved people. Yet our connection to the lives of these people remains relatively absent from our written history. Slave narratives are very rare: only about one hundred survive today. Of those, only a few are first-person accounts by former slaves who ran away and freed themselves, the most prominent being that of Frederick Douglass. In researching the slave narratives that shaped the plot of her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison notes the problematic nature of firsthand accounts of slavery. They frequently avoided the most gruesome details of the experience: “Over and over the writers pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as, ‘But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate.’” How does she rend the veil to offer readers a glimpse into antebellum slavery?