Exemplifying standard trauma and complex trauma, Toni Morrison’s Beloved also points to a special kind of trauma, namely, moral trauma—moral injury—as the key event. Moral trauma, compromised agency, and double-binds are exemplified and artistically transfigured. The traumatic events are transfigured in literary art. The narratives act as an inquiry into the themes of trauma, survival, transformation, and liberation. Morrison is one of the masters of conversational implicature. Conversational implicature allows the empathy to get in—become present in the text and become present for the reader engaging with the text. Morrison’s work is brought into connection with the action of the Jewish Zealots at Masada. Radical empathy is required to engage the traumatic vision of the mythical snake-haired Gorgon (Medusa) that turns to stone the people who encounter it. Radical empathy looks like the scar in the shape of a tree whipped with rawhide onto the back of Morrison’s protagonist (Sethe-Margaret). Sethe is confronted with a choice no one should have to make, but which choice cannot not be made, and that she nevertheless makes as she stares into what must have been for her an image of the Medusa, who shows up as The Four Horsemen. The reader will not get across the abyss of moral trauma without the artistic choke tree inscribed into Sethe’s back—will not get across without radical empathy. The method employed throughout this work is applied to Beloved—empathic receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness are applied to Beloved to bring forth radical empathy.