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Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on. Only once has it been possible for him to stay in one spot- with a woman, or a family- for longer than a few months. That once was almost two years with a weaver lady in Delaware, the meanest place for Negroes he had ever seen outside Pulaski County, Kentucky, and of course the prison camp in Georgia. (1) |
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The majority of Beloved is set in rural Ohio. Because Ohio was part of the North, the specific geography of the state plays an important role in making it possible for Sethe and her “family” to reunite as one. She is not able to move on into the future and have a life with Paul D. unless she is able to come to terms with the past. Although technically at this point in history slavery has been abolished, Sethe and Denver would not have been able to live as freely and luxuriously with and house of their own if they still lived in the South. Both she and Paul D. found their freedom by navigating the land from the South to the North; Paul D. followed the flowering trees, while Sethe escaped through the forest. |
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You said they stole our milk. I never knew what it was that messed him up. That was it. I guess. All I knew was that something broke him. Not a one of them years of Saturdays, Sundays and nighttime extra ever touched him. But whatever he saw go on in that barn that day broke him like a twig. (2) |
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In our society, we are socialized to believe that men, especially in the context of marriage, are the protectors and providers for the family. Due to the circumstances, Halle is entirely dependent on Mr. Gardener, his white slave owner. He is unable to provide financially for his family, nor can he protect his wife at a crucial moment. In this scene where Halle witnesses these young men stealing Sethe’s milk, he immediately becomes emasculated. Paralyzed by the danger that he faces in attempting to save his wife, he is incapable of living up to his duty as a man and a husband. Halle is cannot to forgive himself for this, and it is ultimately what destroys him. The young men who sexually assault and emotionally rape Sethe do so in order to gain power and control, using this attack as a strategy not only to assert power over her specifically, but also more importantly to annihilate and shame her husband, only further rendering him powerless. Thought of in the context of a community, this tactic, whether it is conscious or not, not only destroys morale, but also begins to break down the foundation of a whole community. The institution of slavery ruins the Sweet Home men in the worst kind of way- it rips apart their families and prostitutes their women, steals their childhood, and as if they had anything of worth left, robs them of any kind of masculinity that they still possess. It is completely impossible for the Halle to be the kind of man he wants to be when his entire existence is dependent on the mercy of another human, making him utterly vulnerable. |
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A man ain’t nothing but a man,’ said Baby Suggs. ‘But a son? Well now, that’s somebody.’ It made sense for a lot of reasons because in all of Baby’s life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. So Baby’s eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children (3) |
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What Baby Suggs seems to be implying in this paragraph is that a man is nothing by himself, but a son is part of something; he is part of a family. Some mother’s son, is another woman’s husband, is another persons brother or father; he does not exist alone. This novel is set in a time period, a few years after the Civil War, which was an intensely pivotal time in the chronicle of Slavery. This book explores the emotional, spiritual and, physical devastation that is brought about by slavery. One of the many evils of this period was that it broke apart black families, gradually destroying the infrastructure of the traditional family unit. This form of oppression was a strategic method used by the white slave owners in order to destroy a sense of unity and strength that the slaves could have gained from staying with their families. The devastation continues to haunt the former slaves even in their freedom. Even after some families were able to reunite, the truth of the harsh realities of slavery remained with the men and women who suffered long after they were “free”. Although they were no longer physically slaves, they were emotional slaves to the memories of their horrific past. A case can be made that, in the course of the book, Halle, Baby Suggs, and eventually Sethe were all pushed beyond the breaking point of rational people, due to the enormous amount of pain that they all were forced to endure, thus putting them in emotional states impeding their abilities to function normally in everyday life. Although Sethe seems to be on her way being healed at the end, they all lost their sense of self and were permanently scarred emotionally and physically by the years of damage that slavery was inflicted upon them. |
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124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old- as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). (4) |
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The world in which Morrison creates for her characters
in Beloved continually blurs the line between reality and the supernatural.
She pushes the limits of our current understanding of the world around
us. Nevertheless, her character never cease to believe each and every situation
that they are confronted with, but rather use them to understand the meaning
of the world in which they live. Sethe and her family are guided more by their own superstitions rather than by organized religion, from which they seem to distance themselves. They are living in a society that does not accept blacks as a part of the communityand where Christianity is a driving force, generally dictating how the white slave owners were to live their lives. Similar to the imposition of the supernatural onto the natural, Christianity is implicitly intertwined into society. Morrison juxtaposes Schoolteacher’s authoritarian way of living based on a sense of privilege founded on Biblical teachings and “scientific” fact, with that of the slaves on Sweet Home who are guided solely by what they know through their experiences and a sense of spirituality. This sense of spirituality becomes apparent in the revivals in the woods lead by Baby Suggs. They resemble a religious ceremony, but are really a gathering of people using song and dance to free their souls of their pain. The revivals symbolize the necessity for solidarity not only in the family but also within the community as a source of strength. Despite the lack of explicit religious connotation within the story, Morrison makes many allusions to Christianity. Although the topic of Christianity is not part of the story itself, integrated throughout the book are reoccurring themes of sacrifice, sin, forgiveness, and love, which hold biblical implications. |
