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Example: Passage from Beloved  and close reading (Angelyn Mitchell)

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Example: Passage from Beloved  and close reading (Angelyn Mitchell)

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‘Here,’ she said, ‘in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as
soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty [ . . . ] Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t lovethat either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. […] This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders thatneed arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them.The dark, dark liver—love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private
parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.’ (88-89)

A full exegesis of this passage is beyond the scope of this paper, but I do want to highlight Morrison’s intentionality in anatomizing Black bodies in this passage. Doing so allows her to recoup, reconstruct, and reclaim Black bodies in slavery as
whole, as loved, as precious. Morrison also reminds her readers of the ultimate prize—self-love—a powerful counter she offers to the oppressive and maligning nature of white supremacy. This reminder is always important as the institutions of white supremacy—what is unnamed but known “out yonder”—seeks to denigrate Black subjectivities in every possible way, as sketched here by Morrison. Morrison’s
attention to the beauty of the Black body, to the commodification of the Black body, to the spirit within the Black body, to the economy of the Black body, to the tactility
of loving the Black body, and to the totality of white supremacy’s perversities and cruelties to both the Black body and the Black psyche provides a pedagogy of American slavery and history. It also provides an object lesson of Black resistance, born of resilience, perseverance, and hope, as Baby Suggs explains how each action will counter the traumas of slavery and white supremacy. Significantly, Baby Suggs
begins and ends the sermon with affective modes of expression, reifying the power of body and spirit as a bulwark against the assaults of slavery and white supremacy.
Resilience, perseverance, and hope are the essence of Baby Suggs’s sermon in the Clearing, where readers may be renewed by her words. Mitchell, "Surviving the Pandemic: Necessary Lessons from Morrison’s Beloved," CLA JOURNAL 155

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Self-love and Ownership: Expanding on Baby Suggs and Mitchells' views of self-love

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Self-love and Ownership: Expanding on Baby Suggs and Mitchells' views of self-love

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BELOVED, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing. I didn’t have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But my love was tough and she back now. I knew she would be. Paul D ran her off so she had no choice but to come back to me in the flesh. I bet you Baby Suggs, on the other side, helped. I won’t never let her go. I’ll explain to her, even though I don’t have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her. When I explain it she’ll understand, because she understands everything already. I’ll tend her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else—and the one time I did it was took from me—they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby. Nan had to nurse whitebabies and me too because Ma’am was in the rice. The little whitebabies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left. I’ll tell Beloved about that; she’ll understand. She my daughter. (100)

To expand on Baby Suggs’ sermon, I would like to focus on the passage above. In this moment of Beloved, Morrison illustrates love as a transactional phenomenon. The relationship between self-love and ownership contradicts Baby Suggs’ preachings, wherein love must be self-actualized and independent of another person. When you claim someone as your own, as Sethe does here, love becomes disingenuous. Rather than love acting as a true sentiment, it acts as a commodity that one possesses. This point relates to our previous class discussion, where we examined Kimberly Jones’ statement that “black people don’t own anything.” Morrison makes black peoples’ lack of ownership explicitly known with the line: “...She had no choice” (Morrison 100). Evidently, this disparity relates to slavery and its “commodification of the Black Body” (Mitchell 155). As Sethe’s milk, which is “all she ever had” (Morrison 80), is “taken” from her, we can further recognize her absence of ownership; more specifically, we see her loss of possession over her own body (8). If we regard Beloved as the personification of Sethe’s milk, we can understand why Sethe would want to “claim” her. In her relationship with Beloved, Sethe reclaims the “milk that belongs to her” (100); that is to say, Sethe reclaims the little power she holds over anything--particularly, over herself. “Power” would then be a more appropriate word for Sethe’s “love.” As Sethe attempts to love Beloved, she attempts to love herself again. Mitchell’s claim that self-love is a “powerful counter...to the oppressive and maligning nature of white supremacy” connects to Sethe’s conflict (Mitchell 155). Though Sethe’s search for self-love is the result of “the oppressive and maligning nature of white supremacy,” her “recuperation, reconstruction, and reclamation” of her power becomes muddled.

In contrast to Baby Suggs’ preachings (“‘Love your heart,’” Morrison 88), Sethe heavily relies on her love for Beloved to reciprocate her love for herself. Through this transaction, Sethe simultaneously earns self-love and loses her identity. However, as soon as Beloved leaves, Sethe’s self-love escapes from her, too. Sethe’s disorientation leads her to only identify herself with Beloved. Beloved’s purpose for Sethe is merely to help her recover her identity and power. The later shift in pronouns, transitioning from “I” and “your” to “we,” reflects the interrelation of Sethe’s self-love with her love for Beloved (107). Clearly, Sethe does not fully achieve self-love from her relationship with Beloved. Sethe’s repetition of “‘Me? Me?’” (136) when Paul D. suggests, “‘She’s her best thing,’” solidifies her inability to “‘love her flesh’” (88). This moment raises the question: does Sethe ever try to love her body, or just regain ownership over it? Or, does Sethe attempt to achieve both, but in attaching her worth to another person, fail to attain anything?

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On page 174, the schoolteacher mentioned what his nephew did to Sethe, “See how he liked it; see what happened when you overbeat creatures God had given you the responsibility of – the trouble it was, and the loss”. In this instance the term creatures, let alone the concept of overbeating one is extreme in its own sense, however the term creatures proves the disconnect from seeing an African American as a human or anything worth humanity. In my head, I view creatures as monsters or werewolves, or something supernatural that must be tamed, controlled, or killed. As schoolteacher goes on to chastise his nephew about the treatment he goes on to say “you just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success”, Sethe’s actions on what she did to her children could only be seen as something a creature could do. The other nephew shouts “what’d she do that for” “just for a beating” as to negate the fact that she was beaten so severely and was unable to cope with it which removes her, once again, from situating her as a human.

I appreciate that in Mitchell’s article she mentions that Morrison provides an opportunity in Beloved to highlight “resilience, perseverance, and hope – all needed to advance possibilities for survival”. In Baby Suggs sermon, being able to cherish your flesh and body in such a way creates a resistance to those who harm and mistreat you, so, loving your body “because they won’t” is a powerful statement in and of itself. Seeing the impacts of slavery through Sethe’s trauma response when seeing those men ready to take her and her children back, as cynical as this may be, I try to see the self-less love that Sethe has for her children. Love and Black woman feminism/theory shall be designated as mutually exclusive because of “how trauma is cyclic and generational”.

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CHAPTER 3, "Kneeling in the keeping room where she usually went to talk-think it was clear why Baby Suggs was so starved for color. There wasn’t any except for two orange squares in a quilt that made the absence shout. The walls of the room were slate-colored, the floor earth-brown, the wooden dresser the color of itself, curtains white, and the dominating feature, the quilt over an iron cot, was made up of scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool—the full range of the dark and the muted that thrift and modesty allowed. In that sober field, two patches of orange looked wild—like life in the raw. Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle-green sleeves, and thought how little color there was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did. Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn she worked at fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong with that. It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it."

The body is an archive. In muscles and organs are stored the stories that make us who we are. Some of these stories are trapped within us and, when triggered, constrict us to endure fear and shame instead of embracing hope and joy. Others lay dormant, perhaps waiting for the chance to possess the body's motor functions and diminish emotional health. We are, in essence, haunted by the past if we choose not to persevere. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, the house may seem to be the force haunting Sethe's family. However, it is the stories of Sweet Home that feed the ghosts who haunt 124's living dwellers. Living without colors renders Sethe and her family susceptible to a degradation of resilience, perseverance, and hope.

"Baby Suggs was so starved for color" in her last days. After witnessing Sethe's murder of her grandchild, Grandma Baby needed the pink of a tongue or orange in her quilt to survive in the drabness of 124. Her malnutrition juxtaposes Sethe's lack of appetite for color. "It was as though one day [Sethe] saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it." Even in her death bed, Grandma Baby fought to find joy in experience. Perhaps it helped her survive as long as she did. Sethe, however, was so possessed by her past that the presence of Paul D. triggered a happiness that conjured the colorful Beloved from darkness.

Beloved was where color was not. She found solace in Grandma Baby's quilt with two orange squares "that signaled how barren 124 really was." She stayed in colorless 124, becoming the colors its residents needed. This dependance on Beloved for happiness transformed Paul D into a hermit, Sethe into a homebody, and Denver into someone willing to "forgo the most violent of sunsets, stars fat as dinner plates and all the blood of autumn and settle for the palest yellow if it comes from her Beloved." Even Beloved longed to know "if there are flowers in the dark."

To invite color into your life (through sight, food, or dress) is to choose joy over turmoil. This is survival at its finest. Those who know nothing of chakras still understand the importance of being surrounded by colors. Beloved brought color, but when she left she took it with her to the dark. She left Sethe without. Motionless as Grandma Baby in her last days, Sethe was bed-bound until Paul D reminded her that "You your best thing." There are colors within each of us. If we do not have colors to drink in, it is our responsibility to choose the possibility of seeking joy. This is how we survive the scars of our past. This is how we avoid "past errors taking possession of the present." This is how we recognize we are inherently beloved.

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“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all” (Morrison 164).

In her chapter, “Love and Death,” Nash provides multiple arguments that support Sethe killing her daughter as part of the character breaking the systemic chain of violence that slavery enforces on the family. Sethe, in Beloved, displays a pure form of love towards her eldest daughter and the idea of love is expanded upon in Nash’s writing.

On Page 115, she writes, “Black feminism is distinctive in its commitment to love as a political practice.” There is no greater form of US politics than the government’s enforcement of the highest type of capitalism that profits off of enslavement (both in the mid nineteenth century and into the present day, with prison labor and its associated laws and policies). To break free from the horrific enslavement of her family, and to ensure that her daughter is not cruelly whipped, beaten, or worse in a return to slavery, Sethe commits an act of political rebellion at an immense personal cost. Love is love, as Morrison wrote and Sethe said.

And, while the novel showcases the emotional trauma that is leftover from that incident, it again reinforces “a healthy love for our sisters and our community” as the entire village is present at the climax of the novel to help Sethe (115). Previously ostracized by the village, Sethe is gifted with help by the black community and Denver, at the end of the book, is working in the village.

This is not meant to excuse the murder of children in general (because I recognize how terrible that sounds and I’m gonna get torn apart in class), but the love that Sethe showed toward her daughter, by trying to protect her, eventually ties the community together as the novel unfolds.

Furthermore, Nash writes, “Indeed, it is our willingness to be open to a myriad forms of being known and potential alienation that makes love a site of tremendous transformation,” and that line provides the clearest lens to view Morrison’s Beloved as a story of love, turmoil, and the fallout from a love that is “too thick.”

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Jennifer Nash states, “Black feminism is preoccupied with death.  In many ways, this is unsurprising. We live in a moment where afropessimism has made black death the centerpiece of US black studies…where black feminists have continued to name mourning as ‘the condition of black life’” (111), and, “Rather than ruminate on death and its attendant affects of grief and loss…this chapter proposes love as a way forward (113).  In a similar way, Toni Morrison starts from death in order to refract the full spectrum of life, in every color, just as Baby Suggs begins to hold and feel each for the first time as she parts with the world, pondering yellow, and blue, and green, and pink (but never red).  Toni Morrison writes a book about death and calls it love.

Morrison comes to define love by showing us everywhere that it shouldn’t seem to be - yet it always is.  Despite the immense amount of trauma shouldered by each character, Morrison gives each the agency of redemption, founded powerfully in the love of self, god, and other (and that all three are the same). This type of love is objective – it does not wear frills, and it isn’t self-indulgent.  It is a wrecking force, guided by intuition and unbroken spirit, honorable simply because it is.  The love the characters each fondle and receive is factual, it is omnipresent, and it is inherent to the self, before the self even is able to realize that is has had it, and continues to exercise it, in its capacity.  It is at the bottom of what is empty, and Morrison shows us that it is always the last, lasting thing. It is a soul compass.  It is quiet, and it is deeply human. Perhaps one of the only buy-backs from a life partially lived within trauma is the luxury of awakening – being able to reach a consciousness unpermitted to those who have not been pushed; pushed so far beyond that they are able to understand what “being” truly is: “Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color in her last years.”  There comes a realization where each character arrives, however ugly, into their present moment, by and with themselves, “You’re your best thing, Sethe.  You are.”  Beloved, who spends the entire book dwelling on pain, cannot stay in the end.

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Losing Your Mother: Resilience and Trauma 

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Losing Your Mother: Resilience and Trauma 

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“What did you come back for?” Beloved smiled. “To see her face.” “Ma’am’s? Sethe?” “Yes, Sethe.” “Don’t you remember we played together by the stream?” “I was on the bridge,” said Beloved. “You see me on the bridge?” “No, by the stream. The water in the back in the woods.” “Oh, I was in the water. I saw her diamonds down there. I could touch them.” “What stopped you?” “She left me behind. By myself,” said Beloved. She lifted her eyes to meet Denver’s and frowned, perhaps. Perhaps not. The tiny scratches on her forehead may have made it seem so. Denver swallowed. “Don’t,” she said. “You won’t leave us, will you?” “No. Never. This is where I am.” (p. 88-89)

This passage is taken from a conversation between Denver and Beloved, who are discussing the possibility of their shared memory. Although Beloved’s identity is never truly known, what she can be conceptualized as is a symbol of a person, a stand-in for all slave-girls who lost their mothers. This passage is key to an understanding of her symbolism and character, this idea of shared memory—generational memory—that Beloved contains. This speaks to Mitchell’s ideas of the legacy of slavery, the ways in which it is intergenerational. The women in “Beloved” have been separated from the physicality of slavery, they have escaped the plantations and their masters, however, they will never truly be able to escape.

Mitchell’s commentary on the “lessons” that black literature teaches pays close attention to the fact that lessons of resilience and hope are crafted in order to frame survival as not just a choice, but the possibility of a choice. In the pages after the above passage, we see Denver tell her mother’s story and finally finds a connection with the girl that her mother was when she gave birth to her; therefore she is interacting with the shared memory of those before her. Denver’s understanding of her mother’s resilience in having a child allows her, and of course later looking to her memories of her grandmother as Mitchell references, (p. 244, "Go go on out the yard") to later make these same choices of resistance and perseverance, and also of love for her mother.

Looking at Beloved in the above scene, we can see her used as a symbol for this generational trauma. The points at which we see Beloved recount memories of herself as a young child or the possibly imagined memories of living in her mother’s womb, we come to understand the idea of multigenerational memory/trauma; trauma that is inherent in the lives of those whose ancestors were enslaved. Just as Saidiya Hartman explores in her story, “Lose Your Mother,” it is true for so many black children that they have spent possibly their whole lives searching for or losing their own mothers and with them their history. Sethe lost her mother, whom she never knew. Beloved, as we come to see in this passage, has returned just, “to see her face.” Denver, although she has had her mother for most of her life, slowly loses her own mother as Sethe fades away and waits for death. This loss of mother and subsequent repetitious loss of history is what Mitchell is referring to when she says that the “stories of resilience” are actually stories of the “intergenerational, embodied, and psychic legacy of slavery.”

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"Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood... The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) places. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the white who had made it... The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own" (234-235).

In this, Stamp Paid reflects on how racism and the institution of slavery dismantle the humanity of both slaves and slaveowners alike. This blatant hatred and underlying prejudice paint an animalistic picture, creating a humanity that is dehumanizing and rampant. What white people detect and then run from is their own savagery: of which they project to "the Other" (a further depersonalized representation of the Black community). It is later referenced as a "secret spread of this new kind of whitefolks' jungle" (235), where these animalistic and ravaging characteristics are displaced on the Black community they assume these qualities to; in the end, white people are the ones who hide the jungle under their skin. They are consuming themselves. They cower from the realities of the "jungle" because they fear the unknown, but are weak and realize the direct harm of the spread does not disrupt the flow of their lives in the moment: little do they know, rather tainting their souls.

Mitchell, in "Surviving the Pandemic: Necessary Lessons from Morrison’s Beloved," references the COVID-19 pandemic's disproportionate impact on Black and Brown communities due to a variety of exacerbated social determinants. Specifically, "violently racist policing, especially its embrace
of extralegal, state sanction executions, continue to terrorize Black and Brown
communities" (2). To be frank, the policing system is dominated by, catered to, and beneficial to white people. It is a system longstanding in its racist roots and is still a profession dominated by white officers (over 66 percent). I see this connection between Mitchell's assertion of the damaging impact of the pandemic and the "jungle" reflected upon in Beloved to be one of displacement. The secrecy of the "white jungle" spread relates to these social determinant factors in housing, employment, health, safety, and education that disempower Black individuals under the guise of 'fair' policy and enforcement. Just as white people in Beloved are fearful of the unknown aspects of the jungle that make it so fearful, they would rather cower underneath the protection of these policies that continue to service them, without regard for the impact on others. That is on them.

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It is safe to say that the supernatural presence in Toni Morrison’s Beloved represents more than just a ghost and a never-ending memory. In the confines of one’s home, where safety should be a guarantee, the ominous interactions with the supernatural prove that safety is never certain. I have been pondering this question for a few days – is it safe to love the supernatural? I believe the answer is yes, but I also believe Morrison uses the supernatural to push the boundaries of love in a completely different direction.

There is a greater appreciation of and desire for self-love. Angelyn Mitchell writes, “In other words, this gift of love to oneself is within one’s realm of possibility––even when little else is or seems to be. Moreover, this foundational lesson centers all three gifts––resilience, perseverance, and hope––as essential not only to surviving, but also to thriving.” (154). Over the course of the novel, Sethe gains strength and rebuilds not only the bonds with her family but also with herself. The component of self-love bleeds through, and I believe it is due to Beloved’s presence in the house on 124 Bluestone Road.

One scene that highlights the impact of the supernatural takes place when Paul D reminisces about his time at the house on 124 Bluestone Road. Morrison writes,

“…it occurred to him that what she wanted for her children was exactly what was missing in 124: safety. Which was the very first message he got the day he walked through the door. He thought he had made it safe, had gotten rid of the danger; beat the shit out of it; run it off the place and showed it and everybody else the difference between a mule and a plow. And because she had not done it before he got there her own self, he thought it was because she could not do it. That she lived with 124 in helpless, apologetic resignation because she had no choice…” (193).

At the beginning of this scene, Paul D fully believed that Sethe had never experienced the sensation or reassurance of safety. He believed she never felt safe within the walls of her own home. What Paul D came to realize was the shift in Sethe’s understanding of Beloved’s spirit. The Sethe he was visiting was no longer the one who felt trapped in the house on 124 Bluestone Road. She was no longer held captive by the spirit. Morrison continues to write,

“He was wrong. This here Sethe was new. The ghost in her house didn’t bother her for the very same reason a room-and-board witch with new shoes was welcome. This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman…talked about safety with a handsaw. This here Sethe didn’t know where the world stopped and she began.” (193).

The emphasis on discussing love resonates with me because it offers a moment of reflection and, more importantly, a moment of pride. Sethe finds herself comfortable not only in her home but also in her body. A connecting point that stands true comes from Mitchell’s article, where she writes, “Doing so allows her to recoup, reconstruct, and reclaim Black bodies in slavery as whole, as loved, as precious. Morrison also reminds her readers of the ultimate prize––self-love…” (155). I believe the emphasis on self-love promotes awareness for the present. Maybe by pushing for that feeling, Sethe was able to appreciate the memory of Beloved better while also being able to love herself.

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“Still no one else knew it, because it began inside. A flutter of a kind, in the chest, then the shoulder blades. It felt like rippling—gentle at first and then wild. As though the further south they led him the more his blood, frozen like an ice pond for twenty years, began thawing, breaking into pieces that, once melted, had no choice but to swirl and eddy. Sometimes it was in his leg. Then again it moved to the base of his spine. By the time they unhitched him from the wagon and he saw nothing but dogs and two shacks in a world of sizzling grass, the roiling blood was shaking him to and fro. But no one could tell. The wrists he held out for the bracelets that evening were steady as were the legs he stood on when chains were attached to the leg irons. But when they shoved him into the box and dropped the cage door down, his hands quit taking instruction. On their own, they traveled. Nothing could stop them or get their attention. They would not hold his penis to urinate or a spoon to scoop lumps of lima beans into ​​his mouth. The miracle of their obedience came with the hammer at dawn.” (227-228)

This account is describing the mental and physical state in which Paul D is in as he travels to his placement on a brutal chain gang.  The cruelty and inhumane nature of slavery and are evident as his body begins to fail him.  The trauma that he has endured both mentally and physically is catching up to him as he trembles throughout his entire body during the transportation to the chain gang.  The dehumanization of slavery has shattered both physically and spiritually but that does not mean he is broken permanently, as he continues to endure.  Paul D’s personal experiences being enslaved have left his body and mind only able to react accordingly when being chained or in the vicinity of guards.  He is not in control of his bodily functions yet out of perpetual fear of guards and willingness to not be seen as weak, his body does not shake during the chaining process.  It is described as obedience when his body performs while being enslaved but I view this as strength and resilience.  The despair and emasculation of being enslaved can be seen clearly when he is released into his quarters. Paul D’s survival is at stake based on his ability to perform his body reacts accordingly.