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

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? 

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.”

 

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.  

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.”  

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.

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.