Beloved

“She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible—that for twenty minutes, half an hour, say, she could have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral (and all there was to say, surely) engraved on her baby’s headstone: Dearly Beloved. But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered.”

Sethe reflects on the memory of her dead daughter’s tombstone, regretting the brevity of its message. Even after demanding sex for payment, the engraver only agreed to leave a brief inscription. Sethe gave the engraver a single word, “Beloved,” the most important and memorable part of the preacher’s speech at the funeral, even though it actually refers to the people in attendance, not the deceased. Unnamed except for that single word, the spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter calls herself “Beloved” when she takes corporeal form.

“It’s not! It’s not the house. It’s us! And it’s you!”

When Paul D arrives at 124, he asks Sethe about her way of life, especially given the ghost haunting the house. She pretends that everything is fine, which upsets Denver. Despite being immature and isolated, Denver demonstrates insight into the traumas that everyone in the house carries. According to Denver, the issue is bigger than the haunted house, encompassing their unreconciled pasts.

“I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running—from nothing, I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much.”

After Sethe tells Mrs. Garner, about being violated by the schoolteacher’s nephews, the schoolteacher punishes her by having her whipped so badly that it scars over. When Sethe runs away and encounters Amy, a white woman who helps deliver her baby, Amy tells her that the scars on her back look like a tree. Years later, as a free woman, Sethe tells these memories to Paul D and is visibly agitated when recounting them. She does not specify that one of the costs she refers to is the murder of her daughter. Paul D learns the truth from Stamp Paid later in the novel.

“Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trembled and fell into fits.”

Denver has only known a haunted house where her dead sister lives as her home. As such, she conflates the house with her dead sibling, comparing the tumultuous occurrences in the house to a child throwing a tantrum. Given her intimate relationships with 124 and her dead sister’s spirit, she easily becomes the first one to recognize Beloved as her sister come back in corporeal form.

“Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t go there. Never.”

When Sethe recounts her past, the story is never linear, clear, or specific. She tries to tell Denver about Sweet Home, where she was enslaved, but cannot muster up details or a clear narrative because of the pain associated with her enslavement. When she tells Denver “you can’t go there,” she is not referring to finding the physical place where she once was enslaved but is rather projecting her own reluctance to recall her past aloud. She represses her traumatic memories so as not to relive them in the present.

“The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind.”

When Paul D is put into a prison farm in Alfred, Georgia after trying to murder his new master Brandywine, he is chained with other Black men underground and allowed to see sunlight only when laboring at the quarry. The experience introduces him to a new form of torture, different from the enslavement at Sweet Home where he at least had some room to roam. The prison farm is intended to dehumanize and degrade imprisoned Black men until they die or become mentally unstable because of such torture. Since his experience in Georgia, Paul D has not been the same.

“For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.”

Paul D’s distinction between how a formerly enslaved Black woman loves and how a formerly enslaved Black man loves suggests a gendered way of dealing with trauma and healing. Whereas formerly enslaved Black women turn their trauma into vigilant love for their children, the men respond differently. The men love in anticipation of loss. Paul D identifies with this mode of love, noting that Sethe emblematizes the former.

“Underneath the major question, each harbored another. Paul D wondered at the newness of her shoes. Sethe was deeply touched by her sweet name; the remembrance of glittering headstone made her feel especially kindly toward her. Denver, however, was shaking. She looked at this sleepy beauty and wanted more.”

Sethe, Paul D, and Denver each have their own separate reactions to Beloved’s appearance at 124. Paul D reacts with suspicion about Beloved’s origins, given the newness of her clothing. Sethe fails to realize that it is not a coincidence that Beloved shares the name written on her dead daughter’s tombstone. Her fondness for Beloved comes from this unconscious affinity for her. Meanwhile, Denver intuitively senses that Beloved is her dead sister, as she has a particular closeness to the spirit in the house.

“Tell me your diamonds.”

Beloved suddenly turns to Sethe and demands that Sethe tell her about her diamonds, a request that is puzzling until Sethe realizes that Beloved is referring to a pair of earrings Sethe used to have. When Sethe married Halle, Mrs. Garner, her former master’s wife, gifted her a pair of crystal earrings, which she took with her when she ran away from Sweet Home. Beloved’s mention of the earrings is one of the early signs that she is Sethe’s daughter. However, Beloved is not simply a benign force but one who possesses supernatural knowledge of her mother’s memories.

“She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man.”

When Sethe is young, she barely knows her mother, since the farm where they are enslaved does not permit mothers to spend nursing time with their children. Sethe learns from one of the other women that her mother had killed her siblings. She spared Sethe, although her reasons for doing so are unclear. She gave Sethe a male name, knowing she would need masculine strength to survive as an enslaved person. Sethe will eventually repeat this history with her own children, leaving Denver as the only child without injury. However, Denver does not draw the strength to heal from masculine energy but rather from the collective power of Black women.

“She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you?”

Sethe struggles to deal with past traumas related to her enslavement and fugitive life. When Paul D reenters her life, Sethe is forced to confront her tragic upbringing, the violent events at Sweet Home, and the arrival of slave catchers that leads her to murder her child. She compares this mental unrest to a “greedy child,” much like the ghost that haunts 124 and her subsequent form as Beloved. Sethe’s traumas haunt her in the same way that the ghost in the form of Beloved does. The memories fill her with grief and render her unable to think of anything else.

“In the dark my name is Beloved.”

Beloved emerges from the world of the dead to haunt the living at 124. The “dark” in this case refers to the shadows of life in which Beloved exists. In her corporeal form, she is neither living nor dead, caught in the space between Sethe’s traumatic memories and her ability to move forward. Beloved’s rambling and nonsensical speech typically betray such double meaning in her responses.

“She is the one. She is the one I need. You can go but she is the one I have to have.”

When Denver confirms Beloved’s true identity as her dead sister, she worries for her, as she believes that Sethe is dangerous. Her mother has killed Beloved once before, and she fears that when Sethe learns of Beloved’s identity, she may do it again. However, Beloved makes clear that she does not appreciate Denver’s concern. She has her own agenda: her unhealthy obsession with Sethe.

“Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed […] and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.”

Toward the end of Grandma Baby Suggs’s life, her words of hope and collective healing take a turn toward cynicism. The cruelty of white people incites a personal betrayal from her own Black community when they neglect to inform her about the presence of slave catchers looking for Sethe. It also causes her daughter-in-law to murder her own child to avoid capture. Just when Grandma Baby Suggs thinks she can have the surviving members of her family united at last, the violence of white people takes her family and faith in her Black community from her.

“Years ago—when 124 was alive—she had women friends, men friends from all around to share grief with. Then there was no one, for they would not visit her while the baby ghost filled the house, and she returned their disapproval with the potent pride of the mistreated. But now there was someone to share it, and he had beat the spirit away the very day he entered her house and no sign of it since. A blessing, but in its place he brought another kind of haunting: Halle’s face smeared with butter and the clabber too; his own mouth jammed full of iron, and Lord knows what else he could tell her if he wanted to.”

After Sethe’s murder of her daughter, the Black community ostracizes her. Sethe in turn does not reach out to the community any longer, earning her a reputation of being prideful. When Sethe begins a relationship with Paul D, it appears momentarily that she may be able to forge kinship with someone who shares her experiences. However, Paul D’s traumatic memories trigger her own, making it impossible for her to repress her past.

“Didn’t your mother get locked away for murder? Wasn’t you in there with her when she went?”

Nelson Lord, a young male student who attends the same weekly reading and writing lessons as Denver, asks these questions of Sethe’s youngest daughter. It is how Denver learns Sethe murdered her sister. While Denver has always suspected that things were not right, Nelson’s questions force her to confront the awful truth about her mother. After Nelson’s questions, Denver never returns to the reading and writing lessons, too ashamed of what her mother has done and the town’s public knowledge of it.

“The chain that held them would save all or none, and Hi Man was the Delivery. They talked through the chain like Sam Morse and, Great God, they all came up. Like the unshriven dead, zombies on the loose, holding the chains in their hands, they trusted the rain and the dark, yes, but mostly Hi Man and each other.” 

When Paul D is imprisoned on the prison farm in Alfred, Georgia, he is placed in a chain gang with several other Black men. They are never allowed to speak to one another nor are they able to see one another in the dark underground boxes where they are kept. When the prison farm floods, the leader of the chain gang, Hi Man, sends a signal through their connected chain to let the others know that they are to swim under the bars and move upward to free themselves. The chain gang’s collaboration is a demonstration of collective survival. It foreshadows the later collective movement of Black women who gather to save Sethe from Beloved.

“This is worse than when Paul D came to 124 and she cried helplessly into the stove. This is worse. Then it was for herself. Now she is crying because she has no self.”

During a game, Beloved disappears in the shed, letting Denver believe that her dead sister has departed permanently. Beloved’s sudden absence reminds Denver that her identity has solely been tied to Sethe and her traumas that haunt the house. Denver never leaves 124 and does not know anything else beyond it. She craves Beloved’s presence, since her sisterly love gives her an identity where she has none.

“The Garners, it seemed to her, ran a special kind of slavery, treating them like paid labor, listening to what they said, teaching what they wanted known.”

White attitudes toward slavery range from abolitionism to sheer dehumanization of Black people. The Garners rely on slave labor to work their farm, but they do not exercise the type of cruelty the schoolteacher enforces when he takes over. While they treat their slaves comparatively well, the death of Mr. Garner and dwindling health of Mrs. Garner make the enslaved people susceptible to the schoolteacher’s violence. Regardless of how well the Garners treat them, the enslaved people are still property and thus victim to cruel individuals like the schoolteacher when ownership changes hands.

“She was looking at him now, and if his other nephew could see that look he would learn the lesson for sure: you just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success.”

When the schoolteacher finds Sethe in the shed with her murdered and injured children, he determines that she is mentally unfit to bring back to Sweet Home as an enslaved person. Rather than acknowledge the rape and abuse that brought Sethe to her breaking point, he still thinks of her as an animal that was mishandled. To him, Sethe is not human but merely a breeder of more enslaved people.

“He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.”

Paul D acknowledges a crucial step in healing from the traumas of enslavement. According to Sethe, the ability to love freely and without fear that one’s family or significant others will be sold or killed constitutes true freedom. While both Paul D and Sethe are free after the abolition of slavery, permitting themselves to love without fear proves to be a challenge. They are still informed by the traumatic events of their pasts.

“I stopped him […] I took and put my babies where they’d be safe.”

When Paul D confronts Sethe about the murder of her daughter, Sethe does not express regret over her actions. Instead she insists that her actions are justified, as they successfully prevent the schoolteacher and the slave catchers from returning her and her children to slavery. Sethe believes that dying is preferable to being enslaved again.

“Just about everybody in town was longing for Sethe to come on difficult times. Her outrageous claims, her self-sufficiency seemed to demand it, and Stamp Paid, who had not felt a trickle of meanness his whole adult life, wondered if some of the ‘pride goeth before a fall’ expectations of the townsfolk had rubbed off on him anyhow—which would explain why he had not considered Sethe’s feelings or Denver’s needs when he showed Paul D the clipping.”

Stamp Paid reflects on why he showed Paul D the news clipping about Sethe’s murder of her daughter years ago. While he has dedicated his life to helping fugitive enslaved people to freedom, he has also joined the rest of the Black community in ostracizing Sethe. Rather than come to her aid, he and the others have turned against her. Their justification is that she responds to their ostracization pridefully, refusing to ask for help despite her circumstances. In hindsight, Stamp Paid regrets his actions.