Perhaps no other literary work revives black slaves’ suffering in the United States as vividly as Beloved, a novel by Tony Morrison, which she published in 1987. Morrison’s descriptions of how brutally the slaves were treated are horrifying and heartbreaking. The novel takes place immediately after the Civil War, between 1865 and 1882, but it also revisits events that took place before these years as well. In 1872, Sethe, the novel’s protagonist, escapes slavery in the state of Kentucky. She crosses the Ohio River to get into Ohio, where slavery had already been abolished. She then lives with her daughter, Denver, in what she comes to understand is a haunted house. After she had escaped with her children and settled in Kentucky, the reader discovers that Sethe’s former owners come after her and capture her and her children. Terrified at the thought that her children would have to experience the unbearable suffering of slavery, she tries to kill them—she is willing to do anything to stop them from becoming slaves. She succeeds in killing her eldest daughter, while the others survive. Later, her two boys escape from home, and she is left with her youngest daughter, Denver. Beloved, a young and mysterious young black woman, joins them, and Sethe is convinced that Beloved is the reincarnation of her murdered daughter.
The novel portrays various aspects of slavery, the most important being how it affected family relations, motherhood in particular, which is the most basic human sentiment. Black women were treated ruthlessly. Sethe’s mother-in-law had eight children, and they were all taken from her and sold into slavery. Sethe sees her mother only a couple of times, including once after she was hanged. She manages to raise her children, but at a certain point, she sends them to Kentucky in order to save them from the cruelties of slavery. When she is pregnant, the schoolteacher and his nephew abuse her—the nephew and his friends hold her and steal milk from her breasts while the schoolteacher is taking notes. After reporting their misdeeds, the schoolteacher whips Sethe severely, despite her being pregnant. She escapes into the forest, but the wounds on her back the burden of being pregnant cause her to collapse. She is positive that the fetus is no longer alive, and she believes she is about to die. But a young white woman comes along and helps her give birth, even though she could have turned her in for money. Sethe disguises her true identity, and claims that her name is Lu.
Beloved is one of the very few novels that depict the act of giving birth. No other topic is as repressed as that of a baby coming into the world. Western fiction is full of descriptions of childhood experience, adolescence, love and the loss of it, illness and death, but there is almost nothing about giving birth. Tolstoy, Stern in Tristram Shandy, Tony Morison, and of course Margaret Atwood are virtually the only writers that refer in detail to the physical process of the fetus emerging from its mother’s body. Despite the massive progress in women’s rights in our society, it seems that this feminine experience is still consistently overlooked. One could almost believe that the legend about storks delivering babies is still a popular one today.
But Toni Morrison chooses not to ignore the act of giving birth. In a world that abuses mothers, she portrays the birth of Denver with great detail. Not far from the Ohio River lies Sethe, her back aching from the previous whipping, her legs bleeding from walking without shoes, and a six-month fetus in her womb. First, the author establishes a fundamental theme that comes to be interwoven throughout the novel, applicable to everything: pain has value, and overcoming it brings forth redemption. Sethe likens the scars of whipping on her back to a tree with branches and fruits. The white girl asks Sethe if she is in pain, and adds: “More it hurt more better it is. Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.” The Christian spirit is echoing here: suffering has a purpose; it brings a person to a better place. Pain does not exist in itself but is rather a vehicle for change.
The white girl puts a bed of leaves under Sethe’s aching body and massages her feet. Both of them know that the labor will take place soon, and they look for a proper place for Sethe to give birth. As they walk towards the river, a miracle occurs: they find a deserted boat next to the riverside, which might be a good hiding place suitable for giving birth: “At noon they saw it; then they were near enough to hear it. By late afternoon they could drink from it if they wanted to. Four stars were visible by the time they found … a whole boat to steal.” The white girl says, “There you go, Lu. Jesus looking at you.”
But as the labor begins, an entirely new perspective blends into the Christian viewpoint: labor is portrayed in terms of the fundamental forces of nature. “As soon as Sethe got close to the river her own water broke loose to join it,” writes Morrison. The embryonic fluid and the water of the river are one. She lays down in the boat as the water filters in when “when another rip took her breath away.” The contraction is described as a “rip was a breakup of walnut logs in the brace, or of lightning’s jagged tear through a leather sky.” Pain is like a breaching tree, like lightning in the sky. The head of the fetus is stuck, drowning in his mother’s blood, as the white girl “stopped begging Jesus and began to curse His daddy.” Sethe pushes, the girl pulls, but eventually, an entirely different force causes the labor to end successfully—that of the river itself. “When a foot rose from the river bed and kicked the bottom of the boat and Sethe’s behind, she knew it was done and permitted herself a short faint.” The river brought the labor to a fruitful completion—not God, not Jesus, but rather an ancient primordial power, a wide river rolling across America.
To further emphasize the transition from the primal world to the Christian one, as they find that the baby is indeed alive, “Amy wrapped her skirt around it and the wet sticky women clambered ashore to see what, indeed, God had in mind.” River and land are entirely separated, which is a metaphor for two different modes of existence. In the place where the birth ultimately occurs, the primary forces of nature take action. After the birth, on land, there exists a world dominated by God, with good and evil, ruthless brutality and compassion. “A pateroller passing would have sniggered to see two throw-away people, two lawless outlaws—a slave and a barefoot whitewoman with unpinned hair—wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore. But no pateroller came and no preacher. The water sucked and swallowed itself beneath them.”
In historical circumstances in which motherhood is a source of endless misery, and mothers are willing to kill their own children in order to prevent them from becoming slaves, the act of labor is a moment of uniting with natural forces. Sethe and the girl bid each other farewell, as they will never meet again. Sethe asks her for her name, and she answers, “Amy Denver.” And so it is thus determined that the newborn baby will be called Denver.
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