Beloved by Morrison and Voices From Slavery by Yetman - Essay Example

English Literature In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison explains “It was not a story to pass on.” This simple-seeming, straightforward sentence actually turns very complicated once one truly considers its meaning. First we must determine what story is being discussed. The immediate answer is that this is the story of a woman killing her child. But then we must consider the answers to what is ‘it’ referring to, who is telling the story to whom and who is the audience expected to be. In determining these answers, a variety of approaches to the text can yield a variety of answers thanks to the narrative approach that Morrison takes in revealing the tale. Reading this from a psychological approach might indicate that this is a story Sethe is trying to avoid telling to herself while a familial approach indicates a family history shared rarely and only in the dark. A social history perspective would see this as a story told by the slave community only to those who have a need to know while a national history perspective would demonstrate the story of slavery itself and effects it has as it is told to the public. In a final twist, a reader’s knowledge of vernacular indicates a dual literary translation of the statement. Instead of indicating a story that should not be retold, this passage could indicate a story that should not be unheard, as in passed up or skipped. When compared with other literature documenting the effects and experiences of slavery, such as the stories contained in Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives, the ugly truth about slavery begins to become clearer. In the novel Beloved, we are introduced to the fictional character Sethe, who lives in a small “gray and white house on Bluestone Road” (Morrison, 1988, p. 1) with her daughter Denver. Throughout the story, we learn these two women have not always lived alone, nor will they remain alone as the story progresses. As the story opens, we learn that Sethe and Denver once lived with Sethe’s two sons, Howard and Bugler, who have both run away as a result of strange, ghostly activities happening at the house. They also once lived with Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law and the woman who taught Sethe how to live again after slavery. Very quickly, we are also introduced to Paul D, who was one of the men Sethe had worked with on Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation where she, her husband and several others had been cruelly treated as slaves. That they were cruelly treated is also made immediately obvious in Morrison’s description: “suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves” (Morrison, 1988, p. 6). Perhaps more telling even than this passage is the inclusion of the boys hanging from the sycamore trees that Morrison goes on to describe, indicating Sethe’s guilt at being able to remember the beauty of the trees more than the boys. “Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that” (Morrison, 1988, p. 6). This tendency to skip over the more unpleasant details of slavery is a common theme in books that deal with the subject, despite the well-meaning intent to shed light on the true nature of the subject. It can also be seen in the story of Mary A. Bell, who was 85 at the time she was interviewed by Grace E. White for inclusion in Voices of Slavery. While Mary Bell indicates she was put to work as a slave very early in her life, “Kitty Diggs hired me out to a Presbyterian minister when I was seven years old, to take care of three children.” (Yetman, 2000). Although she indicates “slavery was a mighty hard life,” she doesn’t go into too much detail regarding how life was hard for her. One can only imagine the difficulty a seven year old child might have trying to keep three other children, white children who were taught to have no respect and no regard for black people, under control. While she indicates she spent at least a year taking care of the minister’s children and another two taking care of three children for the baker, Bell says “neither family was nice to me” (Yetman, 2000). The only indication she gives of her duties includes riding a pony out at meal times to call the workers in from the fields, helping in the kitchen, gathering the eggs and “kept plenty busy” (Yetman, 2000). It is only by reading between the lines that we stop to wonder if this small girl had a chance to eat a dinner of her own after calling the men in from the fields or to wonder whether she felt any fear at having to ride the pony out based upon her choice of words to describe the chore: “I was only seven years old so dey put me on a pony at meal time to ride out to de field and call de hands to dinner” (Yetman, 2000). In addition, it requires a reader to keep in mind that the person speaking was ten years old at the oldest point in this portion of the story, expected to take on the full duties, from all indications provided, of a full-grown woman. Another aspect of slavery that becomes apparent in both the fictional and non-fictional accounts deals with the inability of the slave to enjoy a traditional family structure, a fact that is most evident in the relationships between male and female slaves. In Beloved, Sethe is provided much more leniency than most slaves in that she is permitted to ‘marry’ the man she’s chosen from among the five available on the farm. This becomes clear through the narrative of Paul D, who remembers the five of them making the conscious decision to leave her alone in order to allow her to make her own decision. “They were young and so sick with the absence of women they had taken to calves. Yet they let the iron-eyed girl be, so she could choose in spite of the fact that each one would have beaten the others to mush to have her. It took her a year to choose – a long, tough year of thrashing on pallets eaten up with dreams of her. A year of yearning, when rape seemed the solitary gift of life” (Morrison, 1988, p. 10). However, when she did get married, it was signified only by a new dress Sethe had managed to sew for herself ‘on the sly’ and Halle’s hitching rope hanging on a nail on the wall of her cabin. Meanwhile, the other men living on the farm had no choice but to watch and wish. Only one was able to figure out a way to sneak away from the farm long enough to have a quick sexual experience with a girl from more than 30 miles away one time, but none were permitted the luxury of considering a woman his own or to raise a child he knew to be of his own blood. Like Sethe, Baby Suggs was also familiar with the ‘checkerboard piece’ way in which families were pieced together under the slave system. Having had eight children, Morrison tells us these children were fathered by six different men and most taken away before their mother even had a chance to say good-bye. “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. … 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” (Morrison, 1988, p. 23). In the end, only one son was left to her and he worked as hard as he could in all his spare time to save up enough money to buy his mother the freedom to sit down when she wanted to. However, by that time, she had already learned how to prevent herself from loving what she could not keep. This impression is further strengthened in the real-life accounts of slaves that lived through the period and had their stories recorded. According to Mary Bell, her father was owned by a country farmer and was even more harshly treated than herself, her mother and her mother’s other four children, who were all hired out to work at a very early age. “My father was not allowed to come and see my mother but two nights a week. Dat was Wednesday and Saturday. So often he would come home all bloody from beatings his old nigger overseer would give him” (Yetman, 2000). Despite the frequent beatings, Bell only indicates her father ran away after receiving a particularly harsh beating that he felt he did not deserve. This particular phraseology should stand out as being unusually telling. Does this indicate that the man actually felt his other beatings, that sent him home to his wife and children so bloody that it could not even be kept from the children’s prying eyes, were justified in some way? Her description of his escape attempt indicates how important he was to the daily operation of the farm and her following dialogue regarding how the farmer, Mr. Lewis, refused to sell him for any price supports this further. “Lewis owned a large tobacco plantation and father was the head man on dat plantation. He cured all de tobacco as it was brought in from the field, made all the twists and plugs of tobacco” (Yetman, 2000). This knowledge of his usefulness finally gave Mary’s father some room to bargain and threatened to run away again if he was ever beaten again. In addition, Mary indicates how important it was that her father had been taught to read by his owner’s son. “My father read de emancipation for freedom to de other slaves, and it made dem so happy, dey could not work well and dey got so no one could manage dem when they found out dey were to be freed in such a short time” (Yetman, 2000). This ability to read and understand the news that was coming out enabled Mary’s father to eventually run away and join the Union Army, where he and the other slaves he convinced to run away with him remained untouchable by the slave-catchers. It is through Morrison’s deliberate use of the ambiguous in her statement of the story that “was not a story to pass on” as well as the ambiguous nature of her narrative style that allows her to say so much with so little, a trick of narrative that is carried out unconsciously by Mary Bell in relating her experience of slavery. This concept of how authors express the incomprehensible is the subject of Catherine Belsey’s theory of a ‘crisis in subjectivity’ or ‘split subject.’ “Entry into language inevitably creates a division between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enonce, the ‘I’ who speaks and the ‘I’ who is the subject of discourse. The Subject is held in place in the discourse by the use of ‘I,’ but the ‘I’ of this discourse is always a stand in, a substitute, for the ‘I’ who speaks” (Belsey, 1980). Another theory, brought forward by Julia Kristeva, introduces the concept of a “divided subject, even a pluralized subject, that occupies not a place of enunciation, but permutable, multiple, and mobile places” (Kristeva, 1980). Morrison’s approach in Beloved expresses an experimental narrative approach that affords a variety of reading levels while still telling the difficult story of a woman who kills her child rather than allow it to live a life of slavery. In this sense, narrative figures as both a primary technical resource and as part of a theme. Bell’s approach is more realistically oriented, but not any less impactful as Morrison. She simply relates what she remembers as well as she can, informing us through what she’s chosen to remember the survival tool learned by countless former slaves once their freedom had been realized. Yet neither story stops at the state of slavery. For both Beloved and the story that Mary Bell tells of her real life experience, life after slavery took a much greater adjustment than the simple declaration that slaves were free, and takes up a greater degree of their stories. For Sethe, although she had escaped to freedom with her children and her life, her husband was missing and her fear remained permanently ingrained in her heart. The suggestion that she and her children might be taken back into slavery was so horrifying that she attempted to kill the children rather than allow them to live the same sort of abusive, empty, fearful life she had experienced as a slave. This action is based upon a true story that had been buried in the male-dominated tales of slavery in the south that neglected to mention the brutal treatment women often received or the after-effects such treatment could have on the individual psyche. Despite the fact that she is now free, Sethe cannot escape the haunting memories of her past. Her impending recapture comes on the heels of her first understanding of what it meant to be free, when Baby Suggs would lead the community out to the clearing the woods and give the children permission to run and the mothers permission to hear them laugh and the men permission to dance and the women permission to cry for their losses (Morrison, 1988, pp. 87-88). However, following the murder of her beloved daughter to keep her out of the hands of the schoolteacher, Sethe is not able to escape the shackles of her past again. She remains tied to the house, tied to the memory of her lost daughter and incapable of moving forward with her living children. This causes a similar situation to slavery in which the children one by one work to ‘escape’ the house itself and the community quickly pulls away and out of her life, leaving her to her solitary prison cell with no one but Denver for company. Within the story, Morrison makes it clear that the only path to true freedom exists not in remaining enslaved to the actions and events of the past, but in their acknowledgement and acceptance. This is first set forth in the actions that Baby Suggs takes in leading her community to laugh, dance and cry depending upon the age and the gender of her listeners. She understands that the women have suffered heartache greater than any human can bear and that the men have had to hold themselves under rigid control at every waking moment just to survive. She knows, too, that the children have learned how to be silent dark ghosts in the shadows, staying out of the way and asking no questions for fear of punishment or separation from those they love. The appearance of Beloved marks a turning point in the novel as the characters are again forced to remember, forced to face the actions of the past and forced to accept what has happened to them. “Pamela Barnett, for instance, argues that the characters in the novel are forced by Beloved to confront traumatic memories. This confrontation in turn begins the process of healing, which she describes as ‘conscious meaning making about what is inherently incomprehensible.’ And Jean Wyatt … argues that ‘the hope at the end of the novel is that Sethe, having recognized herself as subject, will be able to narrate the mother-daughter story and invent a language that can encompass the desperation of the slave mother who killed her daughter” (Heffernan, 1998). Like Sethe, the majority of Mary Bell’s life seems to get summed up in her experiences of slavery even though the greater time period was spent as a free woman. She was able to get married and had seven children by the same husband before he passed away. On her own, she managed to purchase the house she lived in and took great pride in the two children she had still living, one of whom served in the American armed forces like his father and his grandfather before that. This was in spite of having only a very patchy education squeaked out of various country schools as she traveled from place to place searching for a home with her parents. Never having been forced to make the choice between returning to slavery or placing her children beyond any human’s reach, Mary Bell nevertheless represents the same kind of passive acceptance and blatant defiance expressed by Morrison’s fictional character. “Beloved explores the means by which the disempowered and dispossessed express personal dissatisfaction and enact political dissent” (Parker, 2001). While Sethe allows herself to sink into hysteria resulting in the death of her child as a means of preventing her from entering into slavery, Mary Bell follows her father’s example in escaping the plantation for the Army. She calmly accepts her own place in life, happy and thankful for the few things she has, and, to ensure her family remains out of the clutches of the slave owners, she marries a military man and encourages her children to become military men as well. In both Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Yetman’s collection of Voices from Slavery, it becomes apparent that the effects of slavery still exist in today’s society as black people struggle to free themselves of the yoke of tyranny and establish themselves as free-thinking, free-acting individuals. Although the memories are no longer first-hand accounts and immediate to those struggling to overcome them, they remain an integral part of the family history, providing a well-spring of determination and hope, but also one of loss and despair for those family members who were lost along the way and can never be found again. References Belsey, Catherine. (1980). Critical Practice. London: Methuen. Heffernan, Teresa. (1998). “’Beloved’ and the Problem of Mourning.” Studies in the Novel. Vol. 30, I. 4, p. 558. Kristeva, Julia. (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Leon S. Roudiez (Ed.). Thomas Zora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Morrison, Toni. (1988). Beloved. New York: Penguin Books. Parker, Emma. (2001). “A New Hystery: History and Hysteria in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Twentieth Century Literature. Vol. 47, I. 1. Yetman, Norman R. (Ed.). (2000). Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives. New York: Dover. Read More