ATL 125, Sec. 002
Final draft due: 11 December 2000
Paper four
Source: school/arts/atl125/paper4.draft1a.wpd
At the climax of her book Beloved, Toni Morisson uses strong imagery to examine the mind of a woman about to try killing her own children. She writes,
"Because the truth was simple, not a long-drawn-out record of flowered shifts, tree cages, selfishness, ankle ropes and wells. Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher's hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. outside this place, where they would be safe. And the hummingbird wings beat on." (163)
A full analysis of the book, or even of this passage, would be more extensive than is justified by the constraints of this paper. To a large extent this book is about the victims of the system of slavery. However, Morisson uses this and other passages to comment on issues that are still present even after significant changes in social and economic systems. One statement Morisson is making here is that there is a dichotomy between what we should do to obey our personal spiritual laws and what we should do to exercise "common sense" or "be normal", and also that often neither of these is what we actually do nor what we want to do as a person trying to live life. She makes it implicitly in this sentence, as she does in other parts of the novel, dealing with other characters. It is valid to say that the book deals with the issue of different reasons for a person to act, and especially with the way that emotion and personal nature can outweigh abstract morality or common sense.
One example of a character who is succesful in avoiding the path of common sense is Sixo, one of the other slaves on the plantation that Sethe had run away from. He carries on relations with "the Thirty-Mile woman", a girl slave on another plantation. As her name implies, he has to travel thirty miles (during the night) to see her. One meeting-place he tries to use is an Indian holy-spot; the place's presence gives him permission to use it. In the end, he has had sex with her the night before he is killed by slave-hunters (226). Shortly before that time, he refused to speak English any more. At the end of the novel, Paul D tries to use Sixo's words as a way to describe what he wishes his relationship with Sethe would be (state to convey?): "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."
The story gives absolutely no hint as to how Beloved feels or why she does what she does. It only describes what she does and says. All events in the story are consistent with the possibility that 124 was subject to earthquakes for a while (perhaps because of coal mining in the vicinity), and then a tramp who had almost drowned in the river and had high fever wandered up to the house, stayed there a while, and ran away when she saw the lady of the house crazily try to attack a white man. Sethe and Denver were both isolated from common reference-points. However, it would be a big coincidence for everything to happen that way, and Toni Morrisson is not writing a novel about coincidence. Even Ella, Schoolteacher and Halle get at least a little chance to explain why they did something, but Beloved gives no reason for what she does. The only passage that might be her explaining herself ("I am beloved and she is mine...", 210) is also Sethe speaking, and to a lesser extent Denver. Of course, in life she never had the choice to act; her life was taken early so that she would be safe. Since she was safe from evil, she never had to submit to it; since she was safe from temptation, she never had to explain following it.
Paul D seems to stick with the common-sense alternative. When the hummingbirds bother him, he just walks straight on ahead. Part of that is because he has a different attitude about what he can base his choice on. He describes how he felt in a labor camp:
"Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon --- everything belonged to the men who had guns. ... [who] could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother --- a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose --- not to need permission or desire --- well now, that was freedom."
In spite of his free state he sometimes restricted himself. He took advantage of Beloved's advances toward him. If he really believed that she was Sethe's daughter, then his actions would have been in violation of Jewish and Muslim law (Lev. 18:17). Perhaps that was one reason why he wanted to forget Beloved, especially after she had been pregnant. As a man, it was th common-sense thing to give in to her, but had he been trying to do what was right he would have avoided it. Afterward, he moved out for a while, and tried to rely on the town's gossip for information about what was happening in 124. In this too he was following the common-sense path. Morrisson does not condemn him for it; instead, she does let Paul explain himself, and allow this to be one of his inadequacies: being scared to do what's right because in the past it would have been a fatal choice.
Sethe was the one who chose a strange but right-for-her path. She tried to kill all four of her children, which was against human law and natural law. However, she had a reason for it. She wanted to put them "through the veil ... where they would be safe." When the event happened, she did not have time to think through all the possibilities, and she had no support from the community. She had no hope. Unlike Sixo, she could not just act crazy and suicidal, because four "mostly-helpless people" depended on her. She has precedent to think that someone she loves is better off dead. We admire our soldiers who, in an enemy prison, report only their "name, rank and serial number" even if they have to go through torture over the course of years. The Jews in concentration camps were literate and had the hope that the Allies would conquer, or the German public would change its mind, or their guards would be amenable to bribery. Often we worry about something, and that worry makes it harder to evaluate all the options we have for dealing with it.
Perhaps Toni Morrison wrote this book to explore choices that we all have made between what is right for the "reasonable man" and what is right for us in the context of what we believe and feel, and how we reconcile those things as we deal with society afterward. God judges the heart of every person, but other people can only judge and deal with us on the basis of what they see and hear us do and say. That is a major challenge for each person: expressing his or her true feelings clearly, before and after the action, and expressing them to a sympathetic person who is also able to parse that expression. Perhaps the "hummingbirds" in this passage were all the reactions by people who closed Sethe in rather than allowed her to express herself openly.