Hiding fire and brimstone in lacy groves: the twinned trees of Beloved

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Lorie Watkins Fulton

Paul D also talks about different events that destroy masculinity using tree metaphors. For example, when he tells Sethe that Halle saw the boys steal her milk, Paul D says that Halle's inability to protect his wife as he watched the spectacle "broke him like a twig" (68). Paul D extends this metaphor after Sethe criticizes Halle for his lack of action: Paul D responds, "A man ain't a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside" (69). Similarly, when Paul D later thinks of the guards at the prison in Alfred, he employs another tree metaphor when he describes them as "Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns." Tellingly, these guards control nature: "in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon--everything belonged to the men who had the guns" (162). In Alfred, the men with the guns control nature and make it unnatural by subjugating Paul D, who, on equal footing, could indeed snap them like a twig.

Paul D's manhood becomes further entangled with Morrison's natural imagery when he reveals the ambiguity of his love for nature. Morrison writes, "in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He hid in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it" (268). While Paul D cannot love what he does not own, he can, the text suggests, become a part of it. While Paul D questions his own masculinity, Morrison simultaneously affirms it within her text when she describes him as a "hazelnut man" with "Peachstone skin" (37, 7). Also, like a tree, Paul D wants to "take root" and live with Sethe (221). Paul D's return to Sethe at novel's end seems to disprove Baby's earlier observation that "A man ain't nothing but a man" (23). Paul D wants to stay with Sethe, as he puts it, to "put his story next to hers" precisely because she acknowledges his manhood; in this last scene between them, Paul D remembers Sethe's "tenderness about his neck jewelry" and knows that only Sethe "could have left him his manhood like that" (273).

Clearly, Morrison makes nothing about this novel straightforward, not even something as elemental as its trees. Beyond the eventual redemption that Bonnet identifies in those trees lies incredible complexity. Sometimes positive, sometimes negative, and always interesting, Morrison creates tree images as varied and contradictory as the characters that identify with them. All of which begs one simple question--why? On one level, Morrison uses the tree to show how slavery literally perverts nature. Whether in the more general jungle that white masters plant within each slave (198-99), or in the specific tree on Sethe's back, Morrison shows how slavery systematically misrepresents itself as a natural order, but actually operates antithetically to naturalize, superficially, the unnatural. Her depiction also subverts the idea of growth as inherently constructive; positive growth seems balanced, or in some cases even counteracted, by the destructive growth of objects like that jungle originating within each slave and the scar on Sethe's back. But Morrison also depicts the positive aspects of trees, and thus complicates that equation in a way that allows the more hopeful interpretation that Bonnet articulates. For example, the image of the Sweet Home men hanging in the trees that so disturbs Sethe seems inversely related to her description of "that thing you use to hang the babies in the trees--so you could see them out of harm's way while you worked the fields" (160).