The mother-daughter Aje relationship in Toni Morrison's Beloved

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Teresa N. Washington

A Beloved Re-Embodiment of Aje

"My Mother" is a text woven on a largely ahistorical tapestry, and liberated in that free space, the protagonists themselves constitute their only barriers to expansion. Beloved also revolves around a mother and daughter's desire to enjoy a perfect unity. However, as the narrator poignantly reveals, enslaved Africans in America were struggling for existence in lands in which they could list relatives, especially children, who had been less loved than "run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized" (23). Rather than subject their progeny to the financially motivated, sexually depraved, and morally bankrupt whims of their oppressors, some mothers of Aje returned the creations of their wombs to the tomb-like "wicked bag" that holds destruction, creation, and re-creation. Although many discussions of lineage Aje describe the mother killing (mentally, spiritually, or physically) her daughter, Morrison's work forces us to re-evaluate this simplistic assessment. Tormented mothers of Aje are not destroying their progeny. To quote Sethe, they are putting them "where they'd be safe."

Having a safe, sacred space has always been of paramount importance to displaced African peoples, and under circumstances only she could have imagined, Oduduwa's enslaved progeny attempted to recreate her sacred space of creation. Such spaces have been called the Arbor Church, the Conjuring Lodge, the crossroads, and the praying ground. What occurs in these spaces has been called many things, but it is all juba. In Zami, the space of juba is manifest in the linguistic tools and silences of Linda that are transformed by the daughter Audre. In "My Mother," the space of spiritual interaction is the ever-present, ever-malleable brackish pond. In Beloved, various forms of juba are discussed in relation to the sacred spaces and times that facilitated them. (2) Fittingly, the juba that is created by Sethe and Beloved, twice in the novel, is the exemplar melding of the spiritual and material under Aje and this Aje-juba occurs both times at 124.

The primary setting of Beloved is a home at 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. From the opening of the work, it is apparent that 124 is a space of freedom, juba, and Aje so complex that it can be considered a character. Morrison emphasizes 124's humanity at the beginning of each of the novel's three sections, which respectively describe 124 as "spiteful," "loud," and "quiet." Sethe's daughter Denver regards 124 as "a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trembled and fell into fits (23). (3) While these descriptions of 124's vitality are due to Beloved's spiritual presence, the domicile had long been an arena for cosmic and material interrelations, and this development may be the result of its spiritual and numerological stationing. Perhaps Morrison named Bluestone Road after the healing bluestone that, when applied to a cut, "burns like hell" but heals instantly (Grant-Boyd). The number 124 is the numerological equivalent of seven, the number of Orisa Ogun, owner of iron, technology, and weaponry. Ogun's role in protecting and empowering enslaved Africans and complementing Sethe's Aje is profoundly important. Additionally, Ousseynou Traore contends that readers unconsciously register the unseen number three in 1-2-4. The number three often indicates spiritual unity, and it is also the number of the alternately silent and signifying Yoruba trickster Esu, who, similar to the concept of Beloved (discussed below), is omnipresent and omniscient.