Biblical trees, biblical deliverance: literary landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Glenda B. Weathers

Clearly, her breast milk stolen, Sethe has had her life force literally and figuratively and forcefully stolen as well. And with the chokecherry tree that scars her back and memory, her feminine potential has been violently abbreviated. Indeed, the cherry in common slang references the virginal hymen, and the chokecherry tree, with the Latin name of Prunus virginiana, is known for its bitter fruit. At another point in the narrative, Morrison describes Sethe's impatience to wash away chamomile sap that clings to her legs; she implies that Sethe's impatience is prompted by her recollection of the likeness of the sap to the milky, sticky semen she suffered beneath the trees at Sweet Home in her fall from innocence and ignorance.

Trees of knowledge preside over much of Sethe's story. A primary tree of knowledge is the tree-scar on her back. A second source of tree knowledge is the ink that she made from trees: the cherry gum and oak trees provide the bark from which the ink is made, but Sethe is the agent whose labor creates the very medium that schoolteacher uses to denigrate her. It is this ink that schoolteacher prefers when writing in his notebooks, recording his dehumanizing conclusions about slaves' putative bestial characteristics. With the Sethe-produced, tree-bark ink, schoolteacher, the one who "knows" about good and evil, studies behavior, charts body measurements, numbers teeth, "proving" with pseudo-science that the slaves are less than human. Later in the penultimate chapter of the novel, Sethe, although mentally disoriented and physically depleted, turns to Paul D with a self-accusation, "I made the ink, Paul D. He couldn't have done it if I hadn't made the ink" (271).

Sethe uses the carnal knowledge she could not avoid under the trees at Sweet Home to barter letters from a depraved headstone engraver. Sethe re-members the perverse sex scene, how she rutted with the engraver within the cemetery's confines, as she tried to negotiate some life symbol for her buried daughter. All she asks for is a name that matters, seven letters, "B-E-L-O-V-E-D."

   "Ten minutes," he [had] said. "You got
   ten minutes I'll do it [inscribe the letters]
   for free." Ten minutes for seven
   letters. With another ten could she
   have gotten "Dearly" too? She had not
   thought to ask him and it bothered her
   still that it might have been possible-that
   for twenty minutes, a half hour,
   say, she could have had the whole
   thing, every word she heard the
   preacher say at the funeral ...
   engraved on her baby's headstone:
   Dearly Beloved. But what she got, settled
   for, was the one word that mattered.
   She thought it would be enough,
   rutting among the headstones with the
   engraver, his young son looking on,
   the anger in his face so old; the
   appetite in it quite new. (5)

Seven dearly-purchased letters--one defining word--Beloved, on a tombstone, which, with its dawn-colored stone, signifies the Christian dawn--redemption purchased on a tree. For Sethe, the words matter; words define; and words, both ironically and redemptively, can become flesh as they did when schoolteacher named her a brute, and she felt like one. Words and trees are redemptive as demonstrated when Amy "come out of the trees," calls on "Jesus" to "come here," nurses Sethe's raw and tree-marked back while "wonder[ing] what God had in mind," and warning how a "snake come along he bite you" (187; 79-80). (16) The tree suggests redemption once again when Beloved, the murdered daughter, mysteriously returns to 124 Bluestone Road--"just shot up one day sitting on a stump" (234).