'Beloved': ideologies in conflict, improvised subjects

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Arlene R. Keizer

Paul D is also dismembered by the new master's interpellations. After School- teacher and the patrollers have lynched Sixo, they lead Paul D back to Sweet Home, discussing the fact that he must be sold:

Shackled, walking through the perfumed things honeybees love, Paul D hears the men talking and for the first time learns his worth. He has always known, or believed he did, his value - as a hand, a laborer who could make profit on a farm - but now he discovers his worth, which is to say he learns his price. The dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future. (226; my emphasis)

Nine hundred dollars is the price Schoolteacher attaches to Paul D's parts; under this blatantly capitalist interpellation, Paul D cannot envision himself as whole. In order to keep himself sane through the events that follow his sale by Schoolteacher, Paul D maintains a compartmentalized self: "After Alfred he had shut down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing. If he could do those things - with a little work and a little sex thrown in - he asked for no more . . ." (41). He seals away the painful, significant events of his past in a metaphorical tobacco tin that takes the place of his heart. The tobacco-tin metaphor is a striking one, making it clear that Paul D sees his ruined heart as a product of slavery, as much as tobacco itself was. His life is circumscribed by commerce, and it invades his body as well; he cannot be whole with the symbol of his degradation lodged inside him.

Though it is certainly Schoolteacher's "corrections" which are the immediate catalyst for Paul D's psychic disintegration and loss of manhood, Paul D later comes to realize that Garner's form of slavery was not entirely different from that of his brother-in-law:

For years Paul D believed schoolteacher broke into children what Garner had raised into men. And it was that that made them run off. Now, plagued by the contents of his tobacco tin, he wondered how much difference there was between before schoolteacher and after. Garner called and announced them men - but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. (220; my emphasis)

At the distance created by eighteen years and a constant struggle to retain his manhood, Paul D can recognize the tenuous nature of the identity his master created for him and recognize that Garner, like Schoolteacher, was playing God, indulging in a form of social experimentation by "mak[ing] and call[ing] his own niggers men" (11). Paul D understands how the masculine identity conferred by Gamer falls apart upon Garner's death and reflects upon this in an economical, vernacular rendering of Orlando Patterson's concept of "social death": "Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain't that slavery or what is it?" (220).

In general, the Garners represent a milder - and in some ways more subtle and insidious - form of white-supremacist, capitalist domination of African Americans. Their abolitionist friends, Mr. and Miss Bodwin, share negative views of African Americans with slaveholders, despite their belief that "human life is holy, all of it" (260). The statue that Denver sees at the Bodwins' house is a representation of black dismemberment in the service of the needs of whites: