'Beloved': ideologies in conflict, improvised subjects

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

The Africans teach the New World children both by example and through direct instruction, and both Sethe and Paul D reach for the meaning of their own lives in connection with the lives of their ancestors. The first-generation, New World children seek, in Patterson's words, "to anchor the living present in [a] conscious community of memory" (5); and the Africans they encounter, whether actual relatives or fictive kin, transmit to them elements of a West African world view and call them into the community of their ancestors.

For Sethe, the remnants of African cultural practices are an ambivalent legacy, because they are tied up with her own motherlessness. Sethe has rarely ever seen her mother; she learns to recognize her by her cloth hat amid a sea of straw hats and by the circled cross branded under her breast, which her mother goes out of her way to show her. Nan, her surrogate mother,(13) tells Sethe more of her mother's story:

What Nan told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma'am spoke, and which would never come back. But the message - that was and had been there all along. Holding the damp white sheets against her chest, she [Sethe] was picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood. Nighttime. Nan holding her with her good arm, waving the stump of the other in the air. "Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe," and she did that. She told Sethe that her mother and Nan were together from the sea. Both were taken up many times by the crew. "She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe." (62)

As this memory returns to Sethe, she must translate Nan's words from the African language in which they were spoken into English. She has forgotten both the language and the story told in that language; as she remembers the "message," she feels unfocused anger. On the one hand, she is able to recover the knowledge that she was chosen by her mother. On the other hand, she recognizes that she has been robbed of mothering and her first language - in short, her birthright. This knowledge has not just drifted away, it has been taken from her by the slave system. As she remembers a moment of her interpellation as the chosen child of an African mother, she yearns for Baby Suggs, the only,true mother she has known.(14) Sethe's birth mother was clearly rebellious; she was probably caught running away and hanged for this attempt. Sethe does not want to believe that her mother attempted to escape, because it would mean that she left her daughter behind. Her mother's abandonment of her and the fact that Sethe never got enough milk when she was being nursed are the tragedies at the very base of Sethe's life, and she tries to compensate for her own motherlessness by being a supermother to her children.