Violence, home, and community in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved.'

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Nancy Jesser

The four places I discuss in this essay offer different methods, outcomes, and possible configurations of community. No one is the way. Each community is contingent on how it came into being, and how it must be dismantled to make space for new configurations. In all four there is a notion of escaping to new space or clearing new space. The limitations, whether they are enforced by the law or whether they are the result of defining exclusions - like skin color, or blessedness - demand clearings and transgressions. These crossings both release violent reactions from the enforcers of the boundaries and constitute open spaces that were previously uninhabitable. There is no one method, no utopian configuration that guarantees paradise or freedom from possession. But there are worse places and worse ways to be possessed. We make the rough choice between the place we know and the future. Furthermore, we must choose to risk connections to others that soften boundaries. Safety and protection of the real sweet home do not lie in constructing an iron facade, but rather in a porous and open space. The most open of spaces, however, also offers the greatest danger of incursion. The Clearing, for example, is a place in flux and transition - a place from which one may decide to move forward to the future or be moved back and fixed by the past.

Morrison describes these moments of transition between hardened and softened moments in apocalyptic terms, as though a time of great undoing might wipe the slate clean for a release from history and the formation of a paradise forever outside time. However, these apocalyptic moments do not bring with them final judgments or paradise. History moves through apocalypse, but does not end. And the pre-apocalyptic past is constantly revisited, always potentially relived.

Morrison's historiography provides a way of escaping the notion of millennial progress. By eliminating the possibility of an end-time, she makes us pay attention to history, not as an already-written story condemning us to act and suffer in roles assigned to us by a damaged and damaging past, but as an unfinished process and a working through of traumatic events and daily, repeated violences. Instead of offering a configuration of utopian space, sustainable in isolation, she offers a warning that spaces can change, over time or suddenly, and that the key to sustenance is in links to others, to communities. Creating spaces in which to live is always a process, and never a state. In this way Beloved serves as a theoretical model for understanding the role of communities and spaces born out of and in reaction to raced and gendered violence, a story of the re-covery and uncovering of somewhere to rest, plan, and act, a place to call home in a strange, and haunted, land.

Sweet Home

Sweet Home, the quasi-utopian plantation where Sethe is a slave, offers one critique of the (im)possibility of "home" within the institution of chattel slavery. Sethe attempts to create a space for herself in this home through small, unnoticed interior decoration. Her efforts, though superficially consoling, fail, and in their failure point to the real barriers facing Sethe in self-actualization and home-making. When Schoolteacher takes over, he begins his violently dystopic project of "domesticating" the Sweet Home slave community. We learn about Sweet Home - the farm in Kentucky where Baby Suggs, Paul D, Sethe, and Halle were all slaves - in snippets. The story of life there is fragmented in Morrison's narrative, but it coalesces into two communities bound to the same landscape: the Sweet Home under Mr. Garner's rule, and the Sweet Home under the rule of Schoolteacher. The two Sweet Homes need to be examined in relation, for what is apparent in Schoolteacher's mastership is latent in Garner's.(1) Though the two men have different styles, they share the grammar of chattel slavery. The community is bought and brought together by Garner, and it is he who provides its name. But like Baby Suggs's bill-of sale name, it is merely a label. The name Sweet Home suggests a utopian community, and yet for the slaves it is less than that: Garner's "enlightened" slavery possesses the individuals, extracts their labor, constrains their movements, but doesn't savage or starve them. Sweet Home is for Baby Suggs a "marked improvement" (139) over the physically damaging and emotionally crippling plantations that wrenched most of the life from her.