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

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Nancy Jesser

In Sweet Home Sethe performs small acts in an attempt to claim her world: "The salsify she brought in to Mrs. Garner's kitchen every day just to be able to work in it, feel like some part of it was hers, because she wanted to love the work she did, to take the ugly out of it, and the only way she could feel at home on Sweet Home was if she picked some pretty growing things and took them with her" (22). In a way, Schoolteacher's coming frees the Sweet Home slaves from feeling any possibility of "taking the ugly out" of their lives or "wanting to love" their work. If the ugly were taken out, even briefly, then it would be possible to ignore the truth of the situation, the truth that Schoolteacher made clear by revealing his truth - one "that waved like a scarecrow in rye. . . . they were steer bulls without horns, gelded workhorses." This truth gives Paul D, Halle, and Sethe the strength to plan, because they know Schoolteacher "[i]s wrong" (125). Without being able to know what being free might mean, they risk the known for the unknown. Of course, the harsh lesson of freedom in the "Magical North" is that it offers little to combat the racist institutions, whether in the form of chattel slavery or the brutal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law.

When Sethe crosses over to freedom after her escape from Sweet Home, the possibilities of love are transformed. The connections between mother and child had been under threat, torn and broken by the flux of ownership. When she sees her children at 124 Bluestone," 'look like I loved 'em more. . . . Or maybe I couldn't love 'em proper in Kentucky because they wasn't mine to love.' "We know that Sethe loved her children in Kentucky, but this outpouring is the sign of freedom. While in the Clearing taking stock, she comes to assent to Paul D's definition of freedom as a place "where you could love anything you chose - not to need permission for desire" (162). While she had loved Halle at Sweet Home, she had been given permission to love him. She had loved her children because she had been allowed to raise them. Freedom as the place where love is possible becomes the inspiration for Baby Suggs's preaching - preaching that goes directly against "her same old ways." She reclaims her family relationships and reclaims her relationships to her God, and to her place in the community. None of these "ways" was possible at Sweet Home, despite her being clothed, warm, fed, and not beaten (146).

Sweet Home is the reference point through which Sethe makes her decisions about the future. It is also the place that they "belonged to" (9) and that "belonged to them" (11). For Denver, it is a site of exclusion. She challenges their attachments to each other and to the past by asking the crucial question," 'How come everybody run off from Sweet Home can't stop talking about it?'" (13). Sethe's answer shows how the past is operating - as a haunt. Sweet Home" 'comes back whether we want it to or not'" (14). This is as true for the readers as it is for Sethe and Paul D. The invasion of the present by Sweet Home shows how the communities constructed in the past haunt the communities of the present. They serve as sites for common purposes, sharing, and a reference point against which to measure progress. For Sethe, no matter what the present is like, it is not that past. Denver is locked out, forced to see herself as an outsider. Without the reference point, she knows only her own worse place as the one she is in now.