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

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Nancy Jesser

After the escape Paul D finds direction by subverting the "power" of the chain, trusting to mutual goals (often made mutual by forces outside the community), and then responding to an increasing range of possibilities by joining in new and transitory alliances. The process of removing the chain is a crucial step toward a widening sphere: Paul D's journey to the "Magical North" reveals a place that is "better" but not - as imagined - benevolent and welcoming. His escape from "the box" continues until "Beloved" breaks open the "tin" box in his chest where he has kept the fragments of memory which link him to a past and to some of the "lost," like Halle. In the moments of escape, there is a pragmatic leaving behind of those who cannot make it. It is one of the grim realities of these narratives.

Those lost haunt each of the characters of the book. Baby Suggs's husband and she have an agreement that, if there is an opportunity to escape, it must be seized and that this obligation and necessity supersede their responsibility to each other. This complex interplay between interdependence and individualism provides insight into movements that are based exclusively on either individual or group emancipation. For those who escape under these circumstances, the places they inhabit will be haunted. Those escaping measure their movement not only by triangulation (taking sightings off distant markers) but also by dead reckoning (marking the distance they have traveled). Their journey to a better place is also marked by a reckoning of the dead. As they lay plans according to a distant star or follow movement north of the blossoming of trees, they plot their route by knowing and marking their distance from the past. The going, for Paul D and the enslaved, is the reverse of their coming: He and the others move back toward the "livable" place.

The Clearing

Sethe describes the Clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared that land in the first place" (87), and she remembers it as a "blessed place" (89). It a space outside the political and cultural domain of the white people who constantly disturb the black community of Cincinnati. Soon after her moving to Cincinnati, Baby Suggs goes to the Clearing to preach her gospel of imagined grace - "the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. . . . if they could not see it, they could not have it" (88). The Clearing provides a place for "every black man, woman, and child who could make it through" to love themselves and each other in a way not sustainable in the constricted and categorized world of white Cincinnati and white America (87). Within the Clearing, connections and emotions are possible that are unendurable beyond it.

Baby Suggs sings a litany of loving all the pieces that make up the body because, in the Clearing," '. . . we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare grass. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it'" (88). What Baby Suggs is able to accomplish by encouraging imagined grace is "spaces" created by the singing; what she cannot accomplish is an actual extension of the Clearing into the yonder world. After "the Misery" she loses her own faith in the imagination and its ability to aid in realizing grace. She comes to believe (and it is this belief that robs her of the will to be in the future) that "there was no grace - imaginary or real - and no sunlit dance in the Clearing could change that" (89). Within the Clearing Baby Suggs's grace must be imagined, because phenomenally it does not exist. But even so, it works change, though not the sudden, transcendent change that the Clearing, through her preaching, promises. The clear and boundless freedom to love and dance in the world cannot be extended by the imagination alone.