To Be Loved: Amy Denver and Human Need-Bridges to Understanding in Toni Morrison's Beloved

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Coonradt, Nicole M

In a discussion of slavery and the way in which Morrison shows people as property, critic Rafael Perez-Torres comments, "Commodity and exchange serve as the only form of interaction between blacks and whites in Beloved. This exchange on its most basic level involves the marketing of human beings . . ." (1998, 132; my emphasis). While this proves true for most of the white characters, clearly, since no money changes hands during Sethe's encounter with Amy Denver, this statement is not entirely accurate. Indeed, Amy experiences not material gain, but spiritual gain as a result of saving Sethe and Denver.

~ in the place where it was said to them, "You are not My people," ~

Amy Denver, as a runaway indentured servant with "fugitive eyes" (Morrison 1988, 78), was also property. "The European slave (indentured servant) is represented by Miss Amy Denver of Boston" (Mbalia 1991, 95; my emphasis). Perhaps here, the difference between "slavery" and "indentured servitude" is primarily a semantic one since "in theory, [an indentured servant] is only selling his or her labor. In practice, however, servants were basically slaves and the courts enforced the laws that made it so [with the] treatment of the servants [being] . . . often harsh and brutal" (Barker 2004, 2).4 It is worth noting that the Thirteenth Amendment to The Constitution abolished both slavery and indentured servitude, which indicates that historically the federal legislature saw them as similar ills at the time, even though the issue of slavery was clearly the paramount concern. The amendment reads in part: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" (2003, 33-34). If not "legally" speaking, then both figuratively and physically, Amy experienced her own enslavement at the hands of Mr. Buddy.

Additionally, through images of confinement, Morrison suggests that part of that enslavement Amy suffered also might have been sexual in nature. She alludes to Amy's sexual abuse as the hands of her "master" when he locked her in the root cellar (1988, 34), thus linking her to the novel's host of sexually exploited characters. Recall that Amy's mother, who was "give to Mr. Buddy" may have been raped by him: "Joe Nathan said Mr. Buddy is my daddy, but I don't believe that" (80) Amy tells Sethe. Certainly we know Sethe's mother (62), Baby Suggs (139), and Sethe herself (5, 16-17) were all sexually abused. Sethe "told Denver that she believed Beloved had been locked up by some whiteman for his own purposes, and never let out the door" (119). Ella suffered the same fate at the hands of a white father and son who "for more than a year, . . . kept her locked in a room for themselves" (119). "'You couldn't think up," Ella [recalls], 'what them two done to me'" (119). Even Stamp Paid, "born Joshua, . . . renamed himself when he handed over his wife to his master's son. Handed her over in the sense that he did not kill anybody, thereby himself, because his wife demanded he stay alive. Otherwise, she reasoned, where and to whom could she return when the boy was through" (185)? With these passages, Morrison establishes one of the most degrading aspects of human abuse: sexual enslavement of women at the hands of sadistic masters, the most extreme subjugation of women in a white patriarchal culture that historically touched women irrespective of their ethnicity.