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

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Coonradt, Nicole M

Having fled this abuse, Amy and Sethe meet near the riverbank and Sethe describes Amy as "The raggediest-looking trash you ever saw" with "arms like cane stalks and enough hair for four or five heads" (Morrison 1988, 32). Amy thinks nearly the same thing upon beholding Sethe saying, "You 'bout the scariest-looking something I ever seen" (32). In the woods, as a runaway indentured servant, her situation in many ways mirrors Sethe's as a runaway slave. Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin explore how Morrison places these two "throw-away people, two lawless outlaws" (84):

in parallel destinies in a relationship combining specularity and interaction. This intense and emotionally charged structure constitutes the next stage in the character definition before [Morrison's]. . .heroines immerse themselves in the rituals of community [here childbirth]. . .exploring an intermediary pattern of relationships, the intimate or proximate sphere that no longer wholly contributes to the definition of their personalities but is still distinct from more impersonal collective pressure. (Harding and Martin 1994, 40)

Certainly Sethe and Amy, because of their parallel situations, experience just such a connection. One manifestation of this interaction-again their encounter that makes the rest of the story possible-is the communion of lost souls and the vital and hopeful mothering ritual of birth in which they immerse themselves.

As they wander the wilds, both characters also suffer from starvation. Recalling her desperation Sethe says, "I was hungry . . . just as hungry as I could be. . . . I was gonna eat [the stranger's] feet off. . . . I was hungry to do it. Like a snake. All jaws and hungry" (Morrison 1988, 31). Similarly, Amy, whom Sethe describes as "need[ing] beef and pot liquor like nobody in this world" (32), combs the hillside for huckleberries. Disappointed in her search, she asks Sethe, "You got anything on you, gal, pass for food? I like to die I'm so hungry" (32). This physical hunger they share, parallels not only abuse and the hardships endured fleeing it, but their other needs as well-specifically, the hunger of their love-starved hearts and a need not only to be loved, but to love others, for paradoxically it is through giving that we receive the greatest gifts.

Amy then reveals how her mother consigned herself to work in order to pay for her passage, which provides further evidence of parallel experience with the allusion to "Middle Passage." Amy adds, "But then she had me and since she died right after, well, they said I had to work for em to pay it off" (Morrison 1988, 33), much the way a slave's children were born into bondage and became the master's property. It appears obvious that like Sethe, who does not know her father and lost her mother at a young age, Amy's familial situation proves strikingly analogous, as noted by Mbalia: "The parallels between [Amy Denver's] experiences and those of the African are similar. Her mother is dead and her father, unknown-perhaps the slavemaster. She shared the same work experience and punishment as those Africans" (95). Indeed, they were both orphaned. Ironically, however, it is Sethe who has a mother-in-law waiting for her, Baby Suggs, who cares for her first three children: two boys, Howard and Buglar, and a girl, the "crawling already? baby" Sethe eventually murders. In contrast, Amy, utterly alone in the world, has no one. As slavery denied families their traditional bonds,5 this illustrates yet another layer of abuse leveled on its victims-the dissolution of the nuclear family-certainly one of the central problems in Morrison's text that again underscores both loss and the need for love to heal.