Paul Kim—AP English—Ms.

Mayer Beloved essay (page 1 of 6)

Speak, Beloved
“All I know is that I know nothing.”

Beloved, by Toni Morrison, long in flashback and discussion, stretches around three hundred

pages, and throughout the title character speaks for fewer then ten. Only twice does the enigma whose

mystery the inhabitants of 124 Bluestone Road have taken for granted for years explain herself at

length. But these words, expressed in thoughts that fill the air, do not bring wandering trails to their

ends or connect them to each other in clearly-labeled ways; instead they inaugurate new ones where the

going is hard and the path unlit. Nonetheless, in the context of the whole text (for little in Beloved is

intelligible without the context of the rest of the book) the first chapter that begins “I am Beloved and

she is mine” can be meaningfully explored. Like the rest of Beloved, it deals heavily in ambiguity and

contains familiar information scattered throughout the new and bewildering thoughts, giving anchorage

to the reader lest she become completely lost.

As many observers have noted, the first part of the chapter, until the middle of the last

paragraph, resembles nothing so much as the interior of a ship of the Middle Passage. People stacked

like logs for the fireplace, powerful men whose whiteness is demonized in their name “men without

skin,” and the constant presence of the sea all suggest that this is not only a valid interpretation of the

chapter's events but also that which is intended to be taken most literally. The novel is dedicated to the

“sixty million and more,” which is reflected in the death of Beloved's man with the song and the white

teeth. But beyond this simple explanation, which still does not explain how Beloved, who was born to

a slave in Kentucky, could have any conscious or unconscious memory of a slave ship, new layers of

meaning emerge from the melange of metaphoric analogs for many elements in this chapter. Though

they only fit imperfectly, their implications are still considerable, and they are certainly required to

make sense of Sethe's presence in the chapter.

Paul Kim—AP English—Ms. Mayer Beloved essay (page 2 of 6)

For example, the mystery that Beloved has embodied throughout the book and the dreamlike

tone of this chapter suggest that Beloved is discussing her stay in some supernatural realm. Earlier in

the book, she tells Denver about this place she calls “the dark [where her] name is Beloved” (75).

From this place she sees Sethe, the woman in the sea, and wants to reach her and relieve the suffering

caused by the symbol of slavery, the iron ring around her neck. She repeats the phrase “a hot thing,”

always in connection with Sethe: in keeping with the metaphorical idiom of Beloved's narration, love is

expressed as a physical sensation. The intensity as well as the destructive and dangerous potential of

her love is acknowledged when it is “hot,” not “warm.” This is the place from which Sethe, whose

identity Beloved mentally combines with her own, comes to rescue her. The sense that Beloved is

recounting a dream is enhanced by the extreme stream-of-consciousness style, for example in the

repetition of phrases like “a hot thing” to indicate sustained phenomena. The sudden shift of setting in

the second-to-last of the sections separated by blank lines is also typical of dreams.

The regular casting of heaps of corpses overboard is a clearing of people from the afterlife,

perhaps signifying the fate of people to remain anonymous and unrecognized after in death. Much is

made of remembering one's children; after Baby Suggs' first few children were taken from her, she

does not try to learn the features of the rest that she bears, because she figures they will also be taken.

When the degree of constancy required for a fulfilling human existence is absent, love is dangerous, as

it is for slaves. In the end, though, though Sethe, Denver, and Paul D seem on track to live happily as a

family without Beloved. She is for the most part forgotten, as the last chapter recounts, but she hangs

out in the woods near the river behind the house. If she is not in the oblivion of the sea, she is close. In

this afterlife, only “some is dead” (75) and the living rest are to die a second death. The biggest issue

with this explanation is that Beloved ages during this time, so when she reappears she is the age that

she would be had she been alive in the interval. Perhaps the best explanation is simply that the story

would not work if Beloved were a toddler.

Paul Kim—AP English—Ms. Mayer Beloved essay (page 3 of 6)

Beloved's interaction with Sethe can start to be understood with this interpretation. Beloved is

above the water, she says, and Sethe below, until she is able to swim into the water and merge with her

mother. Though the noted mythologist Joseph Campbell equates submersion in water with altered

states of existence, here it is Sethe, not Beloved, who is submerged. The water here may represent the

drowning that slavery and its legacy threaten to work on her, though; this explanation is backed up in

the joy Sethe recounts because she does not “have to remember nothing” (183) when she realizes that

Beloved is the reincarnation of her daughter. The events at the end of the chapter reflect what happens

when Sethe, Denver, and Paul D see her upon returning from the carnival.

And this correspondence suggests yet another way of looking at the chapter, one which, though

limited, has the greatest implications of all. It is suggested near the beginning, when Beloved reports

that there are rats on the ship. Rats are mentioned three other times in the book: two of those mentions

have to do with the rats in the jail. Of course rats in a slave ship would also constantly harass the

immobile human cargo. But the very fact that they are mentioned, considering the careful crafting that

demonstrably went into Beloved, suggests that we are at least to consider the possibility that Beloved is

conflating natural and earthly events of the plot with supernatural and possibly imaginary events. In

this case, she would be in prison with her mother and her sister, but trapped in a form that cannot reach

Sethe because of the oft-mentioned noisy clouds of smoke. In the next chapter, these same clouds are

mentioned: “Three times I lost her,” says Beloved, in much more conventional prose, “once with the

flowers because of the noisy clouds of smoke...” (214) Beloved and Sethe are separated in a major way

three times before they reach unity: once when the mother sends her children off to Ohio, ahead of her;

once when she murders Beloved; and once when Paul D drives the ghost out of the house. The clouds

are more reminiscent of tumultuous weather, or perhaps gun-smoke, neither of which is involved in the

plot, and in this case it is better understood as whatever kept Beloved from getting to Sethe. It is above

all useful in explaining the man with pretty white teeth.

Paul Kim—AP English—Ms. Mayer Beloved essay (page 4 of 6)

The six relationships among Sethe, Paul D, Beloved, and Denver form the core of the book, but

the nature of that between Beloved and Paul D is at first hard to divine. Denver suggests that they are

in competition for Sethe's love, and that despite what Sethe thinks, love is finite and more for one

means less for the other. Beloved watches two turtles mating, and when she imitates them with Paul D,

he is driven out of the house. For this reason we are led to believe that Beloved has it in for Paul D,

just as he dislikes her presence. But consider Paul D's description of his sensation when he has sex

with Beloved: when she propositions the unwilling man, “a life hunger overwhelm[s] him and he ha[s]

no more control over it than over his lungs. And afterward, beached and gobbling air, in the midst of

repulsion and personal shame, he [is] thankful too for having been escorted to some ocean-deep place

he once belonged to” (264). He knows it is wrong, and he suffers terribly because of it, but for some

reason the rusted-shut tobacco tin keeps shut with Sethe but opens with Beloved.

Back in the ship, she is on top of the man, a position suggesting sex and dominance. Paul D is

the only male character who sings, and Beloved says of her man, “I love him because he has a song”

(211). If the man with white teeth is truly Paul D, she would not intend to drive him out of the house,

and would more likely genuinely want him to “touch her on the inside part.”

There are several analogs for the singing man's death in Paul D's life. There is the time when

Paul D beats Life, as he tells it, during his time in a chain gang in Alfred, Georgia, and there is his

flight from the house at the hands of Beloved. The Georgia end to life might add to the death that

Beloved witnesses; however, if we take the recollection as chronological (which would be a risky

assumption, if the logic of the sequence of events did not make it likely), Beloved claims that she

cannot reach Sethe is not really triggered until the man with pretty white points, i.e. Paul D, leaves. If

the identification of Paul D as this man is not simply a direct retelling of earthly events in other terms,

but instead a mixture and conflation of two actually distinct spheres, then the chain of causation is

unclear: either she loves Paul D because she loves the man in the ship, or vice versa. She readily
Paul Kim—AP English—Ms. Mayer Beloved essay (page 5 of 6)

admits that she could only connect with Sethe after the dead man was removed; similarly, Sethe only

realizes who Beloved is after Paul D leaves and the three women are among themselves. Which is not

to mention the fact that Beloved and of Paul D conceive of this matter so similarly in terms of

drowning, which either indicates that Paul D and Beloved are seeing the same vision, or else lends

credibility to the idea that these things actually did happen, whatever that means.

Muddied correspondence between events arises elsewhere—does Beloved unite with Sethe

when she is found on the stump outside 124? Or is it in front of the fire? For after Beloved loses Sethe

for the final time, these can both be considered instances of finding again. There is ample concrete

evidence pointing either way. On the one hand, Beloved's account of what happens right before she

unites with Sethe's face sounds much like what she does right before arriving at 124. She comes out of

water, which is far too unrealistic to be coincidental. On the other hand, Beloved says that the

departure of her beloved man allowed her to see Sethe, and again, if we take Beloved's dream account

as chronological, we note that she sees turtles before her communion with Sethe. These are the turtles

whose model Beloved follows as she has sex with Paul D, and which also provide weary readers the

satisfaction of recognizing at least something. In either case, there is ultimately little evidence to

suggest that she intentionally blows apart Paul D's tobacco tin and drives him out of the house: it is

more likely an unintended consequence. Beloved's own account of the events on the ship further gives

the lie to this possibility. When “storms rock [them] and mix the men into the women and the women

into the men” (211), and Beloved finds herself on top of the man who is Paul D, she mentions neither

ill will, nor desire to harm, nor competition for Sethe's love.

The significance of these other interpretations of Beloved's chapter suggest that while the most

literal way to think of the events is as on a slave ship, there are other equally valuable ways of looking

at it. In an interview, Toni Morrison said she was not out to write a wide-angle condemnation of

slavery, but was inspired by this incident to write a story whose plot stays small and narrow, a story
Paul Kim—AP English—Ms. Mayer Beloved essay (page 6 of 6)

which necessarily touches many aspects of slavery. The ambiguity of what these chapters mean, or

which of the interpretations is correct, befits a story whose main character comes and goes for reasons

never fully explained, and we gain tremendously for hearing her speak briefly. As long as our

ignorance of the truth between two possibilities is justified, we must accept this ambiguity as another

integral part of the work and derive what meaning we can from it, and hope it was intentional.