South Central Review

It never occurred to me that including a Nobel Prize-winning author’s writing in my junior-level college Literary Analysis course would result in pushback. We had built up to Beloved by way of readings like Medea and Frankenstein—a thematic focus on infanticide that I taught while very visibly pregnant—and the students in the course were all English majors, who tend to be more liberal than our introductory-level freshmen. But upon reading the first chapter, one of my brightest students noticed the subject of bestiality (something many less attuned students miss), and let me know she could not, as a Christian, read the story further.¹ I handed her Pride and Prejudice as an alternate independent reading and focused on the rest of the class. I don’t know if I handled this situation correctly, or how others would have managed it. But Morrison’s Beloved has been regularly banned by groups anxious to protect students from encountering uncomfortable subjects.² I have ignored this censorship as ludicrous because, just as my course on infanticide is not a “how to,” Morrison’s Beloved does not advocate bestiality. Its point, as any good [End Page 117] reader will recognize, is to emphasize institutional slavery’s systematic dehumanization. But as the calls for censorship have only become louder in my home state of Texas, I assume the pushback I see in my classes for assigning works like Beloved will only grow stronger and more self-righteous. It is only recently that I have wondered if my refusal to engage in a subject that strikes me as self-evident is as sanctimonious as that of my resistant students, and contributes to our current political divide. No easy answer there. But because the students who self-censor in my courses typically do so on religious grounds, I have begun introducing Beloved alongside assigned readings from the Bible, just as I might for Goethe’s Faust, Dante’s Inferno, or Milton’s Paradise Lost. I think it serves as a kind of bridge to more difficult literature to build on a text, like the Bible, with which my students already have investment. And I’m sure to mention, in my introduction to Beloved, that Morrison was Catholic.³

One of the reasons Beloved is such an interesting text to examine with students well-versed in religious learning is that like so much of Western literature, it relies on a few quintessential religious stories for its structure—among these, the Garden of Eden references in Morrison’s descriptions of Sweet Home, and the Apocalypse references in the climactic moment in which Sethe kills her daughter, Beloved.⁴ The readings that I offer here will not be surprising to biblical scholars, who may rightly quibble with my interpretation of passages here or there. But they are surprising to my students, who know Genesis, especially, from their pastors and priests rather than the text itself. Genesis 1–4 is short enough and relevant enough for many literary texts that it’s appropriate for non-religious students to read, and sometimes my Christian students are more interested in reading Morrison’s work once they understand her literary investment in biblical scripture.

There are many ways scholars understand the biblical garden story, the distinctions in the character of God between Genesis 1 and 2, and the variations on creation introduced in each. When I’m teaching, I have Bible Gateway⁵ onscreen and visible to the class so that we can easily move between different translations. I also invite students to bring their personal Bible to class to draw attention to common translations and comparisons. I use Robert Alter’s annotated Genesis: Translation and Commentary, designed for academic use, to help us sort out the sources of the earliest texts, and allow students to speculate why translators have made their choices in wording passages in certain ways.⁶

I typically begin by introducing Genesis 1 not because it’s necessarily relevant to Morrison, but more because it’s a reminder of the interpretive possibilities of the text that doesn’t immediately launch us into controversial [End Page 118] subjects. A soft start. We talk about what gets created each day: we might discuss whether, given God’s creation of time on the first day, and His existence outside of time, human actions are therefore predetermined or free; or we might discuss how God’s creation of “light” on the first day is distinct from his creation of the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth; we might ask whether God’s expectation that both animals and man be fruitful and multiply is a defining quality of their nature.⁷ I do ask my students why biblical editors chose to juxtapose the first two chapters, with an omnipotent, all-powerful God who speaks his creations into existence on days 1–6 in the first chapter, alongside a more humanized God who walks and talks with Adam, and who finds himself working so hard he actually takes a rest, introduced as of the seventh day in the second chapter.⁸ But what most interests my students is the way God’s perfect order described in Genesis 2 somehow leads to the fall from innocence by Genesis 3. Morrison arguably unpacks the same story in her pervasive descriptions and deconstruction of Sweet Home, so it’s critical that my students become familiar with the issues at hand in these earliest Genesis stories, for which I sometimes take up to two separate class meetings to establish.

While God insists on a tautological sense of order he establishes from chaos in Genesis 1—in other words, he organizes the world hierarchically, assessing the objects of his own creation to be “good,” and “in our image, by our likeness”—he does not distinguish man from woman in the first chapter.⁹ He does give humankind authority over the animals and gardens.¹⁰ But human gendered differences, which are also a preoccupation in Morrison’s work, are not unpacked until the Bible’s second chapter. In Genesis 2, God creates the Garden of Eden into which he places man, reminding him that he must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, lest he die.¹¹ I ask my students what the threat of death means in a deathless, painless, evil-free world. In other words, how can Adam and Eve know what death means before its existence? . . . because I will later ask them how the slaves who work for the Garners perceive the existential threat from Mr. Garner’s death before it occurs. But in Genesis 2, worried for man’s loneliness, after bringing all the animals to man’s attention and having man name them, God creates Eve from Adam’s rib.¹² Religious scholars, not to mention my students, have sometimes contended that before the Fall, woman is equal to man—made, as she is, from Adam’s side (rather than his foot), and serving as his helpmeet.¹³ But it is worth noting that in this chapter, God does not walk and talk with Eve as he does with Adam, that Adam names Eve just as he had done previously with the other animals, and that Eve is formed for Adam’s purposes, [End Page 119] rather than he for hers. Eve’s place in this hierarchy, this “good” order that God has established, implicitly exists somewhere between Adam and the garden’s animals.¹⁴ There is no indication in Genesis 2 that Eve questions this second-class citizenship, nor that she is even aware of it.

But Eve is soon disillusioned. In Genesis’s chapter 3, the animals, in the form of the cunning, possibly fruit-eating snake, approach Eve to demand equality through a collaborative effort to eat the fruit and be more like God.¹⁵ Eve, second-lowest garden denizen, agrees with the lowly snake that such democracy in the garden is desirable, and shares her discovery with Adam.¹⁶ God takes no notice of this betrayal of his will until Adam eats that apple. And equality—which we might also read as chaos, disorder—destroys the “good[ness]” of the garden in God’s eyes; his creatures must be corrected and returned to their appropriate places. This time, God explicitly restores his hierarchical order—animal will be lowest, then woman (over whom Adam rules), then man, then God remains immortal in the Heavens—and insists human labor will consequentially be painful, and that the cost of disobedience is death.¹⁷ But this second part of God’s punishment must have been at first confusing to the sinners, because as we know, neither Adam nor Eve immediately experiences that threatened death in their exile from the garden. True, both man’s labor and woman’s labor become more strenuous. But without immediate death, what marks the difference between humans before and after the Fall is not the renewed hierarchy which, as I have suggested, was apparent even in Chapter 2. Instead, the difference is the human awareness of the hierarchy; it is the “knowledge” of their subservience to God and their expected obedience to His order.

Many literary sources that contain biblical allusions stop here. But I suggest it’s Morrison’s careful use of the biblical Genesis 4, the story of Cain and Abel, that makes Beloved extraordinary. In Genesis 4, after being expelled from the garden, Adam and Eve have two male children (the Bible being comparatively incurious about their female children). Both Cain, who is a farmer, and Abel, who might be called a shepherd (or, in my neck of the woods, a rancher), make sacrifices to God with the hard-won fruits of their labor. But for unclear reasons, God prefers Abel’s sacrifice of flesh.¹⁸ Cain, envious of Abel’s favor in God’s eyes, kills his younger brother, initiating the first family’s first death.¹⁹ It is only now that the nature of God’s punishment for Adam and Eve’s disobedience is fully realized. That God visits this death not upon the instigators of the sin, Adam and Eve, but upon their son, is worth observing to students. So is Cain’s subsequent exile. And of course, because Adam and Eve [End Page 120] must now mourn the loss of both of their two sons, God gives them Seth, compensation for their loss, and source of Sethe’s feminized male name.²⁰

Morrison’s retelling of Genesis 2, reflected in Sethe’s early memories of Sweet Home and the Garner couple, who are its slave owners, highlights Sethe’s “innocence,” her lack of awareness of the hierarchical world she inhabits. Mr. (Paul) Garner acts as a narcissistic, almost godly Adam, establishing a farm “order” or hierarchy, and naming most of his slaves in his own image, quite literally after himself—Paul A. Garner, Paul D. Garner, Paul F. Garner, Halle, and Sixo. Mr. Garner benevolently insists that his slaves be treated as “men”—where they hire themselves out for work on their downtime, use guns to hunt animals on the farm as needed to supplement their food supply, and are praised for thinking for themselves. The iconic benevolent slave owner that Morrison will deconstruct in Beloved. But Mr. Garner perpetuates the illusion of equality within a system that is anything but, and in which he is complicit. He is like a God who offers equality, democracy, but only so long as his slaves follow his rules, which is not equality at all.

But this illusion of equality, the invisible violence of the system itself, is not immediately apparent to Sethe, even when it becomes apparent to Morrison’s readers. Early on, we can recognize the orderliness of the Sweet Home “garden,” and the establishment of its (traditional) male-female relations, in the infamous actions of Mr. Garner:

Sethe was thirteen when she came to Sweet Home [. . .] The five Sweet Home men looked at the new girl and decided to let her be. [. . .] The restraint they had exercised possible only because they were Sweet Home men—the ones Mr. Garner bragged about while other farmers shook their heads in warning at the phrase.

“Y’all got boys,” he told them. “Young boys, old boys, picky boys, stropping boys. Now at Sweet Home, my niggers is men every one of em. Bought em thataway, raised em thataway. Men every one.”

“Beg to differ, Garner. Ain’t no nigger men”

“Not if you scared, they ain’t.” Garner’s smile was wide. “But if you a man yourself, you’ll want your niggers to be men too.”

“I wouldn’t have no nigger men round my wife.”

It was the reaction Garner loved and waited for. “Neither would I,” he said. “Neither would I,” and there was always a pause before the neighbor, or stranger, or peddler, or brother-in-law or whoever it was got the meaning. Then a fierce argument, sometimes a fight, and Garner came home bruised and pleased, having demonstrated one more time what a real Kentuckian was: [End Page 121] one tough enough and smart enough to make and call his own niggers men.²¹

Admirable though the male slaves’ patience may be, there are so many issues to take up in a scene like this—Sethe’s young age, the assumption that one of five men will suit her and she one of them, the assumption that not raping is somehow a demonstration of manliness, the insults launched against Garner’s “brother-in-law” that will result in School-teacher’s venom against Garner’s slaves, to name a few. But I find my students don’t quite understand the layered meaning of the story Mr. Garner tells, and its implications on Sweet Home. In response to the more brutal treatment slaves might receive on other farms and plantations, Mr. Garner insists on calling his slaves “men.” Especially in our contemporary awareness of a gender spectrum, it’s worth unpacking with our students what we understand “men” to be, and what “women” are. For Garner, and really, for much of society even in today’s less gendered world, men are stereotypical providers for and protectors of women and families, who are expected to be capable of exercising control over their physically powerful bodies. But Garner’s assertion that he treats his slaves as “men,” in his own image, is disingenuous without freedom, and serves only to gild Garner’s authority. When the questioner reminds Garner that masculinity is defined by protection of women, and that Garner has a wife to protect around these “men,” Garner’s response is designed to assure that, unlike his questioner, both Garner’s slaves and Garner’s wife are securely under his control—a hierarchical garden in which women’s and slaves’ relative status is unclear, but Garner’s is certainly on top. And while he remains in charge of Sweet Home, the status quo is unchanged, though “Everything rested on Mr. Garner being alive.”²²

Sethe is innocent, or unaware, of Garner’s implemented order, as Morrison establishes when she has Sethe chat with Mrs. Garner about her prospective marriage to Halle:

When he asked her to be his wife, Sethe happily agreed and then was stuck not knowing the next step. There should be a ceremony, shouldn’t there? A preacher, some dancing, a party, a something. She and Mrs. Garner were the only women there, so she decided to ask her.

“Halle and me want to be married, Mrs. Garner.”

“So I heard.” She smiled. “He talked to Mr. Garner about it. Are you already expecting?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, you will be. You know that, don’t you?” [End Page 122]

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Halle’s nice, Sethe. He’ll be good to you.”

“But I mean we want to get married.”

“You just said so. And I said all right.”

“Is there a wedding?”

Mrs. Garner put down her cooking spoon. Laughing a little, she touched Sethe on the head, saying, “You are one sweet child.”²³

From their conversation, it seems that Mrs. Garner observes no difference between Sethe being married and her having sex—“Are you already expecting?” she asks. As Mrs. Garner explains, whether sex or marriage, Sethe’s womanhood means being fruitful, becoming a mother; maternity is how Sethe must define herself moving forward as a woman. But Sethe assumes, made as she is in her owner’s (Christian) image, that her own marriage constitutes the same expectations as the marriage of the Garners. While Mr. and Mrs. Garner are aware of the hierarchy that elevates them above their slaves, Sethe does not yet understand it. But Halle is beginning to. By the time Halle expresses his fears (to Sethe’s surprise) about making enough money on the side to free not only his mother, Baby Suggs, but also Sethe, himself, and his increasing number of children, he, at least, is becoming less innocent, more aware of the violence and self-perpetuating cycles of the system of slavery, even as practiced by the Garners.

For Sethe, as for all the Sweet Home men, it is literally “Schoolteacher,” Mr. Garner’s insulted brother-in-law, who reinforces the Garners’ implicit hierarchy explicitly, giving Sethe and the Sweet Home slaves a Fall from innocence and first-class introduction to “knowledge.” He does so with a viciousness and abuse that leads to the torture, and in most cases, the brutal death of all five Sweet Home men. In the case of Sethe, she is physically violated by the unnamed Schoolteacher’s nephews. But it’s worth noting that Sethe does not describe her experience as a rape, though many of my students appropriately do. Instead, Sethe explains that the nephews stole her milk, a distinction that reminds us that what they took from her is not so much Sethe’s body, but her sense of self, which is deeply rooted in stereotypical female maternity—the milk that made her someone who could provide for and protect her children.²⁴ What Sethe fails to understand in the case of the Garners, and what she learns from Schoolteacher, is that understanding oneself as a “man” or a “mother”—any form of implied protective bonds with others—is utterly incongruent in the face of slavery’s division of husbands from wives, parents from children. [End Page 123]

But Morrison’s craft is demonstrated by the complicated way these religiously-grounded romanticizations of gender traditions are harmfully maintained in Sethe and Paul D’s outlooks, even as they emerge from enslavement and enter a tentative sort of freedom in Reconstruction. So, for instance, in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Sethe tells Paul D about this violation and he explains that Halle must have seen her abused, Sethe’s anger is directed not at the nephews who violated her, but at Halle, who in his vaunted masculinity, failed to save her:

“The day I came in here. You said they stole your milk. I never knew what it was that messed him up. That was it, I guess. All I knew was that something broke him. Not a one of them years of Saturdays, Sundays and nighttime extra ever touched him. But whatever he saw go on in that barn that day broke him like a twig.”

“He saw?” Sethe was gripping her elbows as though to keep them from flying away.

“He saw. Must have.”

“He saw them boys do that to me and let them keep on breathing air? He saw? He saw? He saw?”

“Hey! Hey! Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddam ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddam minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.”²⁵

Like Halle, Paul D identifies his own masculinity with his ability to control his own physical power. But in defending Halle, Paul D rightly reminds Sethe that a man is more than his physical strength. In fact, Paul D needs “man” to mean more than physical strength, as Paul D’s own emasculating nightmare of being treated like an animal and of becoming physically out-of-his-own-control—both when he is raped by the Georgia prison guards, and again by his own guilt-ridden trauma manifested in the ghost, Beloved—offer plenty of reason for trauma among survivors of enslavement.²⁶ Given Sethe’s readiness to judge Halle for his physical inability to protect her, his failure of masculinity, it is no wonder that Paul D never shares the story of his own rape with Sethe. Male rape, even in Morrison’s deft hands, remains a taboo, unspoken subject in the novel.

But it is Morrison’s handling of the story of Cain and Abel that marks her as the subtle and challenging storyteller we know her to be. The antagonism between two brothers, Mr. Garner and Schoolteacher (who envies Mr. Garner’s spread) serves as a kind of foreshadowing. And by the time Sethe escapes from Sweet Home, we know Sixo, Halle, Paul [End Page 124] A, Paul D and Paul F have all been tortured, with at least three of them killed. So death already exists among the Garner family’s slaves. But it is Beloved’s death, Sethe’s third child killed by Sethe’s own hand, that is the catalyst of Morrison’s story. We see this death acted out in the chapter that describes Schoolteacher’s pursuit of Sethe as the coming of the “four horsemen,” a reference to the Apocalypse that should bring us to the Bible’s end, but one described by Morrison as a new beginning. The slaves’ disobedience and flight in Schoolteacher’s eyes are a result of flawed adamic behavior, “what happened when you overbeat creatures God had given you the responsibility of,” a phrase that instead brings us back to Genesis 1 and 2, and rhetorically sets Sethe and Paul D firmly in the category of animals rather than human.²⁷ And Schoolteacher regrets having offered too much paternalistic “freedom” to the slaves: “All testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred.”²⁸ So the death is there, as punishment for taking more freedom than was sanctioned.

But for my students, I find the most important aspect of the Cain and Abel story to relate to the complex jealousy between brothers, the inexplicable reason God preferred one brother over the other. This thinking is why Stamp Paid’s role in Beloved is so important, particularly in the latter half of the novel. As we know, after she is violated by Schoolteacher’s nephews, Sethe escapes Schoolteacher, and inexplicably manages to save Beloved and her two older boys, Howard and Buglar, by entrusting them to strangers on the Underground Railroad. When she cannot find him, Sethe is forced to leave without Halle and strikes out on her own, giving birth along the way to Denver, named for the transient Amy Denver, an indentured white servant girl on the run, who helps Sethe survive. Stamp Paid rescues Sethe and her newborn, after already having seen Sethe’s children safely into the hands of their grandmother, Baby Suggs. Against all odds, and unlike so many others who travel the same path, Sethe and Baby Suggs’s family survives nearly intact. And they celebrate. “It was Stamp Paid who started it,” toiling amidst the thistles and thorns to get blackberries for the rescued baby, blackberries that were so fine, Baby Suggs—adding her woman’s work to his—insisted on making them into pies: “Fruit worthy of a man’s labor and his love. That’s how it began.”²⁹ Their unexpected joy at survival and premature sense of escape rapidly grows into a celebration of imagined excess, one that inspires envy from the Black refugees of their community: Baby Suggs, lucky enough to have a son who bought her freedom; her grandchildren, miraculously maintained by strangers on the Underground Railroad; and a few weeks [End Page 125] later, her daughter-in-law, complete with a child she had birthed along the way. Why did God smile on Baby Suggs and her family, and not on the families of those others living in the area, who had lost husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, parents, children to the horrors of the slave trade? Such godly beneficence upon one family but not another produce ugly jealousies that, in Beloved as in Genesis, result in a cataclysmic death.

Stamp Paid is the one who understands, even though he has trouble explaining, why Beloved’s death was not just Sethe’s fault, but a community failing. After revealing to Paul D how Beloved died, and feeling pangs of guilt about a revelation not his to share, Stamp Paid is unable to articulate his own feelings of complicity, why he and Baby Suggs had been distracted:

And about the party too, because that explained why nobody ran on ahead; why nobody sent a fleet-footed son to cut ‘cross a field soon as they saw the four horses in town hitched for watering while the riders asked questions. Not Ella, not John, not anybody ran down or to Bluestone Road, to say some new whitefolks with the Look just rode in [. . .] Nobody warned them, and he’d always believed it wasn’t the exhaustion from a long day’s gorging that dulled them, but some other thing—like, well, like meanness—that let them stand aside, or not pay attention, or tell themselves somebody else was probably bearing the news already to the house on Bluestone Road where a pretty woman had been living for almost a month. Young and deft with four children one of which she delivered herself the day before she got there, and who now had the full benefit of Baby Suggs’ bounty and her big old heart. Maybe they just wanted to know if Baby really was special, blessed in some way they were not.³⁰

What Morrison is at pains to describe, and she uses the Bible to do so, is how a people who have lived through such horrors can be further splintered—how brothers can turn against each other, how good people can inflict even more hurt upon each other, upon their own, even after having themselves survived such inhuman conditions—by jealousy. My students struggle to come to grips with this idea, because it’s so hard to judge the actions of a people who have been so brutalized, but this is the work of the text.

In Sethe’s prison sentence, and after that her self-isolation, we have an exile, comparable to Cain’s. And more than this, we know from the ghost Sethe lives with when she returns, and the figure of the ghost-girl Beloved who Sethe is constantly trying to placate and serve, that Sethe [End Page 126] is overwrought with guilt at the murder of her child. But Sethe’s feelings of guilt are complicated by anger because, just as Stamp Paid knows her new community might have prevented the death of her daughter, so does Sethe. And she knows it immediately as we see when she carries the baby Denver with her into the prison cart, walking in front of the witnesses to her crime. This Black community has witnessed many horrors before. So, however inadequate, they usually offer the solace of singing and solidarity to acknowledge the victim’s pain and give voice to their struggles:

Outside a throng, now, of black faces stopped murmuring. Holding the living child, Sethe walked past them in their silence and hers. She climbed into the cart, her profile knife-clean against a cheery blue sky. A profile that shocked them with its clarity. Was her head a bit too high? Her back a little too straight? Probably. Otherwise the singing would have begun at once, the moment she appeared in the doorway of the house on Bluestone Road. Some cape of sound would have quickly been wrapped around her, like arms to hold and steady her on the way. As it was, they waited till the cart turned about, headed west to town. And then no words. Humming. No words at all.³¹

Sethe is ashamed and cannot forgive herself for the murder of her own child. But if Sethe’s “head is a bit too high,” her “back a bit too straight,” it is because Sethe’s cannot forgive the community for their spiteful failure to warn, that results in her daughter’s death. She consoles herself for her child’s murder by blaming her new Black community. And the community knows she is right, that their “meanness,” to use Stamp Paid’s term, has cost Sethe’s daughter her life. So they, also, feel deeply ashamed for their failure. But how does a community apologize for a mistake with so grave a cost? It is much easier to console themselves by blaming Sethe for acting contrary to the Christian expectations of motherhood—as when Elle remarks, “I ain’t got no friends take a handsaw to their own children”³²—than it is to examine their guilt, to do whatever they can to make amends. So when Sethe is taken by the sheriff, both Sethe and the community judge each other for each other’s failings, because it’s easier than admitting to their complicity in the face of trauma. And the silence endures, and the gulf widens for years. Even “Baby Suggs, holy, having devoted her freed life to harmony, was buried amid a regular dance of pride, fear, condemnation and spite,” when Sethe and the community trade veiled insults at the funeral.³³ [End Page 127]

This story of brothers turning against each other is crystallized once more in Paul D’s judgement of Sethe when he learns of her murder, even as someone who advocated for Sethe’s better understanding of how Halle’s impossible identification with the masculine had broken him. Paul D cites Sethe’s lack of maternal instincts, a masculine-feminine binarism upon which Paul D still scaffolds his own identity. Her lack of femininity threatens the order and his understanding of his own masculinity:

He thought he had made it safe, had gotten rid of the danger; beat the shit out of it; run it off the place and showed it and everybody else the difference between a mule and a plow. And because she had not done it before he got there her own self, he thought it was because she could not do it [. . .] He was wrong. This here Sethe was new. The ghost in her house didn’t bother her for the same reason a room-and-board witch with new shoes was welcome. This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman; but what she meant could cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw.

“What you did was wrong, Sethe [. . .] You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet.³⁴

Perhaps most unsettling to Paul D is the recognition that Sethe does not need a man in the way he has self-identified as a man, through his physical strength. Her strength is comparable, if not greater than his own. And it ironically makes him uncertain how he can be a provider and protector of a woman like this, when he, more than anyone, wants to understand himself as more than “a goddam ax.” But, just as Sethe and her community project their own brokenness and grievances onto each other, Paul D consoles himself for his insecure sense of masculinity by projecting his own fears of dehumanization, animalization onto Sethe as well.

Paul D’s conversation and subsequent departure brings about Sethe’s recognition of the ghost as the manifestation of her child, Beloved, about which she can speak to no one. We can read this as a strengthening of Sethe’s isolation and guilt over the death of the baby that allows it to utterly control her, to take her food, her clothing, to eat her alive were it not for Stamp Paid’s (guilt-driven) visits to her house that help him recognize that she’s in trouble, and Denver’s intervention. Though Denver innocently wishes her mother would share more about her past, Morrison’s book is dedicated to memories that are terrible to pass on, of survival at sometimes unheroic and frightening costs. And the pain of [End Page 128] being judged, and judging oneself, for these impossible choices. Having never lived in slavery, Denver finds herself alienated by her mother, and because of her mother and Baby Suggs’s exile, outcast from her community. But from desperation—her mother’s obsequious servitude and capacity for impoverishment to this girl/ghost, who appears increasingly demanding, pregnant, an engorgement of Sethe’s guilt—Denver is forced into adulthood, and finds a role in protecting Sethe from Beloved, protecting her mother from her own all-consuming guilt.³⁵ Denver learns to be intrepid, and to reach out to the very community that has ostracized her family, to suture its wounds. And because she has no memory of the child Beloved’s death, or slavery, or the before-times, and because the community has no quarrel with Denver, Denver is the ideal person to reconnect her family to the community. For knowledge on how to do this, on how to find a job when she knows nothing, she returns to her old schoolteacher, Lady Jones, for help, and Lady Jones (after all, not all schoolteachers are bad) reaches out to others. And while it is true that the community cannot afford to support someone who does not know how to work, it collectively takes Denver up—perhaps a belated expression of the apology it owes but cannot verbalize to Sethe:

Maybe they were sorry for her. Or for Sethe. Or they were sorry for the years of their own disdain. Maybe they were simply nice people who could hold meanness toward each other for just so long when trouble rode bareback among them, quickly, easily they did what they could to trip him up.³⁶

When she hears about the ghost, Beloved, torturing Sethe, Sethe’s former friend, Elle, convinces others to help, and jumps to Sethe’s defense explaining, “Nobody got that coming.”³⁷ The novel’s climax occurs when Mr. Bodwin comes to collect Denver for work, labor, and Sethe mistakes him for Schoolteacher’s return. She turns to attack Mr. Bodwin with her icepick, now correctly aiming her vengeance upon the would-be oppressors instead of her daughter-ghost. But the community, with Denver at the lead, intervenes and wrestles her down to prevent her from mistaking present-day reality with the past, saving her now where before they betrayed her. And while Sethe may still mistake her sense of self as motherhood—“The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing”³⁸—it is significant that Paul D is there to remind her, “You your own best thing, Sethe.”³⁹ Though he is not yet willing to offer up his own traumatic memories, Paul D, in moments like these, demonstrates that [End Page 129] he is beginning to see beyond those religious and gendered expectations that have shut down his ability to communicate his experiences meaningfully. While Denver becomes a household provider, Paul D becomes a caretaker, and both are needed. Both lonely, both helpmeets. So Morrison offers us, for the tragic loss of Beloved, the consolation of Sethe. While a replacement child is never compensation for the lost child, the name “Sethe,” and the affirmation that she is her own “best thing,” we are all our own “best things,” is Morrison’s prescription for finding our way forward in a broken world. A new beginning.

I don’t know that teaching Beloved through the lens of the first four chapters of “Genesis” would have changed anything in the case of my former student. But sometimes reminding my conservative and religious students that I, and the writers I read, are conversant with and thinking about a text that means something to them, as well, is a useful starting point. It conveys the respect we have for a book that has (problematically) shaped Western culture as we know it, so that we can talk about those problems again through contemporary eyes. And I think for those of us interested in real dialogue in our classrooms, such an approach offers some common grounds for students from all kinds of political views, to weigh in and offer opinions. Because, as Morrison’s text reminds us, it is only through talking honestly about our problems and disagreements, finding spaces where we can admit our complicities, that we can make human progress, and establish a more just world.