Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Close Reading: The Permanence of Pain

Page 62-63, Beloved by Toni Morrison
Close Reading: The Permanence of Pain


Sethe dropped the shoes; Denver sat down and Paul D smiled. He recognized the careful enunciation of letters by those, like himself, who could not read but had memorized the letters of their name. He was about to ask who her people were but thought better of it. A young colored woman drifting was drifting from ruin. He had been in Rochester four years ago and seen five women arriving with fourteen female children. All their men -- brothers, uncles, fathers, husbands, sons -- had been picked off one by one by one. They had a single piece of paper directing them to a preacher on DeVore Street. The War had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or black seemed to know it. Odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the back roads and cowpaths from Schenectady to Jackson. Dazed but insistent, they searched each other out for word of a cousin, an aunt, a friend who once said, “Call on me. Anytime you get near Chicago, just call on me.” Some of them were running from family that could not support them, some to family; some were running from dead crops, dead kin, life threats, and took-over land. Boys younger than Buglar and Howard; configurations and blends of families of women and children, while elsewhere, solitary, hunted and hinting for, were men, men, men. Forbidden public transportation, chased by debt and filthy “talking sheets,” they followed secondary routes, scanned the horizon for signs and counted heavily on each other. Silent, except for social courtesies, when they met one another they neither described nor asked about the sorrow that drove them from one place to another. The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew.


This passage was included once the wandering woman was introduced into the story. This woman was found walking out of a river, fully-clothed, and she sat down on the steps of 124 to take a rest. Sethe, Paul D, and Denver find the woman sitting by their house and do not question her intentions or motivations. She says that her name is “Beloved”, which is ironic because Sethe carved the word “beloved” into her dead baby’s gravestone. Beloved hangs around the house and is offered a bed to sleep in, which she accepts.


Morrison intentionally includes an interesting except about Beloved and the cultural divides that permeate a post-slavery society. This passage specifically talks about the way that Sethe and Denver choose to treat the stranger Beloved. They mention that Beloved is a colored woman and she doesn't seem to have an end location in mind as she wanders. Paul D resists the urge to ask Beloved where she is from or “who her people are” and this passage examines why he chooses to hesitate before asking her such a question. Then, he goes into a stream of consciousness that flashes back his past experiences as a slave living in Rochester. He notes that women and their children passed through his area but without men. He explains that although the war was over, “nobody black or white seemed to know it,” meaning that the issue of slavery, which was the original reason why the North and South had began the war, had not resolved.


Similarly to how I explained the way that slaves treat each other in my Responding and Reflecting Blog Post, we can explicitly see how much reverence and support the slaves provide for each other despite their past (and current) hardships. After slaves had been “freed”, Paul D describes how they aimlessly wander around towns and villages with no motivations. He expresses the intense remorse that each wandering fugitive slave has - whether they are running away from a painful past, traveling towards a better future, or a combination of the two.

I think there is an interesting cultural similarity and understanding within this small excerpt of Beloved. Paul D expresses that both fellow colored people and whites acknowledge that they will not ask wandering black people about whether they intend to go. For many of them, this question is pointless, because they do not have a specific place to go. People were drawn to the numbness and apathy of “wandering” to find nothing in particular.

I believe that this excerpt has thousands of interpretations. Pain can be an incredibly hard thing to deal with, especially when a community around you doesn't show support and strength. Slaves had experienced some of the most inhumane actions and injustices against their race. Luckily for the wandering slaves, most individuals all had the common understanding that they had all gone through the unthinkable or even possibly caused it. The slaves were lucky enough to have people that they could confide in when find a loved one or looking for a place to spend the night. Through their communal despair and anguish, they understood each other and could consequently respect the space they needed to repair themselves.

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