new Beloved Paper

5/30/10

Continuous Falling

It was an early spring morning, and I was sitting forward in my chair in the MEW with Toni Morrison on the stage in front of me. It was question and answer period, and I had previously texted my dad asking if he had a question that he wanted me to ask for him because I know he loves Toni Morrison’s writing so much. His question was intriguing to me, yet at that point I had no idea what he was saying because I had not yet read Beloved. “Ask her what she thinks about saying that Beloved is a declaration to be loved.” In the end, I didn’t get my dad’s question answered, but I am going to try to answer a variation on that question: Why is it so hard to allow oneself to be loved? In Beloved, Toni Morrison depicts the lives of freed slaves during Reconstruction. Each of them has had many or all of the things they love taken away from them.  Sethe says, “to get to a place where you can love anything you choose—not need permission for desire—well now that was freedom.” While Sethe connects loving to freedom, Morrison’s novel also connects being loved to freedom and freedom to falling. Allowing oneself to be loved, means exposing yourself to falling, continuously falling. Falling, in this sense, keeps one connected to the present here and now.

When you allow yourself to be loved it keeps you grounded and connected to the people around you. This is exactly what Sethe was not able to do for most of the novel. After she recognizes Beloved, Sethe becomes so consumed by her that she forgets Denver even exists. This contradicts Sethe’s claim to motherhood that she previously so fiercely justified to Paul D. “It ain’t my job to know what’s worse. It’s my job to know what is and to keep them [this includes Denver] away from what I know is terrible. I did that” (194). But Beloved’s death is not freedom, Sethe’s only other choice for her children was slavery and that is not freedom either. So in Sethe’s situation, love could not liberate her children, it could only take them away from slavery. But now School Teacher is no longer there to take away her children, yet Sethe is caught up in her attempt to explain to Beloved why she killed her when there is no need for explanation. She is obsessed with making it up to her. Sethe longs to be in the here and now, she even claims after Beloved returns , “I’m here…Now I can look at things again because she’s here to see them too” (237). Sethe claims to have “thick love” because she will do whatever it takes for Beloved to be happy. “I’ll tend to her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children” (236). In this statement, she leaves out Denver, a child that she should share the same “thick love” with as well. Sethe wants to say that she is in the “here and now”, but she is unable to really “love thick” like she claims, because she is being manipulated by Beloved and her past (which are one and the same) and she is leaving Denver out of the equation.

There are few instances where we see Sethe truly present in her love, and one of those is when she is with Denver and Beloved skating on the frozen lake. In this scene Morrison repeats the phrase, “Nobody saw them falling” (205), over and over. They are fully free to live in this moment. The three women play on the ice, taking turns wearing the three ice skates and falling. “…All three-Sethe, Beloved and Denver herself—laughed till they coughed” (206). The purity of their happiness is there because it was not thought up, planned or forced, but because this is what they chose to do with their day. Laugh and love. On the frozen lake, the three women are able to fall but only when the water, the flow of past to present, is frozen. This image of water is important. “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was (Toni Morrison).” Sethe’s freedom right now is her disremembering. She is most happy when her past can be frozen away from her present, when it is left dormant rather than coming back to invade her thoughts.

In contrast to the frozen lake, on the slave ship Africans were not allowed to fall or even help each other; none of them could receive love from one another because they were chained. “I cannot fall because there is no room to” (249, no punctuation) While they were enslaved they had no room to even be free to be loved, to fall. Of course black slaves loved one another, but they loved each other while the whites tried to beat and rape and take that love out of them. This literal inability to be loved continues on even after they are free from slavery.  Sethe and Paul D can’t seem to make room to fall yet, can’t handle the risk of exposing themselves to being loved, except for that brief moment on the frozen lake.

Paul D struggles a lot in the book with his freedom.  He is a freedman, but throughout the book he cannot grasp the ability to, “wake up and decide what to do with the day.” Paul D has not allowed himself to “love thick” because he has not claimed ownership of his freedom; he is confused about the new meaning of his manhood. He feels as though he can only be a man at Sweet Home because Mr. Garner called he and his brothers the Sweet Home men. Outside of Sweet Home, he can’t yet claim manhood for himself. In addition, Beloved imposed on his manhood by forcing him to touch her and by moving him around his own home. He didn’t know how to share any love that he had until he could claim his own freedom. And for him he had to leave Sethe to realize it. He kept his heart and ability to love, “In that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got whiff of the contents it would shame him” (86). So maybe “loving thin” is not a good or a bad thing; it just is not enough to be free. “So you protected yourself and loved small” (191). But by the end of the book when Beloved leaves 124, Paul D understands how he can love in the present, an act seen when he rubs Sethe’s feet and nurses her back to health.

To Baby Suggs, similar to Sethe, love also comes in the form of her children. During her life, she gives birth to eight children, all of whom are killed, taken or die at a very young age. Once her children are gone, she feels as though freedom is not possible because she cannot love like she desires. The freedom that Halle won for her is not worth it without the love she wanted to give to all of her children. “That child she could not love and the rest she would not. ‘G-d take what He would,’ she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing” (28). Her freedom is her ability to love, and that has been taken away from her. But instead of letting it cripple her, she uses it to command other people to be loved in the clearing. And she, I think, is the only person in the book who never has to learn to fall. She commands her community to be loved, to love all of their parts because the white men surely wouldn’t want to love them. “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (111-112). Maybe she can command this because she is older and a little bit wiser, or maybe because she accepted her loss more than the others. The community struggles to find the reason of her specialness as well. “…They just wanted to know if Baby really was special, blessed in some way they were not” (185).  I think she was so special because she was able to claim the right for herself and her people to be loved. In the end though, even Baby Suggs could not withstand the white men taking away her grandchildren. Being loved, loving yourself, is not foolproof, but it is, as Baby Suggs says in the Clearing the only way to take your life back in the here and now.  

When I watch some of the older people in my family, I see that some have trouble balancing their inhibitions with their ability to allow themselves to be loved. But in this case, it is because they are so insecure that they don’t allow someone else’s love to fill them up and make them bigger. I’ve especially seen this affect my aunt. She was always very honest in her love, but she closed the door to allowing herself to be loved. Because she has shut that door, her love is empty and thin. She seems to be full of resentment and regret, and she continues to close herself off from being loved. Are the people we think of that have a hard time letting people love them, are those the same people that struggle with loving themselves? In my aunt’s case, I think this is valid because she feels much shame about her past. In contrast, Sethe and Paul D protected themselves against feeling shame.

From Beloved I have learned that being loved is a hard thing to do, especially when you are complicated. It is hard to expose the things that you alone have trouble dealing with. But similar to the frozen lake, you trust yourself to fall, and know that you need to allow yourself to be loved, you become more grounded in the here and now and connected to the people around you. Falling in this sense allows you to be fully present and it requires some level of acceptance of yourself. It involves being vulnerable enough to understand that you might fall, and when you allow yourself to be loved you might never stop falling. And by allowing yourself to be loved, you can claim ownership of your freedom.

Thinking back to the frozen lake, it is interesting that Sethe runs at Mr. Bodwin with an ice pick. She confuses past with present, jumping at the sight of the hat. Sethe never gets to use the ice pick on Mr. Bodwin; instead she ends up,  “running into the faces of the people out there, joining them and leaving Beloved behind…. They make a hill. A hill of black people falling” (309). I imagine, although it is hard to do, a hill of black people continuously falling. Close your eyes and try to imagine a hill of people falling in the yard 124. It is a hard image to fix in your mind or paint on a canvas, which is the way I also feel about allowing oneself to be loved. Sethe is finally able to be loved in this very moment when the women come into her yard for the first time since the time in the shed, and is “leaving Beloved [and her unbearable past] behind. Instead of leaving us with the image of Sethe going after Mr. Bodwin and her frozen past, Morrison leaves us with this image of the women in the yard of 124 loving Sethe, and Sethe falling with all the women surrounding her. I think Morrison is telling us that in order to be loved, you have to trust yourself enough to be continuously falling.