Spirits, Leave Me Be!

The past is a slippery thing. When we try to pry our favorite memories from it, they always seem to slip just outside our grasp. Surely, Uni students know well the pain of sitting in a room on finals day and watching as the material completely fades away before your eyes, leaving you without a clue how to do problem two. Yet, often, the things that we most wish to stow away forever never leave us alone; an embarrassing accident, a bad performance, a stupid rumor. They haunt us, sometimes hiding away but always in order to redouble the next grievance. In much the same way, the past in Beloved is shown to haunt Sethe and the other characters both metaphorically (Sethe's painful memories of Sweet Home) and literally (the dead baby ghost in 124). Moreover, each character seems to represent a different way to deal with this atrocious spectre of the past that looms over their heads.

The kids have a very different place coping with their past than the adults. For one thing, the only nightmare they have to relive is the shed episode. But, their methods of making everything okay do not show them to be as strong as their elders. They never make any direct references to the event themselves; Howard and Buglar haven't even been shown to speak, let alone talk to each other about the incident: "Say, Buglar, do you remember when dear old mum nearly killed us all?" Denver was far too young to remember anything. And, even assuming that Beloved really is the crawling-already?baby, she hasn't spoken about the fateful day at all herself. However, their reactions are much more cut-and-dry. Howard and Buglar can't even put up with the ghost, and they simply run away, hoping to leave the past behind. Denver seems to suffer the most from these trials. She becomes a recluse in the house, without friends at school or in the neighborhood. She tries to make up for it by running off to her "room" of boxwood bushes, playact as if her life is normal enough. Her idea of coping is still to run off, but now she's only running inside herself.

The adults have a much more mental reaction to their past rather than the physical response of the children. Baby Suggs, who had gotten over the destitution of slavery by the intoxication of freedom, along with a dash of hope that her son might join her eventually, broke down after the shed episode. She shut out the world; perhaps her hip was in too much pain to straight run away. She retreats to her bed, and shuts out everything of the outside world that might do harm; nothing matters but her colors. She became obsessed with the one thing that wouldn't do anybody harm, trying to block out any memories of the appalling act that occurred in her shed. Sethe is not much better herself. She engages in a thick doublethink, recalling fondly parts of Sweet Home while trying desperately to shove away the rest of it. Moreover, she defends her actions in the shed, pushing away the idea that anything else could have worked, could have kept her babies safe from schoolteacher.  It's this precise doublethink that alienates her from the rest of the community; it's one thing to say that her actions were successful despite the consequences, but another thing entirely to say that what she did was the right choice. Killing her daughter may have worked, and it may have been the only way, but nobody else will accept her back until they see that she is sorry for the taking of life not too dissimilar to what schoolteacher himself had intended to do. And so, as we are beginning to see in part two, she is walling herself off just like Baby Suggs did before.

Paul D is an interesting case. He has shown himself to have gone through hell and back and yet he's readjusted himself to be as normal as possible. He removed the wild from his eye after having the bit. He survived the prison in Alfred, Georgia, and has shown himself to bounce right back now that he's been out for a while. Surely, he should be the best able to cope with the news of what happened twenty-eight days after Sethe arrived at 124. However, he, in entirely the same way the rest of the community already has, shuns the sinners. He doesn't fully run away; although he is trying to escape the reach of Beloved (his *click* comes after hearing Sethe's story, when he thinks to himself, "That bitch is looking at me; she is right over my head looking down through the floor at me" (193-194). But, he doesn't do the same thing as Howard and Buglar; instead of leaving and, like Lot, refusing to look back upon the great mound of sin he left behind, he spends a few nights in the basement of the church in order to clear his head and think things through. He has so far been the one to pull the ladies of 124 back in the direction of normal (getting them to go to the carnival), and I wouldn't be surprised if he bounces back again to continue his work.

Throughout the story, Toni Morrison focuses not just on the facts of the events that occur but on the reactions of the characters to them, and this is an important point to add onto the raw data. They show us how we should respond to stress (like how Paul D has accepted the past and can talk about it without bringing himself to severe pain) and how we shouldn't (such as how Sethe bites Paul D's head off when he fills in the gaps on where Halle was when the escape went awry). The story is a cautionary tale as much as a tragedy; leaving tensions unresolved is the way to get yourself into trouble, sure as anything else.