124 is Haunted

Much critical appraisal of Beloved has turned on the meaning of the eponymous character and whether or not she should be understood as a ghost or simply as a needy young woman who reads and is read by Sethe as the latter’s murdered daughter. The ambiguity surrounding Beloved is probably intentionally generated, that is, multiple readings of this character are not only possible, but can coexist simultaneously. However, other ghosts in the story also play a crucial role as, for example, the “lonely,” “rebuked” “crawling-already?” almost two-year old; the later apparition of the dress “holding” Sethe as she kneels; the deceased Baby Suggs “talking” Denver off the porch and into the frightening world from which she has been isolated; and others mentioned by minor characters. The text is also rife with many clues pointing to the very “real” possibility that the so-called “white woman,” Amy Denver, might also be a “ghostly presence” sent to help Sethe on her fl ight to Cincinnati and deliver her of her fourth child, born at only six months. In fact, toward the end of the text in a skeptical discussion of whether any white people were actually benefi cent in nature, this character is mentioned, but derisively disparaged by Ella, who comments,

And tell me this, how she have that baby in the woods by herself? Said a whitewoman come out the trees and helped her. Shoot. You believe that? A whitewoman? Well, I know what kind of white that was. (Beloved: 187)

With its focus on Denver’s birth, Amy’s timely appearance at a crucial moment becomes almost collateral to the story. True, from the very beginning of the novel Morrison intentionally sets up Denver as a special child:

Don’t worry about her. She’s a charmed child. From the beginning. (Beloved: 41)

Uh huh. Nothing bad can happen to her. Look at it. Everybody I knew dead or gone or dead and gone. Not her. Not my Denver. Even when I was carrying her, when it got clear that I wasn’t going to make it-which meant she wasn’t going to make it either-she pulled a whitegirl out of the hill. [ . . . ]

I went to jail instead. Denver was just a baby so she went right along with me. Rats bit everything in there but her. (Beloved: 42)

And later Denver herself recalls how her grandmother, Baby Suggs, always insisted on her special gifts and circumstances:

After the cake was ruined and the ironed clothes all messed up, and after I heard my sister crawling up the stairs to get back to her bed, she told me my things too. That I was charmed. My birth was and I got saved all the time. And that I shouldn’t be afraid of the ghost. It wouldn’t harm me because I tasted its blood when Ma’am nursed me. (Beloved: 209)

That Denver is a special child is also reinforced by the fact that she is born when Sethe is only six months pregnant,1 a fact that, given the diffi cult circumstances of her delivery, should have condemned her from the very beginning. But Sethe’s repeated allusions to the kicking baby in her womb as a little antelope are more than just reassurance that the baby is still alive, even though Sethe is half-dead from running away, and the repetition of precisely this metaphor is too insistent to simply be incidental to the story:

But she could not, would not, stop, for when she did the little antelope rammed her with horns and pawed the ground of her womb with impatient hooves. While she was walking it seemed to graze, quietly-so she walked, on two feet meant, in this sixth month of pregnancy, for standing still. [ . . . ] Nothing was alive but her nipples and the little antelope. (Beloved: 30)

Note that early on in this story when Amy appears out of nowhere and encourages Sethe to keep moving toward some kind of shelter, the baby responds to Amy’s voice:

So she crawled and Amy walked alongside her, and when Sethe needed to rest, Amy stopped too and talked some more about Boston and velvet and good things to eat. The sound of that voice, like a sixteen-yearold boy’s, going on and on and on, kept the little antelope quiet and grazing. During the whole hateful crawl to the lean-to, it never bucked once. (Beloved: 34)

But why Sethe thinks of her unborn child as a little antelope eludes her:

She waited for the little antelope to protest, and why she thought of an antelope Sethe could not imagine since she had never seen one. She guessed it must have been an invention held on to from before Sweet Home, when she was very young. Of that place where she was born (Carolina maybe? or was it Louisiana?) she remembered only song and dance. (Beloved: 30)

Oh but when they sang. And oh but when they danced and sometimes they danced the antelope. The men as well as the ma’ams, one of whom was certainly her own. They shifted shapes and became something other. Some unchained, demanding other whose feet knew her pulse better than she did. Just like this one in her stomach. (Beloved: 31)

Here, Sethe’s vague memories of the dance of the antelope actually begin to link her to her African heritage and to provide a clue to the origins of her mother, a salt-water African whose defi ance of slavery apparently led to her being hanged. The repeated references to the antelope, and specifi - cally the dance of the antelope, are a clear call to the ritual of the Ci-wara, celebrated by the Bamana (or Bambara) peoples of Mali, an annual rite in celebration of the original being who brought the knowledge of agriculture to this community. The elaborate variations of the headdress used in these rituals often include a carving of the female with her offspring on her back. But it is also important to note that, in the opinion of Suzanne P. Blier, Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, the ritual in Mali may also have been linked to a protest of enslaved peoples who were required to work on tracts of land as slaves far from their homes and families (2004: 42-44). This supposition in fact supports the subtle but nevertheless pervasive idea of resistance in two different ways: fi rst, it complements Sethe’s musing as to why her mother was hanged, that is, for rebellion or for running away;2 and second, as Abena Busia has pointed out, it is at the moment of Sethe’s realization that she and her children are being inscribed and defi ned in schoolmaster’s notebook as subhuman that she becomes determined to run with her three children, in spite of her pregnancy. Note also that the citation from page 30 concerning the location of the plantation where Sethe was born and her mother hung (“Carolina maybe? or was it Louisiana?”) also greatly reinforces this African connection in that other clues in the text (the cultivation of rice and indigo, for example) make it clear that the state in question is South Carolina, possibly Georgetown County or even the Gullah Islands, the coastal region where African Americans have traditionally most steadfastly retained features of their original African culture.3