Something That Is Loved

The ghosts of Toni Morrison’s Beloved

“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place — the picture of it — stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

Toni Morrison, Beloved, Chapter 3

Ghosts are a curious affair. Those of the American variety, in particular, have a special peculiarity to them that sets them apart from their peers: their sheer diversity and variety nearly unrivaled, testament perhaps to the scattered melting-pot of the nation itself. Ghosts have played throughout history an entire spectrum of roles — everything from agents of horror, to wayward prophets of cautionary moralistic fates, and even as playful comedic figures — but always, in the service of the living. Ghost stories — which must be distinguished from the stories about, and of ghosts themselves — are told explicitly for the living, by the living. In this sense, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is not a ghost story, but a story about ghosts — what it means when we speak of them, when we tell their stories; and more hauntingly, what it means when we don’t.

The primary tension of Beloved can be roughly summarised as what Judith Herman describes in the introduction to Trauma and Recovery as ‘the conflict betwen the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud’: namely, what she explicitly identiifes as the ‘central dialectic of psychological trauma’ (Trauma and Recovery 1). The characters of Beloved are almost singularly trapped within the liminality between the unspeakable past, and the haunted present: both psychically, as they struggle with the burdens of immeasurable personal and collective traumas; and physically, their bodies scarred with ancient wounds and the very land itself distorted into a kind of psychogeographical hell in which they are cursed to relive the same painful memories over and over again. Their inability to negotiate this dialectic — to even begin to acknowledge the pain inflicted upon them, the pain which continues to fester beneath the skin — will serve as the teleological impetus for the ghosts which will soon emerge; but even before then, it is critical to note that they have already lost touch with their very existences.

Herman describes that “long after the event, many traumatized people feel that a part of themselves has died” (36) — and indeed, the major characters of Beloved all exist within various stages of psychic decay and thanatos, a sort of negative ego death in which their individual teleologies of meaning have become so eroded that they can no longer function: Sethe, who loves children more than anything, has been shunned from the community for her infanticide, and lives in active denial of the past; Denver, survivor of her mother’s attempted infanticide, refuses to acknowledge any part of the world outside of the haunted space of 124; Baby Suggs, the preacher, has lost faith in God and has retreated to her sickbed, where she dies, bitter and spiritually exhausted; Stamp Paid, as atonement for his past sacrifices as an agent of the Underground Railroad, has lost his name in exchange for having his moral debts paid off; Paul D, who sees himself neither as man nor even human, has been cast out into the wilderness to wander alone. It is through the confluence of these tremendous psychic calamities that the ghost — the revenant Beloved — emerges.

A haunting requires two things. A ghost, for one, most usually a spirit disrupted, who could not find resolution in death because of profound lingering psychic attachment to something in life. It would naturally follow, then, that the second is something — or more usually, somewhere — to haunt in the first place: a locus of tremendous (and often negative) psychic activity, often with an extensive history of some kind of generational or recursive violence, which serves as a physical conduit between the realms of the dead, and the living. Herman attributes to this crystallisation of violence a “frozen and wordless quality” lacking “verbal narrative and context”, a “fragmentary sensation” of memory which she describes, through Robert Lifton’s vocabulary, as an indelible image or death imprint (Trauma and Recovery 27).

The house at 124 Bluestone Road is the death imprint of both Beloved, and Beloved. The epicentre of tremendous personal trauma — Sethe’s gruesome act of infanticide, which leaves her daughter Beloved nearly beheaded — and collective trauma — retold through the transmigration of escaped slaves via the Underground Railroad through the house — 124 is ripe for haunting. The novel begins with an account of 124’s poltergeist — the spirit of Sethe’s baby Beloved, wailing into the night and throwing objects around — that is impetuous, and “spiteful” (Beloved 1). It is worth noting that at this point, it is a disaporic force that drives people apart from one another: each of Sethe’s sons, at the age of thirteen, flee from the home “the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time” (Beloved 1); Denver lives peerless and isolated from the world outside of the house; and Baby Suggs has languished and died bedridden, in spiritual defeat. The ghost at this stage is what Herman would describe as constrictive: it acts as a suffocating force which exists because the family members actively attempt to deny and suppress its presence, and consequently it lashes out at them, disrupting their ability to exist within the present and future. Notably, however, it does not act upon them directly, and instead expresses itself through their surroundings: as Sethe later tells Paul D, who feels its presence as a “wave of grief so thorough he wanted to cry”, the ghost is “not evil, just sad” (Beloved 9). It is a shadow of the past, created in the deliberate absence of memory enforced by those who created it, who is seemingly expelled by the arrival of Paul D (who himself is in some ways a wandering spirit): but we shall know soon enough that the exorcism is no exorcism at all, but a transmutation. For although Paul, for Sethe and her family, may seem like a source of hope in the moment for a new beginning, he too harbours a dead soul within him just like them, and is tethered to the painful, forgotten past. Even more than any of them, he engages in almost self-annihilating levels of constriction, having locked away his emotions in the “tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be… [i]ts lid rusted shut” (Beloved 72). He is no intervention, but a refugee from the land of cruelty and misery, that ironic death-house Sweet Home from whence Sethe herself had only recently just fled. He is even worse off than her in some ways, his dehumanisation more total, his identity more fragmented. It is his pain which serves as the tipping force that frees the ghost from the past, and manifests her in the present, in the form of Beloved.

There is much controversy over the precise nature of Beloved — if she takes on a corporeal body, for instance, is she still a ghost? Whose ghost is she — Sethe’s daughter, or a revenant of the Middle Passage — if she perceives time and memory discretely, as her monologues seem to suggest? Is she even a ghost at all, or just another survivor, one more broken body amongst foundations? The root of all these questions lies in an assumption of the novel as a ghost story, which itself relies upon established fundamental assumptions about the constitution of ghosts, and their habits. Beloved, however, is not a ghost story, and Beloved is no ordinary ghost.

If her prior ethereal form as poltergeist of 124 was Beloved as a constrictive force within Herman’s terminology, then the strange woman who shows up one day on 124’s doorstep is Beloved as intrusive force. Herman defines the intrusive force as the remnants of a past which “becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciousness”, and manifests in the present as a repetitive “fragmentary sensation […] experienced with terrifying immediacy” (Trauma and Recovery 26–8). Beloved, given form by the sudden and uncomfortable reawakening of the past triggered by the arrival of Paul D, is the past made flesh. She comes from beneath a bridge over the Ohio River, which Sethe and the other slaves had to cross to order to return home from Sweet Home (a metaphysical transition from the false ‘home’ of Sweet Home, the land of the dead, to the spiritual home of Cincinnati, the land of the living — or at the very least, those who have escaped death); and which serves as a sort of localised American Kalunga line, drawing early symbolic parallels to the Atlantic slave trade, which will be referenced more explicitly later in a memory by Beloved herself (and which is notable given its significance in the mythology of many enslaved Africans themselves, who believed the New World to be the land of the dead and the Middle Passage to be a passage into hell itself, from whence they would never again return — not an incorrect outlook, given what is now known).

It is a frightening, and often intensely painful thing to come into contact with a ghost. In both the American, and the Gothic traditions particularly, the ghost is a revenant of the past itself, a fragment of history which has become dislodged because of the acute jaggedness of its shape, and slipped between the cracks into the present. Beloved is such a figure, although the trauma she was born from is multiplicitous, and enormous: on one hand, she is borne most directly from the brutality inflicted upon Sethe’s murdered daughter; but even further than that, her true genesis is more ancient, and profound, the culmination of centuries of torture and abuse, the souls of the “Sixty Million and more” — those who perished in the Atlantic slave trade — forgotten and swept away into the collective darkness of history, both by the victims and the perpetrators of this obscene enormity. She is neither singularly the individual past of Sethe, nor the collective horror of her ancestors, but both at once, occupying time past, present, and, in a postmodern sense, future as well (all the way to the present of Morrison’s writing, and even the present of the now). Her monologues speak of memories of what appear to be the Middle Passage centuries prior, where there is “[n]othing to breathe down there and no room to move in […] A lot of people is down there. Some is dead.” (Beloved 75) Although ostensibly she is speaking most explicitly about the nightmarish and claustrophobic darkness of the ships themselves, it is possible too that she is referring to the land of the dead itself, which is populated not just with the dead but the dead men, women and children walking, whose bodies cling to the earth yet whose hearts have long since hollowed out, and rusted: no more alive than she herself.

Where Beloved comes from, the grief is too enormous to remain contained, and centralised: she is a ghost not of an individual or even a people, but an entire history itself, which has become dislodged and dismembered from the flow of time, the narrative lost almost entirely except as a shadow occupying a single dark corner where the ashes just barely trace out the remains where a person once was. That Morrison has the novel shift to the perspective of Beloved, the revenant, is highly unusual per ghost stories, where too often the ghosts themselves are typically just inert agents of fear and mourning, whose sole purpose is to serve as a morbid cautionary device for the author’s morality play. By ascribing a certain amount of agency and consciousness to her ghost, Morrison is able to transcend the archetypes of the ghost story and create a ghost that is at once mythical yet also human, a memory of extraordinary collective trauma, yet also one of a singular, profound personal tragedy. She is both sixty million countless beloveds hunted like beasts, chained into pitch dark abscesses in the bowels of lurching ships and enslaved in service to a cruel new world which would rape and devour them; and one woman’s Beloved, murdered in a moment of brilliant, anguished clarity, a mother’s greatest and cruelest act of love for her children signed in blood.

It is a curious affair to speak of ghosts. What do we say about them, of them? Do we recall the lives they once lived, the people they once were? When we’re touched by them, do we recoil in fear, or reach out in sympathy? And how do we define them — by the absences they have left in our houses, in our hallways, in our hearts; or by the presences which we swear we have felt, in the sudden stillness of an empty room or a strange nostalgic scent carried to us by a peripatetic breeze? All these questions have for centuries, millennia even, gone unanswered; perhaps the answers will never come at all. Either way, it’s alright; we’ve dealt with the uncertainty for this long, and so long as can listen to the stories they have to tell, we might just be okay. Beloved is one such story: not a ghost story, but a story about, and of a ghost — a ghost of a woman, a ghost of a people, a ghost of a history. Whatever they are, one thing about ghosts is certain: we would do well to heed their words, for they are the voices of the violence we could not bear, and theirs are the words which will save us from ourselves. Their trauma does not disappear, but comes and goes, comes and goes. It is all around us — intimately familiar, hiding just beneath the surface; it can be found peering just behind the eyes of the children, in the sighs of the adults. Look away for just a moment, and it disappears again as though there were nothing there at all. Wind through the leaves. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, certainly not the beloved or the dead. By and by all trace is gone. The rest is just wind.