Slavery by definition entails that the self unwillingly belongs to someone else. Toni Morrison demonstrates how that lack of ownership over one’s self impacts the psyche of more than just those who experienced it. Throughout her novel Beloved, Morrison weaves the traumatic disruption that slavery causes into the thoughts of her characters. She uses the way in which they long for belonging and possession of other things to display the initial and inherited trauma of slavery.
In the first third of Beloved, we learn about the complicated relationship between the characters and the past life that the older generation experienced at the Sweet Home plantation. When Paul D first arrives at 124, Sethe is thrown back in time to Sweet Home in Kentucky. Instead of remembering the plantation for what it was, a horrific institution of human captivity, she remembers it with a sense of nostalgia and beauty. She admits that “although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty”(Morrison, 7). Trauma develops when the brain is unable to release the feelings of fear associated with an event. Thus, every time the brain recalls the memory, it assumes the same mode of fear and sends the body into a state of fear. Rather than put herself through those emotions again, Sethe’s brain has been so scared that it will not allow her to return to that mindset, rather it creates a filter over her memories so that they do not register as those same ones that scar so much of her life.
Neither Sethe nor Paul D belonged to themselves when they were at Sweet Home, so they are forever searching for a feeling of belonging. This is why they are so eager to have sex when they interact for the first time in years. They want to belong to one another in the biblical sense because they were robbed of belonging to themselves for so long. However, it is not just those who lived on the Sweet Home plantation who struggle to belong and to own in a world that has owned them. Denver never lived on the Sweet Home plantation, and yet she is caught in the life that resulted from it. She is haunted by ghosts in the literal and figurative sense. Because all those around her did not belong to themselves, they do not belong to her and she has developed a need for what she lacks. When her mother and Paul D reunite, she instantly feels distant from them because “they were a twosome, saying ‘Your daddy’ and ‘Sweet Home’ in a way that made it clear both belonged to them and not to her” (Morrison, 15). Then later when Beloved appears at 124, Denver feels a “love and breakneck possessiveness that charged her” (Morrison, 64). When someone knew and without a past interacts with Denver, she jumps on the opportunity to fill that void of belonging and to possess her. All of these possessions slowly turn bitter, as Paul D continues to remind Sethe of her enslavement and as Denver starts to question Beloved for possibly choking her mother. These possessions are not enough to replace the bitterness of their enslaved past which still haunts them all.
