Ask the Mothers

I wonder if my mom would have made an autopsy of my neck. Dangled my ankles like a pendulum, swung me to the wooden wall until it was painted. I wonder if any mother would. 

There is tragedy in that scene of Beloved; It is a scene people will try to look at superficially and just label as one of the horrors of slavery. They wouldn't be wrong, but this scene goes far deeper than that. The absolute terror a mother must feel in order to see no option other than murdering her own child astounds me.

There is a reason maternal relationships are held so dearly. We come literally connected to our mothers and have to be sawed from her. We all come out screaming, bloody, as if tearing us from our first home was a massacre. Maybe Sethe just wanted to bring her children home, bloody and screaming.

So the amount of horror that must be overcome in order to murder your own child is one that I will not know until I am a mother myself, if I am a mother myself. Sethe had to overcome instinct, history and physical biology in order to kill Beloved.

I had originally wrote "murder" in the previous sentence, but I don't know whether I think Sethe murdered her daughter. That word carries a connotation of a cold-blooded, animalistic execution that is not what happened in the barn. Tragedy happened there, not only for the innocent child, or Baby Suggs who watched her daughter-in-law transform into someone unfamiliar, but also for Sethe herself.

And I am left here, writing a blog post about something I will never understand because I will never experience it because I live in 2016 white suburbia. So how can any of us pass judgement on Sethe? How can we rule whether her actions were justified because slavery was just that horrible? None of us know. So let us ask the mothers.