The Importance Of Names For African American Identity In Toni Morrison's Beloved

The Importance of Names for African American Identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Beloved is one of Toni Morrison's most famous novels that was published in 1987 and earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. In it the author vividly displays the horrors and devastating consequences of slavery and honors all the victims by giving them a voice to tell their unembellished side of the history. Although a person’s name plays an important role in the development of one’s identity and self, the names given to the African-American slaves by their masters were only one of the instruments of oppression and dehumanization they were subjected to that lead to the eventual loss of identity, both individual and collective.

“Sixty Million

He is “one of a series of Pauls, named in alphabetical succession” (Lyles-Scott 206) to differentiate him from other male slaves: “And so they were: Paul D Garner, Paul F Garner, Paul A Garner, Halle Suggs and Sixo, the wild man” (Morrison 32). No trace of individuality is present in that name. At one point, when he is forced to wear the iron bit, he realizes that he is even “inferior to a barn animal” (Cosca 10) because not even the rooster at Sweet Home, called Mister, can experience such an indignity: “Mister, he looked so... free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher . . . Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t [...]” (Morrison 93). After gaining freedom he, “the last of the Sweet Home men” (Morrison 93), keeps his slave name, probably to remember him of his deceased African American

Of course, she was given a name by her first slave owner and was called Jenny Whitlow. However, she proves to be the “most self-identified, self-aware, and self-possessed” (Lyles-Scott 208) character of all when she rejects the name the white people imposed on her and instead takes the one she could identify to the most: “Baby Suggs was all she had left of the ‘husband’ she claimed” (Morrison 163). During the last ten years of her life that she spends as a free woman Baby Suggs reinvents herself completely after realizing that “she knew more about [her children] than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like” (Morrison 161). Later on she becomes the spiritual preacher of her community and is able to move on with her life, thus proving that it is possible for a former slave to overcome the trauma of slavery but it takes time, love and