What Family Means In Toni Morrison's Beloved

What Family Means

In a text as complex and filled with meaning as Beloved, often the surface meaning of passage in the novel is symptomatic of larger claims of the text. While the characters of the novel grapple with the legacies of slavery, passages of the text are often symptomatic of Morrison’s intentional and unintentional claims about the destructive force of slavery. Encoded in both the language used and the significance to the plot, the passage where Sethe recalls her mother showing her how to identify her is symptomatic of one of the many larger claims of the text. The latent meaning of this passage shows that Beloved argues that slavery took the power of determining meaning from black people, especially within the context of familial

This passage reflects this claim in several ways. First, Sethe’s mother use of the word “ma’am” instead of mother reflects the idea that slavery destroyed blacks’ idea of familial relationships. “Ma’am” recalls an owner-owned relationship, as historically, slaves used the word to refer to the wives of slave-owners. A term of respect, it reinforced the idea that the person called “ma’am” had some claim of ownership over the person referring to them as such. Sethe’s mother telling Sethe to call her “Ma’am” instead of mother shows that slavery forced slaves to view familial relationships in terms of the owner and the owned. By pointing to herself and telling Sethe that “this is your ma’am”, Sethe’s mother stated that Sethe belonged to her (ibid). This relationship is not characterized by nurturing. Sethe’s mother does not take care of Sethe; because of slavery she spends all her time working in the fields, so other women have to take care of her daughter. Slavery created a situation where the only way that Sethe’s mother could understand her relationship to her daughter was within the context of of an owner-owned relationship. Her daughter belonged her to her, just like she belonged to her slave owner. And because she knew slavery had the power to

Reading this passage even more closely, Sethe’s mother to a specific mark on her chest, a brand, and tells Sethe that “this is your ma’am” (ibid). Sethe’s mother identifies herself through this brand, which was presumably put there by a white slave trader. The mark sits in an incredibly intimate place, just under her breast, and probably stands as a reminder of her personal history and where she came from. She tells her daughter to use this mark to identify her body and stresses the fact that she is the only living person she knows with that mark. However, this symbol that Sethe’s mother uses to identify herself denotes the impact of slavery. The thing that she uses to identify herself is literally a stamp of oppression, a symbol burnt into her skin by a slave trader marking her as property. Sethe’s mother identifies not with a symbol that she determined for herself, but with a symbol placed on her by her oppressor. By equating the identity of Sethe’s mother with a brand of slavery, this passage shows that slavery took away black peoples’ ability to construct meaning for themselves. By forcibly removing blacks from their homes in Africa, slavery destroyed black culture, black families, and the sense of black community. It replaced all of these with ideas of culture, family, and community with a system revolving around the economic system of slavery. People were to be marked as