Beloved as Stamp Paid Attempts

¶ … Beloved

As Stamp Paid attempts to find out who is staying with Sethe in the house at 124 that no one ever visits, he reflects on the experiences of the former slaves within his community, many of whom he personally smuggled to freedom. In his musings, he thinks to himself, "Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle" (234). He notes, however, that the real jungle was not the "jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (liveable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them" (234).

Stamp Paid agrees that there is a jungle within blacks, but he feels that the "jungle" within them is not a result of their skin color or their place of origin. It is a result of the subhuman treatment they received as slaves. Sethe has spent the last eighteen years in this psychological jungle, and it was not until Paul D. arrived that she was reminded of her humanity.

For Sethe, the seeds of the jungle were planted from her youth, but they blossomed and began to grow on the day the boys cornered her, beat her severely even though she was heavily pregnant, and took the milk that she needed to nurse her baby girl. Out of desperation for her children's safety, she escaped to Ohio. She was able to experience a brief month of happiness after she had escaped to the safety of Baby Suggs' home at 124, but after Schoolteacher arrived to take her back, Sethe committed infanticide. She saw death as an escape that was preferable to the option of allowing herself and her children to be imprisoned again. Paul D. accuses her at one point of her love being "too thick" (193), meaning that her love was suffocating and murderous in its intensity. For Sethe, her love for her children and the jungle created by her suffering are inseparable.

Before Paul D. showed up on her doorstep, Sethe had spent the previous eighteen years mentally and physically isolated within this emotional jungle, surrounded by the "murmuring of the black and angry dead" (p. 234). Her house was haunted by the angry spirit of Beloved, who resented being separated from her mother and buried in the ground (88-89). The other members of the community knew about her past and were terrified of her haunted home, and no one would associate with her.

However, Paul D. reminded Sethe of her humanity. First, he exorcised the house of its baby ghost (22) and then he took her to the carnival (55), which was her first social outing in eighteen years. At that point Paul was as yet unaware that she had killed her baby girl. As the story progresses, the truth emerges. In the conversation between Sethe and Paul D (194-195), Sethe tells Paul the story of how she killed her baby girl when Schoolteacher and the other men arrived to take her and her children back to Sweet Home. Paul, horrified, tells Sethe as he leaves, "you got two feet, Sethe, not four" (p. 194). Again, Paul D. is reminding Sethe that she is free, human and has the rationale to make choices.