Beloved Baby's Navel Analysis

Beloved, the unnamed embodiment of the Sethe’s slain two-year-old daughter, is deliberately depicted not only as illuminating the idea that slavery inevitably resurges to haunt the present but, epitomizing the unnamed masses of black bodies that died and were never remembered during and after the manifestation of slavery. Chapter 1 of the novel opens with “124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children...the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny handprints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard)...Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed

“Ella wrapped a cloth strip tight around the baby’s navel as she listened for the holes—the things the fugitives did not say; the questions they did not ask. Listened too for the unnamed, unmentioned people left behind” (108). A baby’s navel is the aftermath of the slicing of the umbilical cord that connects a mother and her children during pregnancy. The reference to the baby’s navel accentuates generational passage from Sethe’s mother to Sethe and from Sethe to Beloved and beyond that, generation passage of history. Because Beloved is able to share the experiences of her mother, her great-grandmother, and generations before, she serves as a Rememory. She is that thing that can never be forgotten even in death. While she is alive, she performs the same duty as she would in life after death. Similarly to the house, Sethe described in her explanation of a Rememory, that remains constant through time, Beloved is an omnipresent aspect of life that reemerges the concept of Slavery for all people to understand it’s influence. As depicted in the passage, Beloved allowed Ella to listen for the unnamed and unmentioned people left behind. Ella, being a white woman, is incapable of understanding the long-term effect of those anonymous people or even knowing that there are anonymous people left behind but, through Beloved, she was able

“We are not crouching now we are standing but my legs are like my dead man’s eyes I cannot fall because there is no room..the men without skin are making loud noises I am not dead the bread is sea-colored..those able to die are in a pile... the little hill of dead people a hot thing the men without skin push them through with poles” (249). Her dead man’s eyes are congruent to her anonymous identity and her role in shaping anyone affected by Slavery. The imagery that she cannot fall and the bread is sea-colored is an immediate connection to the overcrowdedness of slave ships. Men without skin are the White men that oversee slaves on the ship, the sole vision of a White man pushing a black body overboard with a pole stresses how insignificant the Black body is to White America. Their bodies were literally piled up like, in a hill like inanimate objects, left to perish and be fed to the animals of the sea. This recalling of a slave ship is the pinnacle of Beloved’s vitality. It was the beginning of what will never have an end. All the bodies left unnamed and unmentioned never had an end, likewise, Beloved never has an end. They are just simply forgotten and passed on. Morrison challenges us to realize that this is not a story to pass on, it is not that which should again be