Solidarity In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Survival Through Solidarity in Beloved The evils of slavery are hard enough to imagine and even harder to forget. Stripping millions of people of their liberty led to deep trauma in almost an entire demographic; though their humanity was bruised and bloodied, it was not destroyed. Through their enslavement and especially in the aftermath, black men and women survived and tried to carry out meaningful lives by their unity and kinship with one another. The spirit of the black community at this time employed extreme influences on personal growth and the cultivation of a complete self. Conversely, individuals who could not partake in this type of solidarity were subject to an agonizing isolation and often could not property develop or move on from their trauma to forge a better future. Toni Morrison portrays this post-Civil War situation in her 1987 novel, Beloved. The importance of community and the pain of seclusion from it, a major theme in Beloved, manifests itself through the experiences of Paul D, Sethe, and Denver. Paul D arrives on the scene early in the novel, a lonely wanderer with an unsettling past who had been a slave at Sweet Home along with Sethe. We learn the story of his escape from a chain gang in Georgia. As a prisoner or a slave, Paul D reflects, he could not even relish the sweet

She musters the courage to venture outside the household for the first time, calling on local women to provide her family with sustenance, and eventually, freedom from Beloved’s haunting and sapping nature. In doing this, she accepts the past of her mother and finds a niche in her community (González 124). By breaking out of her shell, so to speak, and making connections with her people, she finds a new and intriguing world to delve into and become a part of, and begins to progress as an