Names in Beloved

After reading Beloved, I found that one of the most memorable parts of the book for me was reading the first sentence. “124 was spiteful” (1). The other two books of the novel mimic this beginning, the second “124 was loud” and the third “124 was quiet.” These phrases show how throughout the book, the house is haunted by a baby’s ghost, how the house is damaged by the ghost’s physical presence, and how is it devastated by the ghost’s grief and anger. The novel is described as moving from tension to chaos to grief, which as a whole seems to comment on the historical level of slavery as well. 

The story of Beloved is one of anguish, of how your past will always come back to haunt you. I think this book also comments on the theme of names and slavery. I found it interesting that the house Sethe lives in was referred to as simply 124. It wasn’t called “124 (street name)” or “number 124,”  and as a result, it seems like it has a real name. Also, the way that the book referred to 124 as spiteful, loud, and quiet gave the house a sort of personality. This made me think of how slave names were treated throughout the book and why it was important for the book to treat names in this way.

As a slave one was usually called only by a first name, although some adopted the surnames of their masters. Many freed slaves chose to adopt a different name, often an innocuous American name or naming themselves after a hero (e.g. Washington, Jefferson, etc.). Morrison addresses this topic in individual characters, namely Baby Suggs. Baby Suggs chose her name over the slave handle “Jenny Whitlow” because her husband’s name was Suggs and he called her Baby, and “Baby Suggs” was all she had left of him. Stamp Paid also chose his name for a specific reason, since for him it symbolizes the settlement of debts.  Beloved, the name of the book, speaks to the loss of a child. In the book, we even learn that “124” is a name bestowed; it didn’t have a name when Sethe’s family first lived there since Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. Looking at names, readers are supposed to see that names serve as reminders of links to other people and personal principles, as well as how this affect those who were previously slaves. 

While I feel that this thought isn’t very complete, it was something that stood out to me as I read the book and I wanted to explore it further. Please comment if you have other thoughts about the implications of names in the novel.

Gunnar's Identity

Following the life of Gunnar Kaufman in The White Boy Shuffle, it is interesting to focus on the ways he thinks about the world and the how these thoughts shift throughout the book. Especially towards the beginning of the book, there are many times where Gunnar stands out and struggles to fit in. We meet Gunnar when he is living in Santa Monica, among a predominantly white population. At this point, he is known as the “funny, cool, black guy,” and went to a school that downplayed race, sexual orientation, and gender. At this school, everyone claimed to be “colorblind.” We see this particularly with his teacher who liked to wear a shirt advocating for colorblindness, and yet apparently paid special attention to Gunnar every time she wore it. As Gunnar put it, “Everything was multicultural, but nothing was multicultural” (29).

Gunnar’s mom moved the family to Hillside because Gunnar and his siblings refused to go to an all-black camp, since they were “different” (37). Surrounded by more black people, Gunnar still initially feels out of place. Once Scoby calls him the N word, Gunnar describes his euphoria and finally feels like he fits in. Scoby introduces Gunnar to basketball and takes him shopping for shoes and a haircut to make Gunnar fit in even more. Finding friends in Nick and Psycho Loco is really what makes him have a sense of belonging in Hillside. However, as he grows older, Gunnar gains a new perspective on his identity.

Following the Rodney King case, Gunnar says “I never felt so worthless in my life” (130). We see a change in Gunnar, and he really understanding what his blackness means to him. Going to BU, he stands out in a different way than before. There, he is everyone’s favorite black author and has students following him to his apartment and asking if they can keep his clothes. Here, too, people claim to not be racist, yet Gunnar is treated very differently because of the color of his skin. To me, one of the most important parts of the book is when Gunnar shows us that he has finally understood how his blackness prevents him from ever truly fitting in. He shows that he really has given up when he gives a speech at a rally at BU, referencing a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. In giving his speech, he realizes that white people will never treat him with respect and see his life as equally valuable to theirs. The book ends with a mood of hopelessness and Gunnar having an entirely different view of what it means to be black.

Wright vs. Hurston

In class, we began discussing Richard Wright’s critique of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Part of his critique is that Hurston does not make enough of a statement about racism, carrying no message or thought. I’d agree that Hurston’s novel is not a protest novel in the same way that Native Son and Invisible Man are, but just because Hurston is black does not mean she should be expected to make a statement about race relations in her book.

Even so, I believe that Hurston was making a statement in a different way, concerning discriminatory relations within a single race. By setting the majority of the book in Eatonville, an all black town, she can make comments on how members of the same race can be discriminatory of one another. When Joe Starks and Janie arrive to town Amos Hicks has doubts about Joe’s goals, saying “us colored folks is too envious of one ‘nother,” so it would be unlikely for them to make any progress (48). Joe and Janie are completely separate in class from other people living in Eatonville, despite being the same race. They even have a fancy spittoon cup that most people would use as a vase. Also, throughout the book even after Joe’s death Janie is set apart from others by her wealth and appearance.

I feel that Hurston’s biggest statement on this topic is when Janie befriends Ms. Turner in the Everglades. Because Ms. Turner is of mixed heritage and looks different, she believes she is set apart from the other black people. The main reason she becomes friends with Janie seems to be because Janie is also fair-skinned. Ms. Turner is strangely racist, and makes many comments about her dissatisfaction at living with black people and being lumped into the same group with them.

Although this is just a small part of Hurston’s comments on race, I would argue that she is still making a point. It doesn’t seem like Wright saw this criticism very clearly, but focused more on his own definition of a protest novel written by an African American author.

The Mule

Although we’ve only just started reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, I found the way gender is portrayed very interesting. At the young age of 16, Janie is married to Logan Killick. Although Janie didn’t want to marry him, Nanny insisted since she doesn’t think that a black women can gain independence without a man. According to Nanny, women are the mules of the world (14) and marriage is a way for Janie to gain status and become financially stable.

This theme of the mule has come up quite a bit in what we have read so far. The mule comes to represent female identity, in the sense that both mules and women must be controlled by their owners and husbands. While Janie is married to Logan, we see her become upset when he intends to buy a mule and expects her to work behind a plow. Janie seems to feel as if she’s being treated like an animal, and insists that Logan didn’t need her help, saying “Youse in yo’ place and Ah’m in mine” (31). Janie seems to feel trapped with Logan, not having found her true love.

Once she is married to Joe Starks, however, Janie doesn’t like being put in her place. According to Joe, she should be sitting at home and acting civilized so he can be seen as a strong leader. Her hair isn’t allowed to show in the store and Joe treats her like a possession. The theme of mules comes up again while she’s with Joe, when a man named Matt Boner buys a mule and works it to death. Here the mule represents victimization. Matt is also criticized for not being able to control his mule, and Janie sympathizes with the mule since they were both subjected to controlling masters. Joe buys the mule from Matt and is viewed as a sort of hero, but this act also symbolizes his ownership of Janie, from which Janie is only freed when he dies. Tea Cake seems to be very different from Janie’s previous husbands, so I wonder if the mule’s symbol of control over women will reappear.

Symbols of Black Stereotypes

Some of our recent Invisible Man readings have included descriptions of a few interesting symbols Ellison uses to represent black stereotypes and how they affect the narrator. The first one that came to mind was the image of the “Jolly N Coin Bank” in chapter 15. This bank represents the stereotypical views of how humiliating it is that a slave must try desperately to be rewarded by their master with a trivial reward. The prison chain given to the narrator by Brother Tarp can also be seen as a symbol of racism, since it was the chain that held Brother Tarp back from being free. Even though Tarp is no longer a slave in the south, his limp is a constant reminder of his past. The Sambo doll is another racist symbol in the book based off of the Sambo slave, who acts lazy according to white stereotypes. The fact that this doll is a puppet controlled by strings also conveys the idea that white people can control and manipulate all the actions made by a black person. In the book, when Clifton gives his spiel he says “he lives upon the sunshine of your lordly smile,” (432) which is another indication of how the doll is meant to illustrate the power white people have over black people.

What is particularly interesting about these symbols is how the narrator continues to carry them with him. In the case of the bank, the narrator leaves Mary’s home with the shattered bank in his briefcase. He keeps trying to get rid of the bank, but he fails each time. Even to where we are now in the book, the narrator carries both Tarp’s chain and the Sambo doll in his pocket. These symbols all illustrate how black stereotypes weigh the narrator down and hold him back from ridding society of these attitudes. These are the first ones I thought of, although I’m sure there are many more throughout the book.

Changes in the Narrator

In class we’ve been talking a lot about how in Invisible Man, there seems to be a theme of how the narrator’s identity is constantly changing. Towards the beginning he’s set on going to college and becoming Bledsoe’s assistant. He’s also completely blind to the reality of the world, in that he acts the way he does towards white people because he thinks it’s right, not because he is being fake to get along like his grandfather did. Even after Bledsoe sends him away from college to get a job, he hopes to return. After denying his grandfather, Bledsoe, and the vets advice that the college life isn’t for him, the narrator has the same reaction towards Emerson. That is, until Emerson provides him with physical evidence that this dream is shattered.

This marks a drastic change in the narrator. After getting a job at Liberty Paints, he seems much more cynical about his situation and less respectful of white people, at least in his mind. For instance, when he is working for Kimbro, he has thoughts of quitting or telling him to go to hell.

Liberty Paints as a whole is a good example of how the book conveys a change needed in the narrator. In class the past couple of days, we talked about how everything about the company gives off a weird vibe, and when the narrator entered a completely new city when he went to work. The way the paint was described as “the purest white that can be found” and “that’ll cover just about anything” (202) was a little off-putting. Also, the fact that Kimbro was upset when there was the slightest gray tinge on the samples the narrator made was strange and made me think that the whole allegory within Liberty Paints is that white people are superior to black people. Another example that supports this is when the narrator is working with Brockway, who says “Our white is so white you can paint a chunk coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through” (217)! This makes it seem even more like the goal of Liberty Paints it to make black people (represented by the coal) whitewashed into behaving like white people.

After the these chapters, the book goes through another section that shows a “rebirth” of the narrator. Another thing we focused on it class is how many of the descriptions in the hospital chapter can be seen as metaphors for the narrator being born again. The narrator is trapped in a glass box (his womb), hears a woman screaming (as women do when they give birth), has a sort of chord attached to his stomach (like an umbilical chord), and the doctors continually ask him who his mother is, to the point where the narrator questions “a machine my mother” (240)? When he leaves, they even have him wearing white overalls. This chapter in the book is another part where it seems like others are trying to change the narrator, recreating him into a different person.

Our discussions of this in class made me question why this theme is something that we keep seeing throughout the book, and I wonder if we’ll keep seeing signs that the narrator needs to change as we continue to read.

My Frustration With Native Son

The argument has been made that the whole chain of events that took place in Native Son are not really Bigger’s fault, since society shaped him to think and act the way he did. To a certain point, I agree. There are a lot of things Bigger did that I really hated, but I understood why he did them. Even so, there are some things I forgive him for more than others.

In the first scene of the book Bigger is at home, where I found him to be very emotionally distant from his family. It seemed that he didn’t like them and felt forced to provide for them, eventually only taking his job at the Dalton’s because he would starve otherwise. This is sad, but understandable, since I’m sure he feels like he has no privacy because they all share a single room, and he may even feel ashamed that he can’t provide for his family. I think his feeling of powerlessness affects the way he acts most of the time, and he tries to overcompensate by making himself look like he has control. He acts this way with his friends, as we see when Bigger tries to show how strong and powerful he is, and even threatened Gus to hide his weakness.

In class, we also spent a lot of time discussing how helpless Bigger feels throughout the book. He expresses this feeling at the beginning of the book, when he says “They don’t let us do nothing” (19) in reference to white people. This also helps me understand many of the actions that he takes, although there were many things he did that made me very mad about the whole situation.

For instance, I get that Bigger felt he had to make his presence in Mary’s room unknown to Ms. Dalton, since he was probably right in assuming that people would have accused him of rape. But if we’re rooting for Bigger to avoid getting in trouble (which I think we all sort of were after listening to all of his thoughts throughout the book), he should have handled the situation differently. I think the first mistake he made was doing anything after he realized she was dead. If he had just left Mary where she was, the family may have assumed that she had died of alcohol poisoning. Cutting Mary’s head off and putting her in the furnace is what got him caught in the first place. 

Another thing that really bothered me was that Bigger let his hunger for power take over when he was with Bessie. I don’t really approve of the way he treated Bessie in general, but I understood that, in his position, he wanted her help. What I really hated happened after Bigger was discovered as guilty and tried to hide. Bessie kept crying that she wanted to kill herself, but Bigger kept telling her that she was being crazy. Then Bigger raped and killed her himself. That by itself is awful, but the fact that Bigger had to have control over that situation made me angry. It was like she couldn’t be killed unless he did it himself, and he had all the power over the situation.  

Obviously there are a lot of other things that I struggled with while reading the book, but these are just two of the ones I thought about the most. Feel free to rant about other situations in the comments!