Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

The narrator adds,

…in all of Baby’s life, as well  as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved , who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought  back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. So Baby’s eight children had six fathers.  What she called the nastiness of   life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.⁴³

             Where Morrison brings a new angle to an ancient motif of crime, guilt and retribution, is in her demonstration of how helplessness in protecting the best part of oneself, that is one’s children, might lead to extremely drastic choices. Morrison lays the ground for tragic irony and paradox in her novel when she tells Gloria Naylor in an interview, “..it’s interesting because the best thing that is in us is also the thing that makes us sabotage ourselves.”⁴⁴  It’s apposite that Morrison should say this, because in response  to Paul D’s accusation that her love was too “thick”⁴⁵ Sethe replies, “Love is or it ain’t . Thin love ain’t love at all. “ ⁴⁶ For many critics, Beloved symbolizes not only Sethe’s repressed past, but also the past of the race. This is why she is so powerful and for sometime at least, exerts a compelling presence in Sethe and
Denver’s life and even in the reader’s consciousness