What it means to love

I was very much in shock after reading about Sethe's past. The little hints and glimmers scattered throughout the book made it easy to see that yes, the baby was probably killed by Sethe herself, but the circumstances and motivations remained unclear. Before I actually got to the retelling of the events, I could, in no way, justify Sethe's actions. Isn't killing your child the absolute worst thing you could do? Hasn't it been ingrained in our minds by every medium of society that murder is just about the worst crime? You probably could argue yes, but in the context of this specific situation, Sethe wasn't killing, she was, as she said in her own words, just sending her baby away to a safer place. To finally taste freedom, to finally realize just how oppressed, how enslaved, and how restricted a life she lived in Sweet Home added a whole new layer of resentment to Sethe's dilemma. Sweet Home was intolerable, she knew she had to get away, if not for herself, then for her children. She took comfort in the fact that she sent away her children alone and vulnerable in the arms of strangers, because that, to her, was a fate more favorable than a lifetime of slavery. With no previous warning, no other means of escape, Sethe had to choose the eternal escape, the only place that her children could be guaranteed safety and protection. In her scrambled state of mind, only one thought ran through her head, and that was keeping her children away from the life that she had endured. If death was the only viable way to save her children, then well Sethe sure took it. Death was the ultimate gesture of her love, honestly the biggest sacrifice any parent could ever be forced to make. She took the cliche of loving someone enough to let them go to a whole new level, and at the end of the day, it worked.

The child that is Denver

So I haven't started my weekend reading, but from what I have read so far, if things weren't laid out in such an explicit chronological order, I honestly would have thought that Denver was a small(ish?) child. Isolated and friendless, Denver is not socialized, she is stubborn, and childlike in her ways. Reading the first few chapters (and even the first few pages) left me very confused. She was mad at Baby Suggs, her grandmother, for dying (dying?!?), overtly rude to Paul D within their first encounter, and much like a small child, she didn't want to share her mother. We are also told that she is basically 18. Still, even in the beginning, I found her character extremely sympathetic. She has essentially been deprived of everything we like to associate with childhood, and really only is hungry for love, attention, and friendship. In the early stages of the book, Denver really reminded me a lot of Janie from Their Eyes Were Watching God, because both characters were enamored with the idea of love (though different kinds), had grown up under the care of women who had lived through the realities of slavery, and had also grown up away and separated from children their own age. In a lot of ways, she also parallels the ghost of the dead baby. The spirit that haunts 124 is prone to tantrums and innocent mischief, and when Beloved actually enters the story, we see that she is a beautiful, young woman, trapped in a state of infancy. Denver too, just like Beloved, is a fully grown woman, that acts like a child. However this slowly changes along with Beloved's intrusion into the story, and we already begin to see changes within Denver as she adopts the role of an older sibling and caregiver instead of the childlike role she played before. I wonder how she'll continue to evolve.