Description
Midterm: Birth, or Sethe and Amy
In Toni Morrison’s Nobel prize winning historical novel, Beloved (1987), the protagonist, or who
we want the happy ending for, Sethe, escapes from intolerable conditions on the farm named,
ironically, “Sweet Home,” where she’s held as a slave. Sethe is not written to be viewed as a
victim, but rather as a fierce Mother who will do the unthinkable, kill her children, to keep them
from being enslaved, especially after tasting freedom after giving birth and taking her newborn,
the “crawling already baby” who is never named, yet called Beloved later on when she returns as
flesh and blood, across the Ohio river and tasting freedom on the other side for the first time.
When Sethe is running, fully pregnant with Denver, who becomes Amy Denver’s
namesake after Amy’s help in terms of delivering her, her feet and legs become so swollen and
injured while at the same time she’s so hungry, she collapses and cannot go another inch. Out in
those woods, the middle of nowhere, Amy, a “whitegirl” (sic) comes along talking constantly.
Sethe, who gives Amy the name Lu, speaks respectfully to Amy, while Amy speaks to Sethe any
way she pleases; some of her talk is ugly. But not all of it—at all. Instead of becoming unglued
when she sees Sethe’s back splayed open from a whipping, she calls it a “chokecherry tree,” and
“dern if them ain’t blossoms on it.” The blossoms, of course, are pus filled areas of infection.
Today, if we found someone like that in the woods, she’d be life flighted to the nearest hospital.
But all Sethe has for a nurse/midwife is Amy, a poor white indentured servant (another kind of
slave) who appears to be on the run as well. Amy and Sethe develop a bond, or so it seems,
through the ordeal of Sethe giving birth. That’s why Sethe names the baby “Denver.” And by
the way, “Amy” in French means “beloved/friend.”
Type in MLA format a 5 paragraph and answer the question: Is Amy totally human, or is
she a creature like Beloved (we come to learn that Beloved knows the conditions of the hold of a
slave ship, something impossible for the “crawling already baby” to know, so Beloved is not
merely human. She is something Other. An “unchained, demanding Other,” as Morrison writes.
So is she a creature, something Other like Beloved, except white? If so, why? If not, why not?
For your three sub-claims, take into account their similar descriptions and show the audience
how much they are alike—voice, arms, strength, hair… that they’re both slaves but of different
sorts and how this illustrates white skin privilege as well.
Consider history. What happened to thousands upon thousands of white women in the
past. If Beloved embodies the pain and grief in terms of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, what
grief might Amy embody? Look at what she does for Sethe. She is her nurse and midwife, what
thousands of women were who were burned at the stake as witches during the Inquisition and the
witch hunts. Her use of cobwebs… “And then she did the magic…”.
There’s also a connection between the velvet Amy is searching for and the as yet unborn
Denver… consider the color Amy wants when she gets to Boston (and she’ll never make it
there—she’s lost in the woods forever in my view). Look up both “carmine” and “velvet.”
Velvet is the name of the new skin that grows on a baby antelope’s horns. Amy says that velvet
is like the world was just born….
Introduce the book to your audience, and these characters in particular. Remember they
many have never read it. Quote and cite Morrison both within the text and under a Works Cited
section, and let’s make it due by Monday. If not for the pandemic, we’d have two hours to
handwrite this essay in class.
