Even Family Trees Have Paul Bunyans
A mighty tree with tangled branches, sturdy roots, begins its life as humans do. A tiny seed, full of promise, bursts forth, becomes a vibrant being, living, growing, feeling, and breathing, until it slowly withers and dies. Trees represent age, time, life, and death. They are symbolic of nature and its beauty, of the world and its cycles, of change. Yggdrasil, the World Tree; in Genesis, the Tree of Life; the olive tree, a sign of peace; the Liberty Tree, a sign of freedom; the tree Assattha, of Buddha's enlightenment; the Tree of Jesse, which became the cross of Jesus-all manifestations of trees' many meanings. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, trees primarily symbolize life and family, especially in relation to the characters of Paul D, Sethe, and Sethe's children.
The interaction of these characters originates in slavery on a farm called Sweet Home, but an attempted escape forces Paul D back into chains, this time in Alfred, Georgia. There grows in Alfred "an aspen too young to call a sapling" (260), which is not "old, wide, and beck-oning" (260) like the Sweet Home tree called Brother, but rather seems "the kind of thing a man would cut to whip his horse" (260). Brother, as its name suggests, represents a kinder element of Paul D's past: the family he leaves behind. With its roots firmly established in Sweet Home soil, Brother has spread its branches wide, reflecting the diaspora of Paul D's Sweet Home family. Paul D has fallen far from this tree, however, and the sapling in Alfred, though it retains the potential for brutality and pain, symbolizes the beginning of his new life alone. Upon his eventual escape from Alfred, he learns from a Cherokee that "the tree flowers" (132) will lead him to freedom in the North, and he "follows in their wake, a dark ragged figure guided by the blossoming plums" (133). Appearing with the onset of spring, these flowering trees symbolize the blossoming of a new chapter in Paul D's life after Sweet Home; they represent the end of his en-slavement. Though he leaves slavery in the winter behind him, its shadow lingers in his mind, a dark past that follows him on his path to freedom. By the time he reaches Sethe in the North, however, he has locked away in his heart the tribulations of his past.
As Paul D is enslaved in Alfred, Sethe, who is with child, escapes Sweet Home only after being raped and beaten, her blood-streaked back a tangled mass of lash marks and shredded skin. To Amy, the girl who helps deliver the baby Denver, Sethe's wounds resemble a "choke-cherry tree . . . . red and split wide open, full of sap" (93) with "a mighty lot of branches" (93) and "tiny little cherry blossoms" (93), all carved sadistically into her flesh. This tree, wrought from Sethe's flesh and blood, represents all that slavery has allowed her: her family. Its blossoms, spread wide among the branches, are her children, far from their roots and their mother. The tree is split and bloody, Sethe's family scattered and torn, yet both are in bloom; her children are her future, symbols of her new beginning. But just as a chokecherry tree bears bitter fruit, Sethe's children eventually come to resent her. Many years after her escape, as Paul D examines this tree for the first time and "learn[s] . . . her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches" (20), Sethe cannot feel him; her "back skin [has] has been dead for years" (21). Some-time since her escape from Sweet Home, her family has become a burden branded on her back, the root of her sorrow and the cause of her pain. Beginning with her murder of her third child and followed by her sons' flight years later, her family and her future have slowly fallen into decay. While looking at this tree, Paul D sees the horrors of Sethe's past, and out of compassion, he loves her. But after a confrontation with the ghost of Beloved, Sethe's murdered child, he begins to see it as only "a revolting clump of scars" (25) that is "nothing like any tree he [knows] because trees [are] inviting; things [he] can trust and be near" (25). His encounter with Beloved's spirit illuminates an inherent ugliness at the core of the tree, which arouses his suspicions, but Sethe's momentary, fear-driven wrath and the familial decay it causes remain unknown to him. He sees only the rotting remnants of dysfunction and insanity and senses a lingering spirit of hos-tility and mistrust. Despite this feeling, he remains at 124, unaware of the reason for his strange disquiet. Eventually discovering the root of his unrest, he is repulsed and finally detaches himself from the family on Sethe's back.
Even as Sethe instigates her own tree's decay, dead wood and broken trees surround the death and preternatural rebirth of Beloved, third child, first victim of her mother's love. Over-come by fear, Sethe herds her children into the woodshed at the back of 124 and, with a hand-saw, cuts Beloved's throat while "the quiet clok, clok, clok of wood splitting" (163) echoes in the yard outside. By a tool for cutting wood and in a shed for broken, lifeless trees, Beloved dies as if she were a tree herself, or at least a branch of Sethe's. At this moment, Sethe's tree begins its demise, the splitting wood outside symbolic of her now broken family, severed by her own hands. Beloved remains at 124 as a haunting specter of Sethe's past, a constant, inescapable re-minder of her mother's crime, but Sethe's compunctions are minimal; in her eyes, her actions are necessary and justified. Years pass at 124, Beloved's restless spirit a ghost of Sethe's sin; then, on the day of Beloved's rebirth, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D pass a lumberyard where "old roses [are] dying" (57), roses meant to "take the sin out of slicing trees" (57). These withered flowers are planted in an attempt to replace the beauty and the lives of the trees killed for lumber, an at-tempt that seems to be failing. And just as no rose can redeem the wrongs of the sawyer, no deed or circumstance can remove the evil from Sethe's similar sin; she, too, is guilty of "slicing trees." Beloved continues to exist, it seems, to maintain Sethe's guilt, her rebirth giving her the means to enact her retribution. Reappearing on "a stump not far from the steps of 124" (60), Beloved re-turns in order to enforce Sethe's penance. Though cut from her roots as an infant, Beloved's spi-rit has remained nearby, and therefore, upon her corporal restoration, she stands neither wholly apart from, nor wholly a part of her family. As a symbol of her rebirth, the bare stump from which a tree has been severed once again holds a severed life; the branch broken by Sethe has been reattached, at least for the moment. It is a long time, however, before Sethe recognizes Be-loved as her daughter reincarnated and must answer for the actions that send Beloved to her grave.
As a product of Beloved's death, Sethe's other children are also associated with tree imagery in the novel. Unable to forget the trauma of their childhood, Sethe's two sons leave 124 behind them while still young, but when their mother dreams, she "[sees] them sometimes in beautiful trees, their little legs barely visible in the leaves" (47). Howard and Buglar have so dis-tanced themselves from their own roots, from Sethe and their sisters, that they are hidden amongst the branches out of sight, and their mother knows not what has become of them. She only hopes that they have surrounded themselves with beautiful, vibrant, and loving families of their own. At times when Denver too feels she must escape, she flees to her sanctuary, "an eme-rald green closet . . . in the woods" (45), where, "veiled and protected by the live green walls, she [feels] ripe and clear" (35). Whenever she is lonely, discontent, or poor spirited in general, she takes refuge among these trees, which seem to symbolize her ideal family. She hides herself from life at 124, forgetting momentarily the hardships of her existence. Only with this alternate family does Denver feel "ripe," not rotting away in despair, not festering in her family's decay.
From the very beginning, Sethe's tree has bled, first in slavery, then split wide by her own hand, never to be healed. Its life drains and the family at 124 falls apart, just as at Sweet Home. But these trees-interwoven, tangled, and meshed-give rise to others; new seeds spread stronger, deeper roots, soon bearing sweeter, riper fruit, and life continues, each seed holding its own potential for growth and decay.
Works Cited
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Random House, Inc., 2004.
1,471 words, 6 pages
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