American history is not shy of moral complexities—particularly surrounding slavery and its legacy. Unfortunately, It’s often overlooked as if slavery was resolved with the Civil War and no longer an issue to consider. This is a problem I find too common especially when pertaining to a neglected group with a unique experience living in the United States: black mothers. As if a microcosm of the harsh reality they were forced to endure, enslaved mothers had to make impossible decisions when it came to their children—assuming they even had a choice in the first place. Thus, their own morals may have been compromised with the limited actions they could take. As the scope of slavery’s inhumanity and the moral corruption that rooted itself is often diluted or forgotten when discussing history, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is such a fascinating fictional depiction of the life and consequences of being a mother during slavery. Within the narrative exists conflicts over Sethe’s decision to kill her children in order to save them from a life of slavery. The success in murdering her own daughter leaves a whole community of characters and readers alike to contemplate over her decision and decide on whether she was in the right as we consider her upbringing and the women—the mothers—who faced slavery alongside her. Within Beloved, Toni Morrison conveys the moral paradox of motherhood during slavery through the inhumane treatment Sethe experienced during her past and pregnancy. These flashbacks incite sympathy and understanding from readers as her past shapes her motherhood and reveals the mothers who influenced her. From Sethe’s very own mother and mother-in-law to Margaret Garner, the real-life mother whose story inspired Sethe’s, Morrison centers the moral corruption mothers face under a cruel institution that would effortlessly push Sethe to infanticide rather than see her children enslaved.

            Toni Morrison graces us with her own words discussing the origins of novel within the foreword. As she pondered over what freedom meant on the Hudson River in 1983, she describes how:

Inevitably these thoughts led me to the different history of black women in this country, a history in which marriage was discouraged, impossible, or illegal; in which birthing children was required, but “having” them, being responsible for them—being, in other words, their parent—was as out of the question as freedom. (Morrison XVI-XVII)

The many contradictions that spill into decisions possibly made by a mother for her children is established by Morrison’s own reflections that inspire the novel and moral paradox within it. Living in a world where one couldn’t be married yet was expected to have kids and sustain them to be treated as property for another was an incredibly dark, corrupt system anyone would logically fear and reject for themselves and their children. Morrison goes further to cite the story of Margaret Garner as the inspiration for the novel and the protagonist Sethe. Investigating more about Margaret Garner shined on many similarities between her and Sethe as P.S. Bassett, who interviewed Garner and her mother-in-law two weeks after the murder for The American Baptist, notes, “No, she replied, I was as cool as I now am; and would much rather kill them at once, and thus end their sufferings, than have them taken back to slavery, and be murdered by piece-meal” (Bassett). This sentiment is corroborated by the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, which writes, “They would be better off dead than forced to live as slaves, she screamed at her captors” (United States). The documentation of Garner’s words reflects not only Sethe’s reasoning but Morrison’s musings on the relationship between black women and the history of the United States. Citing the prevention of uninhibited brutality as the moral justification does not entirely defend the murder of one’s own child, however. This stance sensationalized and led to much scrutiny and support of both Garner and Sethe’s decisions to kill their children in order to save them from slavery.

            The reason Garner and Sethe both seem to argue is that of choosing the lesser of two evils for their children. This divisive paradox is shared by Morrison herself who is quoted saying, “I think if I had seen what she had seen, and knew what was in store, and I felt that there was an afterlife – or even if I felt that there wasn’t – I think I would have done the same thing. But it’s also the thing you have no right to do” (Rothstein). She confesses to understanding Sethe’s—and by extension Garner’s—motives for killing her children instead of sentencing them to a life of slavery. Yet, she clarifies that murdering your child is something you have no right to do. With this in mind, she formulates such a compelling story not only surrounding the murder of Beloved, but of Sethe’s backstory and her experiences at Sweet Home. From the revelations fragmented throughout flashbacks in the narrative, Morrison brews the moral paradox at the heart of the novel. She does not hide the fact that Beloved died an infant as Sethe reveals early on that “she [has] to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut” (Morrison 6). In fact, Morrison hints at Sethe’s moral corruption as this same passage admits that Sethe had to have sex, or prostitute herself, to the engraver of Beloved’s headstone. Given the innate bondage and sexual exploitations slavery forced black women to endure as breeders, it comes to no surprise that she would resort to those actions in order to survive as an escaped woman—as an escaped mother. The hint that she was involved in the murder of her own child was that her knees were “more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil” (Morrison 6).

            As Morrison admits to not researching into more of Garner’s history as she “really wanted to invent her life” (Rothstein), Sethe’s original story unfolds differently. Garner’s story ultimately ends with her dying of typhoid fever after being sentenced back to slavery as:

Even after capture, Margaret defied the institution of slavery. She wanted to be tried in Ohio as a free person even if it meant she would receive the death sentence for killing her child, but authorities refused and tried her in Kentucky as property; therefore, she was not charged for the child’s death. (United States)

Both women had to live with the paradox of being human yet treated like property and the consequences of such an inhumane law. Sethe, however, got to remain in Ohio. Yet, the trauma involved with her enslavement ends up haunting her and intensifies her moral corruption. I will focus on three distinct instances: The violation of her maternity milk and the punishment she received for reporting it, her memories of her mother, and the consequences of being a fugitive slave and the inevitable separation of her children by getting caught. These three experiences reveal Sethe’s torment, headspace, and her motive to commit infanticide as Garner did.

            The first traumatic experience revealed from a flashback during a conversation between Sethe and Paul D is of the scar on her back that looks like a chokecherry tree. The story behind the scar explains why she would never abandon her children no matter the cost. She describes being assaulted by white boys, painfully recounting, “Those boys came in there and took my milk… Held me down and took it…Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still” (Morrison 19-20). This assault hits deeply as it occurred when she was at her most vulnerable: pregnant with Denver and desperate to get to her other baby who needed her. Parvin Ghasemi points out a deeper layer to this traumatic event as, “black women—considered valuable as the breeders of an important commodity, slaves—were stereotyped as nurturing forces that protected and provided for their children at any cost, without any concern for their own individuality and selves” (Ghasemi 238). This stereotype is present during Sethe’s time on Sweet Home as she recalls feeling that:

All I knew was I had to get my milk to my baby girl. Nobody was going to nurse her like me. Nobody was going to get it to her fast enough, or take it away when she had enough and didn’t know it. Nobody knew that she couldn’t pass her air if you held her up on your shoulder, only if she was lying on my knees. Nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me. (Morrison 19)

The emphatic repetition of “Nobody” and emphasis that she was the only one who could provide for her daughter offers insight into her mental state and belief in the importance of a mother solely nurturing her child. She irreversibly attaches her identity to her children. As her maternity milk was ruthlessly robbed from her, her failure to provide for her child coupled with the punishment she received for telling Mrs. Garner was a striking experience that pushed her to run away from Sweet Home and be with her children faster. Morrison incorporates this backstory as the starting point of our sympathy for Sethe. It characterizes the loving and maternal—stereotypical side—of motherhood into her character. Yet, I would not expect such emphatic, passionate love for her child to ultimately lead her to infanticide.

            When investigating further, however, I found precedence for Sethe’s extreme choice that came with another trauma revealed: the memories of her mother, Ma’am. That Sethe would only know her as Ma’am speaks to the drastic difference in her upbringing versus how she would raise her children herself. Amanda Putnam also notes this, writing, “Sethe actually shows abundant connections to her children, risking everything for them to escape and celebrating their life together afterward” (Putnam 38). This is in complete opposition to the few memories she shares with Denver about her own mother. Sethe recalls, “I didn’t see her but a few times… She must of nursed me two or three weeks—that’s the way the others did. Then she went back in rice and I sucked from another woman whose job it was” (Morrison 72). Here we see how Sethe was actively “unmothered by slavery” (Putnam 40) and denied a relationship or connection to her mother. Yet, she still carries this impression of her alongside the violence Ma’am endured and engaged in. Thus, moral corruption spread from mother to daughter. Sethe got slapped without explanation by her mother when asking to be marked like her (Morrison 73) and Nan, one of Sethe’s caretakers, shared the fate of Ma’am’s children before her. Nan relayed, “She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man” (Morrison 74). On one hand, Nan affirms the motherly love Ma’am had for Sethe as she was the only child she accepted and named after her father. Yet, she also establishes a template of infanticide—a moral deterioration that seems a practical choice for slaves given the prevalence of the rape and sexual exploitation of slave women and the commodification of the children they bore. Thus, Ma’am’s motherhood consists of a horrifying paradox as well. She discarded babies who were a product of rape and would never escape the cycle of slavery. Yet, she had Sethe with a black man that she consented to and named her after which shows her willingness to find love and have a child despite the circumstances of slavery. These violent acts closely associated with maternity committed by Ma’am marked Sethe with precedence for violence against children by their mothers, “encrypting Sethe with the understanding that maternal violence is easily also an act of love” (Putnam 40).

            This maternal violence comes to fruition with the return of Schoolteacher and fellow slavecatchers on the hunt for runaway slaves. With the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act, Sethe and her children are not considered free as they were legally required to return to their previous owners if caught. Technically, they were still considered property even at 124. When finally faced with the truth of what happened that fateful day by Paul D, the narration blends with Sethe’s recollection of the moment the slavecatchers came, describing:

And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one else could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. (Morrison 192)

Her maternal instincts kick in alongside the flood of trauma ushered in by the physical manifestations of her past—Schoolteacher and his men—returning to take away Sethe and her “precious and fine and beautiful” children. In this moment she knows two things: the love she has for her children and the understanding to protect them at all costs. She wanted to take them where they could not be hurt by slavery, and, unfortunately, that meant death. From the illuminating flashbacks of the past to the present showcasing Sethe’s hesitance to speak on the murder, all her experiences coalesce into her behaving on maternal instinct. This traumatic response is explored by Florian Bast who investigated Morrison using the trope of the color red’s association with violence, passion, and murder. He attributes voicelessness as a symptom of trauma surrounding the color red, highlighting, “Sethe’s silence throughout the entire scene is more than just an expression of being temporarily overwhelmed by the situation. The scene creates a broad range of instances of voicelessness as it has several of the attendant characters at a loss of words at first” (Bast 1075). Sethe, her living children, Baby Suggs, the slavecatchers, and the black community are pushed to a point of voicelessness—a collective traumatic response—from Sethe committing infanticide. The spill of the baby’s blood all over and the spread of red symbolically represents the legacy of slavery and the grave cost of freedom to black women. They all silently witnessed the abysmal depth slavery corrupts morality, maternity, and humanity.

            The loudly silent trauma of committing and witnessing infanticide sets the tone of Beloved and the circular dance around the subject. The contemplation of protecting your children through murder creates a paradox that violates the sanctity of a parent-child, mother-daughter connection. Even though Sethe planned to kill all her children and herself, that she would target her baby daughter first instead of her sons speaks to the drastic experiences women and girls have compared to men and boys. Though inherent misogyny may had led Sethe to immediately slay her daughter, Stephanie Demetrakopoulos opines, “to kill her daughter is to kill her own best self, to kill her best and self-gendered fantasy of the future. The act is like killing time itself, especially its redemptive gifts, which the daughter, as a potential mother, symbolizes” (Demetrakopoulos 53). She argues that by targeting her daughter, she is killing the most precious part of herself; the part that deserves to be protected most. Demetrakopoulos mentions the concept of a “self-gendered fantasy of the future” which plays to the parental desire to want your children to have a better life—to live to be better than you. That is what Sethe values most and what she fears losing most. This intense value is evidently clear with Denver’s transformative understanding of Sethe and the community’s collective fear:

That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up… The best thing [Sethe] was, was her children. Whites might dirty her alright, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean. ( Morrison 295-296)

Denver comes to realize that Sethe saw her best self in her children—in her daughters. She understood that to be a black mother in America is to live with the fear that a white person could take away your children. This is a fate crueler than death that no parent deserves or wants their family to undergo. Thus, Sethe targets her daughters first knowing what the experience of being a female slave is and to save them from it. Sethe was already “dirtied” by slavery, but she wouldn’t allow her best part to be dirtied as well. In an act of defiance, of protection, and of love, she kills her daughter to deny slavery of her.

            This controversial choice has divided in-world characters and scholars alike who witness the murder. Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, extremely suffered from the moral paradox of motherhood during slavery too. Early in the novel she tells Sethe to be grateful that a baby is haunting her as she informs her that, “I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody’s house into evil” (Morrison 6). Like most enslaved mothers, her children were inevitably fed into the system that stole them away and murdered them. Yet, her own controversial paradox manifests with the admission that:

The last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway. Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips with her own—fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognize anywhere. (Morrison 63)

Suggs actively neglected her children and denied them a mother as the institution of slavery would inevitably take them away. She completely broke away from her children as infants except for Halle. This is a complete deviation from Ma’am who gave Sethe the opportunity to recognize her body should anything happen to her and Sethe who developed an intense bond with her children. Putnam highlights Suggs’ cruelty, remarking:

The reality is that Baby Suggs forced herself to abandon her children almost at birth, knowing that they will eventually be taken away within slavery. In contrast, Sethe never abandons her children—she remains constant for them, even though her method of mothering becomes brutal. (Putnam 41)

The three mothers formed different relationships (or lack thereof) with their children. This divisive choice, however, mirrors Sethe’s as Baby Suggs is not wrong in understanding the nature of the world she lives in and that her children did in fact get taken or chased off. She knew that a cruel death awaited all of them. However, she initially tried her best to protect and stay with them, such as when she slept with a straw boss for four months to stay with her third child only for him to be traded away then followed by a pregnancy by the very man who betrayed her (Morrison 28). This was the final straw that broke her maternity as, “That child she could not love and the rest she would not” (Morrison 28). Hence, this paradox forms as she is corrupted into harming her children through neglect and callously denying them the experience or memory of a mother before slavery would. This parallel brings Baby Suggs to a painful understanding of Sethe, as from one mother to another she recognizes the difficulty in having children as slaves. She met her destiny in the way many slave mothers found themselves at the end of their lives. “[White slavecatchers] came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe’s rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. The whitefolks had tired her out at last” (Morrison 212).

            Morrison somberly depicts the fate of slave mothers and the impossible decisions they were forced to make. She spotlights the inevitable separation from their children getting taken away; of their motherhood—their very selves—being taken and murdered. They had no choice but to make extreme decisions in order to survive. Though each had different relationships with their children, all three fictional mothers knew the inescapable death sentence that the institution of slavery had in store for their families. Though Beloved is a work of fiction, we see with Margaret Garner that reality was just as, if not crueler than what Morrison depicts in the novel. I do not blame the women—real or fictional—who lived and died through slavery. These women were forced to have children and lose them to an atrocious institution that slaughtered them like animals. The novel and my investigation into the moral paradox affirms my personal stance to not condemn any of the mothers of Beloved. Their “moral corruption” is a product of slavery. What extremities they took were a response to the extremities they were placed in—a response to total inhumanity. Sethe did try to save her children, but much like Morrison herself, I want to affirm that no parent has the right to kill their children. What they did does not deny them their motherhood, however. The institution of slavery did that before any of them had children. Beloved is not a story that argues the black and white of infanticide. Instead, Morrison exposes the brutality of slavery, the history of human violence, where black women fall among it, and what that trauma collectively does to us—and what it makes us do.

Works Cited

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vol. 34, no. 4, 2011, pp. 1069–86. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41412478. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.

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Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 1992, pp. 51–59. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3042076. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.

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Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York, Vintage Books, 2004.

Putnam, Amanda. “Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni Morrison’s The

Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, and A Mercy.” Black Women, Gender + Families, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, pp. 25–43. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5406/blacwomegendfami.5.2.0025. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.

Rothstein, Mervyn. “Toni Morrison, In Her New Novel, Defends Women.” The New

York Times, The New York Times, archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com /books/98/01/11/home/14013.html?scp=. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.

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