Slavery’s Continuing Impact

Slavery’s Continuing Impact 

            In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, when Paul D and Sethe find Beloved next to a tree, they don’t ask her many questions about her identity because, as Paul D explains, there were many wanderers escaping slavery, and each of their stories was equally dark. Even after slavery was abolished, its pain still affected those who lived under its power. Paul D uses race as an identifying factor when using the noun-adjective combination “coloredwoman” (62). By attaching the two words, Paul D shows even after slavery was abolished, race still played an integral role in defining one’s nature. Next Paul D begins to count the “coloredpeople” he has seen wandering through the woods: “five women arriving with fourteen female children. All their men… had been picked off one by one by one” (63). The way Paul D uses numbers to describe the women and children he has seen shows he is pulling himself away emotionally from them so they each become just one of the many that left slavery but still suffer. The repetition in “one by one by one” emphasizes the way slavery repeatedly attacks even after the institution is gone. Paul says that nobody seemed to know slavery ended as “strays of Negros” continued to walk around in “odd clusters” (63). Paul D underscores the confusion felt by the freed slaves by using the phrases “odd clusters,” which conveys disorganization and disarray, and “strays of Negros,” implying they are lost, without a place to go, and perhaps still like they animals they were treated as in slavery (63). Paul D gives some concrete ways slavery still affects freed slaves when saying many fled because they were “chased by debt and filthy ‘talking sheets’” (63). The zeugma in this phrase not only emphasizes the way slaves felt their debt press upon them, but also the way slaves were physically chased by “talking sheets” of the Klu Klux Klan during the reconstruction era after the Civil War. Using the slang, “talking sheets,” shows that the KKK was commonplace; the epithet even seems to try to belittle the KKK to deny their power as a coping technique. Most of Beloved is set after the Civil War, yet to understand the novel, it is key to understand the way slavery continues to affect the characters of the book through its legacy.