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Anna Hereford
Ms. Warfield
Freshman English
October 27, 1997
From Checkers to Roosters: The Power of Imagery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Toni Morrison says, "The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it
unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time." In her novel, Beloved,
Morrison demonstrates her ability to produce the "best art." She creates horrifying images
of slavery so vividly that they stay with the reader forever. Her imagery is the kind that is
terribly beautiful, searingly beautiful, painfully beautiful.
One of the images Morrison embeds in the reader's mind is the tree on Sethe's
back. The tree is planted on Sethe's back by her master's nephews. Why? Because she
fought back while they stole her breast milk after raping her. Amy describes the scars on
Sethe's back to her:
“It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here's the trunk-- it's red and split
wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches. You got a
mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain't
blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole
tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder. I had me some
whippings, but I don't remember nothing like this.” (Morrison 79)
Morrison doesn't say, "Slavery is a terrible thing." Rather, she imprints the beatings into
our minds, shows us the puss-filled scars. We feel the aching pain as Amy touches Sethe's
back from the trunk to the blossoms.
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Another powerful and heart-wrenching image is Morrison's depiction of black
families as checkers on a checkerboard. Slaves function as mere objects to be played with
by the white owners who don’t care what happens to them:
...in all of Baby's life, as well as Sethe's own, men and women were moved
around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who
hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up,
brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. So baby's eight
children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock
she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just
because the pieces included her children. (Morrison 23)
Can you imagine your son being the bet in a poker game? A slave owner deciding your
son's worth in dollars? How did slaves survive knowing they were seen as objects without
feelings, without voices? Morrison portrays the feeling of diminished worth brilliantly as
the ownership of slaves at Sweet Home is transferred to their master's brother-in-law. He
reminds them of their value—nothing—every day. His actions scream at them that even
the farm animals deserve better than the slaves do.
Morrison compounds the imagery of slaves as objects, or worse, as animals, in the
scene where Paul D recalls the apparent contempt a rooster has for him. Here, Paul D
remembers sitting by the tree chained up with an iron bit in his mouth. Five roosters walk
by staring at him. The "king" rooster, the rooster Paul D had helped out of his shell, the
rooster whose life he had saved, walked by after the first five. That rooster grew up
hateful, despising everything in the yard. That day, he sat on the tub and stared at Paul D,
his beak in a smile. "[H]e looked so ... free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. Son of a
bitch couldn't even get out of his shell by hisself but he was still king and I
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was..."(Morrison 73). Morrison's picture of a rooster crowing over a chained man with a
bit in his mouth is one that doesn't fade.
The most powerful scene in the novel is Sethe cutting off her daughter's head with
a handsaw, not because her daughter was an unwanted child, but because Sethe wanted to
save her from a life of slavery like she had. In this scene, her master comes to collect
Sethe and her children. In a lovesick frenzy, Sethe attempts to murder all her children
before he can put his hands on any of them. Beloved is the only one she successfully
saves. She explains the situation to Paul D:
“I stopped him,” she said, staring at the place where the fence used
to be. “I took and put my babies where they'd be safe.” [...]
“Your love is too thick,” he said thinking, That bitch is looking at
me; she is right over my head looking through the floor at me.
“Too thick?” she said thinking of the Clearing where Baby Suggs’
commands knocked the pods off horse chestnuts. “Love is or it ain't. Thin
love ain't love at all.”
“Yeah. It didn't work, did it? Did it work?” he asked.
“It worked,” she said.
“How? Your boys gone you don't know where. One girl dead, the
other won't leave the yard. How did it work?”
“They ain't at Sweet Home. Schoolteacher ain't got em.”
(Morrison 125)
Sethe's willingness to murder her children to keep them from bondage answers the
question, how evil is slavery?
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Toni Morrison found the answer when she discovered a newspaper clipping about
a mother who chopped her child's head off in order to save it from a life of slavery. From
that one clipping, one image, she is able to compile enough rage to fill a whole book.
