How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
When I put that headstone up I wanted to lay in there with you, put your head on my shoulder and keep you warm, and I would have if Buglar and Howard and Denver didn't need me, because my mind was homeless then. I couldn't lay down with you then. No matter how much I wanted to. I couldn't lay down nowhere in peace, back then. Now I can. I can sleep like the drowned, have mercy. She come back to me, my daughter, and she is mine. (20.3)
Sethe was "homeless then." Does that mean she isn't homeless now because she has Beloved back? Just wait until she finds out what kind of home Beloved offers. Are home and family related in Beloved?
Quote #8
Beloved is my sister. I swallowed her blood right along with my mother's milk. The first thing I heard after not hearing anything was the sound of her crawling up the stairs. She was my secret company until Paul D came. He threw her out. Ever since I was little she was my company and she helped me wait for my daddy. Me and her waited for him. I love my mother but I know she killed one of her own daughters, and tender as she is with me, I'm scared of her because of it. She missed killing my brothers and they knew it. They told me die-witch! stories to show me the way to do it, if ever I needed to. (21.1)
Halle who? Oh, right. You know, we don't get the missing-father angle often in a book that's all about missed mothering opportunities. This is just a reminder of how the father is an even more absent figure in the book.
Quote #9
Three times I lost her: once with the flowers because of the noisy clouds of smoke; once when she went into the sea instead of smiling at me; once under the bridge when I went in to join her and she came toward me but did not smile. She whispered to me, chewed me, and swam away. Now I have found her in this house. She smiles at me and it is my own face smiling. I will not lose her again. She is mine. (23.1)
Here's our take on this somewhat baffling passage. Beloved is thinking about how she's lost her mother three times. But wait. The three times she lists couldn't have all occurred in hers or Sethe's lifetime (if we consider these "memories" as actual events and not something dreamed up by Beloved).
How do we know this? Well, that part about the sea is a reference to the Middle Passage, which most likely occurred at least a good 50 years before the time of Sethe and Beloved.
So how about this? What if Beloved's mother isn't just Sethe, but other mothers "Beloved" has had? We're not talking about reincarnation here; we're thinking that Morrison wants us to think about why history seems to repeat itself over and over again.