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Ashley Pancho
Professor Hopper
DISC 2306
April 17th, 2015
The Effects of Slavery on Motherhood
Toni Morrisons Beloved tells the story about what African slaves had to deal with
in America. Readers get to hear the story of slavery from a new perspective: that of the slaves.
Motherhood is a factor of life affected by slavery in many ways. Female slaves had no rights at
all and could not make any choices about their body or their children. Throughout the novel, the
strength and safety of motherhood constantly vies against the horrors of slavery. Though slaves
married for the sole purpose of reproduction, most had no choice in their life partner and were
still even obscenely molested by their masters otherwise.
A loss of choice can be seen in many places in Beloved. Though Sethe was lucky enough
to be allowed to choose her husband, Halle, hardly any slaves were allowed that same choice.
Baby Suggs, for example, did not choose who fathered her children; instead, the men were the
ones that chose her. Since she had the choice, Sethe is able to be a very maternal woman who
wants what is best for her children. She describes her maternal love to Paul D to be so wide that
encompassed all of her children. As Sethe explains to Paul D, I was big, Paul D, and deep and
wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide.
Look like I loved em more after I got here (Morrison 190). Even still, marriage was not a bond
of love for the slaves, but rather one way to produce more free labor.
It can almost be said that slavery does not allow for motherhood. Sethe was scared for
her children and felt her motherly approaches being threatened. When molested while pregnant,

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Sethe only thought about the loss of her milk; afraid she did not have enough milk for all of her
children. This scene is important in that it shows that Sethe is being cruelly robbed of her
capability to be a nurturing mother. We can clearly see that Sethe loves her family but fears for
their future, and is constantly afraid that she will not be able to care for them. In reality, slave
mothers dealt with this conflict every day.
African slave children did not have a high change of survival. Some were killed
intentionally while others died from bad situations. Sethe uses a story about her mother to
explain how she herself went through a similar experience. She shares that she did not know her
mother very well, but was told that she was the only child not abandoned and left to die. Sethe
only wants the best for her children and will do anything to secure that, especially if she can
avoid their death.
Death was unavoidable for Sethes first daughter and that certainly played a part in her
motherly instincts as well. She sees her daughters ghost in the form of Beloved. Though it is
never inherently clear who or what Beloved really is, one can assume it is the ghost of her
murdered child. Beloved also can be seen as an embodiment of the seduction and danger of the
past, since she causes Paul D and Sethe to remember their own stories and eventually become
overwhelmed by them. She is also a voice to the pain and suffering of slaves, as she recalls the
middle passage from Africa to the United States. The death of Sethes child resulted in a very
close, crippling, and almost suffocating motherly love towards Denver, rendering Denver unable
to venture anywhere outside of 124.
Slavery as an institution is discouraging towards strong emotional attachments between
child and mother. Slave women were raped and many found it hard to love their children as their
own for this reason. Baby Suggs found herself pregnant by the man who promised not to and

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did and the child she bore was one she could not love (Morrison 28). She was the perfect
example of such a mother. W. E. B. Du Bois addresses the rape of slave women in order to create
more workers and says it resulted in not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the
hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the
obliteration of the Negro home (Du Bois 4).
As soon as a child is able, he is sent to work hard on the farms. Mothers did not expect
anything less than to be separated from their children because of this. Sethe recalls this
separation with her own mother and two of her children, though only through faint memories.
Her mother had been owned and branded, and when Sethe wanted a matching branding, her
mother hit her. The separation she felt was worst when her mother was hanged shortly after.
Sethe also recalls the loss of her two sons. Once she had committed infanticide on her
first daughter, her sons ran away, afraid that they would be next. In contrast, by the time Denver
was born, Sethe had become very overprotective. Paul D states, on seeing Sethe and Denvers
very close relationship, For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was
dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. (Morrison 54).
Baby Suggs also experienced the pain of being raped by various owners and the feeling
of separation from her children. As is narrated in Beloved, Babys eight children had six
fathers (Morrison 28). Of those eight children, Halle was the only one not sold away to
someone else or possibly dead. Though Halle was able to buy her freedom, he bought her
freedom when freedom was a word she could not give meaning to anymore. Years of repeated
rape and loss of children numbed Baby Suggs immensely.
Through all of this pain, each woman had her own mechanisms for coping. Baby Suggs
coped through caring for everybody else and spreading her love. She becomes a source of

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inspiration to Cincinnatis black residents where she holds religious gatherings at the Clearing.
Baby Suggs teaches her followers to love their voices, bodies, and minds. Though she is gone by
part three of Beloved, Baby Suggs continues to inspire when her spirit motivates Denver to leave
124 and seek help for Sethe.
Sethe also learned to cope with her past throughout the novel. Her coping mechanism
was found in communal therapy. After she had made it to 124, she had suppressed almost all of
her past. Beloved is the embodiment of all she had suppressed; she is the inescapable, horrible
past of slavery that has come to haunt the present, as well as what could be the spirit of Sethes
murdered daughter. Her presence becomes more and more malevolent and parasitic throughout
the book as Beloved drains Sethes life force. Their roles begin to change, and it becomes nearly
impossible for Denver to tell the two apart. Sethe starts to act more like a child while Beloved
becomes almost like a mother.
Trudier Harris takes note of this, and compares Beloved to a succubus, using examples
where Beloved takes food from her mouth, eats whatever there is to eat, and inspires Sethe to
leave her job, thereby relinquishing her ability to feed herself, and causing her to become
diminished in stature as well as in self-posession (Harris 154). It was not until Sethe was met
with the love and support of Denver and all of her friends that Sethe was able to let go of the past
and start to better herself as a mother. Denver is consequently able to finally break free of her
isolation until everyone at 124 supports her in getting help for Sethe. Once Beloved was gone, a
period of growth for Sethe and Denver was able to begin.
The motherhood described in the novel is set in slavery. In his essay Slavery and
Motherhood in Toni Morrisons Beloved, Terry Paul Caesar says that there are profound
differences between being a woman and being a mother (Caesar 113). Caesar also says that the

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lack of selflessness on the part of a mother-to-be is why Sethe was frightened by Paul Ds request
for her to have his baby. He also claims that being a slave so profoundly contaminates being a
mother that the two become virtually inseparable, and that all Sethe has to free herself from is
her subjection to motherhood itself, in the person of her daughter, Beloved (Caesar 113). Once
Sethe had freed herself from Beloved, with the help of Denver she was able to immediately
begin healing from the parasite of her past.
Conflict between motherhood and slavery is clearest in the central act of Beloved, when
Sethe kills her own daughter. On one hand, this is the deepest motherly love, in that Sethe saves
her daughter from living a life of slavery, as most slaves believed death was better. However, the
same scene can also be read as Sethe refusing to care for a child under slavery, as slavery would
not let her be as much of a mother to her children as she would have liked, so she would rather
not be a mother at all.
Slavery affected many factors of human life. Motherhood was not exempt from this, and
had arguably one of the worst consequences of slavery. Slavery and motherhood could not
coexist because of how little the lives of slaves were valued. W. E. B. Du Bois recognizes this
loss of human value in slaves and how rape threatened the sacredness of the Negro home. Due to
a loss of choice on the mothers part, slavery prevented mothers from providing true motherly
love to their children. Mothers like Sethe were driven to infanticide in some cases, while the ones
who did not, such as Baby Suggs, were separated from their children shortly after childhood.
Terry Paul Caesar recognizes the hardships between being a woman and being a mother,
especially when the mother is living as a slave, and addresses the problems that arise in Beloved
because of them.

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In the end, the most important part is coping with the past, which needs to be allowed to
happen in order for the ex-slaves in Beloved to heal. Baby Suggs died peacefully having brought
about comfort and inspiration to all from her experiences, while Sethe found solace in gaining
support from her daughter and her friends on 124. Trudier Harris sees Beloved as a succubus that
feeds off of Sethe; she was a physical representation of the consequences of suppressing the past.
It is only upon letting go of the past that healing can truly begin.

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Works Cited
Caesar, Terry Paul. "Slavery and Motherhood in Toni Morrison's Beloved." Revista De Letras 34
(1994): 111-20. JSTOR. Web. 6 Apr. 2015. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/27666617>.
Du Bois, W. E. B. "Of Our Spiritual Strivings." The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Web. 14 Apr.
2015. <https://www.msu.edu/user/carterca/dubois.htm>.
Harris, Trudier. Beloved: Woman, Thy Name Is Demon. Ed. William L. Andrews. Toni
Morrisons Beloved: A Casebook (1999): 127-57. Print.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York: Vintage, 1987. Print.