"Who and whose are you? Naming and Claiming in Toni Morrison’s Beloved"
Submitted on October 7, 2010, to Amy Laura Hall in partial fulfillment of Christian Ethics: Love in the Christian Tradition (CE144).
In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, names are a crucial and central marking, stylistically and literally. It might seem contradictory at first glance, but the importance of naming runs throughout the book in both direct and indirect ways. Chapters are left without names, just like those babies that Sethe’s mother threw away. Enslavement carries with it carelessness symbolized by a bill of sales with an unheard name, one’s owners laying claim over them as property.
Names identify who and whose one is, true names are not given, but accepted freely by a beloved. Nowhere is this clearer than the section that describes Baby Suggs’ first taste of freedom, after she hears her own heart beat and sees her own hands.
There are other names that a body carries, sometimes unknown by its masters and owners. These names, unknown by whitepeople, are stitched together by love and history, theirs is a different kind of claim, and much more powerful. These are the names shared between people you can put your arms around, whose great love claims you and that you claim back.
Suggs is the husband, in a manner of speaking, who calls his beloved “Baby” and who Baby claims in return. Theirs is a mutual love. Jenny is the person Mr. Garner purchases from the Carolinas, who listens to Lillian Garner hum as she works. Baby does not know who Jenny is, but at least nobody knocked Jenny down (or up).
In one unnamed chapter, about half way through the book, is a crucial dialectic about names unmatched in importance anywhere else in the book. Baby Suggs comes face to face with Jenny Whitlow and finally exorcises the name that possessed her. The passage begins with her assigned name, “Why do you call me Jenny?” and closes with her given name, “Baby.”
In nine places on one page, we read as Baby is asked who she answers to, is called, and who she calls. Her first question external; she asks why they call her Jenny. The agency is left with her owners. The second instant is internal, Mr. Garner inquiring as to what she “calls [her]self.” It continues with;
- “I don’t call myself nothing” B
- “Whitlow called you Jenny” G
- “Didn’t he call you jenny?” G
- “What did you answer to?” G
- “Why you call him Suggs, then?” G
- “He didn’t call me Jenny.” B
- “What he call you?” G
The second, third, sixth, and seventh lines are ones that grant Baby her agency, these ore the moments she has the freedom to answer and call. The first, fourth, fifth, eighth, and ninth all remove from Baby her agency, they assume that someone else is naming and claiming. The closing is powerful; she declares how the man who loved her, who calls her, simply and beautifully, “Baby.” This is the name we know her by and that she answers to, she does not honor Jenny with her attention. In fact, Mr. Garner refuses to
Love is expressed in naming, and it is more than just caring, as the Garners certainly do. Try as they might, they do not love Baby, they merely care for her. The people who love her call her Baby, not Jenny. The people who are cared for by Baby also have names. Baby’s babies are Tyree, Johnny, Rosa Lee, Nancy, Patty, Famous, Ardelia and Halle. They are beloved, just as Sethe loved the woman he put his arms around and would have the daughter her never met who shares his name.
When I wore the green and grey, we had money in our pockets and a fog in our heads. We had names like “sergeant” and “sir,” names we thought we earned. Or we called one another Joe, like the Garner’s did their Pauls. People treated us as assets and had a claim over us. Our bodies, we were told, were “government property.” We didn’t call ourselves nothing, we were just called. Sometimes we were told to “lock it up!” and to “get down!”
In the short passage I focused on, Baby never says that she is Baby, she merely indicates that hers is a name she accepts. My name is Logan, but I don’t know if I am Logan. Logan is a name given to me by people who loved me but did not claim me in the same distressed way as Baby did her husband or Sethe’s mother did the man she put her arms around. I claim my parents, and so I take their name, the name they chose carefully for me, but my Beloved has another name in mind. My Beloved will tell me who I am, not just what name I carry.
I am my Beloved’s and she is mine. My Master’s only claim over me is love and she knows my name. I am who She calls me and I am hers.
Beloved is my God