The scene is so brief that readers often miss it, Morrison has said. In a 2010 video interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project, an African American history archive, she explained, “You know it all along … but the actual moment when it happens is so buried in the text you can barely find it.”
Earlier in that same interview, Morrison confessed that it was extremely difficult to write Sethe’s story. “It was very, very hard—not so much to find the language for it, that was difficult enough. But for me, in the process of writing, it is just not authentic or legitimate enough for me to look at it from the outside. You know, I always tell my students: it’s not a black father; it’s yours. You know, the one you know? That one. So if I’m going to imagine what it takes to kill your baby, then I have to put in my arms my baby. … And when that happens—and it’s difficult—then the language just pares down. You don’t get ornamental with that. You get very still, very clean-limbed, and very quiet, because the event itself is bigger than language.”
This is what Schoolteacher and the others see in the shed where Sethe is trying to kill her children, and possibly herself:
Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere—in the ticking time the men spent staring at what there was to stare at—the old nigger boy, still mewing, ran through the door behind them and snatched the baby from the arc of its mother’s swing.
I used to wonder why Morrison doesn’t allow us to experience that scene from Sethe’s point of view; then I realized that Sethe relives this moment on every other page of the novel. The aftermath of this act expands into every scene.
The scene in the shed is compressed, though not static, showing that the level of depth in some scenes has more to do with word choice, well-chosen details, imagery, syntax, tone, rhythm, and cadence, than with word volume. The scene begins concisely, though it is filled with the kind of tension that commands us not to turn away. Two boys—they are allowed to be boys, children, hurt and wounded children—are bleeding. But their mother is not yet allowed to be their mother. She is a “nigger woman” who is holding bleeding children, one of them by the heels. Then the moment that always makes me gasp, no matter how many times I’ve read the book, is when Sethe avoids eye contact with the slave catchers, then swings her baby against the wall, missing, then tries again “to connect.”
The arc of Sethe’s swing is the emotional center of that scene for me, and, indeed, the heart of the novel. The swing demands so much practicality in the very irrational moment when Sethe is trying to connect her baby’s body with the wall to make sure the child dies. This is indeed a hard killing, a baby’s execution, carried out through the determined “arc of its mother’s swing.” (Finally she is allowed to be a mother.) Sethe’s purposeful and sorrowful act is embodied by the arc of that swing, the impossible choice she ends up making as well as the level of concentration required to carry it out.
One thing that struck Morrison about Margaret Garner’s choices, she has said, is that Garner was not crazy, nor did she later show any remorse. In fact, it seemed that, if faced with the same circumstances, she might do it again. This is something that Morrison demonstrates with the deliberate arc of Sethe’s swing. It would take struggle and effort to kill her own child, but there was something else, which in her mind was much worse: the living death that was slavery.
Garner and Sethe’s choice is echoed in many enslaved people’s sayings, prayers, and songs, their tales of freedom or death. “Oh freedom,” many sang, “Oh freedom over me. And before I’d be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave. And go home to my Lord and be free.” Or as the abolitionist Harriet Tubman is reported to have said, “There’s two things I’ve got a right to and these are Death or Liberty.”
Another complex infanticide in Morrison’s oeuvre is Eva Peace’s killing of her son Plum in Sula. Like Shadrack, Plum returns from World War I psychologically damaged. Plum has a drug addiction that leads to him stealing from his family, so Eva takes matters into her own hands.
The scene unfolds mostly from Eva’s point of view, until Plum is close to dying. It too is told in pared-down prose, though it is not as spare as in Sethe’s killing scene.
Eva walks into Plum’s room and holds him as he babbles compliments at her. (“Mamma, you so purty. You so purty, Mamma.”) She remembers when he was a little boy and how she used to hold him and rock him the same way. Then she drags herself to her kitchen on her crutches—she has a missing leg that, rumor has it, she severed to collect insurance money. She gets some kerosene that she pours over her son’s body before lighting him on fire with a rolled-up newspaper.
Now there seemed to be some kind of wet light traveling over his legs and stomach with a deeply attractive smell. It wound itself—this wet light—all about him, splashing and running into his skin. He opened his eyes and saw what he imagined was the great wing of an eagle pouring a wet lightness over him. Some kind of baptism, some kind of blessing, he thought. Everything is going to be all right, it said. Knowing that it was so he closed his eyes and sank back into the bright hole of sleep.
This scene includes more sensory details than the infanticide scene in Beloved. Plum is completely passive, though, showing a lack of control over his fate. We see the wet light of the kerosene. We smell it as it touches Plum’s body. Morrison puts the reader in Plum’s skin right before he’s aflame, but, as if to absolve Eva, or to allow us to feel some empathy for her, Morrison grants Plum “snug delight” in having kerosene poured over him. Gradually we move from the more concrete act of a mother setting her son on fire to the more abstract notion of this brutal act becoming a kind of renewal, a baptism.
What is not there is a way out, a possible rescue. Plum’s death is quietly violent, claustrophobic, and intimate. The scene’s emotional strength comes out of that suffocating atmosphere. The fact that Plum is dying by his mother’s hand makes it a transgression, yet it seems inevitable. At this point, what could save Plum is either his mother dropping her body over his or having water poured over him. The only water, though, is in Eva’s memory. She remembers bathing Plum as a little boy. There are also tears, which Eva tries to lick before they reach her mouth. Even a glass of what she thinks is strawberry crush in Plum’s room turns out to be blood-tainted water from Plum’s drug use.
The “wet light” traveling over Plum’s body is killing him, yet it feels soothing to him. He sinks into it and surrenders to it as one might sink into a baptismal pool. In fact, he sees what is happening to him, just as his mother does, as a kind of “blessing.” He is being saved. Everything will be all right as long as the “bright hole of sleep” looms ahead.
“Dying was OK because it was sleep,” Nell later thinks as she contemplates her own death, echoing the saying that sleep and death are brothers. Albert Camus might as well have been referring to Eva Peace when he wrote, in “Reflections on the Guillotine,” that “Society assumes the right to select as if she were nature herself and to add great sufferings to the elimination as if she were a redeeming god.” Yet neither Eva nor Sethe sees herself as a god, though what is most godlike about them is the magnitude of both their love and their wrath. Their love is so “thick,” as Sethe’s friend Paul D says of Sethe’s, that it might not be survivable.
In Morrison’s fictional world, death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Death is “anything but forgetfulness,” Sethe tells herself while remembering her dead daughter and two runaway sons. “Death is a skipped meal,” Sethe’s surviving daughter, Denver, thinks, compared to losing the people you love. Many of Morrison’s characters seem to think this way, though not all of them.
In a 1993 Paris Review interview with the writer Elissa Schappell, Morrison questioned Sethe’s choice of killing her daughter by imagining ho
w the daughter, who later appears as Beloved, the ghost, would feel about it.
“Beloved surely didn’t think it was all that tough,” Morrison told Schappell. “She thought is was lunacy. Or, more importantly, How do you know death is better for me? You’ve never died. How could you know?”
I don’t want you to think that I am fond only of Morrison’s minimalist death scenes. One of the most detailed and moving scenes I have ever read is in Song of Solomon. Pilate is shot by a bullet meant for her nephew Milkman. Consistent with her fearless, near-outlaw personality, Pilate laughs after she’s been shot.
Here is Pilate’s death scene.
She stood up then, and it seemed to Milkman that he heard the shot after she fell. He dropped to his knees and cradled her lolling head in the crook of his arm, barking at her, “You hurt? You hurt, Pilate?”
She laughed softly and he knew right away that she was reminded of the day he first met her and said the most stupid thing there was to say.
The twilight had thickened and all around them it was getting dark. Milkman moved his hand over her chest and stomach, trying to find the place where she might be hit. “Pilate? You okay?” He couldn’t make out her eyes. His hand under her head was sweating like a fountain. “Pilate?”
She sighed. “Watch Reba for me.” And then, “I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ’em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.”
Milkman bent low to see her face and saw darkness staining his hand. Not sweat, but blood oozing from her neck down into his cupped hand. He pressed his fingers against the skin as if to force the life back into her, back into the place it was escaping from. But that only made it flow faster. Frantically he thought of tourniquets and could even hear the rip of cloth he should have been tearing. He shifted his weight and was about to lay her down, the better to wrap her wound, when she spoke again.
“Sing,” she said. “Sing a little somethin for me.”
Milkman knew no songs, and had no singing voice that anybody would want to hear, but he couldn’t ignore the urgency in her voice. Speaking the words without the least bit of a tune, he sang for the lady. “Sugargirl don’t leave me here/ Cotton balls to choke me/ Sugargirl don’t leave me here/ Buckra’s arms to yoke me.” The blood was not pulsing out any longer and there was something black and bubbly in her mouth. Yet when she moved her head a little to gaze at something behind his shoulder, it took a while for him to realize that she was dead. And when he did, he could not stop the worn old words from coming, louder and louder as though sheer volume would wake her. He woke only the birds, who shuddered off into the air. Milkman laid her head down on the rock. Two of the birds circled round them. One dived into the new grave and scooped something shiny in its beak before it flew away.
Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. “There must be another one like you,” he whispered to her. “There’s got to be at least one more woman like you.”
The “something shiny” scooped up by the birds is the snuffbox earring Pilate had been wearing until a few moments before, when she’d torn it from her earlobe and buried it in the ground with her father’s bones. Inside the snuffbox is a piece of paper bearing Pilate’s name. The flock of birds, one might say, is Pilate’s larger-than-life spirit flying away.
As a witness, Milkman is as close to Pilate’s sudden death as one might get. He not only watches her die but he feels her dying. He even tries to imagine what she’s thinking. (Her smile while she is thinking about the first time they met.) Pilate in turn tries to make it easier for him to watch her die. She smiles, hiding her pain. She confesses her regrets to him, showing a rare moment of vulnerability. Then she asks him to sing to her. Allowing him to comfort her becomes her gift to him. In spite of his reluctance, he sings a modified version of the song she sings for the dying insurance salesman when she’s first introduced in the novel (though he says “Sugargirl” rather than “Sugarman”). Thanks to that song, Pilate’s life comes full circle at the end.
“Sugargirl don’t leave me here,” Milkman sings, but leave him Pilate must, as some of their ancestors had to lose each other to cotton fields (“Cotton balls to choke me”) and to white enslavers’ tyranny (“Buckra’s arms to yoke me”).
Blood stains Milkman’s hands, and comes out of Pilate’s mouth. He thinks of ways he might try to save her (tourniquets, etc.), but it’s too late. Pilate is already dead.
Morrison doesn’t share what words Milkman cries out to wake his dead aunt. (How inspired of her to allow those two a brief moment of intimacy in such a detailed scene.) However, she admits that the words are both “worn” and “old.” Whatever words they are would sound worn in such circumstances anyway. And who could even remember, since this scene is from Milkman’s point of view, all that we say at a moment like this, when someone unexpectedly drops dead while we too are in the line of fire?
Still, right before his own fate is decided, Milkman realizes not just the full breadth of his aunt’s nature (she can fly) but also his own. He learns from her that “if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”
In a 1981 interview with the literary critic Thomas LeClair in the New Republic, Toni Morrison spoke about how she addressed traditional and nontraditional outlaws in what she called her “village literature.”
“My work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it,” she told LeClair. Unlike the outside world, beyond her village’s gates, her novels’ internal codes occasionally force her characters to decide who lives and who dies.
One of the most read and discussed short stories connected with capital punishment is Anton Chekhov’s 1889 short story “The Bet.” One night a rich banker hosts a party full of his gentleman friends, most of whom are opposed to the death penalty and believe that it should be replaced with life in prison.
The banker disagrees. He believes the death penalty is more humane. “Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly.”
They’re both immoral, concludes another guest. “The State is not God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.”
A twenty-five-year-old lawyer joins the conversation. If he had to choose between the two, he’d choose a life sentence, he says. “To live anyhow is better than not at all.”
The banker decides to test this lawyer’s convictions by offering him a large sum of money to remain in solitary confinement for five years. The lawyer happily takes the bet, and to prove how serious he is, he increases the number of years to fifteen. The banker doesn’t think the lawyer will last more than three or four years. Voluntary confinement is even harder than the compulsory kind, he tells him. “The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison.”
The lawyer becomes the banker’s prisoner, living on the banker’s property. The first few years of confinement are difficult for the young man, but he eventually learns six languages, studies literature, history, philosophy, theology, and the sciences.
When the time comes for the lawyer to be released, the banker realizes that paying off the bet would bankrupt him, so he decides to kill his prisoner, but right before he does, he finds a note from him.
“For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life,” the lawyer writes. “It is true I have not seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk fragrant wine, I have sung songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forests, have loved women.… Your books have given me wisdom.”
If the story were to end here, we’d have the neat epiphany that being alone—by choice or by force—makes us wiser, stronger, better. However, the story does not end here.
“And I despise your books,” the lawyer adds, “I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a
mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immoral geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.”
A few hours before he is to be paid, the lawyer leaves his jail, losing the bet, not on his jailer’s terms but on his own.
Though “The Bet” reads like an allegory or fable—the original title was “The Fairy Tale”—the story resists any easy conclusions about either life imprisonment or the death penalty. The circumstances of the lawyer’s imprisonment are lavish compared to those of most prisoners. He eats well, drinks wine, plays the piano, and has access to an unlimited number of books. He can also leave whenever he likes.
The point of the story, though, doesn’t seem to be the usual trope that your mind can be free even while your body is confined, the so-called “freest person on the cellblock” scenario. Freedom, like death, Chekhov appears to be telling us, can be defined in different ways. But as long as we are alive, freedom is possible. Still, the story is very singularly focused, down to the regretful reminiscing from the banker. There are no subplots or any other distracting events. The conflict, crisis, and resolution involve the same people. The banker’s single focus, and ours too, is the young lawyer’s choice.
There are few published accounts written by people who have been on death row. One of the most prolific chroniclers of that experience is Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia is a Philadelphia journalist and radio commentator who spent nearly thirty years on death row.
In 1981, Mumia’s brother, William Cook, was stopped by police officer Daniel Faulkner in the streets of Philadelphia. Mumia arrived on the scene and was wounded by a bullet from Officer Faulkner’s gun. Officer Faulkner was fatally shot. Mumia maintains his innocence, citing the presence of another shooter who fled from the scene. Officer Faulkner’s family and the Fraternal Order of Police maintain that Mumia killed Officer Faulkner.