Trees: A Symbol of Sanctuary and Despair in Beloved

Trees: A Symbol of Sanctuary and Despair

During a period of history when life was filled with racism and hate, blacks turned to anything positive to help them make it through the day. The simplest object could transform into the most significant source of hope and comfort. Trees, for example, could create hope for blacks when there was nothing but loneliness and cruelty. White people on the other hand, associated blacks with the wildness of a jungle. With these two conflicting ideas of trees, Toni Morrison was able to create a historically accurate milieu in Beloved, where blacks saw the image of trees as a place of security and refuge while at the same time, whites manipulated the sanctuary of trees, making it a place that represented pain and suffering.

For Sethe, one of the main characters in the novel, trees offered her protection from the outside world, yet at the same time, her image of them was tainted because her experience with white men. Initially, trees were only a positive symbol with no evil connotations.

Trees provided a place of sanctuary for Sethe. Whenever she thought of trees, she remembered her young boys, Buglar and Howard. She reminisced on how her “boys [hung] from the most beautiful sycamores in the world” (7) and she dreamt of “them sometimes in beautiful trees [with] their little legs barely visible in the leaves” (47). Trees were associated with the joy that her children brought. When she fled slavery, she was a “nineteen-year-old slavegirl… [who] walk[ed] through the woods to get to her children who [were] far away” (91). By walking through trees to reach freedom, Sethe added another positive experience of trees to her memory. Trees were also used later on in the novel to protect her and her children from the outside world. One winter, they were ice-skating on a frozen pond surrounded by oak trees. They were all laughing and falling down but “nobody saw them falling… the live oak and soughing pine on the banks enclosed them and absorbed their laughter” (205). Trees protected them from the hatred of the world and allowed them to do things that whites would not have wanted them to do. It gave them a place to be free from everything. It was a sanctuary that allowed Sethe to be free.

Although Sethe saw trees as a positive, her experience with white men made trees a symbol of evil as well. The chokecherry tree scar on her back is a constant reminder of the pain and humiliation she endured as a slave. The schoolteacher whipped Sethe savagely and created a harrowing symbol of her back that she will never forget. The schoolteacher perverted the sacredness of a simple tree into something evil. As Paul D remarked, it was a “revolting lump of scars. Not a tree as she said” (25). Formerly a comforting image for Sethe, the scar on her back made it a blemish created by white men.

For two other characters in the novel, the same affect