The air is thick with ghosts. I write this blog post two days into a four day trip to Minnesota in light of my grandmother's death. I sit amongst a patchwork quilt of who she was. I grasp for a defined identity of my grandma who I knew mostly through letters and phone calls and a handful of trips over the years for weddings and graduations. I've spent the last couple of days telling and hearing stories, rummaging through old photographs and letters spanning 90 years of life, sorting through her sewing room and running my hands over the literal quilts she made during her life. I've met old neighbors and friends, seen the wild teenaged Gertrude in pictures taken at the beach in scandalous swimsuits, lips locked with the love of her life, my grandfather. Over the last few days I have discovered piece by piece, the fragmented history of Gertrude Dorle Foley.
It's been an exhausting mix of choked down tears and rich belly laughs as my family tries to piece together the celebration of her life and tell the story of 90 years in moments, ignoring chronology, as we lower her body into her earthly resting place, grave site #124.
one. two. four. it's missing the expected three, but the incomplete pattern mirrors the jumble of memories that make up a life.
The structure of Beloved echos life and identity and the quest to define. We are fragments. Lives are stories seldom told in order, questions unasked and answer-less, photographs and soundbites and a whole lot more that we can't understand. We live in the present, past and future. We are fragmented stories told with many voices. We are patchwork quilts, like the ones my grandma stitched, like the one on Baby Suggs' bed.
Morrison tries to answer the same question as this blog is asking,wondering about identity, wondering essentially: How do people change after an adventure and are forced to return "home" or to the life they previously held?How do they cope with this transformation? How do they keep their eyes on the hopeful horizon and move on? Morrison tries to find a way to reconcile past with present, tries to find hope for the future. The "adventures" her characters go on are simply their lives, with defined moments of change the days freedom comes and the day it's taken a way.
Truly, what I have been searching for is an answer to identity during a change, a clear definition when granted the power to take a hold of who you are but are haunted by the ghosts of the past. I've been trying to learn how to accept that it will never be definite and go on adding patches to life's quilt. I've been trying to learn how to stop clutching onto my ghosts. without forgetting.
I started reading Beloved on the one-year anniversary of leaving for HMI. I have compared the community there and my memories of my semester to ghosts in previous posts and started out this novel clutching tightly to the past, just like Sethe, which is an admittedly unhealthy way to live life.
I think half of grief is guilt, and most of our ties to the past come from refusing forgiveness. What did we do? What didn't we say? Did we fight for our past while it was still our present? Sethe's regret and refusal of forgiveness ties her to Beloved. Fear of loving something more than her "best thing" keeps her in the past.
But, something cuts her loose. Something lets her look forward and let go. Stated in the wording of my question: something allows her to to keep her eyes on the hopeful horizon and move on. I Beloved it's the tangible community, and the love and forgiveness that represents. It's all of those things that sound corny when put into words, that allows Sethe to hope for something better than her best. In anyone else's life I think the hope comes from essentially the same place: others.
Denver is the amazing heroin of this novel. That step off the porch and into something new is brave because it's her letting go, moving on, leaving behind a love that has been tainted by obsession. She picks up the fragments of her life and strives to add more, finding another love, the true love she feels for her mother and the love of Baby Suggs, to help her walk on.
My favorite quotation from Beloved is spoken by Amy: "anything dead coming back to life hurts"(page 35). It hurts to move on, it hurts to let go, but hope is a whole lot better than haunting and so we do. We take that step off the porch. We fly. We surrender to life. That's why the ending of the novel holds so much hope, because Sethe, Denver, Paul D., Stamp, the whole town, allows for the possibility of creating a new "best thing".
I don't know if I am ready to do this with HMI, or if there is something that has the power to pull me into the future. There are moments where I am reminded of how real, how full that semester was, when I am reminded that these people I am missing are not just ghosts, they are real. HMI wasn't a dream, and I have not necessarily returned to the "real" world, because life used to have that texture and scent of reality.
To end with one of my grandmother's sayings, one must have roots and wings. Beloved teaches that we all have pasts, but that it is how we deal with the past that creates our identity, that let's us be whole. We are trees with roots, we are backs with scares, but we can fly. I want to learn to fly.
