“Ten minutes for seven letters. With another ten could she have gotten
“Dearly” too? She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it
might have been possible–that for twenty minutes, a half hour, say, she could
have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral
(and all there was to say, surely) engraved on her baby’s headstone: Dearly
Beloved. But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered. She
thought it would be enough, rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his
young son looking on, the anger in his face so old; the appetite in it quite
new. That should certainly be enough. Enough to answer one more preacher, one
more abolitionist and a town full of disgust.
Counting on the stillness of her own soul, she had forgotten the other
one: the soul of her baby girl. Who would have thought that a little old baby
could harbor so much rage? Rutting among the stones under the eyes of the
engraver’s son was not enough. Not only did she have to live out her years in a
house palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut, but those ten
minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star
chips, her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive,
more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil.”
This passage says a lot about memory. It talks about her very little memory that she remembers of her last baby, called Beloved. This memory was good and bad,it was good because she got to say her goodbyes and carve her stone headstone with her words and bad because she had to say goodbye. In this memory Sethe is fulfilling her yearning of her daughter by remembering the little time she had with her. Most of the time Sethe is thinking about all her memories with her children, which shows how she cared for about them more than herself and would do anything for them. For Sethe, everything that is going on in the present is a struggle because of her past and how her memories keep reliving.
“You lucky. You got three left.Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don’t you? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody’s house into evil.” Baby Suggs rubbed her eyebrows.” In these sentences, it shows how their memory is the only thing they have left of most of their children, but for Baby Suggs, all 8 of them, which is why memory is so important to them.
“You forgetting how little it is,” said her mother. “She wasn’t even two
years old when she died. Too little to understand. Too little to talk much
even.” – this passage helps me understand that the memory seems very clear to Sethe as if her baby is still in the house living with them. Also, how she misses her baby so much and is angry so she keep the memory there to comfort her.
I like this passage that you chose to represent memory, but in my opinion I would like to disagree with some of the points you made here. For starters, this passage is not Sethe remembering the little time she had with her daughter. It is more grieving than anything else, and I don’t think it is a positive memory for her, on the contrary. In my opinion, this passage is more of Sethe letting out her anger for the things she can’t control, like only having one word carved on the headstone of her baby. Secondly, you stated that it was both a good memory and a bad one because she got to say goodbye to her baby. If you were to argue this statement, it would have been more helpful if you would had added more supporting points that would help the reader of this blog post. For me, I don’t see how this memory could have been good and bad at the same time, unless I would see it from your point of view when you were writing, or interpreting this passage. For your other two quotes, I think these two are very good for the argument that you are presenting, in that the memory of their babies are important to Baby Suggs and Sethe. Another thing I would like to add is that, in my opinion, reminiscing her past is not something that Sethe enjoys, but that it is something painful for her.
An important thing to notice from this quotation is the author’s emphasis on the poverty level that the slaves lived. It’s safe to assume that Sethe did not have anything of value to trade for the engraving, forcing her to use her body as a means for her goal. Her memory of the event left her with doubt but not because she feels shame, she wonders if spending a few more intimate minutes with the engraver would have allowed her to request a few more words to be engraved on her baby’s tombstone.