“The Last of the Sweet Home Men”

In some respects, Beloved is a novel that’s ambivalent about freedom: the plantation Sethe escaped from is known as “Sweet Home,” and although Paul D remarks succinctly that “it wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home” (16), it does serve a quasi-nostalgic role in the novel, as its name suggests. As Sethe says, “But it’s where we were. . . . All together. Comes back whether you want it to or not” (16). Its bucolic setting strikes a sharp contrast with the grey, lonely house she now occupies on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Sweet Home is a painfully, tragically, ironically beautiful location, and this beauty makes the “rememory” of it a complicated experience for Sethe, whose life in “freedom” at 124 Bluestone Road, after the first ecstatic twenty-eight days, has been dull, isolated, lonely, and haunted. “Although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her—remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. . . . [S]he could not forgive her memory for that” (7). In this novel, memory is an involuntary, almost external force that Sethe must endure. And the fact is, the place she calls “hell,” where her milk was stolen and her back disfigured, which she risked everything to escape from, also represents the last time she was part of an intact family, a small and intimate community. She hasn’t seen her husband since she left, and she’s lost three of her children suddenly and without warning—across the river in “free” Ohio.

Paul D is equally ambivalent about Sweet Home—both a tortured, traumatic memory and something he looks back to with fondness. He remembers a particular tree, under which he and Sixo and Halle and the other Pauls would gather for lunch, and he’s named the tree “Brother.” It’s this tree that he tries to steal one final parting glimpse of before he’s led away in chains, sold to a guy named Brandywine by Schoolteacher after the failed escape attempt (125). Paul D has endured his own novel-worthy odyssey of suffering and wandering in the eighteen years since he and Sethe last saw each other, and in contrast to the chain gang in Alfred, Georgia, sitting in Brother’s shade eating Sixo’s “night-cooked potatoes” (25) looks pretty good.

It’s not just the physical beauty of the place that makes Sweet Home such an ambivalent memory for Sethe and Paul D. They are fully aware that their experience of slavery was not typical. Paul D and the others were known as “Sweet Home Men”: “He grew up thinking that, of all the Blacks in Kentucky, only the five of them were men” (147). Garner, the owner of the plantation and the men and women who worked on it, prided himself on his “progressive” slaveholding ways. He would boast, in language that is blissfully unaware of its own internal contradictions, that “my [N-words] is men every one of em. Bought em thataway, raised em thataway. Men every one” (12).

Garner deploying the slavemaster’s favorite dehumanizing epithet while proudly celebrating his slaves’ “manhood” creates dizzying cognitive dissonance, but this contradiction lies at the heart of Sethe and Paul D’s conflicted memories of their past. Garner allows his slaves a remarkable degree of freedom on the plantation, and he seems to view this as an enlightened form of government—he can “trust” his slaves around his wife, for example, because he hasn’t treated them like animals. He allows Halle to undertake the breathtakingly loving project of buying his mother’s freedom after “five years of Sundays,” by renting himself out as a laborer on a neighboring farm. He doesn't “stud” his male slaves, with his own female slaves or those on neighboring plantations. Sethe is allowed to choose her husband from among the five Sweet Home Men, and Halle’s dedication to buying his mother’s freedom has something to do with why she chose him: “A twenty-year-old man so in love with his mother he gave up five years of Sabbaths just to see her sit down for a change was a serious recommendation” (13). Sethe and Halle are allowed to get “married”—in an unofficial capacity, of course, with no legal standing, no formal ceremony, no fancy wedding dress. Baby Suggs points out how lucky Sethe is that all of her children are fathered by the same man; such a quasi-familial arrangement was not unheard of in the slavery era, but it was rare. Sethe has no personal experience with rape or corporal punishment at Sweet Home until Schoolmaster arrives and “his boys” steal her milk.

Paul D and Halle have been conditioned to see themselves as “men,” with a rare degree of self-sufficiency and independence. The men on Garner’s plantation were “encouraged to correct . . . even defy him. To invent ways of doing things; to see what was needed and attack it without permission. To buy a mother, choose a horse or wife, handle guns, even learn reading if they wanted to” (147). Literacy in particular was heavily policed among slave populations; a slave who could read would have a much wider range of escape options. But the training in the use of guns is maybe the most remarkable of all—an armed insurrection would have been possible, but we get the impression that Garner made life bearable enough that no one thought to rebel.

So why does Morrison set her novel in such a relatively progressive slavery context? Why not depict the most horrific, tortuous, repressive plantation imaginable?

Slavery operated by systematically degrading the slaves’ manhood and womanhood, conditioning them to accept their lot in life as inevitable. Literacy and access to arms, the ability to choose one’s mate, to raise a family are all constitutive of basic personhood or humanity, and this is what slavery categorically denied. But Morrison’s post-Emancipation former slaves were all conditioned to think of themselves as men and women, to see their participation in the plantation economy as something almost voluntary, in which they were personally invested.

We see how insidious the Garners’ “progressivism” is once Mr. Garner dies, and Mrs. Garner brings in schoolteacher and “his boys” to maintain order on the plantation. Schoolteacher is a “breaker”—his expertise lies in the ability to undo the “damage” done by Garner’s liberal policies, to “break” these slaves’ illusions of their own humanity. The central traumatic vignette of the Sweet Home portion of the novel—Sethe on the floor of the barn, being sexually assaulted by schoolteacher’s mossy-teethed “boys” while he looks on and takes notes in his book with ink Sethe made herself, with Halle stuck in the loft and forced to witness her rape, powerless to do anything to stop it, and later Paul D with the bit in his mouth seeing Halle by the butter churn and feeling mocked by Mister the rooster—entails the three principal characters all learning how limited Garner’s “manhood” actually is. Paul D thinks to himself, over a distance of years, “Was that it? Is that where manhood lay? In the naming done by a whiteman who was supposed to know?” (147). In other words, were they “men” at Sweet Home only because of Garner’s say-so? Or is manhood something more fundamental, an inalienable right? Paul remains pretty positive in his assessment of their relations with Garner: “In their relationship with Garner was true metal: they were believed and trusted, but most of all they were listened to” (147).

But when Paul stands there with the bit in his mouth, about to be sold to a man named Brandywine whom he will soon after try to kill (that manhood and self-assertion flaring up again; he hasn’t been completely “broken”), he learns the profound limitations of what Garner has “granted” them. “[T]hey were only Sweet Home men at Sweet Home. One step off that ground and they were trespassers among the human race” (147-48). Garner’s “enlightened” policies are only in effect as long as Garner is alive. Mrs. Garner will sell one of them if she has to, although she feels badly about it. And once schoolteacher arrives on the scene, at her invitation, Sweet Home becomes an entirely different place.

In these pivotal moments—Halle in the loft, Paul D with the bit in his mouth—they both discover that their manhood only exists in so far as it is recognized by the man in power. Even to Garner, they are paradoxically both “men” and “[N-words].” For schoolteacher, only the latter category applies. For Paul, it’s not just the painful indignity of the bit in his mouth, which immobilizes him and reduces him to the state of a speechless animal, who can’t even speak to Halle, crouching at the butter churn nearby—illustrating powerfully that he’s been chattel all along. It’s the roosters: “Walking past the roosters looking at them look at me” (85). Especially the rooster with the painfully ironic name “Mister,” who seems to smile at Paul D, to flaunt his own comparative freedom over this man with the bit in his mouth: “Mister, he looked so . . . free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. . . . Mister was allowed to stay and be what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to stay and be what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead” (86).

We can only surmise that a similar realization—of the profound limits of his freedom, his ability to be a man—is what “breaks” Halle after witnessing his wife treated like a barnyard animal by the “boys.” By “stealing” her milk—the milk intended for her children, now on their way to Ohio—schoolteacher and the boys reduce Sethe to the condition of livestock (we can read Halle’s gravitation toward the butter as an indirect comment on this). They steal her womanhood, just as they steal Paul D’s manhood. For Halle, husband and father, there is no way to act like a husband and father should act in this situation. He can’t stop what’s happening before his eyes, without compromising their escape plan and getting himself and Sethe whipped, sold, separated permanently. He’s confronting the limits of his manhood under slavery, and it breaks him. “Breaking,” once again, is schoolteacher’s stock in trade; he makes it plain to the Sweet Home Men that they are not men anymore.

They feel this as a loss precisely because Garner has conditioned them to think of themselves otherwise. But in fact, their personhood only existed at his whim. This is slavery at its essence.