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Biblical trees, biblical deliverance: literary landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison
African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Glenda B. Weathers
The tree serves once again as a multivalent symbol when Paul D reflects on his years at Sweet Home as he, all alone, engages in a mock Eucharist on the porch of a dry goods shop used as a church. From a bottle of liquor that he has stashed in his coat pocket, he drinks beneath the cross of a white-oak tree, and questions his own manhood. Recalling manhood as bestowed on him by a white man, that is, by Mr. Garner, who had called his male slaves "men," Paul D wonders if the simple act of naming him a "man" had made it so. Conversely, did Garner have the ability to "wake up one morning" and take "the [defining] word" away? (221) Like Adam naming the animals, did Garner make Paul D a man by simply calling him one, and did schoolteacher, who replaced Garner as chief gardener, a perverse god, make him less than a man when he called him a brute?
As he meditates on Sweet Home with its trees and garden images, Paul D recalls the wonderfully sheltering tree that he had called Brother, but he recognizes as well that he and the other slaves at Sweet Home have been "isolated in a wonderful lie"--that so many of these trees he remembers provided limbs and switches for whipping and gallows for lynching. He recalls as well, in an ironic perversion of the biblical Eden, the ambiguity, the treachery of sensory perceptions. Indeed, the serpent image in his story comes in the form of the snake-rattling noise that a slave redeemer would make, someone appointed to signify to other slaves with her rattling noise that it is time to leave "the garden" and escape from the bloody side of the Ohio River to a promised land on the other side--a geographic redemption. Instructed to "follow the tree flowers" north to freedom, Paul D finally finds his way to 124 Bluestone Road. But it is Paul D's Eucharist on the steps of the Church of the Holy Redeemer that marks his moment of knowing. Knowledge constitutes the recognition that the garden is a lie, that slavery is a horror, and that his manhood was "clipped" when first his gun and then his thoughts were taken away by schoolteacher.
Thus, the themes of innocence and knowledge, the images of Eden and the Promised Land provide an extended--albeit subtle--extended metaphoric background to both male and female characters in Beloved. The symbolic props of the Promised Land and Garden landscapes help the black protagonists preserve and bring to conscious awareness the painful reality of destructive forces. At the same time, however, these same tree images, alluding as they do to the fall, to both Christian and secular redemption, and to the power of words to create and destroy, allow the characters to exploit the power of symbol to reconstruct themselves. Indeed, the integrity of selfhood seems to require an "I am"--a realization of the Logos. Paul D, in fact, intuitively understands the power of words for creating and restoring. Recalling how Sethe had respected his manhood, Paul D, looking at the woman before him--Sethe depleted, her breasts "exhausted," her body beneath the "carnival" colored patchwork quilt--wants to put "his story next to hers." Christ-like, Paul D touches Sethe's face, and supplants the great "I am" with a logos reality especially for her: "You your best thing, Sethe. You are" (273, emphasis added).
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