Motherly Instincts - Close Reading #2 by Gennesis Ayala

“The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful magical best thing— the part of her that was clean...whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter.” -Beloved, page 296

In the quote above, Sethe lets us see what she was thinking when the Schoolteacher came for her and her children. Sethe is telling us that anything can happen to her, but she won’t let anyone take her children. Her children are the only part of her that is “clean,” meaning that her children have not yet experienced what she experienced as a slave and woman. Sethe mostly addresses her daughter and says that as long as the white men let her daughter go after they assaulted her, then she would work at a slaughterhouse yard, but her daughter will not.

Sethe is mostly addressing her daughter, Beloved, in this passage. This is because Sethe knows that as a female, Beloved will have the worst experience of all. Sethe is a woman herself and knows by first hand what it is like to be a slave and a woman at Sweet Home. She knows that if her daughter is taken, Beloved will no longer be “clean” and the “whites might dirty her” like they did to Sethe. This shows that during the time when the Schoolteacher came, Sethe wasn’t scared for herself, she let her motherly instincts take over and was sacred for the lives of her children, but mainly her daughter. Sethe’s main concern was her daughter and this is because female slaves were treated a lot worse than male slaves. Sethe constantly has flashbacks where she describes the terrible conditions and events she has to face everyday while she lived in Sweet Home. She didn’t want her daughter to experience that, so instead Sethe decided that her daughter was better off dead, and so were the rest of her children. Although I disagree with her horrifying decision to kill her daughter, I can see where Sethe was coming from. If she didn’t harm her daughter, someone else was going to harm her in a worse way.