In a novel about racism and slavery, you can't pay too much attention to the question of color. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, however, the question of color is not limited to discussions of race. Blood, ribbons and even roosters, all in bright colors, characterize the novel's setting and provide valuable information on the important themes of both dehumanization and the struggle for freedom. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Sethe, the novel's protagonist, inhabits a world defined entirely in black and white. The racial dichotomy created by slavery, combined with the traumatic associations of events caused by slavery, erased all color from his world. Sethe's inability to see colors gradually manifests itself after she kills her son in a desperate attempt to save him from a life of slavery: every day she worked with fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook prepared soup, meat and everything else. rest. And he couldn't remember seeing a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn he saw the dawn, but he never recognized or noticed its color. There was something wrong with this. It was as if one day he saw the red blood of the child, another day the pink splinters of the tombstone, and that was the last (47). Sethe's indifference to color is explained by the lack of freedom Sethe has experienced in her life. He has a touch of color, the menacing red that will continually reappear throughout the novel, when he runs away to reach Denver. Amy, the "white woman" who witnesses Denver's birth, is traveling to Boston to search for velvet. “Carmine,” he says, referring to the deep blood red. “It means red, but when you talk about velvet you have to say 'carmine.'” (41). This red is revisited after Sethe's murder of her daughter approximately twenty-eight days later. After her death, Sethe is imprisoned for two years, further limiting her freedom. Sethe believes that Baby Suggs, her mother-in-law, has begun to contemplate color because of Baby's newfound freedom. Sethe states that, "[n]ow I know why Baby Suggs pondered the color of her later years. She never had time to see it, let alone enjoy it before" (237). Sethe's mental connection between color and freedom makes an interesting point. After her release from prison, Sethe is no longer a slave in the technical sense of being someone else's property. However, her continued inability to see colors proves that in her mind, Sethe is still a slave. This sense of continuous connection is due to his past. She feels guilt-ridden because of Beloved's murder, but it is not the act of murder itself that bothers her. It's the idea that Beloved, as a child, couldn't understand the reasons for her death. When Beloved appears in human form, Sethe does not immediately recognize her. Eventually the reappearance is recognized for what it is, and at this point, Sethe "begged for forgiveness, counting, listing her reasons over and over: that the Beloved was more important, meant more to her than her own life" ( 285). This sort of ongoing servitude and submission continues the slavery of Sethe's life and prohibits her from experiencing any color except those that define her: black and white. Baby Suggs' relationship with color isn't as simple as Sethe thinks it is. It's true that he began to think about color after gaining freedom, but the matter is a little more complex. In a conversation with Stamp Paid, Baby Suggs explains her obsession with color. She begins: "What I have to do is get into bed and lie down. I want to fixate on something harmless in this world." "What kind of world are you in?talking? There's nothing harmless down here." "Yes, it is." . Blue. This doesn't hurt anyone. Not even yellow." "Do you go to bed thinking about detective stories?" “I like yellow” (211). Until Beloved's murder, it would have been relatively easy to spot Baby Suggs' favorite color as the black skin of his fellow slaves. During a spiritual meeting in the woods, Baby Suggs reinforces the dominant dichotomies of the slave population: blacks against whites, oppressed against oppressors. He screams of white contempt for the skin color of slavery when he reminds the listening slaves that "in this place here, we flesh; flesh crying, laughing; flesh dancing barefoot in the grass. Love it. Love it intensely. Over there they don't love your flesh, they despise it" (103). Suggs's color spectrum, before Beloved's death, is made up of only two: black, with which she fully identifies, and white, which she embodies. oppression, hatred and arrogance enter Baby Suggs' life when he realizes that he cannot agree with either black thinking, represented by Sethe, or white thinking , like that of the teacher, when he comes to a conclusion about the circumstances surrounding Beloved's death. Stamp Paid makes this observation: The heart that poured out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, they didn't matter he could neither approve nor condemn Sethe's harsh choice. One or the other could have saved her, but beaten by the demands of both, she went to bed. The whites had finally tired her out (212). After a lifetime of knowingly being all black and no white, Suggs begins to realize that there are indeed shades of meaning that may not fit into such a two-tone system. In realizing this, he must also realize the relative severity of reactions to white and black: a white man can whip a black man's back until he bleeds, precisely because of the color, and Sethe, his black daughter-in-law, kills Beloved at the sight of a white man for fear of continued slavery for the child. In response to this, Suggs chooses to spend the rest of his life focusing on the most harmless colors, the ones that no one has ever been killed or whipped on. "It took her a long time to get to blue, then yellow, then green. She was well into pink when she died. I don't think she wanted to get to red..." (237). The color red takes on a special meaning in this novel. It is obviously associated with blood, but as Morrison has tried to point out throughout the novel, color is rarely as simple and unambiguous as it may seem. The character of the Beloved is often associated with this meaning of the color red. She is the murdered one, whose blood caused Sethe's "red, wet hands" and the "red puddle" into which Baby Suggs slips (178-9). But when combined with Stamp Paid's red ribbon and Paul D.'s experience with the color red—the Mister rooster's comb and his red heart that he initially doubts exists—the reader may come to recognize the use of red. coloring not as a direct analogy to blood, but more as an exclamation point to emphasize powerful dehumanizing moments in the text. Stamp Paid's ribbon is a perfect example of this emphasizing convention: Tying his flatbed on the bank of the Licking River, securing it as best he could, he spied something red at the bottom. Taking it, he thought it was a cardinal feather attached to his boat. He pulled and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a lock of wet woolly hair, still attached to the small piece of scalp (212). This image is particularly powerful: a red ribbon, or perhaps a pale ribbon dyed red with blood, attached to a piece of human scalp that was once.