Beloved

8 Pages 1959 Words

tiful trees of Sweet Home mask the realities of the plantation in Sethe’s memory. Sethe recalls that Sweet Home “never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place to. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.” (Morrison 7). All the terribleness of Sweet Home was masked and hidden in groves of trees. The trees looked beautiful enough to possibly even make hell seem pretty. In this way, trees are making the realities of Sweet Home seem nicer for Sethe.
The site of trauma and brutality on Sethe’s back are changed into one of beauty and growth by imagining the scars on Sethe’s back as a “Chokecherry tree.” By calling her scars a tree, they are thought of as something beautiful. The true ugliness and brutality are masked by the charm of a chokecherry tree. Amy Denver, the white girl who helped deliver Sethe’s daughter, first began calling the scars a tree. Amy Denver’s words were taken away when she first saw the ugliness of the scars. It was after a long silence before Amy returned with the words:

It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, heres the trunk-it’s red and split wide open, f...