Coloring Book

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is an amalgamation of topics that beg to be discussed; race as color is particularly important throughout the first half of the novel. Beloved cues readers into this theme via subconscious reasoning: the many examples of color vivify both the language of the novel and the issues of a social hierarchy dependent on race which need to be addressed.

There hardly exists a page of Beloved without some wild splash of color. From the very first page (“the gray and white house on Bluestone Road” (3)) to nearly half way through the novel (the mud flood described as “dark brown slime” (110)), Morrison’s language exhibits a direct correlation of race and color.

The literally “marked” category of coloredwoman (her whipping scars) comes in direct contrast with ethereal woman-in-white and Beloved-as-character (“a white dress knelt down next to her mother and had its sleeve around her mother’s waist” (29)). Different dresses throughout the novel also embody color in their varying degrees of cleanliness (ie: milk-stained mother-dress, bedding dress, etc), in which their relative darkness from dirt is implied.

Light is explored in a manner far more creative and complicated than “light and dark”, however. Two stunning and perhaps outrageous examples are that of baby Beloved’s pulsing red light (from the first time we encounter Paul D, the “hazelnut” man on page 9) and Denver’s “green closet” (37), a lively bush-built hideaway. These two powerful centers of safety for Denver are conjured up more than once—in fact they both play a rather prominent part in the understanding of the novel.

Morrison also paints with plants, particularly trees; her many examples of green life evoke interesting imagery and push the back-burner issue of race to the forefront of readers’ minds. Aside from Brother, other (nameless) trees are often mentioned—a few examples include page 109’s yellow poplar and 51’s mulberry tree. “By the time the white petals died,” page 64 examples, “and the mint-colored berry poked out, the leaf shine was gilded tight and waxy.”     

By layering so many colors in to the novel, and so frequently, Morrison brings forward the idea of color in a reader’s mind. Whether or not a reader is fully aware of this, she is processing the concept of color almost constantly throughout Beloved, and in this way, is processing our societal basis of race, which of course is skin color (and not ethnic background). Beloved invites discussion of race both outright (with obvious themes of slavery and inequality) and subtly (with its under-the-surface evocation of race as color) in each turn of the page.