d couldn't think it up...Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing...She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter. And no one, nobody on this earth, would list her daughter's characteristics on the animal side of the paper. No. Oh no." (251) The whole question of how to love in an inhuman system which breeds children like horses results in inhumane choices. This theme, Morrison carries throughout the novel. For women like Ella whose "puberty was spent in a house where she was shared by father and son, whom she called the lowest yet.' It was the lowest yet' who gave her a disgust for sex and against whom she measured all atrocities,"(256) nature mercifully quenches the life from the "white hairy thing," the freakish offspring from this monstrous childhood assault. For Morrison's women, sexuality is the reward and burden of their gender. The unlikelihood that any female slave could survive sexual abuse, lashing, thirst, hunger, and childbirth, yet continue to form milk to suckle is Morrison's comment on Sethe's determination, and a tribute to the countless black women who were victimized by the evil of the white man. That the white man committed evil there is no question. The letters of the past reveal countless lives that were ruined or ended because of racial slavery. Our forefathers had no virtues when it required compassion for African-Americans. One cannot speak of morality in terms of active or passive--there simply was no morality concerning slavery. We as a people today must exist in a country that was handed-down, literally, by hypocrites. For over two hundred years, the leaders of our country eagerly allowed the oppression for which they established the country to escape. How can we as descendants of those people view the past and honestly feel a sense of morality for the country? To deal with our past ...
