The Rogue Underground: Hidden Encryption Systems in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

This thesis project investigates the existence and extent of coded language in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. By opening with the phrase “124 was spiteful,” the narrator not only thrusts the reader into a world filled with ambiguity and numerical language but also directs audience attention to what I argue is the novel’s central encryption system. That is, rather than simply operating as the numerical feature of the Suggs family’s Bluestone Road address, 124 or, more precisely, “1-2-4” is a cipher through which Morrison’s reader must pass through to unlock the layered significations of other numerical signs like “Sixo,” “Seven-O,” and the missing three in the 1, 2, (3), 4 number line. By following these figures through what Morrison herself describes as Beloved’s “incredible political world,” the reader observes two distinct narratives take form. One conveys the horrors of American slavery, as recorded in the standard signs of the white slaver (e.g., “Sixo”/6-0/“Sixty Million” black men, women, and children reduced to numbers on ship records and plantation ledgers). The other, written into re-signified nominal and numerical signs representing characters like Sixo and the Thirty-Mile Woman (i.e., black men and women who both re-name and re-numerate themselves), records the stories (and, thereby, archives the histories) of the heroes, heroines, and holy mothers within the black community Morrison foregrounds. By tracking both stories, Morrison’s careful reader sees how the narrator reorients the locus of power over the signification of standard English signs as well as the narrative being told through them in a book dedicated to those within Beloved’s black world; which is to say, Morrison’s beloved black world.