Communicating Through Numbers in Toni Morrisons Beloved...

Communicating Through Numbers in Beloved Humanity uses numbers as a way to communicate beyond words, evoking ideas more readily than words alone are able to. All religions and cultures have significant numbers that communicate an essence or idea more quickly and completely than words can. It is in this manner that Toni Morrison uses numbers in Beloved. Significant numbers occur starting with the first symbols of the text and the words on the pages before the body of the text starts. 124. The first thing to appear, and we already have a significant number. Sethe has four children. The third one is dead. Numbers 1, 2, and 4 remain. Another number that stands alone in its significance is twenty-eight. Twenty-eight†¦show more content†¦Rather than tell Sethe with words that trying to kill her children was inhuman, Paul D uses numbers: You got two feet, Sethe, not four (165). There are thirty women that arrive to remove Beloved. Thirty is a symbol of justice and order, according to Marianne Schimmel. When schoolteacher arrives with his party, they are described as the four horsemen (148). In fact, the only time a number occurs by itself as a sentence is to describe them: All the while it was coming down the road. Four. Riding close together, bunched-up like, and righteous (157). Each of these is a powerful symbol, though none of these numbers recur in the text, at least not with these meanings. Two is duality, a pair, a division. It is also a unity, two halves of the same whole. Sex is expressed in many cultures as a duality, the yin and yang, father sky and mother earth. In Beloved, twos, fours, and even twenties occur in situations related to sex and children. Baby Suggs has eight children (209), four girls, four boys. Sethe has four. Two boys, two girls. 124 has two stories, and Sethe and Paul D have sex on the second floor. At Mrs. Garners wedding, they ate four sheep (59). From the two buckets of blackberries he picked, Stamp Paid put two into the mouth of four week old Denver (170). At Baby Suggs revival, after talking about your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, the crowd sings in four-part harmony (89). Such a performance