Community exorcism

The Community exorcism is the novel's climactic collective ritual, a moment when the private haunting of 124 Bluestone Road becomes a public reckoning. Thirty neighborhood women, led by the formidable Ella, gather outside the house to drive out the ghost of Sethe's murdered daughter, Beloved, who has taken flesh and is consuming Sethe's life. The event transforms the novel's central conflict from a private haunting into a communal act of resistance, and it culminates in a violent confrontation that shatters the household's isolation and ultimately leads to Beloved's disappearance.

The Gathering and the Women's Motives

The exorcism begins as a response to the news, spread by Janey Wagon among the colored women of Cincinnati, that Sethe's dead daughter has come back to torment her. The story, blown up and agitated over days, claims that the daughter beats Sethe, ties her to the bed, and pulls out all her hair. The women fall into three groups: those who believe the worst, those who believe none of it, and those, like Ella, who think it through. Ella, a practical woman who believes there is a root to chew or avoid for every ailment, is the one who convinces the others that rescue is in order. She is infuriated by the idea of past errors taking possession of the present, and she cannot countenance the possibility of sin moving on in the house, unleashed and sassy. For Ella, who spent her puberty in a house where she was shared by a father and son she called "the lowest yet," the ghost's invasion of the living world is an affront she cannot tolerate. The women bring what they can: some carry roots and charms stuffed in apron pockets, strung around their necks, or lying between their breasts; others bring Christian faith as shield and sword; most bring a little of both. They have no idea what they will do once they get there; they just start out, walking down Bluestone Road and coming together at the agreed-upon time.

The Approach and the Vision of the Past

As the thirty women approach 124, the heat is oppressive, and Cincinnati's stench—from the canal, from hanging meat and things rotting in jars, from small animals dead in the fields, town sewers and factories—has traveled to the country. The stench, the heat, the moisture seem to signal the devil's presence. When they catch up with each other and arrive at 124, the first thing they see is not Denver sitting on the steps, but themselves: younger, stronger, even as little girls lying in the grass asleep. They see themselves scooping German potato salad onto plates, oxtail soup simmering, cobbler oozing purple syrup coloring their teeth. They sit on the porch, run down to the creek, tease the men, hoist children on their hips, or straddle the ankles of old men who hold their little hands while giving them a horsey ride. Baby Suggs laughs and skips among them, urging more. Mothers, dead now, move their shoulders to mouth harps. The fence they had leaned on and climbed over is gone; the stump of the butternut has split like a fan. But there they are, young and happy, playing in Baby Suggs' yard, not feeling the envy that surfaced the next day. This vision of the past—of the twenty-eight days of unslaved life, of the feast of blackberries that made them angry—is what the women carry with them as they prepare to confront the present horror.

The Prayer and the Sound

Denver hears mumbling and looks to the left. She stands when she sees them. They group, murmuring and whispering, but do not step foot in the yard. Denver waves; a few wave back but come no closer. A woman drops to her knees; half of the others do likewise. Denver sees lowered heads but cannot hear the lead prayer—only the earnest syllables of agreement that back it: "Yes, yes, yes, oh yes. Hear me. Hear me. Do it, Maker, do it. Yes." Among those not on their knees, who stand holding 124 in a fixed glare, is Ella, trying to see through the walls, behind the door, to what is really in there. She wonders if the dead daughter has truly come back, or if it is a pretend, and whether it is whipping Sethe. Ella has been beaten every way but down; she remembers the bottom teeth she lost to the brake and the scars from the bell that are thick as rope around her waist. She had delivered, but would not nurse, a hairy white thing fathered by "the lowest yet"; it lived five days never making a sound. The idea of that pup coming back to whip her too sets her jaw working, and then Ella hollers. Instantly the kneelers and the standers join her. They stop praying and take a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like.

The Confrontation and Sethe's Attack

Inside 124, Sethe is breaking a lump of ice into chunks when the music enters the window. She drops the ice pick into her apron pocket to scoop the pieces into a basin of water. When the voices grow louder, Beloved, sweating profusely and sprawled on the bed in the keeping room with a salt rock in her hand, sits up, licks the salt, and goes into the bigger room. Sethe and she exchange glances and start toward the window. They see Denver sitting on the steps and, beyond her, the rapt faces of thirty neighborhood women. Sethe opens the door and reaches for Beloved's hand; together they stand in the doorway. For Sethe it is as though the Clearing has come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women search for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that breaks the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they find it, the sound becomes a wave wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It breaks over Sethe and she trembles like the baptized in its wash. The singing women recognize Sethe at once and are surprised by their absence of fear when they see what stands next to her. The devil-child is clever, they think, and beautiful. It has taken the shape of a pregnant woman, naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun, thunderblack and glistening, standing on long straight legs, her belly big and tight, vines of hair twisted all over her head. Then Sethe looks up and sees him: Edward Bodwin, guiding the mare, slowing down, his black hat wide-brimmed enough to hide his face but not his purpose. He is coming into her yard and he is coming for her best thing. She hears wings; little hummingbirds stick needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thinks anything, it is no. No no. Nonono. She flies. The ice pick is not in her hand; it is her hand. Standing alone on the porch, Beloved is smiling, but now her hand is empty. Sethe is running away from her, running into the faces of the people out there, joining them and leaving Beloved behind. Alone. Again. Then Denver, running too, away from her to the pile of people out there. They make a hill, a hill of black people, falling. And above them all, rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the man without skin, looking. He is looking at her.

The Aftermath and the Disappearance

After the attack, the women pull Sethe down to the ground and pry the ice pick out of her hands. Ella, who had clipped Sethe's arm, puts her fist in Sethe's jaw. When they look back to the house, Beloved is gone. Disappeared, some say, exploded right before their eyes. Ella is not so sure: "Maybe," she says, "maybe not. Could be hiding in the trees waiting for another chance." A little boy later puts it out how he had been looking for bait back of 124, down by the stream, and saw, cutting through the woods, a naked woman with fish for hair. The community's stories multiply and diverge, but one point of agreement holds: first they saw it and then they didn't. The exorcism, which began as an act of collective healing, ends with Sethe's near-fatal reenactment of her original trauma, and with the ghost's ambiguous departure. The women's intervention, however, has a lasting effect: it breaks the isolation of 124, and it sets the stage for Denver's emergence into the world and for Paul D's eventual return to Sethe. The house, once full of voices, becomes quiet, and Stamp Paid notes that 124 is "just another weathered house needing repair." The exorcism, in the end, is not a simple victory but a complex act of communal witness that allows the living to begin again.