Sethe a slave to her past
... After the Emancipation Proclamation and after the Civil War, Sethe, the mother who murdered her child to protect her baby from a lifetime of slavery, has yet to know the true meaning of freedom. ... Morrisonís intense metaphorical writing serves as a constant reminder of Setheís infinitely enslaved life, bound to her guilt, her past and her horrifically haunting memories. ... When Sethe arrives in Cincinnati after escaping from sweet home she is reunited with her children, this reunion is bound by a vivid image of nursing, she enclosed her left nipple with the two fingers of her right had and the child opened her mouth. ... Sethe relives the torture of having her milk stolen from the boys at Sweet Home because, in a similar way to how her mother was deprived, the inhumanity of slavery robbed her of the only pleasure a slave woman is given, the gift of nurturing her child. ... The chokecherry treeî shaped scar on Sethes back, for example, is a reminder of the deep sorrow of her past. ... It creates an image of life, a blossoming tree in springtime, but Sethe cannot feel it because her back skin has been dead for yearsî(18). ... Stanley Crouch argues that Morrison cant resist the temptation of the trite and the sentimentalî when he refers to the scene in which Sethe receives her tree shaped scar. ... She began noticing color when she was a free woman and Sethe believes that this is because she never had time to see it, let alone enjoy it beforeî (201). Why then had Sethe not enjoyed or at least noticed the color of things during her time as a free woman in Cincinnati? There had only been two colors that were of any relevance to Sethe when she was enslaved on Sweet Home, and those were black and white, the two colors that dictated her entire life.