"forced to scoop up the corpses… they used pikes and nets’’
In the second chapter, the narrator presents the "tragedy’’ that struck D’Ortega, the man who owed Jacob a large sum of money. The description of the incident reveals how many slaves died while the ship anchored in harbor. To get rid of the bodies, the sailors threw them into the water but then were later fined for doing it and were forced to gather the bodies from the water. Through this description, D'Ortgea focuses only on the "problems’’ the white men had while trying to deal with the dead bodies of the slaves. This shows just how the slaves were perceived and how little their lives mattered to their masters who saw them only as a commodity to buy and sell, not human beings. It is inhumanity, cruelty, and evil on the most extravagant scale.
"To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal.''
The last chapter illustrates how slaves were treated by their masters. The slaves who worked under Rebekka were treated relatively well (until Jacob died) and were allowed to sleep in the house and were given food and warm clothes to wear. However, other slaves, specifically Florens' mother, endured a different experience. Florens' mother was gang-raped and ultimately became pregnant with Florens. As Florens started to go through puberty her mother noticed that D'Ortega was beginning to look at the young girl in a way similar to how he looked at her. The mother knew that as Florens matured, sexual violence perpetrated by D' Ortega and/or other men would be inevitable. Knowing that keeping Florens where she was would subject her daughter to the same abuse she had endured, Florens' mother made the grueling choice to give her daughter up to protect her. The quote illustrates the constant abuse enslaved women were subjected to and how there is no escape from it.
The claws scratch and scratch until the hammer is in my hand.
When the Blacksmith rejects Florens, she begs him to stay with her, but he pushes her away and condemns the "wilderness" in her soul. Enraged, Florens picks up a hammer and attacks the man, most likely killing him. Her rage is unadulterated by any sense of moral compunction; she is pure id. Critic Amanda Putnam explains how this ferocious violence stems from Florens' maternal loss and concomitant stunted adolescence, writing that Florens and other characters from Morrison's ouevre are "all flawed but also all attempting to manage situations far beyond their control, [and] choose violence. In doing so, they transform from powerless subordinates into dominating forces, even though that transformation often has multidimensional repercussions for them and those with whom they have chosen to be violent." Florens' violence is not sanctionable by any traditional moral standard, but Morrison suggests slavery's abuses are so beyond the pale that what is "right and wrong" is indelibly warped and ambiguous.
In short, 1682 and Virginia was still a mess. Who could keep up with the pitched battles for God, king and land?
This quote sums up the tempestuous nature of life in the early colonial era—everyone was trying to stake out a place for themselves, claiming that their particular religious or political affiliation gave them a right to land and/or power. It was a time when order was slow to prevail, when boundaries were still in flux. For someone like Jacob it was a time of immense promise and possibility, though people who were not men, white, Christian, or property owners often found themselves as collateral damage.
And realized, not for the first time, that only things, not bloodlines or character, separated them.
In this line Morrison aptly reveals what attracted so many people to the New World—that pedigree, inheritance, lineage only went so far and that anyone* could, with the right opportunity and connections and ambition, lift themselves above their current social station. There is nothing inherently better about a rich man, Jacob realizes, and that is an exciting thought.
*The "anyone" is a white man, usually Christian.
...when he decided to kill the trees and replace them with a profane monument to himself, he was cheerful every waking moment.
Lina notes Jacob's egregious destruction of the landscape to build his new—and excessively large—home, which foreshadows Jacob's fate: Jacob takes the lives of the trees for no reason, and then he too is senselessly cut down by the pox. Jacob is not an evil man, and surely such a fate befalling D'Ortega would be satisfying, but Morrison is punishing him for his materialism and his willingness to compromise his convictions for a bump in social station.
...three unmastered women and an infant out here, alone, belonging to no one, became wild game for anyone.
In this simple but stark quote, Morrison lays bare the particular vulnerabilities of being a woman and especially of being a poor or non-white woman. With Jacob gone and the potential of Rebekka being gone as well, Lina, Florens, and Sorrow are adrift, opened up to the potential of violence and displacement. The entrenched social hierarchy of the colonial era meant that women needed to belong to someone and that women of color were supposed to be in some sort of thrall to a white person. Thus, these three women and Florens' child have no one and nothing, their fates tied to something that has now vanished.
...she was deeply grateful for every shred of affection...
Florens' abandonment by her mother (regardless of the reason why it happened) inexorably shapes the young woman. She is left craving affection from whomever will bestow it upon her, and feeling intense resentment towards anyone that might take that affection away from her. Her fate is almost obvious—she will fall obsessively in love with someone (the Blacksmith) and will rage when another takes her place (Malaik). Morrison lays the blame for this squarely on the system of slavery, not Florens, her mother, or even the Blacksmith.
In those dreams she is always wanting to tell me something. Is stretching her eyes. Is working her mouth.
Florens often dreams of her mother and the message her mother wants to share with her but never can. The words are smothered by silence, kept from reaching the daughter's ears and providing the answers Florens longs for. Florens will never know why her mother let her go with Sir–to protect her from D'Ortega's sexual advances—and will instead bear the misinterpretation of that goodbye with her until the end of her days. Morrison suggests the system of slavery precludes all closure, all understanding; messages will never make it to those they are meant to reach.
No hate is there or scare or disgust but they are looking at me my body across distances without recognition.
In this exquisitely uncomfortable and demeaning scene, Florens is inspected on suspicion of being one of the Devil's minions. And while it might seem like it is a good thing that the townspeople do not look on her with fear or disgust, it is perhaps just as, if not more, troubling the way they do look at her—as if she is barely a human being, as if she were something totally foreign, alien, other. She is a specimen to be analyzed; it is made clear that she could not be further from the people who are looking at her. This scene reveals the increasing separation along racial lines that was buffeted by the claim that Black people were barely human.
