Summary
Chapter 5: Florens
The night is chilly and Florens is uncomfortable. She thinks of Lina’s spirits and her own unwillingness to speak to the Virgin considering what she is asking for is “not to her liking” (68). She thinks of the Blacksmith, how he is strong and beautiful like his work. He told her he was a free man and she did not know what the difference was between free and not free. She remembers once walking into what seemed like a wall of flowers and seeing a grand stag, and thought maybe this is what it felt like to be free.
Once Lina told her that they do not shape the world but it shapes them, but Florens thinks of how the Blacksmith is her shaper and her world.
Chapter 6: Rebekka
Rebekka’s thoughts swirl together and she wonders when Florens will come back and if she will come back. Lingering between fever and memory, she sees Lina and recognizes her.
Her thoughts flicker to her coming here. It was water everywhere, all day long, as she made the journey to the New World as a teenager to meet her new husband. She was a rebellious daughter, her parents said, but they were consumed with their religion. She thought of God remotely and was not a fervent believer. Her mother told her that when she went to the New World savages would butcher her, so when she first met Lina she was terrified. It took time, but the two became friends.
Life in her former home was violent and tempestuous, and life at sea was far from easy. Thus, the New World was a boon, and it beguiled her with its sweet air and strange birds and tall trees.
There were Anabaptists nearby, who were not the Satanists her parents said they were, but instead sweet and harmless. Only when they refused to baptize her daughter did she turn away from them.
Rebekka had been excited to flee to America, where the prospects seemed better for her. Life was hard but pleasant enough until her babies were taken. The grief made her insensate. She told Lina once that she did not think God knew who they were; that He might like them if he knew them, but He did not. He was doing something else, she was sure of it.
One of the things she mutters over and over again, especially in her sick daze, is that she had shat in a tub with strangers to get here. This was the voyage over, which she experienced with seven other women in steerage. They were the lower-class women, separated from the men and the high-class women. It was dark and smelly in their quarters but the women made the voyage tolerable for each other. Anne had been sent away in disgrace by her family; Lydia and Julia were prostitutes, sent away by the law, and Lydia’s daughter Patty, a ten-year-old thief, accompanied her mother; Dorothea was a cutpurse also sent away; and Abigail was snatched up for the captain’s cabin. The women had “alehouse wit” (83) and spoke of sex freely, making each other laugh and Rebekka blush.
Once they imitated having fine tea together, adding some of the rum Judith and Dorothea brought. They played at the elegant ladies, existing in the ship awaiting their future, which, unlike the past, was refreshingly not yet spelled out for them yet.
When they arrived they separated without emotion, knowing they would never see each other again, but also knowing what they had done for each other.
She thought Jacob was bigger than she had imagined. He offered her no pampering and she would not accept it. His shyness soon melted, and they “settled into the long learning of each other” (87) and developed a deep love. They worked the farm together, but Jacob soon began traveling more and more as he became involved with trading. His returns home were full of joy and stories, but they reemphasized to Rebekka that the world outside was disorderly and threatening.
Over time, his gifts became more whimsical and less practical, and he began building the big house. She told him that they did not need this and a man only left behind his reputation, but he replied that what a man left behind was who he was. The building of the house was a busy time, and she did not notice the fever that would soon kill him. He demanded to be taken to the house right before he expired, so the women hauled him there as a cold spring rain fell.
Rebekka did not think she would be infected, and it seemed incomprehensible that after surviving the Old World and the journey over, she would be stricken as she was.
The women’s voices from the ship come to her on her sickbed. They comfort her with their selfishness, their stories.
What did not comfort her was the vastness of the world outside. She had “learned the intricacy of loneliness” (92). She was annoyed with the Anabatists and their simplistic worldview, jealous of their healthy, living children.
Her memories dance back to the happier days. Flush with love for Jacob and her children, she once had asked Lina if she had ever known a man. Lina replied only once and it was not good. Rebekka speculated as to who the man might be, but did not know.
Now Rebekka wonders what she looks like and asks for the mirror. Taking it, she begins apologizing to her eyes, nose, mouth, skin. Lina tries to make her stop.
Her former happiness pains her. She remembers Florens’ eagerness for approval, which extended to the Blacksmith. Jacob told Rebekka not to worry about him, that he would soon be gone, and reminded her that he had done good work and saved Sorrow. Now she is waiting for Florens and the Blacksmith, becoming more convinced that the Anabaptists were right that happiness was “Satan’s allure, his tantalizing defeat” (97). Those women trusted in something else, daring death. The women on the ship dared life. All the women she knew, though, have this in common: they were/are subject to the promise and threat of men.
The despair is acute. The only dependable one left is Lina; she saved them once… or was it God? She wonders if the journey to this land and the loss of her family and everything she knew was a waystation “marking a road to revelation. Or perdition?” (100).
Analysis
This section features Rebekka’s origin story—what her life was like in London, why she came to the New World, the nature of the journey itself, her relationship with Jacob and her vicissitudes on the farm, and her return to a dogmatic piety on her deathbed after nearly a lifetime of avoiding such a mindset. Morrison explains why that embrace of cruel piety is understandable, but not excusable, and, ultimately through this particular character, is able to explore someone who is simultaneously powerful owing to her race but disenfranchised owing to her gender.
Rebekka grows up in 17th-century London, a place characterized by casual violence and disregard for human life. Though she is anxious to get to the New World to escape such a scene, she finds life in the colonies just as miserable, albeit in a slightly different way since her husband is kind to her and she has a modicum of power due to their gradual increase in wealth.
The journey over, though, is a potent reminder of how much class matters: Rebekka and other poor white women are in steerage, barely able to get out into the fresh air and forced to endure innumerable indignities. This certainly is not the Middle Passage, of which we get a searing account from Florens’ mother, but it is painful and demeaning (one woman is “chosen” by the captain as his companion for the voyage). What makes the journey tolerable for the indentured servants, thieves, and prostitutes is their shared situation. They commiserate, complain, and laugh; they are a community of outcast women but they are full of hope, determination, and verve.
In the colonies, Rebekka ekes out a decent life for herself with Jacob, but trauma ensues. Rebekka loses all of her children, an incomprehensible grief that compounds upon itself, and, when Jacob’s death is added to it, she is utterly unmoored. On her sickbed, Rebekka is consumed by her memories, wondering if she was foolish to ever put any stock in happiness. Happiness is only something that leads one into sin, as it distracts from the reality that the sublunary life is ephemeral and the only real guarantee is death and (hopefully) eternal life. When she heals thanks to the Blacksmith, she decides it was God who really saved her, and that the only way to tolerate her pain is to fervently embrace faith. Geneva Cobb Moore suggests “Rebekka is associated with death, not with life. Having become the archetypal Death Mother who loses all her children and her husband, she piously/deceptively recasts herself as a suffering female Job. Rather than cursing God and dying as his wife commands, Job remains faithful, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him’ (Job 13:15). Rebekka reflects on Job's crisis, but lacks his faith.”
Rebekka’s religious dogmatism is exacerbated by her race privilege. Susmita Roye charts Rebekka’s journey: “It is only after setting foot in the New World that Rebekka's social status and sense of herself improve. Here, although she labors on the farm as the wife of a man with moderate means, she is white and a landowner. Amid other whites in her hometown, she was merely a poor, exploitable girl, but in America, among brown-skinned natives and black slaves, she is the member of a ‘superior race’ and their mistress. Thus, although she herself has once been virtually sold by her poor parents to her husband, she now holds the power to sell Florens and Sorrow. If poverty marginalizes Rebekka in the Old World, her whiteness and her husband's growing prominence and wealth empower her in the New World.” Valerie Babb agrees, explaining that while “It is only when [Rebekka’s] children and Vaark die, when she suffers from smallpox, and when she feels an unendurable isolation, that she turns to race privilege and a religious orthodoxy that promises life hereafter,” but she turns nonetheless.
