I Got A Woman Who Helps My Mind // Fleishman



I Got A Woman Who Helps My Mind

Maxfield Fleishman



There are too many things to say about Beloved. It contains everything: all the kaleidoscopic horrors and joys which fill the "unliveable" lives of Black Americans. Beloved shows how love and fear will have you killing what's yours to keep it yours. It tells of how those who die don't stay dead, but also how they'll never rightly live among the living. Beloved depicts the amputations of trauma: how a life full of struggle severs parts of you and puts them away for you to maybe dig up one day, but for now to stuff them overflowing into a tobacco box heart. Beloved says that the same person who kills their child can go ice skating on no skates, and that the man who wears a bit and eats living wild birds in the woods can bathe his beloved part by part. 

In honor of Phaedrus, I'll say something about love. Paul D suddenly remembers something Sixo said about his Thirty-Mile Woman. "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind" (Pg. 321). 

I got a woman (she would prefer I say partner) who is a friend of my mind. She gathers up all my pieces, everything I've cut off of myself or thought nobody cared to see, and shows them to me in the best light she can. She looks at my tummy and sees a pillow, at my big back and sees a place to jump on, at my watermelon head and sees all the goodness inside. I don't always see that stuff, but she does. She tells me when I've had too much to eat and shouldn't take another bite, because I never know and regret it after. She tells me when I'm thinking too hard about some nothing someone said. She takes care of me when I'm sick and laughs at me when I'm not. I do all the same for her, but of course with her own needs instead of mine. Paul D runs away when he hears Sethe killed her daughter. He insists that the woman in the news clipping wasn't her, wasn't his woman. But that's a piece of her, and if Paul is gonna be any good sort of partner, he'll have to gather it too. That's a difficulty of loving another person. Nobody's pieces are all going to be shiny and perfect. You must gather them up anyway, shine them up however you can, and give them back mixed in with the best stuff you can find. Paul D, as a lover, must remind his beloved, "'You your best thing, Sethe. You are.' His holding fingers are holding hers. 'Me? Me?'" (Pg. 322). 

This book will stick with me always. 

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