What becomes of a human who has been priced? – GILMOUR

When I imagine a person - my own mother, my father, my dearest friends, or someone I have no relation to, I cannot imagine them as property, as valued by a price. This is not my world. But that was the world of the south, which is to say, a completely normal world. I'm imagining the tens of thousands of white people who simultaneously were capable of seeing their relatives and friends as people like themselves, while deeming the humans they owned as priced property, and I'm horrified reflecting on this fact, realizing that I myself could have been born at that time in such a place which could have so forcefully convinced me that my skin was a superior white and that others were the color of inferiority, worth something insofar as they would support my superiorty. 

The human who prices another has erased the human in the human, has turned the human into an terribly strange object, an economic tool. As a priced object, the person's worth fluctuates with market tides, with the ebb and flow of supply and demand; they have become a human-property, a chattel, no different than cattle, an object sometimes worth more or less than they are at any moment. The price of one human can equate to the price of, say, two humans, maybe three; and a mother, a breeder, has potential to be worth as much as the many humans she generates. A priced human is an actively fracturing object, splintering into exchangeable pieces. What becomes of a human that has been forced into being priced? 

I'm thinking about how this fracturing has particularly manifested in Sethe. When School Teacher and the other apocalyptic horsemen arrive at 124, causing Sethe to spontaneously rush to her escape and to protect her children, we are told this: "And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe." (pg.195). Sethe is determined to bring her children into safety, that is, far away from the certain horror of the white Slavemaster's unspeakable cruelty. Her method is to destroy the bodies of her children, sending them "through the veil" where no hurt can take place. Her method, for her, was unambiguously the correct one. As I've been processing my sickening devastation over Sethe's act of protection, that she had been forced into such a labyrinth of abominable suffering where protection could only be conceived as ending life, I've asked myself this: how was it that Sethe could commit this act so swiftly, so deftly, with complete moral confidence in her decision? 

Perhaps what becomes of a human who has become priced, who has become a "replaceable", a site for unspeakable brutalization, a fracturing and splintering; for this human who has become a thing living in pieces–– perhaps Sethe didn't need to make any moral leap when she cut her own child into pieces, being already in pieces herself. Perhaps she was constitutionally unable to for this reason. And perhaps this necessary cruelty, which seems to us so morally impossible, obscures a deeper belief about life that Sethe has been forced to understand: that if one is already in pieces, already made to feel less than human in a time and a place that forces dehumanization, but such a one is simultaneously "thick" with a great love that desires safety against a world inexplicably bereft of it, perhaps death is the last place that can become a hallowed asylum; that having faith in a life giving death-miracle, inexplicably, is to have faith in the last remaining possibility of being human and whole again. 

But even as I settle on this conclusion, I'm horrified, too, that I have further been complicit in turning Sethe into pieces, that is, I've struggled to land on a definite reason for where wholeness resides and why Sethe was capable of acting this way, and I fear, deeply, that I maybe I have cut something off of her in making such a conclusion at all. My G-d, shouldn't I be silent? 



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