Throughout the novel, the characters have been emotionally crippled by their pasts. Sethe and Denver especially are disabled by their histories. The mental and spiritual wounds caused by slavery are still fresh and have not been allowed to heal. Sethe cannot overcome her outrage and sense of violation from her Sweet Home experiences, nor can she work through the guilt she feels about her daughter’s death. Meanwhile, although Denver has never lived as a slave, she suffers from the ramifications of her mother’s experiences. Her development was arrested upon her discovery of Sethe’s murder of Beloved and Sethe’s attempt to murder Denver. The magnitude of this discovery caused Denver to withdraw from the community and to retreat into the sheltered but unhealthy world of 124.
With Beloved’s arrival at 124, Sethe and Denver have been faced with the physical manifestation of the very thing that haunts them and keeps them from moving on with their lives. Beloved embodies not just the spirit of the child Sethe killed but also all of the past pain and suffering from which Sethe and Denver have never been able to escape. Initially they are fascinated by Beloved and what she represents, but in this chapter Morrison demonstrates how destructive centering one’s life around the past can be. As Beloved feeds upon their fascination, Sethe and Denver’s lives devolve into chaos and then into near-starvation.
Denver’s recognition that she needs to “step off the edge of the world” and leave the house to find help signifies the beginning of her movement from the paralyzing world of the past into the freedom of the present. By taking this step, Denver re-enters the black community and propels herself into womanhood. Every connection she makes to other community members draws her farther from her mother and Beloved’s unhealthy love and deeper into a life of possibilities. She learns to read, gets a job, and experiences her first feelings of attraction to a man.
Carrying on the pervasive theme of the lingering trouble caused by slavery, Lady Jones epitomizes the half-breed, "Gray eyes and yellow woolly hair, every strand of which she hated." An altruistic lover of children, she exerts maternal love to vault over her own isolation, widowhood, and failing vision. Recognizing Denver’s needs, she envelops the young woman in love. Lady's intuitive assessment of the situation at 124 Bluestone Road leads her to share "rice, four eggs and some tea" with Denver.
Lady Jones’s outpouring of charity serves as partial payment for the sufferings that every ex-slave has known in servitude. Morrison describes the pain that assaulted Baby Suggs, Ella, Stamp Paid, and Paul D: "That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up."
Denver’s initial visit to Lady Jones and her subsequent visits to the other women in the community serve to reestablish the connections between the community and her family. To Janey Wagon, Denver's story is worthy gossip. To some hearers, it is gospel; to others, fiction. To Ella, it seems unlikely that family members could "just up and kill" their own kind. Whatever the people think of the situation at 124, they feel connected enough to the family again to try to help in different ways. While some people simply offer food, others decide they need to exorcise Beloved from the house. This decision represents a long-awaited reversal of their decision to shun Sethe and punish her for her excessive pride.
The final scene of the chapter, in which Sethe tries to kill Edwin Bodwin, seems to be an echo of the scene in which the schoolteacher comes to 124 to reclaim Sethe and her children. However, whereas that event led to the destruction of a family and its place in the community, this situation leads to healing and reintegration. In this scene, members of the community have come to offer help rather than turn away as they did when the slave catcher came for Sethe. Additionally, the white man coming to take Sethe’s child this time is coming to help rather than to hurt. Finally, Sethe chooses to destroy the perceived threat here rather than sacrifice Beloved for a second time.
The combination of all these elements leads to Sethe leaving Beloved on the porch and rushing into the crowd of women, followed closely by Denver. Beloved watches Sethe and Denver disappear into the “hill of black people, falling” which is overshadowed by the white man with a whip. This image is obviously one of slavery—the massive number of blacks who have been dominated by the slave master’s whip. Sethe and Denver blend into this image; they cannot escape the ramifications of slavery any more than any other African American. However, as we have seen with Denver throughout the chapter, past oppression and suffering do not mean that people cannot build new lives for themselves.
Ironically, Edwin Bodwin, a well-off white gentleman, shares the horror of slavery to the degree that he and fellow Quakers have warred against it. As it did for Paul D, Stamp Paid, Ella, Lady Jones, and Sethe, the inhumanity of the slave era has drawn Bodwin and his associates into the fray. His generosity with the Bodwin family home led to local scandal after Sethe, his tenant, murdered her child. When Sethe was jailed, quick-witted Quakers "managed to turn infanticide and the cry of savagery around, and build a further case for abolishing slavery."
