The complements to Chapters 20 and 21 are these two lyric statements by Beloved, whose sensibilities and speech revert to babyhood, thus denying her the logic and expression appropriate to her adult body. As she explains, "how can I say things that are pictures." On "the little hill of dead people," she is troubled by "a hot thing"; the sensory impression Beloved describes represents Sethe's determined spirit, which wills her daughter back to earth. Still impelled by the bond to motherly love, Beloved insists, "I cannot lose her again." The horror of decay and of merging with the elements blends with Beloved's alienation. She mourns, "there is no one to want me----to say me my name." Morrison employs nonstandard spacing and syntax to probe the mind of the dead child: "again again----night day----night day----I am waiting----no iron circle is around my neck." So strong is Beloved's identification with her mother that the child's spirit loses itself in love: "[S]he is the laugh----I am the laugher----I see her face which is mine."
In a surreal depiction of the watery division between earth and the afterlife that fails to separate Sethe from her daughter, the departed spirit remains "in the water under the bridge." Analysts read into this chapter a scene resurrected from the collective unconscious, a murky race memory of the black diaspora — the scattering of Africans by ship to slave ports in the New World. Although Beloved had no knowledge of the fearful passage, her oneness with the dead forces her to experience the tight compression of black bodies in the hold of the slaves' galley.
