In Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sixo was never truly enslaved, he disconnected his body from his soul by not turning into an animal, refusing to accept mental dominance and rejecting the constraints of slavery. He demonstrated consistent humanity throughout his captivity in Sweet Home despite the Schoolteacher’s twisted methodology and cruel punishments.
When Sethe arrived at Sweet Home at the age of 14, all of the men lusted over her except Sixo. They were all sexually frustrated and in normal situations wouldn’t have acted the way they did towards Sethe. They turned into animals, craving sexual release in any form they could get it, even if that meant trying to sleep with a child. Sixo found his Thirty Mile Women and dreamed of making a live with her. He maintained a mature relationship despite the conditions they all lived in. He saw the family Sethe and Halle made together and he “was hell-bent to make one with the Thirty-Mile Woman”(209).
The way that this sentence was written relays the urgency and need to make this happen. Perhaps the way Sixo kept his soul unchained was by having long- term goals such as creating a family and a life for himself. When they were running away, and were all about to be caught, Sixo sacrificed himself so Thirty-Mile Woman would be able to escape with his child. That night “Sixo pushes the Thirty-Mile Woman and she runs further on in the creekbed. Paul D and Sixo run the other way toward the woods. Both are surrounded and tied” (209). Animalistic instincts would have been to push down the pregnant lady and run, but he wasn’t brutish. He rebelled against slavery by never letting himself act like an animal, this was key in his refusal to accept mental dominance.
127 our experts are availableright now
Sixo never saw himself as less than his white master, even though the Schoolteacher tried to enslave his soul. He refused to accept mental dominance, and challenged the slave master’s lessons. The teacher would lecture his nephews about how to measure a slaves work as if they weren’t real people. Sethe explained that the “Schoolteacher was teaching us things we couldn’t learn. I didn’t care nothing about the measuring string. We all laughed about that– except Sixo. He didn’t laugh at nothing”(169).
Sixo didn’t laugh because he understood that the Schoolteacher was using those strings to determine the worth of the slave and he knew that a person’s value cannot be measured by a piece of string. He was constantly defying the set laws and trying to find clever ways out of punishment. When the Schoolteacher noticed a small pig was missing, he demanded Sixo tell him what happened to it. Sixo had cooked and ate it, and the Schoolteacher questions Sixo further, “you telling me that’s not stealing?” “No, sir. It ain’t.” “What is it then?” “Improving your property, sir” (224).
He tries to reason with the slave owner, and he is right, if he wants Sixo to work better, he’d have to feed him well. But because the Schoolteacher only sees the situation the same as a misbehaved dog eating human food off the dinner table, he punished Sixo anyway. Yet Sixo is resilient, he will not be treated in this was any longer, and more importantly he will not let his child grow up this way, he starts planning an escape.
He would regularly refuse to be limited by the constraints of slavery by traveling to meet the Thirty Mile Woman. Sixo planned out his trip to see his love, he:
“plotted down to the minute a thirty-mile trip to see a woman. He left on a Saturday when the moon was in the place he wanted it to be, arrived at her cabin before church on Sunday and had just enough time to say good morning before he had to start back again so he’d make the field call on time Monday morning. He had walked for seventeen hours, sat down for one, turned around and walked seventeen more.”(25-26)
In this way he was able to defy his oppressor’s ideals, he never conformed. His body may have been doing the work that he was made to do, and may have been taking the physical abuse. But his soul was never touched, he escaped with it intact. Another reason why his trips to see the Thirty Mile Woman were so very beautiful was because he walked all that way just to say good morning to her. He wasn’t motivated sexually to go to her cabin for he only went to say good morning before she went off to church. It was a small gesture that would be meaningless in most situations, but he was risking his life for that moment.
That is the truest form of the human soul, something Sixo possessed dearly. When he was being burned alive, he laughed for the first time, “his feet are cooking; the cloth of his trousers smokes. He laughs. Something is funny. Paul D guesses what it is when Sixo interrupts his laughter to call out, “Seven-O! Seven- O!” (231). He laughs because the big bad Schoolteacher thought he finally caught Sixo but he didn’t. Sixo was able to spread his genes, Seven-O was the hope for the future, and a final act of defiance.
Sixo was the character in Beloved that proved that one can be physically beaten down and restrained while having a free soul. He did this by rejecting animalistic instincts and maintaining a meaningful relationship, by refusing to accept the role of the lesser person by defying the slave master at every turn and by rebuffing the constraints of slavery.
