Trees: Beautiful or Symbol of Horror?

Toni Morrison’s book, Beloved, evokes the horrors of slavery onto the reader quite often in the book.  I found it interesting that Morrison uses nature a lot in the book to help highlight both horrors and beautiful things.  In the very beginning of the book, Sethe describes a choke-cherry tree that is growing on her back to Paul D.  When Paul D touches it, the details are beautiful:

…and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches…he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith… And he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth (p. 17-18)

The reader quickly realizes after Paul D and Sethe sleep together that the “tree” is not beautiful, but the “trunk” and “branches,” “leaves” and “ridges” are all scars from schoolteacher and his men raping and beating her.  This part of the book really spoke to me because it is something we have talked about in many of my outdoor recreation courses.  A big issue in outdoor recreation is diversity: the main demographic is young, middle class, Caucasian males, and we tend to have a lot of discussions in my classes of how we can get a more diverse group of people to participate in outdoor pursuits. 

                Sethe describing the scar on her back as a tree really spoke to me because trees represent lynchings to a lot African Americans, and slavery and civil rights are a big reason why they do not participate in the outdoors.  According to Professor Rasul Mowatt from the HPER, the outdoors does not seem like a safe place to many African Americans and it links back to the days before civil rights when African Americans had no rights, and thus going camping offered no security.  This made me compare the symbol of trees in the book and according to Professor Mowatt: both are a symbol of slavery and violence when relating them to the pre-civil war days.  It is a strange experience to realize that something we find so beautiful, nature, trees, wilderness, evoke quite an opposite feeling for many other people.