In Sethe’s case, escape from slavery is triggered by her maternal feelings, by her desire to liberate her children from slavery. This is also the case of Jacobs’ story, as shown above. And this is also the case of two female characters to be found in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Eliza and Cassy. In Stowe’s book, both Eliza and Cassy design and put into practice two different ways of escaping slavery for their children. While Eliza liberates herself and her child by running from her master’s plantation, Cassy can only think of escape through death, by killing her baby. Importantly, both of Stowe’s characters are conflated in Sethe’s image—a fugitive and a murderer.

Sethe’s representation as a runaway thus finds its counterpart in Eliza. If Sethe runs pregnant, Eliza flees with her boy, rather than seeing him sold and alienated. In both cases, the Ohio River offers a way of escape. For Eliza, it is the boundary between slavery and freedom, as she crosses it carrying her boy, and jumping from one piece of ice to another. For Sethe, it represents not only the gate to liberty but also a cradle of life, as she gives birth to Denver there. It is important to notice that in the vicinity of rivers both heroines encounter white people that have the role of helpers: Eliza finds refuge in Senator Bird’s house, while Sethe is healed and aided by Amy Denver, the white girl.

In the context of the nineteenth century fight for abolishing slavery, Stowe had her reasons for introducing her audience (a predominantly female white audience) to the peaceful home of Senator Bird. Senator Bird’s home is just one of the “compendious galley of homes” that Stowe depicts in order to strengthen the cult of domesticity (Fiedler 1992, 32). By depicting the Birds’ house as exemplary, Stowe urges the reader not only to attain the same domestic harmony, but also to identify with their abolitionist ideas. It is Stowe’s mission to demonstrate that Eliza’s running away with her child symbolizes an act of preserving the family ties and unity. Eliza’s pathetic question—“Have you ever lost a child?”—arises the sympathy of Mrs. Bird, whose drawer hiding the clothes of her dead child unlocks the void of maternal grief. Speaking also for herself (as Stowe lost “the most beautiful and loved” of all her children), Stowe addresses the maternal feelings of her female readers as the main reason for abolishing slavery.

In Beloved, Morrison intentionally alters Stowe’s text, designing a different script for her story: Sethe is not hosted by any white family, and in fact, she is escaping a white family’s house, Sweet Home. By intersecting Sethe’s story with that of a white girl, Amy Denver, Morrison demonstrates that the quest for freedom has a transracial meaning, that at that time oppression was a common reality for both black and white women. There are common points between Amy and Sethe: both of them are orphans (neither of them knows her father); both of them occupy a marginalized place in society (one as a slave, the other as a servant). Their desire to transgress their inferior social or racial status initiates their development of an autonomous identity. If Sethe’s aim is gaining liberty by arriving to the house of her mother-in-law, Amy’s desire is going to Boston, representing the Eldorado where she can find velvet—a symbol of a better social order: “Velvet is like the world was just born. Clean and new and so smooth” (33).

Sethe’s decision to name her newborn bay after Amy Denver is not a meaningless act. Indeed, Amy is the only white person in the novel who treats Sethe on an equal position,²⁵ so that a female bond can be established between them. Later, when Sethe tells her story to her daughters, Denver and Beloved, she stresses how without Amy’s help, she would not have been able to survive and Denver would not have been born. The white girl carefully makes a bed of leaves where the tired runaway slave sleeps; she massages and brings back to life Sethe’s swollen feet; most of all, Amy talks and sings to Sethe, so that the not-yet-born baby may keep quiet.

One step further, when Sethe arrives at the house of her mother-in-law in Cincinnati, Morrison creates the model of a black home as a counterpart of the white domestic harmony presented by Stowe. Here Morrison introduces us to the African American wise woman, the emblematic figure of the black mother: Baby Suggs. She is invested with a positive halo as she receives her exhausted daughter-in-law with open arms. She feeds and bathes her body in a cleansing ritual and she also takes care of the children (the two brothers, the “crawling-already? girl,” and the newborn Denver). Significantly, Baby Suggs is a free person, since her son Halle, a slave himself, worked hard to pay the money for liberating his mother.²⁶

In Baby Suggs’ emblematic character several images are juxtaposed. She is not only the emblematic black mother, but she is also the “unchurched preacher” for her community. During the gatherings in the forest clearing,²⁷ far from the madding crowd of the dehumanizing racial system, she teaches her black people what freedom represents. Under Bay Suggs’ roof and during the religious meetings in the forest clearing, Sethe learns how to cope with her newly acquired freedom: “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (95). Silent and comforting, Baby Suggs’ words of prayer come in a ritual teaching the Blacks that freedom means love for themselves and love for the others. Her words have the special mission of bridging gaps in a traumatized history:²⁸