The alternative is a process of rememory which deconstructs linear time by stitching together history in a nonlinear fashion. That reorganization describes the historical trauma of slavery and property while creating space for methods that heal that pain.

Sampling alone, however, cannot effectively assert the kinds of ownership claims that Morrison wishes to make. Sampling is not another word for rememory. Rather, samples must be given new levels of meaning by their deployment in new patterns. Rememory is the pattern, not the recollections themselves, because certain moments stand out against the background and repeat themselves in the unfolding of chronological time. Like a strip quilt, a nonlinear or asymmetrical pattern must be pieced together from the remnants of American literary history. By reshaping the debris of Margaret Garner’s story and reorganizing it, Morrison creates a text that describes the historical trauma of slavery and property law while attempting to find a method to heal that pain. Layering is the art of creating productive tension.23 For any historically marginalized community to claim ownership over American literary history, productive tensions must be revealed. In a moment when the comic meets the deadly serious, Morrison uses the voice of Sixo to signify on the limits of the property law and to emphasize its discursive authority to shape cultural relations. In an oft-quoted section, Sixo receives a beating from Schoolteacher for stealing and “to show him that definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined.”24 While scholars have tended to view this moment as a critique of Western epistemology or the Enlightenment, they have neglected or downplayed its ironic critique of property and the law of evidence, as Schoolteacher’s methods of cross-examination force Sixo to testify against himself. When Schoolteacher claims that Sixo has stolen food, Sixo does not classify his actions as theft. Rather, he states that he has been “improving your [Schoolteacher’s] property.”25 Sixo’s response exemplifies signifyin’, illustrates hip-hop’s attitude toward intellectual property law, and highlights how property law itself has always struggled to distinguish among the layers of ownership. Reading this fictional conversation within the cultural context of when Morrison wrote Beloved, in the 1980s, Sixo can be understood as asking who owns the sample from a text that gets transformed through layering or a later act of consumption/production.

Morrison’s textual response to this dilemma can be found a few sections later. As the story comes to a close, the novel’s layers of samples begin to fall in on themselves, not merging into a unified voice but producing what Tricia Rose calls the “Black Noise” of hip-hop aesthetics. After rewriting the biblical “Song of Songs” and its heart-wrenching tale of lost love in a paragraph, Morrison weaves together the interior monologues of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved to show both the similarities and the differences between their personal and social desires. Rather than presenting distinct voices, the text makes clear how their respective identities are produced socially: “Beloved / You are my sister / You are my daughter / You are my face; You are me / I have found you again; you have come back to me.”26 In these lines, it is clear that Sethe, Denver, and Beloved are engaged in an unconscious dialogue about how to order their relationships to one another. Textually, Morrison represents this struggle for order by layering their voices. However, she does not portray their voices in fully drawn narratives. Rather, she samples their voices and then shapes the meaning of these samples by layering them in asymmetrical patterns. Sethe, Denver, and Beloved form a triangle in which desires and responsibilities do not fall evenly or symmetrically upon one another. Instead, their demands may be incommensurate, meaning that realizing one desire may necessarily frustrate a second desire.

The tension that layered samples produce comes to a climax in this section’s conclusion, “You are mine / You are mine / You are mine,” in which Sethe, Beloved, and Denver assert contrasting ownership claims. Layering their voices and placing these statements next to one another allows Morrison to interrogate the foundations of property law, in which there is an object and individuals with claims of varying strength. Rather than providing a neat or ready solution to conflict, property law must always navigate conflicting desires and choose one set of interests over another. Even as they struggle, as individuals and as symbols of a communal struggle, with the aftermath of slavery and the legacy of being “owned,” Sethe, Denver, and Beloved continue to make ownership claims. Ironically, it is because their claims are too strong—or, in the words of Paul D, their love is “too thick”—that their desires for ownership come to “own” them. Only when the community returns to 124 can this trio be saved from their excessive internalization of property law’s assumptions.27

According to the logic of Beloved, African Americans can only find freedom by balancing personal and communal claims of ownership. Excessive reliance on property law transforms too much into objects to be owned, while forgoing the logic of ownership creates its own problems. The choice to present the intertwined stories of Beloved through layered samples enables Morrison to depict the partial views of American history that literature provides. It also allows her to assert a certain ownership over that history, even if dominant groups already believe they own that history or literature. Morrison’s strategic use of layered samples implies that property rights do not simply bind a text/object to particular individuals but are constructed by social and textual networks. Ownership rights can be created by producing something de novo or constructing new meaning within a social/textual framework—the primary tool of hip-hop aesthetics. Reading rememory and Sethe’s violent acts through this aesthetic principle reveals that Sethe’s crime shattered the fragile networks of signification that this newly freed community had created. The “art” of layered sampling thus hinges on the ability to invoke memory, but not be controlled by it, to assert ownership over literary and cultural history in order to reveal the “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken.”28 In one of the novel’s multiple’s endings, Morrison writes that “he [Paul D] wants to put his story next to hers.”29 Paul D’s desire, in effect, articulates hip-hop’s strategy of layering as a method to bring together what dominant society seeks to keep apart.