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Ella is a central figure in the Black community of Cincinnati. Upon Sethe’s initial arrival in Cincinnati, Ella befriends her, having already had a friendship with Baby Suggs. However, Ella immediately distances herself from Sethe after Sethe kills her own daughter, horrified by Sethe’s actions and also offended by how Sethe isolates herself from the community after the incident.
Despite being unsympathetic to Sethe’s plight, Ella has trauma of her own to contend with. Before her own emancipation, she was locked in a house for two years by two white men – a father and son – who repeatedly raped and beat her. She was eventually impregnated by one of her rapists and had a child. However, she had no motherly instinct for the product of her rape, and she couldn’t bring herself to love or care for the baby, so the baby died within a week of its birth. It is Ella’s own dark experience with motherhood that eventually helps her to empathize with Sethe, because she is disturbed by the thought of her own dead child coming back from the grave to haunt her in the same way that Beloved is haunting Sethe. While she still maintains that it was wrong for Sethe to kill her daughter, she also states that it’s wrong for Beloved to come back to life to cause never-ending misery to her mother and family. Using this logic, Ella leads the women of the town to carry out an exorcism. In doing so, Ella admits to and atones for her own role in Sethe’s killing of her daughter. Ella was one of the townspeople who had seen schoolteacher arrive, but chose not to warn Sethe. She redeems herself for her mistake by bringing the Black community of Cincinnati together to help Sethe in her time of need, rather than leaving Sethe to fend for herself as she did in the past. Her support ultimately helps rid 124 of Beloved, and Beloved’s successful exorcism symbolizes the Black community joining together to heal from their shared traumatic past.
