In Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "Beloved," the characters find it difficult to leave their traumatizing pasts behind, and therefore must go through the pain of remembering the the trauma of their lives in slavery. Morrison calls this process, "rememory,  allows the past to persevere in the present and haunt those living in one's life. Sethe explains the process to her daughter Denver by saying, "It's never going away ¦.The picture is still there ¦it will happen again; it will be there, waiting for you  (Morrison 43). This quote foreshadows the emergence of Beloved, who is thought to be the embodied spirit of the daughter that Sethe had murdered. By keeping her characters chained to their painful pasts, Morrison demonstrates the persistence of traumatic events in order to remind readers that slavery's the emotional wounds caused by slavery cannot be forgotten. Morrison's emphasis on the persistence of traumatizing events is shown throughout the story. After she is freed, Sethe spends her life struggling to avoid encounters with the past, but through rememory, her past experiences with the brutality of slavery and being forced to kill her child can never be eliminated. Sethe acknowledges this persistence when she "remember[s] something she had forgotten she knew  (Morrison 73) after sharing a memory of her mother being hung. She describes this rememory as "something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit in her mind right behind the slap on her face and the circled cross  (Morrison 73). This type of revisiting can be attributed to "the persistence of a traumatic past that haunts the present through a subjective, psychic experience of trauma that defies the limits of time and space" (George 115). Describing Sethe's sudden rememory as something that had "seeped into a slit in her mind,  Morrison here symbolizes the emotional scarring of slavery and how these mental wounds can unexpectedly open up even when supposedly forgotten. The memory of a traumatic event finds a way to remain persistent even as we try to leave them in the past. Another example of how Sethe concedes that she is unable to rid herself of her traumatizing past occurs when she explains to Denver her struggle with rememory. She claims that "[s]ome things go. Pass on. some things just stay ¦.If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place ”the picture of it ”stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there in there, in the world. Even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened  (Morrison 43). The traumatizing experience of killing her own child will always remain embedded in Sethe's memory even though she has tried to "forget," and she states that even if she dies the fact that she committed the memory will find a way to persevere. Sethe's difficulty explaining this and her use of fragmented sentences demonstrates her inability to describe something abstract. She goes on to tell Denver, "[I]f you go there ”you who was never there ”if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there, waiting for you ¦even though it's all over ”over and done with ”it's going to always be there waiting for you" (Morrison 44). Sethe here is warning her daughter how the trauma from slavery continues to persist indefinitely even as she tries to forget them and explains how anyone can be affected by someone's painful memory. Morrison highlights Sethe's struggle to leave her memories of slavery behind and "suggests the notion of an African American population continually imperiled, not so much physically as psychically, by the history of slavery" (George 115). Paul D is another character who finds difficulty in leaving the past behind. Much like Sethe, he tries his best in trying to elude the pain of his past by compromising some part of himself. While Sethe's coping mechanism comes at the cost of losing part of her memory, Paul D stores his memories in a "tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut  (Morrison 86). By using this tobacco tin as a coping mechanism to store away his painful past, he has also lost his heart and ability to open up to others. Paul D feels that this forfeiture is worthwhile in order to get rid of the trauma of slavery, but his barriers are broken down during his sexual encounter with Beloved. Paul D is