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ay to communicate beyond words, evoking ideas more readily than words alone are able to. All religions and cultures have significant numbers that convey an essence or idea more quickly and completely than words can. It is in this manner that Toni Morrison uses numbers in Beloved. Significant numbers occur starting with the first symbols of the text and the words on the pages before the body of the text starts. 2.1 The number “2” In this novel, the number “2” is a very significant symbol Morrison employs it to symbolize duality, a pair, a division. It is also a unity, two parts of the same whole. Sex is expressed in many cultures as a duality, the yin and yang, father sky and mother earth. In Beloved, twos, fours, and even twenties occur in situations related to sex and children. Baby Suggs has eight children (Morrison, 1987:209), four girls, and four boys. Sethe has four, two boys, two girls. Moreover, Sethe and Paul D have sex on the second floor. At Mrs. Garner’s wedding, they ate four sheep. From the two buckets of blackberries he picked, Stamp Paid put two into the mouth of four weeks old Denver. At Baby Suggs' revival, after talking about “your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts,” the crowd sings in “four-part harmony” (Morrison, 1987:89). Such a performance requires the presence of two men and two women, and is evocative of the sexual nature of two. Paul D spends two years with his weaver woman. Each two is an expression of love, either parental or conjugal. While Paul D and Sethe are in a pair in the kitchen, “Upstairs Beloved is dancing. A little two-step, two-step” (Morrison, 1987:75), in this scene Beloved and Denver are in a pair, with images of two floating in and out of perception. “She swallowed twice”. “The monologue became, in fact, a duet... Denver spoke, Beloved listened and the two did the best they could to create what had really happened.” (Morrison, 1987:76-78) This relationship is erotic, an ironic counterpoint to the stories being told downstairs in the kitchen. The story they are telling is the story of the birth of Denver, and this tale of fertility is replete with twos and fours. Yet another fertility image is evoked when Amy speaks: “I have been bleeding for four years” (Morrison, 1987:83). In the rowboat, there are two bird nests, while in the sky above there are four stars. Finally, as Denver is born, Amy's “strong hands go to work a fourth time,” and when holding the baby, “twenty inches of cord hang from its belly” (Morrison, 1987:84). As Denver is born, the number two is all around. When the boys steal Sethe’s milk, there are two of them. This act is clearly a rape, and entirely sexual. The episode with the turtles is sexual, and also involves twos and fours: “Four placed plates under a hovering motionless bowl” (Morrison, 1987:105). When Paul D asks Sethe to get pregnant by him, they pass four women in the street, “walking two abreast” (Morrison, 1987:129). After four months of “fucking” Beloved, Paul D goes back upstairs to Sethe, and as those two are on the second floor, Beloved thinks about the two dreams she has. One dream is of being swallowed, a somewhat sexual image. All these twos have to do with sex. There are a few twos which are not directly sexual, but do focus on children. In the beginning, the two boys, Howard and Buglar, leave “within two months” of each other. Two pertains to Beloved: “She wasn't even two years old when she died” (Morrison, 1987:4). In the pre