Baby Suggs and Color

After Sethe realizes Beloved is actually her diseased daughter, she finds solace in the fact that Beloved loves her with the knowledge of her past. With this peace she also comes to appreciate Baby Suggs’s practice of focusing on and admiring colors. In general, those who know Baby Suggs glorify her, as they find it difficult to comprehend her desirable psyche following the devastation of slavery. But when Sethe finally reaches a comfortable enough position in her life, she says to herself,  “now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years” (237). This point is reached only when her haunting memories can be more easily controlled with the assurance of Beloved’s understandability of her past. Sethe also feels, with color “she never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before” (237). This statement is important because it plays on the fact that slaves had little ownership or even control over their own bodies; therefore, she never got to experience this basic pleasure. This inability to see colors during slavery can also be interpreted to hint at the fact that in slavery, blacks were dehumanized to the extent of being colorblind as a majority of animals are. Sethe then describes how for Baby Suggs it “took her a long time to finish with blue, then yellow, then green” (237). The use of polysyndeton expresses a slow-moving progression from color to color and reflects the simplified and leisurely life she had lived in this state; one that rivals the complicated and emotional nature of Sethe’s. One notable detail here is the choice of colors and their order, as blue added with yellow always mixes to form green. What this choice could reveal about her progression is that her past, the blue and yellow, cannot completely be forgotten as they form her future, the yellow.