Baby Suggs's Guidance

After revisiting a memory of Baby Suggs’s dance rituals, Sethe recollects the lectures her mother-in-law delivered to the former slaves visiting 124. Baby Suggs’s tactics as an orator reveal her ability to relate to and impact crowds of African-Americans. Suggs calls to “we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass” (103). The word choice in “we flesh” signifies a bond stronger than that of a group of individuals, but rather one fused in an indivisible way, with relation of the community to a body. It is also important to note that with the use of “flesh” in this case, she also addresses the one difference that unifies them all, their unique skin. She then challenges them to “love it. Love it hard” (103). Her imperatives function to show how she assertively provides those in 124 with direction that without her isn’t there and is needed for those freed from slavery looking for assistance in starting over. This direction is apparent when we find Sethe desiring the guidance of Baby Suggs. She warns them “yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out” (103). The word “yonder” is vital in its provision of physical separation of white people and themselves to add to the separation she creates ideologically in showing the distasteful ways whites view them. The ideological separation is largely created with the use of antithesis when she emphasizes the extent of hatred by comparing the opposite and exaggerated sides of emotions between the two. These comparisons are built off the repetition of the phrases “they do” and “they do not,” which also attest to her communication skills as they produce a harmonious pattern.