Broken Heart Strings

In Beloved, Toni Morrison uses the character Baby Suggs to show how slavery violates the sanctity of the human heart, and ultimately causes some slaves to view white people as inhuman. In one of Baby Suggs’s sermons she stresses that one must “love your heart. For this is the prize;” Baby Suggs then goes on to say that white people “broke my (Baby Suggs) heartstrings too” (103). Morrison begins by stressing how Baby Suggs respects the sanctity of the heart, but then shows how slavery takes everything away from slaves by using the cliché that Baby Suggs’s heartstrings were broken. By showing how slavery invaded and broke the most consecrated part of the human body illustrates how slave owner’s practices were immoral, inhuman, and thus bringing the slave owner down to a level of animalistic character rather than human. Baby Suggs subtly shows how she views white people as non-human by saying “those white things have taken all I had or dreamed” (104). The use of the noun “things” instead of “people,” removes the human aspect of white people and instead portrays Caucasians as wild animals. Baby Suggs’s dehumanization of the white people portrays the animosity she feels and pain that the white people inflicted on her, eventually leading to her downfall.