Healing the Hurt: Analyzing the Language of Baby Suggs

In the Clearing, Sethe remembers one of Baby Suggs’s sermons she gave in the Clearing years ago. In her sermon Baby Suggs uses her speech to heal the broken or hurting parts of ex-slaves, and Morrison writes the speech using different literary tactics such as negation, anaphora, and ambiguity to convey this. At the emotional gathering, Baby Suggs tells people to “Love [your flesh] hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it” (103). The negation of the term “love” to “despise” in this sentence shows the true hatred that owners felt towards their slaves. She goes on to say that “[t]hey don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out” (103). Here anaphora is seen through the use of the pronoun “they” being repeated at each successive phrase. This repetition emphasizes the point that “they” caused former slaves incredible suffering. Baby Suggs repeats this to drive in the point that ex-slaves had been harmed and mistreated, and now they needed to be loved and healed. Baby Suggs goes on to say that “No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it” (103). The use of “they” in these phrases is also ambiguous as well as repetitive. “They” are slave owners, the ones who have caused ex-slaves so much pain in their lives. This ambiguity symbolizes the hurt that many still feel when talking about their past enslavement, prompting Baby Suggs to use ambiguous pronouns to describe slave owners. She does this because her goal is not to bring back pain, but rather to abolish it through advice to love oneself.