A Healing Figure: The Important Role Baby Suggs Plays within Beloved

In Beloved, Toni Morrison portrays Baby Suggs as a giver of both healing and comfort to those who have suffered enslavement. Morrison models Baby Suggs’ selflessness by first listing the physical and emotional abuse she endured on “her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb, and tongue” while in slavery (102). By using connotative words within the list such as, “eyes,” “womb,” and “tongue,” one can imply several meanings such as that Baby Suggs was forced to witness gruesome events, was raped, and unable to speak her mind. In addition, Morrison employs asyndeton to create a feeling of endlessness of her abuse. These exhaustions, although leaving her with “nothing,” are all outweighed with Baby Sugg’s ability to overcome her hardships and start fresh by “mak[ing] a living with… her heart” spiritually. Morrison illustrates Baby Suggs compassion by stating how she “opened her great heart to those who could use it”(102). Baby Suggs’ ignorance towards her own needs elucidates the enduring nature of her character and why she is not only important in providing reassurance within the community, but specifically to Sethe who seems to associate happier memories with Baby Suggs.

Beloved: A Nickel a Month

Brandon Mikuriya

AP Lang, Period 5

April 1, 2013

Beloved: Rhetorical Analysis III

            Despite living in a liberated America, relics of slavery continued to haunt Denver and her family.  To educate the black community, “for a nickel a month, Lady Jones did what whitepeople thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little parlor with colored children who had time for and interest in book learning” (120).  The “nickel a month” bears a president who held slaves—Thomas Jefferson.  In addition, Jefferson cemented the Democratic-Republicans, champions of agrarian society and Southern slaveholders, as the dominant force in the political landscape.  By utilizing a coin associated with a proslavery president, Morrison suggests that newly emancipated slaves could still not escape the haunting memories slavery—even if they were born free.  Morrison eliminates the space between the adjective “white” and the noun “people” in order to create the neologism “whitepeople.”  The word “people” should be used as a collective term that encompasses every race, but here, Morrison identifies whites as a different species; in the same manner, blacks could be considered “blackpeople.”  Reclassifying individuals ensures that they remain separate and incompatible with each other.  Finally, the “book learning” provided by Lady Jones is achieved through the use of a bible, which reveals African Americans’ dependence upon Christianity.  While enslaved, blacks attempted to add purpose to their painful lives through Christianity’s message of divine salvation for the poor.  Through this section, Morrison reveals that practices created on plantations followed their owners North.

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. 

A New Family: Sethe’s Acceptance of the Present

A New Family: Sethe’s Acceptance of the Present

Baby Suggs tells Sethe to lay down her defenses against the pain of her memories to be able to move on in life; emotionally moved, Sethe visits Suggs’ favorite “Clearing” in the forest to connect with her spirit. After talking to Baby Suggs, and letting down her defenses to accept her memories, Sethe has a new, positive outlook on what her family, which now includes both Paul D. and Beloved, could become. Sethe’s new use of familial terms to describe Beloved and Denver as “alike as sisters” shows Sethe sees the two as both part of her family, now reconnected. In describing Beloved, Sethe first says she knows “less, nothing” (117). The progression shows Sethe’s realization that she actually knows so little about Beloved. However, moments later, Sethe “now thought she knew why” Denver and Beloved were so close (117). The progression shown in the text from Sethe knowing “nothing” to “now” being able to answer her own questions shows the transition Sethe undergoes to accept Beloved as part of her family. Sethe’s antithetical description of Denver that “years of haunting had dulled her in ways you wouldn’t believe and sharpened her in ways you wouldn’t believe either” (117) shows Sethe can even finally understand her own daughter because she understands and accepts the dichotomous and conflicted nature of Denver’s personality. Sethe decides to “launch” her new life by making dinner for Paul D. as an “offering” (117). The active words “offering” and “launch” imply the effort Sethe has decided she wants put into her family relationship to garner a successful family life. Finally, the change in Sethe’s life because of her acceptance of her new family is plainly visible in the language of colors she uses to describe her planned meal: “potatoes browned on all sides… yellow squash… green onions” (117). Earlier, she refused to see any color as it reminded her of her past, but with her decision to accept Paul D. and try to create a family for herself, she has regained her sense of life’s vibrancy. The progression of colors she describes shows the way her life is going from dark to “green,” which has connotations of new life blooming. As Sethe leaves the liminal Clearing, she returns to 124 a changed person, ready, unlike previously in the novel, to see her life move forward instead of staying caught in the past.

Sword and Shield: Defending from the Effects of Slavery

 In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe learns that her husband stood by and watched as she was raped. Nearly unable to cope with this knowledge, she wishes for the guidance of her dead mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. Morrison uses Sethe’s imagination of Baby Suggs’ calming words in order to emphasize the continuous and violent aftereffects of slavery upon former slaves. In Sethe’s imagination, Baby Suggs’ tells her to lay down her “[s]word and shield” (101). By using a metaphor comparing implements of war to Sethe’s emotional response to pain, Morrison demonstrates how assuming a violent nature is often necessary to be able to cope with the horrors of slavery. Morrison also includes both an aggressive and defensive object in this comparison to demonstrate how slavery cannot be merely held off defensively; it forced slaves to assume an attacking standpoint in order to brook its effects. Sethe instructs herself to lay these implements of war “[d]own by the riverside” (101). This water imagery is particularly important given Sethe’s dangerous escape to freedom across the Ohio River. In this line, Morrison conveys the tendency of former slaves to retain their previous methods of emotional self-defense, these workers being unable to lay these down after crossing the river to freedom. The imaginary Baby Suggs pushes Sethe to release her emotional defenses as she is released from bondage, leaving behind her hurt and memories. Sethe tries to lay down her “heavy knives of defense against misery, regret, gall and hurt” (101). Morrison uses the word “heavy” to indicate the burden this emotional turmoil puts on Sethe and thus, former slaves as a whole. Again, words with defensive and aggressive connotations are mixed in order to portray the complicated way in which former slaves were forced to cope with their past, unable to handle the memories of their past life and yet unable to fight them off. Morrison uses Baby Suggs’ imagined advice in order to convey how, once subjected to slavery, slaves can never escape its effects though they try.

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. 

Like a King: Second Analysis of Beloved

When Sethe asks if Paul D wants to talk about the bit put in his mouth, he talks instead about walking past the roosters with the bit in his mouth. Toni Morrison uses a metaphor to show how slavery dehumanized slaves and turned them almost into animals. When Sethe says that Mister (the rooster) loved perching on a tub, Paul D replies, “Like a throne” (85). This simile introduces the rooster as having a high position. The irony is that roosters are not so intelligent and usually humans are thought of as ruling the animal kingdom. As Paul D continues his story, he says: “He was still king and I was…” (86). Even though Mister would not have survived without Paul D, Mister had a high rank and Paul D can’t even find the words to express what he was. He says that “even if you cooked [the rooster] you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister” (86). Alive or dead, the rooster would still have a better title than Paul D. Toni Morrison uses metaphors to demonstrate how even though Mr. Garner talked about his slaves as “real men,” they are still brought to a point of existence that is worth less than an animal’s.