Baby Suggs' sermon in the Clearing

Baby Suggs' sermon in the Clearing is the foundational spiritual and communal ritual of Toni Morrison's Beloved, a weekly Saturday gathering where the formerly enslaved preacher, Baby Suggs, holy, leads the black community of Cincinnati in a radical act of self-love and bodily affirmation. This sermon, which begins with laughter, dance, and crying before culminating in Baby Suggs' commandment to "love your flesh," represents the novel's core philosophy of grace as an act of imagination and the reclaiming of the body from the dehumanization of slavery. It is the event that establishes 124 Bluestone Road as a center of healing and community, and its subsequent abandonment after Sethe's infanticide marks the tragic collapse of that vision.

The Ritual of the Clearing

The Clearing is a wide-open place cut deep in the woods, known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place, reached by a path known only to them. Every Saturday afternoon in warm weather, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart there. She would situate herself on a huge flat-sided rock, bow her head, and pray silently while the company watched from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, "Let the children come!" and they ran from the trees toward her. "Let your mothers hear you laugh," she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling. Then she called the grown men: "Let your wives and your children see you dance," she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet. Finally she called the women to her: "Cry," she told them. "For the living and the dead. Just cry." And without covering their eyes the women let loose. The ritual then mixed: women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath.

The Commandment of the Flesh

In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. "Here," she said, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. You got to love it." She continued, "This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver--love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize." Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.

The Collapse of the Vision

The sermon's power was such that it made 124 a bustling, cheerful house where Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised and soothed. Strangers rested there while children tried on their shoes. Messages were left there. But the sermon's promise was shattered twenty-eight days after Sethe's arrival, when schoolteacher and the four horsemen came to reclaim her and her children. Sethe's act of infanticide in the woodshed, killing her crawling-already? girl to prevent her return to slavery, broke Baby Suggs' heart. She believed she had lied; there was no grace--imaginary or real--and no sunlit dance in a Clearing could change that. Her faith, her love, her imagination and her great big old heart began to collapse. She went to bed, roused once in a while by a craving for color and not for another thing, and died nine years later. The Clearing itself became a place of haunting: when Sethe later returned there seeking guidance, she was nearly strangled by what she thought were Baby Suggs' fingers but which were actually Beloved's hands, a sign that the sermon's vision of healing had been replaced by the return of the repressed.

The Sermon's Echo in the Community

Years later, when the community of thirty women gathered outside 124 to exorcise Beloved, they unknowingly reenacted the Clearing's ritual. They began with prayer, then moved to a wordless sound, "the sound that broke the back of words." For Sethe, it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash. This moment of communal singing, a direct echo of Baby Suggs' call, momentarily restored the possibility of grace and connection that the sermon had once embodied, even as it precipitated the final confrontation with Beloved and the attack on Mr. Bodwin.