Love your flesh

Baby Suggs, holy, the unchurched preacher who becomes the spiritual center of the free black community in Cincinnati, delivers her most famous sermon in the Clearing, a wide-open space cut deep in the woods. This sermon, centered on the commandment to "Love your flesh," is the foundational act of her ministry, a radical reclamation of the body against the brutal logic of slavery. After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, she calls the community to her in stages: first the children to laugh, then the men to dance, then the women to cry. The gathering builds into a chaotic, cathartic release of laughter, dancing, and weeping until all are exhausted and riven, lying about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that follows, Baby Suggs offers up her great big heart and delivers her message.

The Commandment to Love the Flesh

Baby Suggs does not tell the people to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She does not tell them they are the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. Instead, she tells them that the only grace they can have is the grace they can imagine, and that if they cannot see it, they will not have it. She then launches into a litany of the body, naming each part that slavery has despised and violated. "Here," she says, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard." She contrasts this with the world "yonder," where white people do not love their flesh: they would just as soon pick out their eyes, flay the skin on their back, use, tie, bind, and chop off their hands, break their mouths and break them again, snatch away the food meant to nourish their bodies, and leave their necks unnoosed and straight only to hang them. Against this catalog of violation, she commands them to love every part: their hands, their mouths, their necks, their "inside parts"—the dark, dark liver, the beat and beating heart, the life-holding womb and life-giving private parts. "Love your heart," she concludes. "For this is the prize."

The Performance of the Sermon

The sermon is not merely spoken but performed. Saying no more, Baby Suggs stands up and dances with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart has to say, while the others open their mouths and give her the music. Long notes are held until the four-part harmony is perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh. This embodied performance enacts the very commandment she preaches: the body, even a broken and aged one, is an instrument of grace and joy. The Clearing itself becomes a sacred space where the community, through laughter, dance, and tears, practices the love of flesh that the outside world denies them.

The Collapse of the Sermon's Power

The power of Baby Suggs' sermon is shattered by the arrival of schoolteacher and the slave catchers, who come to reclaim Sethe and her children under the Fugitive Slave Law. Sethe's act of infanticide—killing her crawling-already? daughter to prevent her return to slavery—directly contradicts the sermon's promise of a safe and loving world. The white people "came in her yard anyway," and Baby Suggs, holy, proves herself a liar in her own eyes. Her faith, her love, her imagination, and her great big old heart begin to collapse twenty-eight days after her daughter-in-law arrives. She takes to her bed, roused once in a while by a craving for color and not for another thing, and eventually dies. The sermon's vision of a community that can love its own flesh is overwhelmed by the reality of white violence.

The Echo of the Sermon

Years later, when the community of women gathers outside 124 to exorcise the ghost of Beloved, they unknowingly reenact the structure of Baby Suggs' Clearing. They begin with prayer, but then they stop praying and take a step back to the beginning. "In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like." They build voice upon voice until they find the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. It is a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. This wordless, communal sound—a direct echo of the music that accompanied Baby Suggs' dance—breaks over Sethe and she trembles like the baptized in its wash. The sermon's legacy endures not as a set of doctrines but as a practice of collective, embodied resistance and healing, a sound that can still call a broken woman back to herself.