The Clearing
The Clearing is a wide-open place cut deep in the woods, at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. It is the site of Baby Suggs' most powerful and transformative preaching, where she offered up her great heart to the freed Black community of Cincinnati. It is also the place where Sethe, years later, comes seeking guidance from her dead mother-in-law, only to be choked by the ghostly touch of Beloved, marking the Clearing as a space where the living and the dead, the sacred and the terrifying, converge.
The Sacred Gathering Place
The Clearing was the heart of Baby Suggs' ministry as an unchurched preacher. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she would sit on a huge flat-sided rock while the people waited among the trees. After situating herself, she bowed her head and prayed silently, and the company watched her from the trees, knowing 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. Then "Let the grown men come," she shouted, and they stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees. "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 Sermon of the Flesh
In the silence that followed the laughing children, dancing men, and crying women, Baby Suggs 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, nor did she tell them they were the blessed of the earth. Instead, she told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine, and 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." She went on to enumerate the ways the world despised their flesh—their eyes, their skin, their hands, their mouths, their necks, their livers, their hearts—and commanded them to love each part. "You got to love it, you!" she insisted. 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.
Sethe's Return and the Strangling
Years after Baby Suggs' death, Sethe determined to go to the Clearing to pay tribute to Halle, hoping to get a clue from her husband's dead mother as to what she should do with her sword and shield. She put on a shawl and told Denver and Beloved to do likewise, and all three set out late one Sunday morning, Sethe leading, the girls trotting behind. When they reached the woods, the old path was now a track, arched over with trees dropping buckeyes onto the grass below. Sethe found Baby's old preaching rock and remembered the smell of leaves simmering in the sun, thunderous feet, and the shouts that ripped pods off the limbs of the chestnuts. She bowed her head and felt Baby Suggs' fingers on the back of her neck, light at first, then harder, until the fingers moved slowly around toward her windpipe, making little circles on the way. Sethe was more surprised than frightened to find that she was being strangled, and she tumbled forward from her seat on the rock, clawing at the hands that were not there. Denver and Beloved rushed to her, and when Sethe recovered, she had bruises on her neck. Beloved then reached out and touched the splotches, her fingers mighty cool, and leaned in to stroke the damp skin, kissing the tenderness under Sethe's chin. Sethe, grabbing Beloved's hair and blinking rapidly, separated herself, later believing it was because the girl's breath was exactly like new milk that she said to her, stern and frowning, "You too old for that."
The Legacy of the Clearing
For Sethe, the Clearing represented the twenty-eight days of unslaved life she had after arriving at 124, days of healing, ease, and real-talk, when she had women friends and men friends from all around to share grief with. It was where she had claimed herself, learning that freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. The Clearing's power persisted even after Baby Suggs' death, as the community continued to hold big-city revivals there regularly, complete with food-laden tables, banjos, and a tent. When the thirty neighborhood women later assembled outside 124 to exorcise Beloved, their singing was described as though the Clearing had come to Sethe with all its heat and simmering leaves, a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees, breaking over her so she trembled like the baptized in its wash. The Clearing thus remained the enduring symbol of communal grace and bodily love, even as its original preacher lay in her grave.
