The Word · the Call

The Word / the Call is the spiritual practice and preaching of Baby Suggs, holy, the unchurched former slave who, upon gaining freedom, devoted her remaining life to healing her community through a radical, embodied love of the flesh. Unlike institutional preachers, she accepted no title of honor before her name, insisting she was too ignorant to deliver sermons, yet she became a powerful, unrobed, unanointed presence who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it. Her Call, delivered in the Clearing on Saturday afternoons, rejected sin-based preaching and instead commanded her people to love their own bodies as the only grace they could imagine, making it the novel's central expression of spiritual resistance to the dehumanization of slavery.

Origins and Practice of the Call

Baby Suggs' Call emerged from her own history of loss and her discovery of selfhood upon crossing the Ohio River. After sixty years of slavery, during which she had eight children by six fathers—all taken, sold, or chased away—she was bought out of bondage by her last son, Halle, who gave her freedom when it didn't mean a thing. When she stepped onto free ground, she experienced a profound revelation: seeing her own hands, she thought with dazzling clarity, "These hands belong to me. These my hands," and felt her own heartbeat for the first time. This moment of self-possession became the foundation of her preaching. She established herself at 124 Bluestone Road, where she became an unchurched preacher, carrying her great heart to AME's and Baptists, Holinesses and Sanctifieds, the Church of the Redeemer and the Redeemed. When warm weather came, she took her preaching to the Clearing, a wide-open place cut deep in the woods, where every Saturday afternoon she sat on a huge flat-sided rock while the people waited among the trees.

The Sermon in the Clearing

The Call itself was a structured ritual of communal release. After situating herself on the rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently, and the company 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, and she told them, "Let your mothers hear you laugh," making the woods ring. Next she called the grown men, commanding, "Let your wives and your children see you dance," and the groundlife shuddered under their feet. Finally she called the women to her and told them, "Cry. For the living and the dead. Just cry." The ritual then mixed together—women stopped crying and danced, men sat down and cried, children danced and laughed—until, exhausted and riven, all lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs offered up her great big heart.

The Body Love Commandment

At the heart of the Word was a radical theology of the flesh. Baby Suggs did not tell her people to clean up their lives or 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. Her sermon was a litany of bodily love: "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 contrasted this with the white world's hatred of their bodies—eyes they'd just as soon pick out, skin they flay, hands they tie, bind, chop off and leave empty, mouths they break and break again. She commanded them to love their hands, their necks, their dark livers, their life-holding wombs and life-giving private parts, and above all their hearts: "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 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.

The Collapse of the Word

The Word's power was shattered by the arrival of the four horsemen—schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher, and a sheriff—who came to reclaim Sethe and her children. When Sethe, recognizing schoolteacher's hat, flew into the woodshed and killed her baby daughter to prevent her return to slavery, Baby Suggs' faith collapsed. The bloodspill in her backyard mocked and rebuked her authority in the pulpit, her dance in the Clearing, and her powerful Call. She told Stamp Paid she was going to bed to think about the colors of things, and when he exhorted her not to quit the Word, insisting it had been given to her to speak, she replied that the Word was "one other thing took away from me." Stamp Paid pleaded with her, saying, "You can't quit the Word, I don't care what all happen to you," but she had already decided. She told him she was looking for what she was put here to look for: "the back door." Her marrow was tired, and she lay in the keeping-room bed, roused once in a while by a craving for color and not for another thing, until her big old heart quit. Stamp Paid later understood her: the heart that pumped out love and the mouth that spoke the Word didn't count, because they came in her yard anyway, and she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice.

The Legacy of the Call

The Word's legacy persists in the novel's final acts of healing. When the community women gather outside 124 to exorcise Beloved, their singing is described as a continuation of the Clearing's power: "For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees." This communal sound, rooted in Baby Suggs' practice, breaks over Sethe and she trembles like the baptized in its wash, momentarily restoring the grace the Word had once promised. The Call thus frames the novel's arc: it begins as a source of communal healing, collapses under the weight of trauma, and returns, transformed, in the community's final act of rescue, suggesting that the grace Baby Suggs preached—the grace one can imagine—survives even when its original preacher could not.