the ten years

The ten years marks the span of Baby Suggs' residence at Sweet Home, the Kentucky farm owned by Mr. Garner. It was a period that, in her memory, stood in stark contrast to the brutalities she had endured elsewhere. At Sweet Home, she was not knocked down, not once, and she was given work that did not break her body further. This decade, though lived under slavery, became the reference point against which she measured the horrors that came after, and it shaped her understanding of what freedom might mean.

A Decade of Relative Peace

Baby Suggs came to Sweet Home after Mr. Garner purchased her from a plantation in Carolina, where she had been a bargain because of her injured hip. At Sweet Home, she found a farm that was tiny compared to the places she had known, with a population of just Mr. and Mrs. Garner, herself, Halle, and four boys, over half named Paul. There was no rice field or tobacco patch in sight, and nobody, but nobody, knocked her down. Mrs. Garner hummed while she worked and never pushed, hit, or called her mean names, even when Baby Suggs slipped in cow dung and broke every egg in her apron. Mr. Garner acted like the world was a toy he was supposed to have fun with, and he ran a special kind of slavery, treating his slaves like paid labor, listening to what they said, and teaching what they wanted known. He did not stud his boys, never brought them to her cabin with directions to lay down with her, as they did in Carolina, nor rented their sex out on other farms. This surprised and pleased her, but it also worried her, for she wondered what would happen when those boys ran smack into their nature.

The Work and the Quiet

During those ten years, Baby Suggs worked alongside the humming Lillian Garner, cooking, preserving, washing, ironing, making candles, clothes, soap, and cider; feeding chickens, pigs, dogs, and geese; milking cows, churning butter, rendering fat, and laying fires. It was nothing to it, and nobody knocked her down. Her hip hurt every single day, but she never spoke of it. Only Halle, who had watched her movements closely for the last four years, knew that to get in and out of bed she had to lift her thigh with both hands. This was why he spoke to Mr. Garner about buying her out of there, so she could sit down for a change. Baby Suggs talked as little as she could get away with, because what was there to say that the roots of her tongue could manage? So the whitewoman, finding her new slave excellent if silent help, hummed to herself while she worked.

The Meaning of the Decade

Despite the relative peace, the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home. She had never had the map to discover what she was like, and she knew more about her children than about herself. She did not know what she looked like and was not curious. But when she stepped foot on free ground, after Halle bought her out, she suddenly saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, "These hands belong to me. These my hands." Next she felt a knocking in her chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all along? This pounding thing? She felt like a fool and began to laugh out loud. The ten years at Sweet Home, though a time of slavery, had been a time when she was not knocked down, and it was that experience that allowed her, when freedom came, to recognize the beating of her own heart. The decade was thus not merely a period of servitude but a quiet incubation of the self that would later emerge in the Clearing, where she preached the love of one's own flesh.