Baby Suggs

That transformation is a thing that we must check off our list before we are able to engage in anything that would create a world where all can thrive.

However, In this beautiful story, Beloved, written by ancestor Toni Morrison, and in this clip from the film adaptation, we are introduced to this mystic minister, this worship leader by the name of Baby Suggs Holy.

Baby Suggs was a former enslaved woman who became a traveling preacher and a community leader.

And in this scene, we see her gather the people, my ancestors, in the sacred hush arbors, in the clearing, in the midst of a wilderness.

And she first we see her in a meditative contemplative state and then she begins to give instructions to do men dance children laugh women weep And if you have read this story, you know that it goes on to tell us that that circle went on so long that men were weeping and children were dancing and women were crying.

And before it was all over, everything was mixed up.

Everybody was weeping and laughing and crying.

And then Baby Suggs Holy, this itinerant minister whose only authorization was not the ecclesial ordination of a body, but her status of trust and her way of doing and being in that community that gave her the gravitas of this mystic minister.

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Sethe's main mentor for mothering is her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, but her life has also been profoundly disrupted by slavery's breaking of family.

In all of Baby's life, as well as Seth's own, men and women were moved around like checkers.

Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen, or seized.

So Baby's eight children had six fathers.

What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.

They consume each other and each other's stories, and as Beloved grows larger, Sethe grows ever smaller.

Even Denver is eventually locked out from Beloved and Sethe's mutual obsession.

But what I do know is that the call to beauty, the call to love, the call to honor the body.

The archetype given life is baby Suggs in Beloved.

There's something called the Sermon in the Clearing that you can find quoted.

You can look it up.

They'll show the clip from the movie.

And baby Suggs, unlettered, untutored, the people to them.

She has lived a life of enslavement.

She has suffered.