Grandma Baby Suggs' sermon in the clearing
Mar. 8th, 2003 08:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iamomMy mother was a tireless activist in my childhood, and a leading organizer of the women's movement in the city in which I grew up. Our house was always filled with books from floor to ceiling in every room, and the contents of those shelves ran from radical feminism to the civil rights movement to the Holocaust to women's fiction to vegetarian cooking. One of the first real books I remember reading was a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. when I was about eight.
Perhaps in part because of my upbringing, I've always felt a deep, specific connection with African-Americans as a result of their slavery (and in turn, the civil rights movement) and with Jews as a result of their suffering during the Holocaust. When I started to play jazz saxophone as a child, I always took it seriously as an art created by black people. When I became close with a Jewish family after becoming married, I loved the feeling of inclusion and raucousness they inspired when all gathered together. In each situation, I felt like I became the people I was with.
At the moment, I'm almost halfway through Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize-winning novel, Beloved (the one Oprah made into a movie in 1998), and similarly to when I read black fiction by Richard Wright as a child, I've found myself frequently taken right into this novel and getting inside the skin of the characters. The book takes place just a few years after slavery has been abolished, and blacks are still trying to figure out what it means to be free. They're haunted constantly by memories of their slavery, and most of their family members were lost, sold, traded or killed in the frenzy leading up to emancipation.
A recurring theme in this book is the necessary resiliency that blacks developed as a result of their slavery, and how when they were alone together, they smiled, laughed, danced, and sang in order to return to their true selves. I just reached a description of an outdoor sermon by one of the characters, Grandma Baby Suggs, which underscores this in a poignant way. In it, she also inspires her listeners to look within themselves and love everything they see; to look at it all openly and to accept and love it in its entirety. I felt a ringing with this message in how it resonates with my philosophy of accepting the whole of the reality of the present moment and doing everything you can with it. It's a great passage, and I wanted to include it here.
It's worth describing the setting just a bit. Baby Suggs is an untrained preacher, a woman who has lost every member of her family but who has adopted every black person as her own child through these informal Saturday afternoon congregations she holds in a clearing in the forest behind her house. As per the custom, she goes to the clearing before anyone else, sitting quietly in prayer, while the congregation gathers in the trees. Then she calls out for the children to come forward, and they all run in laughing. Then she calls for the men to come forward, and they all run in smiling. Then she calls for the women to come forward, and they all run in crying. Before the sermon starts, everyone is laughing, dancing, crying together, flushing out their strongest emotions at the time in order to stand or sit afterwards to hear Baby Suggs speak. Those who have seen the movie may remember this scene.
Perhaps in part because of my upbringing, I've always felt a deep, specific connection with African-Americans as a result of their slavery (and in turn, the civil rights movement) and with Jews as a result of their suffering during the Holocaust. When I started to play jazz saxophone as a child, I always took it seriously as an art created by black people. When I became close with a Jewish family after becoming married, I loved the feeling of inclusion and raucousness they inspired when all gathered together. In each situation, I felt like I became the people I was with.
At the moment, I'm almost halfway through Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize-winning novel, Beloved (the one Oprah made into a movie in 1998), and similarly to when I read black fiction by Richard Wright as a child, I've found myself frequently taken right into this novel and getting inside the skin of the characters. The book takes place just a few years after slavery has been abolished, and blacks are still trying to figure out what it means to be free. They're haunted constantly by memories of their slavery, and most of their family members were lost, sold, traded or killed in the frenzy leading up to emancipation.
A recurring theme in this book is the necessary resiliency that blacks developed as a result of their slavery, and how when they were alone together, they smiled, laughed, danced, and sang in order to return to their true selves. I just reached a description of an outdoor sermon by one of the characters, Grandma Baby Suggs, which underscores this in a poignant way. In it, she also inspires her listeners to look within themselves and love everything they see; to look at it all openly and to accept and love it in its entirety. I felt a ringing with this message in how it resonates with my philosophy of accepting the whole of the reality of the present moment and doing everything you can with it. It's a great passage, and I wanted to include it here.
It's worth describing the setting just a bit. Baby Suggs is an untrained preacher, a woman who has lost every member of her family but who has adopted every black person as her own child through these informal Saturday afternoon congregations she holds in a clearing in the forest behind her house. As per the custom, she goes to the clearing before anyone else, sitting quietly in prayer, while the congregation gathers in the trees. Then she calls out for the children to come forward, and they all run in laughing. Then she calls for the men to come forward, and they all run in smiling. Then she calls for the women to come forward, and they all run in crying. Before the sermon starts, everyone is laughing, dancing, crying together, flushing out their strongest emotions at the time in order to stand or sit afterwards to hear Baby Suggs speak. Those who have seen the movie may remember this scene.
...In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, 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. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. 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. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. You go to love it. This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feel that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver -- love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your lifeholding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize."
