![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Grandma Baby Suggs' sermon in the clearing
Mar. 8th, 2003 08:05 amMy 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.( The sermon... )
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.( The sermon... )
