1) Baby Suggs is described as, "loving everybody like it was her job and hers alone." What elements of her background might have contributed to this, and how?
2)Baby seems to have this mystical ability to smell the disapproval in the air and even a prophetic power of being able to actually see something dark coming. How do you interpret this supernatural theme of ghosts and now Baby's powers? In what ways might they be related? Different?
Baby Suggs is characterized by her nurturing ways, “loving everybody like it was her job and hers alone.” I believe her generous love is a way to compensate for not being able to care for her own seven children. She could not protect them, raise them, or watch them grow up before they were taken from her. In fact, when Halle was born, she thought “it wasn’t worth the trouble to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway” but luckily she was able to keep this one son. However, all the love that is meant to be for her missing children is still there so she takes this extra love and channels it to the community, Sethe, and her grandchildren.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, Thuy, I think all her compassion and love for everyone comes from 7 lifetimes of Maternal love that never got to be expressed. Baby Suggs obviously identifies as a mother, like Sethe, but hardly had the opportunity to practice her motherhood because her children were taken from her. Now that she is free, and free to express all that pent up love she does so as much as possible. Other people see this as excessive but Baby Suggs is making up for a lot of lost time and opportunity. I think anyone disapproving of her generosity is seeing it as a way for her to make herself popular, but if they knew her whole story they would probably feel differently.
ReplyDelete^Ahh you guys stole my point! But seriously, I fully agree with the idea that Baby Suggs developed this personality of a nurturing, generous, wise person because she never had the opportunity to be this ideal mother figure during her life. Because of the lack of experiences with her other seven children, she now compensates by being the quintessential maternal figure. The negative feelings others have for her, such as having “overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess” can be immediately discounted because Baby Suggs is not like that. She is not being generous for the shallow reasons critics claim, like being popular, but instead from the lack of chances she had to nurture for her own children. Baby Suggs is merely, finally getting the chance to display her bottled-up love.
ReplyDeleteBeing a slave didn't give Baby Suggs the privilege of loving or being attached to anyone or anything. All her children except one were taken from her, even after being promised to keep others in exchange for sex. Baby Suggs "could not" and "would not" love her children(30). After receiving freedom she had the opportunity she had longed for, to love someone without the fear of them being taken away from her. All the love she had built up inside her for the children she couldn't give it to, she wanted to give to the people in her community and her family.
ReplyDeleteThe people in Cincinnati describe Baby Suggs as "loving everybody as if it were her job alone". This warm attitude most likely originates from her regret of not being able to take care of the children she had in the past and the memory of the life she had that did not involve love. She also probably felt a new sense of beginning after she gets her freedom due to the compassion and love of Halle. After an act like that, it seems normal to want to help others and be kind. As a slave, she experienced hate, mistreatment, and other emotions that she most likely never wanted to surround herself with again. She compensates for this with her warm and loving nature.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with Thuy on the fact that Baby Suggs channels all this love to everyone around her because she was deprived of the opportunity to nurture and raise her own children. Baby Suggs had all this love repressed inside of her and she was unable to share all that love with her children because almost all of them were taken away from her. Now that she has the opportunity to finally love someone without the fear of losing them, Baby Suggs shows her compassion to everyone around her; she is not sharing her love for popularity.
ReplyDeleteWell, like everyone else stated above, Baby's background of having her children taken away affects her need and ability to love everyone around her. But this seems strange to me, because Baby Suggs later says to only love yourself, and that you cannot afford to love anyone else in the world, because they will probably be taken from you in some way. Throughout the book she tells Sethe, and the people in the clearing, to love yourself more than anything else, and to love your heart because no one else will, because no one else can afford to love others. This contradiction seems pretty strange to me, and maybe this love that Suggs harbors for everyone stops when the baby ghost appears?
ReplyDeleteI basically agree with everyone on this particular post. Baby Suggs needed a way to nurture they way any born mother would and she never received the chance to because of the constant loss of her children. The compassion she had needed to be expelled somehow but she was always conscious to tell people not to love too much because of her experiences losing her children. But after being freed she was able to love everyone around her.
ReplyDeleteWell we know that Baby Suggs' changes when the baby ghost appear and maybe that's because her "job" got taken away from her. I agree with the others about why she does give all this love because she's never gotten to before with everyone being snatched right out of her arms, but I think Ellen presents a valid point about her statement of you can't love anyone else in the world but yourself (paraphrasing of course). Baby Suggs tells Sethe this after all the people stop coming, so maybe that is just another love that was taken from her only reaffirming her belief that the only thing you can show true compassion for is yourself, because no one can take that away from you.
ReplyDeleteI think in the cases of Baby Suggs being physically able to smell the “scent of disapproval” and of the baby ghost wreaking havoc on Sethe and her family is related to the theme of spite and/or jealousy in the novel. After Sethe’s arduous journey and arrival to 124 with baby Denver, Baby Suggs throws a huge feast which gets the attention of her friends and neighbors who were “angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess”.(163) From the perspective of other African Americans during this time, who are relatively poorer the economic and social position that Baby Suggs and her family are in would understandably create envy and jealousy. It “made them mad” because all the great amounts of food reflects Baby Suggs’s elevated social and economic status that the society around her thought she did not deserve. Her neighbors understood Baby’s Suggs’s struggle to freedom as less laborious and difficult than their own, since they “did not belong to an ex-slave who had probably never carried one hundred pounds to the scale, or picked okra with a baby on her back….Who had not even escaped slavery—had, in fact, been bought out of it…” (164) It is interesting how Baby Suggs magically through scent, even without talking to anyone, understands how she would be envied in the world that she lives in. A parallel can be drawn to Sethe’s family in 124 who are fully aware of the ‘spiteful’ baby ghost who torments them.
ReplyDeleteBaby Suggs's obligatory feelings to love others as her job alone could speak to her independence gathered from being enslaved for so long. She is used to having to do things on her own in order to get any sort of positive results and certainly has developed the work ethic to achieve results. As for why she thinks love is what the slaves need, I feel she may be getting those potential needs based on what she needs, which is love. She is aware of the lack of love she has received in her own life as a slave and after slavery in the world. She probably feels that her black peers have the same void in their lives which needs to be filled. Baby's mystical abilities fit seamlessly into the greater plot. Beloved's ghost and Baby's ability seem to both pertain the more general theme of "rememories." Where memories in any location linger for others to feel and find in the same spot forever.
ReplyDeleteI feel Baby Suggs' nature, possibly built around the loss of her children and her newfound freedom, is a foil to Beloved's malevolent intentions. But, I feel there is contradiction in Suggs "loving everyone as her own," as she chose to remain unattached to her children as a slave. If Suggs does indeed love everyone, it is a love with perspective and with limits- "good is knowing when to stop."
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I feel the death of Baby Suggs, given her prophetic and well-to-do nature, reflects the oppurtunity for Beloved's return. More clearly, Beloved may have waited this long to manifest in corporeal form, because she could not do so in the presence of Baby Sugg's benevolence.
I agree with a lot of the points already stated. Baby Suggs never had the best platform to perform as the best mother during her prime time in life so she inevitably developed this extremely nurturing personality that would be well described as “loving everybody like it was her job”. One she had the freedom to give love again, she made sure she did it in a very compassionate way. The troubles she experienced in her tragic past of slavery helped develop her into a kindhearted being. After losing children and feeling as a failure, she now was able to turn that around and be the “mother” she never could be.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, I would agree with the idea most of you were conveying about Baby's love originating from her inability to love her children. However, I think it would be a mistake to overlook the life she was given in the Garner's house and the good treatment she was given as a possible reason for some of her kind will towards everyone else.
ReplyDeleteAs for the supernatural powers Baby appears to posses, I believe that they support the hauntings within 124 and give credibility to that fact that there is constantly something supernatural following Suggs and her lineage.