'Beloved': ideologies in conflict, improvised subjects

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Arlene R. Keizer

It is improvisation, the creative rearrangement of traditional verbal and musical structures to suit the expressive needs of the present moment, that allows the African American characters to survive and to re-create themselves. The African practices in themselves are not enough; they must be transformed and incorporated into new circumstances in such a way that they make sense to both the individual and the community. When Sixo stops speaking English "because there [is] no future in it" (25), it is clear that he is not and will not become an African American. Painful as the knowledge may seem in the context of slavery, the future for African Americans is in English (whether Black English or standard English). The songs that Sethe and Paul D create and sing are hybrids, with both African and Anglo/European elements. These songs are on the cusp between work song and blues, sung in a nineteenth-century version of Black English. As LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) writes in Blues People,

. . . I cite the beginning of blues as one beginning of American Negroes. Or, let me say, the reaction and subsequent relation of the Negro's experience in this country in his English is one beginning of the Negro's conscious appearance on the American scene. (xii)

Sethe and Paul D are not only at the point of beginning their free lives as individuals; they are also at the beginning of the African American community's experience of free life, at the beginning of blues, at what Jones calls "one beginning of the Negro's conscious appearance on the American scene." Verbal and musical improvisation, both individual and communal, is one means through which the ex-slaves, both singly and as a group, reaffirm their humanity and create themselves as a new cultural entity.

The life of Baby Suggs most clearly represents the transition from dismemberment to "re-memberment" through improvisatory self-creation. Before she is freed she answers to the "bill-of-sale name" Jenny Whirlow and doesn't call herself anything. In the narrator's/Baby Suggs's description of the effects of slavery upon her, we see again the metaphor of dismemberment: She decides to preach "because slave life had 'busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue'" (87). Freed by her son's labor, she discovers her heart (initially in the physical, and then in the metaphorical, sense) and renames herself, coining and claiming the name Baby Suggs to register the love and desire her slave husband felt for her and to help him find her if he should be in a position to look. Manumission is a resurrection from a living death in which she knows little about the children she has borne (all but one of whom have been sold away from her) and even less about herself. Baby Suggs claims her freedom by claiming her body and her own unique qualities. Denver's name for her, "Grandma Baby," embodies the contradictory miracle of an old woman reborn in freedom.

Though not African by birth, Baby Suggs creates her own syncretic folk religious practice, based on both West African and Christian spiritual traditions. The ceremony in the Clearing reveals the power of individual and communal improvisation to reassemble broken bodies and broken psyches. Baby Suggs issues her "Call" to men, women, and children; their response is laughter, dancing, tears, and "long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh (89).(17) In structure, the ceremony resembles a jazz performance; it begins with three basic elements - children's laughter, men's dancing, and women's weeping - and the congregation plays these elements out in every possible combination, in the jazz ideal of group improvisation. Then Baby Suggs comes in with her solo, her improvised sermon about the need to love the body and the soul. Her spoken-word solo segues into a dance, and the community provides the music to accompany her. This ritual has the same effect as the antelope dance; it provides a moment of plenitude in which the people can experience themselves, re-member themselves, as whole and free, in an individual and communal way. However, Baby Suggs's creation is a New World ritual, a proto-jazz Black English blues spiritual healing song for the inner ear. Jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet's comments on the spirituals and the blues shed light on Baby Suggs's ritual performance. Bechet states that the spiritual "was praying to God" and the blues "was praying to what's human. It's like one was saying, 'Oh, God, let me go,' and the other was saying, 'Oh, Mister, let me be.' And they were both the same thing in a way; they were both my people's way of praying to be themselves, praying to be let alone so they could be human" (212-13). With Baby Suggs leading, the community prays with voices, hearts, and bodies to be allowed to be human.