Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

One can therefore understand the importance of oral narration for a text like Beloved that is accessing some of the most buried and remote areas of the collective  psyche of a community that has undergone the trauma of slavery and the Middle Passage.¹⁰ The recursive patterns of oral narration, create a reverberating resonance that penetrates the “aural being”¹¹ of the reader, drawing him/her into the action. While referring to the “aural”¹² and oral dimensions of Beloved, let me focus on Baby Suggs who helps to concentrate these energies in the text. This is done through the  affixation of the word “holy”¹³  to her. She is Sethe’s mother-in-law, Sethe being the embodiment of generations of occluded black motherhood, who speaks in her own person in this text of revisionist historiography. Baby Suggs functions as the unfrocked priest who told the ex-slave congregation who gathered in a forest clearing in the post-abolition times that the novel is set in,  to claim themselves through an act of will.  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.¹⁴