Critical Lens Close Reading

“Halle she was able to keep the longest. Twenty years. A lifetime. Given to her, no doubt, to make up for hearing that her two girls, neither of whom had their adult teeth, were sold and gone and she had not been able to wave goodbye. To make make up for coupling with a straw boss for four months in exchange for keeping her third child, a boy, with her-only to have him traded for lumber in the spring of the next year and to find herself pregnant by the man who promised not to and did. That child she could not love and the rest she would not. “God take what He would,” she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing.”(28)

This passage from page 28 talks about Baby Suggs and her 8 children and what happened to them. Looking at this through the new historical lens you really see the slaves were treated back in that time period. This is describing what happened to some of Baby Suggs children and shows what slaves were thought of and how they were treated. Saying that she kept Halle for a lifetime which was only twenty years is not a lifetime compared to today. Baby Suggs having her children taken away from her is something that happened to a lot of African Americans who had children, there children would be taken away from them at young ages and sometimes the parents were never able to see them again. Toni Morrison lived in Ohio, her parents moved there to escape the racism of the south, her family has had to deal with the oppression that lots of African Americans went through. She wrote Beloved in 1987 19 years after the civil rights movement ended. Beloved takes place after the Civil war and was inspired by an African American slave named Sethe who escaped from slavery in 1856 by fleeing to Ohio. In 1856 Ohio was one of around 17 free states in the U.S.A. It was the one Sethe fled to because it is neighboring Kentucky.  But just because she made it to a free state did not mean that she was free, because of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which said that slaves that escaped, if captured had to be returned to their masters even if they were in a free state. It shows how even if slaves thought they escaped and thought they were free, they really were not free. At the end of the passage Baby Suggs says “Halle who had given her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing.” Baby Suggs is saying hear that even though her freedom was bought, she had been through alot and being free now does not get the children she lost back, there is no going back to get her children that were sold. She had been through so much being a slave and for almost her whole life that she could never truly feel she is free.