【正文】 hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize. (8889) Baby Suggs sings a litany of loving all the pieces that make up the body. When Baby Suggs preaches in the Clearing to the gathered free blacks, freed slaves, and escaped slaves, the message they hear is radically different from the messages about themselves they hear from white society. Being in the Clearing does not magically release them from oppressive, racist spaces they inhabit and try to make their homes in. But being in that temporary space and hearing a different accounting of themselves are essential for preparing them to survive, join together, and carry what they learn in the Clearing back into town and into their houses.Baby Suggs39。s Clearing is transformed by the collective memory of all that is Yonder, out there and forges the boundaries of a metaphoric homeland. Given the fact that the black presence in North America was for the purpose of labor, the sanctity of the homeland was protected by increased faith and hope for freedom. The arbitrary placement of slaves across the United States extended the bonds of black munities, providing for an expansion of the constitution of the black family. Furthermore, the emergence of a mon black culture necessitated a reconceptualization of the black family in accordance with their lived experiences. What Baby Suggs is able to acplish by encouraging imagined grace is spaces created by the singing。 what she cannot acplish is an actual extension of the Clearing into the yonder world. After the Misery she loses her own faith in the imagination and its ability to aid in realizing grace. She es to believe (and it is this belief that robs her of the will to be in the future) that there was no grace imaginary or real and no sunlit dance in the Clearing could change that (89). Within the Clearing， Baby Suggs39。s grace must be imagined, because phenomenally it does not exist. But even so, it works change, though not the sudden, transcendent change that the Clearing, through her preaching, promises. The clear and boundless freedom to love and dance in the world cannot be extended by the imagination alone.Harris notes that by denouncing her calling, Baby Suggs rejects the power of folk imagination, which has clearly served a constructive purpose for her and the entire munity along Bluestone Road (Harris 1991, 175). Moreover, Harris notes that Baby Suggs39。 rejection of this role is a victimization (Harris 1991, 175).In some ways, the narrative that Morrison writes is an investigation of the power of the imagination and its failures. The imagination provides an escape and alternative to lived reality, but that escape often is not realized, until the world is forced to make adjustments. The real heart of the question is how to get the world yonder to make the necessary adjustments and open up the necessary spaces. Sethe and the ClearingSethe es to this wideopen space to figure out what to do with her past. In this first struggle over which world, the past or the future, Sethe will inhabit, Beloved strangles Sethe. Sethe is caught up in the enchantment of the Clearing, and misreads the touch as Baby Suggs39。s healing hands. Just as she concludes that she has to share it with Paul D, who had beat the spirit, Beloved39。s ghostly fingers shift from massage to suffocation, and the battle over Sethe39。s life begins. Will the past feel its way into the future as healing hands or a suffocating grip?Paul D brings with him new information about the past which simultaneously resurrects and changes it. Sethe39。s knotted, private, walkonwater life slips back into thoughts of the future. For her, the difficulty is managing the new past and the new future, which threaten the stillness and outoftimeness of her life. To figure it out, she goes to the Clearing. Sethe seeks some fixing ceremony (86), a memoration which would place Halle in the past so that she could finally turn to the future. While in the Clearing, she realizes that the haunting by the ghost has not helped her solve anything because it offers only a stay against time, not time itself. The revelations about Halle and Paul D39。s love for her threaten to break up the solid and static moment she has lived in for years. She is trapped between the peting desire to be attached to Beloved and her misery, and her desire to be part of a living family and munity. Thus the Clearing the place of enchantment and release is also a place of dangerous flux, and Sethe39。s quest to find peace in the Clearing presents us with alternative visions (97): a peaceful rest for the past or a deathlike peace in the timeless present.At the foot of Baby Suggs39。s rock, in a scene strangely reminiscent of the sacrifice of Isaac, the sacrificed daughter exacts her demands. Denver wrests Sethe away from the choking fingers, and a bizarre dynamic among the three is established. Their distinctness is lost and their identities confused in a way that prefigures the final chapters: They are three women in the middle of the Clearing, at the base of the rock where Baby Suggs, holy, had loved. One seated, yielding up her throat to the kind hands of one of the two kneeling before her (97). The strange blurring of the daughters confounds. Which has the kind hands? Which the choking? The three begin at this moment the alteration of sacrifice, pain, and pleasure that will shape their immediate future.Denver and Sethe are bound to Beloved. They stayed that way for a while because neither Denver nor Sethe knew how not to: how to stop and not love the look and feel of the lips that kept on kissing (97). The three are fixed into a tableau without narrative movement or dialogue. In the Clearing, the space that was wideopen and blessed, where it was possible to love, is the place where the boundaries of selves are dangerously vague, where the separations are transgressed by a love that knows no bounds, and threatens suffocation.(6) When Sethe emerges from the Clearin