【正文】 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.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 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 healing hands. Just as she concludes that she has to share it with Paul D, who had beat the spirit, Beloved39。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。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。d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. ... And no, they ain39。t love your eyes。 flesh that weeps, laughs。 children danced, women laughed, children cried”(88) Here, roles are reversed, but ritually shared across the bounds of gender and generation.Baby Suggs39。Chapter Two Community Lost The Clearing The Clearing and Baby Suggs’ Imagined CommunitySethe describes the Clearing as a wideopen place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared that land in the first place (87), and she remembers it as a blessed place (89). It is a space outside the political and cultural domain of the white people who constantly disturb the black munity of Cincinnati. Soon after her moving to Cincinnati, Baby Suggs goes to the Clearing to preach her gospel of imagined grace — the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. . . if they could not see it, they could not have it (88). The Clearing provides a place for every black man, woman, and child who could make it through to love themselves and each other in a way not sustainable in the constricted and categorized world of white Cincinnati and white America (87). Within the Clearing, connections and emotions are possible that are unendurable beyond it.The celebratory ritual led by Baby Suggs at the Clearing takes its origin and content from her discovery of her self and of her freedom. What I found most remarkable about this ritual is the way that it reconstructs the “essential” elements of family, making that reconstruction a model for munity. In the isolated openness of the clearing, Baby Suggs calls first the children, who are exhorted to laugh, then the growth men, exhorted to dance, and finally the women, exhorted to cry: “It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced。s going on, and when Sethe sees Mr. Bodwin, she tries to kill him, believing schoolteacher has returned. Beloved runs away because she thinks Mr. Bodwin is the whiteman that has e back for her, and Sethe has abandoned her again. With Beloved gone, Sethe gives up on life because she has lost her child, the best part of herself, again. Paul D es back to 124 to help Denver take care of Sethe. Time passes and Beloved is forgotten. she begins to dominate Sethe with her anger. Sethe starts to waste away as Beloved39。s love and a chance to live. Sethe and Denver continue to live with the restless spirit, in the house that glows red with rage and despair, until the day when Paul D, a former slave from the same plantation where Sethe was held, appears on the front porch of 124 after many years of aimless and sorrowful drifting. The narrative opens with his arrival, a moment that marks the beginning of a healing process for both him and Sethe. As they begin to recount to one another their lives, hardships, and mutual grief, they discover through the telling of these stories a connection to a past that must be confronted and exorcised if each is to have a future. Subsequently, the house begins to quake with the dem