Morrison blends several religious conventions in this chapter. Like Pythia, Apollo's priestess in ancient Delphi, "Baby Suggs, holy" sat in her shrine—the clearing—and, without training, responded intuitively to the spiritual needs of all comers. Her Christ-like message, "Let the children come," emulates Mark 10:14, "Suffer the little children to come unto me." Reaching out to men and women as well, Baby Suggs bid the children to laugh, the men to dance, and the women to cry. The throng, mixing their roles in a symphony of laughter, dance, and sobs, responded to Baby Suggs's "great big heart."
Like the Native American All-Mother or Mediterranean Earth Mother mythic figures who offer blessings and transcend time and place by permeating all cultures, Baby Suggs offers her own version of Christ's beatitudes. After the battering self-denial of slavery, her followers need self-esteem more than theology. Baby Suggs exhorts them to find human comfort—to love their hands and to use them in touching, patting, and stroking others. She names feet, backs, shoulders, arms, liver, and "the prize"—the heart. A foreshadowing of Baby Suggs's heart condition as well as of Sethe's need to rediscover her own self-worth, the scene anticipates the conclusion of the novel in which Sethe, no longer able to lean upon her wise mother-in-law, finds acceptance in Paul D and thus accepts herself.
Sethe's salvation is challenged, however, by a harrowing event that causes the neighboring black community to shun her for 18 years. Coinciding with Baby Suggs's collapse, this event occurs a mere month after Sethe's reunion with her children. The description of the four-week period of peace as "twenty-eight days" reflects another feminine detail, the lunar cycle that governs the menstrual flow.
