Beloved Baby Suggs
by Toni Morrison

Sethe's step-mother, Baby Suggs has been dead for eight years. She was a slave for most of her life until her son, Halle (Sethe's husband), managed to buy her freedom. In freedom, Baby Suggs learned what it meant to own every part of her body and began to Call to the other Negroes to "love yourself." However, after the invasion of white people into her yard and the murder of Sethe's daughter, Baby Suggs took to the bed, pronouncing that all there was left for a Negro to do was endure everything the white men did to him.