Stamp Paid now feels what Baby Suggs realized: that when you kill the life-giving part of anything, especially humanity, the whole of it is terminally ill. Baby's experience with the societal paradigm that classifies her and her family as only partially human and therefore partially an animal has acted upon her faith as chemotherapy acts upon bone marrow: it kills it. Baby takes to her bed to think about the colors of things. Her consideration of color is particularly interesting: color can only be seen in the presence of light. As a preacher she has worked to bring others into the "clearing- to see the "light- of God in themselves. Now, in the face what has happened in her own house she stops and tells Stamp Paid she wants to "fix- on something harmless in this world."" (179) Having witnessed the unspeakable, Baby Suggs begins to explore the nature of Light, i.e. God, in order to come to some understanding of why and how He could allow the evil that exists within the world. Unable to advance without this knowledge, she can no longer move within the story. "She just up and quit."" (177) It was only her very strong faith that she would find the answer in the color that she sought which kept her alive for eight years. "Her marrow was tired and it was a testimony to the heart that fed it that it took eight years to meet finally the color she was hankering after."" (177) I suspect that the color which she specifically "hankered- for was the color red. Red light enables humans to see the colors of other objects. It is as though with the sight of the blood of Beloved she loses the ability to "see- color "waves of Light "and therefore fails to understand her concept of God.
Numerically, there are several items of compelling interest in the following passage:.
At first he would see in the yard occasionally, or delivering food to the jail, or shoes in town. Then less and less. He believed then that shame put her in the bed.
