How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"We could move," she suggested once to her mother-in-law.
"What'd be the point?" asked Baby Suggs. "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief." (1.17-18)
Leave it to Baby Suggs to put everything in perspective. These words remind us that as traumatic as this particular family's history is, they're not alone.
Quote #5
He believed he was having house-fits, the glassy anger men sometimes feel when a woman's house begins to bind them, when they want to yell and break something or at least run off. He knew all about that—felt it lots of times—in the Delaware weaver's house, for instance. But always he associated the house-fit with the woman in it. This nervousness had nothing to do with the woman […] Also in this house-fit there was no anger, no suffocation, no yearning to be elsewhere. He just could not, would not, sleep upstairs or in the rocker or, now, in Baby Suggs' bed. So, he went to the storeroom. (11.14)
Isn't that just another way of rationalizing that a house is a woman's space and that men belong outside of the house? Hasn't Paul D ever heard of women's lib?
Quote #6
A truth that waved like a scarecrow in rye: they were only Sweet Home men at Sweet Home. One step off that ground and they were trespassers among the human race. (13.1)
The men at Sweet Home are treated like men. But what's the point when you can't carry that feeling around past the property grounds? What kind of freedom is that?