Beloved by Toni Morrison
When he got to his house he was too tired to eat the food his sister and nephews had prepared. He sat on the porch in the cold till way past dark and went to his bed only because his sister’s voice calling him was getting nervous. He kept the ribbon; the skin smell nagged him, and his weakened marrow made him dwell on Baby Suggs’ wish to consider what in the world was harmless. He hoped she stuck to blue, yellow, maybe green, and never fixed on red.
Mistaking her, upbraiding her, owing her, now he needed to let her know he knew, and to get right with her and her kin. So, in spite of his exhausted marrow, he kept on through the voices and tried once more to knock at the door of 124. This time, although he couldn’t cipher but one word, he believed he knew who spoke them. The people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons.
What a roaring.
Sethe had gone to bed smiling, eager to lie down and unravel the proof for the conclusion she had already leapt to. Fondle the day and circumstances of Beloved’s arrival and the meaning of that kiss in the Clearing. She slept instead and woke, still smiling, to a snow-bright morning, cold enough to see her breath. She lingered a moment to collect the courage to throw off the blankets and hit a chilly floor. For the first time, she was going to be late for work.
Downstairs she saw the girls sleeping where she’d left them, but back to back now, each wrapped tight in blankets, breathing into their pillows. The pair and a half of skates were lying by the front door, the stockings hung on a nail behind the cooking stove to dry had not.
Sethe looked at Beloved’s face and smiled.
Quietly, carefully she stepped around her to wake the fire. First a bit of paper, then a little kindlin—not too much—just a taste until it was strong enough for more. She fed its dance until it was wild and fast. When she went outside to collect more wood from the shed, she did not notice the man’s frozen footprints. She crunched around to the back, to the cord piled high with snow. After scraping it clean, she filled her arms with as much dry wood as she could. She even looked straight at the shed, smiling, smiling at the things she would not have to remember now. Thinking, She ain’t even mad with me. Not a bit.
Obviously the hand-holding shadows she had seen on the road were not Paul D, Denver and herself, but “us three.” The three holding on to each other skating the night before; the three sipping flavored milk. And since that was so—if her daughter could come back home from the timeless place—certainly her sons could, and would, come back from wherever they had gone to.
Sethe covered her front teeth with her tongue against the cold. Hunched forward by the burden in her arms, she walked back around the house to the porch—not once noticing the frozen tracks she stepped in.
Inside, the girls were still sleeping, although they had changed positions while she was gone, both drawn to the fire. Dumping the armload into the woodbox made them stir but not wake. Sethe started the cooking stove as quietly as she could, reluctant to wake the sisters, happy to have them asleep at her feet while she made breakfast. Too bad she would be late for work—too, too bad. Once in sixteen years? That’s just too bad.
She had beaten two eggs into yesterday’s hominy, formed it into patties and fried them with some ham pieces before Denver woke completely and groaned.
“Back stiff?”
“Ooh yeah.”
“Sleeping on the floor’s supposed to be good for you.”
“Hurts like the devil,” said Denver.
“Could be that fall you took.”
Denver smiled. “That was fun.” She turned to look down at Beloved snoring lightly. “Should I wake her?”
“No, let her rest.”
“She likes to see you off in the morning.”
“I’ll make sure she does,” said Sethe, and thought, Be nice to think first, before I talk to her, let her know I know. Think about all I ain’t got to remember no more. Do like Baby said: Think on it then lay it down—for good. Paul D convinced me there was a world out there and that I could live in it. Should have known better. Did know better. Whatever is going on outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room. This here’s all there is and all there needs to be.
They ate like men, ravenous and intent. Saying little, content with the company of the other and the opportunity to look in her eyes.
When Sethe wrapped her head and bundled up to go to town, it was already midmorning. And when she left the house she neither saw the prints nor heard the voices that ringed 124 like a noose.
Trudging in the ruts left earlier by wheels, Sethe was excited to giddiness by the things she no longer had to remember.
I don’t have to remember nothing. I don’t even have to explain. She understands it all. I can forget how Baby Suggs’ heart collapsed; how we agreed it was consumption without a sign of it in the world. Her eyes when she brought my food, I can forget that, and how she told me that Howard and Buglar were all right but wouldn’t let go each other’s hands. Played that way: stayed that way especially in their sleep. She handed me the food from a basket; things wrapped small enough to get through the bars, whispering news: Mr. Bodwin going to see the judge—in chambers, she kept on saying, in chambers, like I knew what it meant or she did. The Colored Ladies of Delaware, Ohio, had drawn up a petition to keep me from being hanged. That two white preachers had come round and wanted to talk to me, pray for me. That a newspaperman came too. She told me the news and I told her I needed something for the rats. She wanted Denver out and slapped her palms when I wouldn’t let her go. “Where your earrings?” she said. “I’ll hold em for you.” I told her the jailer took them, to protect me from myself. He thought I could do some harm with the wire. Baby Suggs covered her mouth with her hand. “Schoolteacher left town,” she said. “Filed a claim and rode on off. They going to let you out for the burial,” she said, “not the funeral, just the burial,” and they did. The sheriff came with me and looked away when I fed Denver in the wagon. Neither Howard nor Buglar would let me near them, not even to touch their hair. I believe a lot of folks were there, but I just saw the box. Reverend Pike spoke in a real loud voice, but I didn’t catch a word—except the first two, and three months later when Denver was ready for solid food and they let me out for good, I went and got you a gravestone, but I didn’t have money enough for the carving so I exchanged (bartered, you might say) what I did have and I’m sorry to this day I never thought to ask him for the whole thing: all I heard of what Reverend Pike said. Dearly Beloved, which is what you are to me and I don’t have to be sorry about getting only one word, and I don’t have to remember the slaughterhouse and the Saturday girls who worked its yard. I can forget that what I did changed Baby Suggs’ life. No Clearing, no company. Just laundry and shoes. I can forget it all now because as soon as I got the gravestone in place you made your presence known in the house and worried us all to distraction. I didn’t understand it then. I thought you were mad with me. And now I know that if you was, you ain’t now because you came back here to me and I was right all along: there is no world outside my door. I only need to know one thing. How bad is the scar?
As Sethe walked to work, late for the first time in sixteen years and wrapped in a timeless present, Stamp Paid fought fatigue and the habit of a lifetime. Baby Suggs refused to go to the Clearing because she believed they had won; he refused to acknowledge any such victory. Baby had no back door; so he braved the cold and a wall of talk to knock on the one she did have. He clutched the red ribbon in his pocket for strength. Softly at first, then harder. At the last he banged furiously—disbelieving it could happen. That the door of a house with coloredpeople in it did not fly open in his presence. He went to the window and wanted to cry. Sure enough, there they were, not a one of them heading for the door. Worrying his scrap of ribbon to shreds, the old man turned and went down the steps. Now curiosity joined his shame and his debt. Two backs curled away from him as he looked in the window. One had a head he recognized; the other troubled him. He didn’t know her a
After a disagreeable breakfast he went to see Ella and John to find out what they knew. Perhaps there he could find out if, after all these years of clarity, he had misnamed himself and there was yet another debt he owed. Born Joshua, he renamed himself when he handed over his wife to his master’s son. Handed her over in the sense that he did not kill anybody, thereby himself, because his wife demanded he stay alive. Otherwise, she reasoned, where and to whom could she return when the boy was through? With that gift, he decided that he didn’t owe anybody anything. Whatever his obligations were, that act paid them off. He thought it would make him rambunctious, renegade—a drunkard even, the debtlessness, and in a way it did. But there was nothing to do with it. Work well; work poorly. Work a little; work not at all. Make sense; make none. Sleep, wake up; like somebody, dislike others. It didn’t seem much of a way to live and it brought him no satisfaction. So he extended this debtlessness to other people by helping them pay out and off whatever they owed in misery. Beaten runaways? He ferried them and rendered them paid for; gave them their own bill of sale, so to speak. “You paid it; now life owes you.” And the receipt, as it were, was a welcome door that he never had to knock on, like John and Ella’s in front of which he stood and said, “Who in there?” only once and she was pulling on the hinge.
“Where you been keeping yourself? I told John must be cold if Stamp stay inside.”
“Oh, I been out.” He took off his cap and massaged his scalp.
“Out where? Not by here.” Ella hung two suits of underwear on a line behind the stove.
“Was over to Baby Suggs’ this morning.”
“What you want in there?” asked Ella. “Somebody invite you in?”
“That’s Baby’s kin. I don’t need no invite to look after her people.”
“Sth.” Ella was unmoved. She had been Baby Suggs’ friend and Sethe’s too till the rough time. Except for a nod at the carnival, she hadn’t given Sethe the time of day.
“Somebody new in there. A woman. Thought you might know who is she.”
“Ain’t no new Negroes in this town I don’t know about,” she said. “What she look like? You sure that wasn’t Denver?”
“I know Denver. This girl’s narrow.”
“You sure?”
“I know what I see.”
“Might see anything at all at 124.”
“True.”
“Better ask Paul D,” she said.
“Can’t locate him,” said Stamp, which was the truth although his efforts to find Paul D had been feeble. He wasn’t ready to confront the man whose life he had altered with his graveyard information.
“He’s sleeping in the church,” said Ella.
“The church!” Stamp was shocked and very hurt.
“Yeah. Asked Reverend Pike if he could stay in the cellar.”
“It’s cold as charity in there!”
“I expect he knows that.”
“What he do that for?”
“He’s a touch proud, seem like.”
“He don’t have to do that! Any number’ll take him in.”
Ella turned around to look at Stamp Paid. “Can’t nobody read minds long distance. All he have to do is ask somebody.”
“Why? Why he have to ask? Can’t nobody offer? What’s going on? Since when a blackman come to town have to sleep in a cellar like a dog?”
“Unrile yourself, Stamp.”
“Not me. I’m going to stay riled till somebody gets some sense and leastway act like a Christian.”
“It’s only a few days he been there.”
“Shouldn’t be no days! You know all about it and don’t give him a hand? That don’t sound like you, Ella. Me and you been pulling coloredfolk out the water more’n twenty years. Now you tell me you can’t offer a man a bed? A working man, too! A man what can pay his own way.”
“He ask, I give him anything.”
“Why’s that necessary all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know him all that well.”
“You know he’s colored!”
“Stamp, don’t tear me up this morning. I don’t feel like it.”
“It’s her, ain’t it?”
“Her who?”
“Sethe. He took up with her and stayed in there and you don’t want nothing to—”
“Hold on. Don’t jump if you can’t see bottom.”
“Girl, give it up. We been friends too long to act like this.”
“Well, who can tell what all went on in there? Look here, I don’t know who Sethe is or none of her people.”
“What?!”
“All I know is she married Baby Suggs’ boy and I ain’t sure I know that. Where is he, huh? Baby never laid eyes on her till John carried her to the door with a baby I strapped on her chest.”
“I strapped that baby! And you way off the track with that wagon. Her children know who she was even if you don’t.”
“So what? I ain’t saying she wasn’t their ma’ammy, but who’s to say they was Baby Suggs’ grandchildren? How she get on board and her husband didn’t? And tell me this, how she have that baby in the woods by herself? Said a whitewoman come out the trees and helped her. Shoot. You believe that? A whitewoman? Well, I know what kind of white that was.”
“Aw, no, Ella.”
“Anything white floating around in the woods—if it ain’t got a shotgun, it’s something I don’t want no part of!”
“You all was friends.”
“Yeah, till she showed herself.”
“Ella.”
“I ain’t got no friends take a handsaw to their own children.”
“You in deep water, girl.”
“Uh uh. I’m on dry land and I’m going to stay there. You the one wet.”
“What’s any of what you talking got to do with Paul D?”
“What run him off? Tell me that.”
“I run him off.”
“You?”
“I told him about—I showed him the newspaper, about the—what Sethe did. Read it to him. He left that very day.”
“You didn’t tell me that. I thought he knew.”
“He didn’t know nothing. Except her, from when they was at that place Baby Suggs was at.”
“He knew Baby Suggs?”
“Sure he knew her. Her boy Halle too.”
“And left when he found out what Sethe did?”
“Look like he might have a place to stay after all.”
“What you say casts a different light. I thought—”
But Stamp Paid knew what she thought.
“You didn’t come here asking about him,” Ella said. “You came about some new girl.”
“That’s so.”
“Well, Paul D must know who she is. Or what she is.”
“Your mind is loaded with spirits. Everywhere you look you see one.”
“You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.”
He couldn’t deny it. Jesus Christ Himself didn’t, so Stamp ate a piece of Ella’s head cheese to show there were no bad feelings and set out to find Paul D. He found him on the steps of Holy Redeemer, holding his wrists between his knees and looking red-eyed.
Sawyer shouted at her when she entered the kitchen, but she just turned her back and reached for her apron. There was no entry now. No crack or crevice available. She had taken pains to keep them out, but knew full well that at any moment they could rock her, rip her from her moorings, send the birds twittering back into her hair. Drain her mother’s milk, they had already done. Divided her back into plant life—that too. Driven her fat-bellied into the woods—they had done that. All news of them was rot. They buttered Halle’s face; gave Paul D iron to eat; crisped Sixo; hanged her own mother. She didn’t want any more news about whitefolks; didn’t want to know what Ella knew and John and Stamp Paid, about the world done up the way whitefolks loved it. All news of them should have stopped with the birds in her
Once, long ago, she was soft, trusting. She trusted Mrs. Garner and her husband too. She knotted the earrings into her underskirt to take along, not so much to wear but to hold. Earrings that made her believe she could discriminate among them. That for every schoolteacher there would be an Amy; that for every pupil there was a Garner, or Bodwin, or even a sheriff, whose touch at her elbow was gentle and who looked away when she nursed. But she had come to believe every one of Baby Suggs’ last words and buried all recollection of them and luck. Paul D dug it up, gave her back her body, kissed her divided back, stirred her rememory and brought her more news: of clabber, of iron, of roosters’ smiling, but when he heard her news, he counted her feet and didn’t even say goodbye.
“Don’t talk to me, Mr. Sawyer. Don’t say nothing to me this morning.”
“What? What? What? You talking back to me?”
“I’m telling you don’t say nothing to me.”
“You better get them pies made.”
Sethe touched the fruit and picked up the paring knife.
When pie juice hit the bottom of the oven and hissed, Sethe was well into the potato salad. Sawyer came in and said, “Not too sweet. You make it too sweet they don’t eat it.”
“Make it the way I always did.”
“Yeah. Too sweet.”
None of the sausages came back. The cook had a way with them and Sawyer’s Restaurant never had leftover sausage. If Sethe wanted any, she put them aside soon as they were ready. But there was some passable stew. Problem was, all her pies were sold too. Only rice pudding left and half a pan of gingerbread that didn’t come out right. Had she been paying attention instead of daydreaming all morning, she wouldn’t be picking around looking for her dinner like a crab. She couldn’t read clock time very well, but she knew when the hands were closed in prayer at the top of the face she was through for the day. She got a metal-top jar, filled it with stew and wrapped the gingerbread in butcher paper. These she dropped in her outer skirt pockets and began washing up. None of it was anything like what the cook and the two waiters walked off with. Mr. Sawyer included midday dinner in the terms of the job—along with $3.40 a week—and she made him understand from the beginning she would take her dinner home. But matches, sometimes a bit of kerosene, a little salt, butter too—these things she took also, once in a while, and felt ashamed because she could afford to buy them; she just didn’t want the embarrassment of waiting out back of Phelps store with the others till every white in Ohio was served before the keeper turned to the cluster of Negro faces looking through a hole in his back door. She was ashamed, too, because it was stealing and Sixo’s argument on the subject amused her but didn’t change the way she felt; just as it didn’t change schoolteacher’s mind.