Beloved_a novel

by Toni Morrison

  Easily she stepped into the told story that lay before her eyes on the path she followed away from the window. There was only one door to the house and to get to it from the back you had to walk all the way around to the front of 124, past the storeroom, past the cold house, the privy, the shed, on around to the porch. And to get to the part of the story she liked best, she had to start way back: hear the birds in the thick woods, the crunch of leaves underfoot; see her mother making her way up into the hills where no houses were likely to be. How Sethe was walking on two feet meant for standing still. How they were so swollen she could not see her arch or feel her ankles. Her leg shaft ended in a loaf of flesh scalloped by five toenails. But she could not, would not, stop, for when she did the little antelope rammed her with horns and pawed the ground of her womb with impatient hooves. While she was walking, it seemed to graze, quietly--so she walked, on two feet meant, in this sixth month of pregnancy, for standing still. Still, near a kettle; still, at the churn; still, at the tub and ironing board. Milk, sticky and sour on her dress, attracted every small flying thing from gnats to grasshoppers.

  By the time she reached the hill skirt she had long ago stopped waving them off. The clanging in her head, begun as a churchbell heard from a distance, was by then a tight cap of pealing bells around her ears. She sank and had to look down to see whether she was in a hole or kneeling. Nothing was alive but her nipples and the little antelope. Finally, she was horizontal--or must have been because blades of wild onion were scratching her temple and her cheek. Concerned as she was for the life of her children's mother, Sethe told Denver, she remembered thinking: "Well, at least I don't have to take another step." A dying thought if ever there was one, and she waited for the little antelope to protest, and why she thought of an antelope Sethe could not imagine since she had never seen one. She guessed it must have been an invention held on to from before Sweet Home, when she was very young. Of that place where she was born (Carolina maybe? or was it Louisiana?) she remembered only song and dance. Not even her own mother, who was pointed out to her by the eight-year-old child who watched over the young ones--pointed out as the one among many backs turned away from her, stooping in a watery field. Patiently Sethe waited for this particular back to gain the row's end and stand. What she saw was a cloth hat as opposed to a straw one, singularity enough in that world of cooing women each of whom was called Ma'am.

  "Seth--thuh."

  "Ma'am."

  "Hold on to the baby."

  "Yes, Ma'am."

  "Seth--thuh."

  "Ma'am."

  "Get some kindlin in here."

  "Yes, Ma'am."

  Oh but when they sang. And oh but when they danced and sometimes they danced the antelope. The men as well as the ma'ams, one of whom was certainly her own. They shifted shapes and became something other. Some unchained, demanding other whose feet knew her pulse better than she did. Just like this one in her stomach.

  "I believe this baby's ma'am is gonna die in wild onions on the bloody side of the Ohio River." That's what was on her mind and what she told Denver. Her exact words. And it didn't seem such a bad idea, all in all, in view of the step she would not have to take, but the thought of herself stretched out dead while the little antelope lived on--an hour? a day? a day and a night?--in her lifeless body grieved her so she made the groan that made the person walking on a path not ten yards away halt and stand right still. Sethe had not heard the walking, but suddenly she heard the standing still and then she smelled the hair. The voice, saying, "Who's in there?" was all she needed to know that she was about to be discovered by a white boy. That he too had mossy teeth, an appetite. That on a ridge of pine near the Ohio River, trying to get to her three children, one of whom was starving for the food she carried; that after her husband had disappeared; that after her milk had been stolen, her back pulped, her children orphaned, she was not to have an easeful death. No.

  She told Denver that a something came up out of the earth into her--like a freezing, but moving too, like jaws inside. "Look like I was just cold jaws grinding," she said. Suddenly she was eager for his eyes, to bite into them; to gnaw his cheek.

  "I was hungry," she told Denver, "just as hungry as I could be for his eyes. I couldn't wait."

  So she raised up on her elbow and dragged herself, one pull, two, three, four, toward the young white voice talking about "Who that back in there?"

  " 'Come see,' I was thinking. 'Be the last thing you behold,' and sure enough here come the feet so I thought well that's where I'll have to start God do what He would, I'm gonna eat his feet off. I'm laughing now, but it's true. I wasn't just set to do it. I was hungry to do it. Like a snake. All jaws and hungry.

  "It wasn't no whiteboy at all. Was a girl. The raggediest-looking trash you ever saw saying, 'Look there. A nigger. If that don't beat all.' "

  And now the part Denver loved the best: Her name was Amy and she needed beef and pot liquor like nobody in this world. Arms like cane stalks and enough hair for four or five heads. Slow-moving eyes. She didn't look at anything quick.

  Talked so much it wasn't clear how she could breathe at the same time. And those cane-stalk arms, as it turned out, were as strong as iron.

  "You 'bout the scariest-looking something I ever seen. What you doing back up in here?"

  Down in the grass, like the snake she believed she was, Sethe opened her mouth, and instead of fangs and a split tongue, out shot the truth.

  "Running," Sethe told her. It was the first word she had spoken all day and it came out thick because of her tender tongue.

  "Them the feet you running on? My Jesus my." She squatted down and stared at Sethe's feet. "You got anything on you, gal, pass for food?"

  "No." Sethe tried to shift to a sitting position but couldn t.

  "I like to die I'm so hungry." The girl moved her eyes slowly, examining the greenery around her. "Thought there'd be huckleberries.

  Look like it. That's why I come up in here. Didn't expect to find no nigger woman. If they was any, birds ate em. You like huckleberries?"

  "I'm having a baby, miss."

  Amy looked at her. "That mean you don't have no appetite? Well I got to eat me something."

  Combing her hair with her fingers, she carefully surveyed the landscape once more. Satisfied nothing edible was around, she stood up to go and Sethe's heart stood up too at the thought of being left alone in the grass without a fang in her head.

  "Where you on your way to, miss?"

  She turned and looked at Sethe with freshly lit eyes. "Boston. Get me some velvet. It's a store there called Wilson. I seen the pictures of it and they have the prettiest velvet. They don't believe I'm a get it, but I am."

  Sethe nodded and shifted her elbow. "Your ma'am know you on the lookout for velvet?"

  The girl shook her hair out of her face. "My mama worked for these here people to pay for her passage. But then she had me and since she died right after, well, they said I had to work for em to pay it off. I did, but now I want me some velvet."

  They did not look directly at each other, not straight into the eyes anyway. Yet they slipped effortlessly into yard chat about nothing in particular--except one lay on the ground.

  "Boston," said Sethe. "Is that far?"

  "Ooooh, yeah. A hundred miles. Maybe more."

  "Must be velvet closer by."

  "Not like in Boston. Boston got the best. Be so pretty on me.

  You ever touch it?"

  "No, miss. I never touched no velvet." Sethe didn't know if it was the voice, or Boston or velvet, but while the whitegirl talked, the baby slept. Not one butt or kick, so she guessed her luck had turned.

  "Ever see any?" she asked Sethe. "I bet you never even seen any."

  "If I did I didn't know it. What's it like, velvet?"

  Amy dragged her eyes over Sethe's face as though she would never give out so confidential a piece of information as that to a perfect stranger.

  "What they call you?" she asked.

 
However far she was from Sweet Home, there was no point in giving out her real name to the first person she saw. "Lu," said Sethe.

  "They call me Lu."

  "Well, Lu, velvet is like the world was just born. Clean and new and so smooth. The velvet I seen was brown, but in Boston they got all colors. Carmine. That means red but when you talk about velvet you got to say 'carmine.' " She raised her eyes to the sky and then, as though she had wasted enough time away from Boston, she moved off saying, "I gotta go."

  Picking her way through the brush she hollered back to Sethe, "What you gonna do, just lay there and foal?"

  "I can't get up from here," said Sethe.

  "What?" She stopped and turned to hear.

  "I said I can't get up."

  Amy drew her arm across her nose and came slowly back to where Sethe lay. "It's a house back yonder," she said.

  "A house?"

  "Mmmmm. I passed it. Ain't no regular house with people in it though. A lean-to, kinda."

  "How far?"

  "Make a difference, does it? You stay the night here snake get you."

  "Well he may as well come on. I can't stand up let alone walk and God help me, miss, I can't crawl."

  "Sure you can, Lu. Come on," said Amy and, with a toss of hair enough for five heads, she moved toward the path.

  So she crawled and Amy walked alongside her, and when Sethe needed to rest, Amy stopped too and talked some more about Boston and velvet and good things to eat. The sound of that voice, like a sixteen-year-old boy's, going on and on and on, kept the little antelope quiet and grazing. During the whole hateful crawl to the lean to, it never bucked once.

  Nothing of Sethe's was intact by the time they reached it except the cloth that covered her hair. Below her bloody knees, there was no feeling at all; her chest was two cushions of pins. It was the voice full of velvet and Boston and good things to eat that urged her along and made her think that maybe she wasn't, after all, just a crawling graveyard for a six-month baby's last hours.

  The lean-to was full of leaves, which Amy pushed into a pile for Sethe to lie on. Then she gathered rocks, covered them with more leaves and made Sethe put her feet on them, saying: "I know a woman had her feet cut off they was so swole." And she made sawing gestures with the blade of her hand across Sethe's ankles. "Zzz Zzz Zzz Zzz."

  "I used to be a good size. Nice arms and everything. Wouldn't think it, would you? That was before they put me in the root cellar.

  I was fishing off the Beaver once. Catfish in Beaver River sweet as chicken. Well I was just fishing there and a nigger floated right by me. I don't like drowned people, you? Your feet remind me of him.

  All swole like."

  Then she did the magic: lifted Sethe's feet and legs and massaged them until she cried salt tears.

  "It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "Anything dead coming back to life hurts."

  A truth for all times, thought Denver. Maybe the white dress holding its arm around her mother's waist was in pain. If so, it could mean the baby ghost had plans. When she opened the door, Sethe was just leaving the keeping room.

  "I saw a white dress holding on to you," Denver said.

  "White? Maybe it was my bedding dress. Describe it to me."

  "Had a high neck. Whole mess of buttons coming down the back."

  "Buttons. Well, that lets out my bedding dress. I never had a button on nothing."

  "Did Grandma Baby?"

  Sethe shook her head. "She couldn't handle them. Even on her shoes. What else?"

  "A bunch at the back. On the sit-down part."

  "A bustle? It had a bustle?"

  "I don't know what it's called."

  "Sort of gathered-like? Below the waist in the back?"

  "Um hm."

  "A rich lady's dress. Silk?"

  "Cotton, look like."

  "Lisle probably. White cotton lisle. You say it was holding on to me. How?"

  "Like you. It looked just like you. Kneeling next to you while you were praying. Had its arm around your waist."

  "Well, I'll be."

  "What were you praying for, Ma'am?"

  "Not for anything. I don't pray anymore. I just talk."

  "What were you talking about?"

  "You won't understand, baby."

  "Yes, I will."

  "I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it.

  Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."

  "Can other people see it?" asked Denver.

  "Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear.

  And you think it's you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.

  Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if the whole farm--every tree and grass blade of it dies.

  The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there--you who never was there--if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can't never go there. Never. Because even though it's all over--over and done with--it's going to always be there waiting for you. That's how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what."

  Denver picked at her fingernails. "If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies."

  Sethe looked right in Denver's face. "Nothing ever does," she said.

  "You never told me all what happened. Just that they whipped you and you run off, pregnant. With me."

  "Nothing to tell except schoolteacher. He was a little man. Short.

  Always wore a collar, even in the fields. A schoolteacher, she said.

  That made her feel good that her husband's sister's husband had book learning and was willing to come farm Sweet Home after Mr.

  Garner passed. The men could have done it, even with Paul F sold.

  But it was like Halle said. She didn't want to be the only white person on the farm and a woman too. So she was satisfied when the schoolteacher agreed to come. He brought two boys with him. Sons or nephews. I don't know. They called him Onka and had pretty man ners, all of em. Talked soft and spit in handkerchiefs. Gentle in a lot of ways. You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face. A pretty good farmer, Halle said. Not strong as Mr. Garner but smart enough. He liked the ink I made. It was her recipe, but he preferred how I mixed it and it was important to him because at night he sat down to write in his book. It was a book about us but we didn't know that right away. We just thought it was his manner to ask us questions. He commenced to carry round a notebook and write down what we said. I still think it was them questions that tore Sixo up. Tore him up for all time."

  She stopped.

  Denver knew that her mother was through with it--for now anyway. The single slow blink of her eyes; the bottom lip sliding up slowly to cover the top; and then a nostril sigh, like the snuff of a candle flame--signs that Sethe had reached the point beyond which she would not go.

  "Well, I think the baby got plans," said Denver.

  "What plans?"

  "I don't know, but the dress holding on to you got to mean something."

  "Maybe," said Sethe. "Maybe it does have plans."

  Whatever they were or might have been, Paul D messed them up for good. With a table and a loud male voice he had rid 124 of its claim to local fame. Denver had taught herself to take pride in the condemnation Negroes heaped on them; the assumption that the
haunting was done by an evil thing looking for more. None of them knew the downright pleasure of enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things. Her brothers had known, but it scared them; Grandma Baby knew, but it saddened her. None could appreciate the safety of ghost company. Even Sethe didn't love it.

  She just took it for granted--like a sudden change in the weather.

  But it was gone now. Whooshed away in the blast of a hazelnut man's shout, leaving Denver's world flat, mostly, with the exception of an emerald closet standing seven feet high in the woods. Her mother had secrets--things she wouldn't tell; things she halfway told.

  Well, Denver had them too. And hers were sweet--sweet as lily-of-the-valley cologne.

  Sethe had given little thought to the white dress until Paul D came, and then she remembered Denver's interpretation: plans. The morning after the first night with Paul D, Sethe smiled just thinking about what the word could mean. It was a luxury she had not had in eighteen years and only that once. Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible. The one set of plans she had made--getting away from Sweet Home--went awry so completely she never dared life by making more.

  Yet the morning she woke up next to Paul D, the word her daughter had used a few years ago did cross her mind and she thought about what Denver had seen kneeling next to her, and thought also of the temptation to trust and remember that gripped her as she stood before the cooking stove in his arms. Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

  She couldn't think clearly, lying next to him listening to his breathing, so carefully, carefully, she had left the bed.

  Kneeling in the keeping room where she usually went to talk-think it was clear why Baby Suggs was so starved for color. There wasn't any except for two orange squares in a quilt that made the absence shout. The walls of the room were slate-colored, the floor earth-brown, the wooden dresser the color of itself, curtains white, and the dominating feature, the quilt over an iron cot, was made up of scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool--the full range of the dark and the muted that thrift and modesty allowed. In that sober field, two patches of orange looked wild--like life in the raw.