Beloved_a novel

by Toni Morrison

  Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle-green sleeves, and thought how little color there was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did. Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn she worked at fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong with that.

  It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it.

  124 was so full of strong feeling perhaps she was oblivious to the loss of anything at all. There was a time when she scanned the fields every morning and every evening for her boys. When she stood at the open window, unmindful of flies, her head cocked to her left shoulder, her eyes searching to the right for them. Cloud shadow on the road, an old woman, a wandering goat untethered and gnawing bramble--each one looked at first like Howard--no, Buglar. Little by little she stopped and their thirteen-year-old faces faded completely into their baby ones, which came to her only in sleep. When her dreams roamed outside 124, anywhere they wished, she saw them sometimes in beautiful trees, their little legs barely visible in the leaves.

  Sometimes they ran along the railroad track laughing, too loud, apparently, to hear her because they never did turn around. When she woke the house crowded in on her: there was the door where the soda crackers were lined up in a row; the white stairs her baby girl loved to climb; the corner where Baby Suggs mended shoes, a pile of which were still in the cold room; the exact place on the stove where Denver burned her fingers. And of course the spite of the house itself. There was no room for any other thing or body until Paul D arrived and broke up the place, making room, shifting it, moving it over to someplace else, then standing in the place he had made.

  So, kneeling in the keeping room the morning after Paul D came, she was distracted by the two orange squares that signaled how barren 124 really was.

  He was responsible for that. Emotions sped to the surface in his company. Things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot. Windows suddenly had view. And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.

  Little rice, little bean,

  No meat in between.

  Hard work ain't easy,

  Dry bread ain't greasy.

  He was up now and singing as he mended things he had broken the day before. Some old pieces of song he'd learned on the prison farm or in the War afterward. Nothing like what they sang at Sweet Home, where yearning fashioned every note.

  The songs he knew from Georgia were flat-headed nails for pounding and pounding and pounding.

  Lay my bead on the railroad line,

  Train come along, pacify my mind.

  If I had my weight in lime,

  I'd whip my captain till he went stone blind.

  Five-cent nickel, Ten-cent dime,

  Busting rocks is busting time.

  But they didn't fit, these songs. They were too loud, had too much power for the little house chores he was engaged in--resetting table legs; glazing.

  He couldn't go back to "Storm upon the Waters" that they sang under the trees of Sweet Home, so he contented himself with mmmmmmmmm, throwing in a line if one occurred to him, and what occurred over and over was "Bare feet and chamomile sap,/ Took off my shoes; took off my hat."

  It was tempting to change the words (Gimme back my shoes; gimme back my hat), because he didn't believe he could live with a woman--any woman--for over two out of three months. That was about as long as he could abide one place. After Delaware and before that Alfred, Georgia, where he slept underground and crawled into sunlight for the sole purpose of breaking rock, walking off when he got ready was the only way he could convince himself that he would no longer have to sleep, pee, eat or swing a sledge hammer in chains.

  But this was not a normal woman in a normal house. As soon as he had stepped through the red light he knew that, compared to 124, the rest of the world was bald. After Alfred he had shut down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing. If he could do those things--with a little work and a little sex thrown in--he asked for no more, for more required him to dwell on Halle's face and Sixo laughing. To recall trembling in a box built into the ground. Grateful for the daylight spent doing mule work in a quarry because he did not tremble when he had a hammer in his hands. The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind.

  By the time he got to Ohio, then to Cincinnati, then to Halle Suggs' mother's house, he thought he had seen and felt it all. Even now as he put back the window frame he had smashed, he could not account for the pleasure in his surprise at seeing Halle's wife alive, barefoot with uncovered hair--walking around the corner of the house with her shoes and stockings in her hands. The closed portion of his head opened like a greased lock.

  "I was thinking of looking for work around here. What you think?"

  "Ain't much. River mostly. And hogs."

  "Well, I never worked on water, but I can pick up anything heavy as me, hogs included."

  "Whitepeople better here than Kentucky but you may have to scramble some."

  "It ain't whether I scramble; it's where. You saying it's all right to scramble here?"

  "Better than all right."

  "Your girl, Denver. Seems to me she's of a different mind."

  "Why you say that?"

  "She's got a waiting way about her. Something she's expecting and it ain't me."

  "I don't know what it could be."

  "Well, whatever it is, she believes I'm interrupting it."

  "Don't worry about her. She's a charmed child. From the beginning."

  "Is that right?"

  "Uh huh. Nothing bad can happen to her. Look at it. Everybody I knew dead or gone or dead and gone. Not her. Not my Denver.

  Even when I was carrying her, when it got clear that I wasn't going to make it--which meant she wasn't going to make it either--she pulled a whitegirl out of the hill. The last thing you'd expect to help.

  And when the schoolteacher found us and came busting in here with the law and a shotgun--"

  "Schoolteacher found you?"

  "Took a while, but he did. Finally."

  "And he didn't take you back?"

  "Oh, no. I wasn't going back there. I don't care who found who.

  Any life but not that one. I went to jail instead. Denver was just a baby so she went right along with me. Rats bit everything in there but her."

  Paul D turned away. He wanted to know more about it, but jail talk put him back in Alfred, Georgia.

  "I need some nails. Anybody around here I can borrow from or should I go to town?"

  "May as well go to town. You'll need other things."

  One night and they were talking like a couple. They had skipped love and promise and went directly to "You saying it's all right to scramble here?"

  To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The "better life" she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.

  The fact that Paul D had come out of "that other one" into her bed was better too; and the notion of a future with him, or for that matter without him, was beginning to stroke her mind. As for Denver, the job Sethe had of keeping her from the past that was still waiting for her was all that mattered.

  PLEASANTLY TROUBLED, Sethe avoided the keeping room and Denver's sidelong looks. As she expected, since life was like that--it didn't do any good. Denver ran a mighty interference and on the third day flat-out asked Paul D how long he was going to hang around.

  The phrase hurt him so much he missed the table. The coffee cup hit the floor and rolled down the sloping boards toward the front door.<
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  "Hang around?" Paul D didn't even look at the mess he had made.

  "Denver! What's got into you?" Sethe looked at her daughter, feeling more embarrassed than angry.

  Paul D scratched the hair on his chin. "Maybe I should make tracks."

  "No!" Sethe was surprised by how loud she said it.

  "He know what he needs," said Denver.

  "Well, you don't," Sethe told her, "and you must not know what you need either. I don't want to hear another word out of you."

  "I just asked if--"

  "Hush! You make tracks. Go somewhere and sit down."

  Denver picked up her plate and left the table but not before adding a chicken back and more bread to the heap she was carrying away.

  Paul D leaned over to wipe the spilled coffee with his blue handkerchief.

  "I'll get that." Sethe jumped up and went to the stove. Behind it various cloths hung, each in some stage of drying. In silence she wiped the floor and retrieved the cup. Then she poured him another cupful, and set it carefully before him. Paul D touched its rim but didn't say anything--as though even "thank you" was an obligation he could not meet and the coffee itself a gift he could not take.

  Sethe resumed her chair and the silence continued. Finally she realized that if it was going to be broken she would have to do it.

  "I didn't train her like that."

  Paul D stroked the rim of the cup.

  "And I'm as surprised by her manners as you are hurt by em."

  Paul D looked at Sethe. "Is there history to her question?"

  "History? What you mean?"

  "I mean, did she have to ask that, or want to ask it, of anybody else before me?"

  Sethe made two fists and placed them on her hips. "You as bad as she is."

  "Come on, Sethe."

  "Oh, I am coming on. I am!"

  "You know what I mean."

  "I do and I don't like it."

  "Jesus," he whispered.

  "Who?" Sethe was getting loud again.

  "Jesus! I said Jesus! All I did was sit down for supper! and I get cussed out twice. Once for being here and once for asking why I was cussed in the first place!"

  "She didn't cuss."

  "No? Felt like it."

  "Look here. I apologize for her. I'm real--"

  "You can't do that. You can't apologize for nobody. She got to do that."

  "Then I'll see that she does." Sethe sighed.

  "What I want to know is, is she asking a question that's on your mind too?"

  "Oh no. No, Paul D. Oh no."

  "Then she's of one mind and you another? If you can call what ever's in her head a mind, that is."

  "Excuse me, but I can't hear a word against her. I'll chastise her.

  You leave her alone."

  Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one. "Why?" he asked her. "Why you think you have to take up for her? Apologize for her? She's grown."

  "I don't care what she is. Grown don't mean nothing to a mother.

  A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing."

  "It means she has to take it if she acts up. You can't protect her every minute. What's going to happen when you die?"

  "Nothing! I'll protect her while I'm live and I'll protect her when I ain't."

  "Oh well, I'm through," he said. "I quit."

  "That's the way it is, Paul D. I can't explain it to you no better than that, but that's the way it is. If I have to choose--well, it's not even a choice."

  "That's the point. The whole point. I'm not asking you to choose.

  Nobody would. I thought--well, I thought you could--there was some space for me."

  "She's asking me."

  "You can't go by that. You got to say it to her. Tell her it's not about choosing somebody over her--it's making space for somebody along with her. You got to say it. And if you say it and mean it, then you also got to know you can't gag me. There's no way I'm going to hurt her or not take care of what she need if I can, but I can't be told to keep my mouth shut if she's acting ugly. You want me here, don't put no gag on me."

  "Maybe I should leave things the way they are," she said.

  "How are they?"

  "We get along."

  "What about inside?"

  "I don't go inside."

  "Sethe, if I'm here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you "fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out. I'm not saying this because I need a place to stay. That's the last thing I need. I told you, I'm a walking man, but I been heading in this direction for seven years.

  Walking all around this place. Upstate, downstate, east, west; I been in territory ain't got no name, never staying nowhere long. But when I got here and sat out there on the porch, waiting for you, well, I knew it wasn't the place I was heading toward; it was you. We can make a life, girl. A life."

  "I don't know. I don't know."

  "Leave it to me. See how it goes. No promises, if you don't want to make any. Just see how it goes. All right?"

  "All right."

  "You willing to leave it to me?"

  "Well--some of it."

  "Some?" he smiled. "Okay. Here's some. There's a carnival in town. Thursday, tomorrow, is for coloreds and I got two dollars.

  Me and you and Denver gonna spend every penny of it. What you say?"

  "No" is what she said. At least what she started out saying (what would her boss say if she took a day off?), but even when she said it she was thinking how much her eyes enjoyed looking in his face.

  The crickets were screaming on Thursday and the sky, stripped of blue, was white hot at eleven in the morning. Sethe was badly dressed for the heat, but this being her first social outing in eighteen years, she felt obliged to wear her one good dress, heavy as it was, and a hat. Certainly a hat. She didn't want to meet Lady Jones or Ella with her head wrapped like she was going to work. The dress, a good-wool castoff, was a Christmas present to Baby Suggs from Miss Bodwin, the whitewoman who loved her. Denver and Paul D fared better in the heat since neither felt the occasion required special clothing. Denver's bonnet knocked against her shoulder blades; Paul D wore his vest open, no jacket and his shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows. They were not holding hands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all three of them were gliding over the dust holding hands. Maybe he was right. A life. Watching their hand holding shadows, she was embarrassed at being dressed for church.

  The others, ahead and behind them, would think she was putting on airs, letting them know that she was different because she lived in a house with two stories; tougher, because she could do and survive things they believed she should neither do nor survive. She was glad Denver had resisted her urgings to dress up--rebraid her hair at least.

  But Denver was not doing anything to make this trip a pleasure. She agreed to go--sullenly--but her attitude was "Go 'head. Try and make me happy." The happy one was Paul D. He said howdy to everybody within twenty feet. Made fun of the weather and what it was doing to him, yelled back at the crows, and was the first to smell the doomed roses. All the time, no matter what they were doing-- whether Denver wiped perspiration from her forehead or stooped to retie her shoes; whether Paul D kicked a stone or reached over to meddle a child's face leaning on its mother's shoulder--all the time the three shadows that shot out of their feet to the left held hands.

  Nobody noticed but Sethe and she stopped looking after she decided that it was a good sign. A life. Could be.

  Up and down the lumberyard fence old roses were dying. The sawyer
who had planted them twelve years ago to give his workplace a friendly feel--something to take the sin out of slicing trees for a living--was amazed by their abundance; how rapidly they crawled all over the stake-and-post fence that separated the lumberyard from the open field next to it where homeless men slept, children ran and, once a year, carnival people pitched tents. The closer the roses got to death, the louder their scent, and everybody who attended the carnival associated it with the stench of the rotten roses. It made them a little dizzy and very thirsty but did nothing to extinguish the eagerness of the coloredpeople filing down the road. Some walked on the grassy shoulders, others dodged the wagons creaking down the road's dusty center. All, like Paul D, were in high spirits, which the smell of dying roses (that Paul D called to everybody's attention) could not dampen. As they pressed to get to the rope entrance they were lit like lamps. Breathless with the excitement of seeing white people loose: doing magic, clowning, without heads or with two heads, twenty feet tall or two feet tall, weighing a ton, completely tattooed, eating glass, swallowing fire, spitting ribbons, twisted into knots, forming pyramids, playing with snakes and beating each other up.

  All of this was advertisement, read by those who could and heard by those who could not, and the fact that none of it was true did not extinguish their appetite a bit. The barker called them and their children names ("Pickaninnies free!") but the food on his vest and the hole in his pants rendered it fairly harmless. In any case it was a small price to pay for the fun they might not ever have again. Two pennies and an insult were well spent if it meant seeing the spectacle of whitefolks making a spectacle of themselves. So, although the carnival was a lot less than mediocre (which is why it agreed to a Colored Thursday), it gave the four hundred black people in its audience thrill upon thrill upon thrill.

  One-Ton Lady spit at them, but her bulk shortened her aim and they got a big kick out of the helpless meanness in her little eyes.

  Arabian Nights Dancer cut her performance to three minutes instead of the usual fifteen she normally did-earning the gratitude of the children, who could hardly wait for Abu Snake Charmer, who followed her.