Beloved_a novel

by Toni Morrison

  A meal maybe, where me and Halle and all the Sweet Home men sat down and ate something special. Invite some of the other colored people from over by Covington or High Trees--those places Sixo used to sneak off to. But it wasn't going to be nothing. They said it was all right for us to be husband and wife and that was it. All of it.

  "Well, I made up my mind to have at the least a dress that wasn't the sacking I worked in. So I took to stealing fabric, and wound up with a dress you wouldn't believe. The top was from two pillow cases in her mending basket. The front of the skirt was a dresser scarf a candle fell on and burnt a hole in, and one of her old sashes we used to test the flatiron on. Now the back was a problem for the longest time. Seem like I couldn't find a thing that wouldn't be missed right away. Because I had to take it apart afterwards and put all the pieces back where they were. Now Halle was patient, waiting for me to finish it. He knew I wouldn't go ahead without having it.

  Finally I took the mosquito netting from a nail out the barn. We used it to strain jelly through. I washed it and soaked it best I could and tacked it on for the back of the skirt. And there I was, in the worst-looking gown you could imagine. Only my wool shawl kept me from looking like a haint peddling. I wasn't but fourteen years old, so I reckon that's why I was so proud of myself.

  "Anyhow, Mrs. Garner must have seen me in it. I thought I was stealing smart, and she knew everything I did. Even our honeymoon: going down to the cornfield with Halle. That's where we went first.

  A Saturday afternoon it was. He begged sick so he wouldn't have to go work in town that day. Usually he worked Saturdays and Sundays to pay off Baby Suggs' freedom. But he begged sick and I put on my dress and we walked into the corn holding hands. I can still smell the ears roasting yonder where the Pauls and Sixo was. Next day Mrs. Garner crooked her finger at me and took me upstairs to her bedroom. She opened up a wooden box and took out a pair of crystal earrings. She said, 'I want you to have these, Sethe.' I said, 'Yes, ma'am.'

  'Are your ears pierced?' she said. I said, 'No, ma'am.'

  'Well do it,' she said, 'so you can wear them. I want you to have them and I want you and Halle to be happy.' I thanked her but I never did put them on till I got away from there. One day after I walked into this here house Baby Suggs unknotted my underskirt and took em out. I sat right here by the stove with Denver in my arms and let her punch holes in my ears for to wear them."

  "I never saw you in no earrings," said Denver. "Where are they now?"

  "Gone," said Sethe. "Long gone," and she wouldn't say another word. Until the next time when all three of them ran through the wind back into the house with rainsoaked sheets and petticoats.

  Panting, laughing, they draped the laundry over the chairs and table.

  Beloved filled herself with water from the bucket and watched while Sethe rubbed Denver's hair with a piece of toweling.

  "Maybe we should unbraid it?" asked Sethe.

  "Oh uh. Tomorrow." Denver crouched forward at the thought of a fine-tooth comb pulling her hair.

  "Today is always here," said Sethe. "Tomorrow, never."

  "It hurts," Denver said.

  "Comb it every day, it won't."

  "Ouch."

  "Your woman she never fix up your hair?" Beloved asked.

  Sethe and Denver looked up at her. After four weeks they still had not got used to the gravelly voice and the song that seemed to lie in it. Just outside music it lay, with a cadence not like theirs.

  "Your woman she never fix up your hair?" was clearly a question for sethe, since that's who she was looking at.

  "My woman? You mean my mother? If she did, I don't remember.

  I didn't see her but a few times out in the fields and once when she was working indigo. By the time I woke up in the morning, she was in line. If the moon was bright they worked by its light. Sunday she slept like a stick. She must of nursed me two or three weeks--that's the way the others did. Then she went back in rice and I sucked from another woman whose job it was. So to answer you, no. I reckon not. She never fixed my hair nor nothing. She didn't even sleep in the same cabin most nights I remember. Too far from the line-up, I guess. One thing she did do. She picked me up and carried me behind the smokehouse. Back there she opened up her dress front and lifted her breast and pointed under it. Right on her rib was a circle and a cross burnt right in the skin. She said, 'This is your ma'am. This,' and she pointed. 'I am the only one got this mark now. The rest dead. If something happens to me and you can't tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark.' Scared me so. All I could think of was how important this was and how I needed to have something important to say back, but I couldn't think of anything so I just said what I thought. 'Yes, Ma'am,' I said. 'But how will you know me?

  How will you know me? Mark me, too,' I said. 'Mark the mark on me too.'" Sethe chuckled.

  "Did she?" asked Denver.

  "She slapped my face."

  "What for?"

  "I didn't understand it then. Not till I had a mark of my own."

  "What happened to her?"

  "Hung. By the time they cut her down nobody could tell whether she had a circle and a cross or not, least of all me and I did look."

  Sethe gathered hair from the comb and leaning back tossed it into the fire. It exploded into stars and the smell infuriated them. "Oh, my Jesus," she said and stood up so suddenly the comb she had parked in Denver's hair fell to the floor.

  "Ma'am? What's the matter with you, Ma'am?"

  Sethe walked over to a chair, lifted a sheet and stretched it as wide as her arms would go. Then she folded, refolded and double folded it. She took another. Neither was completely dry but the folding felt too fine to stop. She had to do something with her hands because she was remembering something she had forgotten she knew.

  Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit in her mind right behind the slap on her face and the circled cross.

  "Why they hang your ma'am?" Denver asked. This was the first time she had heard anything about her mother's mother. Baby Suggs was the only grandmother she knew.

  "I never found out. It was a lot of them," she said, but what was getting clear and clearer as she folded and refolded damp laundry was the woman called Nan who took her hand and yanked her away from the pile before she could make out the mark. Nan was the one she knew best, who was around all day, who nursed babies, cooked, had one good arm and half of another. And who used different words.

  Words Sethe understood then but could neither recall nor repeat now. She believed that must be why she remembered so little before Sweet Home except singing and dancing and how crowded it was.

  What Nan told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma'am spoke, and which would never come back. But the message--that was and had been there all along. Holding the damp white sheets against her chest, she was picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood. Nighttime.

  Nan holding her with her good arm, waving the stump of the other in the air. "Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe," and she did that. She told Sethe that her mother and Nan were together from the sea. Both were taken up many times by the crew. "She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man.

  She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe."

  As small girl Sethe, she was unimpressed. As grown-up woman Sethe she was angry, but not certain at what. A mighty wish for Baby Suggs broke over her like surf. In the quiet following its splash, Sethe looked at the two girls sitting by the stove: her sickly, shallow-minded boarder, her irritable, lonely daughter. They seemed little and far away.

  "Paul D be here in a minute," she said.

  Denver sighed with relief. For a minute there, while her mother stood folding the wash lost in thought, she clamp
ed her teeth and prayed it would stop. Denver hated the stories her mother told that did not concern herself, which is why Amy was all she ever asked about. The rest was a gleaming, powerful world made more so by Denver's absence from it. Not being in it, she hated it and wanted Beloved to hate it too, although there was no chance of that at all.

  Beloved took every opportunity to ask some funny question and get Sethe going. Denver noticed how greedy she was to hear Sethe talk.

  Now she noticed something more. The questions Beloved asked: "Where your diamonds?"

  "Your woman she never fix up your hair?"

  And most perplexing: Tell me your earrings.

  How did she know? strawberry plants did before they shot out their thin vines: the quality of the green changed. Then the vine threads came, then the buds. By the time the white petals died and the mint-colored berry poked out, the leaf shine was gilded fight and waxy. That's how Beloved looked-- gilded and shining. Paul D took to having Sethe on waking, so that later, when he went down the white stairs where she made bread under Beloved's gaze, his head was clear.

  In the evening when he came home and the three of them were all there fixing the supper table, her shine was so pronounced he wondered why Denver and Sethe didn't see it. Or maybe they did.

  Certainly women could tell, as men could, when one of their number was aroused. Paul D looked carefully at Beloved to see if she was aware of it but she paid him no attention at all--frequently not even answering a direct question put to her. She would look at him and not open her mouth. Five weeks she had been with them, and they didn't know any more about her than they did when they found her asleep on the stump.

  They were seated at the table Paul D had broken the day he arrived at 124. Its mended legs stronger than before. The cabbage was all gone and the shiny ankle bones of smoked pork were pushed in a heap on their plates. Sethe was dishing up bread pudding, murmuring her hopes for it, apologizing in advance the way veteran cooks always do, when something in Beloved's face, some petlike adoration that took hold of her as she looked at Sethe, made Paul D speak.

  "Ain't you got no brothers or sisters?"

  Beloved diddled her spoon but did not look at him. "I don't have nobody."

  "What was you looking for when you came here?" he asked her.

  "This place. I was looking for this place I could be in."

  "Somebody tell you about this house?"

  "She told me. When I was at the bridge, she told me."

  "Must be somebody from the old days," Sethe said. The days when 124 was a way station where messages came and then their senders. Where bits of news soaked like dried beans in spring water--until they were soft enough to digest.

  "How'd you come? Who brought you?"

  Now she looked steadily at him, but did not answer.

  He could feel both Sethe and Denver pulling in, holding their stomach muscles, sending out sticky spiderwebs to touch one another.

  He decided to force it anyway.

  "I asked you who brought you here?"

  "I walked here," she said. "A long, long, long, long way. Nobody bring me. Nobody help me."

  "You had new shoes. If you walked so long why don't your shoes show it?"

  "Paul D, stop picking on her."

  "I want to know," he said, holding the knife handle in his fist like a pole.

  "I take the shoes! I take the dress! The shoe strings don't fix!" she shouted and gave him a look so malevolent Denver touched her arm.

  "I'll teach you," said Denver, "how to tie your shoes," and got a smile from Beloved as a reward.

  Paul D had the feeling a large, silver fish had slipped from his hands the minute he grabbed hold of its tail. That it was streaming back off into dark water now, gone but for the glistening marking its route. But if her shining was not for him, who then? He had never known a woman who lit up for nobody in particular, who just did it as a general announcement. Always, in his experience, the light appeared when there was focus. Like the Thirty-Mile Woman, dulled to smoke while he waited with her in the ditch, and starlight when Sixo got there. He never knew himself to mistake it. It was there the instant he looked at Sethe's wet legs, otherwise he never would have been bold enough to enclose her in his arms that day and whisper into her back.

  This girl Beloved, homeless and without people, beat all, though he couldn't say exactly why, considering the coloredpeople he had run into during the last twenty years. During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; who, like him, stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, paterollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers. Once he met a Negro about fourteen years old who lived by himself in the woods and said he couldn't remember living anywhere else. He saw a witless coloredwoman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies.

  Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on. Only once had it been possible for him to stay in one spot--with a woman, or a family--for longer than a few months. That once was almost two years with a weaver lady in Delaware, the meanest place for Negroes he had ever seen outside Pulaski County, Kentucky, and of course the prison camp in Georgia.

  From all those Negroes, Beloved was different. Her shining, her new shoes. It bothered him. Maybe it was just the fact that he didn't bother her. Or it could be timing. She had appeared and been taken in on the very day Sethe and he had patched up their quarrel, gone out in public and had a right good time--like a family. Denver had come around, so to speak; Sethe was laughing; he had a promise of steady work, 124 was cleared up from spirits. It had begun to look like a life. And damn! a water-drinking woman fell sick, got took in, healed, and hadn't moved a peg since.

  He wanted her out, but Sethe had let her in and he couldn't put her out of a house that wasn't his. It was one thing to beat up a ghost, quite another to throw a helpless coloredgirl out in territory infected by the Klan. Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will.

  Sitting at table, chewing on his after-supper broom straw, Paul D decided to place her. Consult with the Negroes in town and find her her own place.

  No sooner did he have the thought than Beloved strangled on one of the raisins she had picked out of the bread pudding. She fell backward and off the chair and thrashed around holding her throat.

  Sethe knocked her on the back while Denver pried her hands away from her neck. Beloved, on her hands and knees, vomited up her food and struggled for breath.

  When she was quiet and Denver had wiped up the mess, she said, "Go to sleep now."

  "Come in my room," said Denver. "I can watch out for you up there."

  No moment could have been better. Denver had worried herself sick trying to think of a way to get Beloved to share her room. It was hard sleeping above her, wondering if she was going to be sick again, fall asleep and not wake, or (God, please don't) get up and wander out of the yard just the way she wandered in. They could have their talks easier there: at night when Sethe and Paul D were asleep; or in the daytime before either came home. Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.

  When the girls left, Sethe began to clear the table. She stacked the plates near a basin of water.

  "What is it about her vex you so?"

  Paul D frowned, but said nothing.

  "We had one good fight about Denver. Do we need one about her too?" asked Sethe.

  "I just don't understand what the hold is. It's clear why she holds on to you, but just can't see why you holding on to her."

  Sethe turned away from the plates toward him. "what you care who's holding on to who? Feeding her is no trouble. I pick up a little extra from the restaurant is all. And she's nice girl compan
y for Denver. You know that and I know you know it, so what is it got your teeth on edge?"

  "I can't place it. It's a feeling in me."

  "Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a coloredwoman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that."

  "I know every bit of that, Sethe. I wasn't born yesterday and I never mistreated a woman in my life."

  "That makes one in the world," Sethe answered.

  "Not two?"

  "No. Not two."

  "What Halle ever do to you? Halle stood by you. He never left you."

  "What'd he leave then if not me?"

  "I don't know, but it wasn't you. That's a fact."

  "Then he did worse; he left his children."

  "You don't know that."

  "He wasn't there. He wasn't where he said he would be."

  "He was there."

  "Then why didn't he show himself? Why did I have to pack my babies off and stay behind to look for him?"

  "He couldn't get out the loft."

  "Loft? What loft?"

  "The one over your head. In the barn."

  Slowly, slowly, taking all the time allowed, Sethe moved toward the table.

  "He saw?"

  "He saw."

  "He told you?"

  "You told me."

  "What?"

  "The day I came in here. You said they stole your milk. I never knew what it was that messed him up. That was it, I guess. All I knew was that something broke him. Not a one of them years of Saturdays, Sundays and nighttime extra never touched him. But whatever he saw go on in that barn that day broke him like a twig."