Chapter 53
I AM BE LOV ED and she is mine. Sethe is the one that picked flowers, yellow flowers in theplace before the crouching. Took them away from their green leaves. They are on the quilt nowwhere we sleep. She was about to smile at me when the men without skin came and took us up intothe sunlight with the dead and shoved them into the sea. Sethe went into the sea. She went there.
They did not push her. She went there. She was getting ready to smile at me and when she saw thedead people pushed into the sea she went also and left me there with no face or hers. Sethe is theface I found and lost in the water under the bridge. When I went in, I saw her face coming to meand it was my face too. I wanted to join. I tried to join, but she went up into the pieces of light atthe top of the water. I lost her again, but I found the house she whispered to me and there she was,smiling at last. It's good, but I cannot lose her again. All I want to know is why did she go in thewater in the place where we crouched? Why did she do that when she was just about to smile atme? I wanted to join her in the sea but I could not move; I wanted to help her when she waspicking the flowers, but the clouds of gunsmoke blinded me and I lost her. Three times I lost her:
once with the flowers because of the noisy clouds of smoke; once when she went into the seainstead of smiling at me; once under the bridge when I went in to j oin her and she came towardme but did not smile. She whispered to me, chewed me, and swam away. Now I have found her inthis house. She smiles at me and it is my own face smiling. I will not lose her again. She is mine.
Tell me the truth. Didn't you come from the other side? Yes. I was on the other side. You cameback because of me? Yes. You rememory me? Yes. I remember you. You never forgot me? Yourface is mine. Do you forgive me? Will you stay? You safe here now. Where are the men withoutskin? Out there. Way off. Can they get in here? No. They tried that once, but I stopped them. Theywon't ever come back. One of them was in the house I was in. He hurt me. They can't hurt us nomore. Where are your earrings? They took them from me. The men without skin took them? Yes. I was going to help you but the clouds got in the way. There're no clouds here. If they put an ironcircle around your neck I will bite it away. Beloved. I will make you a round basket. You're back.
You're back. Will we smile at me? Can't you see I'm smiling? I love your face. We played by thecreek. I was there in the water. In the quiet time, we played. The clouds were noisy and in the way.
When I needed you, you came to be with me. I needed her face to smile. I could only hearbreathing.
The breathing is gone; only the teeth are left.
She said you wouldn't hurt me.
She hurt me.
I will protect you.
I want her face.
Don't love her too much.
I am loving her too much.
Watch out for her; she can give you dreams.
She chews and swallows.
Don't fall asleep when she braids your hair.
She is the laugh; I am the laughter.
I watch the house; I watch the yard.
She left me.
Daddy is coming for us.
A hot thing.
BelovedYou are my sisterYou are my daughterYou are my face; you are meI have found you again; you have come back to meYou are my BelovedYou are mineYou are mineYou are mineI have your milkI have your smileI will take care of youYou are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me who am you?
I will never leave you againDon't ever leave me againYou will never leave me againYou went in the waterI drank your bloodI brought your milkYou forgot to smileI loved youYou hurt meYou came back to meYou left meI waited for youYou are mineYou are mineYou are mine
Chapter 54
IT WAS a tiny church no bigger than a rich man's parlor. The pews had no backs, and since thecongregation was also the choir, it didn't need a stall. Certain members had been assigned theconstruction of a platform to raise the preacher a few inches above his congregation, but it was aless than urgent task, since the major elevation, a white oak cross, had already taken place. Beforeit was the Church of the Holy Redeemer, it was a dry-goods shop that had no use for sidewindows, just front ones for display. These were papered over while members considered whetherto paint or curtain them — how to have privacy without losing the little light that might want toshine on them. In the summer the doors were left open for ventilation. In winter an iron stove inthe aisle did what it could. At the front of the church was a sturdy porch where customers used tosit, and children laughed at the boy who got his head stuck between the railings. On a sunny andwindless day in January it was actually warmer out there than inside, if the iron stove was cold.
The damp cellar was fairly warm, but there was no light lighting the pallet or the washbasin or thenail from which a man's clothes could be hung. And a oil lamp in a cellar was sad, so Paul D sat onthe porch steps and got additional warmth from a bottle of liquor jammed in his coat pocket.
Warmth and red eyes. He held his wrist between his knees, not to keep his hands still but becausehe had nothing else to hold on to. His tobacco tin, blown open, spilled contents that floated freelyand made him their play and prey.
He couldn't figure out why it took so long. He may as well have jumped in the fire with Sixo andthey both could have had a good laugh. Surrender was bound to come anyway, why not meet itwith a laugh, shouting Seven-O! Why not? Why the delay? He had already seen his brother wavegoodbye from the back of a dray, fried chicken in his pocket, tears in his eyes. Mother. Father.
Didn't remember the one. Never saw the other. He was the youngest of three half-brothers (samemother — different fathers) sold to Garner and kept there, forbidden to leave the farm, for twentyyears. Once, in Maryland, he met four families of slaves who had all been together for a hundredyears: great-grands, grands, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, children. Half white, partwhite, all black, mixed with Indian. He watched them with awe and envy, and each time hediscovered large families of black people he made them identify over and over who each was, whatrelation, who, in fact, belonged to who.
"That there's my auntie. This here's her boy. Yonder is my pap's cousin. My ma'am was marriedtwice — this my half-sister and these her two children. Now, my wife..."Nothing like that had ever been his and growing up at Sweet Home he didn't miss it. He had hisbrothers, two friends, Baby Suggs in the kitchen, a boss who showed them how to shoot andlistened to what they had to say. A mistress who made their soap and never raised her voice. Fortwenty years they had all lived in that cradle, until Baby left, Sethe came, and Halle took her. Hemade a family with her, and Sixo was hell-bent to make one with the Thirty-Mile Woman. WhenPaul D waved goodbye to his oldest brother, the boss was dead, the mistress nervous and the cradle already split. Sixo said the doctor made Mrs. Garner sick. Said he was giving her to drink whatstallions got when they broke a leg and no gunpowder could be spared, and had it not been forschoolteacher's new rules, he would have told her so. They laughed at him. Sixo had a knowingtale about everything. Including Mr. Garner's stroke, which he said was a shot in his ear put thereby a jealous neighbor.
"where's the blood?" they asked him.
There was no blood. Mr. Garner came home bent over his mare's neck, sweating and blue-white.
Not a drop of blood. Sixo grunted, the only one of them not sorry to see him go. Later, however, hewas mighty sorry; they all were.
"Why she call on him?" Paul D asked. "Why she need the schoolteacher?""She need somebody can figure," said Halle.
"You can do figures.""Not like that.""No, man," said Sixo. "She need another white on the place.""What for?""What you think? What you think?"Well, that's the way it was. Nobody counted on Garner dying. Nobody thought he could. How'bout that? Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces.
Now ain't that slavery or what is it? At the peak of his strength, taller than tall men, and strongerthan most, they clipped him, Paul D. First his shotgun, then his thoughts, for schoolteacher didn'ttake advice from Negroes. The information they offered he called backtalk and developed a varietyof corrections (which he recorded in his notebook) to reeducate them. He complained they ate toomuch, rested too much, talked too much, which was certainly true compared to him, becauseschoolteacher ate little, spoke less and rested not at all. Once he saw them playing — a pitchinggame — and his look of deeply felt hurt was enough to make Paul D blink. He was as hard on hispupils as he was on them — except for the corrections. For years Paul D believed schoolteacherbroke into children what Garner had raised into men. And it was that that made them run off. Now,plagued by the contents of his tobacco tin, he wondered how much difference there really wasbetween before schoolteacher and after. Garner called and announced them men — but only onSweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not? That wasthe wonder of Sixo, and even Halle; it was always clear to Paul D that those two were menwhether Garner said so or not. It troubled him that, concerning his own manhood, he could notsatisfy himself on that point. Oh, he did manly things, but was that Garner's gift or his own will?
What would he have been anyway — before Sweet Home — without Garner? In Sixo's country, or his mother's? Or, God help him, on the boat? Did a whiteman saying it make it so? Suppose Garnerwoke up one morning and changed his mind? Took the word away. Would they have run then?
And if he didn't, would the Pauls have stayed there all their lives? Why did the brothers need theone whole night to decide? To discuss whether they would join Sixo and Halle. Because they hadbeen isolated in a wonderful lie, dismissing Halle's and Baby Suggs' life before Sweet Home asbad luck. Ignorant of or amused by Sixo's dark stories. Protected and convinced they were special.
Never suspecting the problem of Alfred, Georgia; being so in love with the look of the world,putting up with anything and everything, just to stay alive in a place where a moon he had no rightto was nevertheless there. Loving small and in secret. His little love was a tree, of course, but notlike Brother — old, wide and beckoning.
In Alfred, Georgia, there was an aspen too young to call sapling.
Chapter 55
Just a shoot no taller than his waist. The kind of thing a man would cut to whip his horse. Song-murder and the aspen. He stayed alive to sing songs that murdered life, and watched an aspen thatconfirmed it, and never for a minute did he believe he could escape. Until it rained. Afterward,after the Cherokee pointed and sent him running toward blossoms, he wanted simply to move, go,pick up one day and be somewhere else the next. Resigned to life without aunts, cousins, children.
Even a woman, until Sethe.
And then she moved him. Just when doubt, regret and every single unasked question was packedaway, long after he believed he had willed himself into being, at the very time and place he wantedto take root — she moved him. From room to room. Like a rag doll. Sitting on the porch of a dry-goods church, a little bit drunk and nothing much to do, he could have these thoughts. Slow, what-if thoughts that cut deep but struck nothing solid a man could hold on to. So he held his wrists.
Passing by that woman's life, getting in it and letting it get in him had set him up for this fall.
Wanting to live out his life with a whole woman was new, and losing the feeling of it made himwant to cry and think deep thoughts that struck nothing solid. When he was drifting, thinking onlyabout the next meal and night's sleep, when everything was packed tight in his chest, he had nosense of failure, of things not working out. Anything that worked at all worked out. Now hewondered what-all went wrong, and starting with the Plan, everything had. It was a good plan, too.
Worked out in detail with every possibility of error eliminated.
Sixo, hitching up the horses, is speaking English again and tells Halle what his Thirty-MileWoman told him. That seven Negroes on her place were joining two others going North. That thetwo others had done it before and knew the way. That one of the two, a woman, would wait forthem in the corn when it was high — one night and half of the next day she would wait, and if theycame she would take them to the caravan, where the others would be hidden. That she would rattle,and that would be the sign. Sixo was going, his woman was going, and Halle was taking his wholefamily. The two Pauls say they need time to think about it. Time to wonder where they will end up;how they will live. What work; who will take them in; should they try to get to Paul F, whoseowner, they remember, lived in something called the "trace"? It takes them one evening'sconversation to decide.
Now all they have to do is wait through the spring, till the corn is as high as it ever got and themoon as fat.
And plan. Is it better to leave in the dark to get a better start, or go at daybreak to be able to see theway better? Sixo spits at the suggestion. Night gives them more time and the protection of color.
He does not ask them if they are afraid. He manages some dry runs to the corn at night, buryingblankets and two knives near the creek. Will Sethe be able to swim the creek? they ask him. It willbe dry, he says, when the corn is tall. There is no food to put by, but Sethe says she will get a jugof cane syrup or molasses, and some bread when it is near the time to go. She only wants to be surethe blankets are where they should be, for they will need them to tie her baby on her back and tocover them during the journey. There are no clothes other than what they wear. And of course noshoes. The knives will help them eat, but they bury rope and a pot as well. A good plan. Theywatch and memorize the comings and goings of schoolteacher and his pupils: what is wanted whenand where; how long it takes. Mrs. Garner, restless at night, is sunk in sleep all morning. Somedays the pupils and their teacher do lessons until breakfast. One day a week they skip breakfastcompletely and travel ten miles to church, expecting a large dinner upon their return.
Schoolteacher writes in his notebook after supper; the pupils clean, mend or sharpen tools. Sethe'swork is the most uncertain because she is on call for Mrs. Garner anytime, including nighttimewhen the pain or the weakness or the downright loneliness is too much for her. So: Sixo and thePauls will go after supper and wait in the creek for the Thirty Mile Woman. Halle will bring Setheand the three children before dawn — before the sun, before the chickens and the milking cowneed attention, so by the time smoke should be coming from the cooking stove, they will be in ornear the creek with the others. That way, if Mrs. Garner needs Sethe in the night and calls her,Sethe will be there to answer. They only have to wait through the spring.
