Stone blind; stone blind.
Sweet Home gal make you lose your mind.
HIS COMING is the reverse route of his going. First the cold house,the storeroom, then thekitchen before he tackles the beds. Here Boy, feeble and shedding his coat in patches, is asleep bythe pump, so Paul D knows Beloved is truly gone. Disappeared, some say, exploded right before their eyes. Ella is not so sure. "Maybe," she says, "maybe not. Could be hiding in the trees waitingfor another chance." But when Paul D sees the ancient dog, eighteen years if a day, he is certain124 is clear of her. But he opens the door to the cold house halfway expecting to hear her. "Touchme. Touch me. On the inside part and call me my name."There is the pallet spread with old newspapers gnawed at the edges by mice. The lard can. Thepotato sacks too, but empty now, they lie on the dirt floor in heaps. In daylight he can't imagine itin darkness with moonlight seeping through the cracks. Nor the desire that drowned him there andforced him to struggle up, up into that girl like she was the clear air at the top of the sea. Couplingwith her wasn't even fun. It was more like a brainless urge to stay alive.
Each time she came, pulled up her skirts, a life hunger overwhelmed him and he had no morecontrol over it than over his lungs. And afterward, beached and gobbling air, in the midst ofrepulsion and personal shame, he was thankful too for having been escorted to some ocean-deepplace he once belonged to.
Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light. Paul D shuts thedoor. He looks toward the house and, surprisingly, it does not look back at him. Unloaded, 124 isjust another weathered house needing repair. Quiet, just as Stamp Paid said.
"Used to be voices all round that place. Quiet, now," Stamp said.
"I been past it a few times and I can't hear a thing. Chastened, I reckon, 'cause Mr. Bodwin say heselling it soon's he can.""That the name of the one she tried to stab? That one?""Yep. His sister say it's full of trouble. Told Janey she was going to get rid of it.""And him?" asked Paul D.
"Janey say he against it but won't stop it.""Who they think want a house out there? Anybody got the money don't want to live out there.""Beats me," Stamp answered. "It'll be a spell, I guess, before it get took off his hands.""He don't plan on taking her to the law?""Don't seem like it. Janey say all he wants to know is who was the naked blackwoman standing onthe porch. He was looking at her so hard he didn't notice what Sethe was up to. All he saw wassome coloredwomen fighting. He thought Sethe was after one of them, Janey say.""Janey tell him any different?""No. She say she so glad her boss ain't dead. If Ella hadn't clipped her, she say she would have.
Scared her to death have that woman kill her boss. She and Denver be looking for a job.""Who Janey tell him the naked woman was?""Told him she didn't see none.""You believe they saw it?""Well, they saw something. I trust Ella anyway, and she say she looked it in the eye. It wasstanding right next to Sethe. But from the way they describe it, don't seem like it was the girl I sawin there.
The girl I saw was narrow. This one was big. She say they was holding hands and Sethe lookedlike a little girl beside it.""Little girl with a ice pick. How close she get to him?""Right up on him, they say. Before Denver and them grabbed her and Ella put her fist in her jaw.""He got to know Sethe was after him. He got to.""Maybe. I don't know. If he did think it, I reckon he decided not to. That be just like him, too. He'ssomebody never turned us down.
Steady as a rock. I tell you something, if she had got to him, it'd be the worst thing in the world forus. You know, don't you, he's the main one kept Sethe from the gallows in the first place.""Yeah. Damn. That woman is crazy. Crazy.""Yeah, well, ain't we all?"They laughed then. A rusty chuckle at first and then more, louder and louder until Stamp took outhis pocket handkerchief and wiped his eyes while Paul D pressed the heel of his hand in his own.
As the neither one had witnessed took shape before them, its seriousness and itsembarrassment (scene) made them shake with laughter.
"Every time a whiteman come to the door she got to kill somebody?""For all she know, the man could be coming for the rent.""Good thing they don't deliver mail out that way.""Wouldn't nobody get no letter.""Except the postman.""Be a mighty hard message.""And his last."When their laughter was spent, they took deep breaths and shook their heads.
"And he still going to let Denver spend the night in his house?
Ha!""Aw no. Hey. Lay off Denver, Paul D. That's my heart. I'm proud of that girl. She was the first onewrestle her mother down. Before anybody knew what the devil was going on.""She saved his life then, you could say.""You could. You could," said Stamp, thinking suddenly of the leap, the wide swing and snatch ofhis arm as he rescued the little curly-headed baby from within inches of a split skull. "I'm proud ofher. She turning out fine. Fine."It was true. Paul D saw her the next morning when he was on his way to work and she was leavinghers. Thinner, steady in the eyes, she looked more like Halle than ever.
She was the first to smile. "Good morning, Mr. D.""Well, it is now." Her smile, no longer the sneer he remembered, had welcome in it and strongtraces of Sethe's mouth. Paul D touchedhis cap. "How you getting along?""Don't pay to complain.""You on your way home?"She said no. She had heard about an afternoon job at the shirt factory. She hoped that with hernight work at the Bodwins' and another one, she could put away something and help her mothertoo.
When he asked her if they treated her all right over there, she said more than all right. MissBodwin taught her stuff. He asked her what stuff and she laughed and said book stuff. "She says Imight go to Oberlin. She's experimenting on me." And he didn't say, "Watch out. Watch out.
Nothing in the world more dangerous than a white schoolteacher." Instead he nodded and asked the question he wanted to.
"Your mother all right?""No," said Denver. "No. No, not a bit all right.""You think I should stop by? Would she welcome it?""I don't know," said Denver. "I think I've lost my mother, Paul D."They were both silent for a moment and then he said, "Uh, that girl. You know. Beloved?""Yes?""You think she sure 'nough your sister?"Denver looked at her shoes. "At times. At times I think she was — more." She fiddled with hershirtwaist, rubbing a spot of something.
Chapter 71
Suddenly she leveled her eyes at his. "But who would know that better than you, Paul D? I mean,you sure 'nough knew her."He licked his lips. "Well, if you want my opinion — ""I don't," she said. "I have my own.""You grown," he said.
"Yes, sir.""Well. Well, good luck with the job.""Thank you. And, Paul D, you don't have to stay 'way, but be careful how you talk to my ma'am,hear?""Don't worry," he said and left her then, or rather she left him because a young man was runningtoward her, saying, "Hey, Miss Denver. Wait up."She turned to him, her face looking like someone had turned up the gas jet.
He left her unwillingly because he wanted to talk more, make sense out of the stories he had beenhearing: whiteman came to take Denver to work and Sethe cut him. Baby ghost came back evil andsent Sethe out to get the man who kept her from hanging. One point of agreement is: first they sawit and then they didn't. When they got Sethe down on the ground and the ice pick out of her handsand looked back to the house, it was gone. Later, a little boy put it out how he had been looking forbait back of 124, down by the stream, and saw, cutting through the woods, a naked woman withfish for hair.
As a matter of fact, Paul D doesn't care how It went or even why. He cares about how he left andwhy. Then he looks at himself through Garner's eyes, he sees one thing. Through Sixo's, another.
One makes him feel righteous. One makes him feel ashamed. Like the time he worked both sidesof the War. Running away from the Northpoint Bank and Railway to join the 44th ColoredRegiment in Tennessee, he thought he had made it, only to discover he had arrived at anothercolored regiment forming under a commander in New Jersey. He stayed there four weeks. Theregiment fell apart before it got started on the question of whether the soldiers should haveweapons or not. Not, it was decided, and the white commander had to figure out what to commandthem to do instead of kill other white men. Some of the ten thousand stayed there to clean, hauland build things; others drifted away to another regiment; most were abandoned, left to their owndevices with bitterness for pay. He was trying to make up his mind what to do when an agent fromNorthpoint Bank caught up with him and took him back to Delaware, where he slave-worked ayear. Then Northpoint took $300 in exchange for his services in Alabama, where he worked for theRebellers, first sorting the dead and then smelting iron. When he and his group combed the battlefields, their job was to pull the Confederate wounded away from the Confederate dead. Care,they told them. Take good care. Coloredmen and white, their faces wrapped to their eyes, pickedtheir way through the meadows with lamps, listening in the dark for groans of life in the indifferentsilence of the dead. Mostly young men, some children, and it shamed him a little to feel pity forwhat he imagined were the sons of the guards in Alfred, Georgia.
In five tries he had not had one permanent success. Every one of his escapes (from Sweet Home,from Brandywine, from Alfred, Georgia, from Wilmington, from Northpoint) had been frustrated.
Alone, undisguised, with visible skin, memorable hair and no whiteman to protect him, he neverstayed uncaught. The longest had been when he ran with the convicts, stayed with the Cherokee,followed their advice and lived in hiding with the weaver woman in Wilmington, Delaware: threeyears. And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land thatwas not his. He hid in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and triednot to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he madehimself not love it. Its graveyards and low-lying rivers. Or just a house — -solitary under achinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stirhim and he tried hard not to love it.
After a few months on the battlefields of Alabama, he was impressed to a foundry in Selma alongwith three hundred captured, lent or taken coloredmen. That's where the War's end found him, andleaving Alabama when he had been declared free should have been a snap. He should have beenable to walk from the foundry in Selma straight to Philadelphia, taking the main roads, a train if hewanted to, or passage on a boat. But it wasn't like that. When he and two colored soldiers (who hadbeen captured from the 44th he had looked for) walked from Selma to Mobile, they saw twelvedead blacks in the first eighteen miles. Two were women, four were little boys. He thought this, forsure, would be the walk of his life.
The Yankees in control left the Rebels out of control. They got to the outskirts of Mobile, whereblacks were putting down tracks for the Union that, earlier, they had torn up for the Rebels. One ofthe men with him, a private called Keane, had been with the Massachusetts 54th. He told Paul Dthey had been paid less than white soldiers. It was a sore point with him that, as a group, they hadrefused the offer Massachusetts made to make up the difference in pay. Paul D was so impressedby the idea of being paid money to fight he looked at the private with wonder and envy.
Keane and his friend, a Sergeant Rossiter, confiscated a skiff and the three of them floated inMobile Bay. There the private hailed a Union gunboat, which took all three aboard. Keane andRossiter disembarked at Memphis to look for their commanders. The captain of the gunboat letPaul D stay aboard all the way to Wheeling, West Virginia. He made his own way to New Jersey.
By the time he got to Mobile, he had seen more dead people than living ones, but when he got toTrenton the crowds of alive people, neither hunting nor hunted, gave him a measure of free life sotasty he never forgot it. Moving down a busy street full of whitepeople who needed no explanationfor his presence, the glances he got had to do with his disgusting clothes and unforgivable hair.
Still, nobody raised an alarm. Then came the miracle. Standing in a street in front of a row of brickhouses, he heard a whiteman call him ("Say there! Yo!") to help unload two trunks from a coachcab. Afterward the whiteman gave him a coin. Paul D walked around with it for hours — not surewhat it could buy (a suit? a meal? a horse?) and if anybody would sell him anything. Finally hesaw a greengrocer selling vegetables from a wagon. Paul D pointed to a bunch of turnips. Thegrocer handed them to him, took his one coin and gave him several more. Stunned, he backed away. Looking around, he saw that nobody seemed interested in the "mistake" or him, so hewalked along, happily chewing turnips. Only a few women looked vaguely repelled as they passed.
His first earned purchase made him glow, never mind the turnips were withered dry. That waswhen he decided that to eat, walk and sleep anywhere was life as good as it got. And he did it forseven years till he found himself in southern Ohio, where an old woman and a girl he used to knowhad gone.
Now his coming is the reverse of his going. First he stands in the back, near the cold house,amazed by the riot of late-summer flowers where vegetables should be growing. Sweet william,morning glory, chrysanthemums. The odd placement of cans jammed with the rotting stems ofthings, the blossoms shriveled like sores. Dead ivy twines around bean poles and door handles.
Faded newspaper pictures are nailed to the outhouse and on trees. A rope too short for anything butskip-jumping lies discarded near the washtub; and jars and jars of dead lightning bugs. Like achild's house; the house of a very tall child.
