More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize." Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music.
Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.
Sethe wanted to be there now. At the least to listen to the spaces that the long-ago singing had left behind. At the most to get a clue from her husband's dead mother as to what she should do with her sword and shield now, dear Jesus, now nine years after Baby Suggs, holy, proved herself a liar, dismissed her great heart and lay in the keeping-room bed roused once in a while by a craving for color and not for another thing.
"Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks." 124 shut down and put up with the venom of its ghost. No more lamp all night long, or neighbors dropping by. No low conversations after supper. No watched barefoot children playing in the shoes of strangers. Baby Suggs, holy, believed she had lied.
There was no grace-imaginary or real--and no sunlit dance in a Clearing could change that. Her faith, her love, her imagination and her great big old heart began to collapse twenty-eight days after her daughter-in-law arrived.
Yet it was to the Clearing that Sethe determined to go--to pay tribute to Halle. Before the light changed, while it was still the green blessed place she remembered: misty with plant steam and the decay of berries.
She put on a shawl and told Denver and Beloved to do likewise.
All three set out late one Sunday morning, Sethe leading, the girls trotting behind, not a soul in sight.
When they reached the woods it took her no time to find the path through it because big-city revivals were held there regularly now, complete with food-laden tables, banjos and a tent. The old path was a track now, but still arched over with trees dropping buckeyes onto the grass below.
There was nothing to be done other than what she had done, but Sethe blamed herself for Baby Suggs' collapse. However many times Baby denied it, Sethe knew the grief at 124 started when she jumped down off the wagon, her newborn tied to her chest in the underwear of a whitegirl looking for Boston.
Followed by the two girls, down a bright green corridor of oak and horse chestnut, Sethe began to sweat a sweat just like the other one when she woke, mud-caked, on the banks of the Ohio.
Amy was gone. Sethe was alone and weak, but alive, and so was her baby. She walked a ways downriver and then stood gazing at the glimmering water. By and by a flatbed slid into view, but she could not see if the figures on it were whitepeople or not. She began to sweat from a fever she thanked God for since it would certainly keep her baby warm. When the flatbed was beyond her sight she stumbled on and found herself near three coloredpeople fishing-- two boys and an older man. She stopped and waited to be spoken to. One of the boys pointed and the man looked over his shoulder at her--a quick look since all he needed to know about her he could see in no time.
No one said anything for a while. Then the man said, "Headin'
'cross?"
"Yes, sir," said Sethe.
"Anybody know you coming?"
"Yes, sir."
He looked at her again and nodded toward a rock that stuck out of the ground above him like a bottom lip. Sethe walked to it and sat down. The stone had eaten the sun's rays but was nowhere near as hot as she was. Too tired to move, she stayed there, the sun in her eyes making her dizzy. Sweat poured over her and bathed the baby completely. She must have slept sitting up, because when next she opened her eyes the man was standing in front of her with a smoking-hot piece of fried eel in his hands. It was an effort to reach for, more to smell, impossible to eat. She begged him for water and he gave her some of the Ohio in a jar. Sethe drank it all and begged more. The clanging was back in her head but she refused to believe that she had come all that way, endured all she had, to die on the wrong side of the river.
The man watched her streaming face and called one of the boys over.
"Take off that coat," he told him.
"Sir?"
"You heard me."
The boy slipped out of his jacket, whining, "What you gonna do? What I'm gonna wear?"
The man untied the baby from her chest and wrapped it in the boy's coat, knotting the sleeves in front.
"What I'm gonna wear?"
The old man sighed and, after a pause, said, "You want it back, then go head and take it off that baby. Put the baby naked in the grass and put your coat back on. And if you can do it, then go on 'way somewhere and don't come back."
The boy dropped his eyes, then turned to join the other. With eel in her hand, the baby at her feet, Sethe dozed, dry-mouthed and sweaty. Evening came and the man touched her shoulder.
Contrary to what she expected they poled upriver, far away from the rowboat Amy had found. Just when she thought he was taking her back to Kentucky, he turned the flatbed and crossed the Ohio like a shot. There he helped her up the steep bank, while the boy without a jacket carried the baby who wore it. The man led her to a brush-covered hutch with a beaten floor.
"Wait here. Somebody be here directly. Don't move. They'll find you."
"Thank you," she said. "I wish I knew your name so I could remember you right."
"Name's Stamp," he said. "Stamp Paid. Watch out for that there baby, you hear?"
"I hear. I hear," she said, but she didn't. Hours later a woman was right up on her before she heard a thing. A short woman, young, with a croaker sack, greeted her.
"'Saw the sign a while ago," she said. "But I couldn't get here no quicker."
"What sign?" asked Sethe.
"Stamp leaves the old sty open when there's a crossing. Knots a white rag on the post if it's a child too."
She knelt and emptied the sack. "My name's Ella," she said, taking a wool blanket, cotton cloth, two baked sweet potatoes and a pair of men's shoes from the sack. "My husband, John, is out yonder a ways. Where you heading?"
Sethe told her about Baby Suggs where she had sent her three children.
Ella wrapped a cloth strip tight around the baby's navel as she listened for the holes--the things the fugitives did not say; the questions they did not ask. Listened too for the unnamed, unmentioned people left behind. She shook gravel from the men's shoes and tried to force Sethe's feet into them. They would not go. Sadly, they split them down the heel, sorry indeed to ruin so valuable an item. Sethe put on the boy's jacket, not daring to ask whether there was any word of the children.
"They made it," said Ella. "Stamp ferried some of that party.
Left them on Bluestone. It ain't too far."
Sethe couldn't think of anything to do, so grateful was she, so she peeled a potato, ate it, spit it up and ate more in quiet celebration.
"They be glad to see you," said Ella. "When was this one born?"
"Yesterday," said Sethe, wiping sweat from under her chin. "I hope she makes it."
Ella looked at the tiny, dirty face poking out of the wool blanket and shook her head. "Hard to say," she said. "If anybody was to ask me I'd say, 'Don't love nothing.' " Then, as if to take the edge off her pronouncement, she smiled at Sethe. "You had that baby by yourself?"
"No. Whitegirl helped."
"Then we better make tracks."
Baby Suggs kissed her on the mouth and refused to let her see the children. They were asleep she said and Sethe was too uglylooking to wake them in the night. She took the newborn and handed it to a young woman in a bonnet, telling her not to clean the eyes till she got the mother's urine.
"Has it cried out yet?" asked Baby.
"A little."
"Time enough. Let's get the mother well."
She led Sethe to the keeping room and, by the light of a spirit lamp, bathed her in sections, starting with her face. Then, while waiting for ano
ther pan of heated water, she sat next to her and stitched gray cotton. Sethe dozed and woke to the washing of her hands and arms. After each bathing, Baby covered her with a quilt and put another pan on in the kitchen. Tearing sheets, stitching the gray cotton, she supervised the woman in the bonnet who tended the baby and cried into her cooking. When Sethe's legs were done, Baby looked at her feet and wiped them lightly. She cleaned between Sethe's legs with two separate pans of hot water and then tied her stomach and vagina with sheets. Finally she attacked the unrecognizable feet.
"You feel this?"
"Feel what?" asked Sethe.
"Nothing. Heave up." She helped Sethe to a rocker and lowered her feet into a bucket of salt water and juniper. The rest of the night Sethe sat soaking. The crust from her nipples Baby softened with lard and then washed away. By dawn the silent baby woke and took her mother's milk.
"Pray God it ain't turned bad," said Baby. "And when you through, call me." As she turned to go, Baby Suggs caught a glimpse of something dark on the bed sheet. She frowned and looked at her daughter-in-law bending toward the baby. Roses of blood blossomed in the blanket covering Sethe's shoulders. Baby Suggs hid her mouth with her hand. When the nursing was over and the newborn was asleep--its eyes half open, its tongue dream-sucking--wordlessly the older woman greased the flowering back and pinned a double thickness of cloth to the inside of the newly stitched dress.
It was not real yet. Not yet. But when her sleepy boys and crawl ing-already? girl were brought in, it didn't matter whether it was real or not. Sethe lay in bed under, around, over, among but especially with them all. The little girl dribbled clear spit into her face, and Sethe's laugh of delight was so loud the crawling-already? baby blinked.
Buglar and Howard played with her ugly feet, after daring each other to be the first to touch them. She kept kissing them. She kissed the backs of their necks, the tops of their heads and the centers of their palms, and it was the boys who decided enough was enough when she liked their shirts to kiss their tight round bellies. She stopped when and because they said, "Pappie come?"
She didn't cry. She said "soon" and smiled so they would think the brightness in her eyes was love alone. It was some time before she let Baby Suggs shoo the boys away so Sethe could put on the gray cotton dress her mother-in-law had started stitching together the night before. Finally she lay back and cradled the crawling already? girl in her arms. She enclosed her left nipple with two fingers of her right hand and the child opened her mouth. They hit home together.
Baby Suggs came in and laughed at them, telling Sethe how strong the baby girl was, how smart, already crawling. Then she stooped to gather up the ball of rags that had been Sethe's clothes.
"Nothing worth saving in here," she said.
Sethe liked her eyes. "Wait," she called. "Look and see if there's something still knotted up in the petticoat."
Baby Suggs inched the spoiled fabric through her fingers and came upon what felt like pebbles. She held them out toward Sethe. "Going away present?"
"Wedding present."
"Be nice if there was a groom to go with it." She gazed into her hand. "What you think happened to him?"
"I don't know," said Sethe. "He wasn't where he said to meet him at. I had to get out. Had to." Sethe watched the drowsy eyes of the sucking girl for a moment then looked at Baby Suggs' face. "He'll make it. If I made it, Halle sure can."
"Well, put these on. Maybe they'll light his way." Convinced her son was dead, she handed the stones to Sethe.
"I need holes in my ears."
"I'll do it," said Baby Suggs. "Soon's you up to it."
Sethe jingled the earrings for the pleasure of the crawling-already? girl, who reached for them over and over again.
In the Clearing, Sethe found Baby's old preaching rock and remembered the smell of leaves simmering in the sun, thunderous feet and the shouts that ripped pods off the limbs of the chestnuts. With Baby Suggs' heart in charge, the people let go.
Sethe had had twenty-eight days--the travel of one whole moon--of unslaved life. From the pure clear stream of spit that the little girl dribbled into her face to her oily blood was twenty-eight days. Days of healing, ease and real-talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better. One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch.
All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day. That's how she got through the waiting for Halle.
Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Now she sat on Baby Suggs' rock, Denver and Beloved watching her from the trees. There will never be a day, she thought, when Halle will knock on the door. Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder.
Just the fingers, she thought. Just let me feel your fingers again on the back of my neck and I will lay it all down, make a way out of this no way. Sethe bowed her head and sure enough--they were there. Lighter now, no more than the strokes of bird feather, but unmistakably caressing fingers. She had to relax a bit to let them do their work, so light was the touch, childlike almost, more finger kiss than kneading. Still she was grateful for the effort; Baby Suggs' long distance love was equal to any skin-close love she had known. The desire, let alone the gesture, to meet her needs was good enough to lift her spirits to the place where she could take the next step: ask for some clarifying word; some advice about how to keep on with a brain greedy for news nobody could live with in a world happy to provide it.
She knew Paul D was adding something to her life--something she wanted to count on but was scared to. Now he had added more: new pictures and old rememories that broke her heart. Into the empty space of not knowing about Halle---a space sometimes colored with righteous resentment at what could have been his cowardice, or stupidity or bad luck--that empty place of no definite news was filled now with a brand-new sorrow and who could tell how many more on the way. Years ago--when 124 was alive--she had women friends, men friends from all around to share grief with. Then there was no one, for they would not visit her while the baby ghost filled the house, and she returned their disapproval with the potent pride of the mistreated. But now there was someone to share it, and he had beat the spirit away the very day he entered her house and no sign of it since. A blessing, but in its place he brought another kind of haunting: Halle's face smeared with butter and the dabber too; his own mouth jammed full of iron, and Lord knows what else he could tell her if he wanted to.
The fingers touching the back of her neck were stronger now-- the strokes bolder as though Baby Suggs were gathering strength.
Putting the thumbs at the nape, while the fingers pressed the sides.
Harder, harder, the fingers moved slowly around toward her windpipe, making little circles on the way. Sethe was actually more surprised than frightened to find that she was being strangled. Or so it seemed. In any case, Baby Suggs' fingers had a grip on her that would not let her breathe. Tumbling forward from her seat on the rock, she clawed at the hands that were not there. Her feet were thrashing by the time Denver got to her and then Beloved.
"Ma'am! Ma'am!" Denver shouted. "Ma'ammy!" and turned her mother over on her back.
The fingers left off and Sethe had to swallow huge draughts of air before she recognized her daughter's face next to her own and Beloved's hovering above.
"You all right?"
"Somebody choked me," said Sethe.
"Who?"
Sethe rubbed her neck and struggled to a sitting position. "Grandma Baby, I reckon. I just asked her to rub my neck, like she used to and she was doing fine and then just got crazy with it, I guess."
"She wouldn't do that to you, Ma'am. Grandma Baby? Uh uh."
"Help me up from here."
"Look." Beloved was pointing at Sethe's neck.
"What
is it? What you see?" asked Sethe.
"Bruises," said Denver.
"On my neck?"
"Here," said Beloved. "Here and here, too." She reached out her hand and touched the splotches, gathering color darker than Sethe's dark throat, and her fingers were mighty cool.
"That don't help nothing," Denver said, but Beloved was leaning in, her two hands stroking the damp skin that felt like chamois and looked like taffeta.
Sethe moaned. The girl's fingers were so cool and knowing. Sethe's knotted, private, walk-on-water life gave in a bit, softened, and it seemed that the glimpse of happiness she caught in the shadows swinging hands on the road to the carnival was a likelihood--if she could just manage the news Paul D brought and the news he kept to himself. Just manage it. Not break, fall or cry each time a hateful picture drifted in front of her face. Not develop some permanent craziness like Baby Suggs' friend, a young woman in a bonnet whose food was full of tears. Like Aunt Phyllis, who slept with her eyes wide open. Like Jackson Till, who slept under the bed. All she wanted was to go on. As she had. Alone with her daughter in a haunted house she managed every damn thing. Why now, with Paul D instead of the ghost, was she breaking up? getting scared? needing Baby?
The worst was over, wasn't it? She had already got through, hadn't she? With the ghost in 124 she could bear, do, solve anything. Now a hint of what had happened to Halie and she cut out like a rabbit looking for its mother.
Beloved's fingers were heavenly. Under them and breathing evenly again, the anguish rolled down. The peace Sethe had come there to find crept into her.
We must look a sight, she thought, and closed her eyes to see it: the three women in the middle of the Clearing, at the base of the rock where Baby Suggs, holy, had loved. One seated, yielding up her throat to the kind hands of one of the two kneeling before her.
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