Beloved_a novel

by Toni Morrison

  From Denver's two thrilled eyes it grew to a feast for ninety people .124 shook with their voices far into the night. Ninety people who ate so well, and laughed so much, it made them angry. They woke up the next morning and remembered the meal-fried perch that Stamp Paid handled with a hickory twig, holding his left palm out against the spit and pop of the boiling grease; the corn pudding made with cream; tired, overfed children asleep in the grass, tiny bones of roasted rabbit still in their hands--and got angry.

  Baby Suggs' three (maybe four) pies grew to ten (maybe twelve).

  Sethe's two hens became five turkeys. The one block of ice brought all the way from Cincinnati---over which they poured mashed watermelon mixed with sugar and mint to make a punch--became a wagonload of ice cakes for a washtub full of strawberry shrug, 124, rocking with laughter, goodwill and food for ninety, made them angry. Too much, they thought. Where does she get it all, Baby Suggs, holy? Why is she and hers always the center of things? How come she always knows exactly what to do and when? Giving advice; passing messages; healing the sick, hiding fugitives, loving, cooking, cooking, loving, preaching, singing, dancing and loving everybody like it was her job and hers alone.

  Now to take two buckets of blackberries and make ten, maybe twelve, pies; to have turkey enough for the whole town pretty near, new peas in September, fresh cream but no cow, ice and sugar, batter bread, bread pudding, raised bread, shortbread--it made them mad.

  Loaves and fishes were His powers--they did not belong to an ex slave who had probably never carried one hundred pounds to the scale, or picked okra with a baby on her back. Who had never been lashed by a ten-year-old whiteboy as God knows they had. Who had not even escaped slavery--had, in fact, been bought out of it by a doting son and driven to the Ohio River in a wagon--free papers folded between her breasts (driven by the very man who had been her master, who also paid her resettlement fee--name of Garner), and rented a house with two floors and a well from the Bodwins-- the white brother and sister who gave Stamp Paid, Ella and John clothes, goods and gear for runaways because they hated slavery worse than they hated slaves.

  It made them furious. They swallowed baking soda, the morning after, to calm the stomach violence caused by the bounty, the reckless generosity on display at 124. Whispered to each other in the yards about fat rats, doom and uncalled-for pride.

  The scent of their disapproval lay heavy in the air. Baby Suggs woke to it and wondered what it was as she boiled hominy for her grandchildren. Later, as she stood in the garden, chopping at the tight soil over the roots of the pepper plants, she smelled it again.

  She lifted her head and looked around. Behind her some yards to the left Sethe squatted in the pole beans. Her shoulders were distorted by the greased flannel under her dress to encourage the healing of her back. Near her in a bushel basket was the three-week-old baby.

  Baby Suggs, holy, looked up. The sky was blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves. She could hear birds and, faintly, the stream way down in the meadow. The puppy, Here Boy, was burying the last bones from yesterday's party. From somewhere at the side of the house came the voices of Buglar, Howard and the crawling girl. Nothing seemed amiss--yet the smell of disapproval was sharp. Back beyond the vegetable garden, closer to the stream but in full sun, she had planted corn. Much as they'd picked for the party, there were still ears ripening, which she could see from where she stood. Baby Suggs leaned back into the peppers and the squash vines with her hoe. Carefully, with the blade at just the right angle, she cut through a stalk of insistent rue. Its flowers she stuck through a split in her hat; the rest she tossed aside. The quiet clok clok clok of wood splitting reminded her that Stamp was doing the chore he promised to the night before. She sighed at her work and, a moment later, straightened up to sniff the disapproval once again.

  Resting on the handle of the hoe, she concentrated. She was accustomed to the knowledge that nobody prayed for her--but this free floating repulsion was new. It wasn't whitefolks--that much she could tell--so it must be colored ones. And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess.

  Baby closed her eyes. Perhaps they were right. Suddenly, behind the disapproving odor, way way back behind it, she smelled another thing. Dark and coming. Something she couldn't get at because the other odor hid it.

  She squeezed her eyes tight to see what it was but all she could make out was high-topped shoes she didn't like the look of.

  Thwarted yet wondering, she chopped away with the hoe. What could it be? This dark and coming thing. What was left to hurt her now? News of Halle's death? No. She had been prepared for that better than she had for his life. The last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn't worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway. Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips with her own--fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognize anywhere.

  She didn't know to this day what their permanent teeth looked like; or how they held their heads when they walked. Did Patty lose her lisp? What color did Famous' skin finally take? Was that a cleft in Johnny's chin or just a dimple that would disappear soon's his jawbone changed? Four girls, and the last time she saw them there was no hair under their arms. Does Ardelia still love the burned bottom of bread? All seven were gone or dead. What would be the point of looking too hard at that youngest one? But for some reason they let her keep him. He was with her--everywhere.

  When she hurt her hip in Carolina she was a real bargain (costing less than Halle, who was ten then) for Mr. Garner, who took them both to Kentucky to a farm he called Sweet Home. Because of the hip she jerked like a three-legged dog when she walked. But at Sweet Home there wasn't a rice field or tobacco patch in sight, and nobody, but nobody, knocked her down. Not once. Lillian Garner called her Jenny for some reason but she never pushed, hit or called her mean names. Even when she slipped in cow dung and broke every egg in her apron, nobody said you-blackbitchwhat'sthematterwith-you and nobody knocked her down.

  Sweet Home was tiny compared to the places she had been. Mr.

  Garner, Mrs. Garner, herself, Halle, and four boys, over half named Paul, made up the entire population. Mrs. Garner hummed when she worked; Mr. Garner acted like the world was a toy he was supposed to have fun with. Neither wanted her in the field--Mr.

  Garner's boys, including Halle, did all of that--which was a blessing since she could not have managed it anyway. What she did was stand beside the humming Lillian Garner while the two of them cooked, preserved, washed, ironed, made candles, clothes, soap and cider; fed chickens, pigs, dogs and geese; milked cows, churned butter, rendered fat, laid fires.... Nothing to it. And nobody knocked her down.

  Her hip hurt every single day--but she never spoke of it. Only Halle, who had watched her movements closely for the last four years, knew that to get in and out of bed she had to lift her thigh with both hands, which was why he spoke to Mr. Garner about buying her out of there so she could sit down for a change. Sweet boy. The one person who did something hard for her: gave her his work, his life and now his children, whose voices she could just make out as she stood in the garden wondering what was the dark and coming thing behind the scent of disapproval. Sweet Home was a marked improvement. No question. And no matter, for the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home. Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.

  Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother?

  A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me?

  In Lillian Garner's house, exempted from t
he field work that broke her hip and the exhaustion that drugged her mind; in Lillian Garner's house where nobody knocked her down (or up), she listened to the whitewoman humming at her work; watched her face light up when Mr. Garner came in and thought, It's better here, but I'm not. The Garners, it seemed to her, ran a special kind of slavery, treating them like paid labor, listening to what they said, teaching what they wanted known. And he didn't stud his boys. Never brought them to her cabin with directions to "lay down with her," like they did in Carolina, or rented their sex out on other farms. It surprised and pleased her, but worried her too. Would he pick women for them or what did he think was going to happen when those boys ran smack into their nature? Some danger he was courting and he surely knew it. In fact, his order for them not to leave Sweet Home, except in his company, was not so much because of the law, but the danger of men-bred slaves on the loose.

  Baby Suggs talked as little as she could get away with because what was there to say that the roots of her tongue could manage?

  So the whitewoman, finding her new slave excellent if silent help, hummed to herself while she worked.

  When Mr. Garner agreed to the arrangements with Halle, and when Halle looked like it meant more to him that she go free than anything in the world, she let herself be taken 'cross the river. Of the two hard thingsstanding on her feet till she dropped or leaving her last and probably only living child--she chose the hard thing that made him happy, and never put to him the question she put to herself: What for? What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for? And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn't; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her.

  Something's the matter. What's the matter? What's the matter? she asked herself. She didn't know what she looked like and was not curious. But suddenly she saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, "These hands belong to me. These my hands." Next she felt a knocking in her chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all along? This pounding thing? She felt like a fool and began to laugh out loud.

  Mr. Garner looked over his shoulder at her with wide brown eyes and smiled himself. "What's funny, Jenny?"

  She couldn't stop laughing. "My heart's beating," she said.

  And it was true.

  Mr. Garner laughed. "Nothing to be scared of, Jenny. Just keep your same ways, you'll be all right."

  She covered her mouth to keep from laughing too loud.

  "These people I'm taking you to will give you what help you need. Name of Bodwin. A brother and a sister. Scots. I been knowing them for twenty years or more."

  Baby Suggs thought it was a good time to ask him something she had long wanted to know.

  "Mr. Garner," she said, "why you all call me Jenny?"

  '"Cause that what's on your sales ticket, gal. Ain't that your name? What you call yourself?"

  "Nothings" she said. "I don't call myself nothing."

  Mr. Garner went red with laughter. "When I took you out of Carolina, Whitlow called you Jenny and Jenny Whitlow is what his bill said. Didn't he call you Jenny?"

  "No, sir. If he did I didn't hear it."

  "What did you answer to?"

  "Anything, but Suggs is what my husband name."

  "You got married, Jenny? I didn't know it."

  "Manner of speaking."

  "You know where he is, this husband?"

  "No, sir."

  "Is that Halle's daddy?"

  "No, sir."

  "why you call him Suggs, then? His bill of sale says Whitlow too, just like yours."

  "Suggs is my name, sir. From my husband. He didn't call me Jenny."

  "What he call you?"

  "Baby."

  "Well," said Mr. Garner, going pink again, "if I was you I'd stick to Jenny Whitlow. Mrs. Baby Suggs ain't no name for a freed Negro."

  Maybe not, she thought, but Baby Suggs was all she had left of the "husband" she claimed. A serious, melancholy man who taught her how to make shoes. The two of them made a pact: whichever one got a chance to run would take it; together if possible, alone if not, and no looking back. He got his chance, and since she never heard otherwise she believed he made it. Now how could he find or hear tell of her if she was calling herself some bill-of-sale name?

  She couldn't get over the city. More people than Carolina and enough whitefolks to stop the breath. Two-story buildings everywhere, and walkways made of perfectly cut slats of wood. Roads wide as Garner's whole house.

  "This is a city of water," said Mr. Garner. "Everything travels by water and what the rivers can't carry the canals take. A queen of a city, Jenny. Everything you ever dreamed of, they make it right here. Iron stoves, buttons, ships, shirts, hairbrushes, paint, steam engines, books. A sewer system make your eyes bug out. Oh, this is a city, all right. If you have to live in a city--this is it."

  The Bodwins lived right in the center of a street full of houses and trees. Mr. Garner leaped out and tied his horse to a solid iron post.

  "Here we are."

  Baby picked up her bundle and with great difficulty, caused by her hip and the hours of sitting in a wagon, climbed down. Mr.

  Garner was up the walk and on the porch before she touched ground, but she got a peep at a Negro girl's face at the open door before she followed a path to the back of the house. She waited what seemed a long time before this same girl opened the kitchen door and offered her a seat by the window.

  "Can I get you anything to eat, ma'am?" the girl asked.

  "No, darling. I'd look favorable on some water though." The girl went to the sink and pumped a cupful of water. She placed it in Baby Suggs' hand. "I'm Janey, ma'am."

  Baby, marveling at the sink, drank every drop of water although it tasted like a serious medicine. "Suggs," she said, blotting her lips with the back of her hand. "Baby Suggs."

  "Glad to meet you, Mrs. Suggs. You going to be staying here?"

  "I don't know where I'll be. Mr. Garner--that's him what brought me here--he say he arrange something for me." And then, "I'm free, you know."

  Janey smiled. "Yes, ma'am."

  "Your people live around here?"

  "Yes, ma'am. All us live out on Bluestone."

  "We scattered," said Baby Suggs, "but maybe not for long."

  Great God, she thought, where do I start? Get somebody to write old Whitlow. See who took Patty and Rosa Lee. Somebody name Dunn got Ardelia and went West, she heard. No point in trying for Tyree or John. They cut thirty years ago and, if she searched too hard and they were hiding, finding them would do them more harm than good. Nancy and Famous died in a ship off the Virginia coast before it set sail for Savannah. That much she knew. The overseer at Whitlow's place brought her the news, more from a wish to have his way with her than from the kindness of his heart. The captain waited three weeks in port, to get a full cargo before setting off. Of the slaves in the hold who didn't make it, he said, two were Whitlow pickaninnies name of...

  But she knew their names. She knew, and covered her ears with her fists to keep from hearing them come from his mouth.

  Janey heated some milk and poured it in a bowl next to a plate of cornbread. After some coaxing, Baby Suggs came to the table and sat down. She crumbled the bread into the hot milk and discovered she was hungrier than she had ever been in her life and that was saying something.

  "They going to miss this?"

  "No," said Janey. "Eat all you want; it's ours."

  "Anybody else live here?"

  "Just me. Mr. Woodruff, he does the outside chores. He comes by two, three days a week."

  "Just you two?"

  "Yes, ma'am. I do the cooking and washing."

  "Maybe your people know of somebody looking for help."

  "I be sure to ask, but I know they take women at the slaughterhouse."

  "Doing what?"

  "I don't know."
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  "Something men don't want to do, I reckon."

  "My cousin say you get all the meat you want, plus twenty-five cents the hour. She make summer sausage."

  Baby Suggs lifted her hand to the top of her head. Money? Money?

  They would pay her money every single day? Money?

  "Where is this here slaughterhouse?" she asked.

  Before Janey could answer, the Bodwins came in to the kitchen with a grinning Mr. Garner behind. Undeniably brother and sister, both dressed in gray with faces too young for their snow-white hair.

  "Did you give her anything to eat, Janey?" asked the brother.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Keep your seat, Jenny," said the sister, and that good news got better.

  When they asked what work she could do, instead of reeling off the hundreds of tasks she had performed, she asked about the slaughterhouse.

  She was too old for that, they said.

  "She's the best cobbler you ever see," said Mr. Garner.

  "Cobbler?" Sister Bodwin raised her black thick eyebrows. "Who taught you that?"

  "Was a slave taught me," said Baby Suggs.

  "New boots, or just repair?"

  "New, old, anything."

  "Well," said Brother Bodwin, "that'll be something, but you'll need more."

  "What about taking in wash?" asked Sister Bodwin.

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Two cents a pound."

  "Yes, ma'am. But where's the in?"

  "What?"

  "You said 'take in wash.' Where is the 'in'? Where I'm going to be."

  "Oh, just listen to this, Jenny," said Mr. Garner. "These two angels got a house for you. Place they own out a ways."

  It had belonged to their grandparents before they moved in town.

  Recently it. had been rented out to a whole parcel of Negroes, who had left the state. It was too big a house for Jenny alone, they said (two rooms upstairs, two down), but it was the best and the only thing they could do. In return for laundry, some seamstress work, a little canning and so on (oh shoes, too), they would permit her to stay there. Provided she was clean. The past parcel of colored wasn't.