It was not a story to pass on.
So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep. Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative--looked at too long--shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don't, because they know things will never be the same if they do.
This is not a story to pass on.
Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there.
By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather.
Certainly no clamor for a kiss.
Beloved.
The End
TONI MORRISON was born in Lorain, Ohio. The recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, and of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Beloved, she is the author of six other novels. The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, which won the 1978 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, Tar Baby, Jazz, and Paradise, which are available or forthcoming in Plume editions. She is Robert F.Goheen Professor, Council of the Humanities, at Princeton University.
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