Beloved

by Toni Morrison

  Denver suggests warming up some cider, while her mind races to something she might do or say to interest and entertain the dancer. Denver is a strategist now and has to keep Beloved by her side from the minute Sethe leaves for work until the hour of her return when Beloved begins to hover at the window, then work her way out the door, down the steps and near the road. Plotting has changed Denver markedly. Where she was once indolent, resentful of every task, now she is spry, executing, even extending the assignments Sethe leaves for them. All to be able to say “We got to” and “Ma’am said for us to.” Otherwise Beloved gets private and dreamy, or quiet and sullen, and Denver’s chances of being looked at by her go down to nothing. She has no control over the evenings. When her mother is anywhere around, Beloved has eyes only for Sethe. At night, in bed, anything might happen. She might want to be told a story in the dark when Denver can’t see her. Or she might get up and go into the cold house where Paul D has begun to sleep. Or she might cry, silently. She might even sleep like a brick, her breath sugary from fingerfuls of molasses or sand-cookie crumbs. Denver will turn toward her then, and if Beloved faces her, she will inhale deeply the sweet air from her mouth. If not, she will have to lean up and over her, every once in a while, to catch a sniff. For anything is better than the original hunger—the time when, after a year of the wonderful little i, sentences rolling out like pie dough and the company of other children, there was no sound coming through. Anything is better than the silence when she answered to hands gesturing and was indifferent to the movement of lips. When she saw every little thing and colors leaped smoldering into view. She will forgo the most violent of sunsets, stars as fat as dinner plates and all the blood of autumn and settle for the palest yellow if it comes from her Beloved.

  The cider jug is heavy, but it always is, even when empty. Denver can carry it easily, yet she asks Beloved to help her. It is in the cold house next to the molasses and six pounds of cheddar hard as bone. A pallet is in the middle of the floor covered with newspaper and a blanket at the foot. It has been slept on for almost a month, even though snow has come and, with it, serious winter.

  It is noon, quite light outside; inside it is not. A few cuts of sun break through the roof and walls but once there they are too weak to shift for themselves. Darkness is stronger and swallows them like minnows.

  The door bangs shut. Denver can’t tell where Beloved is standing.

  “Where are you?” she whispers in a laughing sort of way.

  “Here,” says Beloved.

  “Where?”

  “Come find me,” says Beloved.

  Denver stretches out her right arm and takes a step or two. She trips and falls down onto the pallet. Newspaper crackles under her weight. She laughs again. “Oh, shoot. Beloved?”

  No one answers. Denver waves her arms and squinches her eyes to separate the shadows of potato sacks, a lard can and a side of smoked pork from the one that might be human.

  “Stop fooling,” she says and looks up toward the light to check and make sure this is still the cold house and not something going on in her sleep. The minnows of light still swim there; they can’t make it down to where she is.

  “You the one thirsty. You want cider or don’t you?” Denver’s voice is mildly accusatory. Mildly. She doesn’t want to offend and she doesn’t want to betray the panic that is creeping over her like hairs. There is no sight or sound of Beloved. Denver struggles to her feet amid the crackling newspaper. Holding her palm out, she moves slowly toward the door. There is no latch or knob—just a loop of wire to catch a nail. She pushes the door open. Cold sunlight displaces the dark. The room is just as it was when they entered—except Beloved is not there. There is no point in looking further, for everything in the place can be seen at first sight. Denver looks anyway because the loss is ungovernable. She steps back into the shed, allowing the door to close quickly behind her. Darkness or not, she moves rapidly around, reaching, touching cobwebs, cheese, slanting shelves, the pallet interfering with each step. If she stumbles, she is not aware of it because she does not know where her body stops, which part of her is an arm, a foot or a knee. She feels like an ice cake torn away from the solid surface of the stream, floating on darkness, thick and crashing against the edges of things around it. Breakable, meltable and cold.

  It is hard to breathe and even if there were light she wouldn’t be able to see anything because she is crying. Just as she thought it might happen, it has. Easy as walking into a room. A magical appearance on a stump, the face wiped out by sunlight, and a magical disappearance in a shed, eaten alive by the dark.

  “Don’t,” she is saying between tough swallows. “Don’t. Don’t go back.”

  This is worse than when Paul D came to 124 and she cried helplessly into the stove. This is worse. Then it was for herself. Now she is crying because she has no self. Death is a skipped meal compared to this. She can feel her thickness thinning, dissolving into nothing. She grabs the hair at her temples to get enough to uproot it and halt the melting for a while. Teeth clamped shut, Denver brakes her sobs. She doesn’t move to open the door because there is no world out there. She decides to stay in the cold house and let the dark swallow her like the minnows of light above. She won’t put up with another leaving, another trick. Waking up to find one brother then another not at the bottom of the bed, his foot jabbing her spine. Sitting at the table eating turnips and saving the liquor for her grandmother to drink; her mother’s hand on the keeping-room door and her voice saying, “Baby Suggs is gone, Denver.” And when she got around to worrying about what would be the case if Sethe died or Paul D took her away, a dream-come-true comes true just to leave her on a pile of newspaper in the dark.

  No footfall announces her, but there she is, standing where before there was nobody when Denver looked. And smiling.

  Denver grabs the hem of Beloved’s skirt. “I thought you left me. I thought you went back.”

  Beloved smiles, “I don’t want that place. This the place I am.” She sits down on the pallet and, laughing, lies back looking at the cracklights above.

  Surreptitiously, Denver pinches a piece of Beloved’s skirt between her fingers and holds on. A good thing she does because suddenly Beloved sits up.

  “What is it?” asks Denver.

  “Look,” she points to the sunlit cracks.

  “What? I don’t see nothing.” Denver follows the pointing finger.

  Beloved drops her hand. “I’m like this.”

  Denver watches as Beloved bends over, curls up and rocks. Her eyes go to no place; her moaning is so small Denver can hardly hear it.

  “You all right? Beloved?”

  Beloved focuses her eyes. “Over there. Her face.”

  Denver looks where Beloved’s eyes go; there is nothing but darkness there.

  “Whose face? Who is it?”

  “Me. It’s me.”

  She is smiling again.

  THE LAST of the Sweet Home men, so named and called by one who would know, believed it. The other four believed it too, once, but they were long gone. The sold one never returned, the lost one never found. One, he knew, was dead for sure; one he hoped was, because butter and clabber was no life or reason to live it. He grew up thinking that, of all the Blacks in Kentucky, only the five of them were men. Allowed, encouraged to correct Garner, even defy him. To invent ways of doing things; to see what was needed and attack it without permission. To buy a mother, choose a horse or a wife, handle guns, even learn reading if they wanted to—but they didn’t want to since nothing important to them could be put down on paper.

  Was that it? Is that where the manhood lay? In the naming done by a whiteman who was supposed to know? Who gave them the privilege not of working but of deciding how to? No. In their relationship with Garner was true metal: they were believed and trusted, but most of all they were listened to.

  He thought what they said had merit, and what they felt was serious. Deferring to his slaves’ opinions did not deprive him of authority or powe
r. It was schoolteacher who taught them otherwise. A truth that waved like a scarecrow in rye: they were only Sweet Home men at Sweet Home. One step off that ground and they were trespassers among the human race. Watchdogs without teeth; steer bulls without horns; gelded workhorses whose neigh and whinny could not be translated into a language responsible humans spoke. His strength had lain in knowing that schoolteacher was wrong. Now he wondered. There was Alfred, Georgia, there was Delaware, there was Sixo and still he wondered. If schoolteacher was right it explained how he had come to be a rag doll—picked up and put back down anywhere any time by a girl young enough to be his daughter. Fucking her when he was convinced he didn’t want to. Whenever she turned her behind up, the calves of his youth (was that it?) cracked his resolve. But it was more than appetite that humiliated him and made him wonder if schoolteacher was right. It was being moved, placed where she wanted him, and there was nothing he was able to do about it. For his life he could not walk up the glistening white stairs in the evening; for his life he could not stay in the kitchen, in the keeping room, in the storeroom at night. And he tried. Held his breath the way he had when he ducked into the mud; steeled his heart the way he had when the trembling began. But it was worse than that, worse than the blood eddy he had controlled with a sledge hammer. When he stood up from the supper table at 124 and turned toward the stairs, nausea was first, then repulsion. He, he. He who had eaten raw meat barely dead, who under plum trees bursting with blossoms had crunched through a dove’s breast before its heart stopped beating. Because he was a man and a man could do what he would: be still for six hours in a dry well while night dropped; fight raccoon with his hands and win; watch another man, whom he loved better than his brothers, roast without a tear just so the roasters would know what a man was like. And it was he, that man, who had walked from Georgia to Delaware, who could not go or stay put where he wanted to in 124—shame.

  Paul D could not command his feet, but he thought he could still talk and he made up his mind to break out that way. He would tell Sethe about the last three weeks: catch her alone coming from work at the beer garden she called a restaurant and tell it all.

  He waited for her. The winter afternoon looked like dusk as he stood in the alley behind Sawyer’s Restaurant. Rehearsing, imagining her face and letting the words flock in his head like kids before lining up to follow the leader.

  “Well, ah, this is not the, a man can’t, see, but aw listen here, it ain’t that, it really ain’t, Ole Garner, what I mean is, it ain’t a weakness, the kind of weakness I can fight ’cause ’cause something is happening to me, that girl is doing it, I know you think I never liked her nohow, but she is doing it to me. Fixing me. Sethe, she’s fixed me and I can’t break it.”

  What? A grown man fixed by a girl? But what if the girl was not a girl, but something in disguise? A lowdown something that looked like a sweet young girl and fucking her or not was not the point, it was not being able to stay or go where he wished in 124, and the danger was in losing Sethe because he was not man enough to break out, so he needed her, Sethe, to help him, to know about it, and it shamed him to have to ask the woman he wanted to protect to help him do it, God damn it to hell.

  Paul D blew warm breath into the hollow of his cupped hands. The wind raced down the alley so fast it sleeked the fur of four kitchen dogs waiting for scraps. He looked at the dogs. The dogs looked at him.

  Finally the back door opened and Sethe stepped through holding a scrap pan in the crook of her arm. When she saw him, she said Oh, and her smile was both pleasure and surprise.

  Paul D believed he smiled back but his face was so cold he wasn’t sure.

  “Man, you make me feel like a girl, coming by to pick me up after work. Nobody ever did that before. You better watch out, I might start looking forward to it.” She tossed the largest bones into the dirt rapidly so the dogs would know there was enough and not fight each other. Then she dumped the skins of some things, heads of other things and the insides of still more things—what the restaurant could not use and she would not—in a smoking pile near the animals’ feet.

  “Got to rinse this out,” she said, “and then I’ll be right with you.”

  He nodded as she returned to the kitchen.

  The dogs ate without sound and Paul D thought they at least got what they came for, and if she had enough for them—

  The cloth on her head was brown wool and she edged it down over her hairline against the wind.

  “You get off early or what?”

  “I took off early.”

  “Anything the matter?”

  “In a way of speaking,” he said and wiped his lips.

  “Not cut back?”

  “No, no. They got plenty work. I just—”

  “Hm?”

  “Sethe, you won’t like what I’m ’bout to say.”

  She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind. Another woman would have squinted or at least teared if the wind whipped her face as it did Sethe’s. Another woman might have shot him a look of apprehension, pleading, anger even, because what he said sure sounded like part one of Goodbye, I’m gone.

  Sethe looked at him steadily, calmly, already ready to accept, release or excuse an in-need-or-trouble man. Agreeing, saying okay, all right, in advance, because she didn’t believe any of them—over the long haul—could measure up. And whatever the reason, it was all right. No fault. Nobody’s fault.

  He knew what she was thinking and even though she was wrong—he was not leaving her, wouldn’t ever—the thing he had in mind to tell her was going to be worse. So, when he saw the diminished expectation in her eyes, the melancholy without blame, he could not say it. He could not say to this woman who did not squint in the wind, “I am not a man.”

  “Well, say it, Paul D, whether I like it or not.”

  Since he could not say what he planned to, he said something he didn’t know was on his mind. “I want you pregnant, Sethe. Would you do that for me?”

  Now she was laughing and so was he.

  “You came by here to ask me that? You are one crazy-headed man. You right; I don’t like it. Don’t you think I’m too old to start that all over again?” She slipped her fingers in his hand for all the world like the hand-holding shadows on the side of the road.

  “Think about it,” he said. And suddenly it was a solution: a way to hold on to her, document his manhood and break out of the girl’s spell—all in one. He put the tips of Sethe’s fingers on his cheek. Laughing, she pulled them away lest somebody passing the alley see them misbehaving in public, in daylight, in the wind.

  Still, he’d gotten a little more time, bought it, in fact, and hoped the price wouldn’t wreck him. Like paying for an afternoon in the coin of life to come.

  They left off playing, let go hands and hunched forward as they left the alley and entered the street. The wind was quieter there but the dried-out cold it left behind kept pedestrians fast-moving, stiff inside their coats. No men leaned against door frames or storefront windows. The wheels of wagons delivering feed or wood screeched as though they hurt. Hitched horses in front of the saloons shivered and closed their eyes. Four women, walking two abreast, approached, their shoes loud on the wooden walkway. Paul D touched Sethe’s elbow to guide her as they stepped from the slats to the dirt to let the women pass.

  Half an hour later, when they reached the city’s edge, Sethe and Paul D resumed catching and snatching each other’s fingers, stealing quick pats on the behind. Joyfully embarrassed to be that grown-up and that young at the same time.

  Resolve, he thought. That was all it took, and no motherless gal was going to break it up. No lazy, stray pup of a woman could turn him around, make him doubt himself, wonder, plead or confess. Convinced of it, that he could do it, he threw his arm around Sethe’s shoulders and squeezed. She let her head touch his chest, and since the moment was valuable to both of them, they stopped and stood that way—not breathing, not even caring if a passerby passed them by. The
winter light was low. Sethe closed her eyes. Paul D looked at the black trees lining the roadside, their defending arms raised against attack. Softly, suddenly, it began to snow, like a present come down from the sky. Sethe opened her eyes to it and said, “Mercy.” And it seemed to Paul D that it was—a little mercy—something given to them on purpose to mark what they were feeling so they would remember it later on when they needed to.

  Down came the dry flakes, fat enough and heavy enough to crash like nickels on stone. It always surprised him, how quiet it was. Not like rain, but like a secret.

  “Run!” he said.

  “You run,” said Sethe. “I been on my feet all day.”

  “Where I been? Sitting down?” and he pulled her along.

  “Stop! Stop!” she said. “I don’t have the legs for this.”

  “Then give em to me,” he said and before she knew it he had backed into her, hoisted her on his back and was running down the road past brown fields turning white.

  Breathless at last, he stopped and she slid back down on her own two feet, weak from laughter.

  “You need some babies, somebody to play with in the snow.” Sethe secured her headcloth.

  Paul D smiled and warmed his hands with his breath. “I sure would like to give it a try. Need a willing partner though.”

  “I’ll say,” she answered. “Very, very willing.”

  It was nearly four o’clock now and 124 was half a mile ahead. Floating toward them, barely visible in the drifting snow, was a figure, and although it was the same figure that had been meeting Sethe for four months, so complete was the attention she and Paul D were paying to themselves they both felt a jolt when they saw her close in.