"Beloved" by Toni Morrison, Part 1

Her past had been like her present— intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

Together they waged a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behavior of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air.

For a man with an immobile face it was amazing how ready it was to smile, or blaze or be sorry with you.

Paul D tied his shoes together, hung them over his shoulder and followed her through the door straight into a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood.

He rubbed his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches.

Her deprivation had been not having any dreams of her own at all.

Now it was too late for the rendezvous to happen at the Redmen’s house, so they dropped where they were.

Later he punctured her calf to simulate snakebite so she could use it in some way as an excuse for not being on time to shake worms from tobacco leaves.

So looking at each other intently was a Sunday-morning pleasure and Halle examined her as though storing up what he saw in sunlight for the shadow he saw the rest of the week.

Denver had taught herself to take pride in the condemnation Negroes heaped on them; the assumption that the haunting was done by an evil thing looking for more.

The walls of the room were slate-colored, the floor earth-brown, the wooden dresser the color of itself, curtains white, and the dominating feature, the quilt over an iron cot, was made up of scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool—the full range of the dark and the muted that thrift and modesty allowed.

Sometimes they ran along the railroad track laughing, too loud, apparently, to hear her because they never did turn around.

So, although the carnival was a lot less than mediocre (which is why it agreed to a Colored Thursday), it gave the four hundred black people in its audience thrill upon thrill upon thrill.

Arabian Nights Dancer cut her performance to three minutes instead of the usual fifteen she normally did—earning the gratitude of the children, who could hardly wait for Abu Snake Charmer, who followed her.

Women who drink champagne when there is nothing to celebrate can look like that: their straw hats with broken brims are often askew; they nod in public places; their shoes are undone.

He recognized the careful enunciation of letters by those, like himself, who could not read but had memorized the letters of their name.

Denver tended her, watched her sound sleep, listened to her labored breathing and, out of love and a breakneck possessiveness that charged her, hid like a personal blemish Beloved’s incontinence.

Just as Denver discovered and relied on the delightful effect sweet things had on Beloved, Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling.

"The shoe strings don’t fix!” she shouted and gave him a look so malevolent Denver touched her arm.

During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything.

There is also my husband squatting by the churn smearing the butter as well as its clabber all over his face because the milk they took is on his mind.

He wants me to ask him about what it was like for him—about how offended the tongue is, held down by iron, how the need to spit is so deep you cry for it.

Finally Denver’s breath steadied against the threat of an unbearable loss.

The break, followed by the redundant announcement of labor, arched her back.

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.

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.

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.

It was only a tiny disturbance anyway—not strong enough to divert her from the ambition welling in her now: she wanted Paul D. No matter what he told and knew, she wanted him in her life.

The consequence was a timid but hard-headed daughter Sethe would die to protect.

The patience of her mother and grandmother in its presence made her indifferent to it.

Even when she did muster the courage to ask Nelson Lord’s question, she could not hear Sethe’s answer, nor Baby Suggs’ words, nor anything at all thereafter.

Denver was alarmed by the harm she thought Beloved planned for Sethe, but felt helpless to thwart it, so unrestricted was her need to love another.

But the damage he did came undone with the miraculous resurrection of Beloved.

By the time they unhitched him from the wagon and he saw nothing but dogs and two shacks in a world of sizzling grass, the roiling blood was shaking him to and fro.

The illness that swept them now was reminiscent of the one that had killed half their number two hundred years earlier.

Then it was the cold house and it was out there, separated from the main part of 124, curled on top of two croaker sacks full of sweet potatoes, staring at the sides of a lard can, that he realized the moving was involuntary.

But sometimes—at moments Denver could neither anticipate nor create—Beloved rested cheek on knuckles and looked at Denver with attention.

Where she was once indolent, resentful of every task, now she is spry, executing, even extending the assignments Sethe leaves for them.

Deferring to his slaves’ opinions did not deprive him of authority or power.

But it was more than appetite that humiliated him and made him wonder if schoolteacher was right.

When he stood up from the supper table at 124 and turned toward the stairs, nausea was first, then repulsion.

So, when he saw the diminished expectation in her eyes, the melancholy without blame, he could not say it.

The threads of malice creeping toward him from Beloved’s side of the table were held harmless in the warmth of Sethe’s smile.

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.

And no matter, for the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home.

In Lillian Garner’s house, exempted from the 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.

Caught red-handed, so to speak, they would seem to recognize the futility of outsmarting a whiteman and the hopelessness of outrunning a rifle.

From the solemn air with which Stamp had unfolded the paper, the tenderness in the old man’s fingers as he stroked its creases and flattened it out, first on his knees, then on the split top of the piling, Paul D knew that it ought to mess him up.

Nor was it there because the person had been killed, or maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated, since that could hardly qualify as news in a newspaper.

This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone.