"Beloved," Vocabulary from Part 3

Neither Sethe nor Beloved knew or cared about it one way or another.

When once or twice Sethe tried to assert herself—be the unquestioned mother whose word was law and who knew what was best—Beloved slammed things, wiped the table clean of plates, threw salt on the floor, broke a windowpane.

Listless and sleepy with hunger Denver saw the flesh between her mother’s forefinger and thumb fade.

It was April and everything alive was tentative.

Braced and heartened by that easy encounter, she picked up speed and began to look deliberately at the neighborhood surrounding her.

The pleasure she felt at having found the house dissolved, suddenly, in doubt.

With that education pat and firmly set, she dispensed with rancor, was indiscriminately polite, saving her real affection for the unpicked children of Cincinnati, one of whom sat before her in a dress so loud it embarrassed the needlepoint chair seat.

She did not know it then, but it was the word “baby,” said softly and with such kindness, that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman.

Maybe they were sorry for the years of their own disdain.

In any case, the personal pride, the arrogant claim staked out at 124 seemed to them to have run its course.

And the older woman yielded it up without a murmur.

This and much more Denver heard her say from her corner chair, trying to persuade Beloved, the one and only person she felt she had to convince, that what she had done was right because it came from true love.

She would hire herself out somewhere, and although she was afraid to leave Sethe and Beloved alone all day not knowing what calamity either one of them would create, she came to realize that her presence in that house had no influence on what either woman did.

Growled when they chose; sulked, explained, demanded, strutted, cowered, cried and provoked each other to the edge of violence, then over.

It was “the lowest yet” who gave her a disgust for sex and against whom she measured all atrocities.

Sethe’s crime was staggering and her pride outstripped even that; but she could not countenance the possibility of sin moving on in the house, unleashed and sassy.

“ Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” and nobody needed more; nobody needed a grownup evil sitting at the table with a grudge.

She was a little anxious about whether she would prove satisfactory to the Bodwins, and uneasy too because she woke up crying from a dream about a running pair of shoes.

But there they were, young and happy, playing in Baby Suggs’ yard, not feeling the envy that surfaced the next day.

Privacy was an adult indulgence, but when he got to be one, he seemed not to need it.

It made him the most visible and memorable person at every gathering, and cartoonists had fastened onto the theatricality of his white hair and big black mustache whenever they depicted local political antagonism.

The Society managed to turn infanticide and the cry of savagery around, and build a further case for abolishing slavery.

They saw Denver sitting on the steps and beyond her, where the yard met the road, they saw the rapt faces of thirty neighborhood women.

Keane and his friend, a Sergeant Rossiter, confiscated a skiff and the three of them floated in Mobile Bay.

Keane and Rossiter disembarked at Memphis to look for their commanders.