It was gone. Denver wandered through the silence to the stove. She ashed over the fire and pulledthe pan of biscuits from the oven. The jelly cupboard was on its back, its contents lying in a heapin the corner of the bottom shelf. She took out a jar, and, looking around for a plate, found half ofone by the door. These things she carried out to the porch steps, where she sat down.
The two of them had gone up there. Stepping lightly, easy-footed, they had climbed the whitestairs, leaving her down below. She pried the wire from the top of the jar and then the lid. Under it was cloth and under that a thin cake of wax. She removed it all and coaxed the jelly onto one halfof the half a plate. She took a biscuit and pulled off its black top. Smoke curled from the soft whiteinsides. She missed her brothers. Buglar and Howard would be twenty two and twenty-three now.
Although they had been polite to her during the quiet time and gave her the whole top of the bed,she remembered how it was before: the pleasure they had sitting clustered on the white stairs —she between the knees of Howard or Buglar — while they made up die-witch! stories with provenways of killing her dead. And Baby Suggs telling her things in the keeping room. She smelled likebark in the day and leaves at night, for Denver would not sleep in her old room after her brothersran away.
Now her mother was upstairs with the man who had gotten rid of the only other company she had.
Denver dipped a bit of bread into the jelly. Slowly, methodically, miserably she ate it.
NOT QUITE in hurry, but losing no time, Sethe and Paul D climbed the white stairs. Overwhelmedasmu(a) ch by the downright luck of finding her house and her in it as by the certaintyof giving her his sex, Paul D dropped twenty-five years from his recent memory. A stair stepbefore him was Baby Suggs' replacement, the new girl they dreamed of at night and fucked cowsfor at dawn while waiting for her to choose. Merely kissing the wrought iron on her back hadshook the house, had made it necessary for him to beat it to pieces. Now he would do more.
She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pitched ceiling and not the walls. There weretwo rooms and she took him into one of them, hoping he wouldn't mind the fact that she was notprepared; that though she could remember desire, she had forgotten how it worked; the clutch andhelplessness that resided in the hands; how blindness was altered so that what leapt to the eye wereplaces to lie down, and all else — door knobs, straps, hooks, the sadness that crouched in corners,and the passing of time — was interference.
It was over before they could get their clothes off. Half-dressed and short of breath, they lay sideby side resentful of one another and the skylight above them. His dreaming of her had been toolong and too long ago. Her deprivation had been not having any dreams of her own at all. Nowthey were sorry and too shy to make talk.
Sethe lay on her back, her head turned from him. Out of the corner of his eye, Paul D saw the floatof her breasts and disliked it, the spread-away, flat roundness of them that he could definitely livewithout, never mind that downstairs he had held them as though they were the most expensive partof himself. And the wrought-iron maze he had explored in the kitchen like a gold miner pawingthrough pay dirt was in fact a revolting clump of scars. Not a tree, as she said. Maybe shaped likeone, but nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting; things you could trust and benear; talk to if you wanted to as he frequently did since way back when he took the midday meal inthe fields of Sweet Home. Always in the same place if he could, and choosing the place had beenhard because Sweet Home had more pretty trees than any farm around. His choice he calledBrother, and sat under it, alone sometimes, sometimes with Halle or the other Pauls, but moreoften with Sixo, who was gentle then and still speaking English. Indigo with a flame-red tongue,Sixo experimented with night-cooked potatoes, trying to pin down exactly when to put smoking hot rocks in a hole, potatoes on top, and cover the whole thing with twigs so that by the time theybroke for the meal, hitched the animals, left the field and got to Brother, the potatoes would be atthe peak of perfection. He might get up in the middle of the night, go all the way out there, start theearth-over by starlight; or he would make the stones less hot and put the next day's potatoes onthem right after the meal. He never got it right, but they ate those undercooked, overcooked, dried-out or raw potatoes anyway, laughing, spitting and giving him advice.
Time never worked the way Sixo thought, so of course he never got it right. Once he plotted downto the minute a thirty-mile trip to see a woman. He left on a Saturday when the moon was in theplace he wanted it to be, arrived at her cabin before church on Sunday and had just enough time tosay good morning before he had to start back again so he'd make the field call on time Mondaymorning. He had walked for seventeen hours, sat down for one, turned around and walkedseventeen more. Halle and the Pauls spent the whole day covering Sixo's fatigue from Mr. Garner.
They ate no potatoes that day, sweet or white. Sprawled near Brother, his flame-red tongue hiddenfrom them, his indigo face closed, Sixo slept through dinnerlike a corpse. Now there was a man, and that was a tree. Himself lying in the bed and the "tree"lying next to him didn't compare. Paul D looked through the window above his feet and folded hishands behind his head. An elbow grazed Sethe's shoulder. The touch of cloth on her skin startledher. She had forgotten he had not taken off his shirt. Dog, she thought, and then remembered thatshe had not allowed him the time for taking it off. Nor herself time to take off her petticoat, andconsidering she had begun undressing before she saw him on the porch, that her shoes andstockings were already in her hand and she had never put them back on; that he had looked at herwet bare feet and asked to join her; that when she rose to cook he had undressed her further;considering how quickly they had started getting naked, you'd think by now they would be. Butmaybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said. They encouragedyou to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was,they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her childrenout and tore up the house.
She needed to get up from there, go downstairs and piece it all back together. This house he toldher to leave as though a house was a little thing — a shirtwaist or a sewing basket you could walkoff from or give away any old time. She who had never had one but this one; she who left a dirtfloor to come to this one; she who had to bring a fistful of salsify into Mrs. Garner's kitchen everyday just to be able to work in it, feel like some part of it was hers, because she wanted to love thework she did, to take the ugly out of it, and the only way she could feel at home on Sweet Homewas if she picked some pretty growing thing and took it with her. The day she forgot was the daybutter wouldn't come or the brine in the barrel blistered her arms.
At least it seemed so. A few yellow flowers on the table, some myrtle tied around the handle of theflatiron holding the door open for a breeze calmed her, and when Mrs. Garner and she sat down tosort bristle, or make ink, she felt fine. Fine. Not scared of the men beyond. The five who slept inquarters near her, but never came in the night. Just touched their raggedy hats when they saw herand stared. And if she brought food to them in the fields, bacon and bread wrapped in a piece of clean sheeting, they never took it from her hands. They stood back and waited for her to put it onthe ground (at the foot of a tree) and leave. Either they did not want to take anything from her, ordid not want her to see them eat. Twice or three times she lingered. Hidden behind honeysuckleshe watched them. How different they were without her, how they laughed and played and urinatedand sang. All but Sixo, who laughed once — at the very end. Halle, of course, was the nicest. BabySuggs' eighth and last child, who rented himself out all over the county to buy her away fromthere. But he too, as it turned out, was nothing but a man.
"A man ain't nothing but a man," said Baby Suggs. "But a son? Well now, that's somebody."It made sense for a lot of reasons because in all of Baby's life, as well as Sethe's own, men andwomen were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn'trun off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged,won, stolen or seized. So Baby's eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of lifewas the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because thepieces included her children. Halle she was able to keep the longest. Twenty years. A lifetime.
Given to her, no doubt, to make up for hearing that her two girls, neither of whom had their adultteeth, were sold and gone and she had not been able to wave goodbye. To make up for couplingwith a straw boss for four months in exchange for keeping her third child, a boy, with her — onlyto have him traded for lumber in the spring of the next year and to find herself pregnant by the manwho promised not to and did. That child she could not love and the rest she would not. "God takewhat He would," she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gaveher freedom when it didn't mean a thing. Sethe had the amazing luck of six whole years ofmarriage to that "somebody" son who had fathered every one of her children. A blessing she wasreckless enough to take for granted, lean on, as though Sweet Home really was one. As though ahandful of myrtle stuck in the handle of pressing iron propped against the door in awhitewoman's kitchen could make it hers. As tho(a) ugh mint sprig in the mouth changed the breath aswell as its odor. A bigger fool never lived.