Stamp Paid rearranged his way. Too angry to walk her home and listen to more, he watched her fora moment and turned to go before the alert white face at the window next door had come to anyconclusion.

　　Trying to get to 124 for the second time now, he regretted that conversation: the high tone he took;his refusal to see the effect of marrow weariness in a woman he believed was a mountain. Now,too late, he understood her. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn'tcount. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice.

　　One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. Thewhitefolks had tired her out at last. And him. Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still onthe loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone inKentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; childrenwhipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelledskin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was awhole other thing. The stench stank. Stank up off the pages of the North Star, out of the mouths ofwitnesses, etched in crooked handwriting in letters delivered by hand. Detailed in documents andpetitions full of whereas and presented to any legal body who'd read it, it stank. But none of thathad worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of theLicking River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom.

　　Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what cameloose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bitof scalp. He untied the ribbon and put it in his pocket, dropped the curl in the weeds. On the wayhome, he stopped, short of breath and dizzy. He wait............