"Your woman she never fix up your hair?" was clearly a question for sethe, since that's who shewas looking at.

　　"My woman? You mean my mother? If she did, I don't remember.

　　I didn't see her but a few times out in the fields and once when she was working indigo. By thetime I woke up in the morning, she was in line. If the moon was bright they worked by its light.

　　Sunday she slept like a stick. She must of nursed me two or three weeks — that's the way theothers did. Then she went back in rice and I sucked from another woman whose job it was. So toanswer you, no. I reckon not. She never fixed my hair nor nothing. She didn't even sleep in thesame cabin most nights I remember. Too far from the line-up, I guess. One thing she did do. She picked me up and carried me behind the smokehouse. Back there she opened up her dress front andlifted her breast and pointed under it. Right on her rib was a circle and a cross burnt right in theskin. She said, 'This is your ma'am. This,' and she pointed. 'I am the only one got this mark now.

　　The rest dead. If something happens to me and you can't tell me by my face, you can know me bythis mark.' Scared me so. All I could think of was how important this was and how I needed tohave something important to say back, but I couldn't think of anything so I just said what I thought.

　　'Yes, Ma'am,' I said. 'But how will you know me? How will you know me? Mark me, too,' I said.

　　'Mark the mark on me too.'" Sethe chuckled.

　　"Did she?" asked Denver.

　　"She slapped my face.""What for?""I didn't understand it then. Not till I had a mark of my own.""What happened to her?""Hung. By the time they cut her down nobody could tell whether she had a circle and a cross ornot, least of all me and I did look."Sethe gathered hair from the comb and leaning back tossed it into the fire. It exploded into starsand the smell infuriated them. "Oh, my Jesus," she said and stood up so suddenly the comb she hadparked in Denver's hair fell to the floor.

　　"Ma'am? What's the matter with you, Ma'am?"Sethe walked over to a chair, lifted a sheet and stretched it as wide as her arms would go. Then shefolded, refolded and double folded it. She took another. Neither was completely dry but the foldingfelt too fine to stop. She had to do something with her hands because she was rememberingsomething she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit inher mind right behind the slap on her face and the circled cross.

　　"Why they hang your ma'am?" Denver asked. This was the first time she had heard anything abouther mother's mother. Baby Suggs was the only grandmother she knew.

　　"I never found out. It was a lot of them," she said, but what was getting clear and clearer as shefolded and refolded damp laundry was the woman called Nan who took her hand and yanked heraway from the pile before she could make out the mark. Nan was the one she knew best, who wasaround all day, who nursed babies, cooked, had one good arm and half of another. And who useddifferent words. Words Sethe understood then but could neither recall nor repeat now. Shebelieved that must be why she remembered so little before Sweet Home except singing anddancing and how crowded it was. What Nan told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma'am spoke, and which would never come back. But themessage — that was and had been there all along. Holding the damp white sheets against her chest,she was picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood. Nighttime. Nan holding her withher good arm, waving the stump of the other in the air. "Telling you. I am telling you, small girlSethe," and she did that. She told Sethe that her mother and Nan were together from the sea. Bothwere taken up many times by the crew. "She threw them all away but you. The one from the crewshe threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names,she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The othersshe did not put her arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe." Assmall girl Sethe, she was unimpressed. As grown-up woman Sethe she was angry, but not certainat what. A mighty wish for Baby Suggs broke over her like surf. In the quiet following its splash,Sethe looked at the two girls sitting by the stove: her sickly, shallow-minded boarder, her irritable,lonely daughter. They seemed little and far away.

　　"Paul D be here in a minute," she said.

　　Denver sighed with relief. For a minute there, while her mother stood folding the wash lost inthought, she clamped her teeth and prayed it would stop. Denver hated the stories her mother toldthat did not concern herself, which is why Amy was all she ever asked about. The rest was agleaming, powerful world made more so by Denver's absence from it. Not being in it, she hated itand wanted ............