While Stamp Paid was making up his mind to visit 124 for Baby Suggs' sake, Sethe was trying totake her advice: to lay it all down, sword and shield. Not just to acknowledge the advice BabySuggs gave her, but actually to take it. Four days after Paul D reminded her of how many feet shehad, Sethe rummaged among the shoes of strangers to find the ice skates she was sure were there.

　　Digging in the heap she despised herself for having been so trusting, so quick to surrender at thestove while Paul D kissed her back. She should have known that he would behave like everybodyelse in town once he knew. The twenty-eight days of having women friends, a mother in-law, andall her children together; of being part of a neighborhood; of, in fact, having neighbors at all to callher own — all that was long gone and would never come back. No more dancing in the Clearing orhappy feeds. No more discussions, stormy or quiet, about the true meaning of the Fugitive Bill, theSettlement Fee, God's Ways and Negro pews; antislavery, manumission, skin voting, Republicans, Dred Scott, book learning, Sojourner's high-wheeled buggy, the Colored Ladies of Delaware,Ohio, and the other weighty issues that held them in chairs, scraping the floorboards or pacingthem in agony or exhilaration. No anxious wait for the North Star or news of a beat-off. No sighingat a new betrayal or handclapping at a small victory.

　　Those twenty-eight happy days were followed by eighteen years of disapproval and a solitary life.

　　Then a few months of the sun splashed life that the shadows holding hands on the road promisedher; tentative greetings from other coloredpeople in Paul D's company; a bed life for herself.

　　Except for Denver's friend, every bit of it had disappeared. Was that the pattern? she wondered.

　　Every eighteen or twenty years her unlivable life would be interrupted by a short-lived glory?

　　Well, if that's the way it was — that's the way............