Beloved

  “Did you steal that shoat? You stole that shoat.” Schoolteacher was quiet but firm, like he was just going through the motions—not expecting an answer that mattered. Sixo sat there, not even getting up to plead or deny. He just sat there, the streak-of-lean in his hand, the gristle clustered in the tin plate like gemstones—rough, unpolished, but loot nevertheless.

  “You stole that shoat, didn’t you?”

  “No. Sir,” said Sixo, but he had the decency to keep his eyes on the meat.

  “You telling me you didn’t steal it, and I’m looking right at you?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t steal it.”

  Schoolteacher smiled. “Did you kill it?”

  “Yes, sir. I killed it.”

  “Did you butcher it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you cook it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, then. Did you eat it?”

  “Yes, sir. I sure did.”

  “And you telling me that’s not stealing?”

  “No, sir. It ain’t.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Improving your property, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Sixo plant rye to give the high piece a better chance. Sixo take and feed the soil, give you more crop. Sixo take and feed Sixo give you more work.”

  Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined. After Mr. Garner died with a hole in his ear that Mrs. Garner said was an exploded ear drum brought on by stroke and Sixo said was gunpowder, everything they touched was looked on as stealing. Not just a rifle of corn, or two yard eggs the hen herself didn’t even remember, everything. Schoolteacher took away the guns from the Sweet Home men and, deprived of game to round out their diet of bread, beans, hominy, vegetables and a little extra at slaughter time, they began to pilfer in earnest, and it became not only their right but their obligation.

  Sethe understood it then, but now with a paying job and an employer who was kind enough to hire an ex-convict, she despised herself for the pride that made pilfering better than standing in line at the window of the general store with all the other Negroes. She didn’t want to jostle them or be jostled by them. Feel their judgment or their pity, especially now. She touched her forehead with the back of her wrist and blotted the perspiration. The workday had come to a close and already she was feeling the excitement. Not since that other escape had she felt so alive. Slopping the alley dogs, watching their frenzy, she pressed her lips. Today would be a day she would accept a lift, if anybody on a wagon offered it. No one would, and for sixteen years her pride had not let her ask. But today. Oh, today. Now she wanted speed, to skip over the long walk home and be there.

  When Sawyer warned her about being late again, she barely heard him. He used to be a sweet man. Patient, tender in his dealings with his help. But each year, following the death of his son in the War, he grew more and more crotchety. As though Sethe’s dark face was to blame.

  “Un huh,” she said, wondering how she could hurry time along and get to the no-time waiting for her.

  She needn’t have worried. Wrapped tight, hunched forward, as she started home her mind was busy with the things she could forget.

  Thank God I don’t have to rememory or say a thing because you know it. All. You know I never would a left you. Never. It was all I could think of to do. When the train came I had to be ready. Schoolteacher was teaching us things we couldn’t learn. I didn’t care nothing about the measuring string. We all laughed about that—except Sixo. He didn’t laugh at nothing. But I didn’t care. Schoolteacher’d wrap that string all over my head, ’cross my nose, around my behind. Number my teeth. I thought he was a fool. And the questions he asked was the biggest foolishness of all.

  Then me and your brothers come up from the second patch. The first one was close to the house where the quick things grew: beans, onions, sweet peas. The other one was further down for long-lasting things, potatoes, pumpkin, okra, pork salad. Not much was up yet down there. It was early still. Some young salad maybe, but that was all. We pulled weeds and hoed a little to give everything a good start. After that we hit out for the house. The ground raised up from the second patch. Not a hill exactly but kind of. Enough for Buglar and Howard to run up and roll down, run up and roll down. That’s the way I used to see them in my dreams, laughing, their short fat legs running up the hill. Now all I see is their backs walking down the railroad tracks. Away from me. Always away from me. But that day they was happy, running up and rolling down. It was early still—the growing season had took hold but not much was up. I remember the peas still had flowers. The grass was long though, full of white buds and those tall red blossoms people call Diane and something there with the leastest little bit of blue—light, like a cornflower but pale, pale. Real pale. I maybe should have hurried because I left you back at the house in a basket in the yard. Away from where the chickens scratched but you never know. Anyway I took my time getting back but your brothers didn’t have patience with me staring at flowers and sky every two or three steps. They ran on ahead and I let em. Something sweet lives in the air that time of year, and if the breeze is right, it’s hard to stay indoors. When I got back I could hear Howard and Buglar laughing down by the quarters. I put my hoe down and cut across the side yard to get to you. The shade moved so by the time I got back the sun was shining right on you. Right in your face, but you wasn’t woke at all. Still asleep. I wanted to pick you up in my arms and I wanted to look at you sleeping too. Didn’t know which; you had the sweetest face. Yonder, not far, was a grape arbor Mr. Garner made. Always full of big plans, he wanted to make his own wine to get drunk off. Never did get more than a kettle of jelly from it. I don’t think the soil was right for grapes. Your daddy believed it was the rain, not the soil. Sixo said it was bugs. The grapes so little and tight. Sour as vinegar too. But there was a little table in there. So I picked up your basket and carried you over to the grape arbor. Cool in there and shady. I set you down on the little table and figured if I got a piece of muslin the bugs and things wouldn’t get to you. And if Mrs. Garner didn’t need me right there in the kitchen, I could get a chair and you and me could set out there while I did the vegetables. I headed for the back door to get the clean muslin we kept in the kitchen press. The grass felt good on my feet. I got near the door and I heard voices. Schoolteacher made his pupils sit and learn books for a spell every afternoon. If it was nice enough weather, they’d sit on the side porch. All three of em. He’d talk and they’d write. Or he would read and they would write down what he said. I never told nobody this. Not your pap, not nobody. I almost told Mrs. Garner, but she was so weak then and getting weaker. This is the first time I’m telling it and I’m telling it to you because it might help explain something to you although I know you don’t need me to do it. To tell it or even think over it. You don’t have to listen either, if you don’t want to. But I couldn’t help listening to what I heard that day. He was talking to his pupils and I heard him say, “Which one are you doing?” And one of the boys said, “Sethe.” That’s when I stopped because I heard my name, and then I took a few steps to where I could see what they was doing. Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one hand behind his back. He licked a forefinger a couple of times and turned a few pages. Slow. I was about to turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, “No, no. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to line them up.” I commenced to walk backward, didn’t even look behind me to find out where I was headed. I just kept lifting my feet and pushing back. When I bumped up against a tree my scalp was prickly. One of the dogs was licking out a pan in the yard. I got to the grape arbor fast enough, but I didn’t have the muslin. Flies settled all over your face, rubbing their hands. My head itched like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp. I never told Halle or nobody. But that very day I a
sked Mrs. Garner a part of it. She was low then. Not as low as she ended up, but failing. A kind of bag grew under her jaw. It didn’t seem to hurt her, but it made her weak. First she’d be up and spry in the morning and by the second milking she couldn’t stand up. Next she took to sleeping late. The day I went up there she was in bed the whole day, and I thought to carry her some bean soup and ask her then. When I opened the bedroom door she looked at me from underneath her nightcap. Already it was hard to catch life in her eyes. Her shoes and stockings were on the floor so I knew she had tried to get dressed.

  “I brung you some bean soup,” I said.

  She said, “I don’t think I can swallow that.”

  “Try a bit,” I told her.

  “Too thick. I’m sure it’s too thick.”

  “Want me to loosen it up with a little water?”

  “No. Take it away. Bring me some cool water, that’s all.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Ma’am? Could I ask you something?”

  “What is it, Sethe?”

  “What do characteristics mean?”

  “What?”

  “A word. Characteristics.”

  “Oh.” She moved her head around on the pillow. “Features. Who taught you that?”

  “I heard the schoolteacher say it.”

  “Change the water, Sethe. This is warm.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Features?”

  “Water, Sethe. Cool water.”

  I put the pitcher on the tray with the white bean soup and went downstairs. When I got back with the fresh water I held her head while she drank. It took her a while because that lump made it hard to swallow. She laid back and wiped her mouth. The drinking seemed to satisfy her but she frowned and said, “I don’t seem able to wake up, Sethe. All I seem to want is sleep.”

  “Then do it,” I told her. “I’m take care of things.”

  Then she went on: what about this? what about that? Said she knew Halle was no trouble, but she wanted to know if schoolteacher was handling the Pauls all right and Sixo.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Look like it.”

  “Do they do what he tells them?”

  “They don’t need telling.”

  “Good. That’s a mercy. I should be back downstairs in a day or two. I just need more rest. Doctor’s due back. Tomorrow, is it?”

  “You said features, ma’am?”

  “What?”

  “Features?”

  “Umm. Like, a feature of summer is heat. A characteristic is a feature. A thing that’s natural to a thing.”

  “Can you have more than one?”

  “You can have quite a few. You know. Say a baby sucks its thumb. That’s one, but it has others too. Keep Billy away from Red Cora. Mr. Garner never let her calve every other year. Sethe, you hear me? Come away from that window and listen.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Ask my brother-in-law to come up after supper.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “If you’d wash your hair you could get rid of that lice.”

  “Ain’t no lice in my head, ma’am.”

  “Whatever it is, a good scrubbing is what it needs, not scratching. Don’t tell me we’re out of soap.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “All right now. I’m through. Talking makes me tired.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And thank you, Sethe.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  You was too little to remember the quarters. Your brothers slept under the window. Me, you and your daddy slept by the wall. The night after I heard why schoolteacher measured me, I had trouble sleeping. When Halle came in I asked him what he thought about schoolteacher. He said there wasn’t nothing to think about. Said, He’s white, ain’t he? I said, But I mean is he like Mr. Garner?

  “What you want to know, Sethe?”

  “Him and her,” I said, “they ain’t like the whites I seen before. The ones in the big place I was before I came here.”

  “How these different?” he asked me.

  “Well,” I said, “they talk soft for one thing.”

  “It don’t matter, Sethe. What they say is the same. Loud or soft.”

  “Mr. Garner let you buy out your mother,” I said.

  “Yep. He did.”

  “Well?”

  “If he hadn’t of, she would of dropped in his cooking stove.”

  “Still, he did it. Let you work it off.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Wake up, Halle.”

  “I said, Uh huh.”

  “He could of said no. He didn’t tell you no.”

  “No, he didn’t tell me no. She worked here for ten years. If she worked another ten you think she would’ve made it out? I pay him for her last years and in return he got you, me and three more coming up. I got one more year of debt work; one more. Schoolteacher in there told me to quit it. Said the reason for doing it don’t hold. I should do the extra but here at Sweet Home.”

  “Is he going to pay you for the extra?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then how you going to pay it off? How much is it?”

  “$123.70.”

  “Don’t he want it back?”

  “He want something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Something. But he don’t want me off Sweet Home no more. Say it don’t pay to have my labor somewhere else while the boys is small.”

  “What about the money you owe?”

  “He must have another way of getting it.”

  “What way?”

  “I don’t know, Sethe.”

  “Then the only question is how? How he going get it?”

  “No. That’s one question. There’s one more.”

  “What’s that?”

  He leaned up and turned over, touching my cheek with his knuckles. “The question now is, Who’s going buy you out? Or me? Or her?” He pointed over to where you was laying.

  “What?”

  “If all my labor is Sweet Home, including the extra, what I got left to sell?”

  He turned over then and went back to sleep and I thought I wouldn’t but I did too for a while. Something he said, maybe, or something he didn’t say woke me. I sat up like somebody hit me, and you woke up too and commenced to cry. I rocked you some, but there wasn’t much room, so I stepped outside the door to walk you. Up and down I went. Up and down. Everything dark but lamplight in the top window of the house. She must’ve been up still. I couldn’t get out of my head the thing that woke me up: “While the boys is small.” That’s what he said and it snapped me awake. They tagged after me the whole day weeding, milking, getting firewood. For now. For now.

  That’s when we should have begun to plan. But we didn’t. I don’t know what we thought—but getting away was a money thing to us. Buy out. Running was nowhere on our minds. All of us? Some? Where to? How to go? It was Sixo who brought it up, finally, after Paul F. Mrs. Garner sold him, trying to keep things up. Already she lived two years off his price. But it ran out, I guess, so she wrote schoolteacher to come take over. Four Sweet Home men and she still believed she needed her brother-in-law and two boys ’cause people said she shouldn’t be alone out there with nothing but Negroes. So he came with a big hat and spectacles and a coach box full of paper. Talking soft and watching hard. He beat Paul A. Not hard and not long, but it was the first time anyone had, because Mr. Garner disallowed it. Next time I saw him he had company in the prettiest trees you ever saw. Sixo started watching the sky. He was the only one who crept at night and Halle said that’s how he learned about the train.

  “That way.” Halle was pointing over the stable. “Where he took my ma’am. Sixo say freedom is that way. A whole train is going and if we can get there, don’t need to be no buy-out.”

  “Train? What’s that?” I asked him.

  They stopped talking in front of me then. Even Halle. But they whispered among themselves and Sixo watched the sky. Not the high part, the low part where it touched the trees. You could
tell his mind was gone from Sweet Home.

  The plan was a good one, but when it came time, I was big with Denver. So we changed it a little. A little. Just enough to butter Halle’s face, so Paul D tells me, and make Sixo laugh at last.

  But I got you out, baby. And the boys too. When the signal for the train come, you all was the only ones ready. I couldn’t find Halle or nobody. I didn’t know Sixo was burned up and Paul D dressed in a collar you wouldn’t believe. Not till later. So I sent you all to the wagon with the woman who waited in the corn. Ha ha. No notebook for my babies and no measuring string neither. What I had to get through later I got through because of you. Passed right by those boys hanging in the trees. One had Paul A’s shirt on but not his feet or his head. I walked right on by because only me had your milk, and God do what He would, I was going to get it to you. You remember that, don’t you; that I did? That when I got here I had milk enough for all?

  One more curve in the road, and Sethe could see her chimney; it wasn’t lonely-looking anymore. The ribbon of smoke was from a fire that warmed a body returned to her—just like it never went away, never needed a headstone. And the heart that beat inside it had not for a single moment stopped in her hands.