UPSTAIRS BELOVED was dancing. A little two-step, two-step, make-a-new-step, slide, slide and strut on down.
Denver sat on the bed smiling and providing the music.
She had never seen Beloved this happy. She had seen her pouty lips open wide with the pleasure of sugar or some piece of news Denver gave her. She had felt warm satisfaction radiating from Beloved’s skin when she listened to her mother talk about the old days. But gaiety she had never seen. Not ten minutes had passed since Beloved had fallen backward to the floor, pop-eyed, thrashing and holding her throat. Now, after a few seconds lying in Denver’s bed, she was up and dancing.
“Where’d you learn to dance?” Denver asked her.
“Nowhere. Look at me do this.” Beloved put her fists on her hips and commenced to skip on bare feet. Denver laughed.
“Now you. Come on,” said Beloved. “You may as well just come on.” Her black skirt swayed from side to side.
Denver grew ice-cold as she rose from the bed. She knew she was twice Beloved’s size but she floated up, cold and light as a snowflake.
Beloved took Denver’s hand and placed another on Denver’s shoulder. They danced then. Round and round the tiny room and it may have been dizziness, or feeling light and icy at once, that made Denver laugh so hard. A catching laugh that Beloved caught. The two of them, merry as kittens, swung to and fro, to and fro, until exhausted they sat on the floor. Beloved let her head fall back on the edge of the bed while she found her breath and Denver saw the tip of the thing she always saw in its entirety when Beloved undressed to sleep. Looking straight at it she whispered, “Why you call yourself Beloved?”
Beloved closed her eyes. “In the dark my name is Beloved.”
Denver scooted a little closer. “What’s it like over there, where you were before? Can you tell me?”
“Dark,” said Beloved. “I’m small in that place. I’m like this here.” She raised her head off the bed, lay down on her side and curled up.
Denver covered her lips with her fingers. “Were you cold?”
Beloved curled tighter and shook her head. “Hot. Nothing to breathe down there and no room to move in.”
“You see anybody?”
“Heaps. A lot of people is down there. Some is dead.”
“You see Jesus? Baby Suggs?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know the names.” She sat up.
“Tell me, how did you get here?”
“I wait; then I got on the bridge. I stay there in the dark, in the daytime, in the dark, in the daytime. It was a long time.”
“All this time you were on a bridge?”
“No. After. When I got out.”
“What did you come back for?”
Beloved smiled. “To see her face.”
“Ma’am’s? Sethe?”
“Yes, Sethe.”
Denver felt a little hurt, slighted that she was not the main reason for Beloved’s return. “Don’t you remember we played together by the stream?”
“I was on the bridge,” said Beloved. “You see me on the bridge?”
“No, by the stream. The water back in the woods.”
“Oh, I was in the water. I saw her diamonds down there. I could touch them.”
“What stopped you?”
“She left me behind. By myself,” said Beloved. She lifted her eyes to meet Denver’s and frowned, perhaps. Perhaps not. The tiny scratches on her forehead may have made it seem so.
Denver swallowed. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t. You won’t leave us, will you?”
“No. Never. This is where I am.”
Suddenly Denver, who was sitting cross-legged, lurched forward and grabbed Beloved’s wrist. “Don’t tell her. Don’t let Ma’am know who you are. Please, you hear?”
“Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t you never never tell me what to do.”
“But I’m on your side, Beloved.”
“She is the one. She is the one I need. You can go but she is the one I have to have.” Her eyes stretched to the limit, black as the all-night sky.
“I didn’t do anything to you. I never hurt you. I never hurt anybody,” said Denver.
“Me either. Me either.”
“What you gonna do?”
“Stay here. I belong here.”
“I belong here too.”
“Then stay, but don’t never tell me what to do. Don’t never do that.”
“We were dancing. Just a minute ago we were dancing together. Let’s.”
“I don’t want to.” Beloved got up and lay down on the bed. Their quietness boomed about on the walls like birds in panic. Finally Denver’s breath steadied against the threat of an unbearable loss.
“Tell me,” Beloved said. “Tell me how Sethe made you in the boat.”
“She never told me all of it,” said Denver.
“Tell me.”
Denver climbed up on the bed and folded her arms under her apron. She had not been in the tree room once since Beloved sat on their stump after the carnival, and had not remembered that she hadn’t gone there until this very desperate moment. Nothing was out there that this sister-girl did not provide in abundance: a racing heart, dreaminess, society, danger, beauty. She swallowed twice to prepare for the telling, to construct out of the strings she had heard all her life a net to hold Beloved.
“She had good hands, she said. The whitegirl, she said, had thin little arms but good hands. She saw that right away, she said. Hair enough for five heads and good hands, she said. I guess the hands made her think she could do it: get us both across the river. But the mouth was what kept her from being scared. She said there ain’t nothing to go by with whitepeople. You don’t know how they’ll jump. Say one thing, do another. But if you looked at the mouth sometimes you could tell by that. She said this girl talked a storm, but there wasn’t no meanness around her mouth. She took Ma’am to that lean-to and rubbed her feet for her, so that was one thing. And Ma’am believed she wasn’t going to turn her over. You could get money if you turned a runaway over, and she wasn’t sure this girl Amy didn’t need money more than anything, especially since all she talked about was getting hold of some velvet.”
“What’s velvet?”
“It’s a cloth, kind of deep and soft.”
“Go ahead.”
“Anyway, she rubbed Ma’am’s feet back to life, and she cried, she said, from how it hurt. But it made her think she could make it on over to where Grandma Baby Suggs was and…”
“Who is that?”
“I just said it. My grandmother.”
“Is that Sethe’s mother?”
“No. My father’s mother.”
“Go ahead.”
“That’s where the others was. My brothers and…the baby girl. She sent them on before to wait for her at Grandma Baby’s. So she had to put up with everything to get there. And this here girl Amy helped.”
Denver stopped and sighed. This was the part of the story she loved. She was coming to it now, and she loved it because it was all about herself; but she hated it too because it made her feel like a bill was owing somewhere and she, Denver, had to pay it. But who she owed or what to pay it with eluded her. Now, watching Beloved’s alert and hungry face, how she took in every word, asking questions about the color of things and their size, her downright craving to know, Denver began to see what she was saying and not just to hear it: there is this nineteen-year-old slavegirl—a year older than herself—walking through the dark woods to get to her children who are far away. She is tired, scared maybe, and maybe even lost. Most of all she is by herself and inside her is another baby she has to think about too. Behind her dogs, perhaps; guns probably; and certainly mossy teeth. She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it, but in the day every sound is a shot or a tracker’s quiet step.
Denver was seeing it now and feeling it—through Beloved. Feeling how it must have felt to her mother. Seeing how it must have looked. And the more fine points she made, the more detail she prov
ided, the more Beloved liked it. So she anticipated the questions by giving blood to the scraps her mother and grandmother had told her—and a heartbeat. The monologue became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved’s interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved. The dark quilt with two orange patches was there with them because Beloved wanted it near her when she slept. It was smelling like grass and feeling like hands—the unrested hands of busy women: dry, warm, prickly. Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to create what really happened, how it really was, something only Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time afterward to shape it: the quality of Amy’s voice, her breath like burning wood. The quick-change weather up in those hills—cool at night, hot in the day, sudden fog. How recklessly she behaved with this whitegirl—a recklessness born of desperation and encouraged by Amy’s fugitive eyes and her tenderhearted mouth.
“You ain’t got no business walking round these hills, miss.”
“Looka here who’s talking. I got more business here ’n you got. They catch you they cut your head off. Ain’t nobody after me but I know somebody after you.” Amy pressed her fingers into the soles of the slavewoman’s feet. “Whose baby that?”
Sethe did not answer.
“You don’t even know. Come here, Jesus.” Amy sighed and shook her head. “Hurt?”
“A touch.”
“Good for you. More it hurt more better it is. Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know. What you wiggling for?”
Sethe raised up on her elbows. Lying on her back so long had raised a ruckus between her shoulder blades. The fire in her feet and the fire on her back made her sweat.
“My back hurt me,” she said.
“Your back? Gal, you a mess. Turn over here and let me see.”
In an effort so great it made her sick to her stomach, Sethe turned onto her right side. Amy unfastened the back of her dress and said, “Come here, Jesus,” when she saw. Sethe guessed it must be bad because after that call to Jesus Amy didn’t speak for a while. In the silence of an Amy struck dumb for a change, Sethe felt the fingers of those good hands lightly touch her back. She could hear her breathing but still the whitegirl said nothing. Sethe could not move. She couldn’t lie on her stomach or her back, and to keep on her side meant pressure on her screaming feet. Amy spoke at last in her dreamwalker’s voice.
“It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk—it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder. I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this. Mr. Buddy had a right evil hand too. Whip you for looking at him straight. Sure would. I looked right at him one time and he hauled off and threw the poker at me. Guess he knew what I was a-thinking.”
Sethe groaned and Amy cut her reverie short—long enough to shift Sethe’s feet so the weight, resting on leafcovered stones, was above the ankles.
“That better? Lord what a way to die. You gonna die in here, you know. Ain’t no way out of it. Thank your Maker I come along so’s you wouldn’t have to die outside in them weeds. Snake come along he bite you. Bear eat you up. Maybe you should of stayed where you was, Lu. I can see by your back why you didn’t ha ha. Whoever planted that tree beat Mr. Buddy by a mile. Glad I ain’t you. Well, spiderwebs is ’bout all I can do for you. What’s in here ain’t enough. I’ll look outside. Could use moss, but sometimes bugs and things is in it. Maybe I ought to break them blossoms open. Get that pus to running, you think? Wonder what God had in mind. You must of did something. Don’t run off nowhere now.”
Sethe could hear her humming away in the bushes as she hunted spiderwebs. A humming she concentrated on because as soon as Amy ducked out the baby began to stretch. Good question, she was thinking. What did He have in mind? Amy had left the back of Sethe’s dress open and now a tail of wind hit it, taking the pain down a step. A relief that let her feel the lesser pain of her sore tongue. Amy returned with two palmfuls of web, which she cleaned of prey and then draped on Sethe’s back, saying it was like stringing a tree for Christmas.
“We got a old nigger girl come by our place. She don’t know nothing. Sews stuff for Mrs. Buddy—real fine lace but can’t barely stick two words together. She don’t know nothing, just like you. You don’t know a thing. End up dead, that’s what. Not me. I’m a get to Boston and get myself some velvet. Carmine. You don’t even know about that, do you? Now you never will. Bet you never even sleep with the sun in your face. I did it a couple of times. Most times I’m feeding stock before light and don’t get to sleep till way after dark comes. But I was in the back of the wagon once and fell asleep. Sleeping with the sun in your face is the best old feeling. Two times I did it. Once when I was little. Didn’t nobody bother me then. Next time, in back of the wagon, it happened again and doggone if the chickens didn’t get loose. Mr. Buddy whipped my tail. Kentucky ain’t no good place to be in. Boston’s the place to be in. That’s where my mother was before she was give to Mr. Buddy. Joe Nathan said Mr. Buddy is my daddy but I don’t believe that, you?”
Sethe told her she didn’t believe Mr. Buddy was her daddy.
“You know your daddy, do you?”
“No,” said Sethe.
“Neither me. All I know is it ain’t him.” She stood up then, having finished her repair work, and weaving about the lean-to, her slow-moving eyes pale in the sun that lit her hair, she sang:
“When the busy day is done
And my weary little one
Rocketh gently to and fro;
When the night winds softly blow,
And the crickets in the glen
Chirp and chirp and chirp again;
Where ’pon the haunted green
Fairies dance around their queen,
Then from yonder misty skies
Cometh Lady Button Eyes.”
Suddenly she stopped weaving and rocking and sat down, her skinny arms wrapped around her knees, her good good hands cupping her elbows. Her slow-moving eyes stopped and peered into the dirt at her feet. “That’s my mama’s song. She taught me it.”
“Through the muck and mist and gloam
To our quiet cozy home,
Where to singing sweet and low
Rocks a cradle to and fro.
Where the clock’s dull monotone
Telleth of the day that’s done,
Where the moonbeams hover o’er
Playthings sleeping on the floor,
Where my weary wee one lies
Cometh Lady Button Eyes.
“Layeth she her hands upon
My dear weary little one,
And those white hands overspread
Like a veil the curly head,
Seem to fondle and caress
Every little silken tress.
Then she smooths the eyelids down
Over those two eyes of brown
In such soothing tender wise
Cometh Lady Button Eyes.”
Amy sat quietly after her song, then repeated the last line before she stood, left the lean-to and walked off a little ways to lean against a young ash. When she came back the sun was in the valley below and they were way above it in blue Kentucky light.
“You ain’t dead yet, Lu? Lu?”
“Not yet.”
“Make you a bet. You make it through the night, you make it all the way.” Amy rearranged the leaves for comfort and knelt down to massage the swollen feet again. “Give these one more real good rub,” she said, and when Sethe sucked air through her teeth, she said, “Shut up. You got to keep your mouth shut.”
Careful of her tongue, Sethe bit down on her lips and let the good hands go to work to the tune of “So bees, sing soft and bees, sing low.” Afterward, Amy moved to the other side of the lea
n-to where, seated, she lowered her head toward her shoulder and braided her hair, saying, “Don’t up and die on me in the night, you hear? I don’t want to see your ugly black face hankering over me. If you do die, just go on off somewhere where I can’t see you, hear?”
“I hear,” said Sethe. “I’ll do what I can, miss.”
Sethe never expected to see another thing in this world, so when she felt toes prodding her hip it took a while to come out of a sleep she thought was death. She sat up, stiff and shivery, while Amy looked in on her juicy back.
“Looks like the devil,” said Amy. “But you made it through. Come down here, Jesus, Lu made it through. That’s because of me. I’m good at sick things. Can you walk, you think?”
“I have to let my water some kind of way.”
“Let’s see you walk on em.”
It was not good, but it was possible, so Sethe limped, holding on first to Amy, then to a sapling.
“Was me did it. I’m good at sick things ain’t I?”
“Yeah,” said Sethe, “you good.”
“We got to get off this here hill. Come on. I’ll take you down to the river. That ought to suit you. Me, I’m going to the Pike. Take me straight to Boston. What’s that all over your dress?”
“Milk.”
“You one mess.”
Sethe looked down at her stomach and touched it. The baby was dead. She had not died in the night, but the baby had. If that was the case, then there was no stopping now. She would get that milk to her baby girl if she had to swim.
“Ain’t you hungry?” Amy asked her.
“I ain’t nothing but in a hurry, miss.”
“Whoa. Slow down. Want some shoes?”
“Say what?”
“I figured how,” said Amy and so she had. She tore two pieces from Sethe’s shawl, filled them with leaves and tied them over her feet, chattering all the while.
“How old are you, Lu? I been bleeding for four years but I ain’t having nobody’s baby. Won’t catch me sweating milk cause…”