Toni Morrison - Beloved

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 asked 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 Corn. 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?"

"$123.7o."

"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 buyout."

"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?