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“For a baby she throws a powerful spell,” said Denver. “No more powerful than the way I loved her,”
It shamed her—remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.
They were a twosome, saying “Your daddy” and “Sweet Home” in a way that made it clear both belonged to them and not to her. That her own father’s absence was not hers.
“How come everybody run off from Sweet Home can’t stop talking about it? Look like if it was so sweet you would have stayed.”
“Leave off, Sethe. It’s hard for a young girl living in a haunted house. That can’t be easy.” “It’s easier than some other things.”
“I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running—from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much.
Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.
What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.
For years they saw each other in full daylight only on Sundays. The rest of the time they spoke or touched or ate in darkness. Predawn darkness and the afterlight of sunset. So looking at each other intently was a Sunday-morning pleasure and Halle examined her as though storing up what he saw in sunlight for the shadow he saw the rest of the week.
In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver’s imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out.
Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.
Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it.
