Summary: Chapter 15
After Sethe first arrived at 124,
Stamp Paid brought over two pails of rare, deliciously sweet, blackberries.
Baby Suggs decided to bake some pies, and before long the celebration
had transformed into a feast for ninety people. The community celebrated
long into the night but grew jealous and angry as the feast wore
on: to them, the excess of the feast was a measure of Baby Suggs’s
unwarranted pride. Baby Suggs sensed a “dark and coming thing” in
the distance, but the atmosphere of jealousy created by the townspeople
clouded her perception.
From Sethe’s arrival at 124, the
narration goes even further back in time to Sweet Home. Although
it meant leaving behind the only child she had been able to see
grow to adulthood, Baby Suggs allowed Halle to buy her freedom because
it mattered so much to him. Once she left Sweet Home, Baby
Suggs realized how sweet freedom could be. While Mr. Garner drove
her to Cincinnati, she asked him why he and Mrs. Garner called her
Jenny. He told her that Jenny Whitlow was the name on her bill-of-sale.
She explains the origin of her real name—Suggs was her husband’s
name, and he called her “Baby.” Mr. Garner tells her that Baby Suggs
is “no name for a freed Negro.” He takes Baby Suggs to Ohio to meet
the Bodwins, two white abolitionist siblings who allow Baby Suggs
to live at 124 Bluestone Road in exchange
for domestic work. Baby Suggs is unable to learn anything about
the whereabouts of her lost children.
Summary: Chapter 16
One day, about a month after Sethe arrived at 124,
schoolteacher showed up at the house with one of his nephews, the
sheriff, and a slave catcher. In the woodshed, they found Sethe’s
sons, Howard and Buglar, lying in the sawdust, bleeding. Sethe was
holding her bleeding “crawling already?” daughter, whose throat
she had cut with a saw. Stamp Paid rushed in and grabbed Denver
before Sethe could dash her brains out against the wall. Because
none of the children could ever be of any use as a slave, schoolteacher
concluded that there was nothing worth claiming at 124 and
left in disgust. Sethe’s older daughter was dead, but Baby Suggs
bound the boys’ wounds and struggled with Sethe over Denver. Denver
nursed at Sethe’s breast, ingesting her dead sister’s blood along
with her mother’s milk. The sheriff took Sethe, with Denver in her
arms, to jail.
Summary: Chapter 17
Stamp Paid shows Paul D a newspaper clipping with a drawing
of Sethe, but Paul D, refusing to believe that the woman depicted
is Sethe, insists, “That ain’t her mouth.” Paul D can’t read, so
Stamp Paid tells him the story of Sethe’s tragedy. Stamp Paid leaves
some parts of the story out, though. He doesn’t tell how Sethe grabbed
her children and flew with them to the woodshed “like a hawk on
the wing,” nor does he mention that, out of jealous spite, the community
neglected to warn Sethe about schoolteacher’s approach.
Summary: Chapter 18
She just flew. Collected every bit of
life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine
and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them . . . away, over
there where no one could hurt them.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
When Paul D confronts Sethe with the newspaper clipping,
she begins to circle frantically around the room in a manner that
parallels the circular manner in which she unravels her story for
him. She tells Paul D how, at 124, she began
to love her children with renewed force, because she knew finally
that they were fully hers to love. When she recognized schoolteacher’s
hat outside the house one day, she felt hummingbird wings beating
around her head and could think only, “No. No. Nono. Nonono.” Killing
her children was a way of protecting them from the horrors of slavery
she had herself endured, a way to secure their safety.
Paul D tells her that her love is “too thick.” He feels
distanced from Sethe and condemns her act, saying, “You got two
feet, Sethe, not four,” by which he suggests that she acted like
a beast in attempting to murder her own children. His anxiety increases
when he sees Beloved standing on the staircase. He leaves 124,
and Sethe simply says, “So long.” Although he does not say so, Sethe
knows that Paul D isn’t coming back.
