Summary
White people believed that . . . under
every dark skin was a jungle . . . In a way, [Stamp Paid] thought,
they were right . . . But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with
them. . . . It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it
grew . . . until it invaded the whites who had made it.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
When Stamp Paid hears that Paul D has left 124,
he feels guilty for having told Paul D about Sethe’s crime without
considering her family’s welfare. Stamp Paid reminds himself that
he has a duty to Sethe and Denver by virtue of their connection
to Baby Suggs, of whom he was very fond. He thinks about her late-life
depression, which deeply saddened him. He tried to convince her
to continue preaching God’s word, but she claimed she had lost all
motivation after the white men’s intrusion into her household.
For the first time since Baby Suggs’s death, Stamp returns
to 124. When he approaches the house, he
hears a clamor of disturbing, disembodied conversation. He can discern
only the word “mine.” Although he has a habit of walking into houses
without knocking—it is the one privilege he claims in exchange for
the good he does for the Cincinnati community—Stamp Paid feels uncomfortable
entering 124 unannounced. He stands awkwardly
at the door and thinks about what he ought to do.
Sethe takes Beloved and Denver ice-skating, partly
to show that she has not been devastated by Paul D’s departure.
Later, Sethe hears Beloved humming a song Sethe made up to sing
to her children. Faced with such evidence, Sethe finally recognizes
Beloved as her resurrected daughter. Now that her dead child has
rejoined her, she decides to discard the past and the future for
the “timeless present” of 124.
After returning to 124 several
more times and finding himself unable to knock on each occasion,
Stamp Paid finally works up the courage to knock on Sethe’s door.
No one answers. When he peeks in the window, he sees Denver sleeping
in front of the fire, but he does not recognize Beloved and her
presence disturbs him. When he asks around about the stranger in
Sethe’s home, his friend Ella tells him that Paul D is sleeping
at the church. Stamp chastises Ella for not offering Paul D a place
to stay, and he is angered by the community’s general neglect of
Paul D and of the women.
Stamp wonders whether perhaps he has made a mistake in
staying away from 124 for so long, whether
he might not owe something to Baby Suggs’s kin. Earlier in his life,
he decided that he no longer owed anyone anything. While a slave,
Stamp was forced to give his wife to his master’s son to sleep with,
and he concluded that his wife was a gift so terrible that it freed
him forever after of all obligation. For this reason, he changed
his name from Joshua to Stamp Paid.
Sethe cooks all morning at a restaurant and then takes
her lunch home. Occasionally, she steals food and supplies because
she is too proud to endure the local grocer’s racism. She feels
ashamed of her petty thievery and remembers an occasion when Sixo
stole a small pig from Sweet Home. When schoolteacher confronted
him, Sixo cleverly talked his way out of blame by insisting that
he was actually improving schoolteacher’s property by feeding himself
so that he could better work the land. Schoolteacher whipped him
to teach him that “definitions belonged to the definers—not to the
defined.”
