Chapter 1
124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughters Denver wer...
Chapter 2
Sprawled near Brother, his flame-red tongue hidden from them, his indigo face closed, Sixo slept through dinner like a corpse. Now there was a man, and that was a tree. Himself lying in the bed and...
Chapter 3
"Anything dead coming back to life hurts." (3.65)
Chapter 4
"I don't care what she is. Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing." (4.38)
Chapter 5
A fully dressed woman walked out of the water. She barely gained the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree. All day and all night she sat there, her head res...
Chapter 6
"I didn't see her but a few times out in the fields and once when she was working indigo. By the time I woke up in the morning, she was in line. If the moon was bright they worked by its light. Sun...
Chapter 7
But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day. (7.79)
Chapter 8
"Mister, he looked so… free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. Son a b**** couldn't even get out of the shell hisself but he was still king and I was…" Paul D stopped and squeezed his left han...
Chapter 9
Accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it, she became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it. I...
Chapter 10
"Breakfast? Want some breakfast, nigger?""Yes, sir.""Hungry, nigger?""Yes, sir.""Here you go."Occasionally, a kneeling man chose gunshot in his head as the price, maybe, of taking a bit of foreskin...
Chapter 11
He believed he was having house-fits, the glassy anger men sometimes feel when a woman's house begins to bind them, when they want to yell and break something or at least run off. He knew all about...
Chapter 12
To go back to the original hunger was impossible. Luckily for Denver, looking was food enough to last. But to be looked at in turn was beyond appetite; it was breaking through her own skin to a pla...
Chapter 13
A truth that waved like a scarecrow in rye: they were only Sweet Home men at Sweet Home. One step off that ground and they were trespassers among the human race. (13.1)
Chapter 15
In Lillian Garner's house, exempted from the field work that broke her hip and the exhaustion that drugged her mind; in Lillian Garner's house where nobody knocked her down (or up), she listened to...
Chapter 16
Right off it was clear, to schoolteacher especially, that there was nothing there to claim. The three (now four—because she'd had the one coming when she cut) pickaninnies they had hoped were ali...
Chapter 18
"Your love is too thick," he said, thinking, That b**** is looking at me; she is right over my head looking down through the floor at me."Too thick?" she said, thinking of the Clearing where Baby S...
Chapter 19
When Sethe locked the door, the women inside were free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds. Almost. Mixed in with the voices surrounding the ho...
Chapter 20
When I put that headstone up I wanted to lay in there with you, put your head on my shoulder and keep you warm, and I would have if Buglar and Howard and Denver didn't need me, because my mind was...
Chapter 21
Beloved is my sister. I swallowed her blood right along with my mother's milk. The first thing I heard after not hearing anything was the sound of her crawling up the stairs. She was my secret comp...
Chapter 22
I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe's is the face that left me Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I...
Chapter 23
You are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me who am you?I will never leave you againDon't ever leave me againYou will never leave me againYou went in the waterI drank your bloodI brought your mi...
Chapter 24
Mother. Father. Didn't remember the one. Never saw the other. He was the youngest of three half-brothers (same mother—different fathers) sold to Garner and kept there, forbidden to leave the farm...
Chapter 26
The land, of course, eighty acres of it on both sides of Bluestone, was the central thing, but he felt something sweeter and deeper about the house which is why he rented it for a little something...
Chapter 27
Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman. "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in...
Chapter 28
Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laught...