"You disremember everything? I never knew my mother neither, but I saw her a couple of times. Did you never see yours? What kind of whites was they? You don't remember none?"
Beloved, scratching the back of her hand, would say she remembered a woman who was hers, and she remembered being snatched away from her. Other than that, the clearest memory she had, the one she repeated, was the bridge—standing on the bridge looking down. And she knew one whiteman. (12.3-4)
Usually, Beloved is the one asking Sethe a bunch of questions. But here, it's the opposite. And what do we get? An enigma, sure, but also a possible alternative explanation of Beloved's origins. Compare this account with Stamp Paid's suggestion that Beloved is a runaway girl who was locked up in a house by a whiteman (25.87). Beloved: dead girl alive or runaway slave?
Quote 11
We must look a sight, she thought, and closed her eyes to see it: the three women in the middle of the Clearing, at the base of the rock where Baby Suggs, holy, and loved. One seated, yielded up her throat to the kind hands of one of the two kneeling before her. […]
They stayed that way for a while because neither Denver nor Sethe knew how not to: how to stop and not love the look or feel of the lips that kept on kissing. Then Sethe, grabbing Beloved's hair and blinking rapidly, separated herself. She later believed that it was because the girl's breath was exactly like new milk that she said to her, stern and frowning, "You too old for that." (9.98-100)
If you feel a little uncomfortable, you probably should. Beloved seems to be crossing all sorts of boundaries with Sethe. Not that you couldn't already tell from the rest of the book, but Beloved is clearly a taker, not a giver.
Quote 12
For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had stood in the doorway. For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash. (26.144)
Beloved isn't pushy about faith and religion, but it does give us a pretty radical way of thinking about religious community. In this novel, it's all about women coming together. Are there any religions that follow this pattern today?