"Then why don't it come?""You forgetting how little it is," said her mother. "She wasn't even two years old when she died.
Too little to understand. Too little to talk much even.""Maybe she don't want to understand," said Denver.
"Maybe. But if she'd only come, I could make it clear to her."Sethe released her daughter's hand and together they pushed the sideboard back against the wall.
Outside a driver whipped his horse into the gallop local people felt necessary when they passed124.
"For a baby she throws a powerful spell," said Denver.
"No more powerful than the way I loved her," Sethe answered and there it was again. Thewelcoming cool of unchiseled headstones; the one she selected to lean against on tiptoe, her kneeswide open as any grave. Pink as a fingernail it was, and sprinkled with glittering chips. Tenminutes, he said. You got ten minutes I'll do it for free.
Ten minutes for seven letters. With another ten could she have gotten "Dearly" too? She had notthought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible — that for twenty minutes, a half hour, say, she could have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preachersay at the funeral (and all there was to say, surely) engraved on her baby's headstone: DearlyBeloved. But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered. She thought it would beenough, rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his young son looking on, the anger in hisface so old; the appetite in it quite new. That should certainly be enough. Enough to answer onemore preacher, one more abolitionist and a town full of disgust.
Counting on the stillness of her own soul, she had forgotten the other one: the soul of her baby girl.
Who would have thought that a little old baby could harbor so much rage? Rutting among thestones under the eyes of the engraver's son was not enough. Not only did she have to live out heryears in a house palsied by the baby's fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spentpressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave,were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers likeoil. "We could move," she suggested once to her mother-in-law.
"What'd be the point?" asked Baby Suggs. "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafterswith some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband's spirit was to come backin here? or yours? Don't talk to me. You lucky. You got three left.