Baby Suggs shook her head. "One ata time," she said and traded the living for the dead, which she carried into the keeping room. Whenshe came back, Sethe was aiming a bloody nipple into the baby's mouth. Baby Suggs slammed herfist on the table and shouted, "Clean up! Clean yourself up!"They fought then. Like rivals over the heart of the loved, they fought. Each struggling for thenursing child. Baby Suggs lost when she slipped in a red puddle and fell. So Denver took hermother's milk right along with the blood of her sister. And that's the way they were when thesheriff returned, having commandeered a neighbor's cart, and ordered Stamp to drive it.
utside a throng, now, of black faces stopped murmuring. Holding the living child, Sethe walkedpast them in their silence and hers. She climbed into the cart, her profile knife-clean against acheery blue sky. A profile that shocked them with its clarity. Was her head a bit too high? Herback a little too straight? Probably. Otherwise the singing would have begun at once, the momentshe appeared in the doorway of the house on Bluestone Road. Some cape of sound would havequickly been wrapped around her, like arms to hold and steady her on the way. As it was, theywaited till the cart turned about, headed west to town. And then no words. Humming. No words atall.
Baby Suggs meant to run, skip down the porch steps after the cart, screaming, No. No. Don't lether take that last one too. She meant to. Had started to, but when she got up from the floor andreached the yard the cart was gone and a wagon was rolling up. A red-haired boy and a yellow-haired girl jumped down and ran through the crowd toward her. The boy had a half-eaten sweetpepper in one hand and a pair of shoes in the other.
"Mama says Wednesday." He held them together by their tongues. "She says you got to have thesefixed by Wednesday." Baby Suggs looked at him, and then at the woman holding a twitching leadhorse to the road.