Your Kindle Notes For:

Beloved (Vintage International)

Toni Morrison

Last accessed on Wednesday November 10, 2021

57 Highlight(s) | 6 Note(s)

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Even in that tiny shack, leaning so close to the fire you could smell the heat in her dress, her eyes did not pick up a flicker of light.

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What he did remember was parting the hair to get to the tip, the edge of his fingernail just under, so as not to graze a single kernel. The pulling down of the tight sheath, the ripping sound always convinced her it hurt. As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free. No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.

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to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.

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“Today is always here,” said Sethe. “Tomorrow, never.”

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Beloved looked—gilded and shining.

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her shine was so pronounced he wondered why Denver and Sethe didn’t see it. Or maybe they did.

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Behind her dogs, perhaps; guns probably; and certainly mossy teeth.

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Mr. Buddy whipped my tail. Kentucky ain’t no good place to be in. Boston’s the place to be in.

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She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

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The desire, let alone the gesture, to meet her needs was good enough to lift her spirits to the place where she could take the next step: ask for some clarifying word; some advice about how to keep on with a brain greedy for news nobody could live with in a world happy to provide it.

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Occasionally a kneeling man chose gunshot in his head as the price, maybe, of taking a bit of foreskin with him to Jesus.

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Paul D thought he was screaming; his mouth was open and there was this loud throat-splitting sound—but it may have been somebody else. Then he thought he was crying.

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the tobacco tin lodged in his chest.

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Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like. Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me?

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She fixed on that and her own brand of preaching, having made up her mind about what to do with the heart that started beating the minute she crossed the Ohio River.

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Unlike a snake or a bear, a dead nigger could not be skinned for profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin.

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So Denver took her mother’s milk right along with the blood of her sister. And that’s the way they were when the sheriff returned, having commandeered a neighbor’s cart, and ordered Stamp to drive it.

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Which is why they both missed it: they were looking the wrong way—toward water—and all the while it was coming down the road. Four. Riding close together, bunched-up like, and righteous.

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to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.

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“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet.

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Nobody saw them falling.

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laughter still shaking her chest, making her eyes wet. She stayed that way for a while, on all fours. But when her laughter died, the tears did not and it was some time before Beloved or Denver knew the difference. When they did they touched her lightly on the shoulders.

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She even looked straight at the shed, smiling, smiling at the things she would not have to remember now. Thinking, She ain’t even mad with me. Not a bit.

Note:Baby suggs

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“Well, Paul D must know who she is. Or what she is.” “Your mind is loaded with spirits. Everywhere you look you see one.” “You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.” He couldn’t deny it. Jesus Christ Himself didn’t, so Stamp ate a piece of Ella’s head cheese to show there were no bad feelings and set out to find Paul D. He found him on the steps of Holy Redeemer, holding his wrists between his knees and looking red-eyed.

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Passed right by those boys hanging in the trees. One had Paul A’s shirt on but not his feet or his head.

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The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

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And when she wondered about Ma’am’s earrings—something I didn’t know about—well, that just made the cheese more binding: my sister come to help me wait for my daddy.

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She told me all my daddy’s things. How hard he worked to buy her. After the cake was ruined and the ironed clothes all messed up, and after I heard my sister crawling up the stairs to get back to her bed, she told me my things too. That I was charmed. My birth was and I got saved all the time. And that I shouldn’t be afraid of the ghost. It wouldn’t harm me because I tasted its blood when Ma’am nursed me. She said the ghost was after Ma’am and her too for not doing anything to stop it. But it would never hurt me. I just had to watch out for it because it was a greedy ghost and needed a lot of love, which was only natural, considering. And I do. Love her. I do. She played with me and always came to be with me whenever I needed her. She’s mine, Beloved. She’s mine.

Note:She mine

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the men without skin

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the dead man on my face

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the men without skin are making loud noises

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a hot thing the little hill of dead people a hot thing the men without skin push them through with poles

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she does not like the circle around her neck I know this I look hard at her so she will know that the clouds are in the way I am sure she saw me I am looking at her see me she empties out her eyes I am there in the place where her face is and telling her the noisy clouds were in my way she wants her earrings she wants her round basket I want her face a hot thing

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I do not see her until he locks his eyes and dies on my face we are that way there is no breath coming from his mouth and the place where breath should be is sweet-smelling the others do not know he is dead I know his song is gone now I love his pretty little teeth instead

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I cannot find my pretty teeth I see the dark face that is going to smile at me it is my dark face that is going to smile at me the iron circle is around our neck she does not have sharp earrings in her ears or a round basket she goes in the water with my face

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I see me swim away a hot thing I see the bottoms of my feet I am alone I want to be the two of us I want the join I come out of blue water after the bottoms of my feet swim away from me I come up I need to find a place to be the air is heavy I am not dead I am not there is a house there is what she whispered to me I am where she told me I am not dead 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

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She was about to smile at me when the men without skin came and took us up into the sunlight with the dead and shoved them into the sea. Sethe went into the sea. She went there. They did not push her.

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All I want to know is why did she go in the water in the place where we crouched?

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The breathing is gone; only the teeth are left.

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Sixo said the doctor made Mrs. Garner sick. Said he was giving her to drink what stallions got when they broke a leg and no gunpowder could be spared, and had it not been for schoolteacher’s new rules, he would have told her so.

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Sixo had a knowing tale about everything. Including Mr. Garner’s stroke, which he said was a shot in his ear put there by a jealous neighbor.

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The kind of thing a man would cut to whip his horse. Song-murder and the aspen.

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Perfumed by the things honeybees love.

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Flowers

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Paul D guesses what it is when Sixo interrupts his laughter to call out, “Seven-O! Seven-O!”

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He would have to trade this here one for $900 if he could get it, and set out to secure the breeding one, her foal and the other one, if he found him.

Note:Four Legs foal

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He thinks he should have sung along. Loud, something loud and rolling to go with Sixo’s tune, but the words put him off—he didn’t understand the words. Although it shouldn’t have mattered because he understood the sound: hatred so loose it was juba.

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In his shame he avoids her eyes, but when he doesn’t he sees only black in them—no whites.

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Who could be fooled into buying a singing nigger with a gun? Shouting Seven-O! Seven-O! because his Thirty-Mile Woman got away with his blossoming seed. What a laugh. So rippling and full of glee it put out the fire.

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“She don’t know, or says she don’t. All I ever heard her say was something about stealing her clothes and living on a bridge.” “What kind of bridge?” “Who you asking?” “No bridges around here I don’t know about. But don’t nobody live on em. Under em neither.

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That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light. Sethe pleaded for forgiveness, counting, listing again and again her reasons: that Beloved was more important, meant more to her than her own life. That she would trade places any day. Give up her life, every minute and hour of it, to take back just one of Beloved’s tears.

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Then Sethe spit up something she had not eaten and it rocked Denver like gunshot.

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he was thankful too for having been escorted to some ocean-deep place he once belonged to.

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“You think she sure ’nough your sister?” Denver looked at her shoes. “At times. At times I think she was—more.” She fiddled with her shirtwaist, rubbing a spot of something. Suddenly she leveled her eyes at his. “But who would know that better than you, Paul D? I mean, you sure ’nough knew her.” He licked his lips. “Well, if you want my opinion—” “I don’t,” she said. “I have my own.”

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And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He hid in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its graveyards and low-lying rivers. Or just a house—solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it.

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A pair of ice skates nestles in a basket in the corner. He turns his eyes back to the bed and keeps looking at it. It seems to him a place he is not. With an effort that makes him sweat he forces a picture of himself lying there, and when he sees it, it lifts his spirit.

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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 all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”

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Where the memory of the smile under her chin might have been and was not, a latch latched and lichen attached its apple-green bloom to the metal. What made her think her fingernails could open locks the rain rained on?

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