Beloved, Week 9

The passage that stood out from the rest was the scene where Sethe was talking about the thieves that took her milk. In this scene Sethe explains that she was whipped before she ran from Sweet Home to meet Baby Suggs and her children, whom she had sent ahead, in Cincinnati. The white girl who helped deliver Denver said the resulting scars looked like a chokecherry tree and then Sethe cries and says that the men who beat her stole her baby’s milk before she ran. This seen was a very emotional, depressing and graphic depiction.

“I had milk,” she said. “I was pregnant with Denver but I had milk for my baby girl. I hadn’t stopped nursing her when I sent her on ahead with Howard and Buglar.”

Now she rolled the dough out with a wooden pin. “Anybody could smell me long before he saw me. And when he saw me he’d see the drops of it on the front of my dress. Nothing I could do about that. All I knew was I had to get my milk to my baby girl. Nobody was going to nurse her like me. Nobody was going to get it to her fast enough, or take it away when she had enough and didn’t know it. Nobody knew that she couldn’t pass her air if you held her up on your shoulder, only if she was lying on my knees. Nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me. I told that
to the women in the wagon. Told them to put sugar water in cloth to suck from so when I got there in a few days she wouldn’t have forgot me. The milk would be there and I would be there with it.”

“Men don’t know nothing much,” said Paul D, tucking his pouch back into his vest pocket, “but they do know a suckling can’t be away from its mother for long.”

“Then they know what it’s like to send your children off when your breasts are full.” “We was talking ’bout a tree, Sethe.”
“After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk.

That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn’t speak but her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.

“They used cowhide on you?”

“And they took my milk.”

“They beat you and you was pregnant?” “And they took my milk!”

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