Beloved's arrival

Beloved's arrival at 124 Bluestone Road is the novel's central supernatural event, the moment when the past that Sethe has tried to bury walks out of the water and into her home. A fully dressed young woman emerges from a stream, exhausted and smiling, and is taken in by Sethe, Denver, and Paul D on the very day they have returned from their first joyful outing in eighteen years. Her appearance initiates a haunting that gradually consumes Sethe, isolates the family, and ultimately forces Denver to leave the yard and seek help from the community, setting in motion the novel's climactic exorcism.

Emergence from the Water

A fully dressed woman walked out of the water, barely gaining the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree. She spent all day and all night there, her head resting on the trunk in a position abandoned enough to crack the brim in her straw hat. Everything hurt her but her lungs most of all. Sopping wet and breathing shallow, she spent those hours trying to negotiate the weight of her eyelids. The day breeze blew her dress dry; the night wind wrinkled it. Nobody saw her emerge or came accidentally by. If they had, chances are they would have hesitated before approaching her—not because she was wet, or dozing, or had what sounded like asthma, but because amid all that she was smiling.

It took her the whole of the next morning to lift herself from the ground and make her way through the woods past a giant temple of boxwood to the field and then the yard of the slate-gray house. Exhausted again, she sat down on the first handy place—a stump not far from the steps of 124. By then keeping her eyes open was less of an effort; she could manage it for a full two minutes or more. Her neck, its circumference no wider than a parlor-service saucer, kept bending and her chin brushed the bit of lace edging her dress. Women who drink champagne when there is nothing to celebrate can look like that: their straw hats with broken brims are often askew; they nod in public places; their shoes are undone. But their skin is not like that of the woman breathing near the steps of 124. She had new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hands.

Discovery by the Family

By late afternoon when the carnival was over, and the Negroes were hitching rides home if they were lucky—walking if they were not—the woman had fallen asleep again. The rays of the sun struck her full in the face, so that when Sethe, Denver, and Paul D rounded the curve in the road all they saw was a black dress, two unlaced shoes below it, and Here Boy nowhere in sight. "Look," said Denver. "What is that?" And, for some reason she could not immediately account for, the moment she got close enough to see the face, Sethe's bladder filled to capacity. She said, "Oh, excuse me," and ran around to the back of 124. Not since she was a baby girl, being cared for by the eight-year-old girl who pointed out her mother to her, had she had an emergency that unmanageable. She never made the outhouse. Right in front of its door she had to lift her skirts, and the water she voided was endless. Like a horse, she thought, but as it went on and on she thought, No, more like flooding the boat when Denver was born. So much water Amy said, "Hold on, Lu. You going to sink us you keep that up." But there was no stopping water breaking from a breaking womb and there was no stopping now.

Just about the time she started wondering if the carnival would accept another freak, it stopped. She tidied herself and ran around to the porch. No one was there. All three were inside—Paul D and Denver standing before the stranger, watching her drink cup after cup of water. "She said she was thirsty," said Paul D. He took off his cap. "Mighty thirsty look like." The woman gulped water from a speckled tin cup and held it out for more. Four times Denver filled it, and four times the woman drank as though she had crossed a desert. When she was finished a little water was on her chin, but she did not wipe it away. Instead she gazed at Sethe with sleepy eyes. Poorly fed, thought Sethe, and younger than her clothes suggested—good lace at the throat, and a rich woman's hat. Her skin was flawless except for three vertical scratches on her forehead so fine and thin they seemed at first like hair, baby hair before it bloomed and roped into the masses of black yarn under her hat.

The Naming

"You from around here?" Sethe asked her. She shook her head no and reached down to take off her shoes. She pulled her dress up to the knees and rolled down her stockings. When the hosiery was tucked into the shoes, Sethe saw that her feet were like her hands, soft and new. She must have hitched a wagon ride, thought Sethe. Probably one of those West Virginia girls looking for something to beat a life of tobacco and sorghum. Sethe bent to pick up the shoes. "What might your name be?" asked Paul D. "Beloved," she said, and her voice was so low and rough each one looked at the other two. They heard the voice first—later the name. "Beloved. You use a last name, Beloved?" Paul D asked her. "Last?" She seemed puzzled. Then "No," and she spelled it for them, slowly as though the letters were being formed as she spoke them. Sethe dropped the shoes; Denver sat down and Paul D smiled. He recognized the careful enunciation of letters by those, like himself, who could not read but had memorized the letters of their name.

Sethe was deeply touched by her sweet name; the remembrance of glittering headstone made her feel especially kindly toward her. Denver, however, was shaking. She looked at this sleepy beauty and wanted more. Sethe hung her hat on a peg and turned graciously toward the girl. "That's a pretty name, Beloved. Take off your hat, why don't you, and I'll make us something. We just got back from the carnival over near Cincinnati. Everything in there is something to see." Bolt upright in the chair, in the middle of Sethe's welcome, Beloved had fallen asleep again.

The Keeping Room and the Fever

"Miss. Miss." Paul D shook her gently. "You want to lay down a spell?" She opened her eyes to slits and stood up on her soft new feet which, barely capable of their job, slowly bore her to the keeping room. Once there, she collapsed on Baby Suggs' bed. Denver removed her hat and put the quilt with two squares of color over her feet. She was breathing like a steam engine. "Sounds like croup," said Paul D, closing the door. "Is she feverish? Denver, could you tell?" "No. She's cold." "Then she is. Fever goes from hot to cold." "Could have the cholera," said Paul D. "Reckon?" "All that water. Sure sign." "Poor thing. And nothing in this house to give her for it. She'll just have to ride it out. That's a hateful sickness if ever there was one." "She's not sick!" said Denver, and the passion in her voice made them smile.

Four days she slept, waking and sitting up only for water. Denver tended her, watched her sound sleep, listened to her labored breathing and, out of love and a breakneck possessiveness that charged her, hid like a personal blemish Beloved's incontinence. She rinsed the sheets secretly, after Sethe went to the restaurant and Paul D went scrounging for barges to help unload. She boiled the underwear and soaked it in bluing, praying the fever would pass without damage. So intent was her nursing, she forgot to eat or visit the emerald closet. "Beloved?" Denver would whisper. "Beloved?" and when the black eyes opened a slice all she could say was "I'm here. I'm still here." Sometimes, when Beloved lay dreamy-eyed for a very long time, saying nothing, licking her lips and heaving deep sighs, Denver panicked. "What is it?" she would ask. "Heavy," murmured Beloved. "This place is heavy." "Would you like to sit up?" "No," said the raspy voice.

Significance and Foreshadowing

Beloved's arrival is the novel's pivotal supernatural event, the moment when the past that Sethe has tried to bury walks out of the water and into her home. Her appearance on the very day of the family's first joyful outing in eighteen years—the carnival where the shadows of Sethe, Denver, and Paul D held hands—marks the beginning of a haunting that will gradually consume Sethe and isolate the family. The details of her emergence—the new skin, the flawless hands, the three vertical scratches on her forehead, the broken straw hat, the unlaced shoes—all point to her otherworldly nature, while her name, "Beloved," directly echoes the word Sethe had engraved on her baby's headstone, the one word she could afford for the seven letters of "Beloved." Denver's immediate recognition and possessiveness, Sethe's involuntary physical reaction, and Paul D's wary suspicion all foreshadow the complex and destructive relationship that will develop, ultimately forcing Denver to leave the yard and seek help from the community, setting in motion the novel's climactic exorcism.