Denver leaves 124 to seek help

Denver leaves 124 to seek help is the pivotal act of the novel's final movement, in which the isolated, haunted young woman steps off the porch of her home for the first time in years to save her starving mother and the mysterious Beloved. This journey marks Denver's transformation from a dependent, fearful child into a self-possessed adult who reconnects with the community that had shunned her family, ultimately setting in motion the exorcism of Beloved and the possibility of Sethe's redemption.

The Breaking Point at 124

By the spring of 1874, 124 had become a house of starvation and mutual destruction. Sethe, consumed by her devotion to Beloved, had lost her job at Sawyer's Restaurant and spent her thirty-eight dollars of life savings on fancy food, ribbons, and dress goods, dressing the three of them like carnival women. The women grew weaker and quieter, their hunger silencing them more effectively than any ghost. Denver watched her mother's flesh thin "like china silk" between forefinger and thumb, saw Sethe's eyes "bright but dead, alert but vacant," and witnessed Beloved growing "bigger, plumper by the day" while Sethe picked at crusts and rinds. The arguments between Sethe and Beloved escalated into violence—Beloved slammed things, wiped the table clean of plates, threw salt on the floor, broke a windowpane—and Denver realized that if Sethe did not wake up one morning and pick up a knife, Beloved might. The job she had started out with, protecting Beloved from Sethe, changed to protecting her mother from Beloved. When Sethe spit up something she had not eaten, it rocked Denver "like gunshot," and she knew she had to leave the yard, step off the edge of the world, and go ask somebody for help.

The First Steps Outside

Denver stood on the porch in the brightest of the carnival dresses, wearing a stranger's shoes, ready to be swallowed up by the world beyond. She knew only two people personally: Stamp Paid and Lady Jones. She remembered her grandmother's warning that there was no defense against whitepeople, who "could prowl at will, change from one mind to another," and her mother's advice to judge them by their mouths and hands. As she hesitated, she heard Baby Suggs laugh, clear as anything, and say, "Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on." The way came back to her after a dozen years. She passed four houses on the right, noting the rocking chair, the broom propped on the porch beam, the yellow shutters, the sycamore buds on the roof. When two Negro men approached, she kept her eyes on the road, but they touched their caps and murmured, "Morning. Morning," and the easy encounter braced her. She was shocked to see how small the big things were: the boulder she once couldn't see over was a sitting-on rock, paths weren't miles long, dogs didn't even reach her knees.

The Appeal to Lady Jones

Denver found Lady Jones' house, the post and scrap-lumber fence now gray, the stone porch in a skirt of ivy. She knocked, and Lady Jones, expecting a child with raisins, recognized her immediately: "Why, Denver," she said. "Look at you." Lady Jones had taught Denver when she was seven, watching her "eat up a page, a rule, a figure," and had never believed the child was simple. When Denver asked for work, saying "I can't do anything, but I would learn it for you if you have a little extra," and explained that her mother didn't feel good, Lady Jones said, "Oh, baby," with such kindness that Denver later knew it inaugurated her life in the world as a woman. Lady Jones told her that no one could pay anybody for work they did themselves, but that if they needed to eat, all they had to do was say so. Denver refused the offer of charity, saying "No, no," as though asking for help from strangers was worse than hunger.

The Gifts on the Stump

Two days later, Denver found a sack of white beans on the tree stump at the edge of the yard. Then a plate of cold rabbit meat, then a basket of eggs with a slip of paper reading "M. Lucille Williams." All through the spring, names appeared near or in gifts of food—some with X's and designs—and Denver paid visits to thank the donors, even when she had the wrong benefactor. Each small conversation connected her to the community that had known her grandmother: some had danced with Baby Suggs in the Clearing, others remembered 124 as a way station where they caught news, tasted oxtail soup, left their children, or cut out a skirt. One woman had wrapped Denver when she was a single day old and cut shoes to fit her mother's blasted feet. The personal pride and arrogant claim staked out at 124 seemed to have run its course; they whispered and laughed at Denver's hussy clothes, but it didn't stop them caring whether she ate.

The Decision to Work

Strengthened by the gifts, Denver decided to stop relying on kindness and hire herself out. She had begun to notice that Sethe didn't really want forgiveness given; she wanted it refused, and Beloved helped her out. Denver realized that unless she got work, there would be no one to save, no one to come home to, and no Denver either. It was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve. She met Nelson Lord leaving his grandmother's house, and he smiled and said, "Take care of yourself, Denver," which she heard as though it were what language was made for. The last time he spoke to her, his words had blocked up her ears; now they opened her mind. She decided to go to the Bodwins, who had helped Baby Suggs and Sethe before. Getting lost so many times in the streets of Cincinnati, she arrived at noon though she started at sunrise. Janey Wagon, the Bodwins' servant, made her tell all of it—about the girl in the house who plagued her mother—before agreeing to convince her employers to take Denver on as night help. Denver left with the promise of a job, having seen on a shelf by the back door a blackboy's mouth full of money, a figure on his knees painted with the words "At Yo Service."

The Return and the Community's Response

The news Janey spread among the coloredwomen grew into a story that Sethe's dead daughter had come back to fix her, beating her, tying her to the bed, pulling out all her hair. The women fell into three groups: those who believed the worst, those who believed none of it, and those like Ella who thought it through. Ella, who had been beaten every way but down and had delivered a hairy white thing fathered by "the lowest yet," was infuriated by the idea of past errors taking possession of the present. She convinced the others that rescue was in order, saying "What's fair ain't necessarily right." Thirty women made up the company and walked slowly toward 124 on a Friday so wet and hot that Cincinnati's stench had traveled to the country. When they arrived, they saw not Denver but themselves, younger and stronger, playing in Baby Suggs' yard. They knelt and prayed, then Ella hollered, and the kneelers and standers joined her, stopping their praying and taking a step back to the beginning, where there were no words, only the sound. That sound broke over Sethe like a wave, and she trembled like the baptized—and it was then that she saw Edward Bodwin coming into her yard, and the hummingbirds beat their wings, and she flew with the ice pick that was her hand. Denver, running too, joined the pile of people out there, and it was Denver who was the first to wrestle her mother down, saving Mr. Bodwin's life. The community's exorcism, set in motion by Denver's journey, drove Beloved away, and Denver emerged as the one who had stepped off the edge of the world and found a way back for them all.