Paul D drives out the baby ghost

Paul D drives out the baby ghost from 124 Bluestone Road, an act that clears the house of its haunting but also sets the stage for Beloved's later arrival in the flesh. This violent exorcism, performed with a table and a loud male voice, marks a turning point in the household's history, ending the ghost's reign of spite and allowing Sethe and Denver to begin a new chapter, though it also leaves Denver feeling bereft of the only company she had.

The Haunting of 124

124 was spiteful, full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

The ghost was the spirit of Sethe's baby daughter, the one she had killed with a handsaw to save her from schoolteacher. The baby's fury at having its throat cut had palsied the house, and its rage was so powerful that it could slam Here Boy, the dog, into a wall hard enough to break two of his legs and dislocate his eye, so hard he went into convulsions and chewed up his tongue. Sethe had once tried to reason with the ghost, holding hands with Denver and saying, "Come on. Come on. You may as well just come on." But the sideboard took a step forward and nothing else did. The ghost was "Rebuked. Lonely and rebuked," as Denver put it, and it had been their secret company, a presence that Denver, at least, had come to treasure.

The Exorcism

Paul D arrived at 124 on the day he found Sethe barefoot with chamomile sap on her legs, and he stepped through the door straight into a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood. "You got company?" he whispered, frowning. "Off and on," said Sethe. "Good God." He backed out the door onto the porch. "What kind of evil you got in here?" "It's not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through." He looked at her then, closely, and trusted her enough to step inside her door smack into a pool of pulsing red light. She was right. It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry. It seemed a long way to the normal light surrounding the table, but he made it—dry-eyed and lucky.

The exorcism itself came later, after Sethe had told him about the tree on her back and the stolen milk, and after he had held her breasts in the palms of his hands and rubbed his cheek on her back, learning her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches. When the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, "Aw, Lord, girl." And he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth, none of which Sethe could feel because her back skin had been dead for years. What she knew was that the responsibility for her breasts, at last, was in somebody else's hands.

Then the house itself began to pitch. The stove didn't shudder as it adjusted to its heat. Denver wasn't stirring in the next room. The pulse of red light hadn't come back and Paul D had not trembled since 1856 and then for eighty-three days in a row. Locked up and chained down, his hands shook so bad he couldn't smoke or even scratch properly. Now he was trembling again but in the legs this time. It took him a while to realize that his legs were not shaking because of worry, but because the floorboards were and the grinding, shoving floor was only part of it. The house itself was pitching. Sethe slid to the floor and struggled to get back into her dress. While down on all fours, as though she were holding her house down on the ground, Denver burst from the keeping room, terror in her eyes, a vague smile on her lips.

"God damn it! Hush up!" Paul D was shouting, falling, reaching for anchor. "Leave the place alone! Get the hell out!" A table rushed toward him and he grabbed its leg. Somehow he managed to stand at an angle and, holding the table by two legs, he bashed it about, wrecking everything, screaming back at the screaming house. "You want to fight, come on! God damn it! She got enough without you. She got enough!" The quaking slowed to an occasional lurch, but Paul D did not stop whipping the table around until everything was rock quiet. Sweating and breathing hard, he leaned against the wall in the space the sideboard left. Sethe was still crouched next to the stove, clutching her salvaged shoes to her chest. The three of them, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D, breathed to the same beat, like one tired person. Another breathing was just as tired.

Aftermath and Significance

It was gone. Denver wandered through the silence to the stove. She ashed over the fire and pulled the pan of biscuits from the oven. The jelly cupboard was on its back, its contents lying in a heap in the corner of the bottom shelf. She took out a jar, and, looking around for a plate, found half of one by the door. These things she carried out to the porch steps, where she sat down. The two of them had gone up there. Stepping lightly, easy-footed, they had climbed the white stairs, leaving her down below. She pried the wire from the top of the jar and then the lid. Under it was cloth and under that a thin cake of wax. She removed it all and coaxed the jelly onto one half of the half a plate. She took a biscuit and pulled off its black top. Smoke curled from the soft white insides. She missed her brothers. Buglar and Howard would be twenty-two and twenty-three now. Although they had been polite to her during the quiet time and gave her the whole top of the bed, she remembered how it was before: the pleasure they had sitting clustered on the white stairs—she between the knees of Howard or Buglar—while they made up die-witch! stories with proven ways of killing her dead. And Baby Suggs telling her things in the keeping room. She smelled like bark in the day and leaves at night, for Denver would not sleep in her old room after her brothers ran away. Now her mother was upstairs with the man who had gotten rid of the only other company she had. Denver dipped a bit of bread into the jelly. Slowly, methodically, miserably she ate it.

Paul D's act had rid 124 of its claim to local fame. Denver had taught herself to take pride in the condemnation Negroes heaped on them; the assumption that the haunting was done by an evil thing looking for more. None of them knew the downright pleasure of enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things. Her brothers had known, but it scared them; Grandma Baby knew, but it saddened her. None could appreciate the safety of ghost company. Even Sethe didn't love it. She just took it for granted—like a sudden change in the weather. But it was gone now. Whooshed away in the blast of a hazelnut man's shout, leaving Denver's world flat, mostly, with the exception of an emerald closet standing seven feet high in the woods. Her mother had secrets—things she wouldn't tell; things she halfway told. Well, Denver had them too. And hers were sweet—sweet as lily-of-the-valley cologne.

The exorcism also cleared the way for Paul D to take the ghost's place in the household, and for Sethe to begin to trust and remember again. The morning after the first night with Paul D, Sethe smiled just thinking about what the word "plans" could mean. It was a luxury she had not had in eighteen years and only that once. Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible. The one set of plans she had made—getting away from Sweet Home—went awry so completely she never dared life by making more. Yet the morning she woke up next to Paul D, the word her daughter had used a few years ago did cross her mind and she thought about what Denver had seen kneeling next to her, and thought also of the temptation to trust and remember that gripped her as she stood before the cooking stove in his arms. Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

But the exorcism also had a cost. It left a void that Beloved would later fill. When the carnival outing ended and the three returned to find a fully dressed woman sitting on a stump near the steps of 124, Sethe's bladder filled to capacity at the sight of her face, and she ran around to the back of the house, voiding water endlessly, like flooding the boat when Denver was born. The woman called herself Beloved, and Denver, who had been shaking since she saw her, wanted more. The ghost that Paul D had driven out had returned in the flesh, and the household would never be the same. In the end, after Beloved's disappearance, Paul D would return to Sethe and find her lying in Baby Suggs' bed, and he would tell her, "You your best thing, Sethe. You are." The exorcism had been a necessary violence, a clearing of the ground, but it was not the end of the haunting—only the beginning of a deeper one.