The twenty-eight days
The twenty-eight days—the travel of one whole moon—are the only sustained period of unslaved life Sethe ever knows. They begin when she climbs off a wagon at 124 Bluestone Road, her newborn tied to her chest, and feels for the first time the wide arms of her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. The days are measured not in hours but in the quality of living they contain: days of healing, ease and real-talk; days of company, knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits, where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better. One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day. That is how she got through the waiting for Halle. Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. The twenty-eight days are the novel's fullest realization of that claiming—a state of being that is both personal and communal, physical and spiritual, and that stands in stark contrast to everything that comes before and after.
The Shape of the Days
The twenty-eight days are bracketed by two arrivals. They begin with Sethe's own arrival, exhausted and split open, carrying the baby Denver who was born on the riverbank with the help of Amy Denver. They end with the arrival of the four horsemen—schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff—who come to reclaim Sethe and her children under the Fugitive Slave Law. In between, the days unfold as a kind of idyll, a time when 124 is a cheerful, buzzing house where Baby Suggs, holy, loves, cautions, feeds, chastises and soothes. Not one but two pots simmer on the stove; the lamp burns all night long. Strangers rest there while children try on their shoes. Messages are left there, for whoever needed them was sure to stop in one day soon. The days are filled with the ordinary rhythms of a free black household: cooking, sewing, gardening, talking, and the weekly gatherings in the Clearing where Baby Suggs preaches her gospel of the flesh. For Sethe, the days are a revelation of what life could be without the constant threat of violence and dispossession. She has her children with her—Howard, Buglar, the crawling-already? girl, and the newborn Denver—and for the first time she can love them openly, without the fear that they will be taken from her. The twenty-eight days are the time when Sethe learns to trust, to feel, to claim her own body and her own self as her own.
The Clearing and the Community
The Clearing is the spiritual heart of the twenty-eight days. Every Saturday afternoon, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman and child who could make it through, takes her great heart to the Clearing—a wide-open place cut deep in the woods. There, seated on a huge flat-sided rock, she calls the people to her: first the children, to laugh; then the grown men, to dance; then the women, to cry. The laughter, dancing, and crying mix until all and each lie about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that follows, Baby Suggs offers up her great big heart. She does not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She tells them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. And she preaches her great sermon on the flesh: "Here," she said, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard." She tells them to love their hands, their mouths, their necks, their livers, their hearts—all the parts that whitepeople despise and abuse. The sermon is a direct response to the dehumanization of slavery, a radical affirmation of the body as worthy of love. For Sethe, the Clearing is where she learns to feel her own flesh as her own, to claim the body that had been beaten, milked, and marked. The twenty-eight days are the time when she is most fully alive to this teaching, when she can dance and cry and laugh with the community, when she can feel the joy of being part of a people who love their own flesh.
The community itself is essential to the twenty-eight days. Sethe has twenty-eight days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits, where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better. The neighbors help her learn to read and sew, and they share in the great feast that Stamp Paid initiates with two buckets of blackberries. The feast grows from a few pies to a celebration for ninety people, with fried perch, corn pudding, roasted rabbit, and a washtub full of strawberry shrug. The feast is an expression of the community's joy and generosity, but it also sows the seeds of its own destruction. The next morning, the neighbors wake up angry, resentful of Baby Suggs' bounty and her "reckless generosity." They whisper about fat rats, doom and uncalled-for pride. The disapproval that follows is the first crack in the idyll, a sign that the community's love is not unconditional. The twenty-eight days are thus not only a time of joy but also a time of tension, as the community's envy begins to erode the very bonds that made the days possible.
The End of the Days
The twenty-eight days end with the arrival of the four horsemen. Sethe is in the garden when she sees them coming and recognizes schoolteacher's hat. She hears wings—little hummingbirds stick their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. She thinks, No. No. Nonono. She flies. She collects every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carries, pushes, drags them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. In the woodshed, she kills her crawling-already? daughter with a handsaw, and tries to kill the others, but is stopped by Stamp Paid. The twenty-eight days end in blood and silence. The community that had celebrated with her now stands apart, watching as she is taken to jail. The twenty-eight days are followed by eighteen years of disapproval and a solitary life. The idyll is over, and Sethe is left with the memory of what freedom felt like—and the knowledge that it was snatched away.
The twenty-eight days are the novel's central image of what freedom could be, and their loss is the trauma that shapes the rest of Sethe's life. They are the time when Sethe was "big, Paul D, and deep and wide," when she could stretch out her arms and all her children could get in between. They are the time when she learned to love her own flesh, to claim her own self. And they are the time when she learned that freedom is fragile, that it can be taken away in an instant, and that the only way to protect her children is to keep them from the world that would destroy them. The twenty-eight days are thus both a promise and a warning, a glimpse of what could be and a reminder of what was lost. They are the measure of Sethe's grief and the source of her fierce, protective love. And they are the reason why, when Beloved returns, Sethe is so desperate to make her understand: the twenty-eight days were the best thing she ever had, and she will do anything to keep her children safe from the world that ended them.
