Denver seeks help from Lady Jones and Bodwins

Denver's decision to step off the porch of 124 Bluestone Road and seek help from the outside world marks a decisive turning point in the novel, breaking a self-imposed isolation that had lasted since childhood and setting in motion the chain of events that will ultimately free her mother from Beloved's consuming presence. The journey is both a physical crossing into a world she has feared and a psychological rebirth that transforms her from a dependent child into a young woman capable of preserving her family.

The Threshold Crossing

For twelve years Denver had not left the yard of 124 by herself. The last time she had ventured out on her own was to attend Lady Jones' house-school, a brief period of happiness that ended when Nelson Lord asked her the devastating question about whether her mother had been locked away for murder. That question had made Denver go deaf for two years, and afterward she withdrew completely, finding company only in the baby ghost and later in the emerald closet of boxwood bushes where she played alone. Now, in April, with the weather warm and everything alive tentative, Denver wrapped her hair and shoulders, put on the brightest of the carnival dresses and a stranger's shoes, and stood on the porch ready to be swallowed up by the world beyond. She remembered her grandmother Baby Suggs' final words—that there was no defense against whitepeople, that they could prowl at will—and felt her heart kick and an itchy burning in her throat. But then she heard Baby Suggs laugh, clear as anything, asking if she had never told Denver about Carolina, about her father, about why she walked the way she did, and telling her to know it and go on out the yard.

The Walk to Lady Jones

The way came back to her after a dozen years. She remembered the four houses sitting close together in a line like wrens: the first with two steps and a rocking chair on the porch; the second with three steps, a broom propped on the porch beam, two broken chairs and a clump of forsythia at the side; the third with yellow shutters and pots of green leaves with white hearts or red; the fourth where the buds of a sycamore tree had rained down on the roof. At that fourth house a woman stood at the open door and lifted her hand halfway in greeting, then froze it near her shoulder as she leaned forward to see whom she waved to. Denver lowered her head. Beyond her, male voices floated closer, and she kept her eyes on the road in case they were whitemen. When two Negro men passed, both touched their caps and murmured "Morning," and Denver's eyes spoke gratitude even if her mouth never opened in time to reply. Braced and heartened by that easy encounter, she picked up speed and began to look deliberately at the neighborhood. She was shocked to see how small the big things were: the boulder by the edge of the road she once couldn't see over was a sitting-on rock; paths leading to houses weren't miles long; dogs didn't even reach her knees; letters cut into beeches and oaks by giants were eye level now.

The Encounter with Lady Jones

Denver found the house she would have known anywhere: the post and scrap-lumber fence now gray instead of white, the stone porch sitting in a skirt of ivy, pale yellow curtains at the windows, the laid brick path to the front door and wood planks leading around to the back. She was about to stand on tiptoe to see above the sill, as she had done as a child, when she realized how silly that would be and knocked instead. Lady Jones, expecting a child sent with raisins for a church supper, opened the door to find Denver, now eighteen or nineteen, dressed like a chippy but immediately recognizable by her nickel-round eyes, bold yet mistrustful, her large powerful teeth between dark sculptured lips, and her flawless economical skin. Lady Jones took her by the hand and pulled her in. She had never believed the talk that Denver was simple, having watched her eat up a page, a rule, a figure in the schoolroom. When Denver stopped coming, Lady Jones had thought it was the nickel and approached Baby Suggs on the road to say the money was owed, only to be told the child was deaf. Now Denver sat before her in a dress so loud it embarrassed the needlepoint chair seat. When Lady Jones asked how her family was, Denver stopped in the middle of a swallow and said what was at the top of her mind: she wanted work, anything. She couldn't do anything, she said, but she would learn it for Lady Jones if she had a little extra food, because her ma'am didn't feel good. Lady Jones said "Oh, baby" softly and with such kindness that Denver did not know it then, but that word inaugurated her life in the world as a woman.

The Community's Response

Lady Jones gave Denver rice, four eggs and some tea, and told her that no one she knew could pay anybody for work they did themselves. She mentioned her church's committee invented so nobody had to go hungry, but Denver agitatedly said no, as though asking for help from strangers was worse than hunger. Two days later Denver found a sack of white beans lying on the tree stump at the edge of the yard. Another time a plate of cold rabbit meat appeared. One morning a basket of eggs sat there with a slip of paper fluttering down bearing the name "M. Lucille Williams" in big crooked letters, with a blob of flour-water paste on the back. So Denver paid a second visit to the world outside the porch, returning the basket and saying "Thank you." All through the spring, names appeared near or in gifts of food—some with X's and designs about them—and Lady Jones helped Denver identify the donors by the plate or pan or covering towel. When Denver was wrong, when the person said "No, darling. That's not my bowl. Mine's got a blue ring on it," a small conversation took place. All of them knew her grandmother and some had danced with her in the Clearing. Others remembered the days when 124 was a way station where they assembled to catch news, taste oxtail soup, leave their children, cut out a skirt. One remembered the tonic mixed there that cured a relative. One showed her the border of a pillowslip whose stamens of pale blue flowers were French-knotted in Baby Suggs' kitchen by the light of an oil lamp while arguing the Settlement Fee. They remembered the party with twelve turkeys and tubs of strawberry smash. One said she wrapped Denver when she was a single day old and cut shoes to fit her mother's blasted feet. At least once a week Denver visited Lady Jones, who perked up enough to do a raisin loaf especially for her, gave her a book of Bible verse, and listened while she mumbled words or fairly shouted them. By June Denver had read and memorized all fifty-two pages, one for each week of the year.

The Visit to the Bodwins

Strengthened by the gifts of food but seeing that her home life was deteriorating—Sethe confined to a corner chair, Beloved growing bigger and more demanding—Denver decided she needed real work. She got lost so many times in the streets of Cincinnati that it was noon before she arrived at the Bodwins' house, though she had started out at sunrise. The house sat back from the sidewalk with large windows looking out on a noisy, busy street. The Negro woman who answered the front door, Janey Wagon, told Denver the first thing she had to know was what door to knock on. Denver only half heard her because she was stepping on something soft and blue; all around her was thick, soft and blue, with glass cases crammed full of glistening things, books on tables and shelves, pearl-white lamps with shiny metal bottoms, and a smell like the cologne she poured in the emerald house, only better. Janey remembered Baby Suggs coming to that same spot, sitting right where Denver was, and getting the house on Bluestone Road. She asked what the trouble was with Sethe, and Denver, realizing that nobody was going to help her unless she told it all, explained about the cousin who had come to visit and gotten sick too, plaguing her mother. Janey seemed more interested in Sethe's condition and concluded the woman had lost her mind, as she had always known she would, trying to do it all alone with her nose in the air. Janey told Denver to come back in a few days; she needed time to convince her employers that they needed night help because Janey's own family needed her. Before leaving, Denver saw, sitting on a shelf by the back door, a blackboy's mouth full of money—his head thrown back farther than a head could go, his hands shoved in his pockets, bulging like moons for eyes, his hair a cluster of raised nail-head dots, and painted across the pedestal he knelt on the words "At Yo Service."