Stamp Paid shows newspaper clipping to Paul D

In the winter of 1874, Stamp Paid, a man who had ferried Sethe across the Ohio River and had known her since her arrival at 124, made a decision that would alter the course of several lives. He had carried with him for eighteen years a newspaper clipping, a yellowed piece of print that documented the most terrible act of Sethe's past. On a cold day, standing behind a shed on Western Row, a hundred yards from the crying pigs of the Cincinnati slaughterhouse, he showed it to Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men, who had been living with Sethe and her daughter Denver for several months. The revelation, delivered with the weight of a long-buried secret, would not only shatter Paul D's image of the woman he had come to love but also drive him out of 124, setting in motion a chain of events that would leave Sethe isolated and vulnerable to the return of her past.

The Setting and the Men

The scene unfolds in the industrial heart of Cincinnati, a city that, in the winter months, reassumed its status as a slaughter and riverboat capital. Paul D, along with Stamp Paid and twenty other men, had spent the day pushing and prodding pigs from canal to shore to chute to slaughterhouse, a job that paid well for any stray man who could breathe the stench of offal and stand up for twelve hours. Paul D, trained in such skills, was conscious of the pig shit that remained on his boots, a residue he usually washed off before heading home through a cemetery rife with the agitation of dead Miami. Stamp Paid, an old man with a steely demeanor, had been eyeing Paul D all week, pausing when the evening shift came on to let Paul D's movements catch up to his own. He had made up his mind to show him the piece of paper, a newspaper with a picture drawing of a woman who favored Sethe, though Paul D would insist it was not her mouth.

The Clipping and Paul D's Denial

Stamp Paid unfolded the paper with a solemn air, his fingers stroking its creases as he flattened it out on his knees, then on the split top of the piling. Paul D, who could not read, slid the clipping out from under Stamp's palm and looked at the face, shaking his head no. He saw a woman with eyes almost as calm as Sethe's, a head turned on her neck in a manner he loved so well it watered his eye to see it. But the mouth, he insisted, was not hers. "This ain't her mouth," he said, "I know her mouth and this ain't it." He repeated this denial even as Stamp Paid began to speak, and the more he heard, the stranger the lips in the drawing became. Paul D knew that a black face in a newspaper could only mean something terrible—a whip of fear broke through his heart chambers at the sight, for the face was not there because the person had a healthy baby or outran a street mob, but because of something out of the ordinary, something whitepeople would find interesting, truly different, worth a few minutes of teeth sucking if not gasps.

Stamp Paid's Story

Stamp Paid started with the party, the one Baby Suggs gave, but stopped and backed up to tell about the berries—where they were and what was in the earth that made them grow like that. He described how he had walked six miles to the riverbank, slid down a ravine made almost inaccessible by brush, and reached through brambles lined with blood-drawing thorns to pick two buckets of blackberries, suffering mosquitoes, bees, hornets, wasps, and the meanest lady spiders in the state. He had brought them to Baby Suggs' house, and from that, a feast had grown—a celebration for ninety people that made them angry, too much, they thought, and the scent of their disapproval lay heavy in the air. Stamp Paid was going to tell Paul D about how restless Baby Suggs was that morning, how she had a listening way about her, how she kept looking down past the corn to the stream so much he looked too. They were looking the wrong way—toward water—and all the while it was coming down the road: four horsemen, riding close together, bunched-up like, and righteous. He was going to tell him that nobody warned them, that the exhaustion from a long day's gorging had dulled them, or some other thing—like meanness—that let them stand aside. But Paul D was laughing, saying, "Uh uh. No way. A little semblance round the forehead maybe, but this ain't her mouth."

The Revelation

So Stamp Paid did not tell him how she flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked, how her hands worked like claws, how she collected them every which way: one on her shoulder, one under her arm, one by the hand, the other shouted forward into the woodshed filled with just sunlight and shavings now because there wasn't any wood. The party had used it all, which is why he was chopping some. Nothing was in that shed, he knew, having been there early that morning. Nothing but sunlight, shavings, a shovel, and the saw. Instead, he took a breath and leaned toward the mouth that was not hers and slowly read out the words Paul D couldn't. And when he finished, Paul D said with a vigor fresher than the first time, "I'm sorry, Stamp. It's a mistake somewhere 'cause that ain't her mouth." Stamp looked into Paul D's eyes and the sweet conviction in them almost made him wonder if it had happened at all, eighteen years ago, that while he and Baby Suggs were looking the wrong way, a pretty little slavegirl had recognized a hat, and split to the woodshed to kill her children.

Aftermath and Consequences

The revelation shattered Paul D's world. He had known Sethe as a girl at Sweet Home, had seen her as Halle's woman, iron-eyed and backbone to match. He had come to love her, to believe in a future with her, and had even asked her to have his baby. But the news of the infanticide, of the handsaw and the blood, was too much. He left 124 that very day, moving out without a word, and took to sleeping in the cellar of the Church of the Holy Redeemer, a damp, unlit place where he could be alone with his thoughts. The news also spread through the community, and Sethe, who had already been shunned for her pride, was now the subject of renewed gossip and condemnation. Stamp Paid, who had shown the clipping out of a sense of duty, was left to wonder if he had stopped the one shot she had of happiness, and the guilt weighed on him as he tried to make amends. The event marked a turning point in the novel, exposing the deep wound of Sethe's past and the impossibility of escaping it, even in a place that was supposed to be free.