![]() Sethe remarks that she also understands why Baby Suggs didn't want "to get to red" - the color that covered Sethe's dying baby.Īs Sethe looks to the future, she hopes for a reunion with her "ma'am" and the rest of her family. For the first time, she comprehends Baby Suggs's preoccupation with color and realizes that the freedom to contemplate "what the sun is doing to the day" is a benchmark in an ex-slave's life. Late to work for the first time in 16 years, she testily rebukes her boss Sawyer, risking the loss of a job with one of the few people willing to hire an ex-con. Sethe displays unusual rebellion for an ex-slave as she takes stock of what her choices have brought her. "I lasted," she boasts, "And my girl come home." In one of her frequent, minor epiphanies, Sethe praises herself for what she has accomplished. She also contemplates her marriage to Halle. Garner during her bout with a grotesque throat tumor. She recalls Nan nursing her with the milk left over from the "whitebabies." She thinks about herself tenderly caring for Mrs. In her musings, Sethe declares that "if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her." A mixture of motherhood images roils in Sethe's tangled internal monologue. Sethe contemplates the paradox of Beloved's death. The hope of Denver's future is Beloved, who returned to fill the emptiness left by Baby Suggs's death. She frets, "This time I have to keep my mother away from her." She exults that Paul D is gone and vows to hang on "till my daddy gets here to help me watch out for Ma'am and anything come in the yard." The bright spot in Denver's reality is Baby Suggs, who taught her to appreciate and love her own body. Her mind churning from worry that Sethe will harm her and Beloved, Denver remains alert. Never." Her only forays into the world outside 124 have been a burial and the outing to the carnival. Denver admits to herself that she is a recluse: "Not since Miss Lady Jones' house have I left 124 by myself. In Chapter 21, Denver ponders her brothers' fear of their mother after she tried to kill them. The beating she received for freeing her children cost her a piece of tongue, which she bit off when the lash opened the skin on her back. Quickly, she entrusted her three children to the woman in the wagon, and Sethe returned to Sweet Home to try to find Halle. Through the dying woman's bedroom window, Sethe heard shots. Garner, reduced to invalidism, did nothing about the atrocity. Garner that schoolteacher's nephews attacked her while he watched. A symbolic “heaven” in America is waiting for them if only they can stay alive to see it.Chapter 20 finds Sethe continuing to wander the past, resolved in her choice to reclaim Beloved. They are citizens of a better place, a country where freedom and dignity is a constitutional right. In the midst of his suffering, Louie is able to cling to these moments and to his fellow POWs as restorers of stolen dignity, as reminders that there is hope.Īdditionally, these little rebellions reinforce to Louie and the other POWs that they don’t belong in this systematic hell created by their Japanese captors. The prisoners’ secret rebellions and symbolic acts of resistance, even in the smallest ways, draw the men together. Then, in March 1944, Phil is sent to a slave labor camp called Ashio, north of Tokyo.įor Louie, there is no escape from the hellish abuses in the Ofuna interrogation center, but there are redemptive moments. Louie also keeps a secret diary and befriends Frank Tinker, a dive-bomber pilot. Prisoners are adept communicating via Morse code, stealing from their captors, and secretly insulting Japan-including farting in Emperor Hirohito’s direction. When prisoners manage to steal newspapers, Harris memorizes the war maps pictured in them and reproduces them as morale-builders for the POWs. Louie is befriended by Lieutenant William “Bill” Harris, a captured marine with a photographic memory. Louie discovers that, despite the harshness of their captivity, there is a spirit of resistance running through the prisoners at Ofuna. Part V Chapter 36: The Body on the Mountain.Part IV Chapter 32: Cascades of Pink Peaches.Part IV Chapter 29: Two Hundred and Twenty Punches.Part IV Chapter 20: Farting for Hirohito.Part IV Chapter 19: Two Hundred Silent Men.Part IV Chapter 18: A Dead Body Breathing.Part III Chapter 16: Singing in the Clouds.Part III Chapter 15: Sharks and Bullets.Part II Chapter 11: “Nobody’s Going to Live Through This”.Part II Chapter 9: Five Hundred and Ninety-four Holes.Part II Chapter 8: “Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was”.Part I Chapter 1: The One-Boy Insurgency.
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