"Seth — thuh.""Ma'am.""Hold on to the baby.""Yes, Ma'am.""Seth — thuh.""Ma'am.""Get some kindlin in here.""Yes, Ma'am."
Oh but when they sang. And oh but when they danced and sometimes they danced the antelope.The men as well as the ma'ams, one of whom was certainly her own. They shifted shapes andbecame something other. Some unchained, demanding other whose feet knew her pulse better thanshe did. Just like this one in her stomach. "I believe this baby's ma'am is gonna die in wild onionson the bloody side of the Ohio River." That's what was on her mind and what she told Denver. Herexact words. And it didn't seem such a bad idea, all in all, in view of the step she would not have totake, but the thought of herself stretched out dead while the little antelope lived on — an hour? aday? a day and a night? — in her lifeless body grieved her so she made the groan that made theperson walking on a path not ten yards away halt and stand right still. Sethe had not heard thewalking, but suddenly she heard the standing still and then she smelled the hair. The voice, saying,"Who's in there?" was all she needed to know that she was aboutto be discovered by a white boy.
That he too had mossy teeth, an appetite. That on a ridge of pine near the Ohio River, trying to getto her three children, one of whom was starving for the food she carried; that after her husband haddisappeared; that after her milk had been stolen, her back pulped, her children orphaned, she wasnot to have an easeful death. No. She told Denver that a something came up out of the earth intoher — like a freezing, but moving too, like jaws inside. "Look like I was just cold jaws grinding,"she said. Suddenly she was eager for his eyes, to bite into them; to gnaw his cheek.