Sethe had given little thought to the white dress until Paul D came, and then she remembered Denver's interpretation: plans. The morning after the first night with Paul D, Sethe smiled justthinking about what the word could mean. It was a luxury she had not had in eighteen years andonly that once. Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on gettingthrough it as quickly as possible. The one set of plans she had made — getting away from SweetHome — went awry so completely she never dared life by making more.
Yet the morning she woke up next to Paul D, the word her daughter had used a few years ago didcross her mind and she thought about what Denver had seen kneeling next to her, and thought alsoof the temptation to trust and remember that gripped her as she stood before the cooking stove inhis arms. Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count onsomething? She couldn't think clearly, lying next to him listening to his breathing, so carefully,carefully, she had left the bed.
Kneeling in the keeping room where she usually went to talk-think it was clear why Baby Suggswas so starved for color. There wasn't any except for two orange squares in a quilt that made theabsence shout.
The walls of the room were slate-colored, the floor earth-brown, the woodendresser the color of itself, curtains white, and the dominating feature, the quilt over an iron cot, wasmade up of scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool — the full range of the dark and themuted that thrift and modesty allowed. In that sober field, two patches of orange looked wild —like life in the raw.
Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle-green sleeves, and thought how little colorthere was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did. Deliberate,she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in theheadstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn sheworked at fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all therest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn shesaw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong withthat. It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, andthat was the last of it.