"What for?"
"I didn't understand it then. Not till I had a mark of my own."
"What happened to her?"
"Hung. By the time they cut her down nobody could tell whether she had a circle and a cross ornot, least of all me and I did look."Sethe gathered hair from the comb and leaning back tossed it into the fire. It exploded into starsand the smell infuriated them. "Oh, my Jesus," she said and stood up so suddenly the comb she hadparked in Denver's hair fell to the floor.
"Ma'am? What's the matter with you, Ma'am?"
Sethe walked over to a chair, lifted a sheet and stretched it as wide as her arms would go. Then shefolded, refolded and double folded it. She took another. Neither was completely dry but the foldingfelt too fine to stop. She had to do something with her hands because she was rememberingsomething she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit inher mind right behind the slap on her face and the circled cross.
"Why they hang your ma'am?" Denver asked. This was the first time she had heard anything abouther mother's mother. Baby Suggs was the only grandmother she knew.

"I never found out. It was a lot of them," she said, but what was getting clear and clearer as shefolded and refolded damp laundry was the woman called Nan who took her hand and yanked heraway from the pile before she could make out the mark. Nan was the one she knew best, who wasaround all day, who nursed babies, cooked, had one good arm and half of another. And who useddifferent words. Words Sethe understood then but could neither recall nor repeat now. Shebelieved that must be why she remembered so little before Sweet Home except singing anddancing and how crowded it was. What Nan told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma'am spoke, and which would never come back. But themessage — that was and had been there all along. Holding the damp white sheets against her chest,she was picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood. Nighttime. Nan holding her withher good arm, waving the stump of the other in the air. "Telling you. I am telling you, small girlSethe," and she did that. She told Sethe that her mother and Nan were together from the sea. Bothwere taken up many times by the crew. "She threw them all away but you. The one from the crewshe threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names,she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The othersshe did not put her arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe."