Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don'tyou? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect,worrying somebody's house into evil." Baby Suggs rubbed her eyebrows. "My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can youbeat that? Eight children and that's all I remember."

"That's all you let yourself remember," Sethe had told her, but she was down to one herself — onealive, that is — the boys chased off by the dead one, and her memory of Buglar was fading fast.
Howard at least had a head shape nobody could forget. As for the rest, she worked hard toremember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might behurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sapfrom her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind. The picture of the men coming to nurse her wasas lifeless as the nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard. Nor was there thefaintest scent of ink or the cherry gum and oak bark from which it was made. Nothing. Just thebreeze cooling her face as she rushed toward water. And then sopping the chamomile away withpump water and rags, her mind fixed on getting every last bit of sap off — on her carelessness intaking a shortcut across the field just to save a half mile, and not noticing how high the weeds hadgrown until the itching was all the way to her knees. Then something. The plash of water, the sightof her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in thepuddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before hereyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolleditself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made herwonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boyshanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her — remembering thewonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, thesycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.