The crickets were screaming on Thursday and the sky, stripped of blue, was white hot at eleven in the morning. Sethe was badly dressed for the heat, but this being her first social outing in eighteen years, she felt obliged to wear her one good dress, heavy as it was, and a hat. Certainly a hat. She didn't want to meet Lady Jones or Ella with her head wrapped like she was going to work.
The dress, a good-wool castoff, was a Christmas present to Baby Suggs from Miss Bodwin, thewhitewoman who loved her. Denver and Paul D fared better in the heat since neither felt theoccasion required special clothing. Denver's bonnet knocked against her shoulder blades; Paul Dwore his vest open, no jacket and his shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows. They were not holdinghands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all three of them were gliding over thedust holding hands. Maybe he was right. A life. Watching their hand holding shadows, she was embarrassed at being dressed for church.
The others, ahead and behind them, would think she was putting on airs, letting them know thatshe was different because she lived in a house with two stories; tougher, because she could do andsurvive things they believed she should neither do nor survive. She was glad Denver had resistedher urgings to dress up — rebraid her hair at least.
But Denver was not doing anything to make this trip a pleasure. She agreed to go — sullenly —but her attitude was "Go 'head. Try and make me happy." The happy one was Paul D. He saidhowdy to everybody within twenty feet. Made fun of the weather and what it was doing to him,yelled back at the crows, and was the first to smell the doomed roses. All the time, no matter what they were doing — whether Denver wiped perspiration from her forehead or stooped to retie hershoes; whether Paul D kicked a stone or reached over to meddle a child's face leaning on its mother's shoulder — all the time the three shadows that shot out of their feet to the left held hands.
Nobody noticed but Sethe and she stopped looking after she decided that it was a good sign. A life. Could be.
Up and down the lumberyard fence old roses were dying. The sawyer who had planted themtwelve years ago to give his workplace a friendly feel — something to take the sin out of slicingtrees for a living — was amazed by their abundance; how rapidly they crawled all over the stakeand-post fence that separated the lumberyard from the open field next to it where homeless menslept, children ran and, once a year, carnival people pitched tents. The closer the roses got to death,the louder their scent, and everybody who attended the carnival associated it with the stench of therotten roses. It made them a little dizzy and very thirsty but did nothing to extinguish the eagernessof the coloredpeople filing down the road. Some walked on the grassy shoulders, others dodged thewagons creaking down the road's dusty center. All, like Paul D, were in high spirits, which thesmell of dying roses (that Paul D called to everybody's attention) could not dampen. As theypressed to get to the rope entrance they were lit like lamps.Breathless with the excitement ofseeing white people loose: doing magic, clowning, without heads or with two heads, twenty feettall or two feet tall, weighing a ton, completely tattooed, eating glass, swallowing fire, spittingribbons, twisted into knots, forming pyramids, playing with snakes and beating each other up.
All of this was advertisement, read by those who could and heard by those who could not, and thefact that none of it was true did not extinguish their appetite a bit. The barker called them and theirchildren names ("Pickaninnies free!") but the food on his vest and the hole in his pants rendered itfairly harmless. In any case it was a small price to pay for the fun they might not ever have again.
Two pennies and an insult were well spent if it meant seeing the spectacle of whitefolks making aspectacle of themselves. So, although the carnival was a lot less than mediocre (which is why itagreed to a Colored Thursday), it gave the four hundred black people in its audience thrill uponthrill upon thrill.