Thandiwe Newton

Denver: Why you call yourself Beloved?

Beloved: In the dark, my name Beloved.

Denver: What's it like where you was before? Can you tell me?

Beloved: Dark. I was small in that place.

[curls up]

Beloved: Like this here.

Denver: Were you cold?

Beloved: Hot! Nothing to breathe down there. No room to move.

Denver: You see anybody?

Beloved: It's a lot of people down there. Some is dead.

Denver: You see Jesus? Baby Suggs?

Beloved: I don't know... I don't know the names.

Denver: Well, what you come back here for?

Beloved: To see her face.

Beloved: Mama's? Sethe's?

Beloved: [grabbing Denver's hand] Sethe's.

Paul D: [after becoming more and more suspicious of Beloved] Sethe. Sethe, baby, we were starting to feel a little like a family ourself, till she come along.

Sethe: Is that what got your teeth on edge?

Paul D: It's a feeling in me. I can't place it. It's her.

Sethe: You wanna feel something? Feel what it feel like to be a colored woman, roaming the roads, and anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that!

Paul D: I know every bit of that, Sethe. I wasn't born yesterday, and I never mistreated a woman in my life.

Sethe: Well, that makes one of you in this world.

[Turns to leave]

Paul D: One, not two?

Sethe: [Stops for a moment, then turns and faces Paul D] No, not two.

Paul D: What'd Halle ever do to you? Halle stood by you.

Sethe: Halle ran off. He left me, and he left our children.

Paul D: You don't know that.

Sethe: [Angrily] Who he leave then, if he didn't leave me? He wasn't there! He wasn't where he said he was going to be! I had to pack my babies off ahead of me on their own. Stayed behind to look for him, and got caught by Schoolteacher and his boys for my trouble!

Paul D: He couldn't get out... the loft, I expect.

Sethe: Loft? What loft?

Paul D: The one in the barn, I reckon.

Sethe: [Trembling with realization] He... he was there? How do you know?

Sethe: Morning after you run, I seen Halle chained to a post. I said "What happened? Where you been?" "The loft, the loft, the loft." That's all he said. Could never figure out what he meant by that. He never answered me.

Sethe: [sighing heavily] He... he saw them boys do that to me, and he let them keep on breathing?

Paul D: I... I ask him, "How come you didn't run with Sethe?" He never answered me. I seen him once more, the day Schoolteacher sold me to Brandywine. Takin' me away in the wagon. There Halle was, in the yard, sittin' by the churn. They didn't need to put no chains on him no more. His mind was gone. Sethe... a man ain't a goddamn axe, chopping and hacking, bustin' every minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside. Halle never just run off and leave you, Sethe. You see, you the only one of us who made it out that night. The only one.

Sethe: [Quickly leaves the room, shaking her head in denial and shock]