Explore "Beloved" by Toni Morrison on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
DENVER'S SECRETS were sweet. Accompanied every time by wild veronica until she discovered cologne. The first bottle was a gift, the next she stole from her mother and hid among boxwood until it froze and cracked. That was the year winter came in a hurry at suppertime and stayed eight months. One of the War years when Miss Bodwin, the whitewoman, brought Christmas cologne for her mother and herself, oranges for the boys and another good wool shawl for Baby Suggs. Talking of a war full of dead people, she looked happy-flush-faced, and although her voice was heavy as a man's, she smelled like a roomful of flowers-excitement that Denver could have all for herself in the boxwood. Back beyond 1x4 was a narrow field that stopped itself at a wood. On the yonder side of these woods, a stream.
In these woods, between the field and the stream, hidden by post oaks, five boxwood bushes, planted in a ring, had started stretching toward each other four feet off the ground to form a round, empty room seven feet high, its walls fifty inches of murmuring leaves. Bent low, Denver could crawl into this room, and once there she could stand all the way up in emerald light.