The women, too, briefly desert the too-confining walls of 124 to skate in private on slippery ice, a heavily symbolic bit of escapism that brings them a snatch of joy. Their adventure concludes with a kitchen communion scene graced with warm milk. More hospitable than the cold comfort of Sawyer's restaurant and vastly more inviting than the slaughterhouse where prostitutes smile in desperation and copulate standing up against rough-hewn walls, Sethe's house, for all its dismal past, is a real home. Its welcome draws Paul D upstairs, but the quarrelsome female trio, led by the bumptious ghost, eventually forces Paul D to the shed and Denver to dreamy, post-adolescent withdrawal in the boxwood circle out back.
Later, as Denver approaches desperation, she returns to Lady Jones's husbandless house, where the "post and scrap-lumber fence was gray now, not white" and the stone porch sits "in a skirt of ivy pale yellow curtains at the window." From her former teacher's welcoming abode, Denver moves on to guaranteed work at the Bodwins' house, lush with carpet "thick, soft and blue. Glass cases crammed full of glistening things. Books on tables and shelves. Pearl-white lamps with shiny metal bottoms. And a smell like the cologne she poured in the emerald house, only better." The jewel-like interior, itself only a way station for black sojourners, plays false with Denver and her hopes of renewal because of its statuette — a subservient black holding coins in his mouth — and its owners' hopes of molding her into a student at Oberlin. With more maturity than she has mustered in past episodes, she departs, bound for a job at the shirt factory, support for her ailing mother, and self-actualization.
