"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in teh house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old - as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas was smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsil. Nor did they wait for the one relied periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once - the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time.Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when the first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them."