“ Sethe looked at her hands , her bottle-green sleeves , and thought how little color there was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did . Deliberate , she thought , it just be deliberate , because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the head store of her baby girl . After that she became as color conscious as a hen . Every dawn she worked at fruit pies , potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup , meat and all the rest . And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash . Every dawn she saw the dawn , but never acknowledged or remarked its color . There was something wrong with that . It was as though she saw red baby blood , another day the pink gravestone chips , and that was the last of it .”