Conjure Women Read online

  There came a day that Miss May Belle and Rue returned from a birthing of twins, an all-night and all-day affair, as if the twins had not wanted to come on out to the world but had preferred to stay curled together with just themselves for company. Rue and her mama returned to find that all the fruit in their cabin had dropped to the ground, lay in blackened, defeated piles, on the chairs, on the stove pot, in the rut of the bed, and the once-languid flies had lifted and made a frenzy in the air like they’d lost their sense of meaning. But Miss May Belle didn’t weep like a more earthly woman might. She walked around stooping, collecting the bits of skin and pulp and seed that near turned to nothing at her touch, and it was because of this quiet triumph against ruin that Rue couldn’t bring herself to say, and never would, that she had been the one to pull the fruit down in a sudden fit of rage against her mama’s rising madness. Hoodoo would not bring Miss May Belle’s strength back, nor her man back. But neither would Rue’s bitterness.

  Miss May Belle pounded what was left of the fruit. She sat up in bed, for six days and six nights, from can-see to can’t-see, a crude mortar in one hand, a rock for a pestle in the other. It was on the seventh day, when she’d become like a ghost in her own imprint in the mattress made of straw and pine tags, that they were told they were free.

  Rue carried the message on to her mama, the words sitting like tar on her tongue, for it was something they’d so long wanted and now had but couldn’t figure the use of.

  “Free.” Rue’s mama said the word and then lay back down in her own hollowed-out shape in the bed. She let the mortar fall sideways and moved only to give herself room to spit a glob of red onto the blackened pile of mashed fruit, done with it at last. And Rue knew at least some part of Miss May Belle’s sickness was healed, though it felt like a cure come too late to save her.

  * * *

  —

  Even when Miss May Belle stopped going out, the women stayed coming to her. It was the end of secession, the end of the war and the beginning of that thing, freedom, that idea that had been bandied about for four long years and more, lobbed like cannonballs by the North into fine Southern houses. The smoke cleared and freedom stood. But freedom hadn’t changed things much, not in their isolated country, down in the quarter, where women still had the same aches and pains, the same swelling and suffering, the same look of pure dumb wonder when Miss May Belle let them put their newborn to the safety of their chest. Maybe now they needed her even more because freedom was a word with weights. It meant deciding—to stay or to go. To have or not to have. It was a heady change—becoming the master of one’s own self.

  “Not all women is intended for mamas,” Rue’s mama liked to say, lying on her back in bed looking up like she was looking for stars on the inside of her eyelids.

  Even with her eyes shut Miss May Belle could direct Rue to this or that sachet or herb or salve, and it didn’t take long ’til Rue knew what to fetch her before she even asked it. And then she knew what to fetch before the women finished describing what it was that they were needing. Soon enough Rue could just tell by looking at the expressions on some of the women’s faces that they had come for that particular type of magic that Rue’s mama kept hid.

  The water Miss May Belle gave them was so clear it felt harmless enough, though what it tasted like Rue could not say. She only knew from watching what they experienced, and it looked to her no worse than the agonies of birth, only what they were pushing out was nothing but blood, not much heavier than what came month to month. Still, sometimes they’d cry and cry and always it amazed Rue, and still did, how hard it was to keep a baby and how hard it was to be rid of one.

  * * *

  —

  “You clean?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Rue’d say, only sometimes they weren’t doing anything at all; sometimes they were doing little more than sitting around staring at each other on a Sunday, the day of rest, waiting for the next time they were needed, because they were bound up together by blood but also by the way folks had of keeping their distance. Inside of her on-and-on sleep, Rue’s mama was beginning to get muddled; for her the present was the past come again.

  They could just about hear the singing from outside if they felt like reaching out their ears to where the whole of the town was gathered in the church down the way, singing up to the Lord, thanking him for the day he’d made. And to Rue the sound of their voices was so absolutely lovely, like a thing she could hold in her hands, like a faith she could touch.

  * * *

  —

  “Don’t touch nothin’,” her mama would say. A bad touch was all it took. A bad touch could kill.

  The first time Rue pulled a dead baby from its mama, she felt that she had killed it herself. It was a baby boy, or would have been, sweet and black and small, a perfect fit for Rue’s two cupped hands. He was still caught up in the cord he’d come out with, a constricting braid of blue and red, that wrapped too tight around his neck.

  It had been a rough time from the very start. The mama was mostly a child herself with her eyes turning big and red and watery as the heat of her flesh rose. Her husband was an old man—his eyes were filmy and white—and he’d taken the young girl up because she had no people left of her own and he’d molded her into a wife.

  There’d been a choice.

  “Freedom,” as Rue’s mama liked to say, “be all about choices.”

  And so Rue had put the question to the man: his little woman’s life or his little child’s.

  “Well now, Miss Rue,” he said, his white eyes roving around lost and looking for somewhere to settle. “You know better than I do.”

  But how could she?

  “The water ain’t worth more than the bucket,” Miss May Belle had said, not aloud in that moment, but loud in Rue’s memory, as she’d said it so many times before.

  No, Rue’s mama was at that moment in her bed, in the cabin she’d had built especially for her, far away from everybody else, for a healing woman had to live her life separate and die that way also. There Miss May Belle lay with the spit frothing red at her lips, the black cotton hair her man had loved so much in tangles, and the things she said choked by nonsense so that her very last words received and relayed by a lone traveling preacher had meant nothing. Rue had had to replace them in her memory with better words, with ones she wanted to keep: The water ain’t worth more than the bucket.

  Rue sent the old man away from the birthing—men, after all, were bad luck—and alone she spoke in a soft voice to the young mama, trying to give her comfort. For childbed fever there was black snakeroot, for grief, a few soft-spoken words.

  “You gon’ be alright,” Rue told the young woman. “You gon’ live to love lots more babies.”

  Miss Rue chose the bucket then as she would over and over and over again. She let the water slip right through her fingers.

  FREEDOMTIME

  More and more children were falling sick. There was no denying it or ignoring it or quieting it neither. It was most apparent in Ma Doe’s schoolroom, where every other seat sat empty, words not written, lessons not learned. The illness had come on sudden and at a speed that shook Rue, core-deep. Out loud she blamed it on the cool weather, on those childhood ailments that came and went. But this sickness was clinging on in a way that worried her. Maybe Rue was glad then of the draw of Bruh Abel. At least it took folks’ minds away from their suspicions about her. Still, the illness was unnatural, they were saying, an ill punishment brought on by the few sinners left in their midst. For Bruh Abel had baptized just about every willing sinner he could find, excepting Bean. And Rue.

  And that woman. That woman—her name was Opal, and everybody knew her, biblically, as Rue’s mama would have said. She’d lived on the only other plantation neighbor to theirs, the smaller settlement where Rue’s daddy had lived. It was owned by Marse John, a piteous white man always in Marse Charles’s shadow and in
his debt. Opal had been Marse John’s favorite right up ’til the day he died, the damned apple, Marse John had used to say, of his goddamned eye.

  The rumor of it was that her master had died in bed with her, in fact, deep inside of her, his foul mouth running the whole time, until it wasn’t.

  “Goddammit goddammit goddammit god—” Those had been his last words if the things folks said could be believed, which in Rue’s estimation, they usually couldn’t.

  Whatever the truth was, Opal had rolled right out from under him and made a life for herself the only way she could after that, which was by offering what she had to offer, on roadsides, in outhouses, more than once in the chicken coop, and Rue had had to treat the cuts from the chicken wire that made dizzy patterns on Opal’s back. And Opal seemed alright with it, sure enough, there wasn’t a bit of shame on her, not enough shame to sew a stitch, was how Miss May Belle might have said it, and Rue liked that about Opal, the way she owned her place and lived it, whisperings be damned. ’Til Bruh Abel set on her.

  When Bruh Abel came into town he took up quarters where he could, expecting a bed and finding a different one weekly or even nightly in the houses of the most devout. Opal kept him for three days, and on the third day she shrugged off her wickedness and was reborn.

  “I’m just tired,” Opal had said and maybe that wouldn’t have been enough repentance for most preachers for a lifetime of wild lusting, but it was enough for Bruh Abel.

  He did it in the square, in the center of the cross that was their town. Someone had brought out a stool, so Opal sat with her feet hovering over the bucket, her toes twitching above the water in spasms of virgin hesitation.

  “Like this?” she asked, but already Bruh Abel was rolling up his sleeves.

  Rue wouldn’t have watched except that she was already at Ma Doe’s, bringing a new pouch of herbs to wrap around the superstitious old woman’s neck.

  “All of this carryin’ on. I liked the old prayin’,” Ma Doe had said. “ ’Twas quiet.”

  But same as everyone Ma Doe went out to her porch to have a look at Bruh Abel, whose preaching she didn’t often get to witness, the river being too far for her rheumatic knees to take her. Today Bruh Abel had brought the river to them, by the sloshing bucketful, and had placed it at Opal’s feet.

  Easing herself down into her rocking chair, Ma Doe nodded appreciatively. “He is fine lookin’,” she said to Rue. “Who on earth wants an ugly preacher?”

  This day Bruh Abel’s expression was closed off and serious as though there was great focus required in washing a whore’s feet. Opal had her skirt tucked up beneath her knees. Bruh Abel knelt before her and took both of her arches in his two hands and lowered her feet into the bucket. He had a small chipped cup that he dipped into the water between her legs, and he drew up a cupful and poured it onto one foot. Bruh Abel switched to the other foot, again pouring a stream of water as he held on to her heel, leaned forward, and placed a kiss between her biggest toe and its smaller partner. He held his lips there for a long reverent while.

  * * *

  —

  Ma Doe drew Rue into her empty cabin with no more than a sly cant of her head.

  No children in there. Rue flinched away her foreboding.

  “I’ve had news from up north,” Ma Doe said.

  She settled herself down behind the desk that had used to belong to Marse Charles. They’d only just rescued it from the fire that had destroyed the House. Now it dominated Ma Doe’s schoolroom, a burnt-out treasure chest that held their secrets. Ma Doe’s arthritic fingers turned the brass key and from one locked drawer she pulled out a letter, still in its envelope, and held it up to Rue. “Do you know what it says?”

  No, Rue did not know, not by reading, but she recognized the big scrawling letter V that named the intended recipient of the correspondence, Varina, and from that she could easily imagine the rest. Ma Doe had read to her every one of those Northern letters which so rarely said anything new.

  “The lady writes to her dear niece with concern for her niece’s health,” Ma Doe read. “Asks Varina, once again, to join the family in Boston. Says Christmastime is a most lovely occasion for the blessed reunion of estranged relations.”

  Rue tutted, “Ain’t any time a lovely occasion for the reunion of relations?”

  Ma Doe ignored her, went on, unspooling the letter to reveal its second page. “The lady asks that her beloved niece think again on the proposition of finally selling her stakes of this ruined Southern land altogether. She writes that she understands the reluctance to give up one’s childhood home and its fond memories, but mightn’t Varina, her dear niece and the last of her brother’s living children, come up to Boston to live permanently where she will be lovingly received?”

  Ma Doe set the letter down on the top of the blackened desk. The fat, looping words of the letter written by Marse Charles’s sister meant nothing to Rue, never had, not in their individual meaning, nor in each single character crowded on the page. But the piling-up pieces of paper, which Ma Doe had hoarded in the desk these three years—which formed an organized stack in that selfsame desk—the mere existence of those letters meant everything to Rue, for they meant that their secret conjure held, hers and Ma Doe’s. The aunt did not suspect the hoax.

  It was necessary that somebody out there where it mattered in the white world of records believed that the blacks of Marse Charles’s former land were still owned—yet in the new way they were now meant to be owned, as devoted sharecroppers working the land for love of their stalwart white mistress, Miss Varina.

  “What you gon’ write back?” Rue asked.

  Ma Doe worried the string of the good-luck charm around her neck. Said nothing.

  “You gotta write back, Ma.” They’d had this conversation before. Likely would have it again. It wearied Rue’s soul but not her resolve. That correspondence, those bits of paper and their pen marks, they were more powerful a protection of the town’s isolated existence than any curse that Miss May Belle had ever laid. Rue was proud on that fact, for it was an act of power better than conjure, the only real shield over their people being discovered by the type of whites who did not think much of government-given freedom.

  “ ‘Thank you kindly, Aunt,’ ” Ma Doe said. Her wrinkled hand shook only slightly as she mimicked deft pen strokes in the air. “We’ll say, ‘Your concern as always is a great comfort to me. But I am most happy here and intend to stay on as long as I am able.’ ”

  “ ‘God willin’,’ ” Rue added.

  Over some eighteen months of deception, Rue and Ma Doe had sent such fantastic tales up north they had a quilt’s worth of stories about Miss Varina. To respond to the Northern relation, they’d given Varina Christian faith and a penchant for acts of charity. They’d given her a keen knowledge of the harvests on her profitable property. They’d invented for her good white neighbors and the earnest interest of a fitting suitor, a kindly widower who was winningly cautious in his courtship, and finally a husband so that Varina’s aunt might believe there was a good Christian man to manage Miss Varina’s property and her prosperity. This loving Northern auntie had not once met the Southern relation she wrote to, didn’t know the willful child or the sick woman Varina had grown up to become. It was easy for Rue to dictate a Varina of invention and easier still for Ma Doe to sign Varina’s name. After all, Varina had learned her penmanship by tracing her black nurse’s hand.

  “Are we wrong for carryin’ on this deception, Miss Rue?” Ma Doe asked. She was looking out the window, watching the folks out there enraptured in their praying. The sunlight played tricks on her face, showed wrinkles like valleys.

  Rue figured Ma Doe was not looking for her to answer. Wrong or right was of little use to Rue now. Better she stay keen to the greater danger she sensed building in the air about her. Rue was troubled over the babies and the young children who were
falling sick with winter’s maladies much too early this year. She troubled over the ire with which her name was spoken in the town. She troubled most especially over Bean, who so far had escaped the illness that had laid low the other children. She knew the strange little boy was soon to be Bruh Abel’s next target. Rue was surrounded on all sides by more immediate fears and so she could only leave it down to trust that Ma Doe would go on writing the letters they agreed to, send each letter off by way of one of her students—one of the ones too slow to read it and make meaning of what the schoolteacher and the healing woman were keeping hidden between them.

  Rue drew a newly made hoodoo charm from her pocket. Its wretched stink of crushed carrion flowers and asafetida powder was enough to ease the worry lines from Ma Doe’s forehead. Rue untied the string of the worn-out good-luck charm Ma Doe had been wearing and replaced it with the new one. Knotting the string at the back of the ancient woman’s neck, she came around her and settled the low-hanging pouch, making sure to tuck it neatly in the collar of Ma Doe’s dress.

  There, no one would see the conjure trinket Ma Doe kept near her heart, nor the thick strand of Varina’s curly red hair that Rue had worked artfully into the knot—a lock that held their tenuous magic all together.

  * * *

  —

  The townsfolk hesitated to hang out their white baptismal clothing again, even as the promised Sunday of Bean’s baptism drew nearer. They reckoned that to do so would be to tempt the return of the haint that had come to tear down their faith before, along with their white washing on the occasion of Si’s death. Yet they were afraid of Bean and demanded to see him saved, for their own sake.