Conjure Women Read online

  Rue tried to clear her head, to think on how to avert their envy of Bean’s vitality, all their loathing after his very life. She couldn’t count on Sarah to protect Bean, even if he was her child. She had two other children to worry about after all. Would Sarah sacrifice the one to shield the two? Rue didn’t know. She was not a mama herself.

  What she was was a healing woman, and she found herself thinking on how to heal Bean from an affliction he did not have.

  What would Miss May Belle do? It was a question that had been posed to Rue throughout the town as though they half-expected her to go on to the cemetery, to pull up her dead mama’s body and ask her for a cure.

  Rue paced the little length of the cabin. The room had seemed so much bigger when she was a child. She’d lived there all her life with her mama, but now, empty, it felt more like a cage than it had ever done. In her pacing she felt like Miss May Belle was there, sitting on the end of her bed like she’d just come in from a long day of hoodooing and healing to toss her basket down and throw off her hat and to look at her child with that certain furrowing of the lines of her forehead like she couldn’t remember why she’d allowed herself a daughter in the first place if that daughter was going to go ahead and be so foolish.

  “Rue-baby,” Miss May Belle would’ve said, “there ain’t no easier lie to tell folks than the one they wanna believe.”

  Miss May Belle had always spoke in loops and swirls that may as well’ve been written down for all the use Rue could find in interpreting them. But this bit of recollected wisdom Rue let latch on and suck at her ’til it became fully grown. Soon she had an idea.

  SLAVERYTIME

  1855

  Miss May Belle had made another doll baby. Rue had found it hid amongst her mama’s healing things and knew right away that it did not belong there standing behind the tinctures. Surely, the doll baby was meant for Rue, was to be a gift for her seventh birthday, the first birthday gift she was ever going to get. It looked like Rue. Had her flat nose and dark skin. It had her hair done up in black corkscrews, a bramble that stood up straight no matter how it was brushed. The doll baby had Rue’s thick red lips, painted in a bow, and black beads sewn on for glistening walnut eyes. It wore a green dress, which was the color Rue most preferred because it reminded her of the woods, flush in springtime.

  Miss May Belle had her ways. Healing herbs were in one place and cursing roots in another, and not a thing was ever mislaid or misplaced. Lord forbid she ever get the two things mixed up.

  Rue found the doll baby half-made. Its fabric face was unstuffed, its sack arms dangled with unfinished thread. Beneath its green skirt the black body dropped off, all hollow inside as a tree trunk.

  Rue was not supposed to be looking where she was looking. She was not allowed to get at Miss May Belle’s medicinals when her mama wasn’t at home to advise at them—and even then her mama hovered. But Rue liked to look on the liquid cures and poultices of dried herbs that sat up there on the high shelf. She wanted to ruminate on their ingredients, to memorize the plants from which they took their origin. Better than magic, that.

  The doll was sat on the back of a high shelf in their cabin, behind a jar full of jimson weed tea, a place that a doll did not belong—and a thing in a place where it did not belong was oft there for secret reasons, Rue knew.

  Rue figured she was about to turn seven years old that spring because Varina was about to turn seven. At about-to-be seven years old Rue’s favorite thing was secrets, and she had become quite good at gathering them, the way she was good at gathering leaves and seeds and flower heads; my li’l rabbit, her mama called her.

  With both seeds and secrets the approach was quite the same—go where other folks don’t. The path between the House and the slave quarter, for instance, was over-trod, with the coming and going of hurrying black folks who woke at cock’s crow and were off, to serve Marse Charles in his home or in his field depending on his pleasure. Rue found the best plants for her mama in far-off places, less traveled. At the wide part of the river or in a thicket beyond the hen house, or down at the edge of Marse Charles’s land, the very edge of creation as far as she knew it—that was where the best wildflowers grew.

  Secrets were the same. Rue heard them in isolated corners, and because she was slight and dark and quiet and because she was often dismissed as the strange healing woman’s shy daughter, she could go where others could not and hide in sight of folks and not be seen at all.

  At first, Rue gave Miss May Belle all her gathered secrets, same as any yielded crop. Say that Rue crept by the outhouse, overheard the house girls talking that Marse Charles had made a visit to their rooms, chose a mulatta like he choosin’ a horse from his stables for a day’s ride out. Rue might not know the meaning of the secrets, but she could repeat them fine enough, pass them on to her mama, and sure enough Miss May Belle would slip a cure to the mulatta in passing—a pouch cupped in a handshake—that would set the girl to rights before she would ever have to utter her shame.

  Rue heard the secrets of white folks too, and that’s how she first heard tell of the war, from Missus and a visitor of hers, a translucent pale woman in a big blue hat that highlighted the frosty color of her eyes and the veins beneath her pale skin. Rue had had the misfortune of walking past when the visitor had come calling. Perhaps Rue hadn’t looked busy enough, being on her way to bring water to the hands in the field. Missus had bidden Rue to put down her bucket, picked her out to come and fan them with a fat palmetto leaf while Missus and the visitor took iced tea on the veranda. In sight of her guest, Missus rubbed Rue’s head adoringly as a beloved pet, “for luck,” she said and chuckled.

  Rue spent hours there working the fan, listening to the women jaw on and on. The ice cubes in their glasses glinted like diamonds before they dissipated into filmy sugar water with the midday heat, and not a drop of it for Rue the whole long afternoon. The white women started to swim in her vision, hazy, and still she fanned.

  “They talked and talked and talked like I was deaf and dumb besides,” Rue complained to her mama that night. Her arms still ached, felt to her like they were still in motion, up, down, up, down to the rhythm of the white women’s chatter.

  Miss May Belle shrugged. She had her own hurts from a long day and evening and night of seeing to the hurts of others.

  At the supper table, Miss May Belle shut her eyes. She did this sometimes, like to shut out the world, the eyeballs spinning clear beneath the lids like she was searching. Folks saw it and thought it was how Miss May Belle got her knowledge on what hoodoo to wield or what salve to soothe a pain with, but Rue knew the secret of it. It was her mama’s way of snatching at a little bit of quiet, and Rue knew better than to talk when Miss May Belle was about her eye-shutting.

  Unobserved, Rue let her sights drift up to the shelf where she knew the doll baby was hidden, wondered when her mama might give it to her. Perhaps her birthday, though she didn’t know quite when that was. Varina got presents for her birthdays, pretty wrapped packages done up with bows. Rue wasn’t for all of that wrapper fuss, but she wouldn’t have minded just the present-getting. Maybe this year.

  “What else did Missus have to say?” Miss May Belle had come back to herself.

  Rue picked up the story of that afternoon’s secret-getting. She told her mama all about the white women’s terror, which was that their sons, their husbands, their menfolk all, would stomp off to war to defend King Cotton.

  “Who’s that, Mama?” Rue envisioned a white-haired master with a crown of thorny cotton bolls. Miss May Belle waved Rue’s tale on.

  Rue told of how the women spoke on the impetuous nature of men, always hungry after bloodshed to prove themselves. Miss May Belle grunted her agreement. Rue told her of how the women feared they’d be left alone if their men up and left—how they feared it and longed for it. They spoke on how the plight of the darkies shadowed all other concerns. What o
f temperance? What of suffrage? Rue worked the fan over the white woman words.

  “They said if all the males is gone it ain’t safe for the children, what with all the niggers growing bold with all of Lincoln’s ideas,” Rue repeated, proud she’d remembered the way the blue-veined lady had put it.

  Rue soon came to the part of the telling that she deemed most important. “Mama,” she said. “Missus say she thinkin’ on sendin’ Varina away to Northern relations for what she call ‘refinement.’ Said if the world’s goin’ overall upside down she want her daughter to come out on top.”

  * * *

  —

  Rue told the secret to Miss May Belle and next morning Miss May Belle told the secret to Ma Doe who, once she heard of Varina’s leaving, turned gray as a dropped stone.

  “It ain’t happenin’ yet,” Miss May Belle said. “You know Missus ain’t got no say in it. She just like to think she do.”

  Ma Doe’s face wrinkled down to a frown even as she set out one of Varina’s cranberry red dresses for washing. You would’ve thought the little white girl was in it, the way the old woman laid it down lovingly, smoothing all the frilly edges.

  “I don’t wish to see her go,” Ma Doe said.

  On her knees at the wash basin Miss May Belle laughed in a way that Rue, listening from behind the washboard, thought sounded almost cruel. “Don’t you got better things to wish after than one li’l white girl’s comfort?”

  Ma Doe didn’t answer, only picked up the dress and shook it and laid it down again as if this time she might lay it neater.

  “What you askin’ for, Ma?” Miss May Belle said, gentler, though Ma Doe was not her mama any more than she was anyone else’s. All of Ma Doe’s sons had been sold away young, but that was the type of secret that everybody knew but didn’t ever speak on. “You wantin’ me to fix it so she stay?”

  “No!” Ma Doe seemed to startle even herself with her vehemence. “No, none of your root work, Miss May Belle, none of your trinkets or devilment. I don’t want any of that superstitious nonsense near Varina.”

  Miss May Belle met eyes with Ma Doe over the washboard. “I hear you, Ma,” she said, and a solemn look passed between them, an agreement, fast as a whipcrack. Rue saw the truth and then it was gone again and they were just two slave women busy at the washing.

  “You know I don’t care one wit for conjuration,” Ma Doe said even as she worried at the string of the new asafetida pouch Miss May Belle had only just gifted her that morning. She had it tucked under her stiff collar where it was hidden. It was well known that Missus expressly forbade any sign of hoodooing in the House.

  “Why don’t you just go ’head and speak to Marse Charles if it bother you so. Tell him you’ll see to Varina’s ‘refining’ just fine. He soft on you,” Miss May Belle tutted to her. “He still think he in the nursery nuzzling at yo’ teat.”

  Ma Doe swatted at Miss May Belle’s upraised behind, same as she would any of her misbehaving children.

  “Ain’t nothin’ to be promised for those boys, though,” Miss May Belle said, serious all of a sudden. “But maybe if you do speak to Marse Charles about ’em?”

  Ma Doe was quiet as she tied up all those little white ribbons on Varina’s dress. For a while the music of Rue scrubbing a shirt along the boards was the only sound amongst the three of them. Her knuckles rapped rhythmically on the wood of the washboard as the water sloshed.

  Finally, Ma Doe spoke slow, like the words were being pulled up from inside her body. Said, “Last time I spoke out of turn to Marse Charles on the rearing of his sons he drove a fountain pen through my palm.”

  Rue stopped scrubbing.

  “You ain’t never tell me that,” Miss May Belle said.

  Ma Doe sighed down at the red dress, worshipfully. “You can’t know everything, May Belle,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  What Miss May Belle couldn’t know she sent Rue to hear and see and gather, up through the winding back hallways of the Big House. She sent Rue to the nursery to gather up a lock of Varina’s red hair in Ma Doe’s stead.

  Miss May Belle, for all of Rue’s life, had been banned from venturing into the House—ever since the birth of Varina, in fact, as though the disappointment of Missus’s worm pink daughter wriggling out of her instead of a son of a type her predecessor had produced for Marse Charles had solidified Missus’s distaste for all black healing. Indeed, Miss May Belle might’ve saved Missus’s life during Varina’s breached birth by tending to the emergency before the white doctor could even arrive, but the healing woman hadn’t helped her where it counted—raising Missus’s esteem in her husband’s eyes required a son.

  Folks said Missus was barren after the birth of her daughter and because of it had told Marse Charles that it was ungodly to take pleasure in her. It was a nasty secret, Miss May Belle said, and one Rue ought not repeat unless she wanted her skin whipped clean off her back. But the ugly bit of gossip was likely the truth, or close to it, and everybody knew Marse Charles took his fancies elsewhere.

  Rue troubled her way in through the back door of the House, simply waited on it to swing open when the cook, Big Sylvia, bustled out of the kitchen heading to the storeroom set out in the yard. Rue slipped in the gap just as the door creaked shut and thankfully found the kitchen empty. It was easy then to steal up the service stairs.

  Now Varina would be in the ladies’ parlor, Rue knew, all the way on the opposite side of the vast House, in the middle of one of her daily lessons in needlework with Missus. The lessons always left Varina pinpricked and ornery even when she was finally set free to play with Rue and the slave children in the cool of the evening. Despite the good distance of a whole grand wing stretched between them, Rue still chilled at entering the nursery without permission. But she’d promised Miss May Belle that lock of red hair and there was no better place to snatch it but from one of the bone brushes Ma Doe used to rake at Varina’s thick fall of curls.

  Cursing, conjuring, Miss May Belle claimed, was easy enough done with any old bit of bodily property—a toenail, or a loosed tooth. Urine or blood or even tears. But a conjure that was meant to bind was something else, much like a love spell, Rue’s mama had explained. It called for the deeper essence of the person the fix was to be put upon, and hair was most preferred. Hair tells, Miss May Belle often said, hair tells health and hereditary both. You and the roots of you.

  The nursery was done up in white frilly lace that had aged to yellow in places over time. Rue knew it had been Varina’s half brothers’ nursery once and Marse Charles’s before that. Varina often complained of the drab white and the stale air and the fact that the baseboards were all carved up, pockmarked in places where her half brothers had etched their initials, claiming everything long before Varina was even born.

  The only thing not white was the crib, which was a solid red oak. Varina had outgrown it long ago in favor of the wide white canopied bed across the room, but the crib was still there and in it sat Varina’s collection of blond-haired china dolls, which seemed to wink at Rue when she rounded the corner and came face-to-face with them.

  There were a dozen at least, sat in the crib, arranged in a row like an audience, and Rue nearly fled from the room altogether when she met their glazed porcelain eyes gazing out at her from between the bars of the crib.

  Shook up by the dolls, Rue crept past them quick as she could. The floorboards creaked wickedly with her every step. Across the room she could make out what she was after: All the combs and pins and brushes were laid out neatly in a row on the vanity, doubled in the mirror. Rue made her footfalls high and careful, tested each floorboard before she came to rest on it. Marooned halfway across the room on an especially whining plank, Rue leaned forward, reached out her arm. She snatched up the first comb she could lay hands on, plucked a clump of orange hair, and quickly replaced the comb next to the others. Now
that she had the tuft of hair, she didn’t know quite where to put it. She could hardly walk out of the house with a handful of Varina’s hair. Rue settled on stuffing it into the lining of her dress and turned herself around, traced her laborious route back to the door.

  She stopped again at the dolls, like to see if they had observed what she’d done. They hadn’t moved from their faithful vigil, staring blind and straight out at the dust motes Rue’d unsettled.

  “You’re not so pretty,” Rue whispered at them. “My mama’s gon’ make me a doll baby. One that smiles. Black. Sweet as can be.”

  Rue dared to reach her arm out to touch one and found it cold, as far from a baby as a rock at the river’s edge was. None of them looked like Rue but none of them looked much like Varina neither, with their impossibly white skin and painted-on pink cheeks. The bodies of the dolls jutted out at hard edges beneath a rainbow parade of pretty dresses made of nicer fabrics than any Rue had ever owned. Rue’s first thought was to grab the nearest doll and shuck off the dress to see if the white shining skin continued downward, smooth as a dinner plate.

  “Are you meant to be here?”

  Rue spun at the voice. It was a white boy, almost a man, behind her, one of Marse Charles’s sons. Rue looked down before she could see which. She knew she was not ever allowed to meet their eyes.

  He came into the nursery from the hall. Rue watched his black boots stomp up to her. He made the floorboards moan as loud as he wanted, didn’t care. About him she could smell a heavy stink she knew to be liquor coming up out of his sweat. It was like a cloud he carried. He kneeled before Rue. Grabbed her chin in his rough, dry hand and pulled her face near to his. There was nowhere else to look then.