Conjure Women Read online

  “Folks don’t come here no more. Can’t, I s’pose,” Rue said quick. “But I do. For quiet-like.”

  Bruh Abel tipped back the chair, set it to rocking, but it didn’t rock right and as he moved, dragging the lantern light over the stores of dry food by the altar, the chair kept rocking. Its crooked pace fell in time with Rue’s wracking heartbeat.

  “And this?” He’d turned his light into the farthest room of the rectory proper. Past the stove and water basin was a little back room with a bedroll on the floor, the scant covers neatly tucked.

  Rue hurried in after him. The back room was all empty too, but he’d lighted on something tucked into the bed. He picked it up and turned it in his hands, studied it closely. A little black doll baby in a green dress, a crude likeness of Rue but a likeness all the same. May Belle’s creation had held up all these years. Threadbare, but it had held, and if he flipped the doll over he’d see the face of the white doll hid beneath her skirts. He did not flip it over but tossed it on the sleeping mat.

  There was the one small back door. It took Bruh Abel out into the night again and Rue after him. There was no grass beyond the church but an area of hard-packed mud that looked red in the moonlight. Carved out in its center was a neat square door made of heavy wood, an entrance to a slave jail in the earth.

  Bruh Abel seemed to know what it was from the moment he saw it. He recoiled from the spot, yet the circle of lantern light settled on the thick metal padlock that sat atop the door. The lock was open, Rue saw, and the chains had been disrupted, left a track in the mud from where they used to be to where they’d just been moved. Varina.

  He reached down, as if he meant to pull open the heavy door.

  “Don’t.”

  Bruh Abel swung the light up at Rue, near blinding her with the sudden motion. She covered her face, spoke through her hands.

  “Miss May Belle,” Rue said. “Marse Charles locked her down there once. For three days. Punishment.”

  She let her whole body shudder with the memory of it as though it were a fresh hurt and she were overcome.

  She heard the lantern clatter to the ground. Bruh Abel pulled her into a fierce embrace. Her head at his chest, Rue listened to the pounding of his heartbeat, fast as hers, like a drum on her ear.

  “You punishin’ yo’self by comin’ here, Miss Rue,” Bruh Abel said. “It ain’t right. This ain’t the right way to make peace.”

  “It’s like you say,” Rue spoke into his chest. “I can’t seem to let go a’ the old ways.”

  “We can set this to rights.”

  “Please,” Rue said. “Help me.”

  SLAVERYTIME

  1860

  Before the war, they found a dead man in the woods. They’d found him on the edge of the thick trees, at the crest of a small hill, as if he’d used the last thrust of his life to get up it and had succeeded in that at least. And all the folks agreed that the rusted iron collar locked around his throat looked like a crown of thorns fit for Jesus himself.

  It was the little pickaninny boy, Red Jack, that found the dead man, a mercy that, folks said, for what if it had been one of the girl children who’d come across him? You see, the dead man was full naked, stark as the day he was born, save for his collar of rusted iron.

  Still Red Jack, too, was only ten years old if he was a day, and it was often said that he did not have enough wits to rub together for a fire, so when he stumbled into the thick of the wood to relieve himself and saw the dead man there, facedown in moss, Red Jack shrugged and shook dry and went to Ma Doe, who was the only thing like a mama he’d ever known, and said to her, “Ma Doe, there’s a dead man in the wood.”

  Well, Ma Doe, who minded the children—the master’s and the slave ones and the ones who didn’t or couldn’t know their mamas—well, she’d heard all nature of things in her long life and she thought she had heard every last thing there was to hear ’til she heard that.

  “Who is he?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “How’d you know he’s dead?”

  “He ain’t movin’ none.”

  “How long’s he been there?”

  “ ’Least as long as right now.”

  Ma Doe had a baby on either hip and one swathed up on her back, and she was in no type of place to go running off into the wood on Red Jack’s half-clear declaration, but she had a sense that something dread had come to them and she knew Red Jack didn’t have it in him to lie. If he said there was a dead man in the wood, then there was.

  She sent Red Jack to fetch Charlie and Ol’ Joel and take them to the place where the dead man lay. He did just that, and the two men and one boy came back to her, hats in hand.

  “Sure ’nough he is a dead man,” said Ol’ Joel.

  “Can’t make no sense a’ who he is or where he come from,” said Charlie.

  “Runaway,” said Ma Doe, who had wisdom of such things.

  Ol’ Joel was for telling Marse Charles, as he always was for telling Marse Charles. Charlie, who thought himself wise because he’d been allowed to apprentice at the side of a white blacksmith, commented on the iron collar. One of the long, cruel bars was bent enough to allow the man to lie, his head propped up awkward as if on a pillow of air. But at a touch the whole thing was rusted, weak. Perhaps he’d come up through the water, from the river, risen.

  It was Red Jack that came to the solution, which was as simple as saying, “Miss May Belle oughta know.”

  Ma Doe sent Charlie and Ol’ Joel to fetch the dead man. Standing in the doorway, draped in her orphan babies, she watched as they carried him through the crossways center of the plantation. Ol’ Joel with his bad knees took the legs, Charlie held the head and shoulders, and as they passed her by Ma Doe couldn’t help but to say how young the dead man was, how he was surely just fresh from his first shave and how sad, how very very sad, was the world.

  * * *

  —

  Rue was not there when they brought the dead man into their home. Ma Doe had had the sense to tell Red Jack to run ahead, to warn Miss May Belle of what was coming her way, and in turn Miss May Belle had sent Rue on a fool’s errand—go pick some sassafras from down the road a ways, as if there wasn’t sassafras sprouting up all over the place, but Rue went.

  Sassafras, Rue knew, liked gaps, dwelled in drops of light where the soil was moist but not too wet, and like all good things, it came wrapped in bad. It had a way of tangling itself with poison vines, trying to hide. But Rue’s hands were small and already well practiced, and she picked the two apart and came back to her mama with only the good, a whole mess of sassafras sprouting out from her arms like she was herself a garden.

  They’d put the dead man on the table, drawn the curtains, hid the sun. His raised head was turned at attention, like he’d been startled by the opening door, and though his eyes were half-closed, his blue-lined lips were partways open as if he was making ready a greeting.

  “Who’s that, Mama?”

  “Nobody know.”

  Nobody did know. His yellow-brown skin could have been anybody’s yellow-brown skin, as could his shorn black hair, as could his broad nose, his calloused fingers, his flat, bloodied feet. He was young enough to be any mama’s son and old enough to be any baby’s daddy. The lash marks on his shoulders could come from any overseer’s licks, and it was only the iron around his neck that made him the least bit remarkable. Sure as a brand, it meant he was trouble. It meant he had run away and been brought back and made an example and shackled. Then he had run again.

  There was a quilt for his nakedness, though it seemed small on him and only covered his lower half: his raw knees to the crescent of his belly button, shrouded. Rue looked long at the quilt then up to her mama, who stood behind the stretch of the dead man the way other mamas might stand behind a supper they’d cooked.

  “He ain’t died of no
pestilence, leastwise. Wouldn’t let them have brung him here if he had. Nah, body’s strong, wiry-like, sure, but strong.”

  Miss May Belle touched the taut skin over his calves, thick as tree trunks. She moved to the top of the body, past various scars and scratches, a short life’s worth of hurts and healing. His eyes, not all closed, were hooded, so she opened one of his lids all the way for him and looked in.

  “No yellowin’. No cloudin’. Nah. He just die scared.” She let the eye slip back to half-shut. “See how he look afraid?”

  Rue could not tell what afraid looked like on a dead man. What did he have left to fear for?

  “But, Mama,” she said. She was still frozen in the doorway with all her flowers. “Who is he?”

  “Nobody know,” said Miss May Belle, but that didn’t stop folks from trying to figure it. They came through the cabin one after another to look at him, the dead man, to confirm his strangeness and to make hollow suggestions about from where he’d come.

  “Young buck,” said Ol’ Joel. “They like ’em like that down south way. Strong, they is, but got no sense. Disobedience is his name if it’s anything.”

  “He got some Injun in him,” said Beulah, who’d seen Indian in her red-skinned daddy and so saw it everywhere. The dead man’s ears, she said, were like arrowheads; he could hear danger and that’s how he’d run so far, for so long.

  Opal, who knew a whole mess of men, was known to know them intimately, could not make sense of him.

  “I ain’t never come ’cross him,” she said, as if she’d come across every man since Adam. She swept her hand over the peak of his pointed cheekbone. “Woulda like to known him, though. Face like that, surely he was somethin’ good to somebody.”

  Seemed the dead man was something to everybody. They kept coming to look him over, though it was clear no one could name him. Even folks from the neighboring plantation came by if they could get the leave, not even to speak, just to stare. They put the pennies on his eyes after a while, to respectfully weigh down the lids. They all agreed there was something shiver-stirring in the pureness of those half-mooned whites. White as they knew cotton to be, white as they’d heard snow could be.

  “It’s foul luck to spend the pennies off a’ dead folks’ eyes,” Miss May Belle warned the children that came to peek, “so don’t you dare go an’ think it.”

  Rue did not think of it. What she did think was how strange his stillness was, this dead man, with his muscles still poised as if at any moment were he to hear the hounds barking or the guns firing or the footsteps of white men’s boots on wooded ground, he could take off. He could run again. Rue sensed it in him, and it sent a sort of thrill through her she as yet had never known. She had never before been so close to a man, dead or alive, and it was his potential to run that thrilled her. Women, she realized then, were not built that way. Women were for crouching, for becoming heavy-bellied, for bearing down and pushing close to the earth, that different sort of running, that sedentary sort of endurance.

  * * *

  —

  They all of them conspired to keep the dead man hid from Marse Charles. It was a dangerous folly, they knew, but a risk worth taking to bear the dead man home. He had the look of every runaway sketch hanging from any tree in the county, but still someone might come to claim him if they knew where to look. There was profit in runaway corpses. Even dead, his white folks might string him up in the center of their cotton field as a warning to the others, a scarecrow to watch rot while they worked. His white folks might conspire to have him cut up, each limb and ligament worth a silver dollar from some white doctor curious on how a black body differed from his own.

  The dead man, therefore, had to be prepared, and quickly, for the homegoing. Charlie Blacksmith came through to Miss May Belle’s cabin. He sent a storm of sparks into the air, but he did it—the collar and its serpentine spikes fell away, and beneath it the dead man’s neck appeared, seeming small and vulnerable. When they pulled it away, the collar, once sinister, fell to pieces like so many petals. What power it had had was gone from it now, left to bits of rust and iron.

  * * *

  —

  Rue and Miss May Belle had to sleep with the man; there was no better place to put him than where he already was, stretched out on their supper table. The proposition didn’t seem to bother Miss May Belle much, who long ago had lost her discomfort with life and death, with other folks’ bodies, if she’d ever had any discomfort to begin with. She slept deeply through the night that he was with them. Rue lay awake beside her mama in fear and in wonder both. Across the room she could not see the dead man clearly, but she could make out his bulk and the shape of him, and beneath the lighter color of the quilt, she could make out perfectly the pale white bottoms of his feet, which caught the moonlight.

  Miss May Belle was as boisterous sleeping as she was awake. Her breath came in gusting stutters, a force, for certain, but so rhythmic that Rue most often found it soothing. But there was no comfort this night, and so awake, Rue listened and counted each of her mama’s breaths as a way to keep time ’til it felt safe to move, whenever that might be. When she did get up she did so without telling herself she would. She was just suddenly in motion, quick but quiet to sit up and sweep the sheet from her legs and then stand so that the bed would shift slowly with her spare weight and not disturb her mama, who stayed snoring.

  Rue crept across the room. She ghosted her way across the wooden floor until she reached him. The dead man waited, his head tilted toward her.

  She held her hand to his open mouth, not so close as to touch his lips, but close enough to feel air. There was none to be felt and, emboldened, she hovered her hand down lower and lower still. The quilt was thin, a pattern of interlocking scenes, each block bearing little stitches of activity. Faceless black men and women—made women by the bell of their skirts—danced here and tended harvest there and bore black wings up to white misshaped stars. Rue dared. She pulled back the thickly bordered corner of the quilt and followed the taut V of the dead man’s waist. She saw the dark coiled hairs surrounding the mass of flesh there, long but unmenacing. It was what made him a man, she knew; it stuck close to his left thigh, dead too. A wrongness roiled in the pit of her belly. Rue dropped the quilt back down.

  Across the room Miss May Belle’s breathing came steady, slower than the rhythm of Rue’s nervous heartbeat. Rue slipped one foot toward the bed, another, another. She froze when she saw them, the knowing bare whites of her mama’s eyes. Watching.

  “You done, girl?”

  Rue could scarcely remember how to nod.

  “A’ight. Come on back to bed now.”

  Rue did as her mama said.

  * * *

  —

  The suit they found him the next morning fit as best it could, being something borrowed and not meant to be returned. It was a dusky gray, and folks said he looked ready for his wedding day. Wed to death, some of the older women were saying, wed to Jesus. But no one could spare him shoes, shoes being so rare to begin with. “Where he goin’,” they assured themselves desperately, “he ain’t gon’ need ’em.”

  Still, the pale white bottoms of his feet seemed accusatory in their bareness, even after they had washed the worst of the blood from between his toes and from beneath his splintered toenails. That task, too, fell to Miss May Belle, who had the most knowledge, it seemed, of what was needed to make ready the dead. She surrounded him with flowers to keep him sweet smelling and cleaned his skin, gentle, as though he were her own son. The feet she saved for last, and Rue watched as the cleaning made her strong mama finally weep.

  “He look like yo’ daddy,” she was saying under her sorrow.

  Rue nodded, but he did not. Her daddy was stronger, older, darker. Alive.

  * * *

  —

  How beautiful they’d made him when it was time for him to go on. Rue knew they�
��d cinched the suit in the back, so it pulled about his shoulders in the right way, and she knew the coffin was nothing much more than spare bits of wood left from the repair of other things: chicken coop stake, cracked church pew, things worked together and hastily painted one hue, as if that made for belonging.

  They held the funeral at night after the work was done, and though they were tired they danced and though they had sorrow they sang. They made themselves a slow procession going by him in a manner strangely similar to when he’d first appeared to them. The dead man’s head was pillowed by flowers, by quilted bits of pretty fabric, the finest anybody could spare. In death he looked himself like a celebration, though surely his life had never been. But here it was, close up, freedom. He’d reached finally what he’d been running toward.

  Rue lingered back with the other children, all of them giddy like it was Christmastime and overtired besides. They did their best imitation of their mourning daddies and mamas, bowed their heads when bowing was necessary, keened when others keened. So, this was grieving. Rue followed last in the line that visited the dead man’s motley coffin. She was not sure what she was meant to think or feel when she touched the splintery surface as others before her had done—what message she was supposed to be imparting through her fingers. Goodbye? Sleep well?

  She looked out into the wood, focused on fixing her face in solemn dignity, for the sake of others if not for the sake of the dead man—and that’s when she first saw them, there amongst the dark of the trees, looming white faces watching from afar. Had the dead man’s white folks come for him after all? They weren’t advancing to pay their respects, only looking on, eerie-still in comparison to the commotion of all the black folks’ mourning. Rue took her hand from the box, moved on. Surely she was not the only one who had seen them. For certain everyone felt their presence. Their eyes, watching.