Conjure Women Read online

  “Show me,” Varina demanded.

  It didn’t feel as easy now to show Varina her body as it had been when they were young, back when the only real obvious difference between them was the light and dark of their skin.

  On the roof, the first fat raindrops fell and sounded like knocking. Finally, Rue untied her apron, pulled up her skirt.

  The beads fit close to her skin just as her mama had tied them the night prior, a pattern of red and orange and brown stones that reminded her of the earth lit up by the sun. The string of beads crossed under her belly button like a horizon. They clicked quietly when she moved; she’d heard that clicking all day.

  Varina was just as drawn to the beads as she was to the red strip of fabric they held up. The strip disappeared beneath Rue’s white skirt, secure between her legs. Rue tucked the skirt back into place before Varina could be bold enough to follow the bit of red fabric with her creeping, greedy fingers.

  “What is that?” Varina could make even a question sound like a commandment.

  “My mama gave it to me. Last night I bled.”

  Varina’s eyes rounded. “Why?”

  “What you mean, why?”

  Before then it had not occurred to Rue that Varina didn’t know about blood the way she did. She herself could not remember the first time she’d understood that being a woman meant being bloodied, but then she could not remember the first word she spoke, or the first time she knew herself for herself—some knowing just felt like it had always been.

  “Ain’t yo’ mama tell you ’bout it?” Rue knew it for a foolish question as soon as it left her lips. Varina’s mama, who folks knew to be as brash-mouthed as a clarion in the keeping of her household, was as mute as a fish when it came to her only trueborn child, as though the girl was nothing more than a spare room that a housemaid sometimes neglected to dust. The rearing of Varina fell most to Ma Doe, who could command the girl in schooling and dress, but lately was losing her authority in even that. But in the manners of a white woman and the matters of her body? Rue imagined Ma Doe—who easily was the most proper woman she’d ever known, slave or not—making up Varina’s bed each morning, relieved to find those soft white sheets unstained another day.

  It took Rue what felt like hours to set the girl right. Varina’s ideas were all muddled. She supposed that the bleeding happened only when the woman went to relieve herself. She supposed it was an unusual, unending affliction. She supposed there was shame in it.

  “It’s natural, my mama said,” Rue explained. “There’s no shame. It’s beautiful. That’s why my mama made me the beads to hold up the cloth.”

  * * *

  —

  Miss May Belle didn’t believe in shame, or so she’d tell anyone who’d stop long enough to listen.

  “What’s the use for it?” she’d often say.

  Rue knew it was no good to be ashamed when she’d had to wake her mama in the middle of the night. She knew she had to look brave holding out the front of her white sleeping gown, pointing out the bloodstain she’d left there long enough that it had dried to brown. But she was scared. “Look, Mama.”

  Her mama stirred from her sleep. There was no surprise in her when she saw the blood, and Rue was used to that. Miss May Belle smiled. She knew girls and women before they even knew themselves. Her mama crouched down beneath the bed frame to a basket of spare things she kept there: bits of fabric, tore-up trinkets, and dried posies of no particular use but to be pretty to look at. She pulled the length of beads out inch by inch, like a garden snake. She wrapped the beads around her neck to free her hands ’til she worked the end out at last.

  “Do you hurt, baby?”

  Rue shook her head. She couldn’t feel a thing but a warm damp. It was like a new-sprung well. A thing happening without her say-so.

  “Sometimes you will and sometimes you won’t,” her mama explained. Rue knew this already. There were folks who suffered with it, she knew, women who came to them once a month or more, wanting something to fight away their aches.

  Rue had seen Miss May Belle take care of women her whole life, had done so at her side, at her command. But now, bound by the papery warm feel of her mama’s work-roughened fingers, she felt something she had not known she had wanted so badly.

  “These beads is special.” Miss May Belle held out the belt to its full length, the whole stretch of her arms. The red rag hung in the middle like the flag of some proud country. She shook the string so that the beads click-clacked together loudly. “Iff’n you ever forget yo’self, let that sound be what reminds you.”

  She drew the beads up along Rue’s body with her hands splayed, and Rue felt the thrilling spin of them all the way up her hips. Her mama pulled the ends of the string tidy so they’d lay flat beneath even something as flimsy as her nightdress.

  “A man come and bother you, he can make you a mama. Now that’s a good thing sometimes and a bad thing another. Depends.”

  Rue knew this too. She had seen new mamas collapse in their crying, brought down by all manner of tears, overjoyed or sorrowed.

  Miss May Belle laid a palm on the flat of Rue’s belly. “When the beads start to pull too tight, well that’ll be one of yo’ first signs that somethin’s changin’.”

  Then Miss May Belle did something Rue wasn’t at all expecting, something she never did with the other women who came to see her with all their needs and all their wanting. She pulled Rue close and wrapped her arms around her, spoke quiet words with her lips in her hair.

  “I’m proud a’ you.”

  Rue did not know what she had done that deserved pride but anyway she was glad she had done it.

  * * *

  —

  Outside the rain had soothed itself down to beat but a few half-hearted patterings on the roof of the church.

  “We ought to get back ’fore they know we gone,” Rue said.

  Varina was quiet as they descended the church steps. She walked down slow, over-careful in her hoop skirt, and Rue coming down behind her was impatient. Outside, steam curled up from the ground drawn out from the heat. Already the sun was returning and Rue felt very tired thinking on the work her mama would surely have waiting for her.

  “Make one for me.” Varina’s demand came out of nothing and nowhere. She ghosted her hand over Rue’s hip, where she knew the beads were hidden.

  “What you need it for? You ain’t bleed yet.”

  “But when I do. I’ll for certain need one when I do.”

  Irritation rose in Rue the same as the tendrils of mist that came up off the rainwater. She wanted then so suddenly to slap Varina it was like a sting she already felt in her palm. Varina had pearls and brooches, bows and combs; Rue could have no one thing of her own.

  Varina made her separate way up the road to the House. Rue watched her go, watched her skip round puddles and pockets of mud, her pale hand shading her pale face, her hair glowing like a beacon fire in the growing strands of sunlight. Rue watched Varina all the way until she disappeared into the House, and then she turned and walked home herself, her beads going click-clack-click.

  In their cabin Miss May Belle was working nutmeg, grounding it down to a fine powder. It raised up in a spicy earth smell, Rue’s favorite scent.

  “Where you got to?” Miss May Belle didn’t need to look up to ask it.

  Rue watched her mama’s elbow go up and down with her grinding, and she knew she was in some kind of trouble.

  “Fetched the skullcap like you asked.” Rue set down the basket of damp purple flowers and knew it for a meager offering.

  “Now, wasn’t that near an hour ago?” It wasn’t a question.

  Rue picked up the flowers from the basket one by one at the stems the same way she’d picked them from the thicket. She drew the dew off the leaves and tried to look busy doing it.

  “You and that Vari
na, y’all got different lives to live,” Miss May Belle said. It wasn’t the first time she’d warned it, but Rue had to be impressed at the uncanny way her mama had of knowing what was what. “You listenin’?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Rue bound the skullcap stems with twine and hung the bundled posy up by the window. There were a mess of other herbs up there, waiting with their bottoms up, their stems to the sky as they dried. Rue tiptoed and stretched and added her new pickings to the others, choosing a spot where they could get the full of the heat without getting the full of the sun. The skullcaps hung awkward. To Rue it looked as if their drooping violet heads were straining to stay upright.

  “You got to obey her, fine, but you don’t got to follow her,” Miss May Belle said. Rue was uncertain of the distinction. She wished her mama would leave off the topic. A low twisting pain had started in her stomach, not a stabbing but an ache, and she knew she had to bear it. Miss May Belle of all people wouldn’t have sympathy for woman pains.

  Her mama passed her the ground-up nutmeg without a word, but Rue didn’t need telling. In a large jar on the shelf was where they kept the mama’s milk, an extra bit of help for mamas too thin or too sickly, too overworked or just not at all able to call up any milk of their own. Rue poured out a splash from the jar and stirred in the nutmeg before it could drink up all the milk. The trick of it was to add just the right amount, make a paste not a soup, and Rue had the knack for these kinds of mixings, better, she thought, than even her own mama had.

  Still, Miss May Belle kept up her faultfinding. “You takin’ too long with that. It ain’t Sunday supper.”

  Rue was bleeding. She was tired. She was thirteen, thereabouts, and a woman, thereabouts. But all her mama wanted to talk about was how she ought to stay clear of Varina.

  “You ain’t,” Miss May Belle finally said, “friends.”

  The ache in Rue’s stomach grew to a spasm of pain. She set the bowl down suddenly on the table like she’d lost the strength even to stir. Rue heard Miss May Belle click her tongue at her, presumably in disapproval. It was that small noise, that lifelong cluck of her mama’s correction, that sparked her ire. Rue drew back her hand and slapped the bowl from the table.

  The mixture of mama’s milk and soothing nutmeg splattered, sent a streak across the floor and dashed along the skirt of both of their dresses. The bowl clattered and spun so long it was almost comedy, before Miss May Belle raised her foot and stepped on it to clap the bowl down into silence. She stood there like that with the bowl underfoot, like a turtle subdued, its head and limbs pulled in in fear.

  Rue wanted to run. She’d done a horrible thing, she could feel it in her stomach, a pooling of shame.

  “Good,” said Miss May Belle in a nasty bite. “Good, you go ahead an’ get it all out, girl. But don’t you go an’ forget it. You not a child now, so you best hear it from me an’ remember it well. You can sass all you want in here. But out there”—she pointed hard in the direction of the House—“you never say no more’n, ‘Yes, Miss Varina.’ You hear?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Miss May Belle stepped over the bowl in coming closer, stepped through the mess of their ruined tincture. She took Rue hard by the shoulders, something desperate in her grasp.

  “That girl ain’t yo’ friend.”

  The slap Miss May Belle gave Rue was hard, shocking. The pain of it resonated long after, tremulous on Rue’s skin like the reverberation on a drum. But it was what Miss May Belle said that was slapped into Rue’s memory and stung just the same, years after: “Varina ain’t yo’ friend. An’ I ain’t either.”

  * * *

  —

  Rue made Varina a belt. In rare moments of baby-less, mama-less, blessed quiet, Rue drove holes through pieces of nutmeg. She’d stolen the knitting needle, just the one, straight out of Ma Doe’s basket on a hot afternoon when they’d both been tasked with watching Varina dance.

  It was in a back room of the House, a forgotten parlor, disused and dust-ridden, and it was its emptiness that Varina had taken a liking to when she’d developed all sorts of peculiar wants and fancies shaped by the perceived tastes of other white girls. To Rue those girls were real as haints, which was to say not real at all, and she held ghostly impressions of these playmates of Varina’s, with whom Miss Varina was sent to sometimes take luncheons, a mission for her propriety, endeavored with all the purposefulness of a war campaign.

  Varina was all glory on those visiting days. With her frizzed hair brushed out to an obedient shine, she’d sit beside Red Jack as he drove her to her visits like a queen on her throne. Red Jack for sure was thrilled to have the permission and the pass to leave the plantation. He had a natural way with horses, something holy in the way he yelled “Hey now,” that made him safe to drive the cart that bore the master’s daughter. He had a natural way with a simpleton’s smile that made him safe to come back with her by nightfall.

  Varina would return from these visits with, as Miss May Belle would put it, “some fool idea rattling like beans in her empty head.” The white girl would make herself half-sick with wanting until she got what some other white girl possessed or something better still.

  Now Christmastime was coming on and the cool season and the good harvest and the bounty of babies was making everything languid and slow, and Varina had seen to it that her Christmas present came early, a book of dancing steps that she’d ordered, come all the way from the North. She’d spied an advertisement and sent away for it and some months later the thick tome was there, spread on Ma Doe’s knee. Rue could only pick at certain letters but she liked well the drawings. They were mostly intricate footprints going this way and that, trailed by dashes to mark from where they’d come to where they had to go. The gentleman’s footprints were always the larger, the lady’s daintily following in his wake.

  “You gotta be the man,” Varina had said but Rue had already figured that. She was clumsy at it, trying to lead as the book suggested, but Varina, who squirmed in her arms, wouldn’t let her do the leading, and all they had for music was Ma Doe reluctantly smacking the base of her chair with the heel of her shoe, and she wasn’t very good at that neither.

  “No, no, no, it’s all of it wrong.” Varina stopped Rue right in the midst of a turn. She tugged at her curls, let them spring back to her head to mark her agony.

  “Now, Miss Varina,” Ma Doe petted, “you needn’t learn all this foolishness to be well-liked. You have any number of fine virtues. You’d do well to remember that.”

  * * *

  —

  It was on Christmas Day that Varina remembered her finest virtue, and that was her wiliness. She knocked on their cabin door just after supper and grinned up at Miss May Belle.

  “Fannie’s took ill at the house. She’s needing someone to nurse her.”

  Miss May Belle was not a fool. She squinted down at the white girl.

  “And they sent you all the way down here, Miss?”

  Varina grinned demurely. “I volunteered.”

  “Then I’ll be up presently.”

  “Oh, you needn’t trouble, Belle. Rue’ll do just fine.” Varina leaned in conspiratorially. “I suspect it’s only a block of the bowels that’s botherin’ Fannie. Mother quite spoils her with sweets.”

  Rue came out sleepily, armed with a sloshing gourd of palma christi oil to soothe Fannie’s complaint. She followed awhile in silence before Varina made an abrupt turn away from the House through a thin path in the woods.

  “Dump that someplace.” Varina waved away the oil.

  “Where we goin’?”

  Rue kept the gourd hugged close to her. They stepped through uneven craggy ground, over bent weeds and barren land. They walked for some time, Varina just ahead, Rue struggling behind.

  “What about Fannie’s bowels?”

  “Don’t be foolish, Rue. Ain’t nothin’ the
matter with Fannie’s bowels. Come on now, keep up.”

  Where they were going there was music. It snaked out at them through the trees a little at a time ’til Rue could put it together whole as a song, and closer, as someone picking a banjo, and closer, as folks keeping time with their foot stomping. Closer too there were the words, easy to pick up in their repetition, saying, “I got a right, y’all got a right, I got a right to the Tree of Life.”

  Red Jack had guard of the place. He was crouched atop a log like a frog, his hands hanging between his legs, and he shook his head at Varina like he’d been expecting her and was disappointed to see her all the same. Still, he gave them leave to pass. Inside the singing grew forceful. “You may hinder me here but you cannot hinder me there. God in heaven’s gon’ answer my prayer.”

  Varina and Rue came up to the weathered cabin, stood at either side of the doorway, and listened. They said nothing but watched each other’s faces in the flicker of warm light leaking out. Varina smiled her thumb-worn gap-toothed smile. “Let’s join ’em.”

  Rue followed behind Varina. She thought that the silence that hit the inside of the little cabin was for her, but of course not; it was for the white girl who’d entered, for the master’s daughter, and it wasn’t a whole silence at all but a hiccup, a dampening not of the sound but of the exuberance, of the joy. Black folks turned from what they were doing and faced them.

  There was the seamstress Dinah, and Big and Li’l Sylvia both; there was Charlie Blacksmith and Ol’ Joel, grinning toothless, with Opal and her sweet bottom sat on his lap. There was Fannie even, who should have been asleep at her mistresses’ feet or else straining in some outbuilding somewhere else. Anna’s daddy twanged at the banjo and Sarah sang prettily but loudest, and beyond that was folks from Marse John’s plantation, and Coffey and Homer and Mary John besides, and folks Rue could not name but whose drawn faces looked familiar. And beyond all of them was Rue’s own daddy.