Conjure Women Read online

  “Come here now.” Rue was not expecting Ma Doe to hug her, to kiss her on the cheek like someone’s mama might, to hold her at the end of her arms and look her over and say, “Shall we pray?”

  They bowed their heads as close as conspirators, the mess of their hair mixing together at the end of their spirals as though that were the way secrets were passed.

  “Almighty Lord.” Ma Doe had her hands on Rue’s shoulders, was holding herself heavy on them, weighing Rue down. “Be with Brother Jonah and Sister Sarah, for the loss of their child must sorrow them.”

  Rue felt she was holding them both up, like if she backed away she’d send their two bodies tumbling down.

  “And, Lord, keep Miss Rue.” She shuddered at hearing her own name. “She’s done the best she could by you, for she is your instrument. And Bean’s death—”

  Ma Doe’s face fell then, sunk down on the left side like a razed tower. Her eyes got wide and fearful. She began to hum a continuation of her prayer as if she’d suddenly run short of words.

  “Ma?” Rue clutched her close.

  Ma Doe nodded, working her lips like chewing. “Alright,” she managed.

  Rue had forgotten. Ma Doe was everybody’s mama and she was nobody’s. Her boys had all been stripped from her, easy, like petals off a stem. Same age as Bean was, when each of them were sold.

  “I’m alright,” Ma Doe said, but she seemed to struggle to say more.

  Rue led her back to her seat and helped her settle down. Ma Doe leaned back, looking hollowed. She nodded her head and it reminded Rue of the mindless way Varina had used to suck her thumb. Like Ma Doe had, in all her grief, been dumbstruck and turned into a child.

  Rue’s fault also. She didn’t know that she was weeping. Not ’til the tears were at her neck, wetting her collar. She sat herself on the ground by Ma Doe’s raised feet, buried her face in that ancient knee, and let the weeping take her.

  Miss May Belle wouldn’t have prayed and she’d suffer only so much weeping. When Rue would come to her as a child, snot-nosed and guilty, she would say only, “That’s enough now. Fix what you’ve done. Or live with it quiet.”

  Still, Rue wept.

  WARTIME

  Their plantation held a ball. Marse Charles demanded it for himself, said he deserved a jubilee. Missus had been dead a year by then and he’d grown restless with grieving, bored already with playing the widower. Every day there was news of young Rebs fighting battles and winning to fight another. Or losing and dying of it. Marse Charles had sent his sons to those battlefields, but he was impatient on their glory. He wanted his own safe sort of victory and decided not to wait to celebrate a Northern defeat. But the black folks were whispering behind their hands calling it a Dead Man’s Jubilee.

  The House was made to gleam, a shining beacon of sophistication that had many of the indoor slaves’ hands rubbed raw from keeping those parts of the House that were well-trod from looking like they were ever lived in at all. Even Rue and her mama had to work in a way they’d never been expected to before. Miss May Belle had for so long got by on being too busy with birthing, on giving the plantation its robust number of babies and maintaining the bodies of others. She’d been so important in that above all else, that it was almost like her own body was free. But now she scrubbed with the rest of them, tasked at cleaning the tall white pillars that wrapped around the House’s porch, and it was a lofty type of falling from grace, as she was made to climb up high to remove years of dust and dirt and errant grime between each ridge, approaching immaculate.

  If Rue were to keep an image of her mama in her mind it might be that: Miss May Belle on the top of a rickety stepping stool, the legs of it lodged deep in dirt to keep it steady because it was a waste of a worker to have someone hold it there, even a child.

  Each day of that long, tedious week of preparation, Rue passed by her mama outside on the porch on her step stool, scrubbing. Varina had asked for Rue in the same way she’d asked for a new frock—a heavy blue gown of a certain fabric she’d seen on a rare trip to the nearest town three months prior, on a bolt that had already been sold and made into something for somebody else. Because the dress she got was not the exact shade of blue that she’d been wanting, she felt she could ask for shoes to match it. She asked for Sarah and got her too.

  Rue and Sarah found themselves draping behind Varina like the two ends of a veil. She wanted to practice at being a lady and that in itself was a masque in need of spectators.

  Varina’s preoccupation was her red hair. It had always vexed her, made her look strange and bright and not as demure as she might have wished, what with carrying brimming locks of hellfire everywhere she went. But that had been when she was young and small and a thumb-sucker on Ma Doe’s lap. Now, despite the continued arid nature of her monthly visitor, she’d decided to count herself a proper woman and, in her mind, proper women did not go about having the red cherubic hair of little children.

  “We ought to darken it.” This she said to Sarah, who stood stock-still and held up for her the glass so that Varina might better see herself at all angles.

  It was a thin, garish space, Varina’s bedroom, a place Rue did not often find herself and did not like when she did. Varina had long since moved out of the nursery in favor of one of the disused guest rooms. Her wide bed with its thick posts like tree stumps took up more of the room than made sense to Rue, and up above it a canopy hung in thick drapes that made her hot just looking at them. With three bodies and all their warm, restless breathing, the room was particularly stifling, and Rue relegated herself to the cool varnished wood of the floor, which she was tasked to scrub from end to end. It would have been an alright place to make herself invisible if not for the fact that this position, on hands and knees, put her eyeball to eyeball with the dust-mottled collection of Varina’s ceramic dolls heaped all in one corner. Rue sweated under their staring, and the white gleam off their porcelain skin was like to make her blind. All the dolls were a striking straw-headed blond, unlike their owner.

  Varina and Sarah were already stepping in the part of the floor Rue had just washed. Sarah’s bare feet left little gray imprints of themselves, and Varina’s impatient foot tapped dirt from her small dagger-hilt heel. Sarah fussed, brushing out Varina’s hair. Rue could have screamed as the red spirals drifted out and down to the floor. She’d have to sweep it again when they were all through.

  “Darken it like how, Miss?” Sarah, with her sweet voice, was being just as doting as Rue had ever seen her and Rue had a good sense of why. It was no secret to them that as much as the world seemed to be changing it was not changing so much, so quick. Varina would be needing to become a lady—a lady in pursuit of a husband—and a lady in pursuit of a husband would like as not be in need of her own nigra housemaid.

  Fannie had been the Missus’s girl for all of their lives. A perfect petted favorite, she’d oft be seen to flit all around the House in the Missus’s old clothes, reminding other folks of her favored place, putting them down in theirs.

  Rue watched Varina and Sarah in the mirror, didn’t like how easy they were with one another, how close. They’d just together drew the black crepe off Varina’s large wall mirror and found that, beneath, the glass had been streaked black by the press of the fabric over those long months of mourning. Their doubled reflection was marred, lines over their faces like trenches through mud, and Rue just knew Varina was waiting to tell her to clean off the mirror soon as she finished the floor.

  It made sense that Sarah would be chosen. That Sarah would go to the fete that night and serve drinks to fancily dressed white folks, that she’d follow behind Varina and make sure that her skirt wasn’t dragging in anything dusty. It had never been said, not out loud, but it had always been meant to be Sarah, anybody with eyes could see that. She’d never had a place in the field, not with her skin smooth and light.

  “Miss May Belle’s li
kely got somethin’ I can use for yo’ hair. What you think, Rue?” They were both looking at Rue, their heads turned just sideways. Their mouths and noses and eyelashes in profile were strange and synchronous, and Rue could not deny that she felt a burst of foreknowledge.

  She was invigorated with envy also when she stood and glanced at her own figure in the glass Sarah still held. She was small and dark-skinned and, in that moment, just as ugly-feeling as they must have imagined her, raisin black between them.

  “I’ll run on out and ask Mama.”

  * * *

  —

  Miss May Belle had not been the same after that time spent locked up in the jail hold of the church. Starvation and silence, three days of it, for disobedience, the simple sin of getting a mama some medicine.

  “I done so many worse things than that,” Rue’s mama had said when she’d first come back, like she’d been thinking on all of those things she had done during her time locked away.

  Rue didn’t know what to make of her mama, come back the way she had, with nothing on her to heal. Her body had taken care of itself, the way a body can, eaten up the stored-up flesh so she was just left to sharp, angular bone. Sealed up cuts and scabbed over hurts. There was a chipped tooth far enough back in her mouth to not change her smile, unless she smiled real wide. All of it superficial, save the patch of her scalp where Marse Charles had pulled the hair clear out of her head. It was tiny, barely even there, Rue had assured her mama. It was star-shaped. Fist-shaped, Rue realized after. It didn’t grow back, never would, but it was easily brushed over.

  Why couldn’t she magic her way out of that jail was what Rue kept wondering. A deep resentful hurt centered in her like a pit in fruit. If Miss May Belle was as powerful as folks would have you think, so mysterious, so feared, couldn’t she free herself, or feed herself, turn the ground seepage in that dank cell, water to wine, hoodoo herself into one of them little fleas that had left hard red welt bites on her skin and hop on out?

  Miss May Belle was still scrubbing at the balustrade when Rue came out from the House, and Rue felt her mama tracking her from deep within sunken eyes as she went past. If Marse Charles’s punishment had been meant to make the slave woman obedient, then it had failed. Instead she was all the more outcast, all the more feral. And Rue always became what her mama was.

  * * *

  —

  Rue had never had any intention of asking Miss May Belle after a way to darken Varina’s hair. It was just that Varina could not be pleased. First Rue returned with a poultice of nettle and sage, and Varina did not fancy the color the leaf skins would make. Next Rue returned with tea, steeped to black as ink, but Varina had turned up her nose at the smell. The cure Rue returned with last was a pleasing amber-brown liquid she knew that Varina would take to, the darkness in it likely to bring out her light.

  “There isn’t very much,” Varina complained when Rue showed the small bowl to her. “Do you think it’s enough?”

  Rue could see in Sarah’s eyes that she recognized the stuff where Varina didn’t. There was a hard-questioning look to Sarah’s face, but she stayed stiff-lipped and mute. Who knew? Maybe Sarah was feeling just as vengeful against Varina as Rue was. Perhaps they could be vengeful together. Rue turned the bowl, roiling the liquid enticingly so it would not begin to settle.

  “It’s enough to work,” Rue said. “Color’s like to bring out your eyes.”

  “Alright then,” said Varina, ever easy and trusting.

  It wasn’t that Rue blamed Varina for what her daddy had done to Miss May Belle. Rue didn’t believe hating was transferable. But it awed her that Varina had never in her life had any reason to be distrustful of anything handed to her, even by Miss May Belle or Rue. Never thought that she could be hated for no reason, or for the simple reason of existing. The sweet smell of the gummy resin wafted up between them. Varina had not a clue and Sarah said not a word. Rue kept on turning the bowl in her hands, roiling the brown liquid. Soon it would start to set, harden; it would give the trick away.

  Varina sat on her stool inspecting her hair, her nose almost up to the glass, curling a strand and uncurling it around her finger like something were going to change if she kept doing so.

  “Try it on her first,” Varina said, gesturing at Sarah.

  Sarah and Rue looked at each other. Open-mouthed.

  “Ain’t enough for both,” Rue said.

  “So y’all will go out and fetch more. But I’d like to see how it’s lookin’. We got close kinds a’ hair.”

  It was true. Varina and Sarah were similar, especially sitting together like that in front of Rue. Both thin and drawn and pretty, pug-nosed and curly-headed; the only difference in them was a matter of wording. Varina’s ringlets were red. Sarah’s nappy curls were rust. Sarah, there holding the little mirror, was holding a different version of herself in the glass, or so it seemed to Rue, a different kind of life Sarah could have had.

  Rue struggled to come up with a lie, an excuse that might prevent her being whupped for daring to play such a trick. But Sarah was resigned. Without a word they’d been caught out in their trick before it ever began, and now they had to see it through. Varina and Sarah traded places. Sarah took the vanity stool and Varina held the mirror, playing at being a servant. Rue raised the slow-dripping syrup to Sarah’s waiting head where it would settle and harden, thick as tar.

  * * *

  —

  “What were you thinkin’ of?” On Miss May Belle’s cabin floor Sarah’s cut-off hair lay left behind, hardened like petrified bugs in amber, though Sarah herself had long since gone, sent to bed shorn and weeping. Hair grew back, Miss May Belle had assured her, saying nothing of her own hidden star-shaped scar.

  “I wanted to get her back,” Rue said. “Make Varina feel somethin’ for what Marse Charles done to you.”

  That was the simple answer, the answer that Rue figured her mama, who was always juggling a hundred schemes herself, would be proud to hear. Truth was, Rue could not put simple words to her anger, just that it was anger. She’d wanted to hurt Varina for love of her and did not so much mind hurting Sarah in Varina’s place.

  “And see yourself whipped for it?” Miss May Belle moved about the cabin in her distress like she mistrusted the distance between walls. Even as she raved she walked up and down, smacked at one far wall then crossed the length of the room to smack at the other. “You lucky Miss Varina ain’t catch on to what you was about. You wanna see yo’self hanged? Or worse, sent where they sent me? You couldn’t never survive that place.”

  It was the only time Miss May Belle ever alluded to the three days she had been buried alive in the church’s jail. Rue took her mama’s scolding with her face set sullen.

  “Stupid girl. Ain’t you know it ain’t worth it? Don’t you know there’s no way round it? Aiming to curse white folks is like tryna slap at a fly sittin’ on yo’ wound. It’s never gon’ do you no good. You only gon’ smack yo’self, and that fly gon’ go off laughin’.”

  Rue felt defiant. “Varina say I could go to the party tomorrow in place a’ Sarah.”

  Marse Charles was never gonna let a bald-headed slave girl into the House, not while there were guests there, chittering on in the face of the North-brought war about the fine way they treated their slaves. Like family, they’d lie. Like beloved children needing a stern hand to be raised right.

  “It’s my own fault. I kept you shielded.” Miss May Belle ricocheted off the far wall and sat down hard on the dirty hair-covered floor, drew her knees up to her chest. Curled in on herself. Rue didn’t know what to do. “Go on then. Let Miss Varina take you.”

  “Take me where?” The party was being held up at the House, only a stone’s throw.

  “Let her take you away and show you how the world is.”

  * * *

  —

  Rue’s mama had told her once that
Cain and Abel were not brothers, not twins. They were, Miss May Belle said, two sides of the same person, good and evil warring against its own inclinations. The same struggle was borne out in every person, over and over, from the very most beginning of time, and you could only answer for yourself which brother would win. Varina had told her later that it wasn’t true, that the Bible said it plain, spelled it out in those little letters Rue couldn’t read. There was Cain and there was Abel. There was black and there was white. It wasn’t so much that Rue didn’t believe Varina, but she kept hold of what her mama said, applied it to others, held up that story to folks’ faces and tried to decide which brother they had ruling them.

  Varina could be good, Rue said to herself that day, as giving as Abel. They met in the clearing before the fete. Varina was lovely in her blue gown, the one she’d demanded for herself and won. Rue’s dress was new also, new to her anyway, a bit of calico repurposed in a different pattern, so it almost wasn’t that old rough stuff anymore. She thought it fit her fine. She thought they both were pretty.

  “You can’t work it,” Varina said first. Not a hello or a nice thing about Rue’s new dress, or her own, or even a good word about the neat coils Rue had managed to twist her own hair into with the help of some pilfered pomade—not one of her mama’s ground-up oils neither, but that real patent pomade. Varina’s hair blazed red as ever. “I asked for you. But Daddy’s only wantin’ the light girls inside servin’.”

  Rue could have cried, might’ve, she could feel the sorrow screwing up the back of her throat like a rising sickness.

  “Don’t you worry.” Varina cupped Rue’s cheek lovingly. “I’ve got us a solution.”

  The air buzzed with nightfall gnats as they walked toward the back of the House. Already they could hear the hired-out fiddler playing, little snippets of nothing that began with a flourish then scratched away to frustrated silence, then burst out again, louder. They could hear him crick his strings, ’til they whined like cats. He began anew.