Conjure Women Page 23

  Varina led Rue through the servants’ entrance to an ill-lit hallway with an oilcloth floor that worked its way like a snake through the House. It was well-trod by Varina’s mama’s maid, Fannie, who most often had to appear in rooms throughout the House, serve a visiting guest, and then melt away again like she never even was. Rue hadn’t ever quite got the lay of this trick, had never needed to.

  She knew they’d come close when she could hear the fiddler again. He played a song she knew but could not place the words to. A jaunty tune that deserved a whistle. The corridor they crept through opened into the parlor, only just. The hidden door was only a parting in the heavy flower pattern of the wallpaper—the painted flowers were of a type that did not exist in any stretch of nature Rue had ever known—and the door’s outward swing was hidden by a screen and hindered by a large wooden trunk set deliberately in the path of the disused servant’s door.

  Just beyond the screen and the trunk in the stretch of the parlor she could see the fiddler, but at this angle he could not see them. She knew he couldn’t see them because he cussed at a broken string, a thing he’d never do if he knew a white woman was in his hearing.

  “Only, you have to trust me,” Varina whispered.

  There was a little padlock on the trunk to which Varina produced a little key. With some effort she pulled the trunk open, careful not to ask too much at once of its old rusted hinges.

  The inside was near empty but for a pile of old yellowed papers dotted black with little markings Rue knew signified music.

  “If you hold tight to your knees,” Varina suggested, kindly. “You’ll fit inside just.”

  Rue’s stomach dropped at the thought.

  “Go ahead.” Varina cocked her head; her curls danced.

  Beyond the screen, farther into the room, someone out of sight had joined the fiddle player. Black or white? There was no way to tell from hushed, unclear conversation and it didn’t matter much. If anybody caught them there’d be hell to pay no doubt. Rue pulled up her skirt and stepped into the box. She sat as Varina had suggested, pulled her knees into her chest, tried to be smaller than small. The papers beneath her cut into her thigh, and she had to bite down on a sneeze from the dust they’d roused. Varina began to shut the lid.

  “What you doin’?” Rue hardly remembered to whisper.

  “Can’t leave it open, can I? It’ll draw folks’ attentions. They find you and we’ll both of us be whupped bloody.”

  “Maybe I ought to just go home.”

  “And miss all this?” Varina shook her head, her eyes gleaming. “No, Rue, I want you to be here. To see.”

  Here in this box like a coffin? It was too horrible, too much like her mama’s punishment in the church. Three days, three nights, in the cold and the dark. No food. No water but what leaked in when it rained. Why should Rue ever trust Varina? But there had been her mama’s warning, a cruel thing tossed away that stuck and rang in Rue’s memory: “You couldn’t never survive that place.”

  Rue made to stand. Varina laid a laced hand on her shoulder, pushed her back down. “You can’t miss this, Rue.”

  The lid yawned as it closed down over her head. With her back rounded she could fit into the domed roof, she found. Everything went black. She worried too late about biting spiders and tried again to stand. She heard the latch of the lock click shut, an impossibly loud doom. Then light crept back in. Varina’s fingers snuck in the gap no more than two inches wide.

  “If you sit up straight, you’ll be able to push it open a li’l for yourself,” Varina said, peering in at her. “You’ll be able to see the show. Me dancin’ and all the pretty folks. Go on now. Try it.”

  If Rue turned her head just so she could, in fact, lift the lid open for herself as far as the stretch of the lock would allow. Up close was the corner of Varina’s gap-toothed smile, and beyond was the lofted stage, set up for the minstrel show. Varina raised her finger to her lip, and she was so close that Rue could make out only her knuckles and the leftmost side of her nose, but she knew what the gesture meant and already the first of the white folks were crowding in.

  Rue uncraned her neck and let the box fall lightly shut. Chatter grew in a buzz about the room, and the scuffing footfalls echoed louder. Bereft of sight, Rue made her ears keen, and though she could pull no voices in particular out of the din, she did mark the high, crinkling sound of white women laughing and the deeper rumble of white men pontificating and, beneath, the hush of black folks servanting, the clink of silver, and then the first trill of a flute being played with a scattering of heavy notes on a piano, joined in artful earnest by the strings. She didn’t dare peek out for much of the first few songs, but by the third, a fast, roiling tune that had the wood floor shaking with the force of it, she dared to push up the lid with her head and look awhile.

  There the white folks bent their knees to each other as though in greeting, and at some command of the music that Rue could not figure they began working themselves into knots, here and there turning at sharp angles beneath each other’s arms like lines of ants after some flour, and how they did not smash into one another she couldn’t say. The women and girls swished past her corner in whirls of solid color. Every time she picked out a flash of blue she wondered if it was Varina, but she could not see enough of them to tell, as their skirts quivered up and down with their frantic, senseless bobbing. And here a man’s pant legs and tails would come sweeping in and swing the woman away, and another flash of skirt would come and bob in the same fashion as the last. By the time she’d worked out which way the dancing ought to go, the song had come to an end and they were about the bowing again and she knew she must retreat back to her closed position like a tortoise drawn in on its own self.

  The only indication she had of the time was the growing crick in her neck and the changes in the music, and she’d already lost the sense of how many songs had come and gone. The applause caught her attention, but it was when the strains of a harmonica reached her, muffled through the box, that her curiosity got to her again. She pushed open the lid and looked.

  The white folks had stopped dancing, had made an audience of themselves, and though Rue could not see quite over their heads she could see their legs, the backs of which strained in their desire to watch something that was happening in the very corner of her sight on the far edge of the stage. She saw the first man that came out, an old black man she did not recognize. He walked out on the stage to the strain of the small metal mouth organ he played, his hand working, his wrist flicking as he set the notes to ripple. As he moved across the stage she quickly lost sight of him but his music remained, and she gave her sore neck a rest and let the lid fall down.

  Darkness, ’til she heard a curious spring of laughter. Though she knew she shouldn’t, she pushed her way up again so that she could just see who next crossed the stage. They were, she understood right off, meant to be black men. What they were instead were white men with their faces soot-smeared to a shining solid black. Their lips were reddened out to huge false smiles as gleaming and ugly as bleeding wounds. As one they skipped and tapped their way from the makeshift wings, propelling themselves out from behind the heavy red curtains like they’d been given a swift boot to the behind by some unseen foot.

  The last man in that line lingered in Rue’s sights as he paused to raise his white gloved hand in an enthusiastic wave. He reached up and tipped his tall black hat to reveal a crop of black wool beneath that stuck up in wild tufts. The crowd shook as one with laughter at the mottled wig. Between the pristine white gloves and the sleeve of his threadbare overcoat, Rue saw the true pink skin of his bony wrist before it disappeared again beneath the fold of cloth and he too moved on, obscured to her by the nodding heads of his captive audience. They jerked in time to the swelling music of the black fiddle player starting up again.

  If she shifted her weight she could see clear only the last man, the one who
’d so delighted the crowd with the unruly kink of his false black curls. He’d taken up a seat on the edge of the stage, and he sat with his legs comically wide. He leaned in now and then to watch his fellow performers or to react to their clowning by slapping his hand at his knees in an overdone imitation of mirth.

  They introduced themselves with a comic lack of humility as the world-renowned Ethiop Choir, promising the crowd the most authentic Negro melodies they’d ever had occasion to hear. At this, the one on the end jumped up, stomped his foot as if a thought had hopped on him like a flea.

  “Whee,” he began with a low whistle through his front teeth. “Why, y’all ever hear how it came to be that us black folks gotsta be so black?”

  His fellow players moaned like they’d heard this one before, but the audience chuckled, shook their heads. Some amused themselves by baldly calling out their own punch lines: Tar. Paint. Falling asleep during sunup.

  “I tell you it goes back to when the good Lawd was handin’ out colors.” His accent was overthick. Sludgy. “The good Lawd says one day to all his peoples, ‘A’ight now I’mma start handin’ out colors tomorrow and y’all better come through on time if y’all want ’em, ya hear? So’s the next day folks is lined up and the Lawd, he say, ‘You there, y’all Chinamans? Y’all folks be yellow. And, y’all Injuns, y’all folks be red. And you there, you fine folks, you will be white.’

  “And then the Lawd, he look round hisself and find one of the groups of his people is missin’. He draw out his pocket-y watch”—a dim laugh rose from the audience at his overdone pantomime— “ ‘Di’n’t I tell y’all folks to be on time if you wantin’ yo’ colors?’ ”

  Rue had heard this joke before. It was one her mama liked to tell, berating the lateness of this or that person. Miss May Belle did it better, didn’t belabor the telling as a long walk for a small drink of water. God was never angry in her version, just benignly amused at the way things were.

  “So’s finally the last group come runnin’ up from Africa to get they colors and they so greedy and wantin’, climbin’ over each other like that, and the Lawd say to ’em ‘Get back, get back.’ But so fevered was they, all they heard was ‘Get black, get black’—and that’s the truth!”

  The trumpet blasted as the crowd clapped and laughed and the end man dipped a bow so low his nose touched the waxed-up floor of the stage. They drew further cheers as they trotted in high-stepped kicks switching places and hats and jackets in a comedic whirl. They plumped up their collars pretending to be black folks who were pretending to be white dandies and, that done, they plunked down in their original seats in slovenly postures of exhaustion.

  “Lawdy,” said one of them, “it sure is tiresome bein’ white folk.”

  Rue thought to sink low again but then the raucous crowd turned soberer as they waited on the next act, and lo the man on the end began, without the aid of music, to sing.

  He drew his cap from his head and held it over his heart. “If you want to find God, go in de wilderness, de wilderness.”

  He was good, there was no denying. He sang it so sweet that Rue wanted to take his advice. She thought if only she could rear up that she would run away right into that wilderness he promised, but her neck and legs stayed cramped; she shifted and the box she was in fell shut. She listened as the other men joined him, lending him their voices in four blending parts. She found she could pick them apart better there in the darkness.

  * * *

  —

  Hours might have passed in which Rue grew drowsy the longer she remained in that damned box breathing in her own stale air. She itched, she needed to relieve herself. The revelers took their time in leaving and she heard them go one by one, asking their black footmen to bring about their carriages or going away reluctantly on foot themselves or begging a spare room in the House, stumbling away drunk and ecstatic.

  Varina appeared so suddenly in the gap Rue would have jumped if she’d had the space to do so. The girl was grinning, and her curls were flattened-down ringlets matted to the sweat on her forehead. Her cheeks were rosy beneath false rouge.

  “Can’t you let me out now?” Rue found her voice gritty with disuse.

  Varina lifted a bare finger to her lip to sign for silence again. She’d lost a glove it seemed.

  “In a moment,” she said in whisper. “Shh. He’s coming.”

  “Who?” The lid slipped shut again.

  Varina was giggling, Rue heard that plainly—a high, sweet giggle nothing like her usual laugh. Rue could not make out the man’s words, but she did hear the deep baritone vibration in his voice, which seemed much too loud, which bounced and echoed in the suddenly emptied room. At first she made him for Marse Charles, but no, Rue knew her master’s voice in her sleep and this man’s voice was much too deep to match it. Varina laughed again. Rue’s legs ached something awful.

  The man was fixing to ask a question, Rue could tell that much in the pitch of his voice, and she strained to hear Varina’s side of the conversation. There was no response, laughter or otherwise. Rue didn’t quite dare peek, not with the strange man there and liable to beat her if he realized she’d been there all along. She figured him for white he sounded so sure of himself, the way he kept demanding. His voice came back in the same low rumble it had before, like he was disciplining an ill-behaved child by asking it to explain exactly what it had done. Again, there was the long, strange stretch of Varina’s silence. Rue edged open the top of the chest, just the barest amount.

  They were across the room from her, nearer to the stage, and all she could make out was the tight cinched waist of Varina’s new dress and the man’s middle in a fine suit. He wore a white glove, she saw, and he took Varina’s bare hand in his, squeezed her roughly at the wrist. Varina tried to pull away but at the last minute faltered like she didn’t know what to do, did not want to offend. The center of their bodies glowed in the orange of kerosene lamps, the only light left lit, and they stood there in their awkward tableau like dancers primed for the music to start.

  The man’s question came again, and Rue caught the very ends of it. “Wartime,” he’d said.

  Varina was not giggling now. The center of her body was so strangely tight and still and she said then, quite harshly, “Please.” At that he twisted, reached out his other hand. He yanked up the good blue fabric of her dress as if it had offended him. He pushed her against the wall and tilted her body wholly back like a swinging bell, her thin, pale fighting legs for the clapper. There was the sharp sound of ripping fabric, of seams collapsing. Something skittered, a button perhaps, then a sharp intake of breath, and now Rue could see Varina’s pink bared thighs. Rue balled herself up and disappeared.

  But the image of Varina’s pale hand, tensed and gripped by the pristine white glove, seemed to imprint itself wholly in Rue’s dark hiding place, and she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or whether they were shut. She listened to the thudding of her blood in her ears and told herself if Miss Varina wanted to reveal her she need only call across the room. Rue reasoned there was nothing to be done, nothing she could do; she herself was still bound by the lock.

  Rue began then to hum, not aloud but in her head, trying to put right the words the minstrels had sung: the wilderness, the wilderness. It had been lovely music, no matter the color their faces were painted. She heard Varina scream out loud just the once and thought of the wilderness, a place to run for both of them.

  The abrupt turning of the lock seemed like violence, the lid cracking full open was like a trigger pulled. The dim of the room felt like too much bright and Rue squinted and there was Varina, alone, with tracks of tears ruining her rouged face.

  “Varina.” She reached out her hand. Varina smacked it immediately away.

  With her head bowed and her legs jellied Rue stepped out of the box at Varina’s command. She straightened Varina’s pretty blue dress so it fell down again i
n the perfect circle it had held before.

  “We ought to get to sleep,” Varina was saying. “It’s very late, isn’t it?”

  Rue shrugged, she didn’t know. She looked around the room, suspicious of its dark corners, of what lay behind the minstrels’ curtains, even suspicious of the box she’d just come out from.

  “He gone?” Rue asked quietly.

  Varina sniffed, choked on a sob and stifled another back. “Who?”

  This time when Rue put out her hand Varina took it, and Rue was shocked with how cold Varina’s hand was, and clammy. Was this the hand the man had held? Now she could not remember which it had been. It felt like the memory was slipping away from her, like she’d just sat up from sleep and tried to grasp at the tendrils of a nightmare. Who would want to remember this?

  “I’m very tired.” Varina did not look tired. Her eyes were red-rimmed and more aware than Rue had ever seen them, like someone had forced them open, peeled back the lids. “Take me to bed.”

  Rue did, if taking was the word for it. She followed behind Varina through the still, sleeping house, a white girl and her shadow. They moved like they were walking through a graveyard, afeared of raising the dead. Every movement felt too loud underfoot to Rue, the night seemed so fragile, the air made all of glass.

  THE RAVAGING

  In grief, the town chose to sit up with their dead. Rue did not altogether care for the idea that had rose amongst the people, that they ought to hold a town-wide wake in respect of the children that had died. Wakes were for the living, she figured. Their grief, no matter how good, would not bring the dead babies back. It would not bring Bean back.