Conjure Women Read online

  “I can’t make you no promises,” Miss May Belle said.

  “You made this,” Airey accused. She held out her arms.

  Said Miss May Belle, quietly, “I don’t know that I did.”

  Rue tried to look busy as the women kept on, talking in hushes. They were similar, Rue came to notice, both soft enough to be shaped by life and hardened by it too. She wanted to learn that type of woman magic also, thought she’d find it in the words they traded if she could only pick up on the strands, the half-speak adults often took up when they were aware of a child listening in on them.

  “I can’t risk it,” Miss May Belle was saying. “Iff’n you do get away, but they catch on to it that it was me that helped you…” It was a sentiment not worth finishing.

  “Figured you say that, but if you got some charm some somethin’, I can pay you for it.”

  “I’ll give you this for free: Stick to the river,” Miss May Belle said. “And don’t you never look back for nothin’.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Not even for yo’ man? That Charlie?”

  “He ain’t comin’ with me. He think he owe somethin’ to these people. And I”—Airey kicked up water with her toes—“I can’t be slowed down by nothing. They got all sorts of ways to weigh you down, don’t they?”

  Rue felt their eyes on her. She pricked up like a rabbit might at some slight, shifting noise, and saw Airey and her mama considering her with their hard, grave expressions, the far-off thinking look of grown folks.

  Miss May Belle finally spoke. “You’ll wanna rub oak gum on the soles a’ yo’ feet. Keep to the river, like I say. That’ll throw the scent a’ the hounds they gon’ send. That’s all I can give to you ’sides what you already know. An’ if you can help it, don’t let nothin’ or nobody slow you down.”

  Airey agreed and left then to prepare for it, whatever preparing to leave your life meant. Rue watched her walking away. She was visible for a great distance, her proud back, her speckled legs bared.

  * * *

  —

  By next morning Airey was gone. By late afternoon she was brought back.

  They drug her by her arms through the whole of the plantation, her legs kicking, her body twisting and turning over grass and rocks and dirt in a never-ending dust-billowing futility.

  The white men she hung between were catchers by trade. Marse Charles paid them handsomely, it was said, heaping handfuls of silver dollars, for the pleasure of having his favorite cook returned to him in a bruised pile. They left her tied up to a horse post out front of the House. Even tied down, Airey bucked and pulled at her bonds, and all the passing black folks watched her do it, watched her scream and piss herself and work one wrist free just far enough to yank at her own thick black hair. They weren’t none of them allowed to go near, except at last for Charlie.

  Marse Charles gave Charlie Blacksmith the honor of whipping his would-have-been wife, because Marse Charles himself could not be bothered to come out of the House, particularly as the clouds grew dark and it began to rain. He handed Charlie Blacksmith a whip, told him to use all the strength he’d use to forge a horse’s shoe, and Marse Charles swore he would know it if he didn’t. He’d be checking and expected to see ten good lash marks, drawn blood on Airey’s bare back.

  Assembled, bade to watch, all the slaves in the plantation came and stood in the yard of the House even as a driving rain fell and slicked down their hair and darkened their clothes and made everything cling.

  Marse Charles was somewhere up above and Rue strained to make him out in the windows, not sure what to look for besides a hint of the shape of his darkness behind the billowing white curtains of his daughter’s nursery. Or was it Varina herself that Rue spied, looking down on them? Rue searched so hard that after a while she made herself see shadows where there were none.

  Whether he was watching or not, Marse Charles surely heard it when the first lick lay into Airey’s back; it was that loud.

  She hid her breasts the best she could with her arms wrapped around the post she’d been tied to, pushed them up against the raw, splintered wood. She shook with fear as the rain bounced off her, waiting for the fall of a hit she could not see coming, and her heaving panicked lungs rounded out her back just as the whip came down and split clean the skin. Charlie reared his arm just so far back that it looked like there was more force in the action, and the whip whistled through the air and another thwack landed squarely on her spine. Airey hollered and hissed and choked on her sorrow, gurgling out a bit of red-tinged spit. She’d bit her tongue.

  “Boy,” came Marse Charles up from the window on high. His voice boomed even over the rain, and Rue would have sworn that everybody assembled shook. Up above, Marse Charles was framed in an open second-story window, his arms braced against the sill, the tips of his curly dark brown hair catching the wet. He didn’t have to say any more. Charlie brought down the whip harder the next time. Harder still the next.

  Rue had to shut her eyes. But there was no blocking that high, fine whistle through the air or the sound of Airey’s resistance, quieted from screams now to gut-deep moans then to a silence that seemed altogether worse.

  When he was done, Charlie threw down the whip, his one act of defiance, let it sink in a puddle. There they were, the ten strips of open flesh wrought neatly in Airey’s back like the lines of crude accounting marks. Already the force of the rain was thinning out the intensity of the blood, and Rue found herself worrying, as the crowd began to murmur and break apart, that if Marse Charles didn’t hurry down, he might not see the blood he was after as proof. They might, she feared, have to do it all over again.

  * * *

  —

  Spring came on, like it did, and Rue and her mama stayed busy for seven straight days serving bitters to the slave folks Marse Charles sent through their cabin—a spoonful for each was meant to set his field hands ready for the coming heavy season. By the sixth day Rue was more than tired of looking into the pink expectant quiver of other folks’ mouths, of observing their outstretched tongues and the dangling fleshy marble at the back of their throats. Her mama relegated her to filling up the waiting wood spoons, a dull task.

  Rue looked up and there was Airey, strange to behold in the sunlight, nothing to her but deep pockets between her bones. Sunken—shoulders and chest and all around her eyes. Her voice came out gritty.

  “Thank you,” she said, “Miss May Belle.”

  Rue handed her mama a spoon, and her mama began to hold out the mixture to Airey’s small beak of a mouth, the edges of which were white and dry. At the last minute Miss May Belle pulled the spoon away. The pour puddled down to the floor, wasted.

  “Rue-baby,” Miss May Belle said. She didn’t take her eyes from Airey. “Fetch me a cup instead.”

  Rue had to dig to come up with a small cup of tinned iron; she handed it to her mama, who filled it high with the bitters. Airey drank it all down at once.

  “Meet me Friday night,” Miss May Belle said, in a voice hushed and hurried. “If you still wantin’ what you wantin’.”

  Airey nodded once. She gave her cup back to Rue and moved on down the line, her face betraying nothing, no elation and no fear.

  * * *

  —

  The fact was if there was magic—and Rue, as a child, believed earnestly that there was—her mama had not taught it to her, had not wanted to.

  On Friday night, Rue lay in their bed with her eyes closed, listened to her mama move about their small cabin. Miss May Belle took her time leaving, as if she sensed that the moment was not quite right or else sensed, in the knowing way of mothers, that her daughter lay tense and restless beneath the thin sheet ready to follow her into the night. They waited each other out.

  Rue dozed and found herself dreaming. She was in Marse Charles’s House, which could not be so, she was hardly ever allowed in ther
e, yet there she was in a room so white it was as though the very air was ash water, the world all bleached through as though by lye. In the center of the white room was Varina, the master’s daughter, waiting on Rue like a prize.

  In the dream, Rue took Varina’s hand, led her away, took her down the stairs from the nursery and through the House kitchen and there was Big Sylvia, removing ashcakes from her stove. The cook set them by the window to cool. Wriggling free of Rue’s hold, Varina aimed to pluck one of them ashcakes from the pile. Rue hissed after Varina, but the cook seemed not to see the little girls. Instead Big Sylvia opened up the fire-spitting mouth of her stove, and now she drew from her pocket the little doll Miss May Belle had made of Airey. Easy as that she tossed it into the waiting fire. The doll made of straw and hair caught instantly in the flames, and Rue woke. She sat up from sleep sweating like she’d been in the oven herself.

  The cabin was still. Miss May Belle was gone.

  Outside the night was allover chill, the road through the slave quarter empty of souls. Rue steeled her shivering little body and walked through the blue midnight, picking her way to the river by way of recollection rather than by sight.

  She found them a ways down the rushing river. Airey had her feet ankle deep in the water, and Miss May Belle had her arm in the knot of a tree. When she pulled her arm slowly out, the silver dollars in her hand glimmered in the moonlight. Miss May Belle had crossed to the river, was speaking in urgent whispers to Airey with all those coins offered in her outstretched hands. But Airey didn’t move to take them, and Rue soon saw why. Miss May Belle, one by one, began to drop her silver dollars into the stream at Airey’s feet. As she watched them go, Rue had half a mind to jump in after them. They made tinkling little splashes as they hit the surface and sparkled and spun, and then disappeared.

  “Travel by night. Follow the shine of ’em coins on the river surface,” Miss May Belle told Airey. Suddenly Rue could hear her mama’s voice impossibly clear, like it boomed from the river itself. “That shine’ll take you where you goin’. All the way to the North.”

  They embraced there, one woman in the river and one woman out, and Airey who had become so thin looked frail in Rue’s mama’s arms, she seemed liable to disappear. But when Airey pulled away, her arms flew out with fearsome strength. As Rue watched, Airey seemed to dance, her bones twisting, reshaping beneath her skin; her pouting lips grew sharp and pointed and hardened and, by and by, her back arched and her frame narrowed, and Rue watched as Airey at last sprouted big, thick black wings.

  * * *

  —

  Rue was still breathless in her bed when her mama returned some time later to the cabin. Miss May Belle crawled in quietly beside her, her body radiating warmth like a furnace. Now Rue was sleepless. She lay still the whole night trying to make sense of what she thought she’d seen. A woman become a bird. There was no sense to be made of it. It had to be dreaming.

  The very first moment of sunup, Rue stole away, took herself to the river to see if she could make out any bits of silver in its bed. But the stream was calm and quiet, undisturbed, reflecting the orange haze of the new-day sky. Rue looked upward, like the answer might be there. Her eyes traveled the neighboring trees and there she did glimpse, only in the corner of her sights, a starling—its skin oil black and spotted dazzling white—as it took wing and departed from the ledge of a branch, the starling just then starting to soar.

  FREEDOMTIME

  Black-Eyed Bean was one year old the night his eerie crying woke the townsfolk, roused them to stir from their beds and whisper their growing suspicions about him aloud in the street. Staring down at the odd little child, Rue was just as staggered by his eyes as she always was, as the folks out there were.

  “The water.” Beside the bathtub, Sarah spoke it low. “He got a fear a’ it.”

  In the tub Bean thrashed as he’d thrashed beneath the black veil he’d been born in. Now his pumping little legs and arms managed to push round in a swirl the water that surrounded him as he howled.

  “He ain’t normal,” Sarah muttered. “Screamin’ like he’s bein’ killed soon as I lay him down to bath.”

  Jonah spoke up. “Miss Rue, ain’t the water too hot? I keep sayin’. That water be too hot.”

  “Hush,” Sarah said back. “I gotta wash him, don’t I?”

  Sarah was a sight, her hair in unkempt kinks beneath a roughly cut kerchief. The loose ends of the cotton were streamed through her orange curls like a shredded spider’s web. She looked up when Rue stepped forward. Her eyes said something to Rue her mouth couldn’t shape.

  Rue knew Sarah was waiting for her to get down on her knees beside her and tend to Bean. But Rue couldn’t seem to bring herself to it. She felt all at once afraid that if she picked up Bean she’d be accepting some responsibility for him, when all she wanted was to get away from him and his eerie black eyes.

  Rue knelt. She dipped her hand into the farthest corner of the tub, keeping clear of where she might touch Bean or the irregular pattern on his skin. “Wet a bit a’ cloth, wipe him down good ’til he grow older, ’til he get accustomed to bein’ put in the deeper water.”

  Was it true what folks had been whispering—could Bean be something sinister amongst them, something dark come again? Rue pulled her hand away.

  “It’s mighty strange,” Jonah said. He crossed the room in long strides to help Sarah to her feet, and even when she was steadied he remained, Rue saw, his big hand gentle on the curve of Sarah’s hip.

  “I done him same as the others,” Sarah spoke up. “The other children ain’t never cried like that. They ain’t never had such a fear of water as this.” She shuddered. “Such a cry.”

  Rue looked at those others, Sarah’s daughter and son. Like their brother, Bean, there wasn’t much to be found of Jonah in them. They shared their mama’s coloring, the orange-brown coils of her thick hair, and the fleshy fullness of her lips, the top slightly plumper than the bottom in them both. My babies, Rue’s mama would have called them. She’d called all the children hers. Rue couldn’t see them that way. When they were born, she handed the babies over to their mamas and she handed them over quick. Rue wanted no babies.

  Sarah picked up Bean from the tub with a splash of bathwater. Curled up against his mama’s chest, perhaps soothed by having his head near her beating heart, Bean quieted.

  “He’s surely different. But we all come different,” Rue said. “Ain’t no accountin’ for why we is the way we is.”

  “That’s for God to know,” Jonah supplied, but Sarah wore a scowl, like Rue ought to know as well as God did what the matter was with Bean. The skin of his legs bore the faint blue interlocking pattern that was like the scales on the back of a creeping serpent, and from his warm, wet body, steam still rose in coils.

  “Awful sorry to call for you in the middle a’ the night, Miss Rue,” Jonah said.

  But it had been Bean that had called for her. Hadn’t she been pulled here by his strange cry?

  Rue made her goodbyes, walked herself to the door. Stepping out, she fixed her face purposeful-like, ready to meet the waiting crowd, but there was no crowd now, only the dusty road and the moon that had found its way to shining. She felt unsettled in the bottom of her stomach where there began to be a small ache: fear.

  She’d already started back for her own cabin when a hard grasp on her shoulder made her spin, but it was only Sarah waiting behind her, her arms free of children, her head now bare.

  “Miss Rue, I got somethin’ to ask a’ you,” Sarah said.

  She looked unearthly tired. The front of her thin linen nightdress was dark with wet from where she’d held Bean firm to her chest. Through the damp spot, Rue could make out the shadows of Sarah’s heavy breasts, still weighted, a year out, with milk.

  “Only I was wonderin’,” Sarah spoke soft. “If you had somethin’ I could use. To keep myself, I mean, to kee
p from havin’ anotha conception. Secret-like.”

  Rue knew secrets. She knew many a secret stretched out amongst the folks of that little town, some shameful, some devastating, some just too sad to shape into words. Rue kept them all and kept them well and so folks kept giving them to her, their secrets. And never mind that she knew she had some of her own to keep.

  “You come and see me tomorrow mornin’,” Rue said, “and I’ll have what you needin’ at hand.”

  Sarah nodded and turned back to her door, in no hurry to return, it seemed, to what waited for her there. Rue watched her go, watched her slip into her home, haint-silent, like a ghost, and Rue could have gone on and done the same, but there was no man waiting on her and no crying child, or two, or three. So instead, by instinct, she turned the other way, the way of the wilderness, and started walking.

  Rue knew that wide road made of dust better than any road in the world. She had walked it so many times she half-expected to see her own footsteps coming and going as she passed, from the slave quarters that were now their cabins, to the field that was now scorched land, to Marse Charles’s grand old plantation House, which was now in the final stage of its ruination, and yonder, to the old white church.

  The pillar was how she knew she’d reached what was left of the House. Part of the column still stood, as it had stood with its twin years ago, in a stately portico announcing the door to Marse Charles’s mighty entranceway. Despite the ash, the pillar was nearly still white, and Rue stopped there as though knocking at the door of an old friend.

  The foundation of the House remained enough to mark the ghost of the burned-down rooms and little more. In the very center of the entryway the old staircase made its way up five noble steps toward the sky, then dropped off in a crumble. Rue could, and did, walk straight through the ruin of the House. Her destination was not the House after all but the woods just beyond it.