Conjure Women Read online

  “Posy.” The name came rusted out of Rue’s throat. She hadn’t ever got to name her girl out loud.

  “I don’t know who that is. Rue, you’re not well. Please, let me get you help.”

  Varina’s arm slipped from her hand and Rue let her go, let strength leave her too, let herself lie on the cool hard bench, imagined it to be a burial slab welcome against her cheek. This had been her last hope, her last place to look for Posy. But the church was, as she was, hollowed out and empty. Gutted of its value. Sealed.

  * * *

  —

  “She’ll be alright now.” That voice was a woman’s. Far away.

  “You sure?” That voice was a man’s. Close up.

  There was no more sound from either of them, and in the stretched-out silence Rue opened up her eyes.

  Jonah. Rue almost didn’t recognize him, couldn’t reconcile his work-darkened skin, his shorn-short hair, or the new scar that wormed its way down from his brow line to the corner of his eye, looking like a fishing hook beneath the skin. He couldn’t be real. He didn’t belong inside the dank, dust-thick church that no one was meant to recollect existed.

  “Easy, easy,” he said. He didn’t want her getting up, but she couldn’t think on her back. Her head stewed and swirled. Far behind him Varina stood stock-still in a different aisle of the pews.

  “What you doin’ here, Jonah?”

  “Just come through now. Back from workin’.” He hefted up a haversack at his feet to prove it, half-filled with his traveling possessions. He handed Rue a canteen from its depth, but she felt too ill to drink. He wouldn’t say more ’til she did. Rue took a few sputtering sips that made her feel sicker.

  “Ran into Miss”—Jonah glanced back at her—“Varina at the side a’ the river.”

  “I couldn’t find my way to the quarters with the river up. Isn’t that silly?” Varina’s voice had gone high and tight in a way Rue hadn’t heard in years. Her company voice.

  “She said you was in need a’ help. So I come runnin’,” Jonah finished.

  “I’m alright,” Rue said, but she didn’t feel alright.

  “Take yo’ time,” Jonah said. Whether he meant in moving or explaining she couldn’t figure.

  Varina, never good at silences, moved to fill it. She walked around one whole bench only to settle in the next aisle, eyeing Jonah, skittish the whole time.

  “Is it alright, Rue? I didn’t know what to do. I thought you’d died and if you died—” She cut herself short at some horror.

  “It alright, Miss Varina. Thank you.”

  But now that Varina had got going she couldn’t seem to stop. “I knew it wasn’t safe for me to be seen. But he said he ain’t a soldier. I wasn’t sure. Don’t the North have nigger soldiers?”

  Jonah seemed to flinch. “I ain’t a soldier, no ma’am,” he said. He wouldn’t look at Varina, knew more than well enough not to, but he did stare goggle-eyed at Rue. “I let her know that I’m on the side a’ the South.”

  “Thank you.” Rue could only get herself to whisper it.

  * * *

  —

  Jonah walked her back like he was escorting her on a promenade, a firm hand on her arm, another on her back. Maybe he feared she’d fall, but to Rue it felt like he feared she’d take off running. He was wanting answers.

  “Miss Varina ain’t even recognize you,” Rue said, tried to make a joke of it. Jonah wasn’t laughing.

  “We wasn’t long acquainted,” he said. “When she come runnin’ up to me I ain’t know what to think. When I figured who she was, though, I did wonder if I hadn’t lost all my senses, seein’ for myself a woman what’s supposed to be dead. Then I remembered Ol’ Joel, all ’em crazy mutterin’s he made through the town.”

  “Folks that have glimpsed her, they tell themselves she a haint.”

  The hand Jonah had on her back swatted dismissively, resettled at her hip. “I ain’t believe in all that. I saw her, first thing I thought was she just a white woman run mad. We walked back to the church an’ she kept on askin’ after news from the war. Wasn’t ’til she say her name that I recollect that she was Marse Charles’s daughter, aged over five years since last I knew her. If there is haints in this world, they don’t grow old.”

  Did Varina look so old? Rue couldn’t tell. For her the five-odd years had passed on Varina’s face gradually. To catch her aging, to really see her youth lost, it was like trying to catch the moon moving across the sky at night.

  A mile on, the tent reared its white head up over the treetops. “I heard about this here tent, but I ain’t half believe it,” Jonah said. “All that for Bean?”

  “It’s grown bigger than Bean,” Rue said.

  The way was a steep upward struggle, and it would have been faster by half to cut straight through the woods as Rue often did. But she could sense Jonah’s nervousness as a twitching hand at her side. He kept peering into the thick knit of gathered trees, double-checking every shadow he saw. Likely the white woman had given him a fright. He hadn’t had any way of being sure of where she meant to lead him. Jonah’d followed her anyway, for Rue’s sake.

  “She went away north and come back? Miss Varina?”

  Rue shook her head, no.

  “Don’t say she been among us all this time.”

  “Since the House burned,” Rue admitted. “That ol’ church was meant to house a minister. She got all the things she need.”

  Jonah let go of her hand. His face crinkled up in wonderment. “Ol’ Joel. He done saw it all clear.”

  “Not all clear,” Rue said quick. “Ain’t no hoodoo involved.”

  “Just lies.”

  She shrugged. Jonah should have long ago lost the ability to make her feel the fool. She had kept him safe all these years, and everybody else too.

  “You feed Miss Varina?” Jonah asked. “Clothe her? All this time? Like a li’l child?” Rue nodded.

  “What if she fell sick?”

  “She was sick for a long while,” Rue said, and in saying she could almost smell again the acrid stink of laudanum, hear the clink of the syrup-sticky vials that Varina had sucked from the way she had used to suck at her thumb as a girl.

  “She near-about died. But she come back to life.” Rue looked to Jonah, but she was thinking of Bean. “And now she’s wantin’ after things again. It makes her bold.”

  “How’d you keep her hid this long?” Jonah wanted to know.

  “She believed when I tol’ her it wasn’t safe to go out. She believed when I tol’ her she’d get out of there soon. She believed in me,” Rue said. “Everybody did.”

  Now Jonah fell dumb silent and Rue asked a question of her own, one that had been pounding at her. “Jonah. You ain’t tell her the war was done when you met her?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I ain’t in the business of tellin’ white women they wrong,” he said. “Why didn’t you never tell her? Now or all them years ago?”

  Rue had thought on an answer to that question for years. Chewed on the question and tossed and turned on it, sleepless at night, coming up with kindness as an answer on some days and rage as an answer on others. She could have said to Jonah that Varina didn’t have any living relations save a spinster aunt up north that she’d never known. She could have said that Varina, opium-blind, had been too fragile to accept the South’s surrender ’til the lie told to comfort her was too old to alter. Rue could have said that the world would not be kind to a disgraced belle who’d never been expected to even bathe herself. She could have said that Varina would have reclaimed her home, or what was left of it, would have turned her slaves into her workers, paid them in scraps and promises like nothing had ever changed, a different name for the same thing. She could have said that Varina deserved it, deserved only to see the light of day
in small gasps, to prowl the woods only safely unseen at night, that Varina deserved to still have nightmares of her brothers dead on battlefields and of exploding cannonballs and of Yankee devils with cloven feet. That Varina deserved it all, deserved to be locked up, left to stay waiting and praying after a glory that wasn’t ever going to come.

  All of those things were true but what Rue did say to Jonah was true most of all: “I just didn’t want her to leave.”

  EXODUS

  1872

  Rue had herself some nightmares. Haunted dreams in which her dead baby was a part of a collection. A pickled curiosity on a white man’s shelf, floating and ill-fitting inside a jar, preserved with whiskey, posed and primed to raise her thumb to her mouth in an aborted suck. She woke from these dreams screaming, hollering, clawing. Beside her Bruh Abel was a man she didn’t know. He tried to kiss her and hold her, and she wouldn’t let him. He swore to her the dreams weren’t real. Swore he’d paid the white Quaker doctor, and not the other way around, to see to it that the baby got buried proper. When she got well they could go up and see the place, if she liked.

  Rue wouldn’t believe him, wouldn’t go anywhere with him, wouldn’t make love to him ever again, she swore, even though his hands were loving and soft and gentle. What was the point? He said they could start again, make another, but she knew it wouldn’t take. The place inside her where she’d held Posy was gone all arid now, an earth of dry, cracked clay.

  “You can’t know that,” he said, kissing at her neck.

  “Yes, I can know.”

  She knew now the secret of Bean’s origin, from Queenie to Bruh Abel. The secret had been as plain to see as a mark of Cain, but she had not been looking. Now she could not look away.

  In her nightmares Rue would walk on over to that white man’s shelf and stare. She would pick up the specimen jar in her two hands and hold up her Posy in repose and spin round the liquid in it to get a closer look. She would inspect her baby’s skin and see that it was dark like hers, but with all this dream time in which to look and ponder, she could see things she hadn’t had the chance to see before. Or hadn’t wanted to see. Posy’s skin was like Bean’s. Bean’s skin was like Queenie’s, patterned all over with little scales.

  Inside the dream, Rue threw the jar to the ground where it splintered and shattered, all the liquid gushing away like a foretold flood. But what came out was not her baby Posy. It was Black-Eyed Bean, no longer Sarah and Bruh Abel’s baby, but Bean grown and freed.

  When Rue woke, her eyeballs were like packed mounds of mud in their sockets, as if she’d stared into the sun unblinking and let them bake. She could see then what it was that needed doing.

  * * *

  —

  As she crept up on Sarah and Jonah’s house, slow going still with the pain in her gut, Rue thought she saw a baby. No, that weren’t it. It wasn’t a baby but a child, but still the sight made her heart gallop. When she drew closer she saw clear that it was Bean, and he held in his hands a corn-husk doll, surely one his sister had used to carry around everywhere when she herself was his age. It was a sad thing dressed in a green sack with its face muddied to make it seem black, and Rue recollected one time that she’d humored Sarah’s daughter by looking over the corn-husk baby and pronounced it as thriving.

  Bean stood there on the porch with the doll propped up on his shoulder the way he’d probably seen his daddy transporting wood. He’d watched Rue coming down the path and seemed to want to be noticed in that way that children sometimes did and sometimes did not. Rue thought about picking him up, to what end she could not rightly say. She edged closer, not knowing if she meant to love on him or turn him over. Did he look like Bruh Abel in other ways? Ways she’d never known or didn’t let herself know?

  It was the doll baby that made Rue stop. It was not, after all, the one that had belonged to Sarah’s daughter as she’d first guessed. This was far older, blacker. One made lovingly with red bow lips and a green dress and wild hair in a bramble of yarn, and there in the dead center of its head, as she had done with all her hoodooing dolls, Miss May Belle had likely put in a tuft of Rue’s baby hairs. Her own signature.

  Slung over Bean’s shoulder just so, the doll’s skirts turned and tousled and showed the black baby’s underside, where the white doll ought’ve been, the one that Miss May Belle had made to look like Varina. But there was nothing. Only a hollow, loose fabric, and a trail of straw stuffing, come undone.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  Miss May Belle had made those two halves, those two dolls tied together like one soul. Conjure to keep Varina from being sent away. But Rue had misunderstood from the start, supposed Miss May Belle had made Varina tied to the land, when all along it was Rue that Varina was tied to. The two of them bundled up together and trapped for it. No feet, or knees, or thighs. No legs to run with.

  “Bean. What you done with the other half a’ the doll baby?” Rue knew her voice was too harsh but she couldn’t temper it. Bean’s eyes filled up with tears. He backed away from her, for the first time, frightened.

  “I done a surgery,” Bean said.

  Rue stilled.

  They both heard the ring of Sarah’s voice coming from inside, and though Rue couldn’t make out what she’d said, Bean responded to his mama’s call and disappeared into the house in a hurry, like he was being pulled away from Rue on the end of a string.

  Rue thought to chase after him, to snatch away the doll and make certain she had seen what she’d thought she’d seen. But from down the road a group of men ambled along slow, bearing an injured body between them, and they were coming straight at her the way folks always seemed to with their hurts. It was Jonah, she saw, who hobbled between them. He had to be supported on either side by others, but at least he was moving himself.

  Rue sighed. “Take him on to my cabin,” she said before they could even tell her the full story.

  * * *

  —

  Way they told it, the black men in the town had grown ashamed of their own fear, and in their shame they grew belligerent. They refused to wait out the perceived white demons squatting in the woods. Would not be haunted by haints in white robes.

  They’d gathered themselves into a party of the bravest amongst them to ride out and stand their ground. Jonah was a natural leader, just as he had been during slavery times when he’d been entrusted to protect the women of the plantation, the closest he’d ever been to being viewed by his white master as a man.

  Bruh Abel had told them that they shouldn’t go into the woods, but they’d done it anyway. They had only the one sad-sack mare between them on which Jonah rode out. Before they had even got halfway to where the danger was, the horse had sensed something it felt it had no business going near.

  From deep in the darkness a black mangy dog had appeared and began to bark. The horse had run off in a spook, dragging its rider along, trampling on his leg in its haste to get away.

  So with a leg badly sprained, if not all the way broken, here was Jonah at last, who Rue had wanted for so long. She had learned to want by the lines of him, his broad shoulders, yes, and the strong prominence of his brow and, yes, his dark dark skin, shining. But more than that it was his hands that had always fascinated her, marked as they were from his work by a motley pattern, a deep intersection of scars from reeling fish bare-handed, flesh healed and broken and healed over. His hands reminded Rue of her daddy’s scarred back, a smaller history all in a similar brutal constellation.

  “Horse drug me far,” Jonah said. “Foolish I know.”

  Rue shook her head. “Mighta saved you. Them white folks out for blood and worse.”

  Now was the best chance Rue had to talk to Jonah, what with him lying across her supper table hissing softly at his hurts, and there was a lot that wanted saying. He’d kept secret his discovery of Varina; as far as Rue could tell no one else was any the wise
r that their old mistress had been living amongst them hidden, trapped away thinking the war still raged. For that Rue was thankful, but now she had a favor to ask. She started off light, asked him about where he’d been when he’d been away, the things he’d seen and the money he’d made. Jonah talked between gasps as she looked him over, giving her the bare bones of a scheme he’d heard tell of in a Northern city.

  “I’m of a mind to go back and take it up, permanent-like,” Jonah said. “That’s what I heard from the other men too. That it ain’t safe here and ain’t gon’ never be. You right, Miss Rue, they won’t never let us rest. Now more than ever.”

  Rue didn’t disagree with him. Men were not trees, she knew, black men especially; it had always been dangerous for them to take root.

  “Sarah’s too far along to travel safely,” Rue said.

  In truth Rue had been neglecting Sarah, who had not had an easy time the whole length of this pregnancy. But even with the mama’s suffering, the baby in her still thrived and Rue couldn’t help thinking it was the most unfair thing she’d ever seen. That woman’s big, proud high-yellow belly. To have another baby when Sarah had never claimed her last baby rightly, had wanted to cast Bean out if it came to it.

  Would this baby have skin like scales too? As Bean did. As Posy might’ve.

  “I’ll send for Sarah after,” Jonah said. He hadn’t quite said it in a way that Rue believed. But Jonah had always been the good kind. She had to hope, and this was her chance.

  She said, “When you leave you oughta take Bean with you.”

  “I can’t do that.” His answer came calm as a windless sea. “As I see it they ain’t mine to take.”

  Rue was bracing to tell him, figuring how to put into words what she knew about Sarah and Bruh Abel. It was the same truth that she’d had such a difficult time telling for herself. Because beneath the shock of their hoodwink was the low-down hurt of an infidelity. It was base and it made Rue angrier to think on. That she had expected any different when she had named Bruh Abel as a liar with lies in her mouth also. And laid down with him just the same. It was the least original of all sinning.