Conjure Women Read online

  Throughout the former slave quarters, Rue saw the baptism clothes folks planned to wear hung like white flags of surrender, flapping from washing lines, billowing in the wind so that from afar it seemed as though souls hung in them, too, writhing. Rue had never quite understood it, the airing of one’s belongings on lines for everybody to see. Neither had her mama. When Miss May Belle was living, she’d hung their clothes indoors, never mind that it took longer for their clothing to dry in the close warmth of their cabin. Just one more intimacy they kept close.

  But the white clothes did make a lovely sight from afar, Rue had to admit, strewn like decorations from house to house, all through the old quarter.

  Rue troubled on the problem of Bean alone and came over and over again to the same dissatisfying conclusion: Miss May Belle would’ve known what to do about Bean. Rue herself did not.

  Dinah, a slight mulatto woman who was known to mend clothes, ran to catch up with Rue. As much as she was pretty, she was talented, and Rue liked her fine for this, thought on her something like a friend, if she were to allow herself to indulge in friendships.

  “Y’alright, Dinah?”

  Dinah’s tiredness showed in the squint to her light-colored eyes. She’d wrapped her little baby to her back to make her arms free, a little girl whose name Rue couldn’t quite recollect.

  “She’s caught a chill, I’m thinkin’.” Dinah tilted her back and arched up her behind so Rue could look at the child up close.

  Rue tucked the wayward arm of the sleeping baby into the fabric belted at the small of Dinah’s back. Without waking, the baby girl sucked appreciatively at her thumb. Her skin was warm but not alarmingly so.

  “She’ll come right,” Rue said, and Dinah beamed, took her word on it that easy. “Feverfew. I’ll bring some over to y’all presently.”

  “Y’all goin’ to see Bean be washed?” Dinah asked.

  Rue shrugged like she’d shrugged every time somebody had asked after Bean. “Surely,” she said, “this town got more pressin’ matters than the baptism of one li’l boy.”

  * * *

  —

  The room they’d put the struggling baby Si’s crib in might as well’ve been in the ground already, so dark was it and so chill. It was an old mud-made room that had belonged to Marse Charles’s kitchen, meant for storing things that couldn’t last long in heat, and the clay walls made the outside world’s sounds come together muffled and wrong. It was a rough quarantine but a necessary one, she’d thought, to keep little Si from suffering the heavy air of the late summer heat, to keep him away from his brothers and sisters. Si was only three days old; still his heartbeat had that telltale tripping of a drumbeat out of time. Rue had heard its like before; she knew well what it meant. Stillborn babies happened more than she liked to think on, but the ones born alive who did not thrive were a more weighty kind of tragedy. It was the waiting for the next breath and the next and the last. It made her sick and sleepless every time, that helpless waiting.

  Rue jumped as Si’s daddy came into the room. The sound of his steps had been swallowed up by the clay floor and her own overthinking. And now he stood close behind her. She felt him, watching her watching his son.

  “It’s a hard thing, Miss Rue.”

  “It is.” What else was there to give than that?

  “Heard other babies round here been fallin’ sick also,” Si’s daddy said. The words sounded ominous and cruel and he’d meant for them to, laid out in the room, a threat against her healing power, and an implication.

  His voice seemed too harsh to Rue, what with his sickly boy near. She didn’t much like the man. He was one of those come lately after the war from yonder knows where, dragging along his freedom in search of some woman he’d been separated from years back. Well, he’d found her, Si’s mama, and gave her four other healthy babies before this weak, wanting child had come. Now he stood with his whole weight blocking the doorway, and he seemed more put out than grieving. He seemed to be watching Rue, or so she thought. He was baiting her like she were an unruly creature. He said, “All these babies fallin’ ill. What you make of that, huh, Miss Rue? Is there a sickness come onto us?”

  “Nothin’ of it to make,” Rue said. “Cooler seasons coming on is all.”

  “Heard newborn children ain’t hardly thrivin’ this whole year. Not since you birthed that Bean.”

  Suddenly Rue was full aware of just how large Si’s daddy was in the doorway, overflowing the close room with accusations against her, against Bean. She came aware of how fully Si’s daddy blocked her one escape from the room, standing squarely in the outside light.

  She thought on Ol’ Joel’s wild accusation declaring that she herself had made Bean as a haint and a blight against them. Ol’ Joel had found willing ears for his conspiracy, and who better to fill up with lies than a daddy made empty by the shame of his weak son.

  “And this one here, he won’t latch on the teat.” Si’s daddy had clearly decided Rue was guilty of every one of those wicked rumors.

  “He needs rest,” she managed.

  Si’s daddy shook his head. “We mean to see him baptized by Bruh Abel.”

  Si gave off a cough then. Rue leaned over the child, cooing nonsense words as much to quiet him as to get out from under his daddy’s stare. The baby struggled to open his eyes, gave up on it, returned to uneasy sleep.

  “I don’t think it’s wise to put him to the water,” Rue made herself say.

  “Weren’t askin’ you if it were wise.”

  Rue pulled back from the crib like it’d burnt her. No one had ever before turned away her healing.

  Si’s daddy kept watching her and did not stop watching her as she moved around him toward the door.

  “Keep him restin’,” she said. “It’s good to speak to him. Even a voice can soothe. I’ll be back in the evenin’ time.” She couldn’t keep away, not with a sickly child involved, and she hoped that later it would be the mama she’d find tending the boy—someone softer, sympathetic. Women tended to look more kindly on her, Rue knew. They understood the necessity of her work better than the daddies did.

  She’d hoped to return to her own cabin and collect her troubled thoughts, but there, just past the doorway, was Bruh Abel. The good book was gripped in his right hand, like at any moment he’d be called to fight something off with its heavy binding, its flock of pages.

  He smiled when she neared. Did he smile that bright trickster smile for everybody? Why was it that no one else seemed able to figure him for what he was?

  “Sister Rue,” he said. She balked. She was nobody’s sister, and if she had a quicker wit or a whittled tongue she would have said so.

  “Miss Rue,” she corrected.

  He barreled on forward like she hadn’t spoke, said, “I was hopin’ I’d cross yo’ way.”

  Rue was aware that from a distance folks were watching them. She didn’t have to turn this time to sense Si’s daddy’s approach from behind. He didn’t bother to invent a pretense to look on this moment—when the healing woman and the preacher man were stood toe to toe.

  Rue had to make herself speak up. “If it’s about li’l Si, I tol’ his daddy already. Y’all will only make him weaker if you take him to the water.”

  Bruh Abel’s smile widened. His face was near pretty, up close, she had to admit. He had a spray of freckles on his nose from the sun, and even the way he looked down on her had an air of respectability for all that it made Rue wary. She squared her shoulders. He was a foot taller than her, easy, but not so broad as Si’s daddy, and even if he was laughing at her she felt she’d sparked something in him that wasn’t all the way saintly.

  “Now, you may know better than I, Miss Rue. After all, the gift of healin’ was put in yo’ hands.” If Bruh Abel was bothered by the gathering audience he didn’t show it. He kept his focus on Rue. “But I’m only lookin’
to ease the way for our li’l Si should the Lord see right to recall him to heaven.”

  “Our Si?” She was surprised by the bitter flavor of her own venom. “It’s my thinkin’ that our Si ought to have the easiest path to heaven, seein’ as he’s nary a week old. Baptism? Ain’t no sense in it.”

  “Ain’t no sense in salvation?”

  Rue managed to still her tongue before she said more. Here she was, handing him the rope to hang her, with everybody looking on. She took a step back. “I only mean that I hope to give Si every chance at seein’ another day, good Lord willin’.”

  Seemed Bruh Abel could use patience like a weapon. He paused to mull over what she’d said in what looked like pious consideration.

  He spoke at last. “Lord willin’ an’ if the creek don’t rise, we’ll all see another day, Miss Rue.”

  She shook at the old nonsense saying, took it as her leave to go. It had been a favorite of Miss May Belle’s when she’d been alive, and Bruh Abel surely knew it. The two had talked together, right up ’til the very end.

  “Oh, Miss Rue,” Bruh Abel called after her. His voice was teasing, lilting. “I ain’t even get round to sayin’ why I’d been lookin’ to speak with you.”

  She’d made a mistake by walking away from him; now he had to yell to her to carry across the distance. Surely everybody for miles was listening. She turned to him, and her face felt hot.

  “Only I was wantin’ to ask you formally to come down from outta the woods and join our worship, Sister Rue.”

  So he had seen her that day at the riverbank. And he’d waited ’til now to slip the knot. She walked on, feeling dismissed and not liking it the least bit, not with all those folks watching and counting it as a retreat.

  * * *

  —

  Rue returned that night to see Si as she promised she would, found his mama and daddy both in the chill room hovering over their sleeping baby like new parents over any ordinary newborn. But in his crib Si was still, his face almost waxen in its serenity.

  “How he doin’?” Rue stepped forward but their eyes on her felt as cool as the room did.

  “He’ll be baptized, and in the care a’ Jesus, soon enough.” That was the mama, voice hitching. She was slight and soft-spoken, barely old enough to be called a woman, let alone a mama. She moved toward Rue, as if to block her from Si, and the light made visible a bruise at her jaw so garish Rue let out a hiss. Purple as bloomed larkspur the bruise ran down her neck, perfect in the shape of a handprint.

  “What happened?” Rue asked, though wasn’t it clear? Si’s mama said nothing, and behind her her man towered. He picked up his dying son. Si was so little he took up not much more than the wide stretch of his daddy’s open palm.

  “We mean to have the boy baptized,” Si’s daddy said.

  Rue appealed to the mama. “I come to tell you again that you ought not to.”

  “Ain’t it the Lord’s plan?” The bruise stretched with her speaking. Rue tried to catch her eye, to will some honesty between them, but the mama didn’t want to receive it. Rue pushed round her to look over Si.

  She meant only to feel the baby’s forehead for fever, but Si’s daddy caught her by her outstretched wrist. He squeezed that wrist so hard Rue felt the burn of her skin splitting.

  “Woman,” the daddy spat the word as a curse. “We don’t want none a yo’ devilment near our boy,” and threw Rue toward the door by her arm.

  She caught herself, only just, on the edge of the crib with the same outstretched arm he’d mangled. There was a loud pop in her wrist, not so much heard as felt, and Rue curled around the throbbing pain. It shot through her arm like a lightning bolt and stayed throbbing, but she held her face and looked to Si’s mama.

  Rue spoke with her jaw clenched like to crack her teeth. “Si needs lookin’ after.”

  “Not by you,” the mama said in her soft nothing voice.

  Rue turned her back on them, on Si, stumbled for the door, and as she fled, she thought she heard, though she could not be certain, Si’s daddy hock and spit in the path of her retreat, that old true method for dispelling a witch.

  * * *

  —

  Rue put her broken wrist in the river and howled. The water was inky and cold and it eased the damaged limb as much as it pained her. Like a whetstone, the rushing current honed her senses to a wicked sharpness. She might have done better to go on home, to calm the swelling with a poultice of comfrey and to soothe her upset with a draught of brandy.

  Instead, at the riverside Rue set her wrist with one slow, agonizing twist, tasted blood in her mouth but kept her eyes on her destination. In the distance over the treetops she could just see the bell tower of the old white church.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s Rue,” her voice echoed. “You listenin’?”

  She did not make her entrance quiet. What was there to fear? She walked down the center aisle, knowing she had an audience even if she couldn’t make out any movement in the shadowed corners of the church’s vaulted second story.

  “That was a fool trick you done with the bell,” Rue called up to the haint. But she felt a certain guilt as well, as good as if she’d rung the bell her own damn self. Because she’d stayed away too long. Let this whole fool thing go on too long. But she had to go on with it, particularly now with Bean’s eyes on the back of her mind.

  So Rue thought on what her mama might have done. What a haint might do. She cradled her aching wrist near her body, spun to see all the shadowed corners of the old church at once.

  “I need you to go out there.”

  * * *

  —

  That night everybody in the town said they heard it clear, the screaming in the woods. It was a sharp, suffering scream, high-pitched and awful, roiling louder and then cut off abruptly. In the morning they saw what it had done. Strewn out on the muddied ground were all their baptismal whites in piles on the ground, muddied and ruined.

  Already by midafternoon folks had built stories on top of other stories about the haint, so that in a matter of hours it was no longer a faceless spirit but one jealous of their glory, come to tear down the marks of their freedom-worship.

  When anybody asked her straight out what it might have been that night in the woods, Rue put it to foxes. Their wilderness had a long history of foxes who were vicious, fearless, who came into town looking to tear up chicken pens and rabbit holes, just because they could. Foxes had that sort of cry that sounded like a woman in terror and, heard in echo, it could come out all wrong. But when folks started saying for themselves it was the haint, the drifting ghost some had half-seen in the woods, Rue did not immediately dispel them of the notion. A haint was an affliction she could deal with, or appear to leastwise. Something she could care to that Bruh Abel and his Bible could not.

  Rue again met the preacher man in the square. This time he was on hands and knees alongside his flock, helping to pick up the ripped-down white clothing. She joined him in his stooping, though it vexed her to do so. Better, she figured, to seem to be just another knee-bent sinner in his estimation. Together they shook out a dusty bed cloth, held out opposite ends, and met at corners to fold it and fold it again. Bruh Abel set the neatly folded sheet down at the bottom step of somebody’s porch, then took a handkerchief to his forehead like he’d done a whole day’s labor.

  “Thank you, Sister Rue.” His eyes flashed warily at her bound-up wrist. She’d fashioned a splint of tree limbs and twine, the loose ends of which rattled when she moved. “I can’t seem to disabuse yo’ people of their backwards superstitions. Tell me, why is that?”

  Rue shrugged. “You newly come to these parts. We got a long history that ain’t easily laid to rest.”

  “Even so,” Bruh Abel said, “the baptism of the baby Si will renew their faith.”

  Rue frowned. It was not altogether
what she had expected to hear. “You mean to go on with it after all this carryin’ on?” She gestured round the square where even now folks were discovering their washing in far-flung places. The white clothes had settled everywhere like an early frost foretelling winter.

  Bruh Abel stood, brought himself up to his full height. Rue took a step back and cussed herself for it. Her wrist throbbed and maybe Bruh Abel sensed that, as any animal might sense another’s weak spot and prey upon it. He took her bandaged hand and held it gently between his larger, lighter two hands, as though he meant to pray the break away.

  “Tomorrow mornin’ will see Si baptized,” Bruh Abel promised her.

  “It ain’t right,” Rue said.

  “It’s what the folks are needin’.” He turned over her hand, gently. “You can’t change faith, Sister Rue. And a haint can’t neither.”

  * * *

  —

  In the end, neither Rue nor Bruh Abel was proved right. Si died that night. His body met the grave unwashed, unbaptized. Unsaved.

  SLAVERYTIME

  How long could a white girl keep sucking at her thumb? It was the year that Little Miss Varina would turn seven years old, and everywhere through the quarter the slaves gossiped on her outside of their master’s hearing. They had it in whispers she still behaved like a small child with a small child’s desperate habits. Yeah, they’d laughed about her, wondered at what it was that had made her so strange, and they came down on the fact that it had to be because her mama, the Missus, didn’t ever love her, not even for a minute.

  “You don’t love on a baby enough they come up wrongly,” Miss May Belle told folks who’d asked for her wisdom on the matter. “It’s the same as lettin’ ’em to starve.”

  They’d been corn shucking and they’d been singing. Seemed that they were surrounded on all sides by pale yellow kernels and the fresh green shed skin of corn that’d already been shucked and the darker green husks of those still wanting shucking. Everywhere were the white silky strings, which had gone all up in their hair, rendered them cobwebby and wild. Rue sat near her mama’s feet, letting Miss May Belle drop husks into her lap.