Conjure Women Page 8

  Up above, Miss May Belle sat on a stool someone had brought out. She was winding her toes around the legs of the stool, and Rue knew she was anxious about something, though her mouth smiled as she gossiped and her fingers flew as she tugged and plucked.

  The mismatching collection of benches and stools and house chairs dragged outside made the square in the quarter look like a parlor room had bloomed from the center of the earth. The corn they worked was piled high, a proud mountain of bounty. Above, the sun was dipping down in the sky, shining its last rays on them sweetly, and Marse Charles had seen fit to give them a few jugs of whiskey, which they were allowed to pass amongst themselves as long as their hands didn’t stop moving longer than it took to sip. The world had gone all golden, and their tongues were loosed.

  “Don’t think that Missus picked up that child but the one time,” Fannie the housemaid was saying with a glob of tobacco thickening her lip.

  “And when was that?”

  “To hand her over to Ma Doe, ’course.”

  Ma Doe for her part huffed and said no more. Her arthritic fingers worked slow at peeling back the corn skin, and every now and then she’d set her work down and sigh. Those times Rue would see Miss May Belle reach out to the woman and rub at her fingers and then Ma Doe would begin again.

  It was well known that Ma Doe had seen to the rearing of all of Marse Charles’s children, his three sons and his one daughter. To Rue, Marse Charles’s eldest were as solid as suggestions. The three boys had come to him by his first wife, a woman Rue had never known alive, though she’d heard of her from her own mama, who looked on the dead woman with a sort of reverent respect.

  “She had too much beauty, that ’un,” Miss May Belle would sometimes say, and the saying of it would come out of nowhere, as though Mistress Violet, for that had been the first wife’s name, had just then left the room, her ever-present scent of peppermint oil left to linger.

  “Was my mama what commended it to her, that oil she got to love so well,” Miss May Belle would say, proud. “And she knew there was stock in it. Mistress Vi, she believed.”

  Mistress Violet in stories was pale, thin, her wrist and temples always wet with the anointing of oil. But the sons she made in quick succession were strong and overconfident in their own strength. The coming war would take them quickly in the order Mistress Violet had brought them into the world. But that was not to be for a while yet.

  “You think he’ll send Varina away? Make a belle a’ her?” asked Big Sylvia, who had little patience for Miss Varina. The girl was forever in her kitchen stealing away with the ashcakes left cooling on the windowsill.

  “Varina’s not going anywhere for a long while,” Ma Doe said. She divested a thick piece of corn of its covering in one irate tug. “Ain’t that so, Miss May Belle?”

  Rue’s mama had that far-off thoughtful look on her face. She was looking into the woods, which just then echoed with a chittering of unseen animals. That wilderness seemed louder even than their singing, than the soulful plunking that came from across the high piles of corn where one of the drunker hands was entertaining himself by picking at a fiddle.

  The high, woman-like scream of a fox cut through the newly fallen night, and one of the house girls leaned in and hiccupped and said gaily, “Now, Miss May Belle, ain’t that yo’ babies callin’ to ya?”

  The other women laughed but Ma Doe didn’t and Miss May Belle didn’t. Sitting skin close to her mama’s leg, Rue felt her mama go rigid like she was holding on to something tightly.

  Playing along, Miss May Belle said, “I’ll see to ’em presently,” but there wasn’t any playfulness in her voice despite the good, hard work of the night, despite the harvest, green and yellow and white all around them.

  * * *

  —

  Rue came home alone one afternoon to find their cabin door was slight-ways open. It didn’t lock like the doors in Marse Charles’s House did, with their heavy brass knobs and heavy brass keys, but it was a rule between Rue and her mama that their front door be kept firmly closed whether they were in or out. Miss May Belle said it was to ward off creatures, spirits, and bad air.

  Could a creature have gotten in now? A spirit? A type of badness? Rue knew she’d closed the door firmly when she’d gone out. She always did everything her mama said to; her voice was always in her ear.

  “You want me weepin’?” her mama would always say when Rue put herself into some childish danger, went picking flowers too close to where the patrolmen snatched up runaways, or climbed up a tree she couldn’t climb down from, or waded into the river past where her toes could feel the bank. Never you mind the pain of death or injury; the worst pain was to make your mama cry.

  Rue pushed open the door of the cabin anyway, thinking herself brave. She still jumped when she saw Varina. The white girl was sitting up on their dinner table, her dress spread out around her like a tablecloth, her legs back and forth dangling, her thumb, as always, in her mouth.

  “What you doin’ here?” Rue asked. She knew she wasn’t meant to speak to Varina that way—was meant to call her Miss Varina, give her all the respect a white girl was deserving of. “And why you all pink?”

  Varina’s face up close was mottled with blushing. Snot glowed from the hollow beneath her left nostril, and before she answered Rue, she took the time to rub furiously at her puffy eyes with both fists.

  “Mother slapped me for sucking my thumb. She said she ’shamed of me.”

  It was unlike Varina’s mama to say anything to her, kind, cruel, or otherwise, but it was well known to everybody—to the black folks at least—that the master’s second wife was not much proud of what she’d produced, her one child, his only daughter. And Lord that red, red hair.

  “I’m lookin’ for the healing woman. May Belle,” Varina said.

  “That’s my mama. What you want with her?”

  “I want to be cured.”

  Rue crawled up onto the table beside Varina before she could think better of it. She half-expected that the master’s daughter might push her away, but instead Varina made room for Rue on the table’s surface, scuttling unladylike, baring white frilled bloomers that Rue decided were the prettiest things she had ever seen.

  Varina wiped up snot with her forearm. “Will she help me, you think?”

  “She surely will,” Rue said.

  Up close Varina had only her daddy’s face and none of her mama’s. Marse Charles’s severity, his thin pink lips, the small ears with the heavy loose lobes and hair in dark, curling barbs. But where had that red color sprouted from? It came up from her head in corkscrews.

  Rue let Varina rest her head on her shoulder. After a while she looped her arm around her waist, and that seemed to quiet Varina’s sniffles. Miss May Belle would have words here, but Rue had none except “Mama will know what to do.”

  When Miss May Belle came in, she did not look surprised at all to see the two girls on her supper table. She only looked weary and stopped to pull off her hat. “Afternoon, Miss Varina,” she murmured.

  Miss May Belle set down her basket, sat on the bed for a spell, and gave her left arch a forceful rub like she could squeeze out her foot pains. Only then did she say, “A’ight, what’s the trouble?” as if trouble was a constant, and not particularly urgent, part of every day.

  The question set Varina off weeping again. She told it between hiccups, that her mama had come into the nursery and seen her at her studies. Varina was tasked with copying a page of the Bible as a means to perfect her crooked script. She did so every noontime, for she wasn’t allowed to go out when the sun was high and like to spoil her skin with freckles.

  “I was making the most lovely V’s,” Varina said, and she did one there in the air to show them, her wrist flicking about the invisible flourishes. There weren’t, she despaired, enough letter V’s in the Bible.

  Ma Doe
had stepped out to see Big Sylvia down in the kitchen about their luncheon and Varina had been there alone thinking very hard on her lessons and her piety, she swore. Well, everybody knew when Miss Varina got to thinking hard she was liable to suck her thumb with a distinct abandon, and that is when her mama had come in and seen what she was about.

  “She smacked my hand from my mouth. She called me dirty as a nigra and sent me out the House saying I belonged out in the slave quarter. So,” Varina sobbed, “here I am.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Miss May Belle, and that made Varina cry harder. “S’alright now, Miss Varina. But we just gotta try to heal you off the habit.”

  Varina looked at her thumb. Rue looked down at her own thumbs, trying to figure what the pleasure in sucking them might be. Her hands were work-worn, the nail cut down to the quick. Rue’s hands were too busy to spend time in her mouth. Now that, she thought, was where Varina’s trouble was.

  “What if I tell you a story to ease yo’ mind from it?” Miss May Belle said.

  Varina sniffled. “Yes, please.”

  “Now, lessee,” Miss May Belle began from her seat on the bed.

  It went like this, that Bruh Rabbit was going all throughout the wilderness, bragging on himself, saying how smart he was, smarter than any animal in the wood.

  Well, Bruh Fox, who had declared himself the master of that wilderness, did not like hearing Bruh Rabbit’s claims, and he set out to prove Bruh Rabbit wasn’t so smart after all.

  “ ‘Good gracious. Who he think he is anyhow?’ ” Miss May Belle mimicked Bruh Fox and the girls laughed. She was a good mimic, gave the fox the type of high-minded tongue of a fine, white gentleman. Bruh Fox’s companion, the Snake, she made slither out his words like any upstart overseer.

  Bruh Fox, just to put Bruh Rabbit in his right place, set him a task, gave him a haversack and told him to bring him something back in it.

  “Somethin’ like what?” Varina asked gamely.

  Miss May Belle wagged her finger. Bruh Fox wasn’t about to tell Bruh Rabbit what he ought to bring. If Bruh Rabbit was so smart he’d surely figure it out. But Bruh Rabbit stayed puzzled. He got to talking to the birds—maybe they had an idea how to oblige Bruh Fox? They just shrugged their feathered shoulders.

  “By and by, an idea come into Bruh Rabbit’s head. He asked them birds if he might beg a feather off a’ each a’ them.”

  From beneath their bed Miss May Belle began to pull up lengths of fabric scrap cut to long, spooling ribbons of the type she’d use to tie up newborn baby cords.

  “Bruh Rabbit stuck all ’em feathers to himself and soon he had, there gathered, enough feathers to fly over to the Big House where Bruh Fox lived.”

  Miss May Belle tied neat fast knots of ribbon all the way up Varina’s arms, a prism’s worth of color, and bade her flap her new wings. Varina did so, stuck her arms out stiff and let her ribbons stream with her flapping. Rue, beside her, had no ribbons. She felt earthbound and ordinary.

  In the story, Bruh Rabbit perched himself on a tree outside of Bruh Fox’s house. There he spied Bruh Fox chatting with his old friend Snake.

  “What kind a’ bird is that?” Bruh Fox asked, squinting at the creature dressed in the strange mix of colors, like nothing he’d ever encountered. Snake could not say, and suggested that they might go down and ask Bruh Rabbit, since it was true he was mighty clever.

  “Y’all won’t find him,” Bruh Fox declared. “I sent him on a task he won’t figure. He don’t know that he’s ’posed to fetch me the Moon, and the Sun, and the Darkness.”

  “Once he overheard that, Bruh Rabbit flew away,” Miss May Belle said. One by one she untied the ribbons from Varina’s arms. Before Varina could complain, she left two ribbons behind, one on either arm, red strings knotted around the hitch of Varina’s elbows.

  Meanwhile, Bruh Rabbit went around creation. He snatched the Sun from the east and the Moon from the west. He snatched the Darkness out of night itself. He put them in the sack and lugged them up to Bruh Fox’s Big House, where all the animals were gathered, waiting.

  “ ‘Lessee how you done, Bruh Rabbit,’ ” Miss May Belle quipped as Bruh Fox. Enthralled, Varina went to raise her thumb to her mouth, but the ribbons hitched around her elbows made the movement clumsy. She put her hand down, leaned closer instead, better to hear the end of the tale.

  First Bruh Rabbit brought out the Darkness. The assembled creatures screamed and shivered in the total dark. Then Bruh Rabbit brought out the Moon, and they were calmed by the low light. Lastly Bruh Rabbit tugged the Sun out from his sack, but it was so brilliant and bright that it burned at the animals’ eyes.

  “And that,” Miss May Belle finished, “is how Bruh Rabbit brung a sometimes blindness into the world. Because he may be smart. But ain’t no one smarter than God. And sooner or later they gon’ learn it.”

  FREEDOMTIME

  1868

  The men began to spit wherever Rue walked. They did not do it in her sight. They were not so bold as that. Not yet. But they saved up their spittle behind their lips like cud, spittle being the best defense to ward off what they’d decided must be the cursing of a witch.

  Rue felt it, and she felt the men watching her as she walked through the center square of the cabins. They still nodded greetings, tipped their hats. But when Rue went round the corner she knew that behind her back they were hocking up their hate, swirling it in their mouths. Spitting that hate in the path she’d just walked through like she’d left a bad taste on their tongue they could not wait to be rid of.

  Rue had thought of running away long before the spit began to fly. In the years after Miss May Belle’s passing, the urge would sometimes come upon Rue in the middle of some effort. Say she had to reach up on a high shelf for a vial of medicine, say she was walking clear across the town on a rain-blustering day. Now, after baby Si’s passing, all the mamas were watching her like she had the dust of his death caught under her fingernails. And all the while, Bean, the strange child, thrived.

  After they’d laid Si to rest, Rue resolved to work harder. She paid no mind to the spittle or the suspicion that trailed her like runoff of some venomous sea. She looked in on the sick folks and the elderly and the new mamas like she was dim to their whispers and accusing stares. There were things she’d been neglecting. Things that wanted seeing to. It was the opposite of running. A digging in.

  She was isolated, estranged, but hadn’t she always been? Perhaps from the very moment she’d been born, if memory could take her back that far, for from the start Rue had ever been Miss May Belle’s daughter, her destiny marked because of it.

  Rue knew there was only one other baby born as she had been with distrust heaped upon him, as soon as he blinked open his bean-black eyes. The more alone the townsfolk made her feel, the more she felt a pull toward Bean. The more she felt for him, the more she feared for him.

  Folks did not like what they could not put an explanation to. All she could think, over and over, was that she had not been able to save Si from the affliction he was born with. She would not let Bean fall too, to add to that number of perished children whose births had not saved them from death. Her fear of the dead clawed at her, buried secrets that might surface from her dreams into the waking world. Didn’t everything over and over surface and come again?

  * * *

  —

  And so, one cool evening, Rue came into Bean’s family’s cabin, unannounced. She had been looking for Sarah, had gathered up all her courage to ask after Bean. The grim fact was that where Rue’s name was whispered, Bean’s was often liable to follow. They could hurt Rue with their tongue wagging and their cussing, but Bean was just a baby still, and it made Rue’s freshly healed wrist ache anew to think what way they might devise to hurt a child like Bean if words were not enough.

  Rue was looking for Bean’s mama but she found his daddy ins
tead, and she paused on the threshold unsure if she ought to turn and go before Jonah saw her. She couldn’t help watching him, unobserved, a part of her thrilled. Jonah was head bent at the family supper table shifting grain into a haversack, a strangely womanly task that endeared him to her, for he seemed to be practiced in it. She watched as he took a well-measured cupful from the larger barrel and transferred it to the sack, keeping a count of what he was about with a silent movement of his lips.

  Behind him a suppertime fire was burning itself down. There was Bean on the floor, braced on his hands and knees, his black eyes staring into the fireplace, unblinking. He was still and silent, focused wholly on the dying flame.

  “C’mon in, Miss Rue,” Jonah startled Rue by saying. She hadn’t thought he’d noticed her there half in his doorway.

  “Night’s unseasonably cool, ain’t it?” he said. “Come in an’ warm yo’self.”

  She knelt beside Bean, who looked up at her. She sat herself down heedless of the ash near the stove and pulled Bean into the cradle of her lap. He was small for his age, and she could feel his little jutting ribs beneath his shirt. He did not start up his crying, even as Rue held him at his wriggling waist, but seemed content to be held by her.

  “He likes to sit there ’cause it’s warm,” said Jonah. “He won’t go near the fire.”

  “How you know?”

  “Sarah teaches ’em young how to stay outta the flame. She make sure they know well enough that it hurts.”

  Rue did not make it her place to tell folks how to rear their children. But she did wonder what Jonah, placid as he was, thought of Sarah and her ways. They were both of them orphans—Sarah after her mama’s passing, Jonah sold to Marse Charles in an ill-assorted lot of slaves. They had chosen each other, Sarah and Jonah had. After Marse Charles, after the war, after freedom, they had chosen each other in that hazy time when everybody was pure drunk on choosing. Made a home in this cabin, and a baby, and another, and then this third child that wriggled now warm in Rue’s lap, still mesmerized by the fire and sucking at his thumb. The low flames were reflected in the flat black of Bean’s eyes, and Rue felt Jonah as a safe presence behind her.