Conjure Women Page 9

  Her skin just about buzzed when Jonah leaned in toward her, though he hadn’t touched her. He said, “You here after Sarah, I expect? Women’s work?”

  Rue had near forgot why she’d come. It was comfortable by the fire and in Jonah’s company. Bean eased himself into her arms, dozing.

  “Yes, I’m lookin’ to speak with Sarah. She here?”

  “She down at the river. Bruh Abel got most of the womenfolk out there prayin’, showin’ they thankful as we got such a good harvest this year.”

  It had in fact been a miraculous harvest, and Bruh Abel had appeared right in the heart of it. Rue wondered if that was no simple coincidence but a type of divining. Had the preacher known that it would be the best moment to descend upon them, what with full stores and satisfied bodies?

  “You eat yet?” Jonah shifted the full sack of grain from the table to the ground, proceeded to fill another.

  Rue had not. She often found her meals here and there, a collection of benevolences from the mamas that she looked after, as were her clothing and her other little comforts, and a fair stack of coins that she hid in a distant knothole as Miss May Belle had done. Just in case. But there was no denying that lately Rue had found those favors harder to come by.

  Rue grinned up at Jonah’s work. “You look like you fixin’ to cook a feast.”

  “No, ma’am, I’m tithin’,” he said.

  “Tithin’? To that preacher man?”

  Jonah nodded. He did not look up from the careful transfer of the next cupful. They had not fed her like this. Never tithed to her, nor had she expected it.

  Rue set Bean down, back farther from the fire than he had been, and she stood, the better to look at the grain Jonah was giving to Bruh Abel as it moved from the depleted barrel to the fat haversack. They had used to give Marse Charles a portion of what they’d been allowed to grow for themselves in the piteous gardens in front of the slave cabins. Those growings made up their only food aside from the slave portions. Jonah’s tithing now made Rue envious. It smacked to her of that time before the war that she had thought was safely in their past. But here it was again, taking on another type of robbery: no Big House, but now a fair-skinned black man who’d set himself up above them on little more than his talent for telling tales down by the riverbank.

  “Bruh Abel ain’t ask for it, mind,” Jonah was saying, perhaps guessing at Rue’s unease, hedging it like a wildfire before it could get blazing. “Folks spoke on it and decided amongst themselves that they ought to offer him somethin’ regular-like. In hopes that he might deign to stay on out here, where he’s needed, rather than move on to some big city.”

  “Where he’s needed?” Rue felt she’d be wiser to hold her tongue. She did not like to show to Jonah especially that bitter side of herself that felt so quick to turn to distrust and envy. But she could not overlook those nettles of fear, the clinging notion that something dark was rising up higher and higher against her. Turning her over like loose sand in this town where she had thought she could stand forever sure-footed, respected.

  Jonah spoke on the many wonders that had come to pass now that the town was turning more solidly toward its own faith, not the one pressed into their backs by Marse. The good crops and fair weather, the wind blowing and the moonglow shining and the sun rising and setting as it was supposed to, seemed all of it was down to the faith they’d found. The faith Bruh Abel was guiding them in.

  “And Bean,” Jonah added.

  “What about him?”

  “He ain’t made that awful cry, not one night since Bruh Abel come and start prayin’ over him. Seems to me we can’t go on like we have been,” Jonah said. He’d set down the measuring cup, came toward her empty-handed. “We was froze up. All of us been waitin’ on the future to reveal itself. Waitin’ on what freedom means. Bruh Abel say we don’t gotta wait no more. We can just go ’head and put aside the old ways.”

  Rue felt it in her bones: She was the old ways to which Jonah was referring. Her and her mama and her grandmama. Made for a world that wasn’t anymore, that had been shook off like fetters. But Rue was still bound, to this place, to these ways.

  “What if it’s nonsense?” Rue said. “What if it’s all empty air what Bruh Abel speaks on and seems to do?”

  Jonah shrugged. “Seems to me if faith was tangible it wouldn’t be faith, would it?” He surprised Rue, reached out and touched her cheek like he was soaking up a tear that wasn’t there. His touch was so gentle it startled her.

  “What he makes folks feel is real, ain’t it? You’d know that, if you went to pray with us.”

  Rue turned her head away from Jonah’s palm, buried her face in Bean’s soft brown hair so she wouldn’t have to look at Jonah and show him her hurt, or her wanting.

  “ ’Llow me to fix you supper,” he said.

  Jonah served up dried fish stew on a tin plate. The food was still warm from when Sarah had made it earlier. Rue wondered if Jonah had caught the fish himself out there on one of his working trips on the docks of white men’s boats, reeling in catches for them. Rue liked to think that he had. She motioned for him to eat along with her, both of them head bent over the steaming plate.

  Bean grew restless in Rue’s lap, leaned across the table, curious of the food. She pulled him close to her chest, fed him fingerfuls of corn mush off her plate. Bean gnawed at her fingers, sweet as any teething child. Why were folks so quick to heap their fear and foreboding upon him?

  “I’d like to see after him, your Bean,” she said, “to make sure he come up right.” She did not know why she said it, only that she felt worry for the boy as much as she felt a kinship for him. It seemed right to promise it there in the quiet still of Jonah’s home, her belly filling up warm with his easy kindness. What else could she give Jonah but that? Women’s work, he’d called it. Rue wanted to prove herself worth much more.

  She could smell Jonah this close. Scented of malt and of hay. He laid a hand atop hers, seemed to study her awhile. He nodded, maybe in acceptance of what she’d offered, but when he finally spoke he said, “Bean’s to be baptized soon. Bruh Abel promised.”

  She thought again of the weak baby Si who had lived and died before Bruh Abel could make a spectacle of him. She had to wonder, if Si had lived would Bean now be saved from all this high-mindedness? Wasn’t he just a child? He felt like one. Safe in her arms, he was banging at the supper table, amusing himself like any baby would with the discovery of his growing strength. But his arms did bare that strange hexagonal pattern, like the surface of a bee’s hive, and that skin all over was sickly pale. And the eyes. Rue looked from Bean to Jonah.

  Jonah spoke softly, so soft Rue had to lean in to hear. He said, “I want Bean to be saved.”

  “Yes.” Rue was watching Jonah’s lips. “So do I.”

  The sound of the front door hitting the clapboard startled them apart. Three sharp footfalls and there was Sarah in the doorway. Long and thin, willow reed in coloring and in ease, Sarah seemed to mold herself to the doorjamb. She looked at Rue and Jonah and Bean through slant eyes, like there was something about them to see if only she could squint harder.

  Rue stood from the table, jarring Bean suddenly. He let out a low of displeasure. She clutched him closer, like a thief hiding behind the very thing they meant to steal.

  “Sarah. We was waitin’ on you,” Jonah said. “Rue wished to speak to you on some matter.”

  “Evenin’, Sarah.”

  “Miss Rue.” Perhaps the address galled Sarah, for she said it in a bite. After all, they were near the same age and yet so different.

  “I’ll let you two get on.” Jonah took Bean from Rue’s hands, but Bean struggled to stay with her. He cried out to her like to break her heart. Jonah took him into the next room, deeper into the dark of the house.

  “If we talkin’ let’s do it outside,” Sarah said. “It’s too hot
in here.”

  Rue followed Sarah out onto the narrow porch. They both leaned on the slanted railing, uncomfortably close in the thin space. It was too dark to make out Sarah’s expression but there was the quirking open of her mouth, the baring of teeth as she said, “Hope my cookin’ was to yo’ likin’, Miss Rue.”

  “Yes,” Rue said baldly. “It was. But that wasn’t why I come callin’.”

  Rue shuffled in her pockets, her hand grasping around a vial. It was warmed from where it had stayed pressed against her body and Bean’s. She pulled it out and showed it to Sarah, who made no motion to grab for it.

  “Some time ago you asked me after a protection for yo’self. You said you did not wish to have more babies. I ain’t want you to think I had forgot. Or maybe, it was more you didn’t feel quite comfortable askin’ again.”

  It was a delicate business, Rue knew. It was a secret thing that Rue and before her Miss May Belle would spirit to women who could only hint at wanting it, fearful of either their man’s hearing or their master’s. Sarah, brave as she was, had said the words in a stutter after Bean, who she had devised to keep hid, caught the town’s tainted attention. But she never had come back for the cure. Now Rue turned the vial in her hands so it glistened in a twinge of moonglow.

  “I ain’t want it no more,” said Sarah.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  The bottom of Sarah’s dress, Rue noticed, was shadowed in wet, damp all the way up her legs from kneeling at the river. Bean wasn’t yet two and Sarah had regained her thin frame, her small sharp breasts, her sweet girlish shape, like Bean had never been part of her body at all. Rue found she hated her for that, the way she’d shrugged Bean off.

  “I don’t wish to stop havin’ babies.” Sarah sounded sure of herself. “It ain’t a godly thing to do.”

  “Who tol’ you that?” But Rue knew who.

  “Please,” Sarah said, turning her back toward Rue, retreating to her cabin. “Don’t worry after me or my family no more.”

  SLAVERYTIME

  “The water ain’t worth more than the bucket.”

  If it were a song, her mama would have sung it as gospel ’til her throat ran hoarse, and after her mama was dead and gone, Rue had a habit of saying it to herself, below her breath, as a kind of prayer.

  Miss May Belle had spoken many things before she passed on and most of them Rue had let the years take away, had let erode on purpose, but there were some she held on to fast and kept whole.

  “Scrub,” Rue’s mama had said, so that the whole of Rue’s first memory of Miss May Belle was the smell of lye soap and the sensation of her skin prickling as the water dripped down her elbows.

  “You clean?” her mama would always ask.

  “Yes’m.”

  “What you do next?”

  “Don’t touch nothin’.”

  “That’s right, don’t touch nothin’.”

  For sure it seemed always to be in the middle of the night, what her mama called the witch’s hour, that they’d find themselves yanked from floating dreams and the freedom of sleep, to stumble half-blind to some woman’s bedside with her particular howling filling up the whole of the plantation, and Rue, herself half-asleep and waiting with her little sleeves rolled up her little arms and her arms held out in front of her, wet but drying, and her jaw clenching with the urge to catch a yawn in her palm but with the instructions Don’t touch nothin’ steadily knocking around in her head as good as law, ’cause if she touched something the baby might die.

  “Thank the Lord, you come just in time, Miss May Belle,” the man might say when they’d first arrive. His face would be twitching restless with the desire to look brave. It seemed to Rue that the men were always trying to look brave when really what they wanted was to leave Miss May Belle to it.

  Rue’s mama kept her dark face hard and neutral, for she believed excitement or fear, love or loathing, could spread through the touch with the ease of pestilence, and the last thing you wanted was an excited mama too near her time. Miss May Belle was known to look bored, as if the making of life, the creation of a whole person, was simple and ordinary, and to her it was.

  “Brought my own baby out on my lonesome,” she liked to tell folks.

  Miss May Belle was something else, a soul come again, people said, born and born, with the knowledge of some other place.

  And if Miss May Belle insisted on a thing, she’d have it, as good as willing it into existence. She found fire to warm up babies born too soon, and old sheets to keep down the dust from the floors, and soap, soap in frothing handfuls, and because she kept their property from dying, white folks let her have it. They let her have her own way, and the other black folks looked on in just as much awe as envy at how she lived like a white woman amongst them.

  She’d show up moments before a miracle, wash up, flick her wet hands, first the left then the right, always the left then the right, and the excess water would arc off her and sparkle by the light of the candle she alone was allowed to have, and that meant it was time to settle in.

  “Oh, we got a while yet,” she’d say, and she’d shoo the man off with the reasoning that men were bad luck around birthing. Truth was they just ran her nerves.

  “Now, who you think help Eve push out Cain and Abel?” Miss May Belle was heard to say, loud and often. “Surely wasn’t no Adam.”

  And folks got to saying that Miss May Belle hated men though that was not true—“I wouldn’t have no work if there weren’t men to keep women bothered”—because by and by she did let herself get bothered by a man, and that man was Rue’s daddy.

  * * *

  —

  Rue couldn’t know if what all she knew of her daddy was from real knowing or if it was from hearing the same story over and over ’til the story became as good or better than remembering.

  What she did know was this: what the network of raised scars looked like on the bare skin of his back, the puckered flesh ridged in ruined pink, and how the pattern of the long, thick lines had always made her think of the pattern in the palm of a hand. How the line that was the longest wormed its way from the bowl of his neck and traveled around to his back and down his spine. The ugliness of it never scared her before she understood that they were the lines from a long history of whippings and how that was what she could make out the most in the moonlight on those nights when he’d crawl up the bed on hands and knees, like some pleading nighttime creature, to bother Rue’s mama.

  “I didn’t have any wanting for him at the start,” Miss May Belle would say. But in Rue’s memory her mama always seemed to want him as if she was half a woman without him, would wait and wait for Sundays when visiting was allowed with the kind of shrugged-off longing kept by someone who near believed Sunday wouldn’t be coming that week.

  And in those Sunday nights Miss May Belle showed her wanting. Rue would wake to her little breath-catching sounds, like the reverse of weeping. Rue’s daddy crouched down over Rue’s mama, and on the fullest of full moon nights Rue could see the arc of her against him as if she were floating up off the bed into his body, and Rue could see the tense fist of his left hand baring all his weight against the mattress and the softness of his right hand as it went off by itself and burrowed in the cotton of Rue’s mama’s hair, or drifted down her cheek to rest a thumb in the dimple of her lip, or disappeared completely downward to fill up the little space left between them. And Rue could see the muscles shifting beneath the damaged skin of his back, like clouds stirring in the night sky, until she lost herself in sleep again.

  When Rue’s daddy died, Rue’s mama died, though his death was a grim and sudden surprise and hers was a slow consumption by way of vengeance, spread out one long year after her man’s death, easy as decaying.

  * * *

  —

  “You clean?” Rue’s mama was forever asking.

 
“Yes’m,” Rue would say and shake dry her left hand and then the right.

  When Rue’s daddy died Miss May Belle stopped wanting to touch the mamas, maybe suspicious of the warmth of their flesh or the roundness of their baby joy. Whichever it was, she certainly had a distrust for them, which started up one day from a bad taste she found in her mouth.

  “A curse been put onto me,” Rue’s mama said and she spat on the dusty ground, not even caring they were right outside of Marse Charles’s House. Rue looked down at the pink tinge to the white foam of her mama’s spittle and wondered if it were so.

  In the cabin they shared alone, a privilege to be sure, Rue’s mama began hanging fruit from the wood beams of the ceiling, any fruit she could get hands on, mainly apples, cut in half, their black seeds gleaming like eyes in their white flesh. Even mealy, even molded, they spun in lazy circles and drew lazy flies. And Rue could not know if her mama had run to her madness or if she was warding off something she didn’t want to name. The redder Miss May Belle’s spit got, the more fruit she’d find to let swing.

  If her mama was mad then Rue was mad too, at least in the eyes of other slavefolk. The rotting fruit smell clung to them both, trailing them, persistent as haints. It was beneath her mama’s fingernails, which she had let grow long as creature claws, for she would not cut them, afeared that somebody would gather up the nail clippings to use against her in conjure. Rue, herself, washed and washed, trying to get the smell out from under her own skin. Now they’d kneel down at the birthings together, but it was Rue who touched the mamas, who tugged the babies into being. Her mama’s guidance was as good as if Miss May Belle had her hand atop Rue’s, as if their touch was one touch.