CONJURE WOMEN

Afia Atakora

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Afia Atakora

Cover illustration by Eleanor Taylor

Afia Atakora asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008293918

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008293932

Version: 2020-02-11

Dedication

For Mum, the first storyteller I ever knew

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

Freedomtime

Slaverytime

Freedomtime

Slaverytime

Freedomtime

Surrender

Freedomtime

Slaverytime

Freedomtime

Slaverytime

Part Two

Freedomtime

Slaverytime

Freedomtime

Slaverytime

Freedomtime

Part Three

The Ravaging

Slaverytime

The Ravaging

Wartime

The Ravaging

Wartime

The Ravaging

Wartime

The Ravaging

Part Four

Promise

Wartime

Promise

Wartime

Promise

Wartime

Promise

Part Five

Exodus

Wartime

Exodus

Wartime

Exodus

In the Beginning …

Exodus

Surrender

Exodus

Gilead

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

FREEDOMTIME

1867

The black baby’s crying wormed and bloomed. It woke Rue by halves from her sleep so that through the first few strains of the sound she could not be sure when or where she was, but soon the feeble cry strengthened, like a desperate knocking at her front door, and she came all the way awake, and knew that she was needed, again.

She unwound herself from her thin linen sheet. If there were dreams, she’d lost them now that she’d stood up. There was only the crying, not so loud as it was strange, unsettling. She smoothed her nightmare hair and made ready her face. Stepped out from her cabin, barefooted.

At the center of the town, between the gathering of low cabins that sat close and humble, Rue could make out the collection of folks, like herself, who’d been drawn from their sleep by the haunting cry. Anxious, bedraggled, they emerged to suppose at that unearthly sound. It was a moonless night, the clouds colluding to block out the stars, and the crowd knitted itself tightly in a weave of black whisperings.

“You hearin’ that, Miss Rue?” one of them said when she approached.

What little light there was streamed down from behind the crowd, hiding them, illuminating Rue. She couldn’t make out their faces for the darkness but replied just the same. “Can’t help but hearin’. That some poor sufferin’ somethin’?”

As she walked, already she was holding herself straighter, prouder. It’s what they were expecting. No matter how weary she was feeling on the inside, she knew she had to walk easy, like she were floating, same as her mama used to do. Rue’s magic ought to be absolute, she knew, not come to them sleepwalking and unsure, or it wasn’t magic at all.

“Never heard nothin’ come close to that cry.”

“Ain’t no creature.”

“That’s one a’ Jonah’s li’l ’uns.”

Rue knew they suspected already what child it was. That wrong child, born backward in a caul, a bath of black.

Jonah himself was opening the front door of his cabin and stepping out of it, and Rue did hope that Jonah, calm and right-headed, had come to silence the rumors on his child. But there was no denying that beyond him was the origin of the crying. Even his tower-tall presence in the doorway couldn’t block out the menacing sound.

“Miss Rue,” he called, and his voice was thin like river silt. “You there, Miss Rue?”

Rue did ache for Jonah’s predicament. She answered, “I’m here.”

“Sarah’s thinkin’ the baby’s took sick. She’s wantin’ you to look him over.”

Rue stepped forward, took her time going up the few sunken-down steps to the little porch. She could feel all them eyes clinging to her back like hooks. At the top step Jonah, dark-skinned and strong and sure, reached down for her and took her elbow in his hand, guiding her. His callused palms were hard against her bared skin, rough the way only a man’s hand had cause to be, and as he moved her through the door, he gave the point of her elbow a slow rub, a caress away from their fastened eyes.

“Thank you, Miss Rue,” he said and showed her in.

The home was made up of two rooms, more than most folks could boast, though the thatch roof wept from some long-ago storm. Rue followed Jonah to the front room’s far corner where Sarah was knee bent, washing the children.

The tub was large enough to fit all three of Sarah and Jonah’s little ones, but their elder boy and girl stood outside of it, naked but dry, waiting to be washed. Their faces were damp and ruddy beneath their high-yellow skin, like they’d been crying but had exhausted that sorrow, left it to the baby to do the weeping for them.

Inside the tub the baby was on his back looking like a white island. The steam rose up from his skin in waves. He was crying, Lord, was he crying. Rue heard in it a lost cry, and it was a call she felt compelled to answer, if not with comfort then with a mournful cry of her own. In the water beside the baby a chipped cup bobbed along the ripples created by his movements. It hit the walls of the tub out of time with the high, piercing whine that had snaked its way into Rue’s dreaming.

When she leaned forward, the baby stilled his squall. He opened his eyes as if to look upon her, revealed the oil-slick black irises that had heralded his strangeness, that had prompted the name Rue had given him at his birth: Black-Eyed Bean.

Rue said to Sarah of the baby’s eyes, “They ain’t changed.” She spoke it low enough to be out of Jonah’s hearing.

“No, they ain’t,” Sarah said, in just the same whisper. “He ain’t changed.”

There was no magic in birthing. No conjure, neither. The birth of Black-Eyed Bean had occurred one year back. Had begun no different than any other birth that Rue had known, and she had known many.

Rue just walked the women. That was it. All it took in the birthing room was good sense, the good sense that a thing hanging ought to fall, the way swollen apples brought their branches low before the apples plopped down to the ground. Shouldn’t it be the same with a baby? Let them hang low in the mama when it was time to fall, the mama being the branch near snapping.

Since the end of slaverytime, Rue had birthed every last child in that town. She knew their mamas and their daddies, too, for she was allowed into sickbeds for healing and into birthing beds alike, privy to the intimate corners of joy and suffering, and through that incidental intimacy she had come to know every whisper that was born from every lip, passed on to every ear. She knew what folks said about each other, and Lord, she knew what they said about her.

What folks said about Sarah, Jonah’s wife, Bean’s mama, was that she was beautiful, and it was so. She was a fiery woman, petite as an ember but just as dangerous, with skin light as wheat. Sarah was one of those who had sung when she walked the birth walk, had done so the two births before this, sung and moaned and sung right up to the moment that her bigger than big babies came on out to the world. Sarah had sung while she was heavy with Bean, a sonorous song with no words but so much soul. Her one hand gripped on too tight to Rue’s while the other hand beat out the tune she was singing against her sweat-slicked thigh. It was when Sarah’s squeezing got too tight, the veins standing up like blue rivers in her high-yellow hand, that Rue started her usual worrying.

Truth was Rue didn’t want nothing to do with any of that mess, the moan-singing mamas or the anxious daddies—when there were daddies—wringing their hats and their hands outside the door, or the wet and wailing babies, or, worst of all, the babies that came into the world just quiet, gone already before they ever lived, just lost promises with arms and legs and eyes for nothing. Why would she want to meddle in all of that?

As she laid Sarah down Rue had begun to think of how it all could go wrong, and if it did, what was she to do? Because just as easy as folks’ praise came, it could turn to hating. Magic and faith were fickle. Life and living were fickle. And didn’t Rue know that as well as anyone?

Still, when the time came for bearing down—the women praying with their cussing and cussing with their praying—it was in the way they looked up at her, weepy eyes filled with worship, that kept her door open. Like apples, babies came in seasons, and Rue would always tell herself in the lull, Not next year. Next year I be done.

Bean had been born in one such lull, Sarah being the fertile kind. The “Her man gotta do no more than look at her” kind, like Rue’s mama used to say of the women who could show up twice in a year with their bellies making tents of their dresses.

It was easy going year after year with Sarah. She was still young, twenty-and-some, and already she’d made two babies who had been born after no more than the usual struggle. Still she stayed smooth and sweet, and her breasts remained like two fat fruits just shy of ripe.

“He’s a’comin’,” Rue had said, laying her open palm on Sarah’s restless belly. How Rue knew even before the crown of him started pushing through that Bean would be a boy she could not account for, not in words. There was just her knowing.

Rue had rolled her rough-hewn sleeves on up—just about everything she wore and ate and owned was a gift from those mamas who had no other way to pay—and she had knelt the way she had knelt near a hundred times now, though her knees did ache for it despite her youth. Rue was nearabouts twenty also if her old master’s accounting was to be believed, not much younger than Sarah, though every day Rue felt more worn, like she were living out each one of her years double, aging out of time.

They’d grown up together, true, through slaverytime, wartime, freedomtime, but Sarah had kept herself young, and even here, at her most vulnerable hour, the sweat sitting on her skin had the audacity to glisten. In every way they were opposites—that was clear enough as Rue laid her thick dark fingers on Sarah’s thin thighs and parted them.

“Lord. Miss Rue.” Sarah sighed, praying to them both.

Rue had to love and hate equally being called Miss. She was every time reminded that she’d earned the title—and the respect of it—only after her own mama’s dying.

Rue’s mama, called Miss May Belle, had gotten the kind of sickness that could not be seen and for that reason could not be cured. Its origins were in heartache for her man, Rue’s daddy, who some said ran himself crazy for lust of a white woman.

Well, let folks have their stories. The only truth was he’d been hanged, strung from a tree just outside the town, his dangling toes making circles in the dirt as his body spun on the rope. And Rue had hardly known him.

She’d been under Miss May Belle’s tutelage the whole of her life. From her Rue had learned one true thing, that all birthing was performance. Mamas were made to believe that a bit of pepper by their bed would ward off evil spirits, but it was only meant to cause them to sneeze if what was required was a good last push to get the baby out. Rue learned to tell women to blow into a bottle or to chew on some chicory or to squat over a pot of boiling water to make their babies strong, to make the birthing easy, to protect them in that most crucial hour.

Bean’s mama was easy. Birthing came as natural to Sarah as it did to animals who need only to pause and squat and be off again.

Rue knew that she ought to be glad of that, but she wasn’t. Sarah was silk, free to slip from one type of wanting to another. Rue was rough, coarse linen, starched in her life. Freedom had come after the war for all black folks. All excepting Rue, she felt, for she was born to healing and stuck to it for life. And stuck to this place. Her own doing that, a secret curse of her own making.

“Lord Jesus,” Sarah had crooned as she’d labored. She’d gripped the bedsheets near to ripping. “Get me through this ’un. I swear, Miss Rue, this here’s my last.”

Rue knew sure as she knew the sun would rise that Sarah would come up pregnant again soon enough. Weren’t men drawn to her like flies to shit?

And it was on that thought, potent as a curse, that she realized something between Sarah’s legs was going wrong.

Rue nearly drew away in shock. A black mass came out, all in a forceful gush. The coal-dark sack squirmed in Rue’s hands. The blood that surrounded it was a red made more ominous by the darkness it covered. Through that black sheath Rue could make out the small surprise of a pale face, the mouth working soundlessly, nothing like suckling but more like an old man chewing on the words of a curse.

It wasn’t unusual for babies to come still wearing the veil. “It means good luck,” Rue would be quick to tell the mamas when they saw the extra skin wrapped around their baby’s heads, looking as final as a shroud. In a moment she could wipe it away, and the healthy wail would fight back the unsaid fright in the mama’s eyes that from her womb had come something unexpected, something unnatural.

Bean made Rue’s heart jump in absolute horror of him. She felt then that she knew him for what he was, a secret retribution for a long-ago crime, the punishment she had been dreading.

He was fighting, his arms moving inside that black wrapping like he was swimming, or more like drowning. She had never seen a baby so fully encased in the caul.

Rue forced herself to draw up the scissors she’d heated in preparation to cut the cord; she held them near the baby’s mouth. Sarah had not moved at all from her position braced against the sheets.

“He come dead?” Sarah said, straining to hear the telltale cry.

Rue might’ve said yes. The black thing curling and quivering in her palms stayed gasping. It could not break through the veil without her intervention. She might’ve left it to struggle or smother in its own black sheet.

“Oh, Miss Rue,” Sarah started moaning, squinting her eyes hard to get a look at the bundle. “Don’t say he dead.”

A snip. That’s all it took, and Rue did it. A snip beneath the little nose and then slowly, like peeling back the skin of a strange fruit, she shucked Bean of his dark veil and revealed him to the world. He began, finally, to cry.

“He alright,” Rue heard herself saying. But was he? Was she?

Divested now of the veil that was like his second skin, his true coloring showed, lighter even than his mama was. There was no warmth to the color, only a pallid white. The baby’s skin was peculiar dry too, near scaled, dry as though no loving had ever touched him. Rue had the urge to do more than rub him the way she did to warm life into all the new babies. She had, instead, the urge to scrub the strange skin clean off.

The eyes were the next shock, for when they blinked open they were full black, edged thinly in egg-boil white. The baby’s eyes were the same glossy black as the veil-like husk that had held him. He rolled them slow and looked up at Rue as if he could see clearly through to every thought she had in her head.

When she’d sucked the blood from his nose and had him clean as she could get him she tied off the cord. Her practiced hands shook with the force of her nerves as she hurried to lay this strange baby by his mama’s side and wipe off the stain he’d left on her hands.

Sarah looked at the child. She did not move to give him her breast. Instead she pulled the dirtied sheets around herself, and when Rue came to press on the stretched skin of her belly to check that nothing had been left in the womb, Sarah would not let her near. She wanted only to stare at her baby, not with that new-mama affection but in the very same way you’d stare at a snake you’d woken up to find coiled beside you in your bed.

“He’s a big ’un,” Rue said, to say something.

“Them eyes?”

“Like little black-eyed beans, ain’t they?” Rue said. She wished she could snap back those words soon as they left her lips. She should have pretended that everything was as it ought to be. Her mama, Miss May Belle, had she been living, might have had the words of reassurance, might have made the baby a miracle, for she had that way about her that Rue had never learned or inherited.

Sarah still would not take the baby up. His crying grew more shrill in the silence, like an accusation, and Rue felt she had to go on talking.

“Folks says babies born under the veil got the gift a’ the Sight,” Rue said. It was meant to be a comfort. It came out sounding grim as a burden. Rue found that she pitied that babe if it were true, for here he was not a clock’s tick old and already he had to bear the whole knowledge of the world.

Rue had stripped the sheets, stepped out of the cabin without saying any more. There was Jonah, the daddy, waiting. He’d been keeping himself busy chopping more firewood than the hot summer day rightly called for, and when he saw Rue step out, he stopped mid-swing and smiled.

She studied him, taking in his sun-darkened skin and his eyes that were the same easy brown as the bark he was cutting. He bore no resemblance to his son. His son bore no resemblance to any living thing she had ever seen.

When Rue stepped forward, the bloodied birthing sheets bundled in her arms, Jonah looked up at her with trepidation. He could not lend voice to the question that needed asking.

Rue spoke to spare him the effort: “You got yo’self a thrivin’ baby boy.”

His sweat-shining face broke out into a grin and before he could ask her anything more, she handed him the bundle of sheets that contained the damning black caul, bloody and shapeless, in its center. She knew even if he got a look at it, he wouldn’t understand it. Men could not make sense of women’s work.

“What do I do with all a’ this?”

“Burn it,” she said, telling him what he was needing to hear. “Burn it for luck.”

SLAVERYTIME

1854

Miss May Belle had used to turn coin on hoodooing. As a slave woman she’d made her name and her money by crafting curses. More profit to be made in curses than in her work mixing healing tinctures. More praise to be found in revenge than in birthing babies.

In slaverytime a white overseer had his whip and a white patrolman had his hounds and a white speculator had his auction block and your white master had your name on a deed of sale somewhere in his House, or so he claimed. But those things were afflictions for the battered-burnt-bruised body only. Curses were for the sin-sick soul and made most terrifying because of it.

“Hoodoo,” Miss May Belle used to say, “is black folks’ currency.”

She had admitted only once, to Rue, in confidence: “The thing about curses is that you can know who you’ve wronged the most by who you fear has the notion to curse you.”

Black neighbors would whisper against black neighbors, sure, but by and by a white man would come from afar having heard of Miss May Belle’s conjure, asking for cure of some affliction set upon him by an insolent slave, or even by his own white wife. Other slavefolk got hired out for their washing, for their carpentering, for their fine greasy cooking. Miss May Belle was hired for her hoodooing.

So it was that Big Sylvia, the cook of the plantation House, came to the slave cabin where Miss May Belle and her daughter lived alone, to ask after a curse.

Rue saw her coming from afar. The diminutive house slave had a crooked walk on bowed little legs, and Rue stood tiptoed in the cabin’s one window, watched as the cook came down the dust road at dusk, determination in her little steps but a look like fear on her face, as she headed to the healing woman’s house. Beyond Big Sylvia, Rue could see from where she’d come. Marse Charles’s white-pillared House blazed big and hazy opposite the setting sun.

“Come away from there, Rue-baby,” Miss May Belle said, and Rue obeyed her mama. “Cook’s comin’ to ask after hoodoo. Now, you know that ain’t nothin’ that a child needs to hear ’bout.”

How Miss May Belle knew before Big Sylvia’s knock what the matter was Rue could not rightly say. But she tucked herself in the corner of their one-room cabin, balled herself small between the stove and the bedpost, and pretended at not listening.

Miss May Belle creaked the door open, allowed their visitor in.

“I ain’t been workin’ in the kitchen for some months now,” Big Sylvia complained. She sat across the supper table from Miss May Belle and held out her right hand. It was bundled up covering a deep cut that some weeks back had near took away her fingers.

Rue’s mama undid the bandages, revealed the hideous slash from finger to wrist. It was deep, angry, and oozing. Big Sylvia’s dark skin and eyes were shining with a fever she couldn’t kick. “It won’t never heal ’cause somebody’s put a fix on me.”

“Who you think done it?”

“Who else? That woman. Airey. She the one that’s took up cookin’ in my place. She’s been schemin’ after it for years tryna get herself a place in the House.”

Fact was that Airey’s mama had been the cook when Marse Charles had been a child, back when the plantation had been all but a few rows of hopeful seedlings. By all accounts Airey’s mama hadn’t been all that good of a cook neither, but there was no taking a white man from his auntie nostalgia. Airey had believed that because of her mama she was owed the kitchen, with a lineage as good as a lordship, but Big Sylvia had been bought special with commendations for her cooking. Airey had taken after her field-hand daddy instead, a sharp beauty but mule-strong, bred with hands for picking.

“Now I’m left to do the washin’, even now I’m one-handed, mind,” Big Sylvia said, “and Airey, she at the oven, got Marse Charles smackin’ his lips after every meal, thinkin’ he gon’ get rid a’ poor ol’ Sylvia, maybe sell me next time the prospector come ’round, keep Airey on.”

Miss May Belle tutted. She shut her eyes as if consorting with herself, let Big Sylvia stand there panting for a long while, working herself up into a deeper fury the more she thought on the unfairness.

“You best be sure now,” Miss May Belle finally said. She rebandaged Big Sylvia’s hand good and tight.

Big Sylvia nodded in earnest. “It was her face I saw when my hand slipped and the knife cut me. Yes, I saw her face plain. She tol’ me I was to die. Now I see her in my sleep every night. She set by the foot of my bed with the devil on her left side stabbin’ at my hand.”

To undo Airey’s magicking Rue’s mama advised that Big Sylvia circle her own bed with a sprinkle of salt, nightly. This Big Sylvia swore to do.

“But, Miss May Belle, how am I to get my place back?”

“You’ll needa take somethin’ a’ hers. A piece a’ her hair like. When you fetch it, come back to me on Friday.”

Big Sylvia repeated her thanks over and over. Her rewrapped hand was thick and clumsy with the new bandaging, and she struggled at the pocket of her apron ’til she produced a silver dollar with the promise of more coin to be had come Friday.

“I’d bring you them good ashcakes a’ mine too, but I can’t cook nothin’.”

Rue watched her mama slip the coin easy into her own pocket.

“We’ll see to it that you back in yo’ rightful place, by the Lord’s grace,” Miss May Belle promised.

Rue knew that her mama, thin as she was, did have a love for Sylvia’s ashcakes.

On Sunday her mama picked nits from her daddy’s hair and Rue pretended to be asleep. Half days were for praying and for visiting, the one day that Miss May Belle saw her man. He journeyed from the neighboring plantation, a trip that took him ’til nightfall, and Rue would struggle to stay awake to see her daddy arrive in the doorway and greet her mama. From the bed, Rue strained to watch them, but she could see only their shadows twist and join, stretched out black and big on the dirt floor.

Rue fought off sleep but she did every now and again succumb, and their hushed, soothing voices—her daddy’s as hard as timber, her mama’s as soft as pulp—were sometimes things of her dreams. Her daddy sat on the floor between her mama’s bare thighs, his head pushing up her dress, his lips kissing healed-up grazes on her kneecaps, and her mama sat in the chair above, cussing softly at tangles.

When next Rue jerked herself awake, her daddy had the doll baby in his hand. He was turning it around in his thick fingers. He was displeased; she could tell by the lines etching themselves deep in his forehead.

“It look like her,” he conceded.

Indeed, the doll baby Miss May Belle had made of blackened oilcloth and stuffed with straw, though crude, resembled Airey completely. She’d embroidered a face even, wide-set eyes and a line of red stitching for Airey’s thin, proud mouth. The doll wore spare calico and the type of red kerchief Airey often favored. But the most prominent detail was the mismatched black paint of the legs where Airey was known to have a pattern of birthmarks that freckled in circles black and white up to her thighs, varying smatterings where her skin lacked color, where she seemed almost to be white in unplanned for places great and small. The real live Airey kept the marks hid the great majority of the time, but everybody knew her to be proud on them; she’d hike up her skirt and show them off sometimes in the swirl of her dancing. They were there on the doll hid beneath the blue calico rag dress, beneath the white napkin, an approximation of the kitchen apron Big Sylvia coveted. Miss May Belle had made that miniature live.

“It’s a sinful thing to be messin’ with,” Rue’s daddy warned.

Rue watched her mama pause in her brushing. She kissed the very top of her man’s head, left her lips there when she answered. “I won’t hurt her none.”

Rue’s daddy set the doll down on the floor gentle, like he feared it might start living.

“What is it you mean to buy with all them silver coins?” she heard him ask.

Rue, dozing, might have dreamed the answer her mama gave her daddy: “You.”

Friday came, wicked with rain, and Rue, sent to beg a needle off the seamstress, came back to the cabin wet and cold to find her mama and Big Sylvia, heads bent and conspiring. Beneath the doll’s red kerchief Miss May Belle worked in quick, neat stitches to sew down the tuft of thick black hair Big Sylvia had stolen from Airey’s comb.

“Didn’t hardly think you’d get it,” Miss May Belle said of the hair.

“Weren’t easy. Had to wait ’til Sunday, ’til she’d gone visitin’ that Charlie.”

“They still courtin’?” Miss May Belle asked, though she surely knew—didn’t she know everything?

“They fixin’ to get proper married, iff’n Marse Charles will ’llow for it. And he surely will as he’s like to get from ’em good strong babies.”

Miss May Belle said nothing. Moved or not by talk of sweethearts, she waited patient as Big Sylvia drew two more silver coins from out of her apron pocket. Only then did Miss May Belle hand her the doll.

Big Sylvia’s eyes near gleamed. “What do I do?”

“Scratch off a li’l a’ the black paint from the arms of the doll baby every mornin’. Not too much now, but slowly, and by and by you’ll get what you’re wantin’.”

Rue wished for her own magic and, failing that, wished for coin. She had no use for money, had no sense of what she might or might not buy, but she wanted to feel them, as though the action of slipping her hands across the cool, rare bits of silver, carved with regal fine-boned faces, could elicit a kind of magic in and of itself.

She had been spellbound, at that small age, by the curious mystery of white faces. She saw so few, save the master and his sons, more rarely his wife. Rue was acquainted with only one white face in particular—Varina, Marse Charles’s red-haired, freckle-spotted daughter.

They were both of them six years old, of an age because the master made it so. Varina’s birth was the only clear bright star around which the younger slave children might revolve—you were born after or before the master’s daughter, thereabouts. Rue could hitch her birth in the same season as Varina’s and so they oft played together, kicking up dust in that one precious hour of their mutual freedom, between dusk and candlelight. Varina wasn’t allowed to play at any other time, for the Missus was afeared that her daughter would catch color, spoil away her milk-skim skin.

Rue spent her own days in running favors, not much use in the field or the House and not yet as knowledged as her mama would someday make her. The best use for Rue then was to dash about with a basket, a bucket, or a broom, getting switched on her behind by older folks who complained she was too slow no matter how fast she ran. She was often underfoot. She was often forgotten.

Rue would sometimes look up at the House and spy Varina at the third-story nursery window, knew her for a white figure behind a whiter curtain, looking down. Did she appear wistful? Rue could not truly tell, not from that distance, not with only her hand over her eyes to shade out the midday sun. But it was as though Varina was looking out at her as well, with a sort of wanting, and Rue got to figuring if she ever had magic or money, either, she’d make it so the two of them could play and laugh together in the full sunlight as much as they could stand.

It seemed to Rue that Miss May Belle never had to fetch her coins but could will them into existence, suddenly flipping a flash of silver between her fingers in trade for something or other she was wanting. But where the source was was anybody’s imagining.

Rue watched as her mama slipped her daddy one such coin of a Sunday. She slid it clear across the table over knot holes and scratches and set it in front of her man, who did not take it.

“Nah,” he said.

Miss May Belle was sore. “Why?”

“That’s conjure money.”

“Money is money is money,” she said and he said nothing and the coin gleamed between them.

“Or is it ’cause it’s woman’s money?” Miss May Belle took it back and Rue tried to watch where it went but missed that too, an illusionist’s trick between her mama’s delicate fingers.

Rue looked and looked but she did not find the coins, not in the way she thought she would at least. One day, after the birth of the Airey doll baby that Big Sylvia had bought, Airey herself came to Miss May Belle to ask after a bit of hoodooing. She came upon them at the river where the water was swelled from a season turned rainy before its time.

Rue’s mama said, “I been expecting you to come on round.”

Miss May Belle was not the type interested in making enemies. That was the reason she only advised on how to make a trick, but she never did dispel it with her own two hands. She oft said, The hunter in settin’ his own trap’ll sometimes spring it on himself, which was true, of course—they were forever bandaging up men fool enough to go catching rabbits in the dark of night.

Rue looked over their visitor. Airey was truly pretty, made all of thick bones and fine features, such an amalgamation of two kinds of beauty that she could be admired from one direction and feared from another. But now in person it was clear to see just what Miss May Belle’s magicking had done: The spangled pattern of white skin that had once been on her legs alone had begun to spread up her arms and to the sides of her neck and along her jaw and nose; a round white swathe sickled around her eye.

If Miss May Belle was shocked by what she’d wrought, she didn’t show it, and Airey for her part didn’t look vengeful. She came to sit by them at the river’s edge, and the reflection of her skin shimmering in the water seemed to make her look like the night sky dotted with stars, beautiful.

“I ill-wished Big Sylvia. I wanted her place in the kitchen,” Airey began. “I been up all night with the regret. I had the notion that life would be easier for me in the House, but it ain’t easier. No, life just ain’t easy nowhere. That’s why I come to see you.”

Miss May Belle shook her head. “No more conjure,” she said. “Y’all settle things between yo’selves. I’ll tell Big Sylvia to be rid of the doll and she’ll do it if I tell her to.”

“Big Sylvia will get her place back I reckon.” Airey held up her hands, and Rue saw that the affliction had taken over her wrists and her knuckles. The thumb of one finger looked as though the black had been sucked clean off the skin. “Missus won’t let me cook her food no longer, won’t let me touch it, thinkin’ this is a sign of some cursedness. Marse Charles’ll listen to her, just to quit her from her naggin’. He’s like to sell me away the next time he’s able.”

“You wantin’ a charm to prevent it?” Miss May Belle asked.

“No’m. I’m wanting a charm to help me run away.”

Miss May Belle looked to Rue beside her and Rue knew the look, the get-gone look. This she was good at, becoming invisible on her mama’s whim. She strode over to where the river started thinning toward the creek and let her mama think that she wasn’t listening.

“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 there, 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 keep 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.

Trees remember, Rue’s mama would say, and so it was. The trees behind the House remembered the war and its bitter end, that southward march of the Yankee soldiers and the destruction that was part of their style of victory.

Folks didn’t like to come out this far, not anymore. Cursed, they called it. Word was that Miss May Belle had hoodooed the whole of those woods, laid a curse with the strength of her love for her man and her sorrow at his dying, hanged from these very trees. For wasn’t it in those same woods that they’d hanged Miss May Belle’s man, lynched him and left him to swing? Miss May Belle’s grief had risen there like a flood. Ever since, their used-to-be plantation had existed in isolation, like something locked away and forgotten by time. Nobody came into their town unmolested, folks said, and nobody came out.

If you went looting, you were like to disturb the dead, wake the ghost of Marse Charles, or worse, call up the jealous ghost of Varina, his one redheaded daughter and Rue’s old playmate. Beautiful and scorned, they said of Varina, and robbed of her prime, she made a vengeful haint. Rue alone was not afeard—not of Varina, not of her spirit neither.

All that remained was dead earth, then dirt, then wild grass, peeking up from the ground in knots, and it was from this earth that Rue found her plunder, the herbs she used for healing.

She sat down heavy amongst the weeds as though she were one herself. She felt awful weary, but there was solace in the mud, in the dew, in the aroma the earth made when it sighed. Rue made a bowl of her skirt and let the plants she picked puddle in her lap: feverfew for tired blood, stems and leaves and seed of boneset, longwood chips to be mixed with brandy, berries of pokeweed to soothe breasts grown sore and stretched, and the head of a daisy, which she simply found pretty and stuck, on a whim, into the coils of her hair.

There was a clearing where the grass didn’t grow, and just past that was the only thing that stood tall in that Eden, save for the trees: a shed that had somehow kept all its four walls and the idea of a roof.

There, sat up with her back against the trunk of a tree, Rue stopped to think about Jonah, particularly his passing touch on her arm. She tried, with some difficulty, to remember the feeling of his fingers when he’d guided her into his house.

They had been rough when they’d closed on her elbow, as rough as the bark of a tree, and Rue loved his callouses, knew they were thick and well-earned. He’d go find work, when he could, on distant coastal islands, unloading at the docks, or handfishing in rivers. He’d be gone for long stretches of months when it was the season for it, and Rue longed after him when he was away, tried to imagine him there, on the banks of some other river, some river she could not know.

Maybe Rue could feel sorry for Jonah, this man with the calloused hands, or maybe she could feel what Sarah felt when he finally came home, for his woman must have felt some relief, and surely some desire. And thinking this, Rue ran her own hand up along the inside of her thigh. Her fingertips were rough from her work, certainly, but not quite so rough as a man’s. There was a swell in her of sharper loneliness, but also of satisfaction, because wasn’t she in her place, her conquered ground? And as she moved inside herself, all her roots and flowers scattered and fell, for a moment forgotten and reunited with the earth.

SLAVERYTIME

Folks said Rue’s mama knew everything the foxes knew. Weren’t they her eyes in the woods? Her familiars. How else to explain the uncanny way she figured out everything and everybody’s business all about the plantation?

The feral foxes owed their life to Miss May Belle as if she was their own mama, for word was they were not foxes at all but the departed souls of used-to-be human beings, and Miss May Belle had given the dead a kind of immortality by hiding them at the edge of Marse Charles’s land. In return they were her sharp eyes, her keen ears. Her survival.

Rue could not have said one way or another how far reaching Miss May Belle’s hoodoo reigned. To Rue her mama was always a mystery; in all things great and small, she showed her magic as mamas do, with their knowing. Miss May Belle had a way of anticipating what trouble Rue would find herself in before Rue had even devised the trouble itself.

Trouble usually meant Varina, who often rebelled against her white girlhood and needed always an accomplice to witness her rebellion. That long last summer before the war came upon them, while the white adults fretted and the black adults labored, Varina ran half wild and took Rue running with her.

One particular high noon, they would make their way, without even having to agree upon it aloud, to their usual place by the creek. They ran despite the weight of the heat, trying to catch the wind with their speed; and running behind her on the narrow path, Rue had the pleasure of watching a number of Varina’s ribbons come streaming off her curls and getting tangled up in high branches.

Varina reached the shed first and declared herself the winner in a race Rue hadn’t known they were having. Then Varina, her cheeks still spotted pink, lay herself down on the grass and in one inelegant swoop divested herself of her calico dress and tugged her lace bloomers down to her ankles so that she sat in only her frilled white chemise, bare-bottomed and unashamed.

She said, “This time you can be Miss May Belle.”

They had many fights about this very thing, who got to be the mama and who got to be the healing woman, so that most of their games ended in tears, and for a moment Rue hesitated, wondering what Varina was wanting from her to be so suddenly kind, allowing her to be Miss May Belle.

Before her mind could change, Rue put her hands on Varina’s pale legs, examining as she had watched her mama examine, gently parting the skin between Varina’s legs, which at first was smooth but prickled up to gooseflesh at her touch. Varina leaned back on her elbows and watched Rue as she did this, not closing her eyes as Rue sometimes did when she was pretending to be the mama. Instead Varina was following Rue’s every movement with those blue eyes, which had turned a dull, still-water color in the shade.

“It ain’t time yet,” Rue said and took her fingers away.

“It is time,” Varina spread her legs wider, which was not how the game was meant to be played. The mama was meant to just lie there and wait.

Rue thought about arguing this; she was the one who had taught Varina the game and so best knew the rules. She was the one whose mama was magic.

“It’s time,” Rue agreed instead, placing both of her hands on Varina’s mound, drawing her open with her thumbs.

“It’s a big ’un,” Rue proclaimed, imagining a baby with black skin and red, red hair.

“I’m so very happy,” said Varina.

“What you gon’ name him?”

“It ain’t a him.” When Varina was the mama all of her babies were girls, and Rue had explained again and again that it was not the mama that got to pick.

“It’s a boy,” Rue insisted.

Varina growled, or so Rue thought, the sound seemed so loud in her ear. Then she heard grass and twigs crunching underfoot and she pulled away as quick as she could, certain Varina’s nurse had come over from the House and was about to catch them at something she would not like to see.

Varina crawled on hands and knees through the grass to reach out for her discarded dress, and so when the fox appeared she froze like that, her hand partway out in front of her as though she might ward him off.

The fox would be the silver of ash forever in Rue’s memory, though looking back she figured it had to have been gray. It came all the way out to them, straight into the clearing as though to get a better look at the little girls, one black, one white, playing together in the high grass. Rue could not find her voice to scream, but she didn’t need it. The fox stopped only to cock its head at them, then it turned its bushy tail and bounded away into the thick dark of the woods.

Miss May Belle must’ve gotten her whispers from a fox because come Saturday she beat Rue with the branch of a birch tree.

What Rue remembered more than the pain of the beating was the pain afterward when her mama left her to cry in the dirt of their floor and the pain the next day when they stood in the upper gallery of the church during the service.

The Protestant minister was a white man that Rue had never seen before and could not see now from where she stood amongst the other slaves on the second-story platform in the very back of the church. Rue’s view instead was of backs of knees, hems of skirts, peaks of legs stockinged despite the heat to hide fatty veins. Through the gaps of the wooden slats the white folks below were a blur of somber colors made blurrier by the sweat that dripped down Rue’s forehead and stung at her already teary eyes, and every time any of the tightly packed black folks around her moved or sighed, itched or coughed, the wooden gallery would moan like it was about to give up.

Any other time to be brought to church would have felt like a treat, to feel the close press of those in the quarter that only ever thought of her as Miss May Belle’s girl and to feel like one of them.

She dared to look up every now and then and caught sight of her mama looking tired, restless; she was not listening to that fly-buzz sermon. A sheen of sweat was in the bow of her upper lip, and beneath her one eye was a heavy purple bruise that spread down her cheek and sunk to yellow like the sky of a sunset. Someone had hit Miss May Belle and so Miss May Belle had hit her. That’s all Rue believed to be true, but she couldn’t think on the meaning of all that.

After the sermon they had to wait for the white folks to leave the church in a slow, repentant tide before it was proper for them to descend from the upper gallery one by one on the narrow stair. Rue and her mama were the last ones down. Miss May Belle pulled her along behind her, her hand holding on so firm that Rue could feel her mama’s fingers on the shifting bones of her wrists. That shackling squeeze was as good a way as any for Rue to know that she was still in trouble, though for what she could not figure. Out through the double doors of the dim church they went, where, for a moment, Rue was so dazzled by the sudden bright afternoon that she could sense nothing but the heft of the heat and the sweetness of a voice that was singing.

It was Sarah that was singing. She stood in the very center of everyone, a matchstick of a little girl, small but made large by her inhibition, all eyes on her. The crowd hummed low in their throats for her but Rue could tell Sarah didn’t need them, she could have found the tune herself. She was the tune.

“Thank ya’, Marse Jesus,” Sarah would sing and the crowd would mumble their encouragement, “Yessuh, thank ’im, Lord Jesus.”

Rue’s mama pulled her away with two hands heavy on her shoulder that set the rawness of her back to screaming.

Miss May Belle turned her around, and when she did Rue saw that her mama’s hands were stained bright red.

“You bleedin’, Mama,” Rue said but her voice was empty of panic. It seemed to come from far away.

“Fool child, you the one bleedin’,” Rue’s mama said.

She could see Varina coming down from the House to meet them, and in her hands she held new, gleaming marbles. They looked cool, like ice, and Rue longed to touch them, but her mama was pulling her away.

“I wanna play with Miss Varina,” Rue heard herself saying over and over. She was crying in her mama’s arms, beating at her, kicking at her, sobbing. “I wanna play with Miss Varina.”

Rue cried until she couldn’t cry anymore and then she slept.

For a while she kept her eyes closed, just to feel. She was awake but not ready to wake up, and the pressure of her mama’s hands on her bare back was a wonderful pleasure after all the pain that seemed to have been centered there. The herbs Miss May Belle used were sweet but strong and when she lay them, warm and wet, on the vertical cuts on Rue’s back, what ought to have stung felt soothing, the reverse of a lashing.

Rue might have dozed back into sleep. She was thinking of a game of marbles that she was winning when she heard the rumble of her daddy’s voice.

“What’s all this now?”

Rue felt her mama pull away from her as a vanishing of her warmth. She peeked open one eye. Her father stood in the doorway of the cabin. He held a pass in his hand that was becoming crumpled in the fist he was steadily making. Rue’s mama took the paper from him, set it down on a chair. She reached up to kiss him, and he let her for a while before he pushed her firmly away.

He touched the swelling colors on her face. “Who done this?”

Rue’s mama touched the scar that showed beneath his collar and wrapped around to the front of his neck. “Who done this?” she said. She touched a scar that worked its way up behind his ear. “Who done this?”

He pushed away her hands.

Rue’s mama said, “I caught Missus in a mood and with her ring on, is all. She remindin’ me of my place.”

“She puttin’ you back in yo’ place is what she doin’. She fear you know too much.”

Rue’s mama smiled, her swollen face stretched to a new pattern. “I do know too much.”

Her daddy shook his head. “And the girl?”

Here Rue’s mama was quiet for a long while. “I did it myself. I’d sooner I do it myself than let anyone else do it. But I gotta make a show of it, don’t I, so they know I’m raisin’ her up right. It’s gotta show.”

“Why?”

“She’s gettin’ to like that Miss Varina too well.”

Rue’s daddy sat heavy on the end of the bed, and as Rue dipped toward him she closed her eyes down to the tiniest crack. He put his head in his hands, rubbed his fingers along the sharp edges of his hair. They made the sound Rue knew cats’ fur made rubbed wrong.

“We some kind of family, ain’t we,” he said softly. Rue could feel him looking at her, though she’d shut her eyes at the first shocking vibration of his voice. “I guess she mine.”

“Ain’t no question.”

“We got the same birthmark now,” he said, touching Rue’s back, and Rue near jumped out of herself when she felt his fingers just above the highest of her wounds. But like her mama’s healing, his hands didn’t hurt her. They were hard but kind, rough but warm.

“Don’t you worry, baby girl.” He was speaking to her in near a whisper. “I know better’n anybody. These’ll harden so’s the next time and the next time they beat you it won’t hurt quite so bad.”

Rue didn’t want there to be a next time, but she felt something in his words and in his touch as though he was putting a kinship into her wounds, and a promise.

FREEDOMTIME

There was still the heat of the prior night’s impulsiveness coursing through her when Rue forced herself to rise from her bed. Unrest thrummed in her body like drink, and she felt she could still hear the echo of Bean’s crying.

She plucked the daisy from her hair, put on her sun hat, gathered a few necessities in a basket, and went calling on Ma Doe.

The day was cool as the night had been cool, and Rue had to keep one hand on the straw brim of her hat so as not to be caught unawares by the sudden whistles of wind. At first, she was not much disturbed when she encountered no one on her walk. It was midday. The men would be out in the fields; the women would be just now preparing their families’ suppers.

The old slave quarters had been plotted, boldly, in the shape of a crucifix. Rue’s cabin sat at the lowermost point of that cross and so she walked the whole of the empty dirt path, past all the quiet homes. Suddenly, she was struck with the absence of everyone, a swelling goneness.

Ma Doe was there when Rue stomped up to her door, and at her feet were two small children, just past toddling age.

“Afternoon, Miss Rue,” Ma Doe said.

Rue drew off her hat and looked around. Long as Rue had known her, Ma Doe’s slow gait was trailed by nine or ten children, all of them pickaninnies. In the height of slaverytime Ma Doe had brought up the master’s four children too, Marse Charles’s three sons and Varina. In rearing them, Ma Doe was known to be twice as fierce as any white governess. Since then she’d become something of a teacher, made a kind of freedfolk school right there in her home where the children scratched their letters into the dirt. Rue knew them to be letters but what they meant she could not say.

“Where’s everybody got to?”

“That how you ought to greet me?” Ma Doe said. Rue shushed the woman by kissing her on her leathery cheek.

“What have you got for me, baby?” She locked eyes onto the basket Rue had tucked under her arm.

Rue had known that the charm she’d brought would offer luck, of a kind. It was a packet of leather tied to the end of a coarse string, and it gave off an awful stink as Rue snaked it from her basket. In the crude pouch she had stuffed asafetida powder, as much as she could manage while holding her breath. Ma Doe had been in the habit of wearing such charms all her life, believing that they could ward off all manner of illness and evilness, and she believed her old age to be testament to that fact, though Rue had her doubts.

She tied the charm onto Ma Doe, who bowed her head to let her do it. The rope disappeared into the rolls of Ma Doe’s neck. She tucked the pouch down her shirtfront and it was almost as if she weren’t wearing it at all, save the smell.

“Now. You’re wonderin’ where everyone’s taken themselves,” Ma Doe said. “They all of ’em hotfooted it out a’ here as soon as they caught wind a’ the news. I expect they’re havin’ a fine time down there by the river. For Bruh Abel has come.”

Rue startled at the name. She tried not to let her upset show but there was no hiding the quiver of discomfiture that ran quick up her spine like wind up a shivering tree limb.

Bruh Abel. She ought to have foreseen it. It was the season for him after all. He came to preach and to perform miracles. And he came to spread lies, or so Rue believed. How else to make sense of such a rootless man? He traveled everywhere with a Bible in his hand and a too-wide grin on his face. He seemed to want nothing. In Rue’s mind folks who didn’t say plainly what they wanted harbored the most pernicious type of wanting.

She might have accused him of it if she weren’t so guilty of the same. Wasn’t last night in the woods evidence of her own reckless wanting?

“D’you plan to go hear him preachin’, Miss Rue?” She heard the wistfulness in Ma Doe’s voice, like the old woman wished that she could still walk well enough to go with the others to the riverside and see the preacher man too.

Rue closed the top of her basket sharply. “No’m, I’m mighty busy today as it happens.”

In truth, she was not busy.

Ma Doe said, “Maybe just as well you stay clear of Bruh Abel.”

Rue flushed hot. “Why you say that, Ma?”

Ma Doe shrugged, busied herself observing the letters of her two youngest students, nodding encouragement as they struggled to make meaning out of dirt. Rue doubted the old woman could hardly see anymore with her overcast eyes. But who knew what Ma Doe observed keenly that others could not?

“I only mean that Bruh Abel’s so much like your mama was. He’s got a nose for secrets,” Ma Doe said. “Mind he doesn’t catch wind a’ yours.”

Rue could smell the charm she’d made. A damning stink, it was.

Rue hid herself in the thick of the woods. She simply wanted to know how Bruh Abel did it, how he worked his magic on her people. That was the reason why she was coming round the river from the woods where she could hide in the green and watch him, unobserved.

She feared that once again Bruh Abel had shown up to shake up folks’ faith. It would be a fool thing to make an enemy of him. Ma Doe’s warning against Bruh Abel’s keen sense for secrets clanged in Rue’s head. The old woman knew her words, knew to wield them expertly. And these words she had meant to singe in Rue’s mind as a brand: “He’s got a nose for secrets. Mind he doesn’t catch wind a’ yours.”

But Rue just had to know what sort of healing Bruh Abel had brought with him, what he meant to do to settle folks’ fear and gossip about Bean and the clamor of unease and superstition that Bean’s strange eyes and cry had raised within the townspeople. The years had passed in peace since the end of the war, yet all of them suspected that peace could not last. They’d listened to cannon fire for so long that the quiet made them anxious, waiting for worse to come. Then a seemingly accursed baby had been born amongst them, suddenly, like a lobbed shell. They had been waiting on reprisal, reprisal for freedom, for the joy of being free, and when that reprisal wasn’t fast coming, they’d settled on the notion that that punishment was finally come in the black eyes of a wrong-looking child. Truth was Rue had a share in their suspicions. She had shied away from Bean as they all had. Worse, she’d taken his wrongness as an omen against her and her past sins.

Rue figured it was no coincidence that Bruh Abel had shown up the day after Bean’s horrid wailing. Why else had Sarah chosen that night of all nights to try to bathe her youngest child in hot water? Bruh Abel would soon come upon his seasonal visit and set his sights on Bean. He would find the evil in Bean and cure it. Rue felt she could not allow him to be the one to do so.

She came to rest at the seam of the woods and leaned the whole of herself up against the trunk of a tree, peered just around the edge so she could see them all there at the river, but they could not see her.

She hardly needed to hide, for they watched Bruh Abel as though he was the only thing worth seeing, that assembled crowd of poor black folks.

Bruh Abel was a fine-looking man in that same over-big suit, and he carried a Bible though he wasn’t ever seen to read from it—likely he couldn’t read at all. He didn’t need to look at the Bible to do his preaching.

He could pass, that’s what folks whispered about him soon as he appeared each year, as if in the time since they’d last seen him he’d grown more fair. He could quite easily pass for white with that light skin and the brown in his slicked hair showing golden in the sun, but sure enough he was colored and he did have a gift for speaking, for lighting up the dullness that had some time ago settled over that town like the dust of the Northern soldiers’ retreat.

Bruh Abel spoke with the lilting tongue of some other county, it was there in the spin of his r’s and the caper of his s’s, a twang like the beginning of a good song. His talk was sweet to listen to and he did talk, not from a pulpit, not even from one place on the sandy edge of the river. Instead he walked back and forth through the crowd. Rue saw the way everybody trained their eyes on him. He’d sometimes walk straight into the river as though he thought he’d float right on top, and he didn’t seem one bit bothered by the water that lapped at his ankles.

“Do y’all wanna hear what the Lord say?”

They did.

“He say this: ‘It shall be on the last days that I will pour forth my spirit upon all flesh and yo’ sons and yo’ daughters shall prophesy.’ ”

Bruh Abel put his hands to his head, shut tight his eyes. “And yo’ young men shall see visions. And yo’ old men shall dream dreams.”

He snapped open his eyes. He looked straight at Rue. Shocked, she didn’t move, only dug her fingers deep into the unyielding bark of the tree, went allover still, except for the twist in her stomach, the unrest of her beating heart.

He was not looking at her after all, she realized; he was reading his scripture in the sky.

“‘Even on my bondslaves,’ the Lord say, ‘I shall pour forth my spirit. And they shall prophesy.’”

Bruh Abel walked through the crowd, searching for something. Rue searched with him, trying to see what he saw. There was Sarah standing off to one side, with her three children, Bean sitting on the swell of her bent hip. Rue imagined his sharp black eyes taking in the proceedings. Jonah, Rue noticed, was not with them. Bruh Abel’s gaze seemed to linger on the family, on Bean especially, and Rue swore she’d holler, put voice to her panic, if the preacher man so much as picked Bean from his mama’s embrace.

But Bruh Abel in an eyeblink passed the baby by. He came instead to Ol’ Joel, a man who had always been old in all of Rue’s memory. Time had made him stooped, as though he were perpetually bent over in the field. He still worked the land but walked everywhere with the aid of a cane, a fine lacquered wood one that had been given to him by Marse Charles, their former master. Bruh Abel stopped before him.

“You tired, Bruh Joel?” he asked him in the soft, sympathetic cadence of an old friend.

“These ol’ bones ain’t ne’er too tired to hear ’bout the Lord.”

Bruh Abel grinned. “Will you pray with me?”

They prayed with their heads together, too quiet for Rue to hear from that distance. She watched as Bruh Abel placed his hands along the old man’s back, Joel’s crooked spine showing through the thin cotton of his shirt, and when they parted Ol’ Joel had tears wetting the creases of his weathered face. He stood at least an inch taller, and with a flourish of strength befitting a man a quarter of his age, he tossed the cane into the river, where it hit the surface and then sank with nary a splash.

Bruh Abel next drew a young girl from the midst of the crowd. She was a wispy thing, maybe fifteen, that Rue had spoken to but once when she’d asked, quite earnestly, poor fool, if there mightn’t be something she could take to stop her monthly courses for a turn or two. Now Bruh Abel was leading her into the deepest part of the river.

Rue knew that Bruh Abel had already baptized a number of people in the town, particularly the young women, but she had never seen it done. She watched now and it seemed almost loving, the way he tipped that young girl back. He controlled her fall with one hand on her shoulder, the other spread on her back, and he held her there, as strong as a pillar with the river rushing around his waist. Rue wondered what it must feel like, Lord, to be held down by that man’s hand.

He kept her there so long, fully immersed in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and finally, when he allowed it, she came up gasping and saved, her hair matted to her forehead, her white dress clinging clear to her little bud-hard chest. He had his arm firmly around her as he helped her step high over rocks and branches. They made their way back to the shore.

Rue wanted to know what he would do next. It seemed impossible that he could perform anymore, dripping as he was, but he shook his hands dry and took up the Bible he’d bade someone hold, and he flipped it open, letting it fall to its natural, spine-worn center.

But the Bible’s pages started fluttering in a sudden wind that grew into a gust and before she could reach up and stop it, Rue felt her hat fly straight off her head. It floated down from the woods, clear past the crowd, headed for the river or for Bruh Abel, she could not know, she did not stop to see it land. Rue turned and ran.

SURRENDER

1865

It had been in the high heat of June, two years back, that black folks had been freed. When the last of the war’s rebel fires petered toward Surrender, gossip of that lofty Proclamation had finally come to their isolated corner of torn-up country, the weight of it all winnowed down so that they hardly knew what any of it meant, what good it might do them. Freedom seemed to them to be as useless as the currency of a nation that didn’t exist anymore.

Then Bruh Abel had come amongst them for the first time. He appeared one hot day late that June, gusted in as unexpected as cool air off the distant ocean. He’d arrived only days after they’d been told that they, slave folks all of their lives, were free. That nonsense word. He had come and defined it for them, came into their square and showed them just how free could saunter into town and say the most dangerous, daring things.

“This is to be our prosperity,” Bruh Abel predicted. “This will be the Promised Time for black folks.”

Lofty prophecies. They were wanting to believe him. Couldn’t quite yet. Not without proof.

The first time Rue had heard tell of him she was eighteen or so. She had not yet become Miss Rue but was soon enough to be, for her mama, Miss May Belle, had not stirred from her self-made mourning after the death of her man.

It was Sarah who had stood outside of Miss May Belle’s cabin door that day, waiting on Rue to come home. Sarah, eighteen too, and pregnant then with her very first child, wide with it, though dignified. With her hands cocked in the small of her back, arms akimbo, stomach jutting, she said, “The preacher man is in there with yo’ mama.”

“Who?”

There the preacher was, kneeling at Miss May Belle’s bedside, a broad-shouldered man, stranger to Rue. His good brown suit was surely borrowed, stolen, or gifted from a white man, and either way Rue didn’t trust him on sight. There was something about his goose-greased hair, slicked down to beat back his curls. One stiff brown lock swung free as he bowed his head to whisper some private something in Miss May Belle’s ear. Whatever he’d said, it had her lifting her bed-bound head for the first time in a long while. Miss May Belle laughed in that big-mouthed, full-toothed way that recalled the old days so much that Rue ached with envy over their closeness. She stopped in the doorway not knowing what to make of her mama’s happiness, but distrustful of it.

“Come on, Rue-baby,” her mama croaked. Miss May Belle had been thrifty by then with her words, mean even, saving her speech-making for phrases she deemed of the highest importance. “Come on and meet this Bruh Abel.”

Bruh Abel said he was a traveling preacher. Way he told it, he’d got religion from a white master who’d set young Abel and all the other souls he owned to freedom just before the war.

Even back then, Rue had spat at the idea of a story that saccharine being true, but there was no denying that Bruh Abel’s presence seemed to soothe Miss May Belle’s sadness—a thing that Rue had never been able to do, no matter how badly she wanted to save her mama, not with all the roots and herbs and tinctures in creation.

By that same evening it had been on everybody’s lips that the preacher man had laid hands on Miss May Belle, given her a sip of good holy water. Folks said that she had sat up then and spoken clear from her mad stupor for the first time in weeks. They said that this newcomer must be a real man a’ Jesus if he could so ease Miss May Belle’s pain, a woman who’d eased the pain of so many.

Rue sat with her mama that night, watched her sleeping. Outside she heard them all begin to hum a song of Bruh Abel’s. Lord laid his hands on me. By the tilt of their voices they were going toward the river, carrying him away amongst them in a swollen tide of worship.

When their voices grew dim and distant enough, Rue had gotten up her courage and stolen through the night. She’d made her way to where Bruh Abel’s scrawny mule was hitched up and asleep, left alone to guard a saddlebag filled with the preacher man’s belongings.

Suspect, she rooted through his trinkets. There was a knife atop a folded piece of paper, which, held up to Rue’s candlelight, bore long-scrawled blue letters through the thin skin of a badly wrinkled envelope. There was too a pockmarked brass harmonica and a fat button trailing string, but there, beneath that clutter, were three small vials, the exact thing she’d been after. They were mark-less bottles with cork heads that trapped in them clear liquid. As she wrapped her fingers around them they rolled and clinked together ominously like glasses for a toast. She took one out and put it to her eye to see what it held, and with that done and yielding nothing, she pulled up the stopper and put the liquid to her tongue. It was a mad thing to do. She was killing herself if it was poison that this strange man carried. Still, she did the same with every one of those little bottles, licked the tip of the cork, sipped up the residue on every single one of them, and came quick to realize they held nothing more than a bit of whiskey watered down.

She’d known him for what he was then. His was a clear-water cure sweetened with nothing more than clever words, a con man’s type of conjure.

Did Bruh Abel know she’d done all that? There was something in the way he looked at her all the times he came back after, season after season. Like he was itching to accuse her if only he could figure just what she was guilty of. They were suspect of each other, she and him, from the very start of their acquaintance, and the askance Bruh Abel sent her way only got weightier after Miss May Belle passed. Rue had not been near to comfort her mama when she finally went to her rest—but Bruh Abel had been. They said he’d been right beside Miss May Belle, praying and holding her hand.

Miss May Belle’s final curse would go on and outlive her. It was said that she laid it in her grief after her man had been strung up, lynched for lusting after a white woman, or so the story went. Miss May Belle cast her agony over the whole of Marse Charles’s burnt-down plantation, folks said, and over the wilderness just beyond.

After the war came Surrender and in that time of flux, of fortune and misfortune, of raised white flags and dead white folks, Miss May Belle had believed, or so it was told, that the only way to keep their isolated plantation and the colored people in it free was to keep them chained up, to make for them a master out of the invisible white of the river fog.

This master was not a fat-bellied cotton king in a big white House—was not, as it was told, a master at all but was in fact a conjure come to form as a haint. A ghost was said to weave in and out of the woods surrounding their town on gray nights, was said to wail and to howl, to rule the packs of rabid foxes that overran the unkempt wilderness. The haint she’d made, they believed, lamented the lost war and the Lost Cause. Was said to be so greedy over the land as to keep away all the other whites who might covet their little lost country.

But nothing comes free. It was a tale oft told that Miss May Belle had made her curse like as if she was sat at a blacksmith’s wheel, so expert had she honed her hoodooing, as though to make a double-edge sword, for hadn’t all their white folks died as she had foretold? Dead but not gone. Three years after the war, still among them, their white masters were ruling over them as ghosts. Haints in the woods. Haunting.

After Miss May Belle died, they said the river swelled up fit to weep for her. It occluded the roads and the old byways; it ruined the roots of the trees. Living water, it swallowed up the old, proud stalks of cotton, and still the river rose. And Miss Rue, the only one left to sustain her mama’s curse, found herself afeared of what the river water might dredge up, secret things better left hidden that haunted her, a curse that might rise to the surface.

In that same season of Rue’s fear, Black-Eyed Bean was born, as though he were the new leaving of an old black tide.

FREEDOMTIME

One night, just after Bruh Abel’s arrival, the plantation’s old corpse bell snuck its way into Rue’s dreaming. She was shocked awake, halfway out of bed and partways dressed when she put it together that what she heard was the ringing of that church bell that had no earthly business being rung.

The evening was a perfect mirror of the night that Bean had cried and unsettled the whole of the town. Rue could see it on folks’ faces that they were thinking the same. They stood in the road, hesitated on their porch steps.

The bell stilled to silence, and there was Sarah with proof that Bean was not the cause of the disturbance, for she had come amongst the crowd with the baby asleep and silent on her shoulder.

And there was Bruh Abel too, pristine in his good pressed suit.

“What’s the cause a’ all that commotion?” he said.

Didn’t the man ever sleep? For he looked always ready to come amongst them. Rue squinted to see which house he had come from, where he had been fed and bedded for the night. There was always some or another of the womenfolk after having him stay with her family, taste this and that bit of cooking.

“The bell,” folks were telling him now. “Ain’t heard it ring in an age.”

It had rung harshly only once and then again weakly like somebody, or something, had only the strength or the daring to ring it but the one time and no strength to stop the clapper from coming round the second time and giving out one more hollow knell.

Bruh Abel looked at Rue. His expression was one of benevolent amusement, like he’d figured out the lesson but was ready to let them struggle over learning it.

“What y’all think that clanging was, Sister Rue? You know this here town better’n I.”

Rue kept her face hard. “There’s an old fall-down church way out what used to belong to our marse.”

“Is that right?” Bruh Abel said. “Maybe I oughta take up preachin’ there?”

“You wouldn’t want to,” Rue said in a rush. “The ol’ church just about come to its collapse durin’ the war. More like than not that sound we heard was the old bell fallin’ over, breathin’ its last.”

“Just as well,” Bruh Abel said. Did he wink or was it a sparkle of starlight? “Me myself, I prefer to pray with nothin’ but sky between me and the Almighty.”

He shepherded the townsfolk over to their homes, easing their worries. Rue didn’t follow after but kept her sights on the east horizon where she knew the white church stood just as strong and sure as it ever had. She feared the ringing would sound again. But all was as silent as silent got.

When all the good folks of the world were sleeping, Rue crept out of her cabin. She had not been out in the woods for some days. She’d stayed away too long. Now she felt she’d grown arrogant in things kept hidden, grown too proud and sure. Bruh Abel’s coming had stoked a fear in her. Ma Doe’s warning about secrets clanged. She had let him catch wind a’ her alright. But she wouldn’t allow him to discover the precious thing she kept hid.

She had feared she’d become lax on her sojourns, forgot to make certain that no one saw her coming and no one saw her going when she made these clandestine trips of miles to the old white folks’ church with a brimming basket of secret provisions in tow.

In slaverytime, the black folks had been taken to that church like a marching army, driven there by their Missus especially, who seemed to think on it as her Lord-ordained duty to save her black folks’ souls on the one day a week her husband wasn’t breaking their bodies.

There was a rectory there meant to house a minister Marse Charles had never been able to entice to stay, no sir, not out there in the heat and the solitude of their vast land, not amongst his slaves, who outnumbered his white family something like one hundred to one. Marse Charles had ousted all his white neighbors over time, bought up their land, and made himself an island in the center of a wilderness sea so impenetrable few would brave it, even, or especially, a man of God. Marse Charles hadn’t cared much for religion anyhow except to pay a minister every now and then to make the trip out of a Sunday to say, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling,” and then be gone again. Eventually, the South had fallen in surrender and all those white folks were busied with a different manner of praying.

Now Rue’s lone penance was an irregular one, and it had naught to do with God. But times like these when the townsfolk got to gossiping, when an unrest settled around Rue skin-close as clinging vine, she had to go and look at the church, even if she couldn’t always bring herself to go all the way inside. It was enough to know that the woods and the church were undisturbed, the double doors still shut like she’d left them last. Rue would set down the burden of her basket, stand on the steps, and breathe in the still of the wood and know that all was calm and right, and then she would journey back to the town.

It was Ol’ Joel who caught Rue this night as she made her way back home. He grabbed her at the last half mile where the trees grouped so thick that even the river lost its way. He seized her by the arm and squeezed, his grip surprisingly sure. He squinted at her as the crickets chirped their alarm. There was a sour smell about him stronger than his usual rotgut stink.

She took in his shriveled frame, the way his body seemed to tremor with impatience beneath his nightclothes, a thin shirt with the buttons mismatched in their holes. And he was leaning again, on that old lacquer cane. Had the river brought it back? Spat it up like something distasteful? Or had the whole scene been bunkum, with Bruh Abel brandishing a smartly painted stick?

Rue loosed herself from Ol’ Joel’s hold.

“Miss May Belle, where you think you comin’ from at this hour?”

“It’s Rue,” she corrected.

Ol’ Joel waved that fact away. “You best stay clear a’ patrolmen. It’s after curfew.”

“No, suh.” Rue spoke in slow, gentle rolls like she was calming a spooked horse. “Ain’t no curfew no more. Remember? Ain’t no slavery no more. War’s been over and we been freed.”

Ol’ Joel scratched at his hair, a meager snowcap that looked alarmingly bright next to his blue-black skin. He was old, folks said, so old he dreamed of Africa, woke some nights and thought that he was there again. Was this one of them nights? Rue took him by the elbow and tried to guide him home with her. In the morning he’d be back to himself, sharp-minded as a laid trap and just as likely to bite. But the sun would dip low again and so would his senses. It was a madness that reminded Rue so much of her mama’s final demise that she could hardly wait to be away from him.

“I know what you been doin’, May Belle. Don’t you deny it.”

Rue patted his elbow and sighed. “Been doin’?”

“I seen you with her.”

“With who?”

“That haint in the woods.”

Rue halted at the gravel road, stopped at the head of the cross that started the old slave quarters that were slave quarters no more. She could turn around now. No one would have seen her with him. She could lead the old fool back into the tangle of woods. Turn him round ’til he worked himself lost. She could make the trees swallow him up if she needed to.

“Ain’t no haint in no woods,” Rue spat.

“I seen you with her.” Ol’ Joel tried to free his arm from the crook of her elbow. She wouldn’t let him. She had a hold of him and he was curling in on himself, his lips flapping, his voice rising near to a holler. “I seen you walkin’ through the trees with her, visiting her, whispering with her. I seen you summoning her. The haint. The ghost.”

“Stop that. You ain’t talkin’ sense.” Or he was talking too much sense for her to stomach.

“You a witch, same like yo’ mama was,” he said, and Rue did not know if he was accusing her mama or her grandmama. He’d got his generations, his healing women, all tangled.

“Y’all alright? I heard hollerin’.”

Rue was more relieved to see Jonah then than she could say. He came up the path to them quickly, threw her a knowing look as he steadied Ol’ Joel. Jonah’s broad, sure frame towered over Rue and the sunken old man both.

“Marse Charles’ll hear of it,” Ol’ Joel kept on. “Just you wait, now, Marse Charles’ll see to ya.”

Rue looked to Jonah but it seemed neither of them would correct Ol’ Joel, would tell him that Marse Charles was long dead. If Ol’ Joel could not recollect his own liberation then he was locked in a different kind of hell from which there was no emancipation. Rue would pity him if he hadn’t made her so afraid with his accusations.

“I’ll take him home, Miss Rue,” Jonah said. “Thank you fo’ findin’ him.”

Rue nodded, tried to come up with more, some easy explanation should Jonah ask just how Rue had found him so far from her own home, so very late at night. But Jonah was preoccupied with the care of Ol’ Joel, who struggled against him too—whose hoarse voice took up a cry again: “She turnt yo’ baby evil, Jonah. He a devil, ain’t no flesh a’ yours. She made him in the woods from river water, from clay. I seen her.”

Bean. He was speaking on Bean.

“I seen her.”

But Jonah shushed him, led him away, and still the old man raved ’til he got so far out of earshot that Rue couldn’t make out what he was muttering, couldn’t account for which things were lies and which things were truths so that all of it began to feel, not like words, but like a danger rising up all around her.

SLAVERYTIME

May 1861

Miss May Belle says: Marse Charles comes to me talking about War.

He don’t knock. He walks straight into my cabin in the very middle of the day, something he ain’t ever hardly do no more. I’m warned of his coming before I even see him ’cause outside the slave quarter goes allover hush except for the trumpeted-up sounds of slaves attending to hard work. The repeated greeting comes out like blackstrap molasses, bitter as it is sweet, “Good afternoon, Marse Charles,” and it ripples all the way to my doorstep. But the wave of fawning gives me time to sugar up my countenance so I’m smiling like I ain’t got a thing to hide when my marse comes charging into my cabin.

He sits hisself right down in the center of my bed, says, “It’s to be war, May Belle. Do you know what that means?”

I ain’t say nothing, ain’t know what to say. I’m sweating. It’s one of them blazes-hot days that drag long, never-ending, what with tending to my work round the plantation. The sick and the soul tired, the overworked and the underfed. War, my marse is saying, and nervous sweat drips down my spine like lazy sap off a sycamore. Is he asking if I know the meaning of the word?

“Where’s that girl a’ yours?” Marse Charles looks round my little home like the cramp of it displeases him. I smile so that he keeps his eyes on me instead of picking out anything that might be amiss. But I don’t like him asking after Rue and I know I can’t answer the truth, which is that my Rue’s like as not off mischiefing with Varina, his white daughter.

“Rue ain’t here, suh,” I tell him. “I sent her to look over Homer.”

“Who?”

“Field hand what fell over in the heat yesterday.”

“He malingerin’?”

“No, suh,” I say. “Homer done fell over onto his threshin’ knife.”

Marse Charles grunts. “You teachin’ yo’ girl yo’ knowledge?”

“Sure am,” I say, and that much is the truth. Ain’t that the deal I have with my marse? He keeps my child in his ownership and I make her worth the owning. Marse Charles has far sights. Already he’s thinking when I’m dead and gone he’d like to have another healing woman trained up. I can’t fault him that, or fault Rue neither. Ain’t every woman’s daughter made from the death of the mama, somehow or another?

“War,” Marse Charles mutters.

So we back on that? I shift from foot to foot impatient to have him outta here but not fool enough to let him know it. I do not wish Rue to be witness to this visit. My child may be knowledged in healing, but she don’t know nothing of the ills of the world, and I intend to keep it that way long as I’m alive and able.

Marse Charles unbuttons his shirtsleeves at the wrists, rolls the cuffs up; he’s mad enough to near rip the good fabric.

“This bastard Lincoln, he’s took the reins and now he’s smartin’ at the loss of us Southern states,” he says. “As well he might, seein’ as we make all a’ America’s worth on our goddamned backs. Now we Southerners are seein’ our own way, son of a bitch won’t let us go free.”

Marse Charles leans his big body back. My thin mattress in its creaky wood frame shifts noisily beneath him. He works at the worn leather of his belt, struggles to reach the buckle under the paunch of his belly. When we was both of us young and his stake was new, Marse Charles was lean, strong. Ambitious. Now he’s the most prosperous landowner for miles and miles. His fields spread; his body do too.

“It’s an ungodly business, Belle. I’ve just had a letter from an associate who witnessed the siege. He’s thinkin’ on sellin’ his slaves all away. Better that, he’s sayin’, than the Northern hounds descendin’ to take his property away by brute force. Cussed coward.” Marse Charles punches his meaty fist into his empty hand. “I sure ain’t of the same mind.”

I’m glad to hear it. Every soul sold away feels to me like flayed skin ripped off the flesh. I keep my face peaceable.

“But if it is to be war,” Marse Charles goes on, “changes gotta be made round here.”

“How you mean, suh?” I don’t much care at all about his gossip of war. Ain’t I fighting little battles every day just keepin’ his slaves alive on his behalf?

But I gotta keep talking. Keep his attention on me and no place else.

“You let me know who ain’t pullin’ his weight, May Belle. If there’s a hunkerin’ down to be done, that’ll be where I start sellin’, you hear?”

“Yes, suh,” I say. It’s a sick power, but it’s a power, ain’t it? Who stays? Who goes? Keep his eyes on me.

Now that Marse Charles has mastered his belt buckle, he shucks off his pants. Leaves them to fall in the shape of him on my floor.

“Come here, May Belle,” he say.

I kneel between his legs, keep my eyes on him, only on him. Can he tell I’m afraid? Scent my fear?

He partway lowers his drawers, just enough so that they choke at his thighs, and I can’t say if the flush that flames his cheek is from bashfulness or exertion. Or shame.

Two weeks back a canker bloomed up like fire, red and angry, on the tip of his prick. Now it’s given over to a blotchy red rash, like I told him it would. Marse Charles come to me too late with the symptoms of this sickness to nip it early. He delayed over the choice: me or the white doctor a county over. But the white doctor’s a relation of Missus’s. And Marse Charles told me that he could not live with the guilt if his wife was to hear of his ailment. More like, he can’t live with her exiling him from her bed once and for all.

“The rash is clearin’ up some,” I tell him, and it is too. It ain’t too proud to say the truth. I do good work.

“I’ve heard passin’ talk ’bout the mercury cure,” Marse Charles says. “Men say after a few rounds, this dang sickness gets all the way cleared.”

I suck wind through my teeth. “Sure, suh. Can’t be sick if the cure done killed you.”

He chuckles, rubs my head like I’m his best dog. I help to get him back into his pants so he don’t go bending over. Eyes on me. Only on me.

“You stay takin’ the rabbit root,” I tell him. I’ve got his cure ground down to a fine powder and always at the ready, thank the Lord, so it’s enough to give him a pouch with one hand and guide him out the door with the other.

“Y’all will keep all I’ve said to yo’self, Belle?” He says it to me sweetly, as if I’m a good friend doing him an easy favor, instead of a bit of good property without even the right to say no when it comes to touching his pockmarked pricker.

“’Course I’ll keep it hush,” I say, and it’s a lie. There’s a number of his favorite house girls that I’ve already warned after. Little use a warning is. I keep the rabbit root at the ready for them also.

But it ain’t his sores he’s speaking on.

“No sense worryin’ the lot of ’em with talk a’ battles and warrin’.” Marse Charles inclines his head in the general direction of his fields, like to encompass the whole of his three-hundred-odd slaves. “They’ll be afeared over nothin’, get wrong ideas in their heads. They can’t understand, they’re like children. Not you though, Belle,” he says fondly. “You about the smartest nigra I ever did meet.”

He bangs out of my cabin, satisfied. I stand alone, shaking for long minutes, ’til I’m sure he ain’t comin’ back.

“He gone,” I say at the bed. “You can come on out now.”

My man slides his body out from beneath the wooden bed frame in slow inches ’til he’s all the way clear. I try to help him up, but he refuses my hand. It’s afternoon and he’s meant to be in his own marse’s field, working to death and whistling with the glee of it. And I’ve kept him too long already. But at least I kept him safe.

“You hear what my marse say?” I try to put some cheer to it. “War. The Northern hounds is comin’ for the Southern foxes.”

My man shrugs off dirt and dust, says, “Iff’n the hounds do come, May, you best be sure you ain’t turnt to a fox yo’self by then.”

“What’s that s’posed to mean?” I bark. But I know exactly what he means. He’s told me and told me, my man has, that he won’t abide my spying on Marse Charles’s behalf. But how else am I to keep the things I love protected? I reach out to kiss him, but he slams out the door too, albeit a sight quieter than Marse Charles just done.

Now I’m truly alone, but I don’t suffer for it. My Rue-baby’ll be back any minute now. Safe. Near me another day. Marse Charles won’t cross me. And that makes anything I see or say or sell well worth the loss.

You can lose a hundred battles, ’long as you stay winning the war.

FREEDOMTIME

Rue saw Bruh Abel for what he was, a thief in the night. The thing he meant to use to snare folks was Black-Eyed Bean, the child that many had begun to whisper was the herald of some dark despair. Bruh Abel promised to baptize Bean before everybody and in the eyes of the Lord. To save him. A spectacle.

The baptism would mark the culmination of Bruh Abel’s seasonal appearance in the town, and amongst folks it held a rising anticipation like the peak festivity of a fervent holiday. It was all anybody wanted to talk about. The baptism of Black-Eyed Bean. The day he would be washed clean. Saved.

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.

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.”

PART TWO

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