Conjure Women

“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.