Conjure Women

“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.”