Conjure Women

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.”