Conjure Women

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.