Sarah looked at the child. She did not move to give him her breast. Instead she pulled the dirtied sheets around herself, and when Rue came to press on the stretched skin of her belly to check that nothing had been left in the womb, Sarah would not let her near. She wanted only to stare at her baby, not with that new-mama affection but in the very same way you’d stare at a snake you’d woken up to find coiled beside you in your bed.
“He’s a big ’un,” Rue said, to say something.
“Them eyes?”
“Like little black-eyed beans, ain’t they?” Rue said. She wished she could snap back those words soon as they left her lips. She should have pretended that everything was as it ought to be. Her mama, Miss May Belle, had she been living, might have had the words of reassurance, might have made the baby a miracle, for she had that way about her that Rue had never learned or inherited.
Sarah still would not take the baby up. His crying grew more shrill in the silence, like an accusation, and Rue felt she had to go on talking.
“Folks says babies born under the veil got the gift a’ the Sight,” Rue said. It was meant to be a comfort. It came out sounding grim as a burden. Rue found that she pitied that babe if it were true, for here he was not a clock’s tick old and already he had to bear the whole knowledge of the world.
Rue had stripped the sheets, stepped out of the cabin without saying any more. There was Jonah, the daddy, waiting. He’d been keeping himself busy chopping more firewood than the hot summer day rightly called for, and when he saw Rue step out, he stopped mid-swing and smiled.
She studied him, taking in his sun-darkened skin and his eyes that were the same easy brown as the bark he was cutting. He bore no resemblance to his son. His son bore no resemblance to any living thing she had ever seen.
When Rue stepped forward, the bloodied birthing sheets bundled in her arms, Jonah looked up at her with trepidation. He could not lend voice to the question that needed asking.
Rue spoke to spare him the effort: “You got yo’self a thrivin’ baby boy.”
His sweat-shining face broke out into a grin and before he could ask her anything more, she handed him the bundle of sheets that contained the damning black caul, bloody and shapeless, in its center. She knew even if he got a look at it, he wouldn’t understand it. Men could not make sense of women’s work.
“What do I do with all a’ this?”
“Burn it,” she said, telling him what he was needing to hear. “Burn it for luck.”
SLAVERYTIME
1854
Miss May Belle had used to turn coin on hoodooing. As a slave woman she’d made her name and her money by crafting curses. More profit to be made in curses than in her work mixing healing tinctures. More praise to be found in revenge than in birthing babies.
In slaverytime a white overseer had his whip and a white patrolman had his hounds and a white speculator had his auction block and your white master had your name on a deed of sale somewhere in his House, or so he claimed. But those things were afflictions for the battered-burnt-bruised body only. Curses were for the sin-sick soul and made most terrifying because of it.
“Hoodoo,” Miss May Belle used to say, “is black folks’ currency.”
She had admitted only once, to Rue, in confidence: “The thing about curses is that you can know who you’ve wronged the most by who you fear has the notion to curse you.”
Black neighbors would whisper against black neighbors, sure, but by and by a white man would come from afar having heard of Miss May Belle’s conjure, asking for cure of some affliction set upon him by an insolent slave, or even by his own white wife. Other slavefolk got hired out for their washing, for their carpentering, for their fine greasy cooking. Miss May Belle was hired for her hoodooing.
So it was that Big Sylvia, the cook of the plantation House, came to the slave cabin where Miss May Belle and her daughter lived alone, to ask after a curse.
Rue saw her coming from afar. The diminutive house slave had a crooked walk on bowed little legs, and Rue stood tiptoed in the cabin’s one window, watched as the cook came down the dust road at dusk, determination in her little steps but a look like fear on her face, as she headed to the healing woman’s house. Beyond Big Sylvia, Rue could see from where she’d come. Marse Charles’s white-pillared House blazed big and hazy opposite the setting sun.
“Come away from there, Rue-baby,” Miss May Belle said, and Rue obeyed her mama. “Cook’s comin’ to ask after hoodoo. Now, you know that ain’t nothin’ that a child needs to hear ’bout.”
How Miss May Belle knew before Big Sylvia’s knock what the matter was Rue could not rightly say. But she tucked herself in the corner of their one-room cabin, balled herself small between the stove and the bedpost, and pretended at not listening.
Miss May Belle creaked the door open, allowed their visitor in.
“I ain’t been workin’ in the kitchen for some months now,” Big Sylvia complained. She sat across the supper table from Miss May Belle and held out her right hand. It was bundled up covering a deep cut that some weeks back had near took away her fingers.
Rue’s mama undid the bandages, revealed the hideous slash from finger to wrist. It was deep, angry, and oozing. Big Sylvia’s dark skin and eyes were shining with a fever she couldn’t kick. “It won’t never heal ’cause somebody’s put a fix on me.”
“Who you think done it?”
“Who else? That woman. Airey. She the one that’s took up cookin’ in my place. She’s been schemin’ after it for years tryna get herself a place in the House.”
Fact was that Airey’s mama had been the cook when Marse Charles had been a child, back when the plantation had been all but a few rows of hopeful seedlings. By all accounts Airey’s mama hadn’t been all that good of a cook neither, but there was no taking a white man from his auntie nostalgia. Airey had believed that because of her mama she was owed the kitchen, with a lineage as good as a lordship, but Big Sylvia had been bought special with commendations for her cooking. Airey had taken after her field-hand daddy instead, a sharp beauty but mule-strong, bred with hands for picking.
“Now I’m left to do the washin’, even now I’m one-handed, mind,” Big Sylvia said, “and Airey, she at the oven, got Marse Charles smackin’ his lips after every meal, thinkin’ he gon’ get rid a’ poor ol’ Sylvia, maybe sell me next time the prospector come ’round, keep Airey on.”
Miss May Belle tutted. She shut her eyes as if consorting with herself, let Big Sylvia stand there panting for a long while, working herself up into a deeper fury the more she thought on the unfairness.