“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.