Rue would sometimes look up at the House and spy Varina at the third-story nursery window, knew her for a white figure behind a whiter curtain, looking down. Did she appear wistful? Rue could not truly tell, not from that distance, not with only her hand over her eyes to shade out the midday sun. But it was as though Varina was looking out at her as well, with a sort of wanting, and Rue got to figuring if she ever had magic or money, either, she’d make it so the two of them could play and laugh together in the full sunlight as much as they could stand.
* * *
—
It seemed to Rue that Miss May Belle never had to fetch her coins but could will them into existence, suddenly flipping a flash of silver between her fingers in trade for something or other she was wanting. But where the source was was anybody’s imagining.
Rue watched as her mama slipped her daddy one such coin of a Sunday. She slid it clear across the table over knot holes and scratches and set it in front of her man, who did not take it.
“Nah,” he said.
Miss May Belle was sore. “Why?”
“That’s conjure money.”
“Money is money is money,” she said and he said nothing and the coin gleamed between them.
“Or is it ’cause it’s woman’s money?” Miss May Belle took it back and Rue tried to watch where it went but missed that too, an illusionist’s trick between her mama’s delicate fingers.
* * *
—
Rue looked and looked but she did not find the coins, not in the way she thought she would at least. One day, after the birth of the Airey doll baby that Big Sylvia had bought, Airey herself came to Miss May Belle to ask after a bit of hoodooing. She came upon them at the river where the water was swelled from a season turned rainy before its time.
Rue’s mama said, “I been expecting you to come on round.”
Miss May Belle was not the type interested in making enemies. That was the reason she only advised on how to make a trick, but she never did dispel it with her own two hands. She oft said, The hunter in settin’ his own trap’ll sometimes spring it on himself, which was true, of course—they were forever bandaging up men fool enough to go catching rabbits in the dark of night.
Rue looked over their visitor. Airey was truly pretty, made all of thick bones and fine features, such an amalgamation of two kinds of beauty that she could be admired from one direction and feared from another. But now in person it was clear to see just what Miss May Belle’s magicking had done: The spangled pattern of white skin that had once been on her legs alone had begun to spread up her arms and to the sides of her neck and along her jaw and nose; a round white swathe sickled around her eye.
If Miss May Belle was shocked by what she’d wrought, she didn’t show it, and Airey for her part didn’t look vengeful. She came to sit by them at the river’s edge, and the reflection of her skin shimmering in the water seemed to make her look like the night sky dotted with stars, beautiful.
“I ill-wished Big Sylvia. I wanted her place in the kitchen,” Airey began. “I been up all night with the regret. I had the notion that life would be easier for me in the House, but it ain’t easier. No, life just ain’t easy nowhere. That’s why I come to see you.”
Miss May Belle shook her head. “No more conjure,” she said. “Y’all settle things between yo’selves. I’ll tell Big Sylvia to be rid of the doll and she’ll do it if I tell her to.”
“Big Sylvia will get her place back I reckon.” Airey held up her hands, and Rue saw that the affliction had taken over her wrists and her knuckles. The thumb of one finger looked as though the black had been sucked clean off the skin. “Missus won’t let me cook her food no longer, won’t let me touch it, thinkin’ this is a sign of some cursedness. Marse Charles’ll listen to her, just to quit her from her naggin’. He’s like to sell me away the next time he’s able.”
“You wantin’ a charm to prevent it?” Miss May Belle asked.
“No’m. I’m wanting a charm to help me run away.”
Miss May Belle looked to Rue beside her and Rue knew the look, the get-gone look. This she was good at, becoming invisible on her mama’s whim. She strode over to where the river started thinning toward the creek and let her mama think that she wasn’t listening.
“I can’t make you no promises,” Miss May Belle said.
“You made this,” Airey accused. She held out her arms.
Said Miss May Belle, quietly, “I don’t know that I did.”
Rue tried to look busy as the women kept on, talking in hushes. They were similar, Rue came to notice, both soft enough to be shaped by life and hardened by it too. She wanted to learn that type of woman magic also, thought she’d find it in the words they traded if she could only pick up on the strands, the half-speak adults often took up when they were aware of a child listening in on them.
“I can’t risk it,” Miss May Belle was saying. “Iff’n you do get away, but they catch on to it that it was me that helped you…” It was a sentiment not worth finishing.
“Figured you say that, but if you got some charm some somethin’, I can pay you for it.”
“I’ll give you this for free: Stick to the river,” Miss May Belle said. “And don’t you never look back for nothin’.”
“I won’t.”
“Not even for yo’ man? That Charlie?”
“He ain’t comin’ with me. He think he owe somethin’ to these people. And I”—Airey kicked up water with her toes—“I can’t be slowed down by nothing. They got all sorts of ways to weigh you down, don’t they?”
Rue felt their eyes on her. She pricked up like a rabbit might at some slight, shifting noise, and saw Airey and her mama considering her with their hard, grave expressions, the far-off thinking look of grown folks.
Miss May Belle finally spoke. “You’ll wanna rub oak gum on the soles a’ yo’ feet. Keep to the river, like I say. That’ll throw the scent a’ the hounds they gon’ send. That’s all I can give to you ’sides what you already know. An’ if you can help it, don’t let nothin’ or nobody slow you down.”
Airey agreed and left then to prepare for it, whatever preparing to leave your life meant. Rue watched her walking away. She was visible for a great distance, her proud back, her speckled legs bared.
* * *
—
By next morning Airey was gone. By late afternoon she was brought back.
They drug her by her arms through the whole of the plantation, her legs kicking, her body twisting and turning over grass and rocks and dirt in a never-ending dust-billowing futility.