The white men she hung between were catchers by trade. Marse Charles paid them handsomely, it was said, heaping handfuls of silver dollars, for the pleasure of having his favorite cook returned to him in a bruised pile. They left her tied up to a horse post out front of the House. Even tied down, Airey bucked and pulled at her bonds, and all the passing black folks watched her do it, watched her scream and piss herself and work one wrist free just far enough to yank at her own thick black hair. They weren’t none of them allowed to go near, except at last for Charlie.
Marse Charles gave Charlie Blacksmith the honor of whipping his would-have-been wife, because Marse Charles himself could not be bothered to come out of the House, particularly as the clouds grew dark and it began to rain. He handed Charlie Blacksmith a whip, told him to use all the strength he’d use to forge a horse’s shoe, and Marse Charles swore he would know it if he didn’t. He’d be checking and expected to see ten good lash marks, drawn blood on Airey’s bare back.
Assembled, bade to watch, all the slaves in the plantation came and stood in the yard of the House even as a driving rain fell and slicked down their hair and darkened their clothes and made everything cling.
Marse Charles was somewhere up above and Rue strained to make him out in the windows, not sure what to look for besides a hint of the shape of his darkness behind the billowing white curtains of his daughter’s nursery. Or was it Varina herself that Rue spied, looking down on them? Rue searched so hard that after a while she made herself see shadows where there were none.
Whether he was watching or not, Marse Charles surely heard it when the first lick lay into Airey’s back; it was that loud.
She hid her breasts the best she could with her arms wrapped around the post she’d been tied to, pushed them up against the raw, splintered wood. She shook with fear as the rain bounced off her, waiting for the fall of a hit she could not see coming, and her heaving panicked lungs rounded out her back just as the whip came down and split clean the skin. Charlie reared his arm just so far back that it looked like there was more force in the action, and the whip whistled through the air and another thwack landed squarely on her spine. Airey hollered and hissed and choked on her sorrow, gurgling out a bit of red-tinged spit. She’d bit her tongue.
“Boy,” came Marse Charles up from the window on high. His voice boomed even over the rain, and Rue would have sworn that everybody assembled shook. Up above, Marse Charles was framed in an open second-story window, his arms braced against the sill, the tips of his curly dark brown hair catching the wet. He didn’t have to say any more. Charlie brought down the whip harder the next time. Harder still the next.
Rue had to shut her eyes. But there was no blocking that high, fine whistle through the air or the sound of Airey’s resistance, quieted from screams now to gut-deep moans then to a silence that seemed altogether worse.
When he was done, Charlie threw down the whip, his one act of defiance, let it sink in a puddle. There they were, the ten strips of open flesh wrought neatly in Airey’s back like the lines of crude accounting marks. Already the force of the rain was thinning out the intensity of the blood, and Rue found herself worrying, as the crowd began to murmur and break apart, that if Marse Charles didn’t hurry down, he might not see the blood he was after as proof. They might, she feared, have to do it all over again.
* * *
—
Spring came on, like it did, and Rue and her mama stayed busy for seven straight days serving bitters to the slave folks Marse Charles sent through their cabin—a spoonful for each was meant to set his field hands ready for the coming heavy season. By the sixth day Rue was more than tired of looking into the pink expectant quiver of other folks’ mouths, of observing their outstretched tongues and the dangling fleshy marble at the back of their throats. Her mama relegated her to filling up the waiting wood spoons, a dull task.
Rue looked up and there was Airey, strange to behold in the sunlight, nothing to her but deep pockets between her bones. Sunken—shoulders and chest and all around her eyes. Her voice came out gritty.
“Thank you,” she said, “Miss May Belle.”
Rue handed her mama a spoon, and her mama began to hold out the mixture to Airey’s small beak of a mouth, the edges of which were white and dry. At the last minute Miss May Belle pulled the spoon away. The pour puddled down to the floor, wasted.
“Rue-baby,” Miss May Belle said. She didn’t take her eyes from Airey. “Fetch me a cup instead.”
Rue had to dig to come up with a small cup of tinned iron; she handed it to her mama, who filled it high with the bitters. Airey drank it all down at once.
“Meet me Friday night,” Miss May Belle said, in a voice hushed and hurried. “If you still wantin’ what you wantin’.”
Airey nodded once. She gave her cup back to Rue and moved on down the line, her face betraying nothing, no elation and no fear.
* * *
—
The fact was if there was magic—and Rue, as a child, believed earnestly that there was—her mama had not taught it to her, had not wanted to.
On Friday night, Rue lay in their bed with her eyes closed, listened to her mama move about their small cabin. Miss May Belle took her time leaving, as if she sensed that the moment was not quite right or else sensed, in the knowing way of mothers, that her daughter lay tense and restless beneath the thin sheet ready to follow her into the night. They waited each other out.
Rue dozed and found herself dreaming. She was in Marse Charles’s House, which could not be so, she was hardly ever allowed in there, yet there she was in a room so white it was as though the very air was ash water, the world all bleached through as though by lye. In the center of the white room was Varina, the master’s daughter, waiting on Rue like a prize.
In the dream, Rue took Varina’s hand, led her away, took her down the stairs from the nursery and through the House kitchen and there was Big Sylvia, removing ashcakes from her stove. The cook set them by the window to cool. Wriggling free of Rue’s hold, Varina aimed to pluck one of them ashcakes from the pile. Rue hissed after Varina, but the cook seemed not to see the little girls. Instead Big Sylvia opened up the fire-spitting mouth of her stove, and now she drew from her pocket the little doll Miss May Belle had made of Airey. Easy as that she tossed it into the waiting fire. The doll made of straw and hair caught instantly in the flames, and Rue woke. She sat up from sleep sweating like she’d been in the oven herself.
The cabin was still. Miss May Belle was gone.
Outside the night was allover chill, the road through the slave quarter empty of souls. Rue steeled her shivering little body and walked through the blue midnight, picking her way to the river by way of recollection rather than by sight.
She found them a ways down the rushing river. Airey had her feet ankle deep in the water, and Miss May Belle had her arm in the knot of a tree. When she pulled her arm slowly out, the silver dollars in her hand glimmered in the moonlight. Miss May Belle had crossed to the river, was speaking in urgent whispers to Airey with all those coins offered in her outstretched hands. But Airey didn’t move to take them, and Rue soon saw why. Miss May Belle, one by one, began to drop her silver dollars into the stream at Airey’s feet. As she watched them go, Rue had half a mind to jump in after them. They made tinkling little splashes as they hit the surface and sparkled and spun, and then disappeared.