Before her mind could change, Rue put her hands on Varina’s pale legs, examining as she had watched her mama examine, gently parting the skin between Varina’s legs, which at first was smooth but prickled up to gooseflesh at her touch. Varina leaned back on her elbows and watched Rue as she did this, not closing her eyes as Rue sometimes did when she was pretending to be the mama. Instead Varina was following Rue’s every movement with those blue eyes, which had turned a dull, still-water color in the shade.
“It ain’t time yet,” Rue said and took her fingers away.
“It is time,” Varina spread her legs wider, which was not how the game was meant to be played. The mama was meant to just lie there and wait.
Rue thought about arguing this; she was the one who had taught Varina the game and so best knew the rules. She was the one whose mama was magic.
“It’s time,” Rue agreed instead, placing both of her hands on Varina’s mound, drawing her open with her thumbs.
“It’s a big ’un,” Rue proclaimed, imagining a baby with black skin and red, red hair.
“I’m so very happy,” said Varina.
“What you gon’ name him?”
“It ain’t a him.” When Varina was the mama all of her babies were girls, and Rue had explained again and again that it was not the mama that got to pick.
“It’s a boy,” Rue insisted.
Varina growled, or so Rue thought, the sound seemed so loud in her ear. Then she heard grass and twigs crunching underfoot and she pulled away as quick as she could, certain Varina’s nurse had come over from the House and was about to catch them at something she would not like to see.
Varina crawled on hands and knees through the grass to reach out for her discarded dress, and so when the fox appeared she froze like that, her hand partway out in front of her as though she might ward him off.
The fox would be the silver of ash forever in Rue’s memory, though looking back she figured it had to have been gray. It came all the way out to them, straight into the clearing as though to get a better look at the little girls, one black, one white, playing together in the high grass. Rue could not find her voice to scream, but she didn’t need it. The fox stopped only to cock its head at them, then it turned its bushy tail and bounded away into the thick dark of the woods.
* * *
—
Miss May Belle must’ve gotten her whispers from a fox because come Saturday she beat Rue with the branch of a birch tree.
What Rue remembered more than the pain of the beating was the pain afterward when her mama left her to cry in the dirt of their floor and the pain the next day when they stood in the upper gallery of the church during the service.
The Protestant minister was a white man that Rue had never seen before and could not see now from where she stood amongst the other slaves on the second-story platform in the very back of the church. Rue’s view instead was of backs of knees, hems of skirts, peaks of legs stockinged despite the heat to hide fatty veins. Through the gaps of the wooden slats the white folks below were a blur of somber colors made blurrier by the sweat that dripped down Rue’s forehead and stung at her already teary eyes, and every time any of the tightly packed black folks around her moved or sighed, itched or coughed, the wooden gallery would moan like it was about to give up.
Any other time to be brought to church would have felt like a treat, to feel the close press of those in the quarter that only ever thought of her as Miss May Belle’s girl and to feel like one of them.
She dared to look up every now and then and caught sight of her mama looking tired, restless; she was not listening to that fly-buzz sermon. A sheen of sweat was in the bow of her upper lip, and beneath her one eye was a heavy purple bruise that spread down her cheek and sunk to yellow like the sky of a sunset. Someone had hit Miss May Belle and so Miss May Belle had hit her. That’s all Rue believed to be true, but she couldn’t think on the meaning of all that.
After the sermon they had to wait for the white folks to leave the church in a slow, repentant tide before it was proper for them to descend from the upper gallery one by one on the narrow stair. Rue and her mama were the last ones down. Miss May Belle pulled her along behind her, her hand holding on so firm that Rue could feel her mama’s fingers on the shifting bones of her wrists. That shackling squeeze was as good a way as any for Rue to know that she was still in trouble, though for what she could not figure. Out through the double doors of the dim church they went, where, for a moment, Rue was so dazzled by the sudden bright afternoon that she could sense nothing but the heft of the heat and the sweetness of a voice that was singing.
It was Sarah that was singing. She stood in the very center of everyone, a matchstick of a little girl, small but made large by her inhibition, all eyes on her. The crowd hummed low in their throats for her but Rue could tell Sarah didn’t need them, she could have found the tune herself. She was the tune.
“Thank ya’, Marse Jesus,” Sarah would sing and the crowd would mumble their encouragement, “Yessuh, thank ’im, Lord Jesus.”
Rue’s mama pulled her away with two hands heavy on her shoulder that set the rawness of her back to screaming.
Miss May Belle turned her around, and when she did Rue saw that her mama’s hands were stained bright red.
“You bleedin’, Mama,” Rue said but her voice was empty of panic. It seemed to come from far away.
“Fool child, you the one bleedin’,” Rue’s mama said.
She could see Varina coming down from the House to meet them, and in her hands she held new, gleaming marbles. They looked cool, like ice, and Rue longed to touch them, but her mama was pulling her away.
“I wanna play with Miss Varina,” Rue heard herself saying over and over. She was crying in her mama’s arms, beating at her, kicking at her, sobbing. “I wanna play with Miss Varina.”
Rue cried until she couldn’t cry anymore and then she slept.
* * *
—
For a while she kept her eyes closed, just to feel. She was awake but not ready to wake up, and the pressure of her mama’s hands on her bare back was a wonderful pleasure after all the pain that seemed to have been centered there. The herbs Miss May Belle used were sweet but strong and when she lay them, warm and wet, on the vertical cuts on Rue’s back, what ought to have stung felt soothing, the reverse of a lashing.
Rue might have dozed back into sleep. She was thinking of a game of marbles that she was winning when she heard the rumble of her daddy’s voice.
“What’s all this now?”
Rue felt her mama pull away from her as a vanishing of her warmth. She peeked open one eye. Her father stood in the doorway of the cabin. He held a pass in his hand that was becoming crumpled in the fist he was steadily making. Rue’s mama took the paper from him, set it down on a chair. She reached up to kiss him, and he let her for a while before he pushed her firmly away.