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.
“Travel by night. Follow the shine of ’em coins on the river surface,” Miss May Belle told Airey. Suddenly Rue could hear her mama’s voice impossibly clear, like it boomed from the river itself. “That