stumps took up more of the room than made sense to Rue, and up above it a canopy hung in thick drapes that made her hot just looking at them. With three bodies and all their warm, restless breathing, the room was particularly stifling, and Rue relegated herself to the cool varnished wood of the floor, which she was tasked to scrub from end to end. It would have been an alright place to make herself invisible if not for the fact that this position, on hands and knees, put her eyeball to eyeball with the dust-mottled collection of Varina’s ceramic dolls heaped all in one corner. Rue sweated under their staring, and the white gleam off their porcelain skin was like to make her blind. All the dolls were a striking straw-headed blond, unlike their owner.
Varina and Sarah were already stepping in the part of the floor Rue had just washed. Sarah’s bare feet left little gray imprints of themselves, and Varina’s impatient foot tapped dirt from her small dagger-hilt heel. Sarah fussed, brushing out Varina’s hair. Rue could have screamed as the red spirals drifted out and down to the floor. She’d have to sweep it again when they were all through.
“Darken it like how, Miss?” Sarah, with her sweet voice, was being just as doting as Rue had ever seen her and Rue had a good sense of why. It was no secret to them that as much as the world seemed to be changing it was not changing so much, so quick. Varina would be needing to become a lady—a lady in pursuit of a husband—and a lady in pursuit of a husband would like as not be in need of her own nigra housemaid.
Fannie had been the Missus’s girl for all of their lives. A perfect petted favorite, she’d oft be seen to flit all around the House in the Missus’s old clothes, reminding other folks of her favored place, putting them down in theirs.
Rue watched Varina and Sarah in the mirror, didn’t like how easy they were with one another, how close. They’d just together drew the black crepe off Varina’s large wall mirror and found that, beneath, the glass had been streaked black by the press of the fabric over those long months of mourning. Their doubled reflection was marred, lines over their faces like trenches through mud, and Rue just knew Varina was waiting to tell her to clean off the mirror soon as she finished the floor.
It made sense that Sarah would be chosen. That Sarah would go to the fete that night and serve drinks to fancily dressed white folks, that she’d follow behind Varina and make sure that her skirt wasn’t dragging in anything dusty. It had never been said, not out loud, but it had always been meant to be Sarah, anybody with eyes could see that. She’d never had a place in the field, not with her skin smooth and light.
“Miss May Belle’s likely got somethin’ I can use for yo’ hair. What you think, Rue?” They were both looking at Rue, their heads turned just sideways. Their mouths and noses and eyelashes in profile were strange and synchronous, and Rue could not deny that she felt a burst of foreknowledge.
She was invigorated with envy also when she stood and glanced at her own figure in the glass Sarah still held. She was small and dark-skinned and, in that moment, just as ugly-feeling as they must have imagined her, raisin black between them.
“I’ll run on out and ask Mama.”
* * *
—
Miss May Belle had not been the same after that time spent locked up in the jail hold of the church. Starvation and silence, three days of it, for disobedience, the simple sin of getting a mama some medicine.
“I done so many worse things than that,” Rue’s mama had said when she’d first come back, like she’d been thinking on all of those things she had done during her time locked away.
Rue didn’t know what to make of her mama, come back the way she had, with nothing on her to heal. Her body had taken care of itself, the way a body can, eaten up the stored-up flesh