life Sarah could have had.
Rue struggled to come up with a lie, an excuse that might prevent her being whupped for daring to play such a trick. But Sarah was resigned. Without a word they’d been caught out in their trick before it ever began, and now they had to see it through. Varina and Sarah traded places. Sarah took the vanity stool and Varina held the mirror, playing at being a servant. Rue raised the slow-dripping syrup to Sarah’s waiting head where it would settle and harden, thick as tar.
* * *
—
“What were you thinkin’ of?” On Miss May Belle’s cabin floor Sarah’s cut-off hair lay left behind, hardened like petrified bugs in amber, though Sarah herself had long since gone, sent to bed shorn and weeping. Hair grew back, Miss May Belle had assured her, saying nothing of her own hidden star-shaped scar.
“I wanted to get her back,” Rue said. “Make Varina feel somethin’ for what Marse Charles done to you.”
That was the simple answer, the answer that Rue figured her mama, who was always juggling a hundred schemes herself, would be proud to hear. Truth was, Rue could not put simple words to her anger, just that it was anger. She’d wanted to hurt Varina for love of her and did not so much mind hurting Sarah in Varina’s place.
“And see yourself whipped for it?” Miss May Belle moved about the cabin in her distress like she mistrusted the distance between walls. Even as she raved she walked up and down, smacked at one far wall then crossed the length of the room to smack at the other. “You lucky Miss Varina ain’t catch on to what you was about. You wanna see yo’self hanged? Or worse, sent where they sent me? You couldn’t never survive that place.”
It was the only time Miss May Belle ever alluded to the three days she had been buried alive in the church’s jail. Rue took her mama’s scolding with her face set sullen.
“Stupid girl. Ain’t you know it ain’t worth it? Don’t you know there’s no way round it? Aiming to curse white folks is like tryna slap at a fly sittin’ on yo’ wound. It’s never gon’ do you no good. You only gon’ smack yo’self, and that fly gon’ go off laughin’.”
Rue felt defiant. “Varina say I could go to the party tomorrow in place a’ Sarah.”
Marse Charles was never gonna let a bald-headed slave girl into the House, not while there were guests there, chittering on in the face of the North-brought war about the fine way they treated their slaves. Like family, they’d lie. Like beloved children needing a stern hand to be raised right.
“It’s my own fault. I kept you shielded.” Miss May Belle ricocheted off the far wall and sat down hard on the dirty hair-covered floor, drew her knees up to her chest. Curled in on herself. Rue didn’t know what to do. “Go on then. Let Miss Varina take you.”
“Take me where?” The party was being held up at the House, only a stone’s throw.
“Let her take you away and show you how the world is.”
* * *
—
Rue’s mama had told her once that Cain and Abel were not brothers, not twins. They were, Miss May Belle said, two sides of the same person, good and evil warring against its own inclinations. The same struggle was borne out in every person, over and over, from the very most beginning of time, and you could only answer for yourself which brother would win. Varina had told her later that it wasn’t true, that the Bible said it plain, spelled it out in those little letters Rue couldn’t read. There was Cain and there was Abel. There was black and there was white. It wasn’t so much that Rue didn’t believe Varina, but she kept hold of what her mama said, applied it to others, held up that story to folks’ faces and tried to decide which brother they had ruling them.
Varina could be good, Rue said to herself that day, as giving as Abel. They met in the clearing before the fete. Varina was lovely in her