box like a coffin? It was too horrible, too much like her mama’s punishment in the church. Three days, three nights, in the cold and the dark. No food. No water but what leaked in when it rained. Why should Rue ever trust Varina? But there had been her mama’s warning, a cruel thing tossed away that stuck and rang in Rue’s memory: “You couldn’t never survive that place.”
Rue made to stand. Varina laid a laced hand on her shoulder, pushed her back down. “You can’t miss this, Rue.”
The lid yawned as it closed down over her head. With her back rounded she could fit into the domed roof, she found. Everything went black. She worried too late about biting spiders and tried again to stand. She heard the latch of the lock click shut, an impossibly loud doom. Then light crept back in. Varina’s fingers snuck in the gap no more than two inches wide.
“If you sit up straight, you’ll be able to push it open a li’l for yourself,” Varina said, peering in at her. “You’ll be able to see the show. Me dancin’ and all the pretty folks. Go on now. Try it.”
If Rue turned her head just so she could, in fact, lift the lid open for herself as far as the stretch of the lock would allow. Up close was the corner of Varina’s gap-toothed smile, and beyond was the lofted stage, set up for the minstrel show. Varina raised her finger to her lip, and she was so close that Rue could make out only her knuckles and the leftmost side of her nose, but she knew what the gesture meant and already the first of the white folks were crowding in.
Rue uncraned her neck and let the box fall lightly shut. Chatter grew in a buzz about the room, and the scuffing footfalls echoed louder. Bereft of sight, Rue made her ears keen, and though she could pull no voices in particular out of the din, she did mark the high, crinkling sound of white women laughing and the deeper rumble of white men pontificating and, beneath, the hush of black folks servanting, the clink of silver, and then the first trill of a flute being played with a scattering of heavy notes on a piano, joined in artful earnest by the strings. She didn’t dare peek out for much of the first few songs, but by the third, a fast, roiling tune that had the wood floor shaking with the force of it, she dared to push up the lid with her head and look awhile.
There the white folks bent their knees to each other as though in greeting, and at some command of the music that Rue could not figure they began working themselves into knots, here and there turning at sharp angles beneath each other’s arms like lines of ants after some flour, and how they did not smash into one another she couldn’t say. The women and girls swished past her corner in whirls of solid color. Every time she picked out a flash of blue she wondered if it was Varina, but she could not see enough of them to tell, as their skirts quivered up and down with their frantic, senseless bobbing. And here a man’s pant legs and tails would come sweeping in and swing the woman away, and another flash of skirt would come and bob in the same fashion as the last. By the time she’d worked out which way the dancing ought to go, the song had come to an end and they were about the bowing again and she knew she must retreat back to her closed position like a tortoise drawn in on its own self.
The only indication she had of the time was the growing crick in her neck and the changes in the music, and she’d already lost the sense of how many songs had come and gone. The applause caught her attention, but it was when the strains of a harmonica reached her, muffled through the box, that her curiosity got to her again. She pushed open the lid and looked.
The white folks had stopped dancing, had made an audience of themselves, and though Rue could not see quite over their heads she could see their