the last group come runnin’ up from Africa to get they colors and they so greedy and wantin’, climbin’ over each other like that, and the Lawd say to ’em ‘Get back, get back.’ But so fevered was they, all they heard was ‘Get black, get black’—and that’s the truth!”
The trumpet blasted as the crowd clapped and laughed and the end man dipped a bow so low his nose touched the waxed-up floor of the stage. They drew further cheers as they trotted in high-stepped kicks switching places and hats and jackets in a comedic whirl. They plumped up their collars pretending to be black folks who were pretending to be white dandies and, that done, they plunked down in their original seats in slovenly postures of exhaustion.
“Lawdy,” said one of them, “it sure is tiresome bein’ white folk.”
Rue thought to sink low again but then the raucous crowd turned soberer as they waited on the next act, and lo the man on the end began, without the aid of music, to sing.
He drew his cap from his head and held it over his heart. “If you want to find God, go in de wilderness, de wilderness.”
He was good, there was no denying. He sang it so sweet that Rue wanted to take his advice. She thought if only she could rear up that she would run away right into that wilderness he promised, but her neck and legs stayed cramped; she shifted and the box she was in fell shut. She listened as the other men joined him, lending him their voices in four blending parts. She found she could pick them apart better there in the darkness.
* * *
—
Hours might have passed in which Rue grew drowsy the longer she remained in that damned box breathing in her own stale air. She itched, she needed to relieve herself. The revelers took their time in leaving and she heard them go one by one, asking their black footmen to bring about their carriages or going away reluctantly on foot themselves or begging a spare room in the House, stumbling away drunk and ecstatic.
Varina appeared so suddenly in the gap Rue would have jumped if she’d had the space to do so. The girl was grinning, and her curls were flattened-down ringlets matted to the sweat on her forehead. Her cheeks were rosy beneath false rouge.
“Can’t you let me out now?” Rue found her voice gritty with disuse.
Varina lifted a bare finger to her lip to sign for silence again. She’d lost a glove it seemed.
“In a moment,” she said in whisper. “Shh. He’s coming.”
“Who?” The lid slipped shut again.
Varina was giggling, Rue heard that plainly—a high, sweet giggle nothing like her usual laugh. Rue could not make out the man’s words, but she did hear the deep baritone vibration in his voice, which seemed much too loud, which bounced and echoed in the suddenly emptied room. At first she made him for Marse Charles, but no, Rue knew her master’s voice in her sleep and this man’s voice was much too deep to match it. Varina laughed again. Rue’s legs ached something awful.
The man was fixing to ask a question, Rue could tell that much in the pitch of his voice, and she strained to hear Varina’s side of the conversation. There was no response, laughter or otherwise. Rue didn’t quite dare peek, not with the strange man there and liable to beat her if he realized she’d been there all along. She figured him for white he sounded so sure of himself, the way he kept demanding. His voice came back in the same low rumble it had before, like he was disciplining an ill-behaved child by asking it to explain exactly what it had done. Again, there was the long, strange stretch of Varina’s silence. Rue edged open the top of the chest, just the barest amount.
They were across the room from her, nearer to the stage, and all she could make out was the tight cinched waist of Varina’s new dress and the man’s middle in a fine suit. He wore a white glove, she saw, and he took Varina’s bare hand in