collection plate—into her little bag of treasure hid away in the hollow.
WARTIME
1864
The drumming was in the sky. Marse Charles had woke the whole plantation to come and hear it. It was before sunup even, that he’d sent out the trumpet player whose bellow usually started the day. Come so early, this music had not been meant to signal work time for the field hands, or to summon house slaves who felt they’d only just rested down their heads. It was to herald doom. The trumpeter played a mournful tune, like a sad, strange accompaniment to the distant syncopation of warfare.
But who did Marse Charles think he was waking? They were all already awake, braced in their beds. Was this it now—kingdom come?
“Come on now,” Miss May Belle said to Rue.
They joined the sweeping crowd of black folks being summoned by their master, a black cloud moving dazed in the first crack of morning light.
The mood was tense. They were shaken, like a whole mess of sleepwalkers startled awake to find themselves in the yard of the House, field workers on one side, house workers on another, and between them Marse Charles high on the top step of the porch, which reminded Rue of the stage he’d constructed and deconstructed in the space of a day for his fete. Six months had passed since the party, but it still made her dizzy just to think on it.
A loud bottomless boom echoed in the distance, and the house seemed to rock within their vision. Behind her daddy, Varina came out as if summoned by the cannon fire. She was dressed already for the day, looked small and pale and likely to break the next time the crashing sound came down. It shook through them all like they were the bunched leaves on the same branch of a tree. With no means of knowing from which way the echo was coming, they all of them instinctively turned their eyes to the North.
“Y’all hear that?” Marse Charles’s voice was high and strained, harder than any of them had ever heard it. This man who had whupped them and cussed them and told them he was selling them off or ripping apart their families. He who had plain said no to any bit of independent hope they’d ever thought they’d found—never in any of those times did he sound so tore up as he did now. So downright sorry.
“Those vile Yankees. Those perfidious devils. They mean to snatch y’all up in yo’ sleep,” he warned. “They brought this feud to blood, them Northerners. To get at y’all.” He leveled a shaking finger at the assembled crowd. He was so pale there in the gloaming. Did any of them believe him? “Y’all hear that? That’s the stamp of their cloven feet.”
What they did hear over their master’s small, reedy voice was another explosion in the night, the seams of the world coming all undone. On his whim they waited there for what seemed like hours as the twilight eased to day, waited on him to release them.
* * *
—
“I’m to be married.”
Varina had been in front of the mirror when she said it, and Rue was behind her brushing out her red curls. Everywhere about them was the heady scent of ash blown downwind from the battlefield. The fighting was miles away and yet too close; its smoke was pervasive as a plague and Varina, fool she was, seemed to think the smell was about her. She’d already taken two baths that day, made Rue carry bucketfuls of bathwater up the stairs each time and lug it away again after. Varina had stunk up the water with rose syrup enough to make herself gag. She hadn’t allowed Rue or any of the house girls in to help her wash but had gotten into the hot bath alone, and there stewed herself for what seemed like hours before she’d let anyone in to dote on her. Now her hair was taking up an agitated frizz from all the washing and it wouldn’t obey Rue’s ministrations as she tried to gather it in a low braid. Rue never had liked white folks’ hair, the way it clung wet and stringy, the way it slipped and