curse you by who you done wrong. A curse was a problem that could be countered. Rue would need a piece of him to do it, a lock of hair, a toenail clipping. An image to direct her curse toward.
In the midday empty, the air in Varina’s bedroom was a stale outline of the mistress—it smelled of rose hip and burning hair and sweat, all a uniquely Varina scent that Rue had never been able to put words to ’til she smelled it in the air of the room without her there. It gave Rue pause, that smell—made her feel that Varina was right behind her, ghosting in her steps. She persisted despite it. Began searching under and behind things just as Varina had. She’d have secreted the photograph of her sweetheart away, no doubt.
When Rue couldn’t find the photograph, she turned to the dolls, like they might hold the answer. All in a row, gorgeous doll babies that had been handmade in far distant places Rue could not even cobble up enough imagination to dream about. They were the only acceptable gifts of Varina’s childhood, Rue knew, and the only real education. Varina had been taught to want to be a wife and a mama from the very day that she was born.
Rue unscrewed their heads. Ignored the plaintive squeaks their hinges made. Inside their hollow was cobwebs and disused fly parts some spider hadn’t thought to eat. Nothing.
She thought about smashing them, Varina’s porcelain babies, even took one by the head and raised her arm high and willed herself to do it, waiting on the satisfying crash and crunch, the sound of the porcelain skittering across the hardwood she’d just scrubbed clean. In the end she didn’t do it. Couldn’t. She set the doll down back in its outline of dust on the shelf, even smoothed down its hair like it was a child she was putting to sleep.
There was no use in fighting Marse Charles’s commandment. Varina and Rue, they were bound to their roles, and always had been, Rue figured, by something stronger than curse and conjure—simply, they’d been raised to be the women they had become.
PROMISE
Ma Doe had lost her words. She had always had that slow, stately way of speaking, the deliberateness of a schoolteacher, every breath of hers a lesson. But by the summer that the tent swelled, Ma Doe’s speech had slowly turned into a slurry. Worse than this—and Rue cussed herself for thinking there could be worse—Ma Doe could not write.
The pen trembled violently in her hands whenever she took it up, as if some fear of her own failure started even before she could lay the nib to paper.
It had begun when Bean had died, Rue recollected; the grief of it had sunk Ma so low. Even when he rose again, Ma Doe, who had been battered by so much loss the whole length of slaverytime and after, could not herself be resurrected to her former buoyant majesty.
The letters from the North piled up and Rue hardly knew what to make of it. She lied to Ma Doe, told her not to fret over it, but Rue fretted enough for the both of them. Varina’s auntie in Boston would have to note the silence soon, and rather than take it as her due, she was liable to be sparked to action, of what type Rue dared not think on. She’d never known a white lady to leave well enough alone, and the scribbles of words on all them unanswered letters began to follow Rue everywhere she went, shading her as black clouds on the horizon.
They’d devised together a plan, Rue and Ma Doe had, but it was slow going. Every evening they’d sit at the back of the emptied classroom, and Rue would lay her hand atop Ma Doe’s and together they would write. They wrote ’til their candle burned low and still only got to a sentence a night if that, had yet to finish even one letter, but they kept on.
“What’s that word?” Rue asked. They’d taken a break, exhausted at the bottom of a page. Rue pointed to a word they’d just finished. It was short but she liked well the loops and swirls of it,