or tradition, or ways of life. She cared about her one life and tried to ignore the new one gurgling inside her. The sooner the husband came the better. Maybe she could tell of it then. Maybe she could love it. Take pride in it. Give it a name.
She couldn’t say when she first felt it move, only that it felt like moth’s wings in the dip of her stomach, a sensation so strange and small it seemed like something she’d made happen by half-wishing that it would. There was so much half-wishing then when her daddy had showed her the tin countenance of the man she was to marry. A man she’d danced with only once. Hard and fast and rough and alone, a dance to no music or at least no type that she had ever imagined to hear in her life. No time for courting in wartime, he’d told her, and no time to be so shy. Varina had never been shy a moment in her life ’til then, ’til a man, a supposed-to-be-beau, had ripped up her dress and made her shy of everything, shy of her own reflection in the glass, shy of a flutter in the bottom of her stomach that should have been a good thing. Her life should have been a good thing, but there was a war to the north and there were explosions in the sky and the first time she felt it kick, really kick, it had been a musket shot come from her insides so hot and hard, she’d half-wished she were dead.
* * *
—
Varina asked for them for comfort, her two little nigras. She’d take them with her right to her marriage bed if she could, like a beloved childhood blanket to stick between her and her new husband, a moth-eaten shield. But Varina wasn’t stupid; in fact, she felt smarter as she grew fatter, like she was filling up with a sharper, keener knowledge.
Varina knew what she saw when she looked at that mulatta girl, Sarah, and it was something like seeing her own face looking back up at her, distorted only by a ripple in the pond. Sarah was darker than Varina; that mark of Cain left by a dead black mother made them only half sisters, but if not for that they might have been twins.
Her daddy, Varina realized, was a dirty man. The fact did not surprise her like it ought to. She’d lately been introduced to the dirtiness of men, was growing heavy with it. And if she were to pack up Sarah and take her as her double, it would be all the sweeter that she might send Sarah out to her husband, a soldier for proxy.
* * *
—
“How long this been goin’ on?” Rue asked.
Varina had stripped herself down to next to nothing. Had ruined her room. Had smacked Rue across the face with a parasol handle. Dully Varina marveled at the red raising up on the nigra’s cheek even through the black, a perfect line of the parasol.
The beads off of Varina’s broken belt were still rolling. She could hear them reaching the far corners of her bedroom. Spinning. Under her bed and vanity, bouncing off the walls and edges and corners and still spinning. What would it take to make them come to rest? Varina didn’t have an answer to Rue’s question. To her it had felt like a lifetime that she had been nursing her shameful secret.
PROMISE
His word. It was all Rue had. Bruh Abel kept saying, Girl, you have my word. She did not want his word or anything his.
“The baby come dead,” he said. He said it slow each time, careful, like this was the first time she was hearing it.
Spat on the floor and said to him, “I don’t believe you.”
He cut her nails for her because he thought he was being kind.
“Used to do this for Queenie,” he said of his mama, trying to make Rue smile. “Toes too.”
She did not want to think of Bruh Abel’s mama, she did not want to think of him as coming from a mama who was real, and anyway Queenie did not feel