mama screamin’,” Bruh Abel said. “I loved her more than anythin’ then. I didn’t understand it. I thought they was killin’ her, them strange doctorin’ grandmamas that come. Them two crones who’d rid themselves of their menfolk and lived together in a one-bed cabin. Folks whispered about ’em as much as they relied on ’em.
“Queenie, laborin’, was hollerin’ somethin’ awful when they laid her down. Me, a child, I thought, ‘I’m the only one that can stop it. I’m the only one.’?”
Bruh Abel could weave a tale, Rue knew, and she shut her eyes to see it, this birth, unremarkable as all the ones any woman had ever suffered before and after. But Bruh Abel transfigured it, made it sound so terrifying, his mama there sat up in bed and a pair of old prune-black women at either of her fat ankles, her dress shucked up to her thighs, her toes writhing round the ends of the metal bedpost—all that Abel could see from his vantage point.
He paused in the telling to take a long sip, like he was pushing something down. “I don’t know how y’all women do it.”
“I don’t know either.”
He was deep in his drink by now, drooping across the table already. He’d fall asleep soon, like she’d been after. Now the story wanted finishing.
“What happened to her baby?”
“Come dead.” She held back on hitting him. For telling this story of all stories. But she felt too sluggish and too sick and too defeated.
“I seen him, though.” Bruh Abel’s voice grew thin. “Before they named him a lost cause. The baby. He was as strange a li’l thing as ever there was. Blue all over. So pale he was, it seemed strange to think he’d come from my mama, who was big and dark. But she was his mama alright.”
“?’Course she was.” Rue was growing fed up. “He come out a’ her. Ain’t no question a’ origin to be had there.”
“What it was, though, was his skin,” he ventured quietly.
“They had the same colorin’?” It always seemed to come down to a matter of coloring.
Bruh Abel scoffed, polished his glass to empty. “Not hardly. Queenie was dark as the night is. This baby boy was lighter even than me.”
Rue tried to remember what she knew of Queenie, could recall only that she’d been the figurehead on her master’s boat, every detail of her fecund body chiseled out as a mahogany mermaid, the whole of the boat patterned as her flipper tail.
“So what then?” Rue asked.
“The baby was light enough to be white; that’s why it looked so vivid on him and was nothin’ on her.” He touched his own smooth arm. “A birthmark maybe. All up the body.”
“What it look like?”
“Looked something,” Bruh Abel said, “like scales.”
There were so many sights in the world that Rue hadn’t ever seen. But what she had seen, once, was the birth of a shock-white baby with ochre black eyes. Sarah’s baby, born in a caul and covered all in a birthmark that looked like scales. Just like Queenie’s lost boy.
Bruh Abel had no birthmark that Rue had ever seen, but she understood now that that was how it worked sometimes. The past revealed itself in mysterious ways, and Bruh Abel it seemed had passed his mama’s brand onto his own son. Bean.
Maybe Rue’s girl would have had the same birthmark had she lived.
* * *
—
Posy, half-born and half-remembered. Rue could almost see her baby. The new dark skin, still wet. The wanting O of her little mouth, suckling at the empty air. If Posy had not been real, then nothing was.
Rue’s body remembered. Inside, her muscles still ached, caught in a suspended spasm, still pushing. Her arms and fingers remembered that soft feel of baby, rich and butter smooth as flower petals. Did all babies feel that sweet, and she had never known it? She didn’t wish to touch another to find out.
What was it she thought she’d find out there in that wilderness besides singed