a white man’s shelf, floating and ill-fitting inside a jar, preserved with whiskey, posed and primed to raise her thumb to her mouth in an aborted suck. She woke from these dreams screaming, hollering, clawing. Beside her Bruh Abel was a man she didn’t know. He tried to kiss her and hold her, and she wouldn’t let him. He swore to her the dreams weren’t real. Swore he’d paid the white Quaker doctor, and not the other way around, to see to it that the baby got buried proper. When she got well they could go up and see the place, if she liked.
Rue wouldn’t believe him, wouldn’t go anywhere with him, wouldn’t make love to him ever again, she swore, even though his hands were loving and soft and gentle. What was the point? He said they could start again, make another, but she knew it wouldn’t take. The place inside her where she’d held Posy was gone all arid now, an earth of dry, cracked clay.
“You can’t know that,” he said, kissing at her neck.
“Yes, I can know.”
She knew now the secret of Bean’s origin, from Queenie to Bruh Abel. The secret had been as plain to see as a mark of Cain, but she had not been looking. Now she could not look away.
In her nightmares Rue would walk on over to that white man’s shelf and stare. She would pick up the specimen jar in her two hands and hold up her Posy in repose and spin round the liquid in it to get a closer look. She would inspect her baby’s skin and see that it was dark like hers, but with all this dream time in which to look and ponder, she could see things she hadn’t had the chance to see before. Or hadn’t wanted to see. Posy’s skin was like Bean’s. Bean’s skin was like Queenie’s, patterned all over with little scales.
Inside the dream, Rue threw the jar to the ground where it splintered and shattered, all the liquid gushing away like a foretold flood. But what came out was not her baby Posy. It was Black-Eyed Bean, no longer Sarah and Bruh Abel’s baby, but Bean grown and freed.
When Rue woke, her eyeballs were like packed mounds of mud in their sockets, as if she’d stared into the sun unblinking and let them bake. She could see then what it was that needed doing.
* * *
—
As she crept up on Sarah and Jonah’s house, slow going still with the pain in her gut, Rue thought she saw a baby. No, that weren’t it. It wasn’t a baby but a child, but still the sight made her heart gallop. When she drew closer she saw clear that it was Bean, and he held in his hands a corn-husk doll, surely one his sister had used to carry around everywhere when she herself was his age. It was a sad thing dressed in a green sack with its face muddied to make it seem black, and Rue recollected one time that she’d humored Sarah’s daughter by looking over the corn-husk baby and pronounced it as thriving.
Bean stood there on the porch with the doll propped up on his shoulder the way he’d probably seen his daddy transporting wood. He’d watched Rue coming down the path and seemed to want to be noticed in that way that children sometimes did and sometimes did not. Rue thought about picking him up, to what end she could not rightly say. She edged closer, not knowing if she meant to love on him or turn him over. Did he look like Bruh Abel in other ways? Ways she’d never known or didn’t let herself know?
It was the doll baby that made Rue stop. It was not, after all, the one that had belonged to Sarah’s daughter as she’d first guessed. This was far older, blacker. One made lovingly with red bow lips and a green dress and wild hair in a bramble of yarn, and there in the dead center of its head, as she had done with all her hoodooing dolls, Miss May Belle had likely put in a tuft of Rue’s baby hairs. Her own signature.
Slung over Bean’s shoulder just so,