the doll’s skirts turned and tousled and showed the black baby’s underside, where the white doll ought’ve been, the one that Miss May Belle had made to look like Varina. But there was nothing. Only a hollow, loose fabric, and a trail of straw stuffing, come undone.
“Where’d you get that?”
Miss May Belle had made those two halves, those two dolls tied together like one soul. Conjure to keep Varina from being sent away. But Rue had misunderstood from the start, supposed Miss May Belle had made Varina tied to the land, when all along it was Rue that Varina was tied to. The two of them bundled up together and trapped for it. No feet, or knees, or thighs. No legs to run with.
“Bean. What you done with the other half a’ the doll baby?” Rue knew her voice was too harsh but she couldn’t temper it. Bean’s eyes filled up with tears. He backed away from her, for the first time, frightened.
“I done a surgery,” Bean said.
Rue stilled.
They both heard the ring of Sarah’s voice coming from inside, and though Rue couldn’t make out what she’d said, Bean responded to his mama’s call and disappeared into the house in a hurry, like he was being pulled away from Rue on the end of a string.
Rue thought to chase after him, to snatch away the doll and make certain she had seen what she’d thought she’d seen. But from down the road a group of men ambled along slow, bearing an injured body between them, and they were coming straight at her the way folks always seemed to with their hurts. It was Jonah, she saw, who hobbled between them. He had to be supported on either side by others, but at least he was moving himself.
Rue sighed. “Take him on to my cabin,” she said before they could even tell her the full story.
* * *
—
Way they told it, the black men in the town had grown ashamed of their own fear, and in their shame they grew belligerent. They refused to wait out the perceived white demons squatting in the woods. Would not be haunted by haints in white robes.
They’d gathered themselves into a party of the bravest amongst them to ride out and stand their ground. Jonah was a natural leader, just as he had been during slavery times when he’d been entrusted to protect the women of the plantation, the closest he’d ever been to being viewed by his white master as a man.
Bruh Abel had told them that they shouldn’t go into the woods, but they’d done it anyway. They had only the one sad-sack mare between them on which Jonah rode out. Before they had even got halfway to where the danger was, the horse had sensed something it felt it had no business going near.
From deep in the darkness a black mangy dog had appeared and began to bark. The horse had run off in a spook, dragging its rider along, trampling on his leg in its haste to get away.
So with a leg badly sprained, if not all the way broken, here was Jonah at last, who Rue had wanted for so long. She had learned to want by the lines of him, his broad shoulders, yes, and the strong prominence of his brow and, yes, his dark dark skin, shining. But more than that it was his hands that had always fascinated her, marked as they were from his work by a motley pattern, a deep intersection of scars from reeling fish bare-handed, flesh healed and broken and healed over. His hands reminded Rue of her daddy’s scarred back, a smaller history all in a similar brutal constellation.
“Horse drug me far,” Jonah said. “Foolish I know.”
Rue shook her head. “Mighta saved you. Them white folks out for blood and worse.”
Now was the best chance Rue had to talk to Jonah, what with him lying across her supper table hissing softly at his hurts, and there was a lot that wanted saying. He’d kept secret his discovery of Varina; as far as Rue could tell no one else was any the wiser that