the fox appeared she froze like that, her hand partway out in front of her as though she might ward him off.
The fox would be the silver of ash forever in Rue’s memory, though looking back she figured it had to have been gray. It came all the way out to them, straight into the clearing as though to get a better look at the little girls, one black, one white, playing together in the high grass. Rue could not find her voice to scream, but she didn’t need it. The fox stopped only to cock its head at them, then it turned its bushy tail and bounded away into the thick dark of the woods.
* * *
—
Miss May Belle must’ve gotten her whispers from a fox because come Saturday she beat Rue with the branch of a birch tree.
What Rue remembered more than the pain of the beating was the pain afterward when her mama left her to cry in the dirt of their floor and the pain the next day when they stood in the upper gallery of the church during the service.
The Protestant minister was a white man that Rue had never seen before and could not see now from where she stood amongst the other slaves on the second-story platform in the very back of the church. Rue’s view instead was of backs of knees, hems of skirts, peaks of legs stockinged despite the heat to hide fatty veins. Through the gaps of the wooden slats the white folks below were a blur of somber colors made blurrier by the sweat that dripped down Rue’s forehead and stung at her already teary eyes, and every time any of the tightly packed black folks around her moved or sighed, itched or coughed, the wooden gallery would moan like it was about to give up.
Any other time to be brought to church would have felt like a treat, to feel the close press of those in the quarter that only ever thought of her as Miss May Belle’s girl and to feel like one of them.
She dared to look up every now and then and caught sight of her mama looking tired, restless; she was not listening to that fly-buzz sermon. A sheen of sweat was in the bow of her upper lip, and beneath her one eye was a heavy purple bruise that spread down her cheek and sunk to yellow like the sky of a sunset. Someone had hit Miss May Belle and so Miss May Belle had hit her. That’s all Rue believed to be true, but she couldn’t think on the meaning of all that.
After the sermon they had to wait for the white folks to leave the church in a slow, repentant tide before it was proper for them to descend from the upper gallery one by one on the narrow stair. Rue and her mama were the last ones down. Miss May Belle pulled her along behind her, her hand holding on so firm that Rue could feel her mama’s fingers on the shifting bones of her wrists. That shackling squeeze was as good a way as any for Rue to know that she was still in trouble, though for what she could not figure. Out through the double doors of the dim church they went, where, for a moment, Rue was so dazzled by the sudden bright afternoon that she could sense nothing but the heft of the heat and the sweetness of a voice that was singing.
It was Sarah that was singing. She stood in the very center of everyone, a matchstick of a little girl, small but made large by her inhibition, all eyes on her. The crowd hummed low in their throats for her but Rue could tell Sarah didn’t need them, she could have found the tune herself. She was the tune.
“Thank ya’, Marse Jesus,” Sarah would sing and the crowd would mumble their encouragement, “Yessuh, thank ’im, Lord Jesus.”
Rue’s mama pulled her away with two hands heavy on her shoulder that set the rawness of her back to screaming.
Miss May Belle turned her around, and when she did Rue saw that her mama’s hands were stained bright red.