“Marse Payne dead in the war. We parcel of a forfeiture.”
A good deal then. Marse Charles lucky, always has been, rubbing on me for luck.
I ask the boy, “You got people back there?”
Now he’s turning his face back into that fool-stone and I suppose I can’t blame him for it. He don’t know me; far as he’s concerned I could be the master’s right hand. I hope fiercely that I ain’t.
“Mama?” It’s my girl at the door.
When my girl come in I have it figured all out, just from her look. This boy was bought for breeding. See, she’s eyeing him like she someone who ain’t never tasted food and he’s the dish being brought into a feast. But my girl is shy and given over to thinking on things too hard. That child is so like her daddy and she don’t even know it.
“Rue-baby,” I say to her. “This Jonah.”
* * *
—
After I sent Jonah on his way to the men’s cabin Rue takes me aside and says to me that thing that all mamas long to hear and horror after, too: “Mama, I need yo’ help.”
I done forgot the way to the old white folks’ church. I ain’t been there in so long and the last time I was took there it was through nightfall and I was being dragged, clawing and grasping at the root of trees as I went. I don’t wanna go out that way, not at all, but Rue says there’s something I need to see, something she can’t speak aloud no how, so I bundle up my fear like a sack of spikes and sling it over my shoulder and follow her through them miles.
When we get there the double doors are slight-ways open, like someone just went through them, and it makes me so nervous I stop and shy like a wary dog that’s sniffed up trouble on ahead of itself. I nearly whine in fear from down in the thick of my throat. My girl Rue beckons me forward. What can she be thinkin’? What could be so urgent? I have a bone-deep feeling that this might be my very worst fear come real, that they finally turnt her against me, that she’s the one that’s gon’ drag me back there, put me in that jail, that hole in the ground. She’s gon’ turn the key for them.
“Please hurry, Mama.” So I do.
Little Miss Varina is sat up by the pew looking anxious in a dress too flimsy for propriety, and I don’t have to go all the way up to her to see it. Her big round pregnant belly.
“No.”
“But, Mama.”
“I said no.”
I turn right around and drag my daughter after me saying no no no.
Varina’s hefted herself to her feet and she’s yelling stop but I don’t have to listen. Not as if she can chase me down in that state. Let them kill me later, but I’m leaving with my girl right now.
“Mama, she need you,” Rue says, chasing after me as I clatter through the grass and around the trees, wheeling so fast I almost can’t remember which way home is. “She ain’t got a husband now. She can’t have that baby.”
I grab Rue by the hair and drag her after me the same way Marse Charles done to me so many times. No no no.
“We will not. I won’t and you won’t. That’s death you talkin’ about. Killin’ a white woman’s baby for her.”
I smack at her back. Stupid soft-hearted darling. Push her further into the woods ’til we’re far from there.
“But she need our help,” Rue is saying and stumbling. She wants to turn back. After how far we come, she’s still trying to turn back.
“I’ll kill you myself first.”
She stops. She looks at me and knows I’m speaking the truth. Rue don’t argue after that.
* * *
—
I’m dreaming pure mad and I know it. I burnt up a leaf meant to give me sweet-nothing sleep but breathed too