a child and he moved him and spoke for him and told the folks there, this here’s God’s child. Don’t let no harm come to him. But come mornin’ Bruh Rabbit cried at what he’d found. Somebody done killed God’s child. Now the townsfolk were aggrieved and didn’t know what all they could do but to replace the child one hundredfold with their finest, strongest men of good stock.
Bruh Rabbit marched those men to heaven, right up to God’s veranda, and proclaimed, here I have done it. From one corn kernel to one hundred slaves.
And God did have to admit that Bruh Rabbit was the most cunning of all creatures.
WARTIME
Varina sucked her thumb. She hadn’t done it in years, but there she was, sixteen, her body worming with pain, and she put her thumb in her mouth because it was the only thing she had at hand to keep herself from screaming. She sucked hard at it ’til it was red and sore, the nail down to the quick, the skin puckered and wrinkled and raw. When she put it in her mouth she tasted only the acrid lye-white bubbles that she had held in her hands when she’d prepared the flush of soapy water to do what needed doing. To clean out her baby, root and stem.
Now she curled around her aching middle like someone had put a sawed-off shotgun to her belly button and pulled the trigger. She rolled on the varnished wood floor of her bedroom, her body sliding and twitching. Stuck her thumb in her mouth as the pain rose and rose, bit down on her thumb to try to hold in the mounting scream, because she knew if anybody came upon her, if they came too soon, their first thought would be to save the baby.
But the scream broke loose and came out jagged, tearing at her insides as it carved its way up and out of her throat, a mournful cry against her will.
* * *
—
Miss May Belle rolled back her sleeves. Didn’t know truly where to begin. It was a poor sight to see Varina as she was, shaking and screaming, foam coming from her lips like she’d swallowed the soap instead of the truth, which was that she’d stuck it between her lily-white legs. Marse Charles had sent for Miss May Belle reluctantly but it was better than the alternative, which was to send for the doctor, who, miles and miles off, might not come in time and upon seeing Varina would know instantly the nature of the shame she’d brought down on them, on her own good name—once for conceiving and again for committing such a foul, twisted act as trying to end that conception.
Well, the girl was paying for it now. She might not make it to sunup. And there was a part of Miss May Belle that thought, now maybe that would be the better ending for all of their stories to say she’d tried her damnedest but there was no saving neither of them, mama nor child.
Miss May Belle kneeled and held her hands in a rictus of uncertainty, and beneath her Varina curled and cried, looking like a salted-over slug. Miss May Belle had brought with her everything she had, every type of healing she knew of. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a woman in such a state, though the slaves down there on the plantation had different ways and different reasons. Varina had chosen a hard-chemical death for her baby and to that end Miss May Belle brought with her harder medicines, tinctures in bottles saved up from Varina’s mama’s sickness that had come too late to be used.
“Calm her with the laudanum,” Marse Charles had told Miss May Belle. “Don’t give my daughter any a’ yo’ shit black grass.”
The bottle held enough, Miss May Belle knew, to put Varina to a dreamless forever sleep, and she did think on serving it to her for a long dark while. In the end, Miss May Belle administered Varina only a taste, decided soul-deep that she simply didn’t have it in her to let any woman die, especially not for the mere sake of taking her fate into her own two hands after the world