Rue ran. Out through the slave quarters of the House, a labyrinth of tight dank corners, underground rooms, not hardly fit for habitation but lived in all the same, and she came up gasping on the other side of the slaves’ entrance with the little bundle in her arms wrapped and wrapped and wrapped in cloth. If she encountered anybody she was meant to lie, tell them what she held was a bundle of kindling or a sack of root medicine or a collection of rusty bloodied knives, whatever lie needed telling to get her fast away because the baby needed to be buried and it needed to be buried quick.
Don’t even think on it as a baby, Miss May Belle had said when she’d passed off the little strange bundle, already swathed and hid from Rue’s curious eyes. It ain’t a baby really. It’s just a shame.
Rue took Varina’s shame to the river, as far as she could go without being thought of as running away, the very edge of Marse Charles’s vast territory so large he probably had never even strolled the half of it. There she dug deep with use of little more than a piece of slanted rock that cut and bruised her palms, but the mud was yielding, softened by a slow-falling rain.
She laid the shame down in the hole, and there she could just make out the baby’s figure through the dried blood on the thin blanket. There, his little arms and his little legs, his twisted-up chest and sunken stomach. There the outline of his shock white face. She looked on him so long that the rain collected in the hollow of his skull, pooled on the blanket in black, where his eyes should have been. All black.
Rue plugged up the hole with mud, packed it in deep. She buried him and prayed the whole while. That the shame would stay hid. That the creek wouldn’t ever rise and bring the dead baby back again.
* * *
—
Varina wouldn’t speak. When her daddy came to see her, his fellow want-to-be soldiers were in his company, bedraggled and obviously drunk. Ruddy and heavy with it, they’d called her down to the parlor because her bedroom, the whole upper floor of the House it seemed, was a tainted place in Marse Charles’s estimation. She had stained it all over with a womanly sin.
Her legs would barely take her down the stairs, her head rocked and flipped and did not settle. On the long walk she saw ghosts of women, translucent spirits, all of them with babies to their bared breasts, laughing. She was lost in her own home and it took two slave girls to find her and lead her back, and when she did finally reach the parlor she lay shriveled and pale on a stiff-backed chaise. The men were automatic and polite in her presence, but they were ready. They had their dogs and their guns and their whiskey and their rope. All they needed was the name, they kept saying, and the hungry dogs kept barking, and the ghost women with their babies stood over Varina and let themselves be sucked dry. A name. A name.
“May Belle,” she said to quiet them. “May Belle, she ought to have helped me.”
“May Belle?” Marse Charles said. “May Belle’s man? He’s the beast that attacked you?”
The question echoed. Above her the ghost women leered. A name.
EXODUS
Rue had smacked Bruh Abel. Once and hard and across the face. Named him a cheat and a liar and told him to get gone. She had never hit anybody before, let alone a man, let alone one she might have loved.
Bruh Abel had still been grinning, even when blood bloomed from his split lip, but there was sorrow in that grin. It had been there awhile, Rue knew, since her baby died. Their baby.
“Guess I was deserving that,” Bruh Abel said and rubbed his swollen cheek.
She’d made him a poultice to soothe the red mark her hand had left on his fair skin.
Deserving? What did she herself deserve? She thought on it