kind memory of the older woman who slept beside you in the hayloft, who let you fold into her warmth that first evening that you were owned? And she hummed to you because she couldn’t speak what you spoke. And that first sense of love, the earth still for the first time beneath your back, and for the first time, through an opening in the roof, the evening sky. You can make due with unspoken kindness and the stars also.
* * *
—
There were signs and seasons and days and years. After a time she was called Dorothea, named in the mistress’s own image. They whupped the name into her, but it couldn’t stick right. “No,” she could say. And then “Doe” for the rhyme. In the end, they tied the two together, called her Doe—and it was good.
EXODUS
If anyone had ever loved Varina, Ma Doe had. Rue knew that. Had sometimes envied that, but now she made good on it, or as good as good might ever get leastwise.
Rue walked slowly between her two prizes like she was the juncture between the beginning and the end of time—Ma Doe on her right, Bean on her left, a march for penance.
The new school building wasn’t all the way erected but it had four walls. In Rue’s estimation that was enough to make a room or a home, a permanence, that one could start to feel safe with for a time, never mind that the roof was not quite finished and the rain came blustering in.
“It’s dangerous,” Ma Doe kept warning. She knew as well as anyone the danger the night could hold.
“I want you to see her ’fore she goes.”
Inside Varina had made a seat for herself out of a fat leather case, crafted for her special some years ago for a trip she’d never taken. She sat in the corner as nervous and hair-raised as a wet cat, but she was alert. Ready. She troubled on the finer details of Rue’s plan, seemed to not understand at times the things Rue was asking forgiveness after, but she was not angry to learn that blacks were freed, was only relieved to hear that no hurt was coming after her. Varina was ever fierce after her own survival and she was fierce after the things she loved and now Bean had become one of them.
Ma Doe broke into a shudder when she saw the little baby girl she’d raised from birth. All these years and Ma Doe had been protecting Varina like a jewel in a box she could not open, for there was hardly any safe time that they could meet where others mightn’t discover the secret. Rue hadn’t ever understood how you could love something you couldn’t have and hold, not ’til she’d loved and lost her own baby, loved hard on empty air and an idea.
Ma Doe moved faster than Rue had ever known her to and wrapped her ancient arms around Varina. They hugged and whispered to each other, ignoring the hard-falling rain. Rue looked on, her hands tight on Bean’s little shoulders, rubbing to keep him warm, keep his spirits up. He didn’t seem afraid, though, only curious to see Ma Doe, who he’d known all his small life as a fine marbled rock of a woman, moved to such tears.
Every other bosom baby of hers was gone to meet their maker by various hard means. Marse Charles’s boys had marched away, had not even sent her a letter before the war ended them, she who had taught them their first stumbling words. Marse Charles had followed after, gone out to fight in the last pathetic dredging battles and had gotten not much farther than the next county before he’d surveyed all they’d lost and put a pistol to his mouth, frowned on the metallic taste, and drunk down a bottle of strychnine instead, or so the story went.
At least they had stories. Ma Doe’s trueborn baby boys all had been torn from her arms, not one word to say what had become of them. Rue could, in some ways, sympathize, could understand the way a losing and not knowing was the only thing in the world worse than simple out and out losing. This was the