gift she could give before Varina and Bean’s departure. Knowing.
Rue had done the same for Sarah, had asked the bedbound woman permission to disappear her son away.
“A mama’ll suffer just about any heartbreak,” Sarah had said, through sweat and sorrow. “If it means her child is someplace safe.”
When Ma Doe and Varina had finally pulled apart, Varina turned to look on the boy that was Black-Eyed Bean, Sarah’s baby and, Rue supposed, Varina’s nephew if the tangle of rumors surrounding Sarah’s origins was finally to be named true. Marse Charles had prided himself on his sons, but here were his two daughters, Sarah and Varina, planted in the same season, and like to overgrow the world if the world would only let them.
In the little schoolhouse, Varina and Bean took the measure of each other, and then Varina crouched down to match his height.
“I like your hair,” she said, easy and familiar.
“Me too.”
He’d fidgeted and fussed when Rue had spread the calendula and carrot juice mixture through his hair to lighten it. All it took, a simple change of coloring, of wording, russet to redheaded, and there he was, a white boy before her like she’d laid magic on his head. The color had come out just right, that was clear to see with the two of them face-to-face, close as kin.
Bean looked to Rue and rubbed his big black eyes with both fists in the loving little way of his. “Miss Rue say Mama gon’ be alright.”
“Yes,” Varina said. “Miss Rue has the care of everybody in hand.”
* * *
—
Rue only waited out the rain. There were things that wanted doing and night was coming on with the intention of blackening out the sky, though the sun still had the edges.
She walked Ma Doe halfway back ’til she knew she was safe in the center of the old plantation where folks were still milling about in a hurry to finish what needed finishing before the threat of nightfall. There was something hanging in the air around them, call it foretelling, call it inevitability. Rue kissed Ma Doe’s cheek and said goodbye.
“Where you off to?”
“Goin’ to grab a li’l magic.”
Ma Doe frowned, not catching her meaning, and Rue rubbed her fingers together to indicate coin.
“Thought you gave ’em what they needed.” Ma Doe turned her head in the direction they’d left Varina and Bean, like she could see them going. Between them they carried the satchel of letters that had turned brittle waiting all those years in Ma Doe’s locked desk. The correspondence to the Northern auntie to whom they now were headed had been taken up in two thick bundles: letters received, and, in Ma Doe’s meticulous hand, copies of the letters sent. Two sides of the story. Varina’d read up on the facts of her life. She was like to add embellishments. Hadn’t that always been her way?
“They’ll do just fine,” Rue told Ma Doe.
No dark back roads for a white lady and her white son. Bean with his shock-white skin and his new orange hair would pass as easy as folks had always told Bruh Abel that he could. Why the man had never chose to do so Rue couldn’t rightly say. There were so many things about loving him she’d formed whole cloth in her mind and wouldn’t now ever get the chance to turn over and examine proper in the light.
“This money ain’t for Varina. It’s for someone else.”
Ma Doe mhmmed a smart rolling sound from the back of her throat, like to say she’d lived so long, she’d heard everything before. “And what are you fixin’ to tell him when you give it?”
“Don’t know, Ma,” Rue said. “Maybe somethin’ like goodbye?”
SURRENDER
1865
They hanged Rue’s daddy from a tree. He’d been named the cause of Varina’s shame. That was all it took to enact Varina’s curse upon Miss May Belle, revenge for her refusal to heal her of the baby she did not want. Lily-white conjure. Simple as pointing a finger.
Rue hadn’t been there when they’d