done it but she could see how it went. It was an oft-enough told tale. They’d come upon him up the road, on his way to join up with the Rebs. Hadn’t his marse freed him after all and everything? So there he was when Death came upon him, a black man with the flimsy protection of freedom papers.
Maybe they’d been brutal and rough, beat him to bloodied before they’d done it, though Lord knew they didn’t have to. They could just have easily bade him string himself up.
Fetch the rope, nigger.
Miss May Belle had not been witness, either, when they’d killed her man. But she knew what they’d done the moment they’d done it. Sat in their cabin, Rue watched her mama’s body twitch and bend like she was bearing an assault of unseen hands. Then she went all-over rigid, her neck overextended, her head tilted too far back. Inside her skull her eyes rolled to all white and a gasp shuddered out of her mouth with such force as to be her last. Just like that it was over, and Miss May Belle was herself again, sullen but dry-eyed. He ain’t gone, she kept saying like saying could make it so.
They’d left him to swing. Said the darkie-loving Northerners could cut him down if they felt so inclined. But the truth of it was his slow-spinning body, big and strong and heavy enough to bow the branch he dangled from, was meant to serve as a reminder in the master’s absence. That they would be back once the war was won.
Marse Charles had left Jonah in charge. Who better than a clipped cock to guard a henhouse? With Ol’ Joel beside him, overseeing, things didn’t hardly change. Miss Varina was like a ghost watching from her bedroom window, searching outward. From that height she could just see the tree they’d hanged Rue’s daddy from. She told them the next day to cut him down.
Folks said the Union army was creeping closer. They’d taken Marse John’s plantation for themselves, eaten up all the goods left in the stores, drank and sang their Northern songs, trampled on the fledgling crops, smashed things in Marse John’s parlor that weren’t worth the trouble to steal. Did they have horns, hoofed feet, like they’d all been hearing? They’d disappeared away with the slaves left there, it was said, marched them away not as free but as contraband. Better maybe the devil you know.
* * *
—
By then Miss May Belle had took to her bed with something worse than grief, which was denial. Said, He ain’t gone, of her man and Rue knew she’d find no help from her mama, maybe never would again.
Time was drawing to a close, it felt like, and there was a bristled-up anticipation amongst the people they couldn’t name, precisely, because it was tinged in fear. They’d led their whole slave lives waiting on someday, singing a day will come, promising on that day that they would be ready. Rue never had been good at singing along. She had decided not to wait on the Day but to act in the Night.
The moon lit the way for her, and Rue took herself right on in through the front door of the House, straight up the spinning stairs and down the gilded hall to Varina’s door, went in without knocking, without seeking permission or needing it.
Varina was deep asleep. One of her slave girls had tucked her neatly in her bed like a body laid out for burial, and all her earthly belongings surrounded her. Rue watched Varina for a moment in her repose knowing the moment she woke everything would change.
Rue shook the girl by the shoulders like to snap her neck. What had come over her, Rue could not say, only she knew it needed doing. Had to happen now.
The white girl shocked awake, saw Rue wild in her bed, and seemed to think it was her judgment day, started confessing.
“I didn’t know they meant to kill him,” Varina hollered.
Rue didn’t follow her meaning at first.
“Your daddy,” Varina said. She clutched her bedsheets close and shook. “I swear I didn’t know what