they were asking when they asked it. I didn’t know.”
Maybe it was so. But the trouble was that Varina had never had to know anything up there in the House; she could close the blinds if she didn’t like what she was seeing, could turn away in her featherbed.
“It alright.” Rue began with a lie. “Come with me now. It ain’t safe for you. The army is a-comin’.”
Varina grabbed at Rue. Hid her face in Rue’s little chest, and Rue could feel Varina’s tears and snot and sorrow soaking through her own muslin dress.
“I can’t bear it,” Varina said.
Rue knew that for all her life the little white mistress had been told the bedtime stories where the black man was the brute, the creature to fear in the darkness. Now the world was all turned over and at Rue’s suggestion Varina could just hear the boot stomps of a hundred Northern men, none of them a savior, every one of them like the gentleman Rue had glimpsed defiling Varina’s innocence the day of the Dead Man’s Jubilee. A white-gloved monster. Rue never had been good at comfort, but she comforted Varina’s fears then, laid a kiss on her forehead, said, “Ain’t I gon’ keep you safe?”
It was likely when the Blues came through that they’d be kind to Varina, send her on to wherever disgraced women went to be hid away from the fighting with others of their station, to write letters and sing songs and wait out the new dawn. But it was just as possible that those Northern soldiers, hungry and vengeful, would swoop in and see her as part of what her opulent house stood tall for, just another room in which to plunder. And Varina still had Rue’s name and Sarah’s name on a spirited away bit of paper that promised her ownership of her nigras should she ever take a husband. Any day now the world might right itself and the old laws would hold. Rue had never seen that thing the Yankees were promising—freedom—and she did not trust in what she could not see.
* * *
—
There’d always been rumors of what lay beneath the white church, and in the end the rumors held true. The little locked room under root and earth was not a room at all but a pit, a grave, and Miss Varina, mistress-made, had the key.
“But, Rue,” Varina kept on saying, even as she eased her way into the dark. When her feet landed in the mud down below there was the sound of it sucking, the earth swallowing. Looking up at Rue from down below, Varina shivered.
“It’s the only way.” Lie two. How quick they grew and strengthened and tangled.
“You’ll come back for me, won’t you? Please?”
Rue slid closed the lid. Turned the key hard in the lock.
* * *
—
Day started dawning, and Rue met it. Everybody on the plantation was sleeping still, dredging the last of their resting hours, for normal folks toiled all day, slept at night. Not Rue, never Rue. She was all opposite, a nighttime creature. She could see through the darkness and she had seen what was coming from way off.
Rue stood on the porch of the House alone, little, thin and nothing to her. When they came she faced them down, an army. She had her hand on the pillar for strength, laced her fingers in the etched grooves and rubbed so hard, feeling like it was the only thing left that was real. If she didn’t hold on here she would float away—that was her thinking, as she drew her breath on the next lie.
The leader of them walked up, no uniform on him, but just an air of command. He talked to her slow like he thought maybe she wouldn’t understand.
“Step away from there now, girl.” Already he was snapping orders at one of his men to come and grab her away.
She held, gripped. Spoke: “Only I need to tell you, suh. Miss Varina, our mistress, is dead. Died of the pox just late last night.”