She was still young, twenty-and-some, and already she’d made two babies who had been born after no more than the usual struggle. Still she stayed smooth and sweet, and her breasts remained like two fat fruits just shy of ripe.
“He’s a’comin’,” Rue had said, laying her open palm on Sarah’s restless belly. How Rue knew even before the crown of him started pushing through that Bean would be a boy she could not account for, not in words. There was just her knowing.
Rue had rolled her rough-hewn sleeves on up—just about everything she wore and ate and owned was a gift from those mamas who had no other way to pay—and she had knelt the way she had knelt near a hundred times now, though her knees did ache for it despite her youth. Rue was nearabouts twenty also if her old master’s accounting was to be believed, not much younger than Sarah, though every day Rue felt more worn, like she were living out each one of her years double, aging out of time.
They’d grown up together, true, through slaverytime, wartime, freedomtime, but Sarah had kept herself young, and even here, at her most vulnerable hour, the sweat sitting on her skin had the audacity to glisten. In every way they were opposites—that was clear enough as Rue laid her thick dark fingers on Sarah’s thin thighs and parted them.
“Lord. Miss Rue.” Sarah sighed, praying to them both.
Rue had to love and hate equally being called Miss. She was every time reminded that she’d earned the title—and the respect of it—only after her own mama’s dying.
Rue’s mama, called Miss May Belle, had gotten the kind of sickness that could not be seen and for that reason could not be cured. Its origins were in heartache for her man, Rue’s daddy, who some said ran himself crazy for lust of a white woman.
Well, let folks have their stories. The only truth was he’d been hanged, strung from a tree just outside the town, his dangling toes making circles in the dirt as his body spun on the rope. And Rue had hardly known him.
She’d been under Miss May Belle’s tutelage the whole of her life. From her Rue had learned one true thing, that all birthing was performance. Mamas were made to believe that a bit of pepper by their bed would ward off evil spirits, but it was only meant to cause them to sneeze if what was required was a good last push to get the baby out. Rue learned to tell women to blow into a bottle or to chew on some chicory or to squat over a pot of boiling water to make their babies strong, to make the birthing easy, to protect them in that most crucial hour.
Bean’s mama was easy. Birthing came as natural to Sarah as it did to animals who need only to pause and squat and be off again.
Rue knew that she ought to be glad of that, but she wasn’t. Sarah was silk, free to slip from one type of wanting to another. Rue was rough, coarse linen, starched in her life. Freedom had come after the war for all black folks. All excepting Rue, she felt, for she was born to healing and stuck to it for life. And stuck to this place. Her own doing that, a secret curse of her own making.
“Lord Jesus,” Sarah had crooned as she’d labored. She’d gripped the bedsheets near to ripping. “Get me through this ’un. I swear, Miss Rue, this here’s my last.”
Rue knew sure as she knew the sun would rise that Sarah would come up pregnant again soon enough. Weren’t men drawn to her like flies to shit?
And it was on that thought, potent as a curse, that she realized something between Sarah’s legs was going wrong.
Rue nearly drew away in shock. A black mass came out, all in a forceful gush. The coal-dark sack squirmed in Rue’s hands. The blood that surrounded it was a red made more ominous by the darkness it covered. Through that black sheath Rue could make out the small surprise of a pale face, the mouth working soundlessly, nothing like suckling but more