“No, suh.” Rue spoke in slow, gentle rolls like she was calming a spooked horse. “Ain’t no curfew no more. Remember? Ain’t no slavery no more. War’s been over and we been freed.”
Ol’ Joel scratched at his hair, a meager snowcap that looked alarmingly bright next to his blue-black skin. He was old, folks said, so old he dreamed of Africa, woke some nights and thought that he was there again. Was this one of them nights? Rue took him by the elbow and tried to guide him home with her. In the morning he’d be back to himself, sharp-minded as a laid trap and just as likely to bite. But the sun would dip low again and so would his senses. It was a madness that reminded Rue so much of her mama’s final demise that she could hardly wait to be away from him.
“I know what you been doin’, May Belle. Don’t you deny it.”
Rue patted his elbow and sighed. “Been doin’?”
“I seen you with her.”
“With who?”
“That haint in the woods.”
Rue halted at the gravel road, stopped at the head of the cross that started the old slave quarters that were slave quarters no more. She could turn around now. No one would have seen her with him. She could lead the old fool back into the tangle of woods. Turn him round ’til he worked himself lost. She could make the trees swallow him up if she needed to.
“Ain’t no haint in no woods,” Rue spat.
“I seen you with her.” Ol’ Joel tried to free his arm from the crook of her elbow. She wouldn’t let him. She had a hold of him and he was curling in on himself, his lips flapping, his voice rising near to a holler. “I seen you walkin’ through the trees with her, visiting her, whispering with her. I seen you summoning her. The haint. The ghost.”
“Stop that. You ain’t talkin’ sense.” Or he was talking too much sense for her to stomach.
“You a witch, same like yo’ mama was,” he said, and Rue did not know if he was accusing her mama or her grandmama. He’d got his generations, his healing women, all tangled.
“Y’all alright? I heard hollerin’.”
Rue was more relieved to see Jonah then than she could say. He came up the path to them quickly, threw her a knowing look as he steadied Ol’ Joel. Jonah’s broad, sure frame towered over Rue and the sunken old man both.
“Marse Charles’ll hear of it,” Ol’ Joel kept on. “Just you wait, now, Marse Charles’ll see to ya.”
Rue looked to Jonah but it seemed neither of them would correct Ol’ Joel, would tell him that Marse Charles was long dead. If Ol’ Joel could not recollect his own liberation then he was locked in a different kind of hell from which there was no emancipation. Rue would pity him if he hadn’t made her so afraid with his accusations.
“I’ll take him home, Miss Rue,” Jonah said. “Thank you fo’ findin’ him.”
Rue nodded, tried to come up with more, some easy explanation should Jonah ask just how Rue had found him so far from her own home, so very late at night. But Jonah was preoccupied with the care of Ol’ Joel, who struggled against him too—whose hoarse voice took up a cry again: “She turnt yo’ baby evil, Jonah. He a devil, ain’t no flesh a’ yours. She made him in the woods from river water, from clay. I seen her.”
Bean. He was speaking on Bean.
“I seen her.”
But Jonah shushed him, led him away, and still the old man raved ’til he got so far out of earshot that Rue couldn’t make out what he was muttering, couldn’t account for which things were lies and which things were truths so that all of it began to feel, not like words, but like a danger rising up all around her.
SLAVERYTIME
May 1861
Miss May Belle says: Marse Charles comes to me talking about War.