“Now, Miss May Belle, ain’t that yo’ babies callin’ to ya?”
The other women laughed but Ma Doe didn’t and Miss May Belle didn’t. Sitting skin close to her mama’s leg, Rue felt her mama go rigid like she was holding on to something tightly.
Playing along, Miss May Belle said, “I’ll see to ’em presently,” but there wasn’t any playfulness in her voice despite the good, hard work of the night, despite the harvest, green and yellow and white all around them.
* * *
—
Rue came home alone one afternoon to find their cabin door was slight-ways open. It didn’t lock like the doors in Marse Charles’s House did, with their heavy brass knobs and heavy brass keys, but it was a rule between Rue and her mama that their front door be kept firmly closed whether they were in or out. Miss May Belle said it was to ward off creatures, spirits, and bad air.
Could a creature have gotten in now? A spirit? A type of badness? Rue knew she’d closed the door firmly when she’d gone out. She always did everything her mama said to; her voice was always in her ear.
“You want me weepin’?” her mama would always say when Rue put herself into some childish danger, went picking flowers too close to where the patrolmen snatched up runaways, or climbed up a tree she couldn’t climb down from, or waded into the river past where her toes could feel the bank. Never you mind the pain of death or injury; the worst pain was to make your mama cry.
Rue pushed open the door of the cabin anyway, thinking herself brave. She still jumped when she saw Varina. The white girl was sitting up on their dinner table, her dress spread out around her like a tablecloth, her legs back and forth dangling, her thumb, as always, in her mouth.
“What you doin’ here?” Rue asked. She knew she wasn’t meant to speak to Varina that way—was meant to call her Miss Varina, give her all the respect a white girl was deserving of. “And why you all pink?”
Varina’s face up close was mottled with blushing. Snot glowed from the hollow beneath her left nostril, and before she answered Rue, she took the time to rub furiously at her puffy eyes with both fists.
“Mother slapped me for sucking my thumb. She said she ’shamed of me.”
It was unlike Varina’s mama to say anything to her, kind, cruel, or otherwise, but it was well known to everybody—to the black folks at least—that the master’s second wife was not much proud of what she’d produced, her one child, his only daughter. And Lord that red, red hair.
“I’m lookin’ for the healing woman. May Belle,” Varina said.
“That’s my mama. What you want with her?”
“I want to be cured.”
Rue crawled up onto the table beside Varina before she could think better of it. She half-expected that the master’s daughter might push her away, but instead Varina made room for Rue on the table’s surface, scuttling unladylike, baring white frilled bloomers that Rue decided were the prettiest things she had ever seen.
Varina wiped up snot with her forearm. “Will she help me, you think?”
“She surely will,” Rue said.
Up close Varina had only her daddy’s face and none of her mama’s. Marse Charles’s severity, his thin pink lips, the small ears with the heavy loose lobes and hair in dark, curling barbs. But where had that red color sprouted from? It came up from her head in corkscrews.
Rue let Varina rest her head on her shoulder. After a while she looped her arm around her waist, and that seemed to quiet Varina’s sniffles. Miss May Belle would have words here, but Rue had none except “Mama will know what to do.”
When Miss May Belle came in, she did not look surprised at all to see the two girls on her supper table. She only looked weary and stopped to pull off her hat. “Afternoon, Miss Varina,” she murmured.
Miss May Belle set down her basket, sat on the bed for a spell,