and gave her left arch a forceful rub like she could squeeze out her foot pains. Only then did she say, “A’ight, what’s the trouble?” as if trouble was a constant, and not particularly urgent, part of every day.
The question set Varina off weeping again. She told it between hiccups, that her mama had come into the nursery and seen her at her studies. Varina was tasked with copying a page of the Bible as a means to perfect her crooked script. She did so every noontime, for she wasn’t allowed to go out when the sun was high and like to spoil her skin with freckles.
“I was making the most lovely V’s,” Varina said, and she did one there in the air to show them, her wrist flicking about the invisible flourishes. There weren’t, she despaired, enough letter V’s in the Bible.
Ma Doe had stepped out to see Big Sylvia down in the kitchen about their luncheon and Varina had been there alone thinking very hard on her lessons and her piety, she swore. Well, everybody knew when Miss Varina got to thinking hard she was liable to suck her thumb with a distinct abandon, and that is when her mama had come in and seen what she was about.
“She smacked my hand from my mouth. She called me dirty as a nigra and sent me out the House saying I belonged out in the slave quarter. So,” Varina sobbed, “here I am.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Miss May Belle, and that made Varina cry harder. “S’alright now, Miss Varina. But we just gotta try to heal you off the habit.”
Varina looked at her thumb. Rue looked down at her own thumbs, trying to figure what the pleasure in sucking them might be. Her hands were work-worn, the nail cut down to the quick. Rue’s hands were too busy to spend time in her mouth. Now that, she thought, was where Varina’s trouble was.
“What if I tell you a story to ease yo’ mind from it?” Miss May Belle said.
Varina sniffled. “Yes, please.”
“Now, lessee,” Miss May Belle began from her seat on the bed.
It went like this, that Bruh Rabbit was going all throughout the wilderness, bragging on himself, saying how smart he was, smarter than any animal in the wood.
Well, Bruh Fox, who had declared himself the master of that wilderness, did not like hearing Bruh Rabbit’s claims, and he set out to prove Bruh Rabbit wasn’t so smart after all.
“?‘Good gracious. Who he think he is anyhow?’?” Miss May Belle mimicked Bruh Fox and the girls laughed. She was a good mimic, gave the fox the type of high-minded tongue of a fine, white gentleman. Bruh Fox’s companion, the Snake, she made slither out his words like any upstart overseer.
Bruh Fox, just to put Bruh Rabbit in his right place, set him a task, gave him a haversack and told him to bring him something back in it.
“Somethin’ like what?” Varina asked gamely.
Miss May Belle wagged her finger. Bruh Fox wasn’t about to tell Bruh Rabbit what he ought to bring. If Bruh Rabbit was so smart he’d surely figure it out. But Bruh Rabbit stayed puzzled. He got to talking to the birds—maybe they had an idea how to oblige Bruh Fox? They just shrugged their feathered shoulders.
“By and by, an idea come into Bruh Rabbit’s head. He asked them birds if he might beg a feather off a’ each a’ them.”
From beneath their bed Miss May Belle began to pull up lengths of fabric scrap cut to long, spooling ribbons of the type she’d use to tie up newborn baby cords.
“Bruh Rabbit stuck all ’em feathers to himself and soon he had, there gathered, enough feathers to fly over to the Big House where Bruh Fox lived.”
Miss May Belle tied neat fast knots of ribbon all the way up Varina’s arms, a prism’s worth of color, and bade her flap her new wings. Varina did so, stuck her arms out stiff and let her ribbons stream with her flapping. Rue, beside her, had no ribbons. She felt earthbound and ordinary.