babies born under the veil got the gift a’ the Sight,” Rue said. It was meant to be a comfort. It came out sounding grim as a burden. Rue found that she pitied that babe if it were true, for here he was not a clock’s tick old and already he had to bear the whole knowledge of the world.
Rue had stripped the sheets, stepped out of the cabin without saying any more. There was Jonah, the daddy, waiting. He’d been keeping himself busy chopping more firewood than the hot summer day rightly called for, and when he saw Rue step out, he stopped mid-swing and smiled.
She studied him, taking in his sun-darkened skin and his eyes that were the same easy brown as the bark he was cutting. He bore no resemblance to his son. His son bore no resemblance to any living thing she had ever seen.
When Rue stepped forward, the bloodied birthing sheets bundled in her arms, Jonah looked up at her with trepidation. He could not lend voice to the question that needed asking.
Rue spoke to spare him the effort: “You got yo’self a thrivin’ baby boy.”
His sweat-shining face broke out into a grin and before he could ask her anything more, she handed him the bundle of sheets that contained the damning black caul, bloody and shapeless, in its center. She knew even if he got a look at it, he wouldn’t understand it. Men could not make sense of women’s work.
“What do I do with all a’ this?”
“Burn it,” she said, telling him what he was needing to hear. “Burn it for luck.”
SLAVERYTIME
1854
Miss May Belle had used to turn coin on hoodooing. As a slave woman she’d made her name and her money by crafting curses. More profit to be made in curses than in her work mixing healing tinctures. More praise to be found in revenge than in birthing babies.
In slaverytime a white overseer had his whip and a white patrolman had his hounds and a white speculator had his auction block and your white master had your name on a deed of sale somewhere in his House, or so he claimed. But those things were afflictions for the battered-burnt-bruised body only. Curses were for the sin-sick soul and made most terrifying because of it.
“Hoodoo,” Miss May Belle used to say, “is black folks’ currency.”
She had admitted only once, to Rue, in confidence: “The thing about curses is that you can know who you’ve wronged the most by who you fear has the notion to curse you.”
Black neighbors would whisper against black neighbors, sure, but by and by a white man would come from afar having heard of Miss May Belle’s conjure, asking for cure of some affliction set upon him by an insolent slave, or even by his own white wife. Other slavefolk got hired out for their washing, for their carpentering, for their fine greasy cooking. Miss May Belle was hired for her hoodooing.
So it was that Big Sylvia, the cook of the plantation House, came to the slave cabin where Miss May Belle and her daughter lived alone, to ask after a curse.
Rue saw her coming from afar. The diminutive house slave had a crooked walk on bowed little legs, and Rue stood tiptoed in the cabin’s one window, watched as the cook came down the dust road at dusk, determination in her little steps but a look like fear on her face, as she headed to the healing woman’s house. Beyond Big Sylvia, Rue could see from where she’d come. Marse Charles’s white-pillared House blazed big and hazy opposite the setting sun.
“Come away from there, Rue-baby,” Miss May Belle said, and Rue obeyed her mama. “Cook’s comin’ to ask after hoodoo. Now, you know that ain’t nothin’ that a child needs to hear ’bout.”
How Miss May Belle knew before Big Sylvia’s knock what the matter was Rue could not rightly say. But she tucked herself in the corner of their one-room cabin, balled herself small between the stove and the bedpost, and pretended at not listening.
Miss May Belle creaked the door open, allowed their visitor in.