between them. And Rue could see the muscles shifting beneath the damaged skin of his back, like clouds stirring in the night sky, until she lost herself in sleep again.
When Rue’s daddy died, Rue’s mama died, though his death was a grim and sudden surprise and hers was a slow consumption by way of vengeance, spread out one long year after her man’s death, easy as decaying.
* * *
—
“You clean?” Rue’s mama was forever asking.
“Yes’m,” Rue would say and shake dry her left hand and then the right.
When Rue’s daddy died Miss May Belle stopped wanting to touch the mamas, maybe suspicious of the warmth of their flesh or the roundness of their baby joy. Whichever it was, she certainly had a distrust for them, which started up one day from a bad taste she found in her mouth.
“A curse been put onto me,” Rue’s mama said and she spat on the dusty ground, not even caring they were right outside of Marse Charles’s House. Rue looked down at the pink tinge to the white foam of her mama’s spittle and wondered if it were so.
In the cabin they shared alone, a privilege to be sure, Rue’s mama began hanging fruit from the wood beams of the ceiling, any fruit she could get hands on, mainly apples, cut in half, their black seeds gleaming like eyes in their white flesh. Even mealy, even molded, they spun in lazy circles and drew lazy flies. And Rue could not know if her mama had run to her madness or if she was warding off something she didn’t want to name. The redder Miss May Belle’s spit got, the more fruit she’d find to let swing.
If her mama was mad then Rue was mad too, at least in the eyes of other slavefolk. The rotting fruit smell clung to them both, trailing them, persistent as haints. It was beneath her mama’s fingernails, which she had let grow long as creature claws, for she would not cut them, afeared that somebody would gather up the nail clippings to use against her in conjure. Rue, herself, washed and washed, trying to get the smell out from under her own skin. Now they’d kneel down at the birthings together, but it was Rue who touched the mamas, who tugged the babies into being. Her mama’s guidance was as good as if Miss May Belle had her hand atop Rue’s, as if their touch was one touch.
There came a day that Miss May Belle and Rue returned from a birthing of twins, an all-night and all-day affair, as if the twins had not wanted to come on out to the world but had preferred to stay curled together with just themselves for company. Rue and her mama returned to find that all the fruit in their cabin had dropped to the ground, lay in blackened, defeated piles, on the chairs, on the stove pot, in the rut of the bed, and the once-languid flies had lifted and made a frenzy in the air like they’d lost their sense of meaning. But Miss May Belle didn’t weep like a more earthly woman might. She walked around stooping, collecting the bits of skin and pulp and seed that near turned to nothing at her touch, and it was because of this quiet triumph against ruin that Rue couldn’t bring herself to say, and never would, that she had been the one to pull the fruit down in a sudden fit of rage against her mama’s rising madness. Hoodoo would not bring Miss May Belle’s strength back, nor her man back. But neither would Rue’s bitterness.
Miss May Belle pounded what was left of the fruit. She sat up in bed, for six days and six nights, from can-see to can’t-see, a crude mortar in one hand, a rock for a pestle in the other. It was on the seventh day, when she’d become like a ghost in her own imprint in the mattress made of straw and pine tags, that they were told they were free.
Rue carried the message on to her mama, the words sitting like tar on her tongue, for it was something they’d so long wanted and now had but couldn’t figure the use of.