Ma Doe set the letter down on the top of the blackened desk. The fat, looping words of the letter written by Marse Charles’s sister meant nothing to Rue, never had, not in their individual meaning, nor in each single character crowded on the page. But the piling-up pieces of paper, which Ma Doe had hoarded in the desk these three years—which formed an organized stack in that selfsame desk—the mere existence of those letters meant everything to Rue, for they meant that their secret conjure held, hers and Ma Doe’s. The aunt did not suspect the hoax.
It was necessary that somebody out there where it mattered in the white world of records believed that the blacks of Marse Charles’s former land were still owned—yet in the new way they were now meant to be owned, as devoted sharecroppers working the land for love of their stalwart white mistress, Miss Varina.
“What you gon’ write back?” Rue asked.
Ma Doe worried the string of the good-luck charm around her neck. Said nothing.
“You gotta write back, Ma.” They’d had this conversation before. Likely would have it again. It wearied Rue’s soul but not her resolve. That correspondence, those bits of paper and their pen marks, they were more powerful a protection of the town’s isolated existence than any curse that Miss May Belle had ever laid. Rue was proud on that fact, for it was an act of power better than conjure, the only real shield over their people being discovered by the type of whites who did not think much of government-given freedom.
“?‘Thank you kindly, Aunt,’?” Ma Doe said. Her wrinkled hand shook only slightly as she mimicked deft pen strokes in the air. “We’ll say, ‘Your concern as always is a great comfort to me. But I am most happy here and intend to stay on as long as I am able.’?”
“?‘God willin’,’?” Rue added.
Over some eighteen months of deception, Rue and Ma Doe had sent such fantastic tales up north they had a quilt’s worth of stories about Miss Varina. To respond to the Northern relation, they’d given Varina Christian faith and a penchant for acts of charity. They’d given her a keen knowledge of the harvests on her profitable property. They’d invented for her good white neighbors and the earnest interest of a fitting suitor, a kindly widower who was winningly cautious in his courtship, and finally a husband so that Varina’s aunt might believe there was a good Christian man to manage Miss Varina’s property and her prosperity. This loving Northern auntie had not once met the Southern relation she wrote to, didn’t know the willful child or the sick woman Varina had grown up to become. It was easy for Rue to dictate a Varina of invention and easier still for Ma Doe to sign Varina’s name. After all, Varina had learned her penmanship by tracing her black nurse’s hand.
“Are we wrong for carryin’ on this deception, Miss Rue?” Ma Doe asked. She was looking out the window, watching the folks out there enraptured in their praying. The sunlight played tricks on her face, showed wrinkles like valleys.
Rue figured Ma Doe was not looking for her to answer. Wrong or right was of little use to Rue now. Better she stay keen to the greater danger she sensed building in the air about her. Rue was troubled over the babies and the young children who were falling sick with winter’s maladies much too early this year. She troubled over the ire with which her name was spoken in the town. She troubled most especially over Bean, who so far had escaped the illness that had laid low the other children. She knew the strange little boy was soon to be Bruh Abel’s next target. Rue was surrounded on all sides by more immediate fears and so she could only leave it down to trust that Ma Doe would go on writing the letters they agreed to, send each letter off by way of one of her students—one of the ones too slow to read it and make meaning of what the schoolteacher and the healing woman were keeping hidden between them.
Rue drew a newly made hoodoo charm from her pocket. Its wretched stink of crushed carrion flowers