and asafetida powder was enough to ease the worry lines from Ma Doe’s forehead. Rue untied the string of the worn-out good-luck charm Ma Doe had been wearing and replaced it with the new one. Knotting the string at the back of the ancient woman’s neck, she came around her and settled the low-hanging pouch, making sure to tuck it neatly in the collar of Ma Doe’s dress.
There, no one would see the conjure trinket Ma Doe kept near her heart, nor the thick strand of Varina’s curly red hair that Rue had worked artfully into the knot—a lock that held their tenuous magic all together.
* * *
—
The townsfolk hesitated to hang out their white baptismal clothing again, even as the promised Sunday of Bean’s baptism drew nearer. They reckoned that to do so would be to tempt the return of the haint that had come to tear down their faith before, along with their white washing on the occasion of Si’s death. Yet they were afraid of Bean and demanded to see him saved, for their own sake.
“It’ll be alright,” Rue told them, and it would.
Rue took the climb to her mama’s grave on the hilltop cemetery slowly. She felt she was dragging along all her fear behind her like a yolk. Fear for the sick children, fear of Bruh Abel, fear for Bean.
Folks believed they’d found in Bean the evil that needed washing away: Bean, a baby boy born with hideous black eyes like he’d come up from a coffin, rather than from a womb. Now they demanded to flush the evil out, through baptism.
As she walked, Rue came upon the newest graves first, closest to the town by planning. The white family’s graves were as large as monuments—cherubs and weeping women and ornate crosses all.
When she and Varina were children they’d often played in the solitude of this cemetery. Varina had read aloud the headstones on one such visit. They had loved always to play the type of games that contained secrets, Rue and Varina had, loved even more the forbidden thing that was their friendship.
Beyond the white graves, where the former slaves were laid to rest, there were no headstones. There were, instead, bits of wood and pretty glass and here and there a natural stone, renewed each season like a clearing of harvest and a sowing of new seeds.
After Surrender, after the war and the fire that ate up the House, after the Northern army had marched through, plundered what they liked, and moved on to the next place they could pick at as any scavenger would, after all of that and after freedom, the black folks had made their way up onto this hill and begun calling out the names of their lost dead, names for bodies they couldn’t bring home or bury.
Ma Doe, ancient as she was, learned her letters in a time when there weren’t yet laws against slave-learning, and when the laws did come it was too late; they could not take the knowing away from her. On the plantation there were a few other former slaves who had also learned their writing and reading, in secret, all of them having done so despite threat of death or worse if they were caught at knowing. But just like that, the threat was lifted, knowledge emancipated. And so in the graveyard Ma Doe and the other learned black folks etched into crude planks the names of the lost dead. Everybody had promised that if by some miracle lost bodies came walking back from the far-off places they’d been sold to, then they’d pluck the crosses right up, but few of the lost had ever returned.
Folks had made a grave for Varina, after she’d been burnt up in the fire that took the House. Even though their young Missus was not their black kin she was still theirs, and lost, and they figured she needed remembering also. Remembering for good or remembering for ill—well, that was a private matter.
Rue touched the crooked cross she knew spelled out Varina’s name, touched the first letter, which Rue knew was called V only because Varina had taught her that letter over and over in their girlhood.