“I ain’t been workin’ in the kitchen for some months now,” Big Sylvia complained. She sat across the supper table from Miss May Belle and held out her right hand. It was bundled up covering a deep cut that some weeks back had near took away her fingers.
Rue’s mama undid the bandages, revealed the hideous slash from finger to wrist. It was deep, angry, and oozing. Big Sylvia’s dark skin and eyes were shining with a fever she couldn’t kick. “It won’t never heal ’cause somebody’s put a fix on me.”
“Who you think done it?”
“Who else? That woman. Airey. She the one that’s took up cookin’ in my place. She’s been schemin’ after it for years tryna get herself a place in the House.”
Fact was that Airey’s mama had been the cook when Marse Charles had been a child, back when the plantation had been all but a few rows of hopeful seedlings. By all accounts Airey’s mama hadn’t been all that good of a cook neither, but there was no taking a white man from his auntie nostalgia. Airey had believed that because of her mama she was owed the kitchen, with a lineage as good as a lordship, but Big Sylvia had been bought special with commendations for her cooking. Airey had taken after her field-hand daddy instead, a sharp beauty but mule-strong, bred with hands for picking.
“Now I’m left to do the washin’, even now I’m one-handed, mind,” Big Sylvia said, “and Airey, she at the oven, got Marse Charles smackin’ his lips after every meal, thinkin’ he gon’ get rid a’ poor ol’ Sylvia, maybe sell me next time the prospector come ’round, keep Airey on.”
Miss May Belle tutted. She shut her eyes as if consorting with herself, let Big Sylvia stand there panting for a long while, working herself up into a deeper fury the more she thought on the unfairness.
“You best be sure now,” Miss May Belle finally said. She rebandaged Big Sylvia’s hand good and tight.
Big Sylvia nodded in earnest. “It was her face I saw when my hand slipped and the knife cut me. Yes, I saw her face plain. She tol’ me I was to die. Now I see her in my sleep every night. She set by the foot of my bed with the devil on her left side stabbin’ at my hand.”
To undo Airey’s magicking Rue’s mama advised that Big Sylvia circle her own bed with a sprinkle of salt, nightly. This Big Sylvia swore to do.
“But, Miss May Belle, how am I to get my place back?”
“You’ll needa take somethin’ a’ hers. A piece a’ her hair like. When you fetch it, come back to me on Friday.”
Big Sylvia repeated her thanks over and over. Her rewrapped hand was thick and clumsy with the new bandaging, and she struggled at the pocket of her apron ’til she produced a silver dollar with the promise of more coin to be had come Friday.
“I’d bring you them good ashcakes a’ mine too, but I can’t cook nothin’.”
Rue watched her mama slip the coin easy into her own pocket.
“We’ll see to it that you back in yo’ rightful place, by the Lord’s grace,” Miss May Belle promised.
Rue knew that her mama, thin as she was, did have a love for Sylvia’s ashcakes.
* * *
—
On Sunday her mama picked nits from her daddy’s hair and Rue pretended to be asleep. Half days were for praying and for visiting, the one day that Miss May Belle saw her man. He journeyed from the neighboring plantation, a trip that took him ’til nightfall, and Rue would struggle to stay awake to see her daddy arrive in the doorway and greet her mama. From the bed, Rue strained to watch them, but she could see only their shadows twist and join, stretched out black and big on the dirt floor.
Rue fought off sleep but she did every now and again succumb, and their hushed, soothing voices—her daddy’s as hard as timber, her mama’s as soft as pulp—were sometimes things of her dreams. Her daddy sat on the floor between