alone if their men up and left—how they feared it and longed for it. They spoke on how the plight of the darkies shadowed all other concerns. What of temperance? What of suffrage? Rue worked the fan over the white woman words.
“They said if all the males is gone it ain’t safe for the children, what with all the niggers growing bold with all of Lincoln’s ideas,” Rue repeated, proud she’d remembered the way the blue-veined lady had put it.
Rue soon came to the part of the telling that she deemed most important. “Mama,” she said. “Missus say she thinkin’ on sendin’ Varina away to Northern relations for what she call ‘refinement.’ Said if the world’s goin’ overall upside down she want her daughter to come out on top.”
* * *
—
Rue told the secret to Miss May Belle and next morning Miss May Belle told the secret to Ma Doe who, once she heard of Varina’s leaving, turned gray as a dropped stone.
“It ain’t happenin’ yet,” Miss May Belle said. “You know Missus ain’t got no say in it. She just like to think she do.”
Ma Doe’s face wrinkled down to a frown even as she set out one of Varina’s cranberry red dresses for washing. You would’ve thought the little white girl was in it, the way the old woman laid it down lovingly, smoothing all the frilly edges.
“I don’t wish to see her go,” Ma Doe said.
On her knees at the wash basin Miss May Belle laughed in a way that Rue, listening from behind the washboard, thought sounded almost cruel. “Don’t you got better things to wish after than one li’l white girl’s comfort?”
Ma Doe didn’t answer, only picked up the dress and shook it and laid it down again as if this time she might lay it neater.
“What you askin’ for, Ma?” Miss May Belle said, gentler, though Ma Doe was not her mama any more than she was anyone else’s. All of Ma Doe’s sons had been sold away young, but that was the type of secret that everybody knew but didn’t ever speak on. “You wantin’ me to fix it so she stay?”
“No!” Ma Doe seemed to startle even herself with her vehemence. “No, none of your root work, Miss May Belle, none of your trinkets or devilment. I don’t want any of that superstitious nonsense near Varina.”
Miss May Belle met eyes with Ma Doe over the washboard. “I hear you, Ma,” she said, and a solemn look passed between them, an agreement, fast as a whipcrack. Rue saw the truth and then it was gone again and they were just two slave women busy at the washing.
“You know I don’t care one wit for conjuration,” Ma Doe said even as she worried at the string of the new asafetida pouch Miss May Belle had only just gifted her that morning. She had it tucked under her stiff collar where it was hidden. It was well known that Missus expressly forbade any sign of hoodooing in the House.
“Why don’t you just go ’head and speak to Marse Charles if it bother you so. Tell him you’ll see to Varina’s ‘refining’ just fine. He soft on you,” Miss May Belle tutted to her. “He still think he in the nursery nuzzling at yo’ teat.”
Ma Doe swatted at Miss May Belle’s upraised behind, same as she would any of her misbehaving children.
“Ain’t nothin’ to be promised for those boys, though,” Miss May Belle said, serious all of a sudden. “But maybe if you do speak to Marse Charles about ’em?”
Ma Doe was quiet as she tied up all those little white ribbons on Varina’s dress. For a while the music of Rue scrubbing a shirt along the boards was the only sound amongst the three of them. Her knuckles rapped rhythmically on the wood of the washboard as the water sloshed.
Finally, Ma Doe spoke slow, like the words were being pulled up from inside her body. Said, “Last time I spoke out of turn to Marse Charles on the rearing of his sons he drove a fountain pen through my palm.”
Rue