“You ain’t never tell me that,” Miss May Belle said.
Ma Doe sighed down at the red dress, worshipfully. “You can’t know everything, May Belle,” she said.
* * *
—
What Miss May Belle couldn’t know she sent Rue to hear and see and gather, up through the winding back hallways of the Big House. She sent Rue to the nursery to gather up a lock of Varina’s red hair in Ma Doe’s stead.
Miss May Belle, for all of Rue’s life, had been banned from venturing into the House—ever since the birth of Varina, in fact, as though the disappointment of Missus’s worm pink daughter wriggling out of her instead of a son of a type her predecessor had produced for Marse Charles had solidified Missus’s distaste for all black healing. Indeed, Miss May Belle might’ve saved Missus’s life during Varina’s breached birth by tending to the emergency before the white doctor could even arrive, but the healing woman hadn’t helped her where it counted—raising Missus’s esteem in her husband’s eyes required a son.
Folks said Missus was barren after the birth of her daughter and because of it had told Marse Charles that it was ungodly to take pleasure in her. It was a nasty secret, Miss May Belle said, and one Rue ought not repeat unless she wanted her skin whipped clean off her back. But the ugly bit of gossip was likely the truth, or close to it, and everybody knew Marse Charles took his fancies elsewhere.
Rue troubled her way in through the back door of the House, simply waited on it to swing open when the cook, Big Sylvia, bustled out of the kitchen heading to the storeroom set out in the yard. Rue slipped in the gap just as the door creaked shut and thankfully found the kitchen empty. It was easy then to steal up the service stairs.
Now Varina would be in the ladies’ parlor, Rue knew, all the way on the opposite side of the vast House, in the middle of one of her daily lessons in needlework with Missus. The lessons always left Varina pinpricked and ornery even when she was finally set free to play with Rue and the slave children in the cool of the evening. Despite the good distance of a whole grand wing stretched between them, Rue still chilled at entering the nursery without permission. But she’d promised Miss May Belle that lock of red hair and there was no better place to snatch it but from one of the bone brushes Ma Doe used to rake at Varina’s thick fall of curls.
Cursing, conjuring, Miss May Belle claimed, was easy enough done with any old bit of bodily property—a toenail, or a loosed tooth. Urine or blood or even tears. But a conjure that was meant to bind was something else, much like a love spell, Rue’s mama had explained. It called for the deeper essence of the person the fix was to be put upon, and hair was most preferred. Hair tells, Miss May Belle often said, hair tells health and hereditary both. You and the roots of you.
The nursery was done up in white frilly lace that had aged to yellow in places over time. Rue knew it had been Varina’s half brothers’ nursery once and Marse Charles’s before that. Varina often complained of the drab white and the stale air and the fact that the baseboards were all carved up, pockmarked in places where her half brothers had etched their initials, claiming everything long before Varina was even born.
The only thing not white was the crib, which was a solid red oak. Varina had outgrown it long ago in favor of the wide white canopied bed across the room, but the crib was still there and in it sat Varina’s collection of blond-haired china dolls, which seemed to wink at Rue when she rounded the corner and came face-to-face with them.
There were a dozen at least, sat in the crib, arranged in a row like an audience, and Rue nearly fled from the room altogether when she met their glazed porcelain eyes gazing out at her from between the bars of the crib.