into the nursery, skipping, laughing again that high false laugh. Her face was overbright and flushed, her curls undone in the heat.
Marse Peter slid his eyes to his half sister, just rolled them like marbles in his head without even turning his neck.
Rue tried to catch Varina’s gaze and plead, but Varina was grinning gap-toothed at her brother.
“We was playin’ hide-and-go-seek, weren’t we, Rue?”
They were doing no such thing. Rue didn’t know whether Varina wanted her to speak the lie or if she’d be punished for it.
“Peter, do you want to join our game?”
Marse Peter spat. Right there on the nursery floor, a gleaming glob flecked black with old tobacco tar. “Shit no, I don’t. That’s children’s stuff.”
“I’ll tell Daddy you were cussin’.”
Marse Peter whirled on Varina. He grabbed his half sister’s wrist as she let out a cry, seemed to crumple to her knees in pain.
“Peter, you’re hurtin’ me!”
“Aw, hell,” he said. But he let her go.
He thrust his hands deep into his pocket and turned his back on them. He began to whistle, a jaunty manic tune, and he kept on whistling walking out of the nursery. They heard him descend the main staircase in great thudding stomps, whistling the whole while, so that they weren’t sure he was gone ’til they couldn’t hear him any longer. Only then did Varina rise from the floor.
“Y’alright, Miss Varina?” Rue’s voice shook. “Let me look on yo’ wrist.”
“Oh, it don’t hurt none,” Varina said, waving the arm that Marse Peter had grasped. The expression of screwed-up pain she’d shown her brother was gone. She had a big pleased grin on her face. She’d played him like a song and now she looked about her room with her hands fisted on her hips, like she was figuring what she could conquer next. “Rue, shall we play a game?”
* * *
—
Rue kept it a secret. She couldn’t say why precisely, only that she felt ashamed of the way Marse Peter had leered at her, of the way she’d stuttered, of how her apron had come untied like it meant to betray her too. She kept the secret even from her mama—whereas before she had told her everything—because Miss May Belle didn’t lately listen well to her daughter’s hurts.
“Ain’t we all of us hurtin’?” she’d say, if Rue uttered any complaints.
Miss May Belle was making a doll baby at the supper table. A white one, with a face made from an old handkerchief, blue corn seeds for eyes, lips painted on red, thin as a wound. The hair was of straw, stewed to bright orange in calendula and carrot juice, save for a sprig of Varina’s real hair in the very center. The twisting real strand was hid in plain sight, where you’d have to know to look for it to find it. That secret lock was where the magic lived that bound up Varina’s fate to her home.
The doll baby was Varina all over, right down to the cranberry red dress, a scrap of fabric cut from a dress she’d fast outgrown.
“Why couldn’t Ma Doe just’ve asked after the conjure straight?” Rue wanted to know. It hurt her somehow to see her mama put so much love and care into a thing that was not for Rue herself.
“She know the cost’s too high for her, if she had a hand in it,” said Miss May Belle. She didn’t raise her head from her sewing to say it.
Seemed to cost Miss May Belle nothing to sit there and sew, humming to herself a little. Seemed it had cost Rue too high to do what Ma Doe wouldn’t, to snatch Varina’s hair for the conjure. But Rue thought on Airey, and the way she’d been whipped raw in the yard of the House at Marse Charles’s whim. Was that the cost? Rue couldn’t imagine Ma Doe treated that way. Ma Doe was everybody’s mama, white folks’ too, even if she was colored, and who could dare hurt their own mama?