see it.” Miss May Belle clicked her tongue. “Lord, you just like yo daddy, ain’t you? Come on over here.”
Rue crossed the cabin to sit on the floor at her mama’s feet. She was about-to-be seven—she was no baby, and Miss May Belle was never oversentimental, said she didn’t have the time for petting. It was rare and wonderful for Rue to rest her head in her mama’s lap, to feel her mama’s long, thin fingers drift lovingly through the tangles of her tight head hair.
“Mama?”
“Yes, Rue-baby?”
Rue wanted then to tell her more than anything, about the hunger she’d seen in Marse Peter’s eyes that had made her stomach curdle. But she didn’t know quite how to begin it, and perhaps it was as Ma Doe had said. Miss May Belle didn’t know everything, or need to neither.
“Nothin’,” Rue said.
She let her mama’s threading fingers on her scalp lull her into an almost sleep and she did not wake, even when she felt one sharp twang at the very center of her head.
* * *
—
Varina ripped through paper, through ribbon and lace. The box opened up, and from its innards she drew out a little model carriage pulled by a little white horse.
“How lovely,” Varina cooed from up above. The rocking chair she sat in creaked with her delight.
Curled up at Varina’s feet with the other black children, Rue bit back a yawn. It had been a treat at first, to be picked with Sarah and Beulah and Li’l Sylvia to make an oohing-and-aahing audience as Varina opened her birthday presents. But now the floor of the veranda was littered with ribbons and bows, with shreds of paper, with piles of toys and books, knitting needles and sewing sets, dresses and hats and hairpins, and Varina placed the pale horse burdened with its white carriage on the very top of that mess of gifts where it threatened to fall over but did not. Rue oohed and aahed with the rest of them.
“I painted it myself,” Marse Peter boasted. He leaned on one white pillar of the veranda, watching at a distance, smoking from his daddy’s pipe.
“Why, thank you, Peter,” Varina said, but she was already on to the next gift. A simple box of brown paper and twine. “No name on it. Now who could this be from?”
Varina didn’t wait on an answer but began working furiously at the knot of the twine. Rue peeked behind her to look at the white family. It was rare to see them all assembled, Marse Charles and his three sons, the elder two dressed in new, stiff military uniforms, and Missus there too, complaining of the early spring heat in little mumbles that no one was paying any mind.
Rue couldn’t know it then, but it would be the last time she would see them all gathered, the last time she’d see the elder two sons at all. They’d joined up, to defend King Cotton and the honor of their womenfolk, showing allegiance to the very cause their step-mama was afeared of, to be called Rebels and worse. Marse Peter would follow not too far behind his brothers. He’d live two more years, dead before he was eighteen—or presumed so leastwise—on a battlefield, in the midst of a Northern ice storm. Varina would read aloud the letter that made it so, with her remaining slaves gathered around her, just like this, like children primed for a bedtime story, Rue amongst them, and Varina would not even weep on the words that presumed her last living brother gone to meet his maker. She had never liked him much and anyway with the last of her daddy’s sons dead she would finally be the sole mistress of her daddy’s land, which would soon be only vast ashes.
Varina would never leave that place and Rue wouldn’t neither—but they couldn’t know that then, couldn’t know how well Miss May Belle’s conjure would take. Today Rue was seven years old because Varina was, and even that she couldn’t know for sure.
“How lovely!” Varina said. She’d managed to work the box of her last gift open and she’d pulled out the prize. Rue turned