back around to see it emerge, though she knew already that it would be the little redheaded doll baby her mama had fixed to conjure for Ma Doe to keep Varina tied to the land. Perched in her lap it really was a perfect double of Varina. And Rue knew the girl would love it for that.
“Well, ain’t this darlin’,” Varina said, inspecting the doll.
“Isn’t it darling,” Missus corrected.
Varina ignored her mama. Instead she turned the doll over and lifted up its skirts, and for a moment, stunned, Rue thought she meant to strip the baby nude right there, before her brothers and her daddy.
But Varina flipped the doll baby on its head and pulled down the bright red dress over the white face. Sewn on the opposite side was another dress, a bold green one, as bright as the trees in springtime, and there where the white doll’s legs ought to have been was another head, this one black with fat red lips and brown eyes and hair wild like bramble.
“It’s a topsy-turvy doll! How clever!” Varina said. She hugged the black side close. “Look! A li’l nigra.”
Rue ached in secret where only she could know. Was this the gift that Miss May Belle had all along meant for Rue to receive? Not a present but an emptiness where a present might be? Rue at seven realized then what she ought to have known all along—that she, and even her own doll baby, a thing made in her own image, would belong always to Miss Varina.
FREEDOMTIME
What would Miss May Belle have done? Rue had only the memory of her dead mama to put the question to. But the dead did sometimes answer, in their way, and Miss May Belle answered Rue now with a way to save Bean.
All at once that mind-apparition of Miss May Belle turned back to the empty dust-dark corners of the one-room cabin, and Rue might have felt lonely if not for the fact that she knew the spirit of her mama was upon her, that spirit being conjure.
She left her cabin almost in a run, her skirts fisted up in sweating palms so she could hit a full fast stride. If she was going to do it, if she was going to find the cure for Bean’s vitality, she’d have to do it quick.
The skeleton of the House loomed, the black remains of Marse Charles’s mansion, its charred stairs leading nowhere. Rue rubbed her hand against the white pillar at the entryway as she always did when she passed, but she couldn’t stop there. She made her way into the clearing beyond. She knew at once which plant she needed but it was a struggle to find it in the little moonlight, and it had to be right.
It was a pattern to the leaf—Rue knew to look for black backward raindrops, and, true, she’d need only the barest hint of it, a handful, no more, crushed down into a dust, into a powder; it would be so easy to go into Sarah’s house and put it on the tip of Bean’s tongue. He trusted her now. If she timed it rightly the swirls of red would rise up on his pale skin as brightly as it had risen in his sister and brother, and a fever was bound to take hold. If taken by mouth, there might be vomiting, a flux—not quite the symptoms the other children had, though it would not be so different as to raise doubt, and it was all good toward the growing curse and toward the show. If Rue timed it rightly and gave Bean just enough, the sickness would overtake him in the evening, so that Sarah would have to knock at her door, would have to ask for her help plainly where everyone could see, and by the morning the artificial sickness would pass, as though Rue had healed him, and likewise the pestilence of suspicion would pass, and pass by Bean and Rue with it.
But with her face so close to the ground that the grass tickled her ears she felt suddenly ashamed. Maybe she was ill herself to dream such a wild thing. Was this the madness of fear, or a fever coming on? Or