slave children might revolve—you were born after or before the master’s daughter, thereabouts. Rue could hitch her birth in the same season as Varina’s and so they oft played together, kicking up dust in that one precious hour of their mutual freedom, between dusk and candlelight. Varina wasn’t allowed to play at any other time, for the Missus was afeared that her daughter would catch color, spoil away her milk-skim skin.
Rue spent her own days in running favors, not much use in the field or the House and not yet as knowledged as her mama would someday make her. The best use for Rue then was to dash about with a basket, a bucket, or a broom, getting switched on her behind by older folks who complained she was too slow no matter how fast she ran. She was often underfoot. She was often forgotten.
Rue would sometimes look up at the House and spy Varina at the third-story nursery window, knew her for a white figure behind a whiter curtain, looking down. Did she appear wistful? Rue could not truly tell, not from that distance, not with only her hand over her eyes to shade out the midday sun. But it was as though Varina was looking out at her as well, with a sort of wanting, and Rue got to figuring if she ever had magic or money, either, she’d make it so the two of them could play and laugh together in the full sunlight as much as they could stand.
* * *
—
It seemed to Rue that Miss May Belle never had to fetch her coins but could will them into existence, suddenly flipping a flash of silver between her fingers in trade for something or other she was wanting. But where the source was was anybody’s imagining.
Rue watched as her mama slipped her daddy one such coin of a Sunday. She slid it clear across the table over knot holes and scratches and set it in front of her man, who did not take it.
“Nah,” he said.
Miss May Belle was sore. “Why?”
“That’s conjure money.”
“Money is money is money,” she said and he said nothing and the coin gleamed between them.
“Or is it ’cause it’s woman’s money?” Miss May Belle took it back and Rue tried to watch where it went but missed that too, an illusionist’s trick between her mama’s delicate fingers.
* * *
—
Rue looked and looked but she did not find the coins, not in the way she thought she would at least. One day, after the birth of the Airey doll baby that Big Sylvia had bought, Airey herself came to Miss May Belle to ask after a bit of hoodooing. She came upon them at the river where the water was swelled from a season turned rainy before its time.
Rue’s mama said, “I been expecting you to come on round.”
Miss May Belle was not the type interested in making enemies. That was the reason she only advised on how to make a trick, but she never did dispel it with her own two hands. She oft said, The hunter in settin’ his own trap’ll sometimes spring it on himself, which was true, of course—they were forever bandaging up men fool enough to go catching rabbits in the dark of night.
Rue looked over their visitor. Airey was truly pretty, made all of thick bones and fine features, such an amalgamation of two kinds of beauty that she could be admired from one direction and feared from another. But now in person it was clear to see just what Miss May Belle’s magicking had done: The spangled pattern of white skin that had once been on her legs alone had begun to spread up her arms and to the sides of her neck and along her jaw and nose; a round white swathe sickled around her eye.
If Miss May Belle was shocked by what she’d wrought, she didn’t show it, and Airey for her part didn’t look vengeful. She came to sit by them at the river’s edge, and the reflection of her skin shimmering in the water seemed to make her look like the night sky dotted with stars, beautiful.