it to rocking, but it didn’t rock right and as he moved, dragging the lantern light over the stores of dry food by the altar, the chair kept rocking. Its crooked pace fell in time with Rue’s wracking heartbeat.
“And this?” He’d turned his light into the farthest room of the rectory proper. Past the stove and water basin was a little back room with a bedroll on the floor, the scant covers neatly tucked.
Rue hurried in after him. The back room was all empty too, but he’d lighted on something tucked into the bed. He picked it up and turned it in his hands, studied it closely. A little black doll baby in a green dress, a crude likeness of Rue but a likeness all the same. May Belle’s creation had held up all these years. Threadbare, but it had held, and if he flipped the doll over he’d see the face of the white doll hid beneath her skirts. He did not flip it over but tossed it on the sleeping mat.
There was the one small back door. It took Bruh Abel out into the night again and Rue after him. There was no grass beyond the church but an area of hard-packed mud that looked red in the moonlight. Carved out in its center was a neat square door made of heavy wood, an entrance to a slave jail in the earth.
Bruh Abel seemed to know what it was from the moment he saw it. He recoiled from the spot, yet the circle of lantern light settled on the thick metal padlock that sat atop the door. The lock was open, Rue saw, and the chains had been disrupted, left a track in the mud from where they used to be to where they’d just been moved. Varina.
He reached down, as if he meant to pull open the heavy door.
“Don’t.”
Bruh Abel swung the light up at Rue, near blinding her with the sudden motion. She covered her face, spoke through her hands.
“Miss May Belle,” Rue said. “Marse Charles locked her down there once. For three days. Punishment.”
She let her whole body shudder with the memory of it as though it were a fresh hurt and she were overcome.
She heard the lantern clatter to the ground. Bruh Abel pulled her into a fierce embrace. Her head at his chest, Rue listened to the pounding of his heartbeat, fast as hers, like a drum on her ear.
“You punishin’ yo’self by comin’ here, Miss Rue,” Bruh Abel said. “It ain’t right. This ain’t the right way to make peace.”
“It’s like you say,” Rue spoke into his chest. “I can’t seem to let go a’ the old ways.”
“We can set this to rights.”
“Please,” Rue said. “Help me.”
SLAVERYTIME
1860
Before the war, they found a dead man in the woods. They’d found him on the edge of the thick trees, at the crest of a small hill, as if he’d used the last thrust of his life to get up it and had succeeded in that at least. And all the folks agreed that the rusted iron collar locked around his throat looked like a crown of thorns fit for Jesus himself.
It was the little pickaninny boy, Red Jack, that found the dead man, a mercy that, folks said, for what if it had been one of the girl children who’d come across him? You see, the dead man was full naked, stark as the day he was born, save for his collar of rusted iron.
Still Red Jack, too, was only ten years old if he was a day, and it was often said that he did not have enough wits to rub together for a fire, so when he stumbled into the thick of the wood to relieve himself and saw the dead man there, facedown in moss, Red Jack shrugged and shook dry and went to Ma Doe, who was the only thing like a mama he’d ever known, and said to her, “Ma Doe, there’s a dead man in the wood.”
Well, Ma Doe, who minded the children—the master’s and the slave ones and the ones who didn’t or couldn’t know their