lately was losing her authority in even that. But in the manners of a white woman and the matters of her body? Rue imagined Ma Doe—who easily was the most proper woman she’d ever known, slave or not—making up Varina’s bed each morning, relieved to find those soft white sheets unstained another day.
It took Rue what felt like hours to set the girl right. Varina’s ideas were all muddled. She supposed that the bleeding happened only when the woman went to relieve herself. She supposed it was an unusual, unending affliction. She supposed there was shame in it.
“It’s natural, my mama said,” Rue explained. “There’s no shame. It’s beautiful. That’s why my mama made me the beads to hold up the cloth.”
* * *
—
Miss May Belle didn’t believe in shame, or so she’d tell anyone who’d stop long enough to listen.
“What’s the use for it?” she’d often say.
Rue knew it was no good to be ashamed when she’d had to wake her mama in the middle of the night. She knew she had to look brave holding out the front of her white sleeping gown, pointing out the bloodstain she’d left there long enough that it had dried to brown. But she was scared. “Look, Mama.”
Her mama stirred from her sleep. There was no surprise in her when she saw the blood, and Rue was used to that. Miss May Belle smiled. She knew girls and women before they even knew themselves. Her mama crouched down beneath the bed frame to a basket of spare things she kept there: bits of fabric, tore-up trinkets, and dried posies of no particular use but to be pretty to look at. She pulled the length of beads out inch by inch, like a garden snake. She wrapped the beads around her neck to free her hands ’til she worked the end out at last.
“Do you hurt, baby?”
Rue shook her head. She couldn’t feel a thing but a warm damp. It was like a new-sprung well. A thing happening without her say-so.
“Sometimes you will and sometimes you won’t,” her mama explained. Rue knew this already. There were folks who suffered with it, she knew, women who came to them once a month or more, wanting something to fight away their aches.
Rue had seen Miss May Belle take care of women her whole life, had done so at her side, at her command. But now, bound by the papery warm feel of her mama’s work-roughened fingers, she felt something she had not known she had wanted so badly.
“These beads is special.” Miss May Belle held out the belt to its full length, the whole stretch of her arms. The red rag hung in the middle like the flag of some proud country. She shook the string so that the beads click-clacked together loudly. “Iff’n you ever forget yo’self, let that sound be what reminds you.”
She drew the beads up along Rue’s body with her hands splayed, and Rue felt the thrilling spin of them all the way up her hips. Her mama pulled the ends of the string tidy so they’d lay flat beneath even something as flimsy as her nightdress.
“A man come and bother you, he can make you a mama. Now that’s a good thing sometimes and a bad thing another. Depends.”
Rue knew this too. She had seen new mamas collapse in their crying, brought down by all manner of tears, overjoyed or sorrowed.
Miss May Belle laid a palm on the flat of Rue’s belly. “When the beads start to pull too tight, well that’ll be one of yo’ first signs that somethin’s changin’.”
Then Miss May Belle did something Rue wasn’t at all expecting, something she never did with the other women who came to see her with all their needs and all their wanting. She pulled Rue close and wrapped her arms around her, spoke quiet words with her lips in her hair.
“I’m proud a’ you.”
Rue did not know what she had done that deserved pride but anyway she was glad she had done it.