Still, Miss May Belle kept up her faultfinding. “You takin’ too long with that. It ain’t Sunday supper.”
Rue was bleeding. She was tired. She was thirteen, thereabouts, and a woman, thereabouts. But all her mama wanted to talk about was how she ought to stay clear of Varina.
“You ain’t,” Miss May Belle finally said, “friends.”
The ache in Rue’s stomach grew to a spasm of pain. She set the bowl down suddenly on the table like she’d lost the strength even to stir. Rue heard Miss May Belle click her tongue at her, presumably in disapproval. It was that small noise, that lifelong cluck of her mama’s correction, that sparked her ire. Rue drew back her hand and slapped the bowl from the table.
The mixture of mama’s milk and soothing nutmeg splattered, sent a streak across the floor and dashed along the skirt of both of their dresses. The bowl clattered and spun so long it was almost comedy, before Miss May Belle raised her foot and stepped on it to clap the bowl down into silence. She stood there like that with the bowl underfoot, like a turtle subdued, its head and limbs pulled in in fear.
Rue wanted to run. She’d done a horrible thing, she could feel it in her stomach, a pooling of shame.
“Good,” said Miss May Belle in a nasty bite. “Good, you go ahead an’ get it all out, girl. But don’t you go an’ forget it. You not a child now, so you best hear it from me an’ remember it well. You can sass all you want in here. But out there”—she pointed hard in the direction of the House—“you never say no more’n, ‘Yes, Miss Varina.’ You hear?”
“Yes, Mama.”
Miss May Belle stepped over the bowl in coming closer, stepped through the mess of their ruined tincture. She took Rue hard by the shoulders, something desperate in her grasp.
“That girl ain’t yo’ friend.”
The slap Miss May Belle gave Rue was hard, shocking. The pain of it resonated long after, tremulous on Rue’s skin like the reverberation on a drum. But it was what Miss May Belle said that was slapped into Rue’s memory and stung just the same, years after: “Varina ain’t yo’ friend. An’ I ain’t either.”
* * *
—
Rue made Varina a belt. In rare moments of baby-less, mama-less, blessed quiet, Rue drove holes through pieces of nutmeg. She’d stolen the knitting needle, just the one, straight out of Ma Doe’s basket on a hot afternoon when they’d both been tasked with watching Varina dance.
It was in a back room of the House, a forgotten parlor, disused and dust-ridden, and it was its emptiness that Varina had taken a liking to when she’d developed all sorts of peculiar wants and fancies shaped by the perceived tastes of other white girls. To Rue those girls were real as haints, which was to say not real at all, and she held ghostly impressions of these playmates of Varina’s, with whom Miss Varina was sent to sometimes take luncheons, a mission for her propriety, endeavored with all the purposefulness of a war campaign.
Varina was all glory on those visiting days. With her frizzed hair brushed out to an obedient shine, she’d sit beside Red Jack as he drove her to her visits like a queen on her throne. Red Jack for sure was thrilled to have the permission and the pass to leave the plantation. He had a natural way with horses, something holy in the way he yelled “Hey now,” that made him safe to drive the cart that bore the master’s daughter. He had a natural way with a simpleton’s smile that made him safe to come back with her by nightfall.
Varina would return from these visits with, as Miss May Belle would put it, “some fool idea rattling like beans in her empty head.” The white girl would make herself half-sick with wanting until she got what some other white girl possessed or something better still.
Now Christmastime was coming on and the cool season and the good harvest and the bounty of babies was making everything languid and slow, and Varina had seen to it