Rue’s fault also. She didn’t know that she was weeping. Not ’til the tears were at her neck, wetting her collar. She sat herself on the ground by Ma Doe’s raised feet, buried her face in that ancient knee, and let the weeping take her.
Miss May Belle wouldn’t have prayed and she’d suffer only so much weeping. When Rue would come to her as a child, snot-nosed and guilty, she would say only, “That’s enough now. Fix what you’ve done. Or live with it quiet.”
Still, Rue wept.
WARTIME
Their plantation held a ball. Marse Charles demanded it for himself, said he deserved a jubilee. Missus had been dead a year by then and he’d grown restless with grieving, bored already with playing the widower. Every day there was news of young Rebs fighting battles and winning to fight another. Or losing and dying of it. Marse Charles had sent his sons to those battlefields, but he was impatient on their glory. He wanted his own safe sort of victory and decided not to wait to celebrate a Northern defeat. But the black folks were whispering behind their hands calling it a Dead Man’s Jubilee.
The House was made to gleam, a shining beacon of sophistication that had many of the indoor slaves’ hands rubbed raw from keeping those parts of the House that were well-trod from looking like they were ever lived in at all. Even Rue and her mama had to work in a way they’d never been expected to before. Miss May Belle had for so long got by on being too busy with birthing, on giving the plantation its robust number of babies and maintaining the bodies of others. She’d been so important in that above all else, that it was almost like her own body was free. But now she scrubbed with the rest of them, tasked at cleaning the tall white pillars that wrapped around the House’s porch, and it was a lofty type of falling from grace, as she was made to climb up high to remove years of dust and dirt and errant grime between each ridge, approaching immaculate.
If Rue were to keep an image of her mama in her mind it might be that: Miss May Belle on the top of a rickety stepping stool, the legs of it lodged deep in dirt to keep it steady because it was a waste of a worker to have someone hold it there, even a child.
Each day of that long, tedious week of preparation, Rue passed by her mama outside on the porch on her step stool, scrubbing. Varina had asked for Rue in the same way she’d asked for a new frock—a heavy blue gown of a certain fabric she’d seen on a rare trip to the nearest town three months prior, on a bolt that had already been sold and made into something for somebody else. Because the dress she got was not the exact shade of blue that she’d been wanting, she felt she could ask for shoes to match it. She asked for Sarah and got her too.
Rue and Sarah found themselves draping behind Varina like the two ends of a veil. She wanted to practice at being a lady and that in itself was a masque in need of spectators.
Varina’s preoccupation was her red hair. It had always vexed her, made her look strange and bright and not as demure as she might have wished, what with carrying brimming locks of hellfire everywhere she went. But that had been when she was young and small and a thumb-sucker on Ma Doe’s lap. Now, despite the continued arid nature of her monthly visitor, she’d decided to count herself a proper woman and, in her mind, proper women did not go about having the red cherubic hair of little children.
“We ought to darken it.” This she said to Sarah, who stood stock-still and held up for her the glass so that Varina might better see herself at all angles.
It was a thin, garish space, Varina’s bedroom, a place Rue did not often find herself and did not like when she did. Varina had long since moved out of the nursery in favor of one of the disused guest rooms. Her wide bed with its thick posts like tree