Conjure Women

by Afia Atakora

  Now she curled around her aching middle like someone had put a sawed-off shotgun to her belly button and pulled the trigger. She rolled on the varnished wood floor of her bedroom, her body sliding and twitching. Stuck her thumb in her mouth as the pain rose and rose, bit down on her thumb to try to hold in the mounting scream, because she knew if anybody came upon her, if they came too soon, their first thought would be to save the baby.

  But the scream broke loose and came out jagged, tearing at her insides as it carved its way up and out of her throat, a mournful cry against her will.

  * * *

  —

  Miss May Belle rolled back her sleeves. Didn’t know truly where to begin. It was a poor sight to see Varina as she was, shaking and screaming, foam coming from her lips like she’d swallowed the soap instead of the truth, which was that she’d stuck it between her lily-white legs. Marse Charles had sent for Miss May Belle reluctantly but it was better than the alternative, which was to send for the doctor, who, miles and miles off, might not come in time and upon seeing Varina would know instantly the nature of the shame she’d brought down on them, on her own good name—once for conceiving and again for committing such a foul, twisted act as trying to end that conception.

  Well, the girl was paying for it now. She might not make it to sunup. And there was a part of Miss May Belle that thought, now maybe that would be the better ending for all of their stories to say she’d tried her damnedest but there was no saving neither of them, mama nor child.

  Miss May Belle kneeled and held her hands in a rictus of uncertainty, and beneath her Varina curled and cried, looking like a salted-over slug. Miss May Belle had brought with her everything she had, every type of healing she knew of. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a woman in such a state, though the slaves down there on the plantation had different ways and different reasons. Varina had chosen a hard-chemical death for her baby and to that end Miss May Belle brought with her harder medicines, tinctures in bottles saved up from Varina’s mama’s sickness that had come too late to be used.

  “Calm her with the laudanum,” Marse Charles had told Miss May Belle. “Don’t give my daughter any a’ yo’ shit black grass.”

  The bottle held enough, Miss May Belle knew, to put Varina to a dreamless forever sleep, and she did think on serving it to her for a long dark while. In the end, Miss May Belle administered Varina only a taste, decided soul-deep that she simply didn’t have it in her to let any woman die, especially not for the mere sake of taking her fate into her own two hands after the world of men had shackled those hands behind her.

  * * *

  —

  Rue ran. Out through the slave quarters of the House, a labyrinth of tight dank corners, underground rooms, not hardly fit for habitation but lived in all the same, and she came up gasping on the other side of the slaves’ entrance with the little bundle in her arms wrapped and wrapped and wrapped in cloth. If she encountered anybody she was meant to lie, tell them what she held was a bundle of kindling or a sack of root medicine or a collection of rusty bloodied knives, whatever lie needed telling to get her fast away because the baby needed to be buried and it needed to be buried quick.

  Don’t even think on it as a baby, Miss May Belle had said when she’d passed off the little strange bundle, already swathed and hid from Rue’s curious eyes. It ain’t a baby really. It’s just a shame.

  Rue took Varina’s shame to the river, as far as she could go without being thought of as running away, the very edge of Marse Charles’s vast territory so large he probably had never even strolled the half of it. There she dug deep with use of little more than a piece of slanted rock that cut and bruised her palms, but the mud was yielding, softened by a slow-falling rain.

  She laid the shame down in the hole, and there she could just make out the baby’s figure through the dried blood on the thin blanket. There, his little arms and his little legs, his twisted-up chest and sunken stomach. There the outline of his shock white face. She looked on him so long that the rain collected in the hollow of his skull, pooled on the blanket in black, where his eyes should have been. All black.

  Rue plugged up the hole with mud, packed it in deep. She buried him and prayed the whole while. That the shame would stay hid. That the creek wouldn’t ever rise and bring the dead baby back again.

  * * *

  —

  Varina wouldn’t speak. When her daddy came to see her, his fellow want-to-be soldiers were in his company, bedraggled and obviously drunk. Ruddy and heavy with it, they’d called her down to the parlor because her bedroom, the whole upper floor of the House it seemed, was a tainted place in Marse Charles’s estimation. She had stained it all over with a womanly sin.

  Her legs would barely take her down the stairs, her head rocked and flipped and did not settle. On the long walk she saw ghosts of women, translucent spirits, all of them with babies to their bared breasts, laughing. She was lost in her own home and it took two slave girls to find her and lead her back, and when she did finally reach the parlor she lay shriveled and pale on a stiff-backed chaise. The men were automatic and polite in her presence, but they were ready. They had their dogs and their guns and their whiskey and their rope. All they needed was the name, they kept saying, and the hungry dogs kept barking, and the ghost women with their babies stood over Varina and let themselves be sucked dry. A name. A name.

  “May Belle,” she said to quiet them. “May Belle, she ought to have helped me.”

  “May Belle?” Marse Charles said. “May Belle’s man? He’s the beast that attacked you?”

  The question echoed. Above her the ghost women leered. A name.

  EXODUS

  Rue had smacked Bruh Abel. Once and hard and across the face. Named him a cheat and a liar and told him to get gone. She had never hit anybody before, let alone a man, let alone one she might have loved.

  Bruh Abel had still been grinning, even when blood bloomed from his split lip, but there was sorrow in that grin. It had been there awhile, Rue knew, since her baby died. Their baby.

  “Guess I was deserving that,” Bruh Abel said and rubbed his swollen cheek.

  She’d made him a poultice to soothe the red mark her hand had left on his fair skin.

  Deserving? What did she herself deserve? She thought on it now as she sat on a pew in the white church as though it were the subject of a sermon.

  Across from Rue, Varina held Bean in her lap.

  “How long?” Varina bit out.

  She’d already asked. Rue answered again. “Comin’ up on seven years that the war’s been over.”

  “We lost?” Varina said.

  Rue didn’t know if she counted as “we,” but she nodded.

  “You never told me. You never said.”

  “I thought I was helpin’,” Rue said and that much had been true at the start.

  That first year Varina had been delirious, her body half-poisoned from the lye, half-poisoned from the laudanum she’d sipped and sipped.

  Rue hadn’t known what to use to cure Varina of the addiction. She’d never had to counter white medicine with her own, and Varina seemed so content to die in her dreams. By the second year, if Varina had cared enough about the war to ask after it, it was easy for Ma Doe to arm Rue with scraps of old newspaper. Varina’d lost her sense of dates, quickly lost her appetite for news entirely. After that she’d simply waited and trusted and believed.

  She’d believed that the South’s glory and the life she’d been promised would rise up from the war ash resurrected and reconstructed, as if by magic. Faith in magic was far more potent than magic itself—hadn’t Miss May Belle said that all along?

  Rue held out her hands like she meant to give Varina something, but her hands were empty and her right palm stung. “I thought you were safe here.”

  “Safe? When was I ever safe here?” Varina moaned, and it echoed off th
e church walls. In her arms Bean snuggled close to her, unaware of what they were speaking on but keen to hurt just the same.

  Rue figured Varina would rail against her, would scream, would haul off and hit her, same as Rue herself had hit Bruh Abel. Or worse, Varina would drag her off to the middle of the used-to-be plantation and whip Rue raw.

  But Varina was not the girl she had been or the mistress she might have become.

  She was a woman like a flower that had lived in a dark, dark place and tried her best, if not to flourish, then to survive—and that sort of thing made a body grateful, Rue well knew.

  “So it’s over?” Varina asked again. “I can go?”

  “Yes.”

  Varina kissed Bean’s head, then looked up to the church rafters.

  She said, “Thank God.”

  IN THE BEGINNING…

  There was the ship hold. The early swirling motion of the sea, sickening. The heat of fever, the heat of fear, the only thing cold the new chains, and even those warmed quick and rusted over with rubbing with sores, with blood, with futile struggle. The darkness, the void of that black ship bottom, the darkness on the face of the deep, and then someone said unto them let there be light, piercing light, did you know light could hurt so bad? On the deck above they were made to dance under that brightness. So much light—the light of the heavens, and also the light of the heavens reflected on the sea, and then a few black bodies that got somehow free of the dance went jumping into that sea, blind, perhaps confusing the sea they’d never seen before for heaven, God’s face in the waters. Waste that. False profits. The rest of them were sent back to the dark void ’til the ship reached firmament.

  She had no words for then; they hadn’t given them to her yet. But if she thought back and tried to give words to the memories of the ship and after, there was the one that had rung out when they’d stood her up before the curious white faces and made her hold out her arms and then hold open her mouth and then hold open her legs. Sold.

  And was a mama the warm body that made you in a time and a place and a land you couldn’t remember? Or was a mama what you made for yourself—the good warm body, the first kind memory of the older woman who slept beside you in the hayloft, who let you fold into her warmth that first evening that you were owned? And she hummed to you because she couldn’t speak what you spoke. And that first sense of love, the earth still for the first time beneath your back, and for the first time, through an opening in the roof, the evening sky. You can make due with unspoken kindness and the stars also.

  * * *

  —

  There were signs and seasons and days and years. After a time she was called Dorothea, named in the mistress’s own image. They whupped the name into her, but it couldn’t stick right. “No,” she could say. And then “Doe” for the rhyme. In the end, they tied the two together, called her Doe—and it was good.

  EXODUS

  If anyone had ever loved Varina, Ma Doe had. Rue knew that. Had sometimes envied that, but now she made good on it, or as good as good might ever get leastwise.

  Rue walked slowly between her two prizes like she was the juncture between the beginning and the end of time—Ma Doe on her right, Bean on her left, a march for penance.

  The new school building wasn’t all the way erected but it had four walls. In Rue’s estimation that was enough to make a room or a home, a permanence, that one could start to feel safe with for a time, never mind that the roof was not quite finished and the rain came blustering in.

  “It’s dangerous,” Ma Doe kept warning. She knew as well as anyone the danger the night could hold.

  “I want you to see her ’fore she goes.”

  Inside Varina had made a seat for herself out of a fat leather case, crafted for her special some years ago for a trip she’d never taken. She sat in the corner as nervous and hair-raised as a wet cat, but she was alert. Ready. She troubled on the finer details of Rue’s plan, seemed to not understand at times the things Rue was asking forgiveness after, but she was not angry to learn that blacks were freed, was only relieved to hear that no hurt was coming after her. Varina was ever fierce after her own survival and she was fierce after the things she loved and now Bean had become one of them.

  Ma Doe broke into a shudder when she saw the little baby girl she’d raised from birth. All these years and Ma Doe had been protecting Varina like a jewel in a box she could not open, for there was hardly any safe time that they could meet where others mightn’t discover the secret. Rue hadn’t ever understood how you could love something you couldn’t have and hold, not ’til she’d loved and lost her own baby, loved hard on empty air and an idea.

  Ma Doe moved faster than Rue had ever known her to and wrapped her ancient arms around Varina. They hugged and whispered to each other, ignoring the hard-falling rain. Rue looked on, her hands tight on Bean’s little shoulders, rubbing to keep him warm, keep his spirits up. He didn’t seem afraid, though, only curious to see Ma Doe, who he’d known all his small life as a fine marbled rock of a woman, moved to such tears.

  Every other bosom baby of hers was gone to meet their maker by various hard means. Marse Charles’s boys had marched away, had not even sent her a letter before the war ended them, she who had taught them their first stumbling words. Marse Charles had followed after, gone out to fight in the last pathetic dredging battles and had gotten not much farther than the next county before he’d surveyed all they’d lost and put a pistol to his mouth, frowned on the metallic taste, and drunk down a bottle of strychnine instead, or so the story went.

  At least they had stories. Ma Doe’s trueborn baby boys all had been torn from her arms, not one word to say what had become of them. Rue could, in some ways, sympathize, could understand the way a losing and not knowing was the only thing in the world worse than simple out and out losing. This was the gift she could give before Varina and Bean’s departure. Knowing.

  Rue had done the same for Sarah, had asked the bedbound woman permission to disappear her son away.

  “A mama’ll suffer just about any heartbreak,” Sarah had said, through sweat and sorrow. “If it means her child is someplace safe.”

  When Ma Doe and Varina had finally pulled apart, Varina turned to look on the boy that was Black-Eyed Bean, Sarah’s baby and, Rue supposed, Varina’s nephew if the tangle of rumors surrounding Sarah’s origins was finally to be named true. Marse Charles had prided himself on his sons, but here were his two daughters, Sarah and Varina, planted in the same season, and like to overgrow the world if the world would only let them.

  In the little schoolhouse, Varina and Bean took the measure of each other, and then Varina crouched down to match his height.

  “I like your hair,” she said, easy and familiar.

  “Me too.”

  He’d fidgeted and fussed when Rue had spread the calendula and carrot juice mixture through his hair to lighten it. All it took, a simple change of coloring, of wording, russet to redheaded, and there he was, a white boy before her like she’d laid magic on his head. The color had come out just right, that was clear to see with the two of them face-to-face, close as kin.

  Bean looked to Rue and rubbed his big black eyes with both fists in the loving little way of his. “Miss Rue say Mama gon’ be alright.”

  “Yes,” Varina said. “Miss Rue has the care of everybody in hand.”

  * * *

  —

  Rue only waited out the rain. There were things that wanted doing and night was coming on with the intention of blackening out the sky, though the sun still had the edges.

  She walked Ma Doe halfway back ’til she knew she was safe in the center of the old plantation where folks were still milling about in a hurry to finish what needed finishing before the threat of nightfall. There was something hanging in the air around them, call it foretelling, call it inevitability. Rue kissed Ma Doe’s cheek and said goodbye.


  “Where you off to?”

  “Goin’ to grab a li’l magic.”

  Ma Doe frowned, not catching her meaning, and Rue rubbed her fingers together to indicate coin.

  “Thought you gave ’em what they needed.” Ma Doe turned her head in the direction they’d left Varina and Bean, like she could see them going. Between them they carried the satchel of letters that had turned brittle waiting all those years in Ma Doe’s locked desk. The correspondence to the Northern auntie to whom they now were headed had been taken up in two thick bundles: letters received, and, in Ma Doe’s meticulous hand, copies of the letters sent. Two sides of the story. Varina’d read up on the facts of her life. She was like to add embellishments. Hadn’t that always been her way?

  “They’ll do just fine,” Rue told Ma Doe.

  No dark back roads for a white lady and her white son. Bean with his shock-white skin and his new orange hair would pass as easy as folks had always told Bruh Abel that he could. Why the man had never chose to do so Rue couldn’t rightly say. There were so many things about loving him she’d formed whole cloth in her mind and wouldn’t now ever get the chance to turn over and examine proper in the light.

  “This money ain’t for Varina. It’s for someone else.”

  Ma Doe mhmmed a smart rolling sound from the back of her throat, like to say she’d lived so long, she’d heard everything before. “And what are you fixin’ to tell him when you give it?”