by Afia Atakora
“Don’t know, Ma,” Rue said. “Maybe somethin’ like goodbye?”
SURRENDER
1865
They hanged Rue’s daddy from a tree. He’d been named the cause of Varina’s shame. That was all it took to enact Varina’s curse upon Miss May Belle, revenge for her refusal to heal her of the baby she did not want. Lily-white conjure. Simple as pointing a finger.
Rue hadn’t been there when they’d done it but she could see how it went. It was an oft-enough told tale. They’d come upon him up the road, on his way to join up with the Rebs. Hadn’t his marse freed him after all and everything? So there he was when Death came upon him, a black man with the flimsy protection of freedom papers.
Maybe they’d been brutal and rough, beat him to bloodied before they’d done it, though Lord knew they didn’t have to. They could just have easily bade him string himself up.
Fetch the rope, nigger.
Miss May Belle had not been witness, either, when they’d killed her man. But she knew what they’d done the moment they’d done it. Sat in their cabin, Rue watched her mama’s body twitch and bend like she was bearing an assault of unseen hands. Then she went all-over rigid, her neck overextended, her head tilted too far back. Inside her skull her eyes rolled to all white and a gasp shuddered out of her mouth with such force as to be her last. Just like that it was over, and Miss May Belle was herself again, sullen but dry-eyed. He ain’t gone, she kept saying like saying could make it so.
They’d left him to swing. Said the darkie-loving Northerners could cut him down if they felt so inclined. But the truth of it was his slow-spinning body, big and strong and heavy enough to bow the branch he dangled from, was meant to serve as a reminder in the master’s absence. That they would be back once the war was won.
Marse Charles had left Jonah in charge. Who better than a clipped cock to guard a henhouse? With Ol’ Joel beside him, overseeing, things didn’t hardly change. Miss Varina was like a ghost watching from her bedroom window, searching outward. From that height she could just see the tree they’d hanged Rue’s daddy from. She told them the next day to cut him down.
Folks said the Union army was creeping closer. They’d taken Marse John’s plantation for themselves, eaten up all the goods left in the stores, drank and sang their Northern songs, trampled on the fledgling crops, smashed things in Marse John’s parlor that weren’t worth the trouble to steal. Did they have horns, hoofed feet, like they’d all been hearing? They’d disappeared away with the slaves left there, it was said, marched them away not as free but as contraband. Better maybe the devil you know.
* * *
—
By then Miss May Belle had took to her bed with something worse than grief, which was denial. Said, He ain’t gone, of her man and Rue knew she’d find no help from her mama, maybe never would again.
Time was drawing to a close, it felt like, and there was a bristled-up anticipation amongst the people they couldn’t name, precisely, because it was tinged in fear. They’d led their whole slave lives waiting on someday, singing a day will come, promising on that day that they would be ready. Rue never had been good at singing along. She had decided not to wait on the Day but to act in the Night.
The moon lit the way for her, and Rue took herself right on in through the front door of the House, straight up the spinning stairs and down the gilded hall to Varina’s door, went in without knocking, without seeking permission or needing it.
Varina was deep asleep. One of her slave girls had tucked her neatly in her bed like a body laid out for burial, and all her earthly belongings surrounded her. Rue watched Varina for a moment in her repose knowing the moment she woke everything would change.
Rue shook the girl by the shoulders like to snap her neck. What had come over her, Rue could not say, only she knew it needed doing. Had to happen now.
The white girl shocked awake, saw Rue wild in her bed, and seemed to think it was her judgment day, started confessing.
“I didn’t know they meant to kill him,” Varina hollered.
Rue didn’t follow her meaning at first.
“Your daddy,” Varina said. She clutched her bedsheets close and shook. “I swear I didn’t know what they were asking when they asked it. I didn’t know.”
Maybe it was so. But the trouble was that Varina had never had to know anything up there in the House; she could close the blinds if she didn’t like what she was seeing, could turn away in her featherbed.
“It alright.” Rue began with a lie. “Come with me now. It ain’t safe for you. The army is a-comin’.”
Varina grabbed at Rue. Hid her face in Rue’s little chest, and Rue could feel Varina’s tears and snot and sorrow soaking through her own muslin dress.
“I can’t bear it,” Varina said.
Rue knew that for all her life the little white mistress had been told the bedtime stories where the black man was the brute, the creature to fear in the darkness. Now the world was all turned over and at Rue’s suggestion Varina could just hear the boot stomps of a hundred Northern men, none of them a savior, every one of them like the gentleman Rue had glimpsed defiling Varina’s innocence the day of the Dead Man’s Jubilee. A white-gloved monster. Rue never had been good at comfort, but she comforted Varina’s fears then, laid a kiss on her forehead, said, “Ain’t I gon’ keep you safe?”
It was likely when the Blues came through that they’d be kind to Varina, send her on to wherever disgraced women went to be hid away from the fighting with others of their station, to write letters and sing songs and wait out the new dawn. But it was just as possible that those Northern soldiers, hungry and vengeful, would swoop in and see her as part of what her opulent house stood tall for, just another room in which to plunder. And Varina still had Rue’s name and Sarah’s name on a spirited away bit of paper that promised her ownership of her nigras should she ever take a husband. Any day now the world might right itself and the old laws would hold. Rue had never seen that thing the Yankees were promising—freedom—and she did not trust in what she could not see.
* * *
—
There’d always been rumors of what lay beneath the white church, and in the end the rumors held true. The little locked room under root and earth was not a room at all but a pit, a grave, and Miss Varina, mistress-made, had the key.
“But, Rue,” Varina kept on saying, even as she eased her way into the dark. When her feet landed in the mud down below there was the sound of it sucking, the earth swallowing. Looking up at Rue from down below, Varina shivered.
“It’s the only way.” Lie two. How quick they grew and strengthened and tangled.
“You’ll come back for me, won’t you? Please?”
Rue slid closed the lid. Turned the key hard in the lock.
* * *
—
Day started dawning, and Rue met it. Everybody on the plantation was sleeping still, dredging the last of their resting hours, for normal folks toiled all day, slept at night. Not Rue, never Rue. She was all opposite, a nighttime creature. She could see through the darkness and she had seen what was coming from way off.
Rue stood on the porch of the House alone, little, thin and nothing to her. When they came she faced them down, an army. She had her hand on the pillar for strength, laced her fingers in the etched grooves and rubbed so hard, feeling like it was the only thing left that was real. If she didn’t hold on here she would float away—that was her thinking, as she drew her breath on the next lie.
The leader of them walked up, no uniform on him, but just an air of command. He talked to her slow like he thought maybe she wouldn’t understand.
“Step away from there now, girl.” Already he was snapping orders at one of his men to come and grab her away.
She held, gripped. Spoke: “Only I need to tell you, suh. Miss Varina, our mistress, is dead. Died of the pox just late last
night.”
It was the best lie to tell. She saw the effect it had, the way the men shivered and stepped back afeared of the House as if she’d painted a curse on it, and in a way she had, the conjure of contagion. The only course they had was fire, that one true final cure.
* * *
—
The crackling, popping, hissing of the House going up in flames seemed to speak to the slavefolk in a forgotten language they hadn’t known they’d lost. When they heard it talking they came out of their quarters, out from by the river, out from the cotton fields, to hear what the fire had to say, to watch it devour all they’d known, turn that white House black, sunder it all to a thin windswept ash. When it had eaten up all it could, the fire, still hungry, went after the trees.
Miss May Belle came out amongst the gathered people, strange and stumbling in the light, like somebody just drawn out from the depths of a cave. Rue ran to her, wanted to whisper to only her mama the truth of what she’d done. Let the rest of them mourn after Miss Varina or dance on her grave if they liked. Rue held the truth of her trick to her like treasure. The key was in her pocket.
But when Rue reached her mama the woman was not smiling; instead she was collapsing, falling like her knees were where the fire was, all her bones popping and snapping.
Rue held her mama, hugged at her, tried to understand where her grief came from. Miss May Belle was pointing at the trees, to one in particular, a tall white birch where the flames had caught the very top, blazed all orange like a new type of leaf.
“My man,” Miss May Belle cried. “My man. Lord, Rue, what you done? Ain’t you know I made him safe? Ain’t you know I turnt him to a tree?”
EXODUS
“You wanna see her ’fore you go?”
“You think there’s time?”
Rue did not.
“You think she mine?” Bruh Abel said “she” because Rue had said “she.” There was really no telling what a baby meant to be ’til it had come.
“Don’t you know?”
“Even Adam wasn’t sure a’ Eve an’ they was the only two in the garden.”
Save the snake. Rue shrugged. “Won’t know ’til she come out. An’ even then.” Even then.
Bruh Abel smelled of his faith, the bold, beautiful kerosene lights that illuminated his church’s tent like a lone star in the night sky. Did the moon see it and envy? Most likely, and if it did not, he’d only go on and build that light bigger. The scent of the burning oil clung to his clothes, traveling clothes of a type Rue’d never seen him in. Unadorned and ordinary, they fit close to his lithe body like extra skin. Running clothes.
“It was done with long ago, me an’ Sarah was. Rue, I swear it.”
Rue had never asked him to swear. And maybe that had been her failing. She didn’t know how to ask. Or how to believe.
They were in the front room of Sarah’s house, looking on water boiling in a pot. When it was time to go Bruh Abel had nothing with him but the tied-up bundle of his suit wrapped around his Bible and whatever he could hold in its smaller pockets, as if he’d accumulated nothing in all those years. That couldn’t at all be true. Rue kissed him while the water bubbled and popped and hissed.
Their plan, like all the plans they’d ever formed together in the rut of their shared bed, between the optimism of flesh to flesh, was simple. Bruh Abel would lead his people out in the early threads of morning light, march sure through the gathered dew, wind up northward, away from the legacy of danger, all of them that wanted gone, going together. Those that would stay would stay, the old, the infirm, those tied to the land they found too beloved to leave, it being theirs by bitter rights, a home where they’d sweated and bled and lost as much as it was a place they’d planted seeds and watched things flourish. Miss Rue was among those staying. She felt rooted here.
“What if folks change they mind, if things get too bad?” Rue asked. “Wanna follow after you?”
From inside his bundled suit, from inside the fluttering pages of his Bible, Bruh Abel conjured. Paper. Pen. He wetted the pen on his tongue. With a swirl of ease and grace he began to write. The words blossomed black out of his pen like fast, elegant little miracles, and Rue was astonished to see his agility—and with his left hand no less.
“You can write,” she said.
He smiled.
“You can read.”
“The two things go together nicely I’m told.”
She was too shocked to slap his smart mouth. “I didn’t know you could read.”
“When did I ever say I couldn’t? ’Sides, some knowledge is better kept hid.”
Rue would keep that. It was the truest thing he’d ever told her.
Ma Doe would read it, tell the others the direction they’d run if they were wanting to know it. Rue herself found she didn’t want to know. Rue had told Bruh Abel that Bean was gone but safe, spirited off to a trusted location, though she did not tell Bruh Abel the color of his son’s escape. The gift of one last lie.
“You sure you gon’ be safe here?” he asked.
“They was always after you,” Rue told him, “yo’ faith and yo’ freedom. The power you and Bean had made here. Them white men, they ain’t heard tell a’ me.”
Bruh Abel grinned for her a final time and went.
* * *
—
Rue sang when Sarah sang as they made their way in a slow march around her bedroom waiting on the baby, that last leaving of Bruh Abel’s, to come on out and greet the world. The song was a simple sweet appeal to God, and when the pain got so great that Sarah could not grind out the words, Rue hummed with her too, felt the squeezing of her hand and squeezed back.
When the hooves beat in the distance, when the dogs barked, when they heard the gunshots and the whooping and the hollering, all the telling signs that the white demons had come down from the trees, Sarah and Rue quieted.
Sarah labored in terrified silence as they listened to the night fall all around them. Rue laid her down, not in the bed but on the ground, where they were as well hid as they could be, far from the windows, the white robed men, and the malevolent light they bore, a skittering glow from their passing torches. Rue told Sarah to be brave, to close her eyes and pray. To bear down close in her crouch, push all she could toward the ground.
“Easy, easy,” Rue whispered. She stroked Sarah’s face, tried to pass comfort through the tips of her fingers.
When she looked up she spied him, the white man in the window. He stared down at them, watched Sarah push and twist and scream all from inside the hollow of his draped white disguise, no expression painted there, just the crooked point of his hood, the deep pool black where he’d cut for eyes.
Rue said one, small word. “Please.”
Just like that, the man was swallowed back up by the night.
An hour or an eternity had passed by the time the baby came on out in three forceful pushes and Rue was there to catch her, to pull her into her arms and to hear that first powerful cry, afraid that cry would call back the demons, but loving it too much to ever quiet it.
“Sarah,” Rue told her. “You got yo’self a baby girl.”
The baby blinked up at Rue, gray-eyed as Bruh Abel was, and perfect, as promising as any fresh day.
* * *
—
In the quiet of the morning Rue woke. Sarah was beside her, watching her. In her arms the baby suckled with delight. The dawn was still. The air smelled of smoke. Rue rose from the ground where they’d survived the night and made her way to the door.
“You ain’t tell me what her name is, Miss Rue.”
She turned to look back at Sarah, who stood and pulled herself and her baby into the bed. Mama and child settled in, looked safe and small.
“I think her name is Posy.”
“Posy,” Sarah said.
Outside, the town was a
mess of toppled houses, of scorched grass and bitter smells, the work of the white-hooded demons.
“Miss Rue,” folks said as she passed. Their voices were rough from smoke and from grief. “Them that left with Bruh Abel? You think they got away safe?”
“ ’Course,” Miss Rue told folks, and they were appeased. “I gave them a charm, best that I got, to see them safely north. Root a’ High John the Conqueror.”
She walked on, through the town square, out from what had used to be the plantation up to the clearing where the House had stood and fallen, where the tent had stood and fallen also. Now there was nothing there to mark either, no words on a grave, just the lone thing the white devils had left standing to say that they had come and gone, burning itself out to black: two planks of tall wood formed perfect in the shape of a cross.
GILEAD
1929
Rue walks. If she doesn’t keep walking the pain catches up on her, settles round the low of her stomach and burns. The thing is, there isn’t much place to walk in the hospital room. She amuses herself by fitting her bare feet full in the tiles, avoiding the sharp black lines delineating the edges. The tile is cold beneath her feet, unyielding beneath her uncut toenails, and it takes only ten of those tile steps lengthwise to take her from one side of the room to the other, and then she has to turn round and start back again. But it takes only these next ten steps for her to grow nearly so weary that she can’t stand. And she has a notion that soon it will take less, and less still.
One day, today, whatever day it may be, a doctor comes. He is not the first doctor, let’s say he is the third, who seeks to cure what can’t be cured. Now the first doctor said, “Miss Rue, we will try to cut it from you, to cut your body clear of it.” And he took her to a place he called a theater where they watched from above what was done to her. That doctor, a small mustached man who spoke in a voice like her old master, made an incision where an incision had been already made, tried to take something out of her that had been put in long ago, a curse, she liked to think of it. A bitter taste in her mouth. But it grew again and bigger. The affliction would not leave her.