Conjure Women by Afia Atakora

Author:Afia Atakora
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

WARTIME

1861

Varina never did bleed. Varina had been their pacer for all those years, the girl and then the woman by whom they, her black servants, might set the clocks of their own bodies, for they had no better way of knowing their own age besides looking and guessing at their reflections in the glass they were scrubbing or in the water pails they were fetching. Then all at once Varina, who was always first, fell behind, came up dry.

Sarah bled, and then Beulah that same spring that they counted as their thirteenth year. Then Rue bled in the rainy season, the last of a crop of girls turned to women in the course of one evening, now elevated in value by the promise of their multitudes.

Varina came to Miss May Belle’s cabin each time she heard that one of the black girls had become a woman. She pestered, sniffed it out of them, like a beast for the blood, and when she caught the scent she’d come knocking at Miss May Belle’s door.

“Girl, ain’t nothin’ wrong with you,” Miss May Belle would say. “It’ll happen when it has cause to happen.”

It was Rue that set Varina on wanting to bleed. They were where they should not have been, up in the lofted gallery of the little church, which, every Sunday, creaked and buckled under the weight of the black congregation. It seemed so much smaller, Rue realized, absent of that press of bodies. Rue and Varina lay together on their backs, the way they might’ve in their field. Outside the sky flashed and rocked with thunder and lightning, working itself up to a downpour.

The little church was much farther down the path outside the plantation than either of them had the right to go, but Varina had urged them one step farther and one step farther still.

“If we come across someone I’ll say you mine.” Varina had it all figured. “I’ll tell ’em I brought you out here to give you some religion.” But they did not meet anyone as they picked their way east through the wood and there was no religion to be found in the building—only below them the simple pulpit and the empty pews, important to no one on a black-cloud afternoon, for the minister lived in the next county, which was by horse hooves still a day’s trip.

Still, Varina said it was better to stay hidden in the church’s second story than to be caught out by the pews should anyone wander in. But they had trouble lying still on the wood floor, and Rue felt that they were only doing a gimcrack imitation of their younger selves, those carefree children who could lay about, mindless and gathering grass stains.

The passing of time was most obvious in Varina, whose round, full face had grown pointed, whose freckles had faded altogether. In Rue’s memory was Varina as she’d always been, fat and thumb-sucking, defiant in a calico dress bearing patterned flowers. Now Varina was growing

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