Invisibility Blues by Michele Wallace

Author:Michele Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Rufel had taken the baby to her bosom almost without thought, to quiet his wailing while Ada and the other darkies settled the girl in the bedroom … The sight of him so tiny and bloodied had pained her with an almost physical hurt and she had set about cleaning and clothing him with a single-minded intensity.

(p. 101)

Born to a moderately prosperous family in Charleston, SC, Rufel married the wrong man – dashing Bertie Sutton, who boasted of a ‘cotton plantation’ in Northern Alabama, which turns out to be sparsely settled frontier land plainly inhospitable to the cultivation of cotton. Bertie has been gone for at least a year and a half when Dessa arrives at Sutton Glen. Meanwhile, Rufel’s Mammy, a wedding gift from her father, has rallied a collection of runaway slaves to harvest the crops. Rufel has only the dimmest grasp of what has happened, can’t cope with the fact that she hasn’t heard from her family in four years, that Bertie may never return, that Mammy died the previous spring.

So Rufel spends the better part of the day sitting beside Dessa’s bed, staring out of the window, sewing and daydreaming about her coming-out days in Charleston and her warm, talkative relationship with ‘Mammy’. Occasionally, she speaks to herself aloud, and Dessa can’t help but hear her. Rufel refers to Mammy more than once. Finally, Dessa interrupts her. ‘You don’t even know Mammy,’ Dessa says.

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