Conjure Women

Cain and Abel were not brothers, not twins. They were...two sides of the same person, good and evil warring against its own inclinations. The same struggle was borne out in every person, over and over, from the very most beginning of time, and you could only answer for yourself which brother would win.

Worrying was a disease for women, and it came as a chronic ailment.

They'd listened to cannon fire so long that the quiet made them anxious, waiting for worse to come.

There ain’t no easier lie to tell folks than the one they wanna believe.

It was folly to think that she was the only one that had ever had any secrets.

She had never before been so close to a man, dead or alive, and it was his potential to run that thrilled her. Women, she realized then, were not built that way. Women were for crouching, for becoming heavy-bellied, for bearing down and pushing close to the earth, that different sort of running, that sedentary sort of endurance.

There was no use in fighting Marse Charles commandment. Varina and Ruth, they were bound to their roles, and always has been, Ruth figured, by something stronger than curse or conjure - simply, they had been raised to be with the women they had become.

Ain’t every woman’s daughter made from the death of the mama, somehow or another?

Freedom seemed to them to be as useless as the currency of a nation that didn’t exist anymore.

Magic and faith were fickle. Life and living were fickle.

Worrying was a disease for women

They bowed their heads as close as conspirators, the mess of their hair mixing together at the end of their spirals as though that were the way secrets were passed.

Please, suh.” Rue’s voice came out in a warble, child-thin, like it had been in slaverytime when every white man was sir. “I’m lookin’ for a li’l boy. He lost.

They were both of them just passing through that strange twilight where the new feeling stirring in their bodies was pushing past simple sickness and weakness and aches and pains into being a real idea, a person, a possibility. But to say so aloud seemed over-proud, like fate itself might wend in, overhear, and intervene.

Varina and Rue, they were bound to their roles, and always had been, Rue figured, by something stronger than curse and conjure—simply, they’d been raised to be the women they had become.

In Rue’s mind, Varina had laid for her a curse. But Rue knew well the way that curses worked, for Miss May Belle often warned against them, saying, you can tell who’s got a mind to curse you by who you done wrong. A curse was a problem that could be countered. Rue would need a piece of him to do it, a lock of hair, a toenail clipping. An image to direct her curse toward.

Bean, you mindin’ Bruh Abel?” she asked her son. She petted his head the same way the other faithful had. No feeling in it, just a kind of reluctant awe. “Yes’m,” Bean said. Rue wanted nothing more than to scoop him up and run. Instead she said in a hush to Bruh Abel, outside of Sarah’s hearing, “I just ain’t think it’s a good sign. White folks wonderin’ after us. After all a’ this.” Bruh Abel raised his arms wide. If he could’ve he would’ve held in his palm the very idea of all-of-this. “Ain’t you heard? This our time. The time that was Promised.

Men could not make sense of women’s work.

Ain't every woman's daughter made from the death of the mama, somehow or another?

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 mistake of taking her fate into her own hands after the world of men had shackled those hands behind her.

In death he looked himself a celebration - though surely his life had never been. But here it was, close up: freedom. He'd reached finally what he'd been running toward.

Never you mind the pain of death or injury; the worst pain was to make your mama cry.

The thatched roof wept from some long ago storm.

It was an honor to lift this burden and so the burden was light.

It seemed to Rue that the men were always trying to look brave when really what they wanted was to leave Miss May Belle to it.

Their faces were damp and ruddy beneath their high-yellow skin, like they’d been crying but had exhausted that sorrow, left it to the baby to do the weeping for them.

That wrong child, born backward in a caul, a bath of black.