It oughta be a movie: Conjure Women, by Afia Atakora

 

This book follows Rue, the ‘conjure woman’ of an isolated black community somewhere in the South. Like her mother, Miss May Belle, she is a skilled midwife and healer who is also believed to be able to make curses and converse with spirits. As such, the respect her neighbors have for her is tinged with fear. Her position in their Reconstruction-era village is threatened by the arrival of a charismatic preacher named Bruh Abel, the birth of an uncanny child, a spreading sickness, and the lies Rue has told to try and keep safe both her people and an individual who is important to her.

In telling Rue’s story, Atakora jumps back and forth between “Freedom time”, “Slavery time”, and “War time”. This makes it feel like a mystery in many ways, with the reasons for certain decisions or character interactions coming as twists partway through or at the end. That and the cliffhangers at the end of most sections keep pulling the reader forward, and the solutions do not disappoint – though they are often an emotional gut-punch. That is one reason I think this would make an excellent film. The other reason is that there are still far too few slavery movies that are entirely from the perspective of the enslaved. Having Rue and her neighbors be our eyes means that instead of focusing on an outside savior coming to set people free, we get to see the full range of responses people can have to that situation, as well as to the fragile, uncertain freedom that comes afterward.

Rue is a resourceful young woman, even when events threaten to spin out of her control. A good chunk of her work is midwifery, but: “There was no magic in birthing. No conjure, neither…All it took in the birthing room was good sense, the good sense that a thing hanging ought to fall.” Her mother, though, was more of a true witch. “Miss May Belle had used to turn coin on hoodooing… She had admitted only once, to Rue, in confidence: ‘The thing about curses is that you can know who you’ve wronged the most by who you fear has the notion to curse you.’” Once, Rue glimpses her turn a woman into a bird, to fly to freedom – we find out later that that was probably real, but the event also foreshadows what happens to that woman when she tries to come home. People think their community has been left alone since the war, even though the plantation house dramatically burnt down, because “Miss May Belle hoodooed the whole woods…For wasn’t it in those same woods they’d lynched Miss May Belle’s man, lynched him and left him to swing?” The truth is, though, Rue worked her own spell of words with the help of Ma Doe – the old “mammy” of the plantation, old enough to have been taught how to read and write and now running a school for the youngsters.

Bruh Abel is an interesting character too. Bean, the pale-skinned, black-eyed child born in a caul (a sign of a prophetic gift, it is said) and the rumors surrounding him, are what first draw them into close contact: “’And Bean’, Jonah added…’ He ain’t made that awful cry, not one night since Bruh Abel come and started prayin’ over him…All of us been waitin’ on what freedom means. Bruh Abel say we don’t gotta wait no more, We can just go ‘head and put aside the old ways.’ Rue felt it in her bones: She was the old ways to which Jonah was referring.” Jonah is (supposedly) Bean’s father, and Rue has a bit of a crush on him – perhaps in part because he’s more relaxed and honest with her than most. He seems like a good man, and it hurts when you find out about a cruel act by their former master that Rue knew nothing about. As for Bruh Abel, he’s not a true antagonist as one might initially expect, but not a reliable ally either. Rue and Bruh Abel both understand the importance of understanding what people want to believe. Granny Weatherwax could relate to that ‘headology’, and to Miss Rue and Miss May Belle’s positions on the edge of light and dark, making the decisions no one else wants to make, and therefore being needed but not trusted.

There’s a haunting incident from slavery time when they find a dead man in the woods. Despite some quiet investigation, no one can figure out who he is, other than someone who ran – he bears a spiked iron collar on his neck. They give him a funeral, kept quiet somehow from the master, with Miss May Belle seeing to his laying out. Young Rue thinks: “She had never been this close to a man, dead or alive, and it was his potential to run that thrilled her…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.” Or at least she is – no matter how risky things get at home, she doesn’t leave; she has roots as much as the herbs she gathers.

The only white character who gets substantial page time is Varina, the master’s daughter. She and Rue were always much closer than they were supposed to be, though the nature of their relationship is hard to define. Sometimes it seems almost romantic,¹ other times more like an intense “frenemy” relationship. Varina wants a brief escape from stifling white Southern girlhood and uncaring parents. What Rue gets is something more complicated. She simultaneously envies Varina and feels sorry for her, treasures their closeness and feels trapped by it. But the massive inequality of their positions makes it impossible to fully understand or relate to one another. For instance, Varina asks her father to give her Rue as a wedding present; That will allow them to stay together, but it doesn’t seem to occur to Varina that this would make Rue leave her mother and she doesn’t ask which she would prefer. Neither is safe from the threat of white male violence, but the consequences of that vary hugely². Varina has a huge amount of power to "curse" Rue and her family, even by accident. And Rue, due to very well justified but deeply buried resentment mixed with a kind of love, sometimes simultaneously helps Varina and hurts her.

 

1. If you’re familiar with this blog you may be thinking I have a tendency to over-read the Sapphic vibes – and you might well be right. But there are certain moments, like the two ‘playing midwife’ and Rue “imagining a baby with black skin and red, red hair”, or getting jealous of the lighter skinned girl who seems likely to become Varina’s maid – who would therefore get to brush her hair and stay closer to her - that do hint at something extra in the big mess of feelings Rue has about this white girl.

2. Trigger warning for sexual violence, BTW, as well as just violence in general.

 

Adaptation Issues:

            This could probably be turned into a screenplay rather straightforwardly, without too much alteration to dialog or order of events. There are a lot of Rue’s internal thoughts, but as many are highly visual flashbacks they could probably be made known without too much (or any) intrusive voice-over. In an author’s note at the end, Atakora (who grew up in Britain, rather than the US) mentions that her research for this story drew on ‘Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in The United States’, which is a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people carried out in the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration. But she also thanks her mother and grandmother, the latter of whom partly inspired “Ma Doe” and who “relayed a hundred years’ worth of memories, stories, and proverbs all the way from Ghana”. That makes sense, because not only did African traditions get carried on in new forms in the Americas by enslaved people, the Evangelical Christianity of the US got carried back to Africa, and influenced the way people think about things like witchcraft – as is visible in the Lagos-based Sci-Fi novel ‘Lagoon’. Those could be good sources to return to for details. The book has a somewhat ambiguous ending. I think we are meant to assume that the young doctor Rue meets is someone we’ve encountered before and, if that is the case, careful casting would be needed to make sure that audiences get that point.

Finally, it would be important NOT to add to or expand on any of the white “villains” in this story. I put that in quotations because they don’t really matter, not as individuals. Rue’s old master and mistress are essentially faceless – I couldn’t describe them the way I could Bean, or Ma Doe…or Varina, the one white person Rue cares about. Partly that’s because the slaves are trained not to make eye contact - Varina is unusual in letting Rue really look at her, letting her see her human flaws - but also, I think, because the white characters represent a system. There is a temptation in movies, as happened with ‘Harriet’ to try to personify the threat (in that case with a man who never existed) but that’s not really how white supremacy works. On the one hand, if you knock one master or Klansman down, another will spring up in his place. At the same time, in this tale they are like ghosts or monsters haunting the edges of the community, sometimes barging in to leave bloody clawmarks on someone’s back or to steal a child away but not real in the same way that Rue’s neighbors are real. I like that perspective, and if scenes are were adapted literally it would not be hard to represent on film – Rue watching a party from inside a trunk, with the lid’s edge cutting off the heads of the guests from view, for instance, or Varina’s father sitting at a desk, his back to the slave girls he’s transferring to his daughter.