own. In the water beside the baby a chipped cup bobbed along the ripples created by his movements. It hit the walls of the tub out of time with the high, piercing whine that had snaked its way into Rue’s dreaming.
When she leaned forward, the baby stilled his squall. He opened his eyes as if to look upon her, revealed the oil-slick black irises that had heralded his strangeness, that had prompted the name Rue had given him at his birth: Black-Eyed Bean.
Rue said to Sarah of the baby’s eyes, “They ain’t changed.” She spoke it low enough to be out of Jonah’s hearing.
“No, they ain’t,” Sarah said, in just the same whisper. “He ain’t changed.”
* * *
—
There was no magic in birthing. No conjure, neither. The birth of Black-Eyed Bean had occurred one year back. Had begun no different than any other birth that Rue had known, and she had known many.
Rue just walked the women. That was it. All it took in the birthing room was good sense, the good sense that a thing hanging ought to fall, the way swollen apples brought their branches low before the apples plopped down to the ground. Shouldn’t it be the same with a baby? Let them hang low in the mama when it was time to fall, the mama being the branch near snapping.
Since the end of slaverytime, Rue had birthed every last child in that town. She knew their mamas and their daddies, too, for she was allowed into sickbeds for healing and into birthing beds alike, privy to the intimate corners of joy and suffering, and through that incidental intimacy she had come to know every whisper that was born from every lip, passed on to every ear. She knew what folks said about each other, and Lord, she knew what they said about her.
What folks said about Sarah, Jonah’s wife, Bean’s mama, was that she was beautiful, and it was so. She was a fiery woman, petite as an ember but just as dangerous, with skin light as wheat. Sarah was one of those who had sung when she walked the birth walk, had done so the two births before this, sung and moaned and sung right up to the moment that her bigger than big babies came on out to the world. Sarah had sung while she was heavy with Bean, a sonorous song with no words but so much soul. Her one hand gripped on too tight to Rue’s while the other hand beat out the tune she was singing against her sweat-slicked thigh. It was when Sarah’s squeezing got too tight, the veins standing up like blue rivers in her high-yellow hand, that Rue started her usual worrying.
Truth was Rue didn’t want nothing to do with any of that mess, the moan-singing mamas or the anxious daddies—when there were daddies—wringing their hats and their hands outside the door, or the wet and wailing babies, or, worst of all, the babies that came into the world just quiet, gone already before they ever lived, just lost promises with arms and legs and eyes for nothing. Why would she want to meddle in all of that?
As she laid Sarah down Rue had begun to think of how it all could go wrong, and if it did, what was she to do? Because just as easy as folks’ praise came, it could turn to hating. Magic and faith were fickle. Life and living were fickle. And didn’t Rue know that as well as anyone?
Still, when the time came for bearing down—the women praying with their cussing and cussing with their praying—it was in the way they looked up at her, weepy eyes filled with worship, that kept her door open. Like apples, babies came in seasons, and Rue would always tell herself in the lull, Not next year. Next year I be done.
Bean had been born in one such lull, Sarah being the fertile kind. The “Her man gotta do no more than look at her” kind, like Rue’s mama used to say of the women who could show up twice in a year with their bellies making tents of their dresses.