of his hands, the twitch of a smile in his face. It was like catching someone admiring their own reflection. “Ain’t vanity one of them big sins?” she’d sometimes say to him, and sure enough he’d just grin, suck her into that sinking cheek dimple. There was no shaming him. Not there under his own big white tent, with his own Lazarus playing marbles at his feet.
“I come to speak to you in fact,” Rue began. Now that she was here to say it, she didn’t know quite how to put words to her urgency or the fear that was rising up inside her. “I seen a white woman.”
Bruh Abel quirked his eyebrow. “What? You ain’t never seen one before?”
“She come to see me about her baby.”
“You help her, ain’t you?”
Rue worried her lip. “I tol’ her to come back. I plan to help her,” she hurried to say. “But she a relation a’ Ol’ Marse John who owned the only other plantation near here durin’ slavery times. She stayin’ on at his place. Got a husband with her.”
“Tell ’em to come hear some prayin’,” Bruh Abel said. He busied himself adjusting the tall wood lectern he’d had made. It was where his Bible often sat, open but untouched. Already, the tent was filling up again for the second go-round.
“That ain’t it,” she said. She hated him a little then. How easy he was with words when she wasn’t.
The last time strange white folks had come through the woods, her mama had been alive and the country had been warring. And they had come as an army.
Bruh Abel bent to start picking up Bean’s marbles, ignoring the small whine of protest the little boy made. Rue couldn’t understand why Bruh Abel didn’t see it. That he had made Bean in his image, made him a curiosity on which the town hinged, when he’d said all along that that was what they’d been trying to avoid. For her part in it Rue felt sorry, but in a town now known for its curiosities, she had begun to fade quietly into the weave. Hadn’t that fact saved both of their lives—hers and Bean’s?
Sarah came in at the lead of the next flood of parishioners, heading straight for her son with a sense of duty if not of ease. She laid a kiss on Bean’s forehead, one he didn’t seem even to feel, then straightened up slow to greet Bruh Abel and then Rue. Her expression was tight and tired. Jonah was away working at some port, here-and-gone the way only a man could be in the name of supporting his family.
“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.”
He kissed her, full on the lips, there in front of Sarah and Bean and those waiting on worship. Rue extracted herself quick from his arms. She was dizzy from just the sheer force of how free he thought he was. Nothing like that could last.
“Miss Rue.” “Good evening, Miss Rue.” “Sister Rue.” It all clattered around her brash as church bells as she forced her way out of the tent against a crowd clambering to get in.
It was never fully dark anywhere now, not with the candlelight in the tent always burning, emanating that constant soft glow of promise. The woods on the periphery were what was all dark; the distance in between stayed stuck in everlasting twilight. That’s where Rue lingered, masked in shadow, with a steadying palm to her belly. She was making herself afraid, she reasoned, because it had always felt safer to her to be afraid. From