the heat of the prior night’s impulsiveness coursing through her when Rue forced herself to rise from her bed. Unrest thrummed in her body like drink, and she felt she could still hear the echo of Bean’s crying.
She plucked the daisy from her hair, put on her sun hat, gathered a few necessities in a basket, and went calling on Ma Doe.
The day was cool as the night had been cool, and Rue had to keep one hand on the straw brim of her hat so as not to be caught unawares by the sudden whistles of wind. At first, she was not much disturbed when she encountered no one on her walk. It was midday. The men would be out in the fields; the women would be just now preparing their families’ suppers.
The old slave quarters had been plotted, boldly, in the shape of a crucifix. Rue’s cabin sat at the lowermost point of that cross and so she walked the whole of the empty dirt path, past all the quiet homes. Suddenly, she was struck with the absence of everyone, a swelling goneness.
Ma Doe was there when Rue stomped up to her door, and at her feet were two small children, just past toddling age.
“Afternoon, Miss Rue,” Ma Doe said.
Rue drew off her hat and looked around. Long as Rue had known her, Ma Doe’s slow gait was trailed by nine or ten children, all of them pickaninnies. In the height of slaverytime Ma Doe had brought up the master’s four children too, Marse Charles’s three sons and Varina. In rearing them, Ma Doe was known to be twice as fierce as any white governess. Since then she’d become something of a teacher, made a kind of freedfolk school right there in her home where the children scratched their letters into the dirt. Rue knew them to be letters but what they meant she could not say.
“Where’s everybody got to?”
“That how you ought to greet me?” Ma Doe said. Rue shushed the woman by kissing her on her leathery cheek.
“What have you got for me, baby?” She locked eyes onto the basket Rue had tucked under her arm.
Rue had known that the charm she’d brought would offer luck, of a kind. It was a packet of leather tied to the end of a coarse string, and it gave off an awful stink as Rue snaked it from her basket. In the crude pouch she had stuffed asafetida powder, as much as she could manage while holding her breath. Ma Doe had been in the habit of wearing such charms all her life, believing that they could ward off all manner of illness and evilness, and she believed her old age to be testament to that fact, though Rue had her doubts.
She tied the charm onto Ma Doe, who bowed her head to let her do it. The rope disappeared into the rolls of Ma Doe’s neck. She tucked the pouch down her shirtfront and it was almost as if she weren’t wearing it at all, save the smell.
“Now. You’re wonderin’ where everyone’s taken themselves,” Ma Doe said. “They all of ’em hotfooted it out a’ here as soon as they caught wind a’ the news. I expect they’re havin’ a fine time down there by the river. For Bruh Abel has come.”
Rue startled at the name. She tried not to let her upset show but there was no hiding the quiver of discomfiture that ran quick up her spine like wind up a shivering tree limb.
Bruh Abel. She ought to have foreseen it. It was the season for him after all. He came to preach and to perform miracles. And he came to spread lies, or so Rue believed. How else to make sense of such a rootless man? He traveled everywhere with a Bible in his hand and a too-wide grin on his face. He seemed to want nothing. In Rue’s mind folks who didn’t say plainly what they wanted harbored the most pernicious type of wanting.
She might have accused him of it if she weren’t so guilty of the same. Wasn’t last night in the woods evidence of her own reckless wanting?