“D’you plan to go hear him preachin’, Miss Rue?” She heard the wistfulness in Ma Doe’s voice, like the old woman wished that she could still walk well enough to go with the others to the riverside and see the preacher man too.
Rue closed the top of her basket sharply. “No’m, I’m mighty busy today as it happens.”
In truth, she was not busy.
Ma Doe said, “Maybe just as well you stay clear of Bruh Abel.”
Rue flushed hot. “Why you say that, Ma?”
Ma Doe shrugged, busied herself observing the letters of her two youngest students, nodding encouragement as they struggled to make meaning out of dirt. Rue doubted the old woman could hardly see anymore with her overcast eyes. But who knew what Ma Doe observed keenly that others could not?
“I only mean that Bruh Abel’s so much like your mama was. He’s got a nose for secrets,” Ma Doe said. “Mind he doesn’t catch wind a’ yours.”
Rue could smell the charm she’d made. A damning stink, it was.
* * *
—
Rue hid herself in the thick of the woods. She simply wanted to know how Bruh Abel did it, how he worked his magic on her people. That was the reason why she was coming round the river from the woods where she could hide in the green and watch him, unobserved.
She feared that once again Bruh Abel had shown up to shake up folks’ faith. It would be a fool thing to make an enemy of him. Ma Doe’s warning against Bruh Abel’s keen sense for secrets clanged in Rue’s head. The old woman knew her words, knew to wield them expertly. And these words she had meant to singe in Rue’s mind as a brand: “He’s got a nose for secrets. Mind he doesn’t catch wind a’ yours.”
But Rue just had to know what sort of healing Bruh Abel had brought with him, what he meant to do to settle folks’ fear and gossip about Bean and the clamor of unease and superstition that Bean’s strange eyes and cry had raised within the townspeople. The years had passed in peace since the end of the war, yet all of them suspected that peace could not last. They’d listened to cannon fire for so long that the quiet made them anxious, waiting for worse to come. Then a seemingly accursed baby had been born amongst them, suddenly, like a lobbed shell. They had been waiting on reprisal, reprisal for freedom, for the joy of being free, and when that reprisal wasn’t fast coming, they’d settled on the notion that that punishment was finally come in the black eyes of a wrong-looking child. Truth was Rue had a share in their suspicions. She had shied away from Bean as they all had. Worse, she’d taken his wrongness as an omen against her and her past sins.
Rue figured it was no coincidence that Bruh Abel had shown up the day after Bean’s horrid wailing. Why else had Sarah chosen that night of all nights to try to bathe her youngest child in hot water? Bruh Abel would soon come upon his seasonal visit and set his sights on Bean. He would find the evil in Bean and cure it. Rue felt she could not allow him to be the one to do so.
She came to rest at the seam of the woods and leaned the whole of herself up against the trunk of a tree, peered just around the edge so she could see them all there at the river, but they could not see her.
She hardly needed to hide, for they watched Bruh Abel as though he was the only thing worth seeing, that assembled crowd of poor black folks.
Bruh Abel was a fine-looking man in that same over-big suit, and he carried a Bible though he wasn’t ever seen to read from it—likely he couldn’t read at all. He didn’t need to look at the Bible to do his preaching.
He could pass, that’s what folks whispered about him soon as he appeared each year, as if in the time since they’d last seen him he’d grown more fair. He could quite easily pass