for white with that light skin and the brown in his slicked hair showing golden in the sun, but sure enough he was colored and he did have a gift for speaking, for lighting up the dullness that had some time ago settled over that town like the dust of the Northern soldiers’ retreat.
Bruh Abel spoke with the lilting tongue of some other county, it was there in the spin of his r’s and the caper of his s’s, a twang like the beginning of a good song. His talk was sweet to listen to and he did talk, not from a pulpit, not even from one place on the sandy edge of the river. Instead he walked back and forth through the crowd. Rue saw the way everybody trained their eyes on him. He’d sometimes walk straight into the river as though he thought he’d float right on top, and he didn’t seem one bit bothered by the water that lapped at his ankles.
“Do y’all wanna hear what the Lord say?”
They did.
“He say this: ‘It shall be on the last days that I will pour forth my spirit upon all flesh and yo’ sons and yo’ daughters shall prophesy.’?”
Bruh Abel put his hands to his head, shut tight his eyes. “And yo’ young men shall see visions. And yo’ old men shall dream dreams.”
He snapped open his eyes. He looked straight at Rue. Shocked, she didn’t move, only dug her fingers deep into the unyielding bark of the tree, went allover still, except for the twist in her stomach, the unrest of her beating heart.
He was not looking at her after all, she realized; he was reading his scripture in the sky.
“?‘Even on my bondslaves,’ the Lord say, ‘I shall pour forth my spirit. And they shall prophesy.’?”
Bruh Abel walked through the crowd, searching for something. Rue searched with him, trying to see what he saw. There was Sarah standing off to one side, with her three children, Bean sitting on the swell of her bent hip. Rue imagined his sharp black eyes taking in the proceedings. Jonah, Rue noticed, was not with them. Bruh Abel’s gaze seemed to linger on the family, on Bean especially, and Rue swore she’d holler, put voice to her panic, if the preacher man so much as picked Bean from his mama’s embrace.
But Bruh Abel in an eyeblink passed the baby by. He came instead to Ol’ Joel, a man who had always been old in all of Rue’s memory. Time had made him stooped, as though he were perpetually bent over in the field. He still worked the land but walked everywhere with the aid of a cane, a fine lacquered wood one that had been given to him by Marse Charles, their former master. Bruh Abel stopped before him.
“You tired, Bruh Joel?” he asked him in the soft, sympathetic cadence of an old friend.
“These ol’ bones ain’t ne’er too tired to hear ’bout the Lord.”
Bruh Abel grinned. “Will you pray with me?”
They prayed with their heads together, too quiet for Rue to hear from that distance. She watched as Bruh Abel placed his hands along the old man’s back, Joel’s crooked spine showing through the thin cotton of his shirt, and when they parted Ol’ Joel had tears wetting the creases of his weathered face. He stood at least an inch taller, and with a flourish of strength befitting a man a quarter of his age, he tossed the cane into the river, where it hit the surface and then sank with nary a splash.
Bruh Abel next drew a young girl from the midst of the crowd. She was a wispy thing, maybe fifteen, that Rue had spoken to but once when she’d asked, quite earnestly, poor fool, if there mightn’t be something she could take to stop her monthly courses for a turn or two. Now Bruh Abel was leading her into the deepest part of the river.
Rue knew that Bruh Abel had already baptized a number of people in the town, particularly the young women, but she had never seen it done. She watched now and it seemed almost loving, the way he