tipped that young girl back. He controlled her fall with one hand on her shoulder, the other spread on her back, and he held her there, as strong as a pillar with the river rushing around his waist. Rue wondered what it must feel like, Lord, to be held down by that man’s hand.
He kept her there so long, fully immersed in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and finally, when he allowed it, she came up gasping and saved, her hair matted to her forehead, her white dress clinging clear to her little bud-hard chest. He had his arm firmly around her as he helped her step high over rocks and branches. They made their way back to the shore.
Rue wanted to know what he would do next. It seemed impossible that he could perform anymore, dripping as he was, but he shook his hands dry and took up the Bible he’d bade someone hold, and he flipped it open, letting it fall to its natural, spine-worn center.
But the Bible’s pages started fluttering in a sudden wind that grew into a gust and before she could reach up and stop it, Rue felt her hat fly straight off her head. It floated down from the woods, clear past the crowd, headed for the river or for Bruh Abel, she could not know, she did not stop to see it land. Rue turned and ran.
SURRENDER
1865
It had been in the high heat of June, two years back, that black folks had been freed. When the last of the war’s rebel fires petered toward Surrender, gossip of that lofty Proclamation had finally come to their isolated corner of torn-up country, the weight of it all winnowed down so that they hardly knew what any of it meant, what good it might do them. Freedom seemed to them to be as useless as the currency of a nation that didn’t exist anymore.
Then Bruh Abel had come amongst them for the first time. He appeared one hot day late that June, gusted in as unexpected as cool air off the distant ocean. He’d arrived only days after they’d been told that they, slave folks all of their lives, were free. That nonsense word. He had come and defined it for them, came into their square and showed them just how free could saunter into town and say the most dangerous, daring things.
“This is to be our prosperity,” Bruh Abel predicted. “This will be the Promised Time for black folks.”
Lofty prophecies. They were wanting to believe him. Couldn’t quite yet. Not without proof.
The first time Rue had heard tell of him she was eighteen or so. She had not yet become Miss Rue but was soon enough to be, for her mama, Miss May Belle, had not stirred from her self-made mourning after the death of her man.
It was Sarah who had stood outside of Miss May Belle’s cabin door that day, waiting on Rue to come home. Sarah, eighteen too, and pregnant then with her very first child, wide with it, though dignified. With her hands cocked in the small of her back, arms akimbo, stomach jutting, she said, “The preacher man is in there with yo’ mama.”
“Who?”
There the preacher was, kneeling at Miss May Belle’s bedside, a broad-shouldered man, stranger to Rue. His good brown suit was surely borrowed, stolen, or gifted from a white man, and either way Rue didn’t trust him on sight. There was something about his goose-greased hair, slicked down to beat back his curls. One stiff brown lock swung free as he bowed his head to whisper some private something in Miss May Belle’s ear. Whatever he’d said, it had her lifting her bed-bound head for the first time in a long while. Miss May Belle laughed in that big-mouthed, full-toothed way that recalled the old days so much that Rue ached with envy over their closeness. She stopped in the doorway not knowing what to make of her mama’s happiness, but distrustful of it.
“Come on, Rue-baby,” her mama croaked. Miss May Belle had been thrifty by then with her words, mean even, saving her speech-making for phrases she deemed of the highest importance. “Come on