and meet this Bruh Abel.”
Bruh Abel said he was a traveling preacher. Way he told it, he’d got religion from a white master who’d set young Abel and all the other souls he owned to freedom just before the war.
Even back then, Rue had spat at the idea of a story that saccharine being true, but there was no denying that Bruh Abel’s presence seemed to soothe Miss May Belle’s sadness—a thing that Rue had never been able to do, no matter how badly she wanted to save her mama, not with all the roots and herbs and tinctures in creation.
By that same evening it had been on everybody’s lips that the preacher man had laid hands on Miss May Belle, given her a sip of good holy water. Folks said that she had sat up then and spoken clear from her mad stupor for the first time in weeks. They said that this newcomer must be a real man a’ Jesus if he could so ease Miss May Belle’s pain, a woman who’d eased the pain of so many.
Rue sat with her mama that night, watched her sleeping. Outside she heard them all begin to hum a song of Bruh Abel’s. Lord laid his hands on me. By the tilt of their voices they were going toward the river, carrying him away amongst them in a swollen tide of worship.
When their voices grew dim and distant enough, Rue had gotten up her courage and stolen through the night. She’d made her way to where Bruh Abel’s scrawny mule was hitched up and asleep, left alone to guard a saddlebag filled with the preacher man’s belongings.
Suspect, she rooted through his trinkets. There was a knife atop a folded piece of paper, which, held up to Rue’s candlelight, bore long-scrawled blue letters through the thin skin of a badly wrinkled envelope. There was too a pockmarked brass harmonica and a fat button trailing string, but there, beneath that clutter, were three small vials, the exact thing she’d been after. They were markless bottles with cork heads that trapped in them clear liquid. As she wrapped her fingers around them they rolled and clinked together ominously like glasses for a toast. She took one out and put it to her eye to see what it held, and with that done and yielding nothing, she pulled up the stopper and put the liquid to her tongue. It was a mad thing to do. She was killing herself if it was poison that this strange man carried. Still, she did the same with every one of those little bottles, licked the tip of the cork, sipped up the residue on every single one of them, and came quick to realize they held nothing more than a bit of whiskey watered down.
She’d known him for what he was then. His was a clear-water cure sweetened with nothing more than clever words, a con man’s type of conjure.
Did Bruh Abel know she’d done all that? There was something in the way he looked at her all the times he came back after, season after season. Like he was itching to accuse her if only he could figure just what she was guilty of. They were suspect of each other, she and him, from the very start of their acquaintance, and the askance Bruh Abel sent her way only got weightier after Miss May Belle passed. Rue had not been near to comfort her mama when she finally went to her rest—but Bruh Abel had been. They said he’d been right beside Miss May Belle, praying and holding her hand.
* * *
—
Miss May Belle’s final curse would go on and outlive her. It was said that she laid it in her grief after her man had been strung up, lynched for lusting after a white woman, or so the story went. Miss May Belle cast her agony over the whole of Marse Charles’s burnt-down plantation, folks said, and over the wilderness just beyond.
After the war came Surrender and in that time of flux, of fortune and misfortune, of raised white flags and dead white folks, Miss May Belle had believed, or so it was told, that the only way to keep their isolated plantation and the