least I kept him safe.
“You hear what my marse say?” I try to put some cheer to it. “War. The Northern hounds is comin’ for the Southern foxes.”
My man shrugs off dirt and dust, says, “Iff’n the hounds do come, May, you best be sure you ain’t turnt to a fox yo’self by then.”
“What’s that s’posed to mean?” I bark. But I know exactly what he means. He’s told me and told me, my man has, that he won’t abide my spying on Marse Charles’s behalf. But how else am I to keep the things I love protected? I reach out to kiss him, but he slams out the door too, albeit a sight quieter than Marse Charles just done.
Now I’m truly alone, but I don’t suffer for it. My Rue-baby’ll be back any minute now. Safe. Near me another day. Marse Charles won’t cross me. And that makes anything I see or say or sell well worth the loss.
You can lose a hundred battles, ’long as you stay winning the war.
FREEDOMTIME
Rue saw Bruh Abel for what he was, a thief in the night. The thing he meant to use to snare folks was Black-Eyed Bean, the child that many had begun to whisper was the herald of some dark despair. Bruh Abel promised to baptize Bean before everybody and in the eyes of the Lord. To save him. A spectacle.
The baptism would mark the culmination of Bruh Abel’s seasonal appearance in the town, and amongst folks it held a rising anticipation like the peak festivity of a fervent holiday. It was all anybody wanted to talk about. The baptism of Black-Eyed Bean. The day he would be washed clean. Saved.
Throughout the former slave quarters, Rue saw the baptism clothes folks planned to wear hung like white flags of surrender, flapping from washing lines, billowing in the wind so that from afar it seemed as though souls hung in them, too, writhing. Rue had never quite understood it, the airing of one’s belongings on lines for everybody to see. Neither had her mama. When Miss May Belle was living, she’d hung their clothes indoors, never mind that it took longer for their clothing to dry in the close warmth of their cabin. Just one more intimacy they kept close.
But the white clothes did make a lovely sight from afar, Rue had to admit, strewn like decorations from house to house, all through the old quarter.
Rue troubled on the problem of Bean alone and came over and over again to the same dissatisfying conclusion: Miss May Belle would’ve known what to do about Bean. Rue herself did not.
Dinah, a slight mulatto woman who was known to mend clothes, ran to catch up with Rue. As much as she was pretty, she was talented, and Rue liked her fine for this, thought on her something like a friend, if she were to allow herself to indulge in friendships.
“Y’alright, Dinah?”
Dinah’s tiredness showed in the squint to her light-colored eyes. She’d wrapped her little baby to her back to make her arms free, a little girl whose name Rue couldn’t quite recollect.
“She’s caught a chill, I’m thinkin’.” Dinah tilted her back and arched up her behind so Rue could look at the child up close.
Rue tucked the wayward arm of the sleeping baby into the fabric belted at the small of Dinah’s back. Without waking, the baby girl sucked appreciatively at her thumb. Her skin was warm but not alarmingly so.
“She’ll come right,” Rue said, and Dinah beamed, took her word on it that easy. “Feverfew. I’ll bring some over to y’all presently.”
“Y’all goin’ to see Bean be washed?” Dinah asked.
Rue shrugged like she’d shrugged every time somebody had asked after Bean. “Surely,” she said, “this town got more pressin’ matters than the baptism of one li’l boy.”
* * *
—
The room they’d put the struggling baby Si’s crib in might as well’ve been in the ground already, so dark was it and so chill. It was an old mud-made room that had belonged to Marse Charles’s kitchen, meant for storing things that couldn’t last long in