It had in fact been a miraculous harvest, and Bruh Abel had appeared right in the heart of it. Rue wondered if that was no simple coincidence but a type of divining. Had the preacher known that it would be the best moment to descend upon them, what with full stores and satisfied bodies?
“You eat yet?” Jonah shifted the full sack of grain from the table to the ground, proceeded to fill another.
Rue had not. She often found her meals here and there, a collection of benevolences from the mamas that she looked after, as were her clothing and her other little comforts, and a fair stack of coins that she hid in a distant knothole as Miss May Belle had done. Just in case. But there was no denying that lately Rue had found those favors harder to come by.
Rue grinned up at Jonah’s work. “You look like you fixin’ to cook a feast.”
“No, ma’am, I’m tithin’,” he said.
“Tithin’? To that preacher man?”
Jonah nodded. He did not look up from the careful transfer of the next cupful. They had not fed her like this. Never tithed to her, nor had she expected it.
Rue set Bean down, back farther from the fire than he had been, and she stood, the better to look at the grain Jonah was giving to Bruh Abel as it moved from the depleted barrel to the fat haversack. They had used to give Marse Charles a portion of what they’d been allowed to grow for themselves in the piteous gardens in front of the slave cabins. Those growings made up their only food aside from the slave portions. Jonah’s tithing now made Rue envious. It smacked to her of that time before the war that she had thought was safely in their past. But here it was again, taking on another type of robbery: no Big House, but now a fair-skinned black man who’d set himself up above them on little more than his talent for telling tales down by the riverbank.
“Bruh Abel ain’t ask for it, mind,” Jonah was saying, perhaps guessing at Rue’s unease, hedging it like a wildfire before it could get blazing. “Folks spoke on it and decided amongst themselves that they ought to offer him somethin’ regular-like. In hopes that he might deign to stay on out here, where he’s needed, rather than move on to some big city.”
“Where he’s needed?” Rue felt she’d be wiser to hold her tongue. She did not like to show to Jonah especially that bitter side of herself that felt so quick to turn to distrust and envy. But she could not overlook those nettles of fear, the clinging notion that something dark was rising up higher and higher against her. Turning her over like loose sand in this town where she had thought she could stand forever sure-footed, respected.
Jonah spoke on the many wonders that had come to pass now that the town was turning more solidly toward its own faith, not the one pressed into their backs by Marse. The good crops and fair weather, the wind blowing and the moonglow shining and the sun rising and setting as it was supposed to, seemed all of it was down to the faith they’d found. The faith Bruh Abel was guiding them in.
“And Bean,” Jonah added.
“What about him?”
“He ain’t made that awful cry, not one night since Bruh Abel come and start prayin’ over him. Seems to me we can’t go on like we have been,” Jonah said. He’d set down the measuring cup, came toward her empty-handed. “We was froze up. All of us been waitin’ on the future to reveal itself. Waitin’ on what freedom means. Bruh Abel say we don’t gotta wait no more. We can just go ’head and put aside the old ways.”
Rue felt it in her bones: She was the old ways to which Jonah was referring. Her and her mama and her grandmama. Made for a world that wasn’t anymore, that had been shook off like fetters. But Rue was still bound, to this place, to these ways.