“Free.” Rue’s mama said the word and then lay back down in her own hollowed-out shape in the bed. She let the mortar fall sideways and moved only to give herself room to spit a glob of red onto the blackened pile of mashed fruit, done with it at last. And Rue knew at least some part of Miss May Belle’s sickness was healed, though it felt like a cure come too late to save her.
* * *
—
Even when Miss May Belle stopped going out, the women stayed coming to her. It was the end of secession, the end of the war and the beginning of that thing, freedom, that idea that had been bandied about for four long years and more, lobbed like cannonballs by the North into fine Southern houses. The smoke cleared and freedom stood. But freedom hadn’t changed things much, not in their isolated country, down in the quarter, where women still had the same aches and pains, the same swelling and suffering, the same look of pure dumb wonder when Miss May Belle let them put their newborn to the safety of their chest. Maybe now they needed her even more because freedom was a word with weights. It meant deciding—to stay or to go. To have or not to have. It was a heady change—becoming the master of one’s own self.
“Not all women is intended for mamas,” Rue’s mama liked to say, lying on her back in bed looking up like she was looking for stars on the inside of her eyelids.
Even with her eyes shut Miss May Belle could direct Rue to this or that sachet or herb or salve, and it didn’t take long ’til Rue knew what to fetch her before she even asked it. And then she knew what to fetch before the women finished describing what it was that they were needing. Soon enough Rue could just tell by looking at the expressions on some of the women’s faces that they had come for that particular type of magic that Rue’s mama kept hid.
The water Miss May Belle gave them was so clear it felt harmless enough, though what it tasted like Rue could not say. She only knew from watching what they experienced, and it looked to her no worse than the agonies of birth, only what they were pushing out was nothing but blood, not much heavier than what came month to month. Still, sometimes they’d cry and cry and always it amazed Rue, and still did, how hard it was to keep a baby and how hard it was to be rid of one.
* * *
—
“You clean?”
“Yes, Mama,” Rue’d say, only sometimes they weren’t doing anything at all; sometimes they were doing little more than sitting around staring at each other on a Sunday, the day of rest, waiting for the next time they were needed, because they were bound up together by blood but also by the way folks had of keeping their distance. Inside of her on-and-on sleep, Rue’s mama was beginning to get muddled; for her the present was the past come again.
They could just about hear the singing from outside if they felt like reaching out their ears to where the whole of the town was gathered in the church down the way, singing up to the Lord, thanking him for the day he’d made. And to Rue the sound of their voices was so absolutely lovely, like a thing she could hold in her hands, like a faith she could touch.
* * *
—
“Don’t touch nothin’,” her mama would say. A bad touch was all it took. A bad touch could kill.
The first time Rue pulled a dead baby from its mama, she felt that she had killed it herself. It was a baby boy, or would have been, sweet and black and small, a perfect fit for Rue’s two cupped hands. He was still caught up in the cord he’d come out with, a constricting braid of blue and red, that wrapped too tight around his neck.
It had been a rough time from the very start. The mama was mostly a child herself with her eyes turning big and red and watery as