someone to find him, to fetch him. Give him word. Bring him to pray over us. For Bruh Abel is, they were saying, the only hope we got as more children sickened daily. It seemed to be passing through all of them in no sort of order, only weakening some, but snatching away others. It was Ma Doe’s health that Rue feared after especially, though to say so was an ugly thing. If Ma Doe died all those orphans would be orphaned again, but most importantly, if Ma Doe died the spell of protection Rue had created with her over the town would be broken. Without Ma there was nobody Rue trusted with the secret, nobody to send correspondence north, nobody to pose as their white mistress behind the looping lines of oak gall ink. And if there were no letters to the Northern auntie it would only be a matter of time before some white official came along wondering after their white mistress and her untouched acres. Freedom wasn’t free.
On this day Ma Doe was teaching in the usual way. She held up letters that she’d written big and bold, each one existing solitary on either side of thirteen sheets of yellowy paper. She made the sounds and the children made them back, a call and response that Rue found soothing. Sometimes she mouthed the sounds with them, though she did not add her voice to theirs. From Ma Doe’s side she looked them over, the children, checking for sweat sitting on the skin of the darker ones, red blooming on the cheeks of the lighter, or for a pair of shiny, unfocused eyes struggling to make sense of their mud-made letters.
Rue hoped each day would be the day when they’d finally be free of the spreading fever. Winter would soon be giving way to spring, and everything, as her mama would have said, good or bad, had an end.
When Rue arrived this morning, Ma Doe dismissed the children in a hurry. The younger ones were pardoned to go play then return for a lesson in figures; the older went off for the work waiting on them at the side of their mamas and daddies. Rue found herself sorrowing after it, those blind simple days when she herself had been a child.
“How you doin’, Ma Doe?” she asked. She took Ma Doe’s hand in hers in greeting, believing that whatever the old woman said, she’d find the true answer in the heat of her palm. The skin was warm but dry, and Rue held on long to a callous that rose up when Ma Doe had been writing.
“Well, you know what folks are sayin’,” Ma Doe said. She culled gossip from her children who were in the habit of repeating, with some authority, the things their daddies and mamas said in private. “They’re all of ’em mistrustful of you and your Bean.”
Now when had Bean become hers? Ma Doe was slowly retracting her one hand from between Rue’s two.
“And what they sayin’?”
“He isn’t sick. He hasn’t been sick. So people are thinkin’ he isn’t goin’ to be sick. Of all the children, seems he’s the only one that’s kept his health.”
Rue frowned. “Say it plain, Ma.”
“Some folks think you’re the one keepin’ him healthy. And some folks think you pullin’ vitality from the other little ones to do it. Usin’ that contraption you’ve got.”
“Contraption?” Rue stumbled on the word.
“Your tool for suckin’. It isn’t natural. Like root magic, they’re sayin’. Like witchcraft.”
“Where this come from?” But Rue, as soon as she asked it, knew where it had come from. It was inevitable, like birth and death and birth, like smoke rising toward the sky, it was just the way things went. Folks were scared. They needed their finger-pointing for succor.
“They talk of little Si,” Ma Doe continued. Rue thought on Si often, thought on how he’d lived three days and died before they could put him to the water. They’d wanted him baptized but she’d wanted him to live.
“Folks say you went to see him and tracked graveyard dirt by his sleeping face. They don’t want you near their children, Miss Rue,” Ma Doe said. Her