Rue took a step back from him. Recoiled at the very idea of it. “Y’own mama? Sold you?”
“Sho’ ’nuff. She had other mouths that were wantin’ to be fed, how she told it. Her older sons were grown by then, no property of hers. She weren’t like to sell off her daughters neither. Men do nasty stuff when they buy up pretty mulattas, she tol’ me, but I was a boy, and sons is meant to leave, that was her thinkin’. Or leastwise what she said aloud. When I recollect it all now, though, I suspect it was more the eyes.”
Bruh Abel tilted his head all the way back. He opened his eyes wide for Rue so that she could examine them for herself.
“Like the captain’s,” he explained.
Rue looked hard. He was kneeling below her still, the same height as the lesser gravestones all around him, and in the bright of high noon his eyes were the same swampy mixed-up gray of those rocks. His whites were red-rimmed, like he’d lost as much sleep as she had been losing. He blinked hard and carried on. “I was the only one that got ’em. Ain’t it funny what we pass down? Her man was dead but she always said I had a haint in my eyes. Now, how could she be free with a white man looking on her from beyond?”
Rue said nothing, had nothing to say to something so hard.
“Ain’t no one reason for anybody doin’ anythin’, is there?” Bruh Abel said. “Like as not it was just as much that I was what my new marse was lookin’ for to buy. Boy, young enough to still be molded. He used to be a breaker before he got religion. Don’t think they have a word for what he become.”
Breakers. Rue had heard of such men. In slaverytime Marse Charles would threaten to send his more discourteous slaves to a famed breaker a few counties over, though he never had done it, perhaps more because of the prohibitive cost than the cruelty of the breaker’s methods. But the threat still rang in their heads, which was just as good to keep them in line and cheaper besides, a fear on the inside of their backs, always rolling up their spines, the knowledge that they could be sent away to a place whose whole function was to leech you of your spirit, to send you back home hollowed and broken and thankful for it.
Bruh Abel pulled Rue close to him and leaned his head on the soft bottom of her stomach, buried his nose briefly in her belly button like it was meant to fit there naturally. Rue had a sudden moment of sorrow, and of wanting. A flash thought that she ought not go forward with her poison scheme. But just like that it passed in her. She did not pull away from him, not even when his grip on her hips tightened, each finger digging in with individual need.
“I ain’t mad at what my mama done or what the breaker done,” Bruh Abel said. “The scripture teaches forgiveness and the scripture is what my marse branded into me without even lifting a hand. There’s other ways to make a boy the man you want him to be, and that’s what he was after. To prove it could be done another way. Through the spirit, he said.”
Bruh Abel went on, and said, “It started off as a drunken parlor bet. Can you teach a bird, teach a monkey, teach a black man how to worship so good he draws in a white crowd? Funny thing is, he never did collect on that bet, my marse. Man he laid the bet with said in the end it didn’t count, didn’t prove nothin’ seein’ as my ability might’ve come from my half-white side. Well, my marse, bein’ white and smart hisself, he recoup in another fashion. He took me all round. To every state and out on the ocean, in trains and steamboats, and out west to wildernesses not even yet staked or named, all so that folks could look on me as an example. Of all the things a black man could and could not be. That’s the part