Root Magic

by Eden Royce

  “Where were you all night?” I asked.

  I moved her head with my first finger as though she was answering my question. “Dis my new frock, enny? Had to go have me a little fun.”

  I laughed at the voice I used for Dinah’s, high and whiny. “That’s true, I guess.” I sat up in bed and lifted her up with me. “Tell me, how come I didn’t know you could walk by yourself?”

  Her little red stitched mouth smiled. “You don’t know erryting ’bout the world. Least not yet.”

  I smoothed Dinah’s crepe wool hair and placed her on the bed, then shoved my hand through my Devil’s Shoestrings bracelet and got up to get ready for school. On the way to the washroom, I shook Jay awake. He groaned and threw his pillow at me, but I was too fast. I made it out of the room, laughing all the way.

  I was hungry thanks to my adventure the night before, and all I wanted was rice for some reason, but Mama was already dishing up our breakfast of steaming grits. As we ate, a car pulled up the dirt road that led to our place. I rushed to the window to peek out, elbowing Jay so we could both see.

  It was a police car.

  Mama craned her neck to see as well. “Lord, I don’t need today to start off with no foolishness.”

  “You gonna be all right?” Doc asked. When Mama nodded, he took his opportunity to leave out of the back door.

  It was Sheriff Edwards again. He parked by the chicken coop and got out, unfolding his height like a sheet. He took his hat off the seat next to him, but he didn’t put it on. Instead he tucked it under his arm and made his way up to the house.

  We ran back to the table and sat like we’d been there all along. Before he could knock, Mama smoothed her dress, then pulled the screen door open. The sheriff’s brown hair was damp around the edges, and his shirt was still pressed straight with sharp creases in it.

  “Mighty early for a visit, Sheriff,” Mama said, blocking the door with her whole body. She looked about half his size, but the sheriff stayed a respectful distance away from the open door.

  “Sorry about that, Mrs. Turner, but I was hoping I might get some eggs.”

  “Eggs?” Mama repeated, surprised.

  Me and Jay looked at each other, just as confused as Mama.

  “There’s plenty eggs in the market. Why he want our eggs?” Jay whispered to me.

  “I don’t know,” I told him, tracing the vines in my bracelet.

  When Mama didn’t answer, Sheriff Edwards said, “Oh, and some corn too, if you have any.” Mama stood there staring at him, and he added, “Please.”

  That little word somehow put her into action. She put six eggs into a cardboard container and placed it in a peach basket. Then she added four ears of corn from the box she was planning to take to the roadside stand to sell once we left for school.

  “And would you add a jar of your fig jam? I’d be grateful.” He pulled out his wallet to pay for it all.

  Mama handed him the basket of food, and he placed a few bills in her hand.

  “This is too much,” she said with a frown. “I don’t take charity.”

  “I didn’t think you did. But I got first pick of everything today, and I expect that costs a bit more.”

  Mama still frowned, but she didn’t say anything. She slid the bills in her apron pocket. “Anything else, Sheriff?”

  He looked over at me and Jay where we sat at the table. Then he took a big, deep breath. “I spoke to him yesterday. Deputy Collins. About harassing folks without cause. He didn’t take it too well, but I wanted you to know.”

  Mama balled her hands up into fists at her side. “I don’t know if you made things better or worse for us, Sheriff.”

  “I hope better. Now he knows I won’t stand for such actions.”

  “You’re one man. Lots of others out there will take his side.” Mama sighed and rubbed her temples. She looked down at us. “Then where will we be?”

  “Mama,” I said, touching her apron. “Me and Jay will help keep the family safe.”

  She nodded, then looked up at the sheriff. “Is that all?”

  “That’s all, Mrs. Turner. Kids.” He stepped back from the open door, put his hat on, nodded at each one of us. Then he clomped down the stairs, carrying his basket of food. A moment later, the car started, then pulled away.

  Mama sighed and shut the door. She shuffled back over to the kitchen table and sank into a chair.

  “What’s he gonna do now?” Jay asked.

  “Do we need to stop going to school?” I added.

  “No!” That drew Mama’s back straight upright. “You will keep on as usual. Go to school the same way you always do, but be sharp. Look around you, be aware of anyone creeping around. If you see anything strange, you get on back here, understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” we both said.

  Jay went back to his breakfast, but I saw the worry on Mama’s face. She looked out the window toward Doc’s cabin and bit her lip. I knew what she was thinking. Deputy Collins would be coming back, and coming back mad, and there was nothing any of us could do about it.

  I felt scared and helpless all at the same time. Seeing Mama worry when she almost always had an answer for everything was the worst part. My tummy felt wobbly, rough as the ocean during a storm. I pushed my bowl away toward Jay, and he dug into the rest of my breakfast.

  Could we trust Sheriff Edwards to help us? Or would we have to fix this thing with Deputy Collins ourselves? Doc had left as soon as the sheriff arrived. Was he headed off to make a potion? Or was he leaving Mama to handle things, like Daddy did all those years ago?

  Mama busied herself getting her last things ready for the market. She put Jay’s lunch together, scooping Sea Island red peas on top of steaming rice. While I usually loved peas, I didn’t want any today. I asked for my rice plain.

  “You sure, Jez? Plenty of peas here,” she said as she got a small bowl out of the cabinet.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mama shrugged, then scooped up the warm rice and covered it with a lid. “You kids head on off to school now, and remember what I said.” She hugged both of us. “If you see Doc in his cabin, send him in here.”

  Jay scraped my dish clean and put it in the sink along with his. Then he grabbed his books and lunch and made for the cabin.

  Mama was gathering up her blue metal cash box and getting her crates of jams and jellies and baskets ready to go. I touched her arm, and she stopped rustling around the kitchen long enough to look at me.

  “It’s gonna be okay, Mama,” I said. “Do you want my bracelet?”

  “No, thank you. That’s yours, Jez.” She smoothed her hands over my pigtails. “And you’re right—it’s gonna be fine. You go on to school.”

  I didn’t want to leave her, but I grabbed my books and my lunch and raced off after Jay.

  Classes were so much fun that morning that I almost forgot about Deputy Collins. Today was our first music appreciation lesson, and we listened to a classical opera song, followed by some big-band jazz tunes from Duke Ellington. I knew the answer when I got called up to the chalkboard in math. But my good day changed at lunchtime.

  In the cafeteria, I sat with Susie again, at a sun-warmed table near the door to outside. The cool breeze coming inside rustled my paper bag. I took out my dish of rice and a spoon and sat it beside my thermos of tea. I lifted the tinfoil wrapper off, and a voice interrupted me.

  “You’re still coming to school, little witch baby?”

  Lettie and her group of girls had already gone through the cafeteria line and were standing above me with their trays of food. Her nose was tilted up high in the air, like she was trying to make herself look taller than she really was.

  Susie groaned. “Go away, and let us eat in peace.”

  I rolled my eyes and decided not to answer. I didn’t owe her my attention. But ignoring Lettie didn’t work.

  “I thought you’d be in jail by now, with all the other witches.”

  Lettie was grinning when I lifted my head. But I wa
sn’t looking at her. I was looking at the girls who surrounded her. Many of them I knew from last year, and most had parents who had come to Doc for something. I stared straight into the eyes of those girls pretending to look down on my family when I knew they benefited from our magic. A few of the girls turned their faces away.

  I was tired of hearing her talk about how I was different because my family held on to our traditions and our history while we studied and learned and improved ourselves at the same time. I touched my Devil’s Shoestrings bracelet and looked at each one of the girls as I said her name aloud. “Lettie. Wanda. Ruth. Brenda. Evelyn.”

  “What are you doing?” Lettie looked confused. Her girls all looked at each other, then at me, then back at their leader. It was like they were seeing her uncomfortable for the first time.

  I smiled. I wasn’t doing any kind of spell or anything, but making her feel worse made me feel better.

  But Lettie quickly regained her composure. “Well, what can you expect from someone like that?”

  One of her friends gave me a hateful smile. “Like what, Lettie?”

  My head was light. Maybe it was that feeling Doc was talking about. The feeling something bad was going to happen. I held my breath.

  “She’s a bastard.”

  A gasp went up from the whole crowd that had gathered around the table when Lettie approached. It was followed by an “ooooh” that was just as loud. My face burned with heat and shame, although I didn’t know what for. I knew she used a bad word, but it was one that I didn’t exactly know the meaning of.

  Lettie went on, “And one of those evil root people. Look at that ugly bracelet. It looks like it has bugs living in it.”

  “Root isn’t evil!” I shouted back at her. “You’re evil for all the nasty things you say.”

  Lettie cackled. “She admits it! She’s one of those root witches that poison people’s minds. My mom says you can’t expect anything from them. They don’t know any better.”

  Before I could open my mouth to respond, Susie shot up. She marched over to the whole group of girls to face Lettie. They were almost eye to eye, but Susie was taller.

  “You will go away right now,” she said. “Or else.”

  Susie fixed Lettie with a stare that made her take a step back. I knew that look, but I’d never seen it on Lettie’s face. She was scared.

  She put her nose in the air and turned away. But I noticed her voice shook a bit when she spoke. “Come on, girls, we don’t need to stick around here. The witch baby might turn us into frogs or something.”

  Susie sat back at the table with me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I managed to say, even though my throat felt like it was closing up. “Thanks for sticking up for me.”

  “Of course,” she said in a soft voice. “We’re lunch buddies.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t finish eating. The whole experience had made me lose my appetite.

  9

  I held tears in for the rest of lunch, and when I got back to class, I raised my hand. “Miss Watson, may I go see the nurse?”

  I hoped she wouldn’t ask me what was wrong, because nothing was. I just needed to get out of there. Miss Watson seemed to read my mind, and I breathed a sigh of relief when she nodded and handed me the hall pass without a word.

  As soon as I got out of the classroom, the tears came. Then they ran down my cheeks, hotter than bathwater, down into the starched neck of my dress. I’d wanted so badly for this school year to be wonderful, and all I’d managed to do was make enemies and look silly in front of the whole class, every day. I wanted to disappear.

  The dim hallway was empty. When I arrived at the door to the nurse’s office and knocked, a voice called out, “Come in!”

  “Miss Corrie?” I asked, peeking my head around the door.

  The nurse sat in a chair with a padded back, different from every other chair in the school. She looked up from a thick hardcover book. When she saw me, she put an envelope in it to mark her place and closed the cover. The school nurse was a round-cheeked, dark-skinned woman with cat-eye glasses and a quick, crooked smile. It was said around school that she didn’t have any time for children who pretended to get out of doing work. But if you were actually sick, there was no one better to help you.

  “Good afternoon, Jezebel,” she said. Her voice was gentle but serious.

  “You remember me?”

  Miss Corrie nodded. “Of course. You’ve been to see me before.”

  I hadn’t been really sick before, but I had been to the nurse’s office last year. It was when one of the kids poked me in the back of my neck with a pencil and the tip of the lead broke off in my skin. Miss Corrie cleaned it up and called the boy into her office for a talking-to.

  She motioned for me to sit in a chair right across from her. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  Suddenly my shoes were very interesting. The trouble was I didn’t feel like I had a place in school, like I fit somewhere. But that wasn’t something you could fix with medicine or bandages. When I looked up into Miss Corrie’s cat-eye glasses, she pressed her thin lips together.

  “Well?”

  I took a deep breath. “I wanted this school year to be perfect. I wanted to make friends and not feel awful about myself. And I’ve already messed that up.”

  If she was annoyed that I didn’t have a real medical emergency, she didn’t show it. She just removed her glasses and wiped them with a cloth she took from a case on her desk. “Well, didn’t you skip ahead a grade this year? That’s a lot for a student to adjust to. And no school year is ever perfect. No person is ever perfect.”

  I thought of Lettie and her friends, with their beautiful new dresses and pressed hair and shoes without buckles. “Some people sure look like they are.”

  “That’s how they look on the outside. Maybe what’s inside them is very different.” Miss Corrie looked like she wanted to say something, then thought better of it. She scribbled a note for Miss Watson and handed it to me. “Give this year a chance, Jezebel. It might surprise you.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted to hear right then, but I appreciated her trying.

  “What did I tell you about slamming that screen door?” Mama asked when me and Jay came in the house from school that afternoon. She was facing the stove, her back to us. “And James, you are supposed to let ladies in before you.”

  “Jezzie ain’t no lady,” Jay said.

  I had done a pretty good job not crying anymore after getting back from Miss Corrie’s office, and the whole walk home with Jay, while he ran and did cartwheels, having no idea how I was feeling. But at that moment, my tears burst into a wave like the big salt at high tide. I stood there in the middle of the kitchen and cried until I could hardly breathe. Jay looked uncomfortable and Mama put a dish in the oven before she turned back to look at me.

  “What happened?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said, scratching at a mosquito bite on his scrawny arm. “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Well, somebody did.”

  Mama poured a glass of lemon water from the icebox and came and sat in the chair in front of me. “Calm down, now. You’re home. Drink this. Go on.” She put the glass in my trembling hands and helped me tilt it back. I drank enough to ease the burning heat in my throat. Guzzled it until I choked on the water and Jay thumped me hard on the back. Mama put her cool hands on my forehead, my cheeks, and my neck, and I sighed. I took another long drink of water and set the glass down. Now I felt exhausted. Tired, ready to go to bed and sleep forever.

  “Little better?” she asked. “Feel like you can tell me what that was all about?”

  I took a deep breath of kitchen-warm air. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Jay sat in a chair on the other side of the table and chewed on a ragged wedge of sugar cane from the counter.

  “I don’t want to go to school anymore.”

  The gentleness in Mama’s face disappeared. Her mouth twisted up like she had sucked on the le
mon she’d put in my water. “Well, you’re going to go to school anyway. And you’re going to study and get the grades you need to make something out of yourself. That’s it. End of story.”

  “But I—”

  “No buts. You know how many Negroes are unemployed? Can’t get jobs and have no money to live off? We don’t have much, but I’ve always given you what I could. You and your brother have always had food and a roof over your heads. I don’t want you to have to rely on anyone else for your livelihood, do you hear me?”

  When I didn’t answer or meet her eyes, she took me by the arms and gave me a little shake. “Do you?”

  The look in her eyes was one I couldn’t remember seeing before. I thought of the words to the sonnet-ballad poem Miss Watson read to us. There was a line about asking your mother where happiness was. I wanted to ask my mother about happiness, but right now, she didn’t look like she knew. “Mama, you don’t understand what it’s like.”

  “I understand that you have to go through troubles in life and this is only one of them. You must, must, must go to school.” She locked eyes with me. “So you have a chance at a future.”

  I pulled away from the grip Mama had on my arms, moved and stumbled, almost falling on my backside. I scrambled out of the screen door, letting it slam behind me as I flew down the packed-dirt path, then thought better of it and turned to the fields where the corn was growing taller than I was.

  The neat rows reminded me of the braids Mama put in my hair at night to keep what she called my wild hair under control. I ran until my legs ached and muscles burned. Then I slowed down and sank to the ground. I lay on my back, looking up at the yolk-yellow sun in the sky, hoping to burn the tears out of my eyes.

  I couldn’t understand why Mama did that to me. She was always tough, but kind, especially when she was explaining why things had to be different for me than for my brother. Jay was a boy, and the world was different for men and boys, especially Negro men and boys, and he had to learn how to live in it. Doc had said that I felt things differently than Jay did because I was a girl. Gran always treated me and Jay the same, but even she admitted that the world wouldn’t. She also told me I needed to be independent, learn how to do things for myself, even things men are supposed to do. If there was something I couldn’t do for myself, I should find a trustworthy person to do it and pay a fair price for the work.