Rootwork.
I knew a little about rootwork from all the time I spent with Gran and Doc after school. Mama was always getting home late ever since she opened her roadside market stall. And on Saturdays, when Mama sold the sweetgrass baskets she made along with our extra vegetables at the stall, me and Jay spent all day with Gran. We helped her pick flowers and roots that she would mix with water and rum to make perfume. Once my hands got steady enough, she even let me help pour the sweet, flowery perfume into little clear glass bottles that Mama would sell at her stall the next day.
Once, last year, I had asked Gran to teach me and Jay some root magic. “You already doing it by helping to make the perfume!” she said. But then she added that we would learn more when the time was right. I pouted while Jay sucked his teeth. But Gran laughed and said she would show us her biscuit recipe instead. Gran made the best biscuits: warm, fluffy dough with a fine layer of crisp butteriness along the edges. All my pouting was gone at the thought of getting to eat those perfect little circles, and Jay’s stomach rumbled. Me and Jay raced to get all the ingredients she said she needed while she added wood to our cast-iron stove in the kitchen.
Now, Jay nudged me with his scrawny elbow, bringing me out of the memory. We were almost home.
We turned onto the path that led out to the marsh. Dust still clung to his black shoes as he shuffled his feet along the path. “Don’t get your dust on me!” I told him. Most of the time I didn’t mind getting dirty. I loved running and playing outside, even sinking my feet into the marsh’s pluff mud, which was warm and soft as cake batter. But this was my best dress, and if it got too dirtied up, Mama would tell my head a mess.
“You hear Doc and Mama say root?” he asked.
I nodded. “I couldn’t tell what all they were discussing, though.”
“Me neither,” Jay said.
“Hice tail, y’all,” Mama called back over her shoulder as she and Doc picked up the pace.
I knew what that meant. It was Gullah for “hurry up.” Gullah was a language of English mixed with different West African languages. It’s what the people who were forced to be slaves—my foremothers and forefathers—ended up speaking after they were first brought here to the Carolinas hundreds of years ago. It belonged to us. My family still spoke it sometimes, to each other and to other people on the island who knew the language. Mama wanted me and Jay to speak English; she felt it gave us a better chance to do well in school and get a good job later on in life. Gran spoke Gullah a lot. Hearing it just then made me feel closer to her.
Still, Mama’s words were sharp. It was her I-mean-business voice, and so me and Jay ran to catch up. We were close enough to home now that I could see Gran and Doc’s rootwork shop—now just Doc’s shop, I supposed—and our little shotgun house in the distance, and we came alongside the start of our farm and our full, late-summer crops. Our vegetables were ripe and I could smell the scent of tomato leaves. Bees buzzed all around us, bobbing in the thick, steamy air. A few wide-winged butterflies soared over our heads, and I knew they could smell the fresh, green scent of the vines too.
Rows and rows of fat red and orange tomatoes hung on our vines. There were lots of green snap beans, stalks of yellow sweet corn, Sea Island red peas, crookneck squash, benne seeds, and purple okra that looked like fingers reaching for the sky. Just last week we helped Mama plant collard and mustard green seeds and sweet potatoes to harvest later in the fall and into winter. We had eggs from our many chickens all year round. There was even a fig tree—sometimes, Mama had me and Jay pick figs for her to make into jam and sell. Along with rice and seafood from the marsh and ocean around us, the crops we grew and the eggs we collected were what we ate, and also what Mama sold to support us at her stand.
“It’s too hot out here to argue,” Mama was saying to Doc. “We’ll finish this discussion once we get home.”
Getting home wouldn’t take much longer. As we passed the crops, we came to the rootworking shop. It was a small cabin, with wooden clapboards blasted by the sun and sea salt air until they’d turned grayish brown. The cabin stood all alone by itself on the road to our house, and it was the place Doc did all of his business. Everywhere you looked inside were rows and rows of wooden shelves, and on every shelf was some kind of bottle or jar or basket filled with a liquid or a powder or even whole dried flowers or curls of shaved tree bark. The cabin smelled like a flower shop inside a forest: fresh-turned dirt, sweet spices and pine, surrounded by new blossoms. The customers loved that smell. They would come to buy a potion but would usually end up talking to Doc for a while. Doc gave good advice to the people of our community, and not just about magic or medicine. He had what Gran used to call “good common sense,” and people came from all around to ask what he thought about a certain brand of fertilizer, or what he’d heard about a company that was hiring workers.
Doc’s advice made me think of Gran, and tears burned my eyes again. Before Gran got sick, she used to be the one everyone in town went to for her opinion. And she was always happy to give it to people in need. She didn’t like to take money for it either. But a lot of the local people—called binyas in Gullah—were so grateful they brought things anyway. People would come up the path to the house with bags of fresh-caught shrimp or a bushel of snapping blue crabs or a few whiting just off the fishing pole. Gran would give the bag to me and Jay and sit down with her guest at the kitchen table. At the sink, me and Jay would clean the guts out of the fish and take the heads off the shrimp while Gran listened. Once the person was done explaining, Gran then told them what she thought they should do about their problem. Her visitors would always get up and leave happier than when they came. I wanted to be able to do that for people one day.
I was so caught up with what was in my own head that I wasn’t looking where I was going, and I ran right smack into the back of Mama. Since Jay was right beside me, he bumped into the back of Doc, and our uncle reached down and placed a hand on Jay’s shoulder to stop him from moving around and running up to the house.
“What’s going—” I started to ask.
“Hush now,” Mama said.
That’s when I saw why both Mama and Doc had frozen all of a sudden. A police car was parked right in front of our porch. The red and blue lights on top of the car weren’t on, but it still made me nervous. The black-and-white car stood smack-dab in the middle of the path, between us and our house. And on our porch, up the rickety front steps Gran had made Doc fix a few months ago, was a policeman.
Deputy Collins was standing there like he owned the place, hands on his hips, one of them near the gun strapped to his right leg. He had a rail-thin body, but with loose, floppy cheeks like a bloodhound. Sweat stains showed under his arms as he looked down at us. The porch overhang threw deep shadows on his pale face.
Mama’s whole body was stiff next to me. Her hand shook as it grabbed mine a little too hard and pulled me behind her. When I looked over at Jay, Doc had a hand on his head, doing the same. Doc’s usually sunny, smiling face was blank as a chalkboard. A bead of sweat rolled off my forehead, stinging my eyes, but I didn’t dare move to wipe it away. I clutched at Mama’s hand and she squeezed it before letting go. She stood up real straight—putting iron in her back, Gran used to call it—and then she stepped forward.