Root Magic: Chapters 8–13

“Dis my new frock, enny? Had to go have me a little fun.”

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.

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?

They would snuffle and snort softly, rooting through the grass until they smelled us, and we would gather mud from the marsh bank and rub their skin with it to keep them from getting burned up under the sun.

I only watched Mama walk the rows that looked like my plaits and cover them with moist, black soil.

Gran used to say hurt wasn’t like a splinter that might work itself out after a while, it was a boil that had to be lanced—the hurt had to leak out before it could heal up.

“The same reason your ma is so adamant that you go to school.”

All skin folk ain’t kinfolk.

“Thing is, Jezebel, people will find a way to make you feel bad about yourself if you let them. But it diminishes you. What does diminish mean?”
“To get smaller.”

When I got home, the yard was bustling with chickens getting ready to roost down for the evening and there was nobody sitting on the porch.

Doc sat at the table calm as can be, sipping on his coffee. Mama, though, was bustling about the kitchen, packing and repacking her items for the market.

“When you start working with conjure—root is a type of conjure magic—you’re opening yourself up to a part of the world most folks don’t have access to. But: it also opens up that part of the world to you. Haints and spirits and all manner of things from the stories your gran told. And many of them—most of them—ain’t friendly.”

I already told you both why we had to paint the house blue, and showed you how to lay graveyard dirt to deter spirits.

He got up and headed out of the cabin and down to a cluster of trees whose thick branches touched and tangled together to make a dense overhang. It was much cooler here, and so much darker under the trees that it didn’t look like daytime anymore.

Doc put a little salve on the bat’s cut and let it go.

Jay coughed and hacked and wheezed while he wiped his tongue on the hem of his shirt.

I loved ebb tide, when the pluff mud bubbled, and flood tide, when the waters lapped gently against the shore.

She sashayed out of the kitchen, and a moment later, I heard her in her bedroom, humming “One Fine Day” by the Chiffons along with the radio and sweeping the floor.

Grasses were tall near the marsh, even around tree trunks, and they grazed my knees.

Its fur was a mix of light and dark brown, thick and bristly, and it had a bushy tail.

Still humming softly, I placed the tines of the pitchfork into the narrow opening between the jaws of the animal trap.

Heat built up under my hands as I turned the handle. In science lessons, Miss Watson called it friction. Force between two things trying to slide across each other.

“People like him have been doing this to folks for years, with no one saying a word. I have to operate within a certain chain of command to even get an investigation of Collins and his cronies started.”

After a storm, we always went down to the marsh, because the rains dredged up all kinds of weird stuff.

There was something out there in the murky water: a glimpse of red that sank away as soon as I saw it.

Dinah thrashed around, the tug of her flailing keeping me off-balance.

The puddle of water churned now, and I saw glimpses through its cloudy surface.

My body tightened up and I flailed around, trying to get loose.

I writhed and punched the water, but nothing I did made any difference.

Bucking and struggling, I knew, would make me run out of air even faster.