I carried that baby all the way back to our house. She was not yet a year old, by the look of her. Still too young to walk. She lay against my chest. I could feel her spittle pool on the front of my dress. She was so heavy, and with every step, I could feel her chest rise and fall. It unnerved me. I tried to match her rhythm, to breathe along with her, but her heart was beating too fast. Still, despite all this, she would look around, keep her eyes wide open, staring at something in the tree branches above us—part of the past, or the present, or maybe the future, that I could not see. I kept praying to the woman in the water, even as every step took me farther from her. Don’t take this one with you. Keep her here with us. Let her spirit leave the water and come with me to land.

The baby was still in my arms at noon, when we had gotten some of the survivors to our houses, some of them to the church.

“You can put the baby down,” Mama told me.

I looked up at her. “I can’t,” I said. By which I meant if I gave up the weight of that baby, the whole weight of what had happened across the river—the fire and the hangings and the beatings and the white women dashing babies’ brains and whatever had been done to that girl from the boat who had handed me the baby, that had made her hold her dress between her thighs—all of that weight would take the baby’s place, and I knew I was not strong enough to hold it. Not yet. Not then. Even if I made a million prayers to the woman in the water, I knew it wouldn’t help.

And Mama, my mama, she looked at me and she understood. She said, “This is the hardest part of our work.” She said, “Keep the baby close if you need to. But you can’t carry her all the time.” And she had me sit in the nicer armchair in the parlor while the women of our town crowded into the room.

They had gathered there, all sweating in the full heat of the day, their apron fronts and pinafores damp, their voices merging together into a new song, this one made up of just the question they asked one another in the room over and over again:

What to do?

“Look at that baby’s skin,” Miss Dinah said, gazing at the girl in my arms. “Covered in rashes, even worse than the singe from the burns.”