Free Brown Girl In the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

table.” She went to the cold storage and hauled back a basket of apples. That would hold them while she fixed them a meal. The children dove at the apples, chattering excitedly, crunching them down as fast as they could chew and slinging the apple cores at each other. Josée growled at them. They stopped the game but kept eating.
    Ti-Jeanne had a look through their stores. There was plenty of cornmeal.
    “Josée, you know how to cook?”
    “Some things. Do it for these kids. On a fire, you know? With a strip of sheet metal over it?”
    So Ti-Jeanne set Josée to stirring up a big pot of cornmeal mush. A little girl with dead straight black hair reached up and tickled Baby’s leg. Baby chuckled, kicking his legs and pumping his arms. Ti-Jeanne moved Baby to her other hip, out of the urchin’s reach. Dirty child probably had fleas.
    The little girl asked, “Can’t I hold him?” She was about eight. She had one wandering eye. There was a black line of dirt under each of her fingernails. She smelled of rotten teeth and sour milk. But Baby was playing peek-a-boo with her across the bulk of Ti-Jeanne’s body. He chortled with glee.
    Ti-Jeanne decided. “Go and wash your hands in the sink,” she told the girl. She dipped a bowlful of water from the bucket and gave it to her. “Use the carbolic soap. And wash your face, too.”
    The little girl obeyed. Ti-Jeanne pursed her mouth in a grimace as she watched the water in the bowl darken with filth. She caught Josée looking appraisingly at her and smoothed her expression over. The little girl came back, presenting rough pink hands to show that they were clean. “Now can I hold him?”
    Reminding herself to bathe Baby again later and check him for lice, Ti-Jeanne put him carefully into the child’s arms. “Hold him good, but not tight-tight, you hear?”
    The little girl nodded and started humming a half-remembered lullabye at Baby. The language sounded like Chinese. Baby often fussed when strangers held him, but to Ti-Jeanne’s surprise, he seemed content to stay where he was. She took the pair out to the paddock with her while she milked the long-suffering cows. Baby and the girl rolled about happily on the straw-covered ground. She did a so-so job of preventing him from manoeuvring handfuls of dirt into his mouth.
    When Ti-Jeanne brought the full buckets of milk into the kitchen, Tony had taken over stirring the porridge. Baby took one look at him and started wailing.
    Ti-Jeanne sucked her teeth in exasperation. “Lord, child. Is what do you today?” She put down the milk, took Baby from the little girl, and carried him, screeching, upstairs to their room. She put him in his crib. He kept crying. She rapped on the side of the crib to startle him into silence. Instead his cries became screams, his little tongue curled and quivering in his open mouth, tears squeezing themselves out from his screwed-shut eyes. Feeling helpless, Ti-Jeanne patted and stroked his chest for a few moments. “Ssh. Ssh. Is only your daddy. You don’t need to ’fraid he.”
    It didn’t help much. Finally she just pulled the blanket up to his chin. Under her hands, his small body was stiff with indignation. She patted his chest once more, then went downstairs, hoping he would tire and stop eventually.
    Tony was grating a whole stick of Mami’s precious cinnamon into the porridge. “Susie’s leg was broken all right,” he told her. “Greenstick fracture. She’s sleeping now.”
    Josée had her hands full, trying to keep the pack of kids from investigating every corner of the house, playing tag around the kitchen tables, jumping up and down on the sofa. She looked apologetically at Ti-Jeanne.
    “They don’t get to be in houses much,” she said.
    Ti-Jeanne scowled. “Call them into the kitchen.”
    She and Josée organised the washing of many dirty pairs of hands, then she gave everyone a job: cutting up apples to be stirred into the cornmeal; sprinkling in handfuls of raisins