The highway stretched out before us as if it had nothing left to give. My mother drove on, silent, hands steady at ten and two. The landscape outside the window was nothing remarkable—flat fields, patches of wildflowers, branches dipping into the breeze. I watched the mile markers slip away, counting them one by one as if they could bring me closer to something I couldn’t quite name. But my thoughts strayed, drawn back to stories from a time long gone—the ones my mother held close, never fully spoken, never fully mine.

We were heading back home to New York City after an uneventful trip to an outlet mall that hadn’t been worth the drive. It was one of those long, unbroken stretches of road where time softens at the edges and questions you’d buried start to push their way to the surface, shaped by all the years you spent trying not to ask them.

“Tell me about Bertha Murphy,” I said, my voice small, like I accidentally let the question out before it was ready.

I watched my mother carefully, searching for some small sign that I had pried too deeply, but her gaze remained on the road. Even now, I believe it wasn’t just the answer I was searching for. I was hoping to find a version of my mother I had always yearned to uncover that existed in another plane beyond the one we shared. In my childhood, Bertha’s name had always been there, like something just out of sight. I remember nights lying still in my bed, the house wrapped in silence except for the low murmur of my mother on the phone with my aunt. I would strain my ears, listening through the crack of her bedroom door, gathering what I could from words not meant for me.

“Why do you want to know about Bertha Murphy?” she asked after a long pause.

My mother always said her name in full. Bertha. Murphy. The two words felt heavy, like they weren’t meant to be separated, like saying them together made something true.

“Just curious, I guess. You used to talk about her a lot when I was younger."

"Did I now?" she said, and there was this small, almost invisible smile at the corner of her mouth. Not a warm smile, but a smile you’d miss if you blinked.

My mother isn’t one to offer up her stories freely. Whenever I asked about her childhood, she’d say, “I don’t remember; that was so long ago.” It felt like a rehearsed line, like the answer you’d give to a stranger asking something oddly personal on the bus. She held her memories like a deck of cards, shuffling and reshuffling, showing only the one or two she was willing to share. But something about this moment felt different.

"You did," I pressed. “I think you said she was a root worker or something.”

She let out a long, deep sigh and then at last, she began.

~

“Bertha Murphy worked roots.”

My mother said it so plainly, the way you might say someone worked at a grocery store or bank. But the way her voice carried it made it sound like a confession. Root worker. The words had an otherworldly quality to them, as if the sound of them alone could stir something awake. Down south, my mother said, rootwork was more than belief. It was the bones of things, the secret language of survival. People didn’t question the things they couldn’t see. It was simply there, as familiar as their own breath.

The women in Bertha’s family had carried that knowing for generations. Her mother had it. Her grandmother too. By the time Bertha was a teenager everyone in town knew about her talent. She had a touch they’d say, a gift.

“People came to her from all directions,” my mother said, her voice taking on a note of awe. “Virginia, Georgia, even New York. And they weren’t just country folks, either. Lawyers. Factory workers. Teachers. They all came to see her.”

When their husbands had strayed, or their wives turned cold they found their way to Bertha’s house. It was small and modest, set back from the road, surrounded by fields that stretched out on all sides. Cars filled the dirt lot out front, scattered in crooked, zigzag rows. Inside, a narrow rectangular room was lined with plain wooden chairs where customers waited until Bertha called their name.

“My cousin Tata Bread and I would spend many afternoons playing outside that house,” my mother continued, her voice slipping into a softer tone. “We weren’t allowed inside during appointments.”

Tata Bread—Bertha’s daughter—had earned her nickname by stuffing pieces of potato bread in her pockets as a child. She and my mother were the same age. They would linger on the porch or play in the yard. Every now and then, when the door swung open, they’d catch a glimpse of the men and women that came and went, faces lined with worry.

“She never looked like much,” my mother recalled. “She’d just lay on that old bed of hers, like she didn’t have a care in the world.”

It was hard to picture Bertha as my mother described her—propped up in bed, a large figure wrapped in a nightgown that hung loosely over her cinnamon skin. Her left eye droopy, and her gray afro untamed. She greeted all her clients from that bed, never moving much, smoking her cigarettes down to the filter as if time bent to her slow, steady pace. She would listen to their troubles, then reach into her cabinet, carefully selecting the right root or herbs to mend their woes.

The roots themselves weren’t always plants. Sometimes they were powders. Sometimes small vials of liquid or bundles of herbs tied with string. Whatever form they took, they always came with instructions—precise, specific directions. Bury this under your bed. Put it in his shoes. Stir it into her drink. If you didn’t follow them to the letter, it wouldn’t work.

Yet, as my mother kept repeating, it wasn’t the roots alone that worked the magic. It was the belief. Bertha could work miracles—but only if you let her.

~

"There was a woman who came to see Bertha once," my mother said, her voice dropping low. "She drove all the way from New York. Her husband had left her for another woman, and she wanted him back."

My mother remembered the woman well—how she pulled up in a shiny black car wearing elegant city clothes that seemed out of place on the red dirt road in front of Bertha’s house.

“And what did Bertha tell her?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice even. My mother hesitated slightly, as if she was weighing whether to let the words loose or not.

“She told her to save some of the blood from her monthly . . . and mix it into her husband’s favorite soup,” she finally said.

I pictured the scene: the woman standing in her quiet kitchen, stirring the soup diligently over the stove. Her husband lifting the spoon to his lips, unaware of what mingled with every sip. I could almost taste it myself—a faint, metallic tang began to seep into my senses.

"Did it work?"

My mother shrugged, her eyes still on the road. “Well she never came back to town.”

~

Ms. Hynes was the story my mother didn’t like to tell, though pieces of it had reached me anyway throughout the years.

“She was beautiful once,” my mother said. “But you wouldn’t have known it by the end.”

Ms. Hynes had smooth, chestnut skin and a slender frame. She taught at the local school and the town admired her in a quiet, respectful way. But all of that faded when her name started bouncing from porch to porch, for she had been seeing a married man. When the sickness took hold of her, it was unlike any sickness the town had seen. Her skin grew pale and blotchy, her eyes a strange, sickly yellow. Ms. Hynes began to waste away, each day a shadow of the woman she had once been. The church ladies clucked their tongues, muttering that she had brought this suffering upon herself. Someone had put a root on her, they said. But my mother remembered seeing something else—a fear that sat deeper than the gossip, something that crawled under the surface of Ms. Hynes’ skin.

“She looked like a snake,” my mother whispered, as if the memory might hear her and come back.

There was something almost reptilian about her. It reached a point where Ms. Hynes could barely walk. One Sunday, the deacons wheeled her up to the pulpit, her small, frail body swallowed by the wheelchair. Reverend Foster placed one palm on her forehead and called on the Lord to cast out whatever devil had taken hold of her.

But nothing happened.

“She just sat there staring at him with those yellow eyes,” my mother said.

She left the church that day, still sick, still cursed, and the whispers grew louder. And so, with nowhere else to turn, she found her way to Bertha. Bertha took one look at Ms. Hynes and knew someone had put a powerful root on her. She gave her a tincture to draw out whatever had taken hold.

“She took that drink and started to shake.”

Out of Ms. Hynes’ mouth slid a small black snake.

“She died two weeks later,” my mother said, her voice trailing off. She spoke it without emotion, as though the death was simply a footnote, as though Bertha had done her part and the rest had been left up to God. As we drove on, the miles slipping away beneath us, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there were things that lived in the spaces between what my mother told me and what she kept hidden. I tried to look at her, to see if she felt it too, but her eyes stayed on the road.

~

Bertha worked until the very end. Even when the cancer spread through her body, she didn’t stop. She never tried to heal herself. She let the sickness take root in her, and kept it hidden. Tata Bread tried to take up her work, but it wasn’t the same. The connection Bertha had to the earth, the roots, to the things that lived in the in-between places—it didn't belong to Tata Bread. People came for a while, but soon they stopped coming altogether.

The whole town turned out for Bertha’s funeral. People came from miles away, packing into the small Baptist church until there was no room left to stand. Bertha left more behind than just her name. With her success she left property, too—cars, houses, acres of land that her family inherited.

There was always something haunted in the way my mother spoke of Bertha—like she was describing a world where shadows walked alongside the living, where belief was thick enough to hold in your hands. And yet, as she spoke, I sensed a longing too, a yearning to touch that vanished world, even if only for a moment.

“What made Bertha so successful?” I asked as we pulled up to my apartment building.

“They all believed her,” she said softly, almost to herself. “And if the mind believes, then it’s real.”

I wished I had met Bertha before the world forgot how to believe in such things. It’s a strange kind of ache, longing for someone you never knew. In my mind I play out little scenes: ex-lovers who might have been swayed, greedy landlords who might have softened, small injustices that could have been set right with a root.

Outside, the city is loud and endless, too big to care about the stories we’ve just unraveled. My mother shifts in her seat, her fingers drumming lightly against the steering wheel. Maybe belief isn’t about choice at all. Maybe it’s something that clings to you, waiting in the silence for you to notice it’s already there.