The Healing

Chapter 10





The next morning Granada was in the kitchen with Aunt Sylvie when they heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs off the gallery. It was first light and early for any of the family to be out, but from the heaviness of the steps, Granada figured it had to be the master’s boots.

They spied on him through the kitchen window as he left the house and strode directly over to the old woman’s cabin. The door was open and she stepped out to meet him. No word was exchanged.

“Well, I’ll be,” Aunt Sylvie said. “What nature of rag she got tied on her head?”

Indeed the old woman had lost the tattered hat and feathers she had worn the previous day and now her hair was covered with a head rag, tied turban style. As the woman followed the master closely, Granada noticed something peculiar about the scarf. From it hung a fringe of a shiny metal that lined the old woman’s brow and glimmered in the early-morning light.

The two disappeared from sight as they walked in the direction of the quarter, the collection of cabins that sat on the plantation grounds. These were especially set aside for the slaves who worked closely with the family, those who did the ginning, weaving, blacksmithing, and the tending to the animals and vegetable gardens. The ones for whom Sylvie oversaw the cooking.

Aunt Sylvie shook her head worriedly. She was still suspicious as to why somebody should need a fireplace almost as big as hers. In spite of Chester’s reassurances, she hadn’t ruled out the possibility that the master had brought another cook to the plantation, especially when she spied all the supplies the woman had brought with her. Sylvie said maybe the woman knew secret recipes that made the slaves multiply faster. She said she had heard of such things. In fact, she herself had been told by Mistress Amanda to put cotton root in the food of the house servants with the lightest complexions to stop them from getting bigged-up with ever whiter children. “One day the mistress grew so flustered,” Sylvie had once said to everybody at the kitchen table, “she told me, ‘My God, Aunt Sylvie, can’t he bring one Negro into this house that doesn’t look like they dropped off the Satterfield family tree?’ ” Everybody had laughed then. But Sylvie wasn’t laughing now.

“I wager there are things that work the other way around,” Aunt Sylvie said. “Maybe that Chester wasn’t far off the track when he was pranking about triple-yolkers. Maybe that witch can make a stew that causes a woman to drop a litter like a cat.”

“You making me scared, Aunt Sylvie. I think she’s got her eye on me.”

“Well, I reckon you best go see what she up to.”

Granada gasped. “What if she conjure me?”

“Then don’t let her catch you looking! And mind your leavings. I hear they can take a hank of your hair or your toenails or even a shoelace and lay a curse on you.”

Granada took a step back, but Sylvie grabbed the girl’s arm. “Go on now. You come back here and tell me everything she does.”

Granada steeled herself and then slipped quietly down the kitchen steps. As she crept like a cat across the yard and down toward the cluster of cabins, Granada wondered exactly what it was she was supposed to be looking for. Whatever the woman did, the girl thought, was bound to be strange. For all she knew, the woman had already put a hex on her. When she got near enough to the cabins to watch, she made sure that she was well hidden behind the large cottonwood.

That’s when Granada got a better look at what the woman was wearing on her head. Unlike the sugar sacks or checked gingham or homespun cloth Granada had seen the other women wear for head scarves, this one was violently flowered and slightly faded. But that wasn’t the thing that riveted her attention. From the turban dangled bright disks that looked like coins. Even in the dim morning light her wrinkled brow seemed to be lit in a soft glow.

The master pounded on the door of the first cabin. “Cassius! Get your family out here.”

The cobbler, a long-faced, saddle-colored man, emerged from the cabin first. His woman, the milky-eyed Lizzie, followed him outside with his two little boys from his first wife. The children wiped the sleep from their eyes.

Lizzie and Cassius hadn’t been together long. A few years after the jealous mistress got Lizzie’s Rubina sent to the swamps, Lizzie had lost her husband to malaria. Aunt Sylvie never got tired of telling the story. She said Lizzie hadn’t wanted a man, swearing she would never have another child that could be snatched away so easily, but the master had insisted. That’s why she had chosen a man with a readymade family. But just in case she got with child and needed to be unfixed, Lizzie kept a supply of Aunt Sylvie’s cotton root hidden away.

Right there outside the front door, the old woman studied the eldest boy, rubbing his skin, peering into his eyes, and then caught his tongue with her fingers to get a closer look. She noisily sniffed his breath. She did the same with each member of the family. The only words she uttered were sharp commands to open a mouth or to roll an eyeball about in its socket. When she got to Lizzie and examined her milky eye, the one damaged by the excellent aim of the mistress, the old woman laid the palms of her withered hands against the luckless Lizzie’s face. The look she gave old sour Lizzie was so full of tenderness, Granada found herself suddenly lost in that astonishing act. For a moment she was filled not with the usual foreboding about Lizzie but with an overpowering love. Granada felt the deep, unrelenting ache the woman had been carrying in her chest, that dark crevice of grief.

The girl had no idea how long it lasted, if it had been a fleeting moment or several minutes, only that during the spell she was aware of nothing but Lizzie. She came to her senses only when she found Polly Shine, her disks shimmering, staring hard in her direction, giving Granada a knowing look.

Granada tensed at having been found out, but the old woman smiled and turned away. She looked once more at Lizzie, and then cut her scalding gaze up toward the great house. As if pronouncing judgment, Polly Shine let go a hurtling stream of tobacco juice with so much fury the little disks that hung from her scarf commenced to jingle. Then, as if nothing had happened, she and the master went on to the next cabin, where she repeated her probing and prodding.

At the last cabin the old woman announced confidently, “Ain’t nothing wrong with this batch. Least nothing your family can catch. You best take me out to them you say is dying.”

That was it! The woman was looking for diseased slaves! Granada recalled all the frightened talk in the kitchen about the horrible sickness that had broken out among the slaves out at Mott’s quarter.

But what could this witch want with them? If the white doctor couldn’t save them, she asked herself, what was this meddlesome slave woman going to do? Maybe she was looking to cull them out like sick biddies, Granada guessed.

When the master called for Chester to bring both the buggy and the stallion, Granada decided it was time to return to the great house and report what she had observed. She stepped carefully from behind the tree, trying not to draw attention to herself. Granada had only gone a few feet when she heard the woman’s voice piercing the morning calm.

“Girl! You come with me.”

Granada stopped in her tracks, her feet rooted in the ground by the woman’s words. The girl waited, listening for the master’s voice, hoping he would scold her for leaving the house and send her back to help Sylvie with breakfast.

“You heard her, Granada,” he said from up on his horse. “You ride with Polly.”

Before Granada could argue, he was off at a gallop.

• • •

Morning broke with a weak sun struggling to peek through a dirty smear of soot-colored clouds. The two rode side by side in the buggy, the woman called Polly Shine acting like she was more interested in the rumps of the mules than in Granada. Each time Polly flicked the reins, or the wheel found a deep rut throwing the buggy to one side, the little coins suspended from her scarf tinkled against one another like the crystal pendants in the mistress’s chandelier.

When they were out of sight of the plantation grounds, Polly all at once reined the mules to a stop, right in the middle of a canebrake. There was no one else in sight. The old woman turned to Granada and demanded, “Hold out your hands.”

“I ain’t took nothing of yours!” Granada exclaimed.

“Hold out your hands,” the old woman repeated in her bossy tone that didn’t require a raised voice.

Granada did as she was told.

Polly grabbed both hands and turned them palm-side up. She examined them for a long moment, and while she did, Granada became alarmed by the heat intensifying in the old woman’s grip. The woman’s hands were on fire. She finally released Granada.

Polly shook her head and grumbled, “I ain’t got no idea why the Lord chose somebody like you. Don’t make any sense, giving you the gift.”

“Chose me for what?” Granada asked. “Who’s giving me a gift?”

“And them hands,” Polly mused to herself, “one day they be big as dinner plates. Big enough to choke a boar hog. How they going to be any use to nobody?”

Polly glared straight into Granada’s eyes until the girl dropped her face. Polly snatched Granada roughly by the chin and lifted her head.

After a few moments of studying the girl, Polly’s grip softened. “But the eyes don’t lie, child,” the woman said, now smiling at Granada. “I seen you back there. You don’t know it, but you got the gift.”

Polly was right. Granada didn’t know what the old woman was getting at. The experience earlier at the quarters had been so foreign and fragile, it had already dissolved like sugar in tea.

Polly shook her head and laughed. “Lord save the people.”

That was all she had to say. The woman clucked the mules once and trained her eyes straight ahead. Every now and then as they progressed through the wilds she would rear up and spit a stream of tobacco juice over the wheel, but paid no more attention to Granada.

Nevertheless the girl was certain she was still being studied. She couldn’t shake the feeling that some part of her was being prodded, pulled back, exposed, and it frightened her. She sat on her hands, as if that could keep the woman away from places she didn’t belong.

A steady drizzle began to fall and steam rose from the heaving sides of the mules. The week had been cool and wet, so the road was mostly mud, and several times during the journey Polly had to get out and coax the mules across the log planking and cypress branches that work gangs had laid over the bottomless mud holes.

Soon the buggy rimmed the bank of a roadside slough. Rising out of the green-skimmed water was a grove of towering cypress, their bulging roots resembling the feet of trolls from Little Lord’s volume of the Brothers Grimm. Past the slough came an expanse of newly cleared fields hazed with the smoke from massive smoldering trunks of oak and sycamore. Set farther back on the horizon was a line of more cypress emerging from yet another swamp, their tops feathered with new growth brushing against the clouded sky.

When they reached a rough track that edged rich black fields, Granada noticed they looked abandoned. It was the planting season, when entire slave families should be out in the newly broken fields spreading seed, but there was not a soul to be seen.

She discovered why after the buggy rounded another stand of cypress. Granada spied two rows of porchless, whitewashed cabins. In the wide lane between stood all the people missing from the fields. There had to be a hundred or more.

Granada sat up straight and rigid next to Polly. The skin quivered across the back of the girl’s neck. Her legs tensed with the thought of jumping out of the buggy and fleeing down the road back to the mansion.

The darkest of the dark were kept here. Granada believed she could smell them already, their unwashed odor sharp to her nose. She began breathing in quick, shallow gulps. This is where Aunt Sylvie said the mistress would send Granada if she misbehaved. “Back to live with your real momma,” Sylvie would scold, sending shivers of terror through the girl, who imagined a place worse than the bishop’s hell. She had not been wrong.

As the buggy drew close, Granada’s chest tightened and her temples pounded. She was no longer gazing down on these people safely from the upstairs gallery. She was at eye level and any one of them could reach out and drag her off. She quickly scanned their faces, looking for that one particular woman she had only seen in her darkest dreams. All she knew was her name: Ella.

Long ago Chester had told Granada about the woman, but the girl hadn’t wanted to hear and had covered her ears. She refused to follow his finger when he pointed to the woman from up on the gallery one Preaching Sunday. Granada didn’t want to know the woman’s face.

Now she felt for sure, as she continued to skim the faces, this was where the woman stayed, the woman from whom the mistress had rescued Granada. She wished now she had looked when Chester had pointed. Then she could run and hide if she saw Ella coming.

A March wind, piercing and sodden with swamp dampness, swept across the settlement and Granada could almost feel the crowd shiver as one. The clothes they wore were filthy and in tatters, and they shuffled about in the yard wearily.

Granada dug her fingernails into the skin of her arms, hating the thing that linked her to them.

Polly jerked the mules to a halt, tied off the reins, and hoisted herself down over the wheel. Granada remained where she sat. She lowered her head to hide her face.

Through the tops of her eyes she saw the master sitting astride his horse beyond the throng of Negroes, talking to a white man on foot. Why was the master letting this happen to her? she wondered. Wait until the mistress found out she was missing!

The master turned his face toward Polly and motioned her over.

Polly grinned at Granada menacingly. “Get down, now,” she commanded and then almost under her breath, she muttered, “we got to go see about your people.”

A band of fear tightened around Granada’s chest, making it hard for her to breathe. “My people?” Granada stammered. Again she frantically scanned the faces in the yard and then looked back at the old woman.

She knew!

I’m not one of them, Granada wanted to explain. She might look like them, but her insides were not the same. She had to let the woman know.

“I belong in the great house with the mistress,” Granada whispered. “I’m a house-raised girl.”

“I say, get down!” Polly ordered, her words set with an iron resolve.

Granada winced, and then did as she was told. As they walked over to where the master sat astride his horse, a cold blast of wind swept through the yard, and the rain began falling in drops as big as pennies.

“Let me see them about to die first,” Polly said to the master. “These here can wait.”

Bridger, the overseer, scowled at Polly. He was a sinewy, weather-toughened man with a flint-sharp face who, along with a couple of white hands and several Negro drivers, managed the master’s operations, including all three settlements. “Wait? I just now called them in from the fields,” he fumed. “We wasting time and money here.” He looked up at the master for confirmation.

Master Ben frowned. “Then we best get to it.” He dismounted and handed the reins to one of the drivers.

Bridger went into a sulk. He spun on his heels and stomped off down the foot-worn track between the cabins. When the track played out, he led the group onto a weeded path that wound away from the cabins, through a recently burned-over field and finally to a long hut-like structure built on the edge of the woods. It was constructed from cut saplings set upright in the ground and had three walls and a roof laid with brush. On the open side stood a grizzle-bearded white man cradling a rifle, rain dripping from the crease in his hat. His mouth was stained with tobacco spit and he glared at Polly with small menacing eyes.

“I raised up this here brush arbor to quarantine the sick ones,” the master said. “Least until I know if it’s catching or not.” He didn’t look at Polly, but the words were obviously for her benefit.

Polly grunted irritably at the tobacco-chewing man with the rifle. Again without acknowledging her directly, Master Ben said to nobody in particular, “He’s got orders to shoot anybody that tries to get in or get out.”

Master Ben entered first, followed by Polly and Bridger. After the girl took the first two hesitant steps, she held back. Peering into the gloom, Granada saw nothing but vague shapes. As she stood there waiting for her eyes to adjust, she heard the sounds of raspy breathing and strangled cries emerging from the bowels of the cavernous hovel. The putrid smell was overpowering, like dead animals left out to rot, forcing Granada to put her hand over her mouth and nose. As her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, she was able to make out silhouettes of bodies on thin pallets spread across the earthen floor. All around she heard the patter of rain dripping through the roof of interwoven branches onto cold, bare earth.

A woman’s ragged scream penetrated the darkness. “There she is!” she screeched in an unearthly voice. “There the witch that been riding me to hell!”

Granada’s legs trembled beneath her.

“Quiet, you!” Bridger snapped. The screaming ceased, only to be replaced by deep sobbing.

“Some gone plum out their heads since you left,” he said. “Hollering out to invisible spirits and such. Big Dante here run off down to the creek and tried to drown hisself. Took four of us to haul him back. I don’t blame him one bit, neither,” Bridger said with a rare inflection of pity, looking down on the man at his feet. “Them that died appear to be the lucky ones.”

The master didn’t respond. He was kneeling on the ground now, gazing into the face of the prostrate body. He removed his hat and leaned over the man.

“Big Dante, it’s Master Ben,” he said. Granada was surprised to hear what she took as tenderness in the master’s voice. “I brought somebody to get you better.”

The man bucked up from the middle at the master’s words and began a frantic, thick-throated grunting. Master Ben reached out to hold him down. Granada saw that it was not a man the master had reached out to but a giant. Master Ben’s hand appeared child-size on Big Dante’s shoulder.

“No, not Dr. Barbour. Somebody else. I sent after one of your own kind. It’s going to be all right, you hear, Big Dante?”

Again the man tried to talk but could only produce garbled sounds.

“I brung you safe all the way down from Daddy’s place in Kentucky, didn’t I?” the master said. “Goddamn if I won’t get you through this, too!”

Big Dante stilled himself and the master nodded for Polly to come closer. When the master stood to make room for the old woman, Granada got a good look at Big Dante’s face. His tongue was swelled up horribly, too big for his head, lolling out of his mouth. The organ was as black as ink and appeared to be cracking open like a ripe fig. Granada turned her face away lest she retch. She stood for a long while with her eyes closed and a hand over her mouth. She reminded herself that soon she would be back in Aunt Sylvie’s kitchen where the smells would be pleasant and tempting, and where people kept themselves neat and clean.

Granada waited for her stomach to settle and then looked again. Polly was now nose to nose with the diseased man. The old woman was sniffing his horrible breath! Then Polly put her mouth to his ear and whispered something no one could hear. Granada thought she saw the muscles in that grotesque face relax. Polly smiled at the man like he might be her long-lost son. The entire sight had made the bile raise in the girl’s throat.

Polly went on to do the same with every ailing man, woman, and child in the arbor. All of them, regardless of how contorted their faces or how badly their skin had ruptured, seemed more at peace after she whispered the secret words into their ears. Even the woman who had screamed that she was being ridden by a witch stilled herself in Polly’s presence.

When she was done, Polly stepped out of the brush arbor. Without speaking a word she took off at an angry clip down the track toward the quarter. The master and Bridger scrambled after her. Granada was in no such hurry, thinking the woman had obviously left her gentleness and compassion back in the brush arbor.

They all caught up to her in the quarter where the families of the sick and dying were gathering around Polly, studying her face with worried expressions. The rain had stopped and there was a heavy silence all around. No one was sure what to make of the woman, only that she was as much a slave as they and had been allowed to see their family and friends.

The master was breathing hard when he strode up to her. “You seen it before? Is it catching?” he asked her anxiously. “Do you have a remedy?”

That’s when it occurred to Granada that the master was not simply sorting the sick from the healthy; he was expecting this woman to make them well. He was looking to a slave woman to heal them!

The silence grew more intense as they waited for the old woman’s response. But the old witch still held her tongue.

“For all the money I paid,” the master spat, “I expect you to have a ready remedy.”

Polly still didn’t answer Master Ben. She stood there glaring at him, looking as if she might be too angry to speak.

He shook his fist in her face. “I could maybe fix it for you to come down with the same thing. If you can’t save them, I wager you can figure a way to save yourself.”

The old woman finally spoke. “What you feeding them sick ones?” she asked.

“Corn and molasses,” he said.

“No meat? No greens?”

“They on half rations until they get well. That’s my policy. It’s scientific. A body don’t need as much when they’re sick,” he said confidently. “And nobody’s allowed to forage the woods for food. Can’t eat nothing that I don’t approve myself. Leastwise, no telling what they’d get into.”

“You lucky they ain’t all dead,” Polly said, not bothering to hide her contempt. “Bring ever one up to my hospital.”

“Your hosp …” the master stammered. Then he said emphatically, “No. Not these. These are to be kept here in quarantine. I’ll not have them near the house. Nothing contagious is to be treated in the hospital.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, like they were in full agreement, “we could leave them here like you say. Without no proper roof over their heads. Sleeping on the sopping-wet ground. That way if the blacktongue don’t kill them, the pneumonia will.”

She spat on the ground and then put her fists on her bony hips. “Or we can get them gathered up in one place with sound walls, a raised-up floor, and a warming fire so I can keep an eye on this thing. I reckon that hospital you built for me is the only place you got stout enough. Except your own grand house.”

The master stood stone-still with his jaw clenched. His blue eyes blazed with fury. Granada figured Polly Shine had worn out her welcome for good. When the master turned against a slave, if he didn’t have them whipped, he could do worse. He could sell them to labor on a sugarcane plantation down in Louisiana, a certain death sentence.

The woman wouldn’t be rattled. “Master,” she said with a certain bold sympathy in her voice, “I ain’t going to let it carry to your family. I’ll stop this thing in its tracks. Yes, sir. I got me a notion for a remedy, but I need to get them all under the same roof.”

He looked away for a moment, and then turned back to her. “Swear it to me. Swear to me you can make them all well. You swear to it, and I’ll do what you say.”

She shook her head, setting the little brass disks to tinkling. “I can’t swear to what God Hisself got to do.”

“Damn it, woman! You better do more than pray over them. You better have some remedies in them pots and bottles and bushel baskets I hauled halfway across the country.”

“I ain’t got the remedy. You do.”

“Me?” he snapped. “Then tell me what it is and I’ll have some hands go collect it.”

“Yes, sir,” she said and then spat again. “Here’s what I need. I need enough mutton to feed them all for three weeks and enough port wine to get ever last one of them drunk five times over.”

A collective gasp emerged from all around, except from the overseer who burst out laughing. He quickly brought himself up short when he caught the stunned look on the master’s face.

“What? What?” Master Ben began sputtering. “You trying to make a fool out of me? That ain’t no remedy for no Negro! They all get a fair ration of cornmeal and fatback and molasses. That’s all the African body craves. It’s scientific. I’ve done proved it.” He hit the word hard, like it was as unquestionable as one of God’s “Thou shalt”s.

Granada wondered if the master was going to read to the old woman out of one of his journals.

“They don’t even like lean meat,” he continued. “Wouldn’t eat it if they tried it.”

Polly said nothing and while the master continued his rant, she looked up at the sun as it began to break through the cloud cover. The first rays caught the disks that framed her face, setting them to winking.

“Negroes eating like white folks,” Master Ben was squawking. “I can’t have it. What next, china plates?”

The woman pulled her gaze from the heavens and looked the master straight in the eye, causing Granada to wonder if Polly Shine was putting another fix on him.

“Master, do like I advise and most be back in the fields after two weeks,” she said, calm but firm. “But if you don’t, the ones back there in your grass tepee hut are going to start dying off tomorrow. The first one to die will be that giant fellow you call Big Dante.” She grinned showing off her tobacco-stained teeth. “Master, I reckon I won’t be the last head of stock you’ll have to buy at market, bad habits and all.”

Nobody breathed. Granada saw that Bridger had a nasty smile on his face and a tight grasp on the stock of his cowhide whip, as if waiting to be summoned. There was no way a slave could get away with this.

Sure enough, the master called a very smug Bridger over to his side and then grumbled something into his ear. The smile dropped off Bridger’s face and his eyes bugged out like he had swallowed a flopping catfish. That’s when everybody knew it was true.

Somebody close to Granada whispered low, “Lord to God. Slaves eating like white folks.”

Another mumbled, “Looks like what heals the slave might kill the master.” There followed sounds of suppressed laughter rippling through the crowd.

When Bridger didn’t hop to it, instead remaining where he stood with a white-knuckled grip on his whip, the bluster returned to the master’s voice. “Load all the sick ones and bring them to the hospital. My hospital,” he emphasized. “I sure paid for it. I might as well get my money’s worth.”

He held up a finger in Polly’s face. “If a single one dies, I’ll give you thirty lashes and then turn you over to the speculators.” He stiffened. “That all?”

The crowd leaned in close. Granada strained to hear if this bought slave was crazy enough to ask for anything else. Even among these illiterate field hands, everybody could count up to two and that was how many licks she had already gotten off the master and it was still morning.

“Yes sir, that’s all,” she said in that exaggerated tone the white folks took as obedience but Granada knew to be sass. “You been generous. You a wise and good master. I couldn’t think of asking no more.”

“It’s a damn good thing,” he said, jerking his shoulders straight before mounting his horse.

But the girl doubted Polly Shine was telling the truth. Granada had the strong feeling that this woman had more licks saved up.