The Healing

Chapter 19





It was still light when Polly drove the wagon into the plantation yard and up to the stable lot. Chester winked at Granada as he led the mules off, but she didn’t try winking back. She kept her eyes fixed on the ground, lagging behind Polly as they made their way to the hospital cabin.

Polly went to work as soon as she walked through the door, while Granada stood at the table, her arms hanging heavy and useless at her sides. She watched dutifully as the old woman put on a pot of water to boil and then carefully wiped down her stone mortar like it was a favorite child.

When Polly began to peel back the skin on a burdock root, Granada said, “I can do that. Don’t look hard at all.”

“Miss Prissy’s mouth is working fine, but she ain’t got no idea what she’s saying. She don’t know nothing about this.”

“It appears mighty easy to me,” Granada said, reaching for a piece of root. “Let me try.”

“Leave it be!” Polly ordered. “Like I done said, you can’t do it in your hand until you see it in your heart. And your heart is locked tighter than the door to the master’s pantry.”

Granada picked up the root anyway and Polly slapped the girl’s hand. “Put that down. You going to spoil it!” she scolded. “You still trying to show off what’s in your head.”

Polly turned and cast the root that Granada had defiled out the window. “I ain’t got no use for that trash them white folks put in your head. It as dead as you is.”

“Why you hate them so bad?”

“I don’t hate white folks. They just ain’t got nothing I need, is all. You’re like a lot of others, thinking everything come from the white man. Long as you believe that, you’ll be blind to your own lights. You got to break the lie.”

Granada looked at the woman doubtfully. It wasn’t a lie. Everything she wanted did come from the white man, and from his kitchen and from his wardrobe and from his smokehouse. What could a Negro have that she would ever want?

Polly must have read her thoughts. With heat returning to her voice, Polly said, “You can’t get nothing from them because they ain’t got nothing to give. It ain’t theirs to give. Never was.” She stared hard at Granada and jabbed a finger to the girl’s chest. “That is the lie! Every damn thing on this piece of Mississippi dirt they calls the master’s plantation,” she said, her voice smoldering with a boundless rage, “everything you’ve known since you was a baby. The great house, the master’s big black stallion, them dresses you pine for. Even the sugar cookies from the master’s kitchen. All the glitter and the gleam and the gold. Everything you seen and touched and tasted. Everything the mistress holds in her hands. Even you. It all come from one thing and it ain’t the white man.”

Polly held up her index finger. “Just one place. And you got to give it honor or you be as dead as your mistress.”

“You ain’t telling me nothing,” Granada shot back. “It all come from God.”

Polly’s laugh was harsh. “And then I reckon God turned it over to the white man for safekeeping? That’s sure what they say in the white man’s church. You a fool to believe none of their religion. All they got to tell us is that we’ll burn in hell for stealing the master’s chicken.” Then she laughed again. “Ain’t even his chicken.”

“If you don’t think they is no God,” Granada argued, “then why you always looking in that big Bible book of yours?”

“Lord, girl! Arguing with you is like trying to show red to a blind mule.” Polly took a calming breath and then explained. “I didn’t say they weren’t no God. But I can read for myself. Most of the mess the white man preaches ain’t in the Bible I got. And a lot of things he don’t say, is. The white man got his own special Bible, plum full of mischief for folks like us.”

“So if it all don’t come from God, and it don’t come from the white man, where ever thing come from?” Granada challenged.

Polly shocked Granada by letting out an earsplitting cackle. “Where do it come from, the little girl asks?” she shouted out to nobody Granada could see.

Polly fell into a fit of frenzied laughter. “Lordy, Lordy!” she hollered. “Lordy, my Lordy! Little Miss Prissy sure be asking a grown-up woman’s question all right! But little missy ain’t going to like the answer I got. No, sir! She liable to spit it out like she spit out dirt.”

Her laughter grew wild, scaring Granada. Polly stood and lifted her skirt, swishing it from side to side like a fancy woman, taunting Granada. “Miss Prissy asking me a grown-up woman’s question about grown-up woman’s things! ‘Where it all come from, Polly?’ she asks.”

She lifted her skirt higher, showing her bony knees and under-drawers. “When I tell her, she’ll say, ‘How could something good come from such a nasty nappy place?’ ”

She released her skirt and reached down to thump the girl’s ear. “She wants to know woman’s things, but she still listens with little-girl ears.”

Then Polly began to weave unsteadily on her feet. She reached to brace herself on the table.

Granada held a hand over her throbbing ear. How was she supposed to know about woman’s things? Nobody ever told her anything. She watched Polly where she stood panting like a hard-run mare.

“I swear, girl,” Polly said, still breathing hard, “you beat all. Argue the horns off a bull.”

“How am I supposed to learn?”

“Done told you. Watch and listen to ever thing around you. And when you begin to know it here,” she said, lifting her hand to her chest, “make sure you do one thing.”

“What?” she asked.

“Keep your damn mouth shut,” Polly said as she turned back to her work. “A flapping tongue puts out the light of wisdom. And that tongue of yours could put out a house fire.”

Tears stung Granada’s eyes, but she blinked them away, not wanting to give the old woman the satisfaction of seeing her cry. She spun around on her heels and stomped outside, feigning anger instead. Once out the door, she let the dark hide her tears.

Through the twilight she could see the great house across the way. The windows were dark, awaiting Pomp’s ritual lighting of the candles. Smoke rose from the great chimney in the kitchen behind the house. Granada breathed deeply. Aunt Sylvie was tending something delicious, pork roast maybe, readying it for the master. Soon she would put it on serving trays and tell a house girl to hurry it down the boardwalk to the master’s table while the meat was still steaming.

It had been weeks since she had eaten in the kitchen or stood at the master’s table. And longer since that last Preaching Sunday. All those beautiful clothes remained unseen and unworn, locked away in a wardrobe, now more the dead girl’s than hers. Polly told Granada she didn’t need those clothes, that she was prettier without them. “You got a beauty them people just want to cover up. It scares them,” Polly had said. “You got to see it for yourself.” Granada didn’t believe Polly. The girl knew that without pretty things, she was invisible.

Granada strained to see through the darkened windows, looking for the passing shadow of Mistress Amanda. While she watched the house, Little Lord stepped out onto the gallery.

Upon spying Granada, he ran up to the railing. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, “Granada!,” his voice barely rising above the whir of insects. “Granada, why don’t you play marbles with me no more?”

He was so small and far away. He might have been calling her from some world she had only dreamed once upon a time. She opened her mouth to answer, but tears rose in her throat. She could only wave and watch as Lizzie appeared and, after a wide sweep of her head to take in the entire yard with her good eye, led the boy inside the house.

And the mistress, she wondered, did she dream her up, too? She never came out on the gallery anymore and her heavy burgundy curtains were usually pulled in her room. Did the mistress ever think of her? Was she grieving Granada as much as Granada grieved the mistress? As Granada wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, Polly stepped out of the cabin and stood beside the girl.

“What you crying over?” she asked.

“I ain’t crying!”

Polly crossed her arms over her sagging breasts and said softly, “Granada, she ain’t got nothing for you.”

Granada froze. How did the woman know what goes on in a person’s head?

Polly continued. “She’s got nothing because she ain’t nothing but a house of dreams. She’s lost to her own self and holding tight to you on her way to hell. She ain’t never going to find her way back. Let that woman go. Her time has passed.”

Granada began to sob, the words spilling out as freely as her tears. “I can’t read no dirt. I can’t remember something I ain’t seen yet. I don’t want to hear no more riddles. Why you ever choose me?”

Granada succeeded in squeezing back her tears, but the unspent sadness quivered through her limbs. She braced for Polly’s anger.

The woman bent over and placed her hand firmly on the top of the girl’s head, her fingers splayed like she was choosing a melon. “Granada,” she said firmly, “this is where learning take place. And you smart, too. I ain’t denying it. But that ain’t what turned my face to you.”

Granada looked up at the woman, whose features had grown soft and, even in the twilight, glowed.

Polly moved her hand from the girl’s head to over her heart. The heat from the palm of the old woman’s hand penetrated the fabric and warmed Granada’s chest. Polly’s hand heated up like an oven brick.

“This is where remembering lives,” she heard her say. “I seen it in you the first day.”

She watched the old woman through a film of tears.

“You got eyes that can see what nobody else can see, if you would only look.”

Polly then raised herself up and stood next to the girl. For a long while they remained at the door of the hospital cabin in the cooling nightfall, Polly staring off in the distance, watching the first stars of the evening, and Granada sniffling, the place where Polly’s hand had been still radiating an intense heat.

The hounds began bellowing for their supper and Granada heard Chester’s laughter drift down through the soft evening air from the kitchen. Granada looked over at the mansion to see the windows lighting up one by one as Pomp passed through the house.

In a low voice, almost tender, Polly said, “There are things you got to know if you going to be of any use to the people. And I can’t tell you where you can understand it. My momma used to say, ‘I can pour water on your head, but you got to wash yourself.’ That’s what I been saying. You got to see these things through your own eyes. All I can do is point.”

“What are they?” Granada asked, desperate now to know. She was so weary of all the riddles without answers. She wanted something sure and fast to hold on to, a firm place under her feet to stand. “Polly, please tell me.”

Polly eyed her carefully and to Granada’s surprise, nodded her head in consent. She took a deep breath, as if the things she had to tell were many and weighty.

“The first thing to know is ever thing you think you see before you is a lie.” Polly said this looking directly at the great house. “A bottom-upward lie. Our people are living, breathing, slaving, birthing, and dying so that lie can keep being told. Like it’s something that been handed down from the apostle days. People believe the lie because they forgot how to remember.”

Polly’s gaze left the mansion and returned to the darkening sky. The moon shone dimly behind a narrow streak of satiny black clouds. Stars were beginning to show themselves.

“My momma was a saltwater girl from Africa. Before the slavers caught her, she was the main weaver in her village. She say all the women in her clan were natural-born watchers of the night sky. So I reckon they knew a thing or two about that moon and them stars up there. We looking at the same sky they seen. The way they told it, all our people—dead, alive, and the un-begat—they all wove up in it, fixed one to the other by threads finer than spiderwebs. A sky of souls, they called it.”

Polly smiled sorrowfully, her eyes still searching the heavens. “Our people is like them stars, I reckon. All threaded up together in a bolt of black velvet.”

Negroes in the sky, thought Granada. Was that the answer to the riddle?

“When you got a question,” Polly said before Granada could ask, “first be silent. Look around you. Let creation speak the truth to you.” She raised her arms out before her, like she was letting loose two handfuls of glittering stars.

Granada studied her closely, wondering about Polly’s reach, wanting to know.

The girl heard a deep, rich rumbling and at first she thought it came from far off in the distance, beyond the levees, and wondered what kind of amazing animal possessed a call so beautiful, yet so heartbreakingly sad. Then she realized it was the old woman who made the sound. It rose from her throat and began to take on strange rhythms, unlike any music the girl had heard. It reminded her of the wind whistling through the canebrakes and how the raindrops sounded when they trickled through the forest canopy. She thought she could feel the sun on early-morning dew and hear the creek water rushing after a spring downpour. The entire world seemed to be nestled into Polly’s sweet utterances.

Polly gently swayed her body side to side, like a streamer of moss caught by the breeze. Her arms extended, weaving the starlit heaven. Her entire body became liquid and flowed like a gentle wave to the rhythm of her voice. She began to make new sounds, and Granada heard what could have been words, foreign to her ears, borne out on the rhythmic cadence.

She didn’t understand the meaning of the song in the same way she understood the rhymes that Chester sang, but she found this one comforting, familiar even. The secret part of her, warmed by Polly’s touch, was awakening from a lengthy sleep, urged on by the sound, aching to rise from her chest into her throat and fly out into the night.

Granada watched the old woman through the gathering dark. Polly had transformed. She appeared softer and much younger, graceful, as delicate as morning mist. Granada found herself thinking Polly beautiful, in a way that, like the place in her chest, had not been known to her before this moment. She was irresistibly drawn to Polly, wanting to lose herself in the words and the rhythms and the softness of her curving body.

The last of the song flowed gently from Polly’s lips and was carried off by the cool evening breeze, and Granada believed she could hear that final, waning note as it traveled to places she had never seen. She ached to go with it.

Polly blew softly through her mouth, as if she were putting out a candle, and then brought her arms down to her sides.

Granada felt many things she had no words to shape, so she remained quiet and let the secret part of her flicker as long as possible until at last it faded to its hiding place.

Polly still peered into the distant night. “Them words come from far off, from my momma.”

Was this sadness she heard in the old woman’s voice?

“You missing your momma?” Granada asked.

“I do that,” Polly answered. “But I don’t forget her. I draw memory from my mother’s mouth like you draw water from the cistern. Her words are sweeter to my tongue than honey. They come to me from all the way back.” Polly crossed her arms and sighed. “From the time before the lie.”

“That song sure was pretty,” Granada said, edging closer to the woman, craving the warmth that radiated from Polly’s body. “Don’t know what it says, but I sure would like to learn it. If you was to teach it to me.”

Polly nodded. “It’s a song the village women used to sing. It says, ‘What we see and what we can’t see … What we know and what we can’t know … The mighty and the small … The Father and the Mother … The creatures that prowl the forest and the growing things in the fields … The young ones that tread the ground and the old ones that sleep under it … The birthing and the dying … The laughing and the crying and the bearing up … All creation breathes with one breath.’ ”

She reached up and wiped something from her eye with the back of her hand.

“Anyhow, that’s the way my momma told it to me,” she said, looking down at Granada. “And that’s the way I’m telling it to you. All the people is caught up in this thing together. Like your eyes and ears and heart is one in your body. We all tied by invisible threads, one to another. My momma said nobody can go her own way without breaking them threads that make us one tribe. One breath.”

She held both hands out before her. Then she laced her fingers. “This,” she said with conviction, “is where you belong, Granada.”

Granada studied the woman’s hands. Granada looked up at the house lit like a giant chandelier. She then raised her eyes to the stars once more.

“Them stars, Granada. You thinking they need a mistress? They need a master?”

“But they the master’s stars, ain’t they?” Granada said. “They on his property.”

“No. Ain’t no white master over them stars. No mistress, neither. Just made-up words. Master. Mistress. Nigger. Slave. Property. They ain’t nothing but bothersome night clouds that keep you from seeing the heavens with a clear eye. Keep you blind to all them stars.”

Polly placed an arm gently around Granada’s shoulder and drew her close. She pointed a finger to the sky. “Look up, Granada. Look to your people. We as beautiful and as plentiful as them stars knitted together in heaven. We just forgot. Somebody’s got to remember for us all.”