The Healing

Chapter 21





Granada was sitting on the porch of a swamp slave’s cabin in one of the master’s far-flung settlements, wondering what Polly was doing to the woman inside to make her so angry. She had been growling like a gut-shot bear.

Bridger had come with a wagon early that morning, summoning Polly from the hospital. The two exchanged a few words and Polly hurried back into the cabin and grabbed the short cloth sack she kept hanging on a peg behind the door. While she filled it with remedies, she told Granada to fetch one of the clay vessels she had fired and painted the week before.

As soon as they had settled into the wagon, the mules took off at a trot. Polly rode straight-legged in the wagon bed, resting her back against the sideboard. After a while she removed her floppy hat and tied up her hair in the faded flowered scarf with the beaten-brass disks that glittered in the sun.

Granada made the trip sitting in the rear of the wagon, dangling her legs over the rough track. As the overseer persistently cursed the mules and snapped the reins, and the wagon jolted her, Granada hugged the little clay pot close to her chest.

During the four-mile trek to Burnt Tree quarters she had plenty of time to speculate about how long it would be before the woman called Ella would appear on one of these visits. Perhaps she was dead. Or maybe she cared as little for a reunion as Granada did. But still the prospect filled her with an icy dread, and she tried her best to put it out of her mind. She looked back at Polly, who now seemed to be sleeping, her hands clasped in her lap, the little round mirrors catching the rising sun and flashing about her head. There were times now, especially when she slept, the old woman didn’t seem so scary.

When they entered the settlement, Granada noticed that Burnt Tree looked nearly identical to Mott’s quarter and Hanging Moss—two long rows of small whitewashed cabins with newly built porches facing each other across a well-trod lane. Screening the settlement from the fields was a skirt of woods on one side and a cypress slough on the other.

The quarter lay quiet. It had been light now for several hours and most of the inhabitants were already in the fields. Down at the end of the row she saw an old, shrunken woman sitting on a stump chair under a cottonwood, minding pallets of sleeping babies. Larger children squatted or crawled naked on the hard ground. Bridger pulled the team to a stop in front of a two-room cabin and both Polly and Granada exited through the rear of the wagon.

Bridger called back at them. “Get her done in good time so she can be back in the fields by morning.”

Polly didn’t reply.

As they walked toward the cabin, Granada spied two women through the open door. They stood on either side of the bed, obstructing from view all but the head of the sick woman, which she threw back and forth on a pillow of straw. Even through the shadows, Granada could see the sweat glistening on the woman’s face and hear her pained moans.

Granada dragged her feet as she followed Polly up the two steps and onto the plank porch, bracing herself for the disgusting sights of another sickroom. Polly turned to Granada and brusquely told her to wait outside with the empty crock. Then she entered the cabin and shut the door.

Unexpectedly alone, Granada couldn’t decide if she was more relieved or hurt at being excluded, but she felt the need to register her complaint regardless.

“I ain’t going to say nothing!” she protested weakly through the cypress door. Then, resigned, she plopped onto a plank bench situated below a burlap-curtained window, the clay pot resting in her lap.

Granada’s feelings finally came down hard on the side of relief when the sick woman yelled out like somebody was whipping her with a leather strop. A while later a dark, mud-splattered woman wearing a sweat-stained head rag emerged from the nearby skirt of woods and came running down the track. She hurried up the steps of the cabin, passing by Granada with only the briefest of glances, and then tapped gently on the door.

“It’s Pansy,” she said.

The door opened to let her in as another woman stepped out and rushed off into the woods.

This odd routine was repeated several times throughout the day with some women collecting a baby to nurse before stepping inside the cabin. It was puzzling, all the comings and goings. The conspiracy seemed to involve every woman in the quarter. By midafternoon, Granada was determined to solve the mystery, even if it meant going into the sickroom.

Polly emerged from the cabin after several hours. When Granada opened her mouth, the old woman shushed her before she could speak. Polly sat down heavily on the bench and unknotted a square of cloth she had packed away in her sack.

Inside was a wedge of corn bread and a bit of salt pork. She nibbled a bird’s portion and secured her packet again, never bothering to offer Granada one bite. Then she shut her eyes.

It took only a moment for her chin to drop. She began to snore lightly, leaving Granada to watch the old woman’s chest rise and fall with her breathing.

Not more than five minutes could have passed before Polly woke with a snort and scrambled to her feet. She reached down and took the crock from Granada’s hands, and then returned inside the cabin. She never said a word.

By late afternoon the cries of Sarie, the sick woman, were raw with exhaustion and her speech more agitated.

“Get the hell out of here and let me die!” the woman screamed. Granada pitied the poor women who attended her, but Sarie’s fury only evoked another round of gentle words and soothing tones.

The gray dark of twilight saw the slaves quitting the fields for home. Some of the women stopped off by the cottonwood and picked up a child or two, while the men headed straight for their cabins to sit on their porches and smoke their pipes, or chop weeds in the little garden plots that each family now had, thanks to Polly.

More magic, they claimed. Granada knew different. She had heard Polly tell the master to his face that a patch of greens was a small price to pay to keep out the blacktongue. “Don’t worry yourself,” she had told Master Ben. “Let them grow it on their own time.” Wasn’t magic. Sneaky is what it was! Polly also told him they could all use a porch as well. Soon as he started bellyaching about the cost, she explained to him how a porch would get him another hour of work out of them every day. With a porch, they could see to do their house chores like weaving, soapmaking, harness mending, and such after it got too dark inside the cabin. Of course that made folks love Polly Shine even more.

Nope, it sure wasn’t magic. It was conniving.

All around Granada rose the shouts of children playing their ring games and mothers singing to their babies and the steady chop-chop-chop of hoes in the gardens. But none of it could disguise the fact that everybody, young and old, was keeping one eye on the sick woman’s cabin.

When a weary, barrel-chested man arrived with two somber-faced boys, Polly cracked the door of the darkened cabin. She told the man that he was welcome to come into his own home, but only for a short while. The big man didn’t argue. He removed his battered hat and stepped inside, leaving the boys on the porch to stare blankly at Granada like she was nothing more that a porch step.

Granada’s belly began to grumble. The smoke from a multitude of chimneys settled over the quarter, bringing with it the suppertime smell of frying meat, reminding her again that she had not eaten all day. As darkness fell, women began to gather around the house. Some brought plates of corn bread and side meat and shared it with Sarie’s sons.

At last, one woman with a shy, cringing look, like a dog that had been kicked once too often, held out a plate to Granada. When she took it, the woman startled Granada by breaking into a broad, gapped-toothed smile that lit up her face.

Did the woman recognize her? Granada started and the tin plate nearly fell from her hands.

Terrified, Granada dropped her eyes, trying to make the woman disappear, praying that this was not the woman named Ella. The little woman said nothing and at last Granada heard her limping shuffle down the steps.

Now Granada looked up to see that many more people were milling about the yard. Children had gathered dry wood and pine knots, and a fire blazed in the lane. The men talked quietly while the women carried babies on their hips. But whenever some commotion arose from the direction of the cabin, everyone went still, as if they were awaiting some important pronouncement. Firelight reflected the great anticipation in their eyes.

As Granada sat alone, feeling a stranger to everybody and everything around her, the door creaked opened and out came the sick woman’s man. He wiped his hands anxiously on his dirty pants, and then reached into the pocket of a ripped shirt for a clay pipe. He sat down on the bench next to Granada.

“You Polly’s apprentice?” the man asked, twisting the pipe stem with his thick, blunt fingers.

Granada shrugged, not knowing what he meant by the word. He smelled of sweat and tobacco. Granada inched away.

“Well,” he said, taking her lack of response in the affirmative, “don’t reckon you could ask for nobody better to learn under. That’s what I hear anyhow.” He laughed self-consciously and said, “She make the lame walk and the blind sure enough see. Least that’s what they tell me. They right about that?”

He looked at Granada for reassurance. “They say she totes her conjuring herbs in that sack. Some say she do hoodoo on folks.”

When she still didn’t respond, he muttered softly, “Sure hope she knows what she doing.” He tapped the bowl of the pipe against his palm and glanced over at his two sons who stood at the edge of the porch. He lowered his voice and said, “Sarie done lost the three before this one. Last baby nearly took her with him. You ever seen Polly do this before?”

“Do what?” Granada asked. “What she doing?”

“Don’t you even know why you here?”

“She don’t tell me nothing,” Granada grumbled.

“Girl, my woman’s having a baby!” He laughed. “Thought for sure you knew that. Thought you come to help out.”

“She got a baby in her belly?” Granada gasped. She had heard about this happening to women, but had never actually seen it up close. “That why she sick?”

The man laughed. “She ain’t sick. She bigged! And that baby trying to get hisself born this very night.”

Granada thought about that for a moment. Why didn’t Polly want Granada to know anything about babies? she wondered.

Over the next hour, it was Polly’s voice that dominated within the cabin, handing out orders left and right. As the hoarse cries from the woman grew more desperate, Polly’s instructions became more succinct, sometimes comforting and other times insistent.

“Bear down harder!” she would scold.

Then she would croon softly, “That real good, Sarie. Now breathe in and out real easy, like you blowing in a jug.” And in the next moment she would be hollering at the woman again, or commanding the others to get Sarie on her feet and walk her around the room.

Finally, the woman cried out, “Something ain’t right! I can’t do it no more! It wants to kill me!”

There followed the sounds of the women calling out Sarie’s name, telling her she was in God’s hands now. “Let it roll with God,” they cried. “He’ll see you through.”

“Yes, Lord,” the man next to Granada whispered.

Sarie released a heaving groan that threw a deathly quiet over the yard. The only sounds now were pine knots popping in the fire.

Sarie’s man leaned his arms on his knees, clasped his hands together, and mumbled his prayers, while his sons stood wide-eyed against the porch railing, the older boy’s arm wrapped protectively around his little brother. Those in the yard began their silent prayers.

God was beseeched with one voice, and in that long moment, there seemed to beat only one heart, growing stronger and louder. Granada’s entire body throbbed with it, and when she felt that she couldn’t contain the surging force any longer, there came the cry of a newborn baby, breaking over their heads like a sheet of lightning.

The entire community answered the new arrival with a spontaneous cry of its own. Sarie’s man jumped up, flung open the door, and charged into the cabin.

Granada, filled with the wonder of that moment, found her legs and stood to gaze through the door.

The grease lamp on the table cast a golden circle around the group. They were all looking down adoringly at Sarie, whose face radiated light. She held a tiny child close to her, its little arms reaching.

Granada fixed her eyes on Polly as she stood tall and erect, looking down on the mother and child, the disks winking in the lamplight. She neither smiled nor frowned. Her countenance begged no gratitude. Her expression was so complete in itself, nothing was required of those who saw her but to love her, and Granada could not help doing so herself.

Sarie reached out to Polly and, after taking her hand, brought it to her own glistening face. Granada did not know that she herself had begun to weep.

“God bless you, Mother Polly,” Sarie said, her voice liquid with tears. And then she did a surprising thing. She lifted the baby in her hands and offered her child to Polly.

Without speaking, Polly gathered the naked child and swaddled it in a piece of snow-white linen. Then she lifted the child to her lips and kissed it on the brow. When she returned it to the mother’s arms, she leaned over and spoke very softly what Granada thought must have been a single word, but one that could be heard only by mother and child.