The Healing

Chapter 36





I stand before the darkened forest again. Polly is by my side. I hear a chorus of women’s voices, surging and tugging at me like a river current. But the name they say is not Granada. It is Yewande and it is the word that gives strength to my legs.

I look up at Polly and say, “I’m a woman now,” and then step alone into the dark.

I can see nothing and stand in place, not knowing where to go. A hand takes mine, and I am not sure who it is that is leading me forward through the darkness, but I follow without fear.

We emerge from the dense growth and walk for what seems like a long distance on a floor of cool, soft grass. A gentle breeze carries the sound of rushing water. The air is clean and sharp.

The guiding presence has departed and I walk alone in the dark toward the sound of the river. I see dimly a mist rising from the water’s surface. The rush of the river is as comforting as a womb and there is no part of me that does not thirst for the water that now flows at my feet.

From a short distance ahead, Polly calls out. “To know a woman,” she sings, her voice very young, “is to know a thing underwater! Come and remember who you are.”

But the mist is like a curtain. “I can’t see you, Polly.”

“Don’t trust your eyes. Close them and come to me.”

Behind my eyelids, the world is brilliantly lit. I see Polly ahead of me, standing midway across the river. She is a young woman again, as she was the evening she sang her mother’s song. She wears a large turban, a regal coronet, made from many folds of a fabric that is rich with purples and with golds. Her body is draped in the same shimmering cloth and it appears to melt into the water that surrounds her.

I look down. I, too, am clothed in a garment of delicately woven cloth, shimmering white, embroidered with elaborate patterns. They are the drawings of the moon from the clay pots.

It is not the sun that glows overhead but many moons. They shine like beaten brass, like the disks that dangled from Polly’s head scarf.

Everything I see is new, but nothing I see is new. It has been before my eyes all along, unnamed.

“Come,” Polly says again.

I step into the warm, rushing water, my internal eye still on Polly. The river is dark, quietly surging with a potent force, but my feet are sure. I reach out and Polly takes my hand. When we touch, I hear the rumbling of thunder. The wind picks up, rustling in the trees onshore, taking their leaves. The current strengthens and I lose my footing.

Polly grips me tighter and I feel the fierce pulsing of a single heart in my hand. I can’t tell if it is mine or Polly’s or another’s.

I hear the terrible whoosh of giant wings beating overhead. Tremendous birds are circling, throwing shadows across the water. The creatures finally roost in the now leaf-bare trees on the far bank. Their weeping is unearthly, terrible and sad.

“You hear them now, don’t you?” Polly asks. “Oh Lord, so many need comforting tonight.”

“Who is it, Polly?”

“The ones who give the people life.”

“Why are they sad? What are they crying for?”

“To be known again. When the Old Ones are forgotten, they cry for their children.”

“What do they want from me?” I ask.

“These are the ones who sent you the gift. They are calling you to heal.”

And with that, Polly places one hand firmly against my chest and the other on my back. Completely trusting, I allow myself to be lowered gently into the water.

As the water courses over me, my body, my flesh and bone, seem to dissolve and flow with the current, and I finally understand that there was never a part of me that was unknown. No part unclaimed. The rushing of my blood, the pulsing in my heart, every breath I take is reaching back to long before. I have been thirsty for the water, and the water has thirsted for me.

I rise up from the river and the water rains down my face and breasts like gentle kisses. Polly takes me by the shoulders and faces me upstream. We are not alone anymore. I am now looking into the glistening eyes of the woman from whom I have been running. Her face glows like a dark sun, her hair woven into intricate plaits. The woman called Ella reaches out to me and puts her hand on my breast.

“They are touching you and you are touching them,” Polly says. “The water never forgets. It never dies. It rushes and whirls from the very mouth of God. Women are things of the river, creatures poured out onto the earth.”

And then my gaze is drawn to another woman, who has risen from the river upstream from Ella. I know her to be Bessie, my grandmother. And behind her, Yewande, Bessie’s mother, the one out of Africa, whose name I bear.

“God spoke the Old Ones into this world, and he still must be speaking because we keep coming,” Polly says. “Look!”

Polly points, her arm strong and straight above the water, the silken sleeve draping down to the river surface like the shimmering wing of a bird. “All the way back to Creation, you are being touched.”

When I look up, there are women as far as I can see, standing in the river one behind the other, generations going back to the beginning time, from the very womb of God.

• • •

When Granada awoke at dawn, there was an unreal shimmer to the light gathering around her bed. The unrelenting heartbeat still throbbed in her hand. She was still being borne by the river, its current propelled by the abiding pulse of that unseen heart.

She looked up to see the cane-bottomed rocker next to the bedside and in it slumped the old woman, her chin on her chest, holding tightly to Granada’s hand.