The Healing

Chapter 49





By the time Freedom arrived, people all over the county had come to depend on Granada’s doctoring. She traveled in her own buggy and on the back of her own mule, crisscrossing the swamps and the fields, making a good life for herself as a midwife, delivering more babies than anybody in the history of Hopalachie County, white or black. Her love for catching babies only grew.

The children she had delivered, when they were old enough to speak, called her Gran Gran. By the time she was twenty, everybody in three counties had heard of Gran Gran Satterfield, the big-boned woman with hands large enough to span a good-size watermelon and strong enough to slap a bull cross-eyed, but gentle enough to nestle a sleeping baby in her palm.

They said nobody was better with a difficult delivery. Her hands always knew exactly what to do. “But don’t expect to find out nothing else about her,” they said. “That woman is all business.”

She grew to be a large, dark-skinned, stern-faced woman, appealing at first sight, but the men she came across didn’t know what to make of a woman like her, a woman who acted like she had no need of them.

Granada did go on to marry a man named Luster Canary. Besides a pretty name, he had skin the color of parlor-room mahogany and a penchant for roaming—and was in need of a steady source of funds to do so. She didn’t care. What she wanted was to bear a child, a little girl to raise around the very same hearth that had illuminated her earliest memories. Granada would teach her daughter everything she had learned. The girl would take her mother’s place when she became too old to mount a mule at midnight. But after years of hoping and trying, she finally gave up on Luster ever giving her a baby. She was more relieved than pained when one day her pretty husband didn’t come home. The only thing she kept was his name.

After Luster there were other men, but she was never able to birth a baby of her own. The woman who knew every lullaby there ever was never got to sing one to her own child.

There were plenty of people who needed her and that’s what mattered. Their pains and miseries, spoken and unspoken, filled her days, and her days filled her years. She was as happy as a person had a right to be. The sights and sounds of birthing occupied her senses and the busyness kept a certain nagging uneasiness at bay, a vague memory of something she had once let go of, dismissed before she had even learned to say its name. The remembering was as fine as a silken thread and as faint as a word whispered upon a breeze. It was as sure as the turning of a face to its beloved.