The Healing

Chapter 50





For a long time after the story, Gran Gran said nothing, while Violet studied the old woman’s face.

Finally the girl asked, “What happened then?”

“Nothing much,” Gran Gran answered too quickly. “No,” she laughed to herself, “you come along. That’s what happened.”

The girl still looked at Gran Gran, waiting. She could tell Violet was confused, but this was where it had to stop. Gran Gran had decided to give the girl a happy ending. She deserved at least that. Sometimes, in spite of what Polly said, a person needs to be protected from memory.

“I didn’t work as many miracles as they say Polly Shine did. But I did all right. Polly trained me real good.”

“But you still missing her,” Violet said.

“Missing who?”

“Polly Shine. Is that why you crying?”

Gran Gran reached up and touched her face. She had found herself doing this quite often since Violet’s arrival, crying without realizing it, as if something inside was trying to free itself, like when Polly would place the flat of her hand against Gran Gran’s chest.

But this had to stop, as well.

The girl was getting better and she would soon be moving on. One day they would open a suitcase. They would begin to pull out the girl’s stories, one by one. She would remember an uncle she loved. Then they would come across an address and that would be that. Gran Gran would go back to days of nothing. Being needed would just be a thing to miss. The girl would be another.

“I plum run out of stories, Violet.”

“Ain’t no more faces?” Violet asked, clearly disappointed.

“We done took ever last one off the wall.” Then Gran Gran said carefully, “Maybe it’s time we heard some of your stories. You got a story to tell?”

Violet smiled and nodded. “But first you got to show me how,” Violet said.

“Show you what?”

“How to make the faces, so I can tell you a story.”

“You mean you want to copy a mask after somebody?” Gran Gran asked.

“But I can’t tell who. It’s a surprise. For you.”

At first Gran Gran resisted. It would mean hiking down to the clay bank where she and Polly used to go together, then Gran Gran alone.

She told Violet she was too old and tired.

Of course there was a time she wouldn’t think a thing of walking twenty miles or getting on her mule and riding all over the county on the road and off, delivering and tending. She owned the countryside back then. But nowadays, the old woman hardly ever left her kitchen. The Choctaw twins with their mules and wagon called on her regular and took her lists of dwindling needs.

And besides, a trip to that stretch of the creek would mean going near Shinetown.

“Maybe you can draw it for me,” Gran Gran suggested.

But the girl insisted. It had to be like Gran Gran’s. “You told me you’d teach me how, Gran Gran,” she begged. “Like Mother Polly did you.”

Yes, Polly would go. The girl had found a thread, a way back, and in the end, Polly would never refuse the journey.

As they made their way across the damp field, the girl carried the empty molasses can and Gran Gran stabbed the ground with her cane, ever wary of snakes and strangers. The old woman resisted the urge to grasp Violet by the hand and place palm against palm, beating heart against beating heart. The gesture might be a comfort to Gran Gran, but it would greatly disturb Violet. She wasn’t ready yet. At least Gran Gran had been right about that much. It would be the last thing to heal. Violet’s hands were where her darkness had finally settled. It would empty soon enough.

The walk was longer than it had to be. Cutting through Shinetown would have been quicker, but that was a place the old woman swore she would never set foot again. What used to be the old slave quarters had been fixed up, several of the cabins now occupied by descendants of house slaves who had never left the plantation. As far as Gran Gran was concerned, the place was haunted. Ghosts of the Old Ones, trapped in the eyes of strangers, inhabited the settlement now.

Gran Gran would circle through hell and back to avoid those folks. It was their soul-sick eyes she dreaded.

Of course there once was a time when she was recognized and loved by everyone who lived there. They all needed her. Said they couldn’t do without her. They said she had the sight. A few old heads compared her to somebody called Polly Shine, a long-ago miracle-working woman they swore had really lived, once upon a time.

The younger ones listened respectfully but didn’t believe in all that old-time foolishness. Gran Gran didn’t notice the contempt in their eyes, didn’t notice how embarrassed they were by anything that reminded them that they came from slaves.

When they grew up and had families of their own, they fell out of the habit of sending for the old woman. They bought the new patent medicines and listened to the educated folks who warned of the old woman’s unsanitary ways. Mothers became wary of her slave-time birthing methods. Preachers called her out from the pulpit, claiming she was using root magic on people. She was not defended. Everybody had heard of her, but there was no one who knew her.

Her days eventually became as empty as her massive hands, as if time had been nothing but a fistful of sand. There was seldom any sleep, and when there was, there were no dreams. She would walk the old plantation yard day and night, down past the stump of the ancient live oak where she had once played marbles, along the footpath that ran by the ruins of Polly’s old hospital, and then off into the woods, searching for something that had gone missing but whose name she could not remember.

Once, while trudging down the track, she had been startled by something she saw in a child’s face: eyes belonging to an ancient time. Some grandfather or great-grandmother of the child looked right into her, but she couldn’t name who it was. She had fled back to her hearth, out of breath, her panicked heart racing in her chest, trying to remember who it was peering at her across the ages. She recited the old names like a chant—“Lizzie, Sylvie, Silas, Chester, Pomp …”—trying to picture each one in her mind, asking them, “Is it you?” Those eyes stalked her for days.

She had returned to the place by the creek where she and Polly had scooped clay, and hauled basketfuls back to the kitchen. She spent weeks molding the clay, recalling the old faces with her fingers. She fired them and painted the eyes and skin and replicated the hair with moss and string and cotton, coaxing the dead to reveal their secrets.

What was it they wanted? What was it she was supposed to remember? But the answer never came. Gran Gran refused to tell Violet a story with such an ending.

• • •

The old woman and the girl arrived at the clay bank without coming across a soul from Shinetown. Tired from the walk, Gran Gran found a log on which to sit and issue directions while Violet did the back-work, stooping and digging, filling the bucket with wet clay.

“Did Aunt Sylvie miss Father Silas?” she asked, as she labored with the big soupspoon.

“Who?”

“Father Silas.”

“I never called him that. You must be thinking of Mother Polly. I told you how everybody picked up on saying that. But they called Silas ‘Old Silas.’ ”

“But he didn’t like it,” Violet said expertly as she tapped a spoonful of yellow clay into the bucket. “He wanted to be called Father.”

Gran Gran laughed. “I reckon you getting healthy enough to make up your own story, then.”

“How come Aunt Sylvie didn’t go with him?” Violet asked.

“Sylvie said he tried to talk her into going, spent two days begging, but she wouldn’t leave the kitchen. Funny, she hated the mistress, but she sure loved her kitchen.”

Gran Gran smiled, understanding now. “I guess Sylvie thought that’s where she beee-longed, like Polly would say. After Freedom, everybody all of a sudden had to decide where they belonged. Nobody to tell them no more. Wasn’t easy for some of us.” She smiled sadly. “Some of us picked wrong, I reckon.”

As the morning passed and the easy back-and-forth between Violet and Gran Gran continued, the woman found herself unaccountably content. The rhythm was familiar, an old woman overseeing a young girl’s work, the fluid intimacy earned between teacher and student. It was comforting, she thought, like the unconscious ticking of the head to the cadence of a secret verse.

So when Violet asked Gran Gran if they could walk through Shinetown on the way back, for the first time in years the idea did not bring up the dread that had kept the old woman away.

“Why do you want to see Shinetown?” she asked Violet.

“We can see if Chester is home,” she said.

Gran Gran laughed. “Violet, Chester is long dead.”

“Oh,” the girl said, like she was sad to hear the news. Violet considered this and then ran her hand over her yellow head scarf. She turned toward the rise where the slave graveyard lay hidden in overgrowth, frowned, and then scraped another spoonful of clay. Gran Gran could tell the girl was still struggling with the idea.

“Chester up in that graveyard?” Violet asked after a short while.

“Yes, I put him there myself. Aunt Sylvie, too. She was the last.”

“All those people … up there,” she said, casting her gaze in the direction of the old burying ground again, “they in boxes like my momma, ain’t they?”

“Some of them got boxes.” Gran Gran fought hard not to take the reins, letting the girl take this at her own pace.

“Some ain’t?”

“No, some ain’t,” Gran Gran answered truthfully, now thinking of how Master Ben had tossed Rubina in a hole like a dog. “Don’t even know if my momma got one or not. But your momma does for sure.”

Violet nodded and looked up to catch Gran Gran’s eye. “I know,” the girl said. “I reckon I seen it. My daddy’s, too.”

Not a minute later the girl was chattering away again, as if they had not just had their first conversation about her mother. Gran Gran was once more struck by how a person goes about healing themselves, if you let them. Polly had preached it over and over, but when it happened, it always struck Gran Gran as curious that more magic wasn’t involved.

When the bucket was full and they were ready to depart, Gran Gran was surprised to find herself looking forward to walking through the settlement. She would not be alone this time. She would be with Violet.

The first houses came into view, but still the old dread did not raise its head. Gran Gran kept right on walking and talking with the girl, lulled by the ease she was feeling with Violet, bound by the stories they now shared.

For the first time in many years, Gran Gran stepped onto the lane. She knew that people were beginning to notice, coming out to their porches to watch, but being with the girl, the old woman didn’t feel their stares.

The girl became more animated. She began asking questions about who lived in each house, pointing this way and that, looking shamelessly into the perplexed faces surrounding them. She asked how each one was kin to the characters in the old lady’s stories. She made Gran Gran recite entire family trees.

As they cut between two cabins to return to the mansion, a pinch-faced boy standing on the porch, watching them pass, called out, “Look, Momma. It’s that old witch.”

From behind her, Gran Gran heard the sharp slap of the woman’s hand against the child’s face, and then words of indignation hurled at the wailing boy. “You leave her alone, you hear? She’s crazy!”

Gran Gran stopped walking and turned back to look. The woman and her pinch-faced son had disappeared into their house.

“Who they meaning, Gran Gran?” Violet asked. “Who’s crazy?”

“Me,” the old woman answered flatly. “They meaning me. I’m the one they calling crazy.”

The blood rushed to Gran Gran’s face and she picked up her pace, not answering any more of the girl’s questions.

“Hush now,” Gran Gran said, no longer understanding Violet’s words. “We got to get back. We been out too long already.”

Maybe she wasn’t crazy, but she had been an old fool. Tricking herself into thinking for a moment that Violet was hers to raise up, to train in the old ways, as Polly had done her. She wasn’t Polly, and Violet wasn’t her apprentice. Polly was dead and gone and Gran Gran would soon follow. All of it would be forgotten. She would be the last.

Ahead Gran Gran gazed at the mansion. The master said it had taken six years, a hundred and fifty slaves, a Philadelphia architect, and a genius of a water-shifter to build it high and dry.

But now it appeared to Gran Gran like one of those monstrous beasts out of Revelations, lowering itself for its last drink of fetid water. For a century the creek had eaten its way up to the doorstep, long ago swallowing the front gardens and washing out the winding drive where those wealthy planters and their well-bred ladies had stepped from fancy carriages onto the graveled surface.

She knew the creek would never stop searching for its old bed, gnawing its way farther and farther into the rotting mansion, until it finally reclaimed the entire foundation.

Even now, as she neared the house, it seemed to tilt a little more toward the hungry current.