The Healing

Chapter 52





When Gran Gran at last returned to the kitchen, the room had gone dark. “Violet?” she called, but there was no response. She shouldn’t have left her for so long. “Violet,” she called, her voice panicked, “where are you?”

Gran Gran reached for the lantern next to the door and almost tripped on the suitcase at her feet. It was lying open. Violet must have pulled it out.

The fear notched tighter around her chest. She raised the lantern and saw that the girl was still at the table. Her head was down, resting on the tabletop.

Gran Gran began to breathe again, her heart still racing.

The yellow scarf was hung carefully on the back of a kitchen chair. In front of the girl was a molded face, but nobody Gran Gran recognized. Tomorrow she would show the girl how to do the eyes and shape the features with the flat of a knife and trowel.

Spread about Violet’s head on the table were dozens of photographs. That’s what she had taken from the suitcase, probably looking for faces to copy.

Gran Gran reached for the framed photograph she had already seen, the one taken at Lucy’s wedding. She tried to remember the day Lucy came seeking her help.

She was so beautiful and again Gran Gran noticed the resemblance to Violet. The almond-shaped eyes. The small mouth. If the man in uniform was Violet’s father, it made sense. He was much darker than Lucy. Again, she wondered, who is it Lucy favors? It wouldn’t come to her.

As she looked at the photograph, for the first time she drew her eyes to the background, what appeared to be the front of a church. There was a pulpit behind the couple, and on the wall hung three paintings in elaborate frames. It took a moment, but holding the picture up real close, she recognized the middle one as Jesus praying in Gethsemane.

“They got him painted as a colored man!” Gran Gran gasped. She had never seen such before and began to chuckle to herself, wishing to visit a church like that.

Her eyes strained at the portrait on the left, wondering who else they might have claimed as one of their own. But this man was very dark, and very, very old. A black beardless Moses, maybe?

“Hmm,” she mused. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that looks like Old Silas!” She shook her head. “I reckon I’ve lived long enough to say most of us old folks look pretty much alike.”

Violet yawned and then lifted her head from the table. Rubbing her eyes, she said, “You seen what I done?” Then she pointed to the face. “Want to guess who it is?”

Gran Gran studied the face, but couldn’t say it looked like anyone in particular.

“I’ll tell you. It’s Charity. You didn’t have her up on your wall. I’m making her for you.”

“Charity?” Gran Gran asked. “Charity who?”

“You know! Charity and Barnabas, who went off with Mother Polly.”

“Charity,” Gran Gran said again. “How you know what Charity looks like?”

Violet picked up a tintype from where her head had been resting earlier. “See?” she said holding it up. It was of an old woman sitting in a chair with a man standing beside her, one hand placed firmly on her shoulder. She was old, yes, but merciful heavens, it very well could be Charity! And the man standing over her, was that Barnabas, the carpenter?

She looked at the unfinished piece of clay but saw no resemblance. The resemblance was in the girl herself.

Gran Gran grew unsteady on her feet, not knowing if she wanted to stay, sit, or run.

She held the lantern over the table and illuminated the photographs. Families gathered in the churchyard at dinners on the ground. A brick bank building. In front were rich-looking colored men wearing suits and high-collar shirts. A photograph of a few dozen youngsters sitting on schoolhouse steps flanked by several prim-looking women—everyone colored. A city hall, and lined up in two rows for the photographer, elegant-looking colored men and women. She had heard of towns like these. Colored towns. Out West.

“But I know these people,” she said. “I see somebody in every face.”

She looked back at the wedding portrait she still held in her hand. When she went to examine the third portrait, on the far right, the old woman’s hand began to shake.

“No,” she gasped. “That can’t be.”

The portrait was partially obscured by the shadow of the couple, but Gran Gran could distinctly make out the round disks that fell from the woman’s wrapped scarf onto her forehead.

“No,” she said again, and shook her head, refusing to believe. “My Lord, Polly, is that really you?”

“Mother Polly,” Violet said. “And Father Silas.”

“These pictures …” Gran Gran stammered. “All these pictures. This town and all these colored—”

“Where my momma come from. I ain’t never been. She showed me the pictures at night and told me the stories. Like you done with the faces.” She laughed. “Y’all tell some of the same stories.”

“Who are you?” Gran Gran asked, dazed now.

“I’m Violet,” the girl answered, suddenly concerned. “You know who I am. Don’t you remember?”

“What game you pulling on me?” Gran Gran now hovered over the girl, her voice frantic. “You taking me for a fool?”

“No, ma’am. I … don’t know.”

Gran Gran held the lantern to the girl’s face. The light flickered in her moistening eyes. “You lying!”

But her eyes weren’t lying. The mournful hazel eyes. Those were Charity’s eyes. The small troubled mouth. It was Charity, and with her name came snatches of memory … Charity, the weaver … never able to have a child … the apple fell green from the tree … until Polly …

“I ain’t lying!” Violet cried. She pulled away from Gran Gran’s panicked anger, and then shielded her hands behind her back. “Why you so mad with me?” she whimpered. “I wanted to surprise you is all!”

Gran Gran struggled to catch her breath. She could see as clear as crystal that day in the hospital. She remembered the words Polly had spoken to Charity. “Your sons and daughters, your blood will lead the people home.” And then Polly asking Granada to put her hand on Charity’s belly. “What lies under your hand is all of us, Granada. It’s where we are going. This child comes from the place where the river is born.”

“You’re Charity’s blood,” the old woman said in barely a whisper.

The kitchen had become as close as a coffin. From the masks and photographs on the table, one face broke through the darkness like a bubble rising in water, glowing in its own light, the disks gleaming, like the first day she had seen her.

“No,” Gran Gran muttered, shaking her head against the thought. It couldn’t be.

Gran Gran stepped back from the host of faces. She eyed the girl again.

“Polly send you?” Gran Gran asked, her voice raspy. “What she want from me?”

The girl looked at the woman. “I don’t know Mother Polly. She’s dead and buried … next to that church.” Violet motioned with her head to the framed photograph the old woman still held.

Gran Gran shut her eyes. “No! This ain’t nothing but lies.”

The old woman was terrifying the girl and she knew it. She had to get away from Violet. She fled to the porch, stumbling, not wanting to see or hear. Tears brimmed behind her lids, and her breath was short, strangled, like a steel band was tightening around her chest.

A vision of Polly’s little town blazed in her inner eye. Neat white cottages with roses and sunflowers and vegetable gardens out back. Neighbors calling to one another over fences. Children in the streets. So much life! In a great sweep of vision she saw them laughing and crying in each other’s arms; and marrying and bearing children and comforting one another and growing old together; grieving and burying one another and then beginning again.

She let go a great shuddering sob. “Why did you leave me?” Gran Gran covered her eyes with a trembling hand.

The chill night wind carried the sounds of her plea over the empty yard and across the quarter, but no one lit their lanterns to see what ancient heart was breaking. Her ragged cry drifted over the graveyards that hugged tight their silent dead and fluttered through a primeval forest, taking the last leaves of the hardwoods and scattering them over the souls that once had been rooted there. It rippled the surface of the yellow-mud creek, below which lay drowned a secret name that had not been called in seventy years.

The old woman at last opened her eyes and dared to look across the darkened yard. Staring back at her were hundreds of faces, women, men, children, and at once she knew each one of them, their names and their fears and their hopes. The night was full of shining eyes, unblinking, looking up at her, wanting.

There was a great uprushing in her throat and she cried aloud, “You were my people!”

Gran Gran began to quake. It was not just skin and muscle, but something had set her bones to trembling, as if the earth had shuddered. Her cane went rattling down the steps and Gran Gran, unable to bear the weight any longer, crumpled to the porch floor.

She was not aware of how much time had passed before she lifted her head to the velvet star-filled sky. Behind her she heard the careful footsteps, and then felt a hand, small and chilled, take her own. The grasp was tentative but then gathered strength as it warmed like an oven brick, until the girl’s grip was as sure and strong as any the old woman could remember, the heat soothing her ancient sorrow like a salve.

The revelation was neither blinding nor thunderous.

Polly Shine had remembered.