The Healing

EPILOGUE





Today the living will surely outpopulate the dead. It is sociable weather, the kind that naturally draws people together. The dawn broke with the threat of rain, but it cleared off nicely. Now a procession of low billowy clouds wafts through the mid-August sky, mercifully capturing and holding the sun long enough to provide a steady succession of shady reprieves.

Folks are still climbing the ridge to the old burying grounds, leaving behind their mules and wagons and the occasional automobile strewn about the old plantation yard below. Women in their Sunday-best dresses kneel at gravesides pulling weeds, while their men carefully situate newly chiseled slabs of concrete or brush on new coats of whitewash to wooden crosses, sweat darkening the shoulders of their freshly boiled white shirts.

On the back side of the ridge a chorus of cheers rises up as two men set the last section of the low border fence. After a century, the burying place is now completely ringed in iron. The biggest portion of the fence is made up of the elaborate grillwork that had once adorned the mansion’s galleries, but the supply ran out and the back side was left unfinished. Earlier in the day, the great-grandson of Big Dante showed up with a truckload of rusted bedsteads. The fence will be so heavily swathed with honeysuckle by next Cemetery Day no one will be able to detect the slightest inconsistency in style.

As the day progresses, the grounds begin to take on the look of an overplanted garden. Syrup buckets, rusted enamel dishpans, and coffee cans brimming with plants and flowers of every imaginable color and fragrance are still being placed on the grave mounds. Overpowering the senses is the smell of lemon lilies mingling with fried chicken.

The old pine table was hauled up from the mansion’s kitchen and positioned in a shady grove of oaks and sweet gum. It is already laden with tubs of greens and ham hocks and potato salad, platters of every kind of meat, plates of corn bread and biscuits, pies and cakes and cobblers and puddings, everything covered with dish towels. Makeshift tables built by laying planks across stumps await the overflow. Women stand guard, shooing off the gathering storm of flies and hungry children with sharp flicks of their starched aprons.

Beyond the tables and deeper in the shade, the old ones sit in straight-backed chairs and favorite rockers toted up from the quarter, or hauled halfway across the county in the back of a mule-drawn wagon or pickup truck. The ground before them is a field of patterned quilts on which lie a small army of babies either drowsing or hypnotized by the pretty bits of silk and satin hanging from the branches of the shade tree, their gauzy edges tinged by fire, fluttering in the breeze like candied cobwebs.

A flock of giggling children race by, chased by a boy with a handful of ice stolen from beneath the burlap sacks. As they pass, a flurry of shushes and stern warnings not to trample across the graves “lest the devil burn your feet!” rise from among the grown-ups. The oldest voice breaks above the rest.

“Violet!” she fusses from her rocker. “Gather up all these little chicks, you hear? Get them to mind you.”

The slight girl with color-shifting eyes commences to corral the host of children. When she gets them quiet, she herds them about the graveyard like a master shepherd.

Her voice is as solemn as any preacher’s. “Now this is where Aunt Sylvie is buried. She made biscuits and dressed up Gran Gran when she was only a little girl.”

The children’s heads turn in unison to the old woman. With open mouths and wide eyes, they study the crooked lady in the rocking chair, as if trying to imagine such an ancient creature ever being a girl.

“Father Silas was her husband,” Violet continued, “but she stayed behind because she didn’t want to leave her kitchen. He’s the one who led the people to Kansas and was their first preacher and mayor both. He lived to be a hundred and three!”

Violet draws their attention with the wave of her hand to the silk tatters in the tree. “Them is the very dresses Gran Gran wore!” she exclaims in a voice that says she is as astonished as anybody to find them there, as if she hadn’t hung the scraps with her own two hands, somehow knowing that the sight would not only quiet the babies but charm the children. “That’s all that was left after the mistress set that terrible fire.”

A young woman big with child pauses at Gran Gran’s rocker. “Your girl sure got a way with the young ones. I reckon she could dose them with castor oil and they would say, ‘Thank you for the candy.’ ”

Gran Gran nods, but she knows Violet has a way with more than just children. Everyone here sees something in Violet, though they can’t name it yet. Even now as the girl leads the reverential procession from grave to grave, all eyes follow her, ears cock in her direction. The old ones raise up their chins and the chaws of tobacco are momentarily stilled in their cheeks.

It has been this way since that day Violet first stole off from Gran Gran and wandered down into Shinetown, bubbling with the stories she collected from her mother and from Gran Gran, quilting together the history of a scattered people.

She showed up at the doors of complete strangers, unembarrassed, twining threads of memory into rope, drawing folks one by one to the burying ground to see the graves of those long dead yet somehow familiar. Soon word of the stories spread across the county. Folk took trips to Kansas to visit. Today there is not a grave that goes unclaimed on Cemetery Day.

Violet’s voice seems to ride the cooling breeze as she travels from grave to grave, counting down ancestors. “This is my mother,” the girl says, stopping at Lucy’s grave. “Her momma was my Granny Cindy and her momma was Jolydia.” She pauses, letting that sink in. “And Jolydia was Charity the weaver’s miracle baby, saved by Polly Shine herself.”

The children murmur their amazement, whispering Polly Shine’s name like a charm, as if the old woman might appear before them at any moment.

“Don’t need me to tell any history,” Gran Gran laughs. “The girl’s doing fine.”

After Gran Gran rocks herself up from her chair, a sudden wooziness sets her to tottering. The pregnant woman reaches out, offering to steady the old woman. At first she waves off the assistance, but then reconsiders, taking hold of the woman’s arm.

Upon seeing Gran Gran being guided to the head of the old kitchen table, folks begin to draw near from all parts of the graveyard, calling out to one another, “It’s time! Gran Gran getting ready to do the history!”

As they gather to hear the old woman tell once more the story of Polly Shine, Gran Gran casts her gaze over the spectacle. Hundreds of faces, descended from a time and a place that only she could remember. She finds their eyes and whispers the names of those who have come before, and the multitude seems to grow, coursing toward her like a great flood.

She watches as the children elbow their way confidently through the crowd, surging up to the very front. The proud pretty girls: hair greased and plaited, twirling their starched skirts washed bright in rainwater, their eyes fresh and eager, expecting magic around every corner.

The bold-blooded boys: every shade of God under the sun, self-assured yet with faces fixed in innocent wonder. The Lord could show Himself at any second and they would see Him first, for He was already in their eyes.

They all press closer, each trying to stand near enough to touch the old woman, to feel her leathery hands, to know firsthand the tough-skinned fabric of eternity.

And then she begins. “They tell me my momma’s name was Ella.”





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS





Writing is not, as I once believed, a solitary effort. I relied on a community of experts to write this book. The collaborators who came to my aid as The Healing took shape were gracious, generous, and patient; and there are several I’d like to acknowledge by name.


Victoria E. Bynum, Ph.D., Professor Distinguished Emerita at Texas State University, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies, offered rare insight into the role gender played in the antebellum South.


Joanne Jones-Rizzi, a developer of the highly acclaimed “Race: Are We So Different?,” a national traveling exhibit sponsored by the American Anthropological Association, helped me to understand the artificiality of race and to see it as a social rather than a biological or genetic construct.


Dawn L. Martin, M.D., a pediatrician at the Hennepin County Medical Center, and her husband, Dr. Gregory T. Lehman, an internist at the Park Nicollet Medical Center, made themselves available to put into layman’s terms the medical science behind the conundrums that stalled my narrative.


Katherine E. Murray, M.D., at the University of Minnesota, is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician who taught me about the psychological impact of trauma on young children. Elise Sanders, a psychoanalyst and president of the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Society, was invaluable in validating for me the psychological and spiritual roles a healer can play.


Alice Swan, dean of the Department of Nursing at the College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota, made available her nurse teacher/practitioners, including specialists in midwifery, to read and respond to a draft of the book.


My dear friend Margaret Block from Cleveland, Mississippi, is a veteran civil rights worker who as a teenager in the sixties escaped the Klan by hiding in a coffin and being carried across the county line in a hearse. Her brother was the well-known activist Sam Block. Margaret drove me down dirt tracks, levee roads, and through cypress swamps to show me old sharecropper cabins and ancient slave quarters, and she introduced me to Mound Bayou, a Mississippi town built, occupied, and run by the ex-slaves of Jefferson Davis, all while teaching me the Freedom songs she sang with Fannie Lou Hamer during the “Movement.” She gave me a view of the Mississippi Delta that I could not have imagined on my own.


The late Mrs. Willie Turner, midwife of Midnight, Mississippi, served as a living, breathing, and exemplary model of a healer. After spending two hours with her one summer afternoon in 2002, I often drew from Mrs. Turner’s spirit, her compassion, and the fierce love and pride she had for her calling. She obviously adored “her babies,” all 2,063 of them, and they all adored her, still calling her “Mother” until her death at ninety-nine in 2010.


Two of my teachers were researchers whom I have never met but whose work I referred to so often that I feel they are old friends. One is Sharla Fett, who wrote the paradigm-shifting book Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations and who introduced me to the subversive role midwives and healers played during slavery.


The other is Todd Savitt. His two works, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia and Race & Medicine in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century America provided a lens through which to compare and contrast the way whites and blacks understood, responded to, and treated disease.


The treasure trove of documents and recordings made available by the folks at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage and by the Delta State University’s Capps Archives was indispensable, as was their enthusiasm for my project.


I relied extensively on the words of former slaves themselves, as recorded in the WPA Slave Narratives, the Fisk Collection of Slave Narratives, and oral histories of midwives from the twentieth century, including Onnie Lee Logan in her book Motherwit, An Alabama Midwife’s Story and Margaret Charles Smith, whose life is recounted in Listen to Me Good: The Story of an Alabama Midwife.


I’m blessed to know a number of very fine authors who also excel at editing. I am greatly indebted to the time they invested as well as to the tact they displayed in giving feedback to a writer with a very thin skin. They include my partner, Jim Kuether, C.M. Harris, Mary Gardner, Lindsay Nielsen, Pam Joern, Lee Galda, and Christopher Davis. (Oh, yes, at the moment I am writing these words, my eighty-three-year-old mom is in the next room checking the final draft for typos, just as she did when I was in the third grade. Luckily, some things never change.)


I also want to acknowledge my African American readers who had the task of letting me know whenever they could tell a white man was writing the book. They were patient with my naivety. Thanks to Maye Brooks and her book club and to Joanne Jones-Rizzi of the Minnesota Science Museum, and to my friend Merthlyn Collins.


I’m a committed introvert who needs to immerse himself in the story, with no distraction for extended periods of time, in order to be productive. Over the course of writing this book I have been fortunate to have several “cabin fairies” in my life. Thank you to the Martin-Lehman’s, the McGray-Forsyth’s, and to Rickie and John Ressler for loaning out your lovely vacation homes so that I could spend extended periods writing in the woods and on the seashore, listening to “the beasts and the fowls of the air.”


My agent, Marly Rusoff, and her partner, Michael Radulescu, are a pair of angels dropped to earth. For years I had admired their successes from afar but never believed that I could be fortunate enough to have them champion my work. When they said yes the route was short, quick, and painless to publisher Nan A. Talese and her editor, Ronit Feldman. These four have transformed my life.


And, finally, I want to thank all the Mississippi folks, black and white, who trusted me with your stories. For letting me onto your porches, into your kitchens, yards, and parlors; for showing me the old photographs, genealogies, and family Bibles; but, most of all, for letting me into your lives.





A NOTE TO THE READER





While my mother was giving birth to me in the little town of Laurel, Mississippi, Willie McGee, a black man, was being legally lynched only a few blocks away at the courthouse to the cheers of over a thousand white citizens. If you walked a bit north, you could spy the mansion a young Leontyne Price regularly helped her aunt clean, until the white lady of the house heard her sing and got her into Juilliard. And if you kept on walking to the other side of town, you might spy a respected businessman, Sam Bowers, the owner of Sambo’s Amusement Company, closing up shop. He was only a few years away from becoming the Imperial Wizard of the KKK of Mississippi Burning fame and charged with planning one of the bloodiest atrocities of the civil rights era.

Home sweet home.

But I knew none of these things until I was well into adulthood. Like most white citizens, I was isolated from the events and assumed they had nothing to do with me.

It shames me to admit that in the white-defined society in which I was raised, blacks were considered merely background. This was worse than physical segregation. This was psychological segregation. It wasn’t that we were taught not to associate with blacks: close association was unavoidable. Instead, we were taught to see half the population not as individuals but as functionaries—maids, yardmen, etc.

I distinctly remember the first time I was taught a lesson in bigotry. I was about eight and sitting under a tree in our backyard on a hot summer day. Over in the next yard I spotted an elderly black man in a flannel shirt, raking straw.

“Why are you wearing that hot shirt?” I asked. “Ain’t you burning up?”

He looked down at me and smiled. He explained that he wore the shirt because it made him sweat and when a breeze came up, it was like air conditioning.

As I mulled over the wisdom of his reply, his employer, an older white lady, approached us. Her name was Helen Callahan. I called her Miss Helen, not because she was unmarried, which she wasn’t, but because older white women were not addressed using either Mrs. or their last names. When they advanced past some unspoken age you just knew to address them using Miss and their given name. It’s part of the complex nomenclature of titling in the South.

As was typical of older southern women, Miss Helen felt obligated to shape every rough-edged boy within her purview into a southern gentleman. So besides teaching me various titles of respect, she told me to always say “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am,” never to talk with my mouth full, and to keep my elbows off the table. I loved Miss Helen dearly. She was one of the gentlest and most refined women I ever came across. To make her proud was my most noble ambition.

“What y’all doing out here?” she asked sweetly, joining her yardman and me.

Minding my manners and wanting to make her proud, I said, “I’m just talking to Mister Joe.”

Miss Helen knitted her brows and pursed her lips in a way that indicated I had been “unmannerly.”

“No, Johnny,” she said, “Joe’s not a mister. Joe’s a nigger.”

You may be shocked when you read this. After all, the vernacular is distasteful, if not abhorrent, nowadays. But this was 1959 Mississippi. And when it happened, I felt somehow relieved. Suddenly so much in my world made sense. In that moment I understood why there were certain water fountains that I was not supposed to drink out of. Why blacks had to eat their food from the café out in the alley. Why the shacks in the colored town had no paint and the roads had no pavement. It all made perfect sense. No longer did these conditions seem arbitrary. I finally understood that it was about color, and Joe’s color was “wrong” and mine was somehow “right.”

“Now, one day, Joe will call you mister,” Miss Helen went on, “but never the other way around.”

She was gazing sweetly at Joe. Her words had not been harsh nor her tone unkind. There was no villainy in what she believed, only the Christian truth. It was obvious she cared for Joe.

And Joe was also smiling pleasantly, nodding his head in agreement.

This was the way it was supposed to be, I thought, and it was just fine with everybody. It was indeed a fine thing to be a white boy in Mississippi! The silence of an entire race was evidence of your superiority.

Fast-forward a few decades to an April evening in 1988. I was living in Minnesota, on the more tolerant end of the Mississippi River. I had created a comfortable existence as a business consultant. I had come out as a gay man, a liberal, and an agnostic. I believed I had overcome all my prejudices and left my past behind.

That night PBS was running film clips from the civil rights movement in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. I had watched these scenes on the evening news when I was growing up in Mississippi—blacks marching down the middle of Main Street in some hot and dusty nearby town. I could smell the thick, humid air, the sweat. The dust prickled my nose.

But this time, as an adult, I saw something I had not noticed before. Instead of focusing on the marchers, I noticed the white people who lined the streets, throwing rocks, jeering, waving Confederate flags. My people. And again I studied the marchers.

For the first time I saw the whole picture. This is not black history, I thought. This is my history! And I know nothing about it. These people, white and black, and especially the unspoken space between us, made me who I am. Every day as a white man I shape and am shaped by race.

I remembered Joe and his silence and it was clear to me that I owed Joe a tremendous debt. I still can’t begin to fathom what his mandatory silence cost him that day, but I am beginning to understand how his invisibility was used to underwrite my sense of privilege and entitlement, to embellish my history. His dignity was the price extracted so that an eight-year-old child could feel superior.

I also became certain that I would never understand my own story until I discovered Joe’s. He and I held the missing pieces to each other’s narrative, and for our stories to be complete, one would need to include the other.

• • •

When I decided to write novels focusing on the racial divide, I got some good advice from a black friend. “Don’t you dare write another To Kill a Mockingbird,” he cautioned.

I was taken aback. I told him every “evolved” white person I knew loved that book.

“Exactly,” he said. “Self-respecting black folks hate it. Whites get to feel sorry for the poor, ignorant, and powerless black man. And conveniently put the blame on the white southern cracker. I’d rather your book be about a black scoundrel, just as long as he’s a full-blooded and complex human being. We don’t need any more victims for you white folks to feel sorry for. I don’t want my children to have to read one more book about a pitiful black man who needs saving by the white man.”

I went back home to Mississippi. I sought out African Americans who could introduce me anew to myself through their stories. I did countless interviews. I read books, listened to oral histories, pored over slave narratives, spent hours in the cellars of county courthouses. I collected all the broken pieces, all the missing links that I could find.

When The View from Delphi, my first novel, was published by a small press, Kirkus Reviews wrote, “Odell, an African American, is the rare writer on race who allows for a range of responses—and for the possibility of change.” (Italics mine.) I really hated to alert them to their mistake. To assume that I was a black man was the greatest compliment they could have paid me.

In this, my second novel, I wanted to delve even deeper into the shadowy world uneasily inhabited by both the black and white psyches. I specifically wanted to look at the black midwife. During my research I had interviewed several elderly ladies who had “caught” thousands of children in their communities. I learned that midwifing served spiritual and communal functions as much as a physical one. Midwives could trace their practices back through Jim Crow, through slavery, and all the way to Sierra Leone and Temne tribal practices.

Their occupational demise began in the 1950s when the white medical establishment orchestrated a campaign to discredit midwives in order to make way for government-funded public health services. In other words, when it became once again profitable for white men to touch black flesh, the midwives had to go. They were portrayed in medical journals and state legislatures as dirty, ignorant, and superstitious abortionists. When the medical establishment required that they be licensed, many were forced to “turn in their bags” because they could not read. A category of “nurse midwives” was created to work under the direct supervision of a doctor.

The midwives I spoke with were gracious, proud, and spiritual, saddened to have been barred from their calling and eager to have someone listen to their story—not the official white story that vilified them. After I discovered that the live-birth rates among these “uneducated” black women were higher than those of the white doctors who replaced them, I knew I needed to write their story.

Serendipitously, I discovered something about my own family history that fueled my desire to write.

My grandfather lived to be ninety-seven, but just before he died he called his estranged son, my father, to his bedside. “I think it’s time I told you about your mother,” Papa Johnson said. My dad was then in his seventies.

We had all been told that my dad’s mother died of pneumonia in 1927, when my father was only an infant. But that wasn’t the truth.

In the nursing home that morning Papa explained that when my father was six months old, his mother, Bessie, planned to take her child and run away with him. But then she found out she was pregnant again. She had sworn she would never have another child by my abusive grandfather, whom she had come to despise, and so she went to her stepmother, my great-grandmother, who happened to be a midwife. Big Sal performed an abortion on her daughter, from which Bessie contracted blood poisoning and died. My father was left motherless.

Big Sal went on to help raise my father, whose mother she had had a hand in killing. My father loved her dearly and never learned the truth until seventy years had passed.

I began to wonder, what could it have been like for my great-grandmother to have that child reach out for her, the same woman who was responsible for his mother’s death?

And then there was a third element that intrigued me. Can stories about which we are not consciously aware still serve to shape our lives?

The fear of betrayal by the ones you love most, whether by death or deceit, was never talked about in my family, but it affected at least three generations of men. It is the genesis of our common unwillingness to be truly vulnerable before one another, especially those we love. It explains the high premium my family places on self-sufficiency, on never relying on others for help.

The repression of story can scar the soul.

But knowing our common story can heal. My father, my brothers, and I have learned to connect with an understanding and compassion that was not available to us before. We recognize ourselves in one another.

Through writing The Healing and by stitching together my own family history, I have discovered the truth in the old saying “Facts can explain us, but only story will save us.”

If you want to destroy a people, destroy their story. If you want to empower a people, give them a story to share.





A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Odell is the author of the acclaimed novel The View from Delphi, which deals with the struggle for equality in pre–civil rights Mississippi, his home state. His short stories and essays have appeared in numerous collections. He spent his business career as a leadership coach to Fortune 500 companies and currently resides in Minnesota.