The Healing

Chapter 7





Violet woke to the distant muttering of voices. This happened almost nightly since the day of her arrival, after the old lady had put out the light and gone to bed. As the girl did the other times, she carefully pushed back the covers and rose from her cot.

She had come to think that there might be other people living in this house, and at night they gathered in some room beyond the kitchen to talk with one another. Perhaps they knew the whereabouts of her mother.

She walked barefoot across the cold plank floor into the moon-drenched kitchen. The old woman lay snoring in the bed next to the boarded-over hearth. Too slight to call forth the creaking of the floorboards, Violet soundlessly crossed the room in the direction of the voices. They seemed to come from behind the far wall, where the tattered remnant of an old damask curtain hung. It was nailed up high and dropped nearly to the floor. On every other night, when she had gotten this far, the voices ceased. Tonight, they grew louder. Violet pulled back the drapery and there it was, the door that held back the sounds, shut tight.

The girl put her ear to a cold panel of white pine. From somewhere in the distance a dog belled out and others answered. Perhaps they were hearing what she heard.

Even standing on the tips of her toes, the latch was out of her reach. She quietly eased a chair over to the door. From its height, she lifted the little metal hook from its eye and then pushed, not reacting to the rusty creak. A fetid rush of air greeted her. It was the sharp, musty odor of things shut up for too long.

She climbed down from the chair and haltingly entered the unlit passageway. The planks beneath her feet were icy and the floor sloped downward, urging her forward through the narrow bricked hallway. Waiting for her at the end of the passageway was another door, this one open.

She entered a room as vast as nighttime, only there were no stars above her. She stood stock-still as her eyes adjusted to the light.

To her left was a succession of floor-to-ceiling windows, covered from the inside with immense slatted shutters, some partially covered with heavy drapes, identical to the damask panel that hung in the kitchen.

Directly before her was a seemingly endless table, extending into the inky blackness beyond. The whispering now was all around her. Hundreds of voices, some saying her name, some uttering sounds she did not know as words but could feel their meanings—happy, afraid, angry, sad.

Something on the table drew her attention. When she looked down and saw what it was, she let out a strangled cry.

A pair of glowing eyes peered back at her in a wide, petrified stare. Next two dark nostrils emerged from the void, and a large mouth smiled up at her.

The face remained frozen.

Violet found her breath and screamed, and kept screaming until she heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and a light bloomed from behind.

“Violet! What you doing in here?”

The girl turned and threw herself into the old woman’s arms, shivering from the sight.

Violet’s embrace caught Gran Gran off guard. It had been so long since anyone had sought her out with such fervor, with such desperate need.

“It’s nothing to be a’scared of, Violet,” Gran Gran said. “Look a’here.”

She held the lantern over the face on the table. Violet peeked through the tiny slits between her lids. When she saw, she carefully reached out to touch it. The surface was smooth and cold and solid, not fleshy at all. It was clay! A face molded of clay and baked hard.

Gran Gran raised the lantern and threw the flickering light against the wall. “And here, Violet.”

The girl gasped. All down the wall there were other faces, dozens of them, each different, some smiling, some frowning, some looked as if they were about to say something, others like they had been startled awake, others still asleep. Some had coarse, patchy heads of hair made from moss and string. Rows and rows of them. There were too many to count.

“Nothing to be scared of. Only dried mud,” Gran Gran laughed, “just like me!”

The girl seemed calm now, but she still shivered.

“You ought be in bed,” the old woman fussed. “You not well yet and you and me both in our naked feet.”

The girl didn’t respond, her eyes still taking in the wall of faces.

When Gran Gran took the girl by the shoulder to lead her to the kitchen, she drew back and then reached for the edge of the table. She was making a stand. Since the night she had arrived, this was the first thing the girl had shown an interest in.

“You want to stay? You want to study these faces?” Gran Gran ventured. “Maybe one of them favors somebody you remember?” she asked hopefully.

The girl’s eyes scanned the wall, shifting from face to face.

After a long while, Gran Gran said, “I don’t know what you want to hear about. But I’ll just tell you what you looking at. How’s that?”

The girl turned to Gran Gran, her expression expectant, like a child eager to be taken by a tale.

“Since I’m going to have to do the talking for both of us, let me see what’s something a little girl might ask.” She studied Violet, making out like she could read the girl.

“Now, if I was you, I might ask, ‘Where all them silly faces come from?’ And I would say back to the girl what asked, ‘I made them every one with my own two hands. Dug the clay and fired them in that very fireplace in that very kitchen.’ ”

Gran Gran paused, waiting for the girl’s reaction. Her head tilted upward at the old woman, as if intent on hearing every word.

“And then you might ask, ‘Are them real folks?’ And I would say, ‘Yes, they real people. Knew ever soul.’ ” Gran Gran smiled. “I’m nearly ninety years old. That’s why I needed me a whole wall.”

The girl nodded, almost imperceptibly.

Gran Gran continued. “You see, a long time ago I was thinking it might help cut down on my forgetting. I figured if I could get all their faces in one place, I could remember them better.” Gran Gran shook her head at the silliness of the idea. “Like I said, mostly foolishness.” She looked carefully at Violet. “Forgetting got its place, I reckon.”

Gran Gran held the lantern over the table, illuminating a face sporting a wide grin and a set of perfect white teeth. “Now like this one. The one that scared you. This is Chester. He was the driver for Mistress Amanda. When I was a girl like you. Chester, now he loved to tell riddles. When he weren’t telling riddles, he was polishing the brass buttons on his coachman’s coat. He was proud of them buttons. Chester!” Gran Gran said, addressing the mask. “Like you to meet my friend Violet.” Gran Gran nodded at the mask and waited, as if for a response. She turned to the girl. “Violet, Chester say he glad to make your acquaintance and to forgive him for putting a fright in you.”

There it was! Gran Gran definitely discerned a smile on the girl’s face. And the shivering had ceased.

Gran Gran carried the lantern over to the wall. “Now this giant of a man with a nose as big as a housecat, he called Big Dante.” Gran Gran laughed at the memory of him. “Big Dante could pick six hundred pounds of cotton a day. Had fingers tough as hawks’ feet. Most gentle man with children I ever seen.

“Next to him we got Aunt Sylvie. The cook.” The face was plump and stern. “She helped lay the bricks for her own fireplace when this wasn’t nothing but swamp. The very same one in the kitchen today. And she cooked up a storm back there. Nobody never made biscuits like Aunt Sylvie.”

Gran Gran sniffed the air and then laughed in wonderment. “I could swear I smell them biscuits right this minute. Lord, ain’t it strange how the memory can play tricks on you!”

The expression on Violet’s face was rapt, even hungry. But for what? For her words? For the tales of folks long dead? Polly used to say that it was the people’s story that kept them bound one to another. Everybody holds their own thread.

“Stories!” Gran Gran laughed. “It’s the stories you needing, ain’t it? Well, you come to the right place. All these faces got a tale. Like this one!” She moved on to a mask that appeared to have a fresh coat of whitewash. “That be Mistress Amanda herself,” Gran Gran said shaking her head. “She up there in the Satterfield burying ground. ‘Long with her babies.” Gran Gran chuckled. “Now she was a mess. She even got a vault for her monkey. He’s buried right next to her. Her precious daughter on one side and that monkey on the other and her boy at her feet.

“Now if I was you, I wouldn’t believe a word I just said. But I ain’t lying!” Gran Gran exclaimed.

“Satterfield family burying ground is what you call exclusive. It just for white folks and monkeys.” She laughed again. “Slaves, they buried by themselves. Neither one nothing but bramble now. Satterfields all dead and after Freedom, colored started burying at their churches. Nobody left to tend no graves.”

Gran Gran breathed deeply and scanned the wall. Almost to herself she said, “I guess I’m the last one left to carry these tales. I used to come in here and study these folks. Even talk to them. But they never said nothing back. So I let them be. Let the dead bury the dead and dust to dust.”

Violet pointed to the wall.

Gran Gran smiled. That was almost as good as a word. “Which one, baby? This one?”

The old woman carefully lifted a mask off the wall and for a moment studied the face with pointed cheekbones and eyes the color of sunlit amber. “This is the one I spent most of my time on. Trying to bring her back, I reckon.”

Gran Gran had perfectly replicated the head scarf lined with the beaten disks of brass. She held it up to the light so the girl could see how the metal shone like yellow moons. “I used Chester’s old coat buttons to make it.”

The girl was smiling now, holding her hands out. Gran Gran gave it to Violet to hold.

“Yes, ma’am. You got good taste in people, Violet. You went straight to the biggest bug of them all. Polly Shine. But to really know her, you need to know how things were before she showed up to turn them all upside down.”