The Healing

Chapter 9





Aunt Sylvie hurried from the smokehouse, gripping a leg of mutton like an ax. She called out to Granada, “Master Ben going to be here most any minute, and he got that miracle slave with him! I seen the dust rising up along the levee. Bound to be them.”

Granada was at that moment shooting marbles with Little Lord under the live oak. She was as curious as anybody to see what this slave from up the country looked like. It had been all anyone had talked about for weeks. But she wasn’t curious enough to lose her precious marbles to the master’s boy. The blond-headed cheater was at that moment positioning himself for his next shot.

As she passed under the tree, Sylvie fussed at Granada. “I told you to get that boy cleaned off! Master come home to Little Lord looking pig-dirty and you’ll be the one to catch the feathers for sure.”

Granada still didn’t answer.

Sylvie huffed and then continued her lope toward the kitchen, calling out over her shoulder, “I ain’t got time to fool with you, gal. Don’t blame me when you get the strap.”

That particular threat carried no weight with Granada. The mistress wouldn’t allow Master Ben to harm her.

Granada kept both eyes glued to the red-clay marble in Little Lord’s tight fist, watching him knuckle down for his shot. He was the worst marble-cheater in the world, and she could tell right then from the way his alabaster cheeks had reddened, his mind was clearly on just that.

“Look!” Little Lord shouted. “The bull got loose!”

Granada swung her gaze toward the barn, and as soon as she did, Little Lord reached over and dropped his marble into the duck hole instead of knuckle-shooting it like he was supposed to. But he had not been fast enough. Granada whacked the boy upside the head with the flat of her hand. His face clouded and then he took off running for the great house, threatening to tell his mother.

Granada was quick on his heels. “Master Little Lord, you better not tell on me or I’ll yank a knot in your noggin for sure!”

She meant it. Granada knew she wasn’t supposed to be nasty to the boy, but sometimes she didn’t know what got into her. When he acted so full of the devil, she couldn’t resist being mean. It did her spirits good to take a whack at him every once in a while. And sometimes that yellow-headed, blue-eyed boy was just too pretty for his own good.

Little Lord had made it up the stairs and onto the gallery when he stopped dead in his tracks. “Daddy’s home!” he shouted, and then ran to the railing, pointing off in the distance. “And he’s got the bought slave with him!”

This time he wasn’t fooling. Granada looked in the direction the boy was pointing and saw a storm of dust rising off the Delphi road. The master was riding out ahead of the roiling cloud on his black horse. Granada sucked in her breath at the sight. She loved to see the master ride, switching his whip, making that big-blooded stallion fly, its muscles sleek and sweaty and pulsing, all shiny and beautiful and sassy. She wondered how the master managed to keep his seat with a horse so fast its hooves were nothing but a blur of motion and dust.

Coming up close behind was a speeding wagon, driven by what she first took to be an old woman because of the two long black plaits of hair dangling from beneath a beat-up felt hat. Then Granada second-guessed herself. It couldn’t be a woman. The driver handled the four-mule wagon like a man, spitting tobacco off the side of the wheels and popping the reins sharply. A Choctaw Indian maybe!

Little Lord took off down the steps and Granada took off after him. At the foot of the stairs Granada came to a stop, but Little Lord continued to race toward the galloping horse. Master Ben grasped the boy under the arm and hoisted him up into the saddle. From his perch between his father and the pommel, Little Lord found Granada’s eyes and then stuck his tongue out at her. They both exploded into fits of giggles.

A spirit of hilarity hung over the entire plantation. For days servants had been in a state of high anticipation. Like Granada, the younger ones had never seen a bought Negro before, and the older ones thought they might never see one again, especially one from as far away as the Carolinas.

The whole yard came out to watch. Washwomen and spinners and weavers, dairy and stable hands, the children too young to work and the old ones too feeble, they all gathered in the yard. From inside the mansion, house slaves peeked out from French plate windows. Even Mistress Amanda stepped onto the upstairs gallery with Daniel Webster perched upon her shoulder and watched as the wagon rolled into the yard.

The driver jerked back on the reins and the horses pulled to a stop in front of the new four-room cabin while everybody stood there with chins nearly touching the ground.

It was a woman after all!

“Lord, she a sight!” Granada whispered to herself. She had never seen anything like her. The stranger was reddish brown with pointed cheekbones and amber eyes. Bird feathers stuck out of her braids this way and that, and around her neck she wore a ponderous necklace made of gleaming white shells. She was as skinny as a river bird, and draped over her shoulders was a mangy wrap made from the fur of some animal Granada imagined being too ugly to ever have lived.

Granada heard the whispers all around her.

“Got some Indian in her, that’s for sure!”

“Mostly African, still.”

“Exactly what kind of creature is it?” they asked one another.

She was too unsightly to be thought of as frolic in bed for the master. She was too far past her childbearing years to multiply the stock. Though she seemed nimble enough, it was hard to imagine her being brought all the way from North Carolina for field work.

Granada surprised herself by laughing out loud with glee, but not only at the woman’s outlandish manner of dress. It was the way the odd-looking stranger jerked back on the reins, tied them off, and then jumped down off the wagon, spry as a pullet chicken. Granada eased closer to get a better look.

She wasn’t the only one.

Aunt Sylvie and the servant girls came out into the yard to inspect the odd sight, all of them gathering in a tight knot at the kitchen steps, unable to take their eyes off the gangly, yellow-eyed woman.

“She old as black pepper,” Aunt Sylvie whispered. “Got wrinkles you could grow cotton in.”

“But she can manage them mules like a crack hand,” came Chester’s reply.

People began to speculate aloud that there had to be somebody worth five thousand dollars hiding under the dusty tarpaulin in the back of the wagon. Maybe the master had bought him a bunch of children after all, and she was the used-up mammy thrown into the bargain.

But not a peep emerged from under the wagon’s tarp.

All eyes went back to the woman, waiting for her to do something worth a pot of gold.

First thing she did was walk with a limber-jointed step across the yard right up to the new cabin with the huge brick chimney. She disappeared through the door and then emerged a few moments later with hands on her hips like she had taken ownership. She strode right over to where the master had reined his horse to a halt and was lowering Little Lord down from the saddle.

The master opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get a word out, she looked him square in the face and said, “I’ll need me a couple of hands to unload the wagon and get everything moved in.” Her voice was firm and clear-throated.

Master Ben commenced to turn as purple as bullis grape. He lifted himself up in his stirrups, clenching his jaw so that the muscles in his face bulged.

The servants watched the master’s reaction with great apprehension. Though he was known to be slow to the whip, preferring to get rid of troublesome slaves rather than beat them, he surely couldn’t stand for this. Granada didn’t hear one person take a breath.

Master Ben finally swallowed hard and barked at two old yard hands to wait on the woman. There followed a wave of headshaking from the onlookers.

Next she took to bossing the pair of hands like she had Master Ben. With a voice that sounded curiously comfortable with authority, she told the old men to unload her wagon. They didn’t argue and got right to it, unfastening the tarp and then whipping it off.

Not a child to be seen. Instead, the wagon was filled with all sizes of gourds and bulging burlap bags, intricately woven coiled-grass baskets and glazed pots of all sizes made out of clays of strange hues.

Granada whispered to Aunt Sylvie, “Did she bring her own grub to eat, too?,” thinking she was some special kind of creature, like the mistress’s pet monkey.

Aunt Sylvie shrugged. “Girl, I got no idea. But I’m going to tell you one thing I do know. Ain’t none of it coming in my kitchen. That woman makes the hair crawl off my head.”

They all watched silently as she walked toward her cabin, but when she got to the doorway she stopped and turned around. She stood for a moment with her chin lifted and her eyes closed.

What on earth was she doing? Granada wondered.

The woman took a long, deep breath and smacked her lips like she could taste the air. Nodding thoughtfully, she looked in the direction of the kitchen where the evening’s meal was cooking—roast lamb. Then she threw back her head and exploded into a fit of high-pitched cackling that could be heard across the plantation yard.

The woman swung one last gaze over the yard full of dumbfounded spectators, and for the weightiest of moments her eyes settled on Granada, turning the girl’s skin to chicken flesh.

No one had ever looked at her that way before, studying her so thoroughly. The old woman’s all-consuming glare was nothing like the master’s sharp glances. Or the look she got from the cold blue eyes of the mistress, momentarily glinting in icy recollection but then frosting over opaque.

No, the strange woman’s eyes gripped her like two fists and held her tight. That stare was not one of questioning or of doubt, but one of rock-sure recognition. It gave Granada the eerie feeling that there was something she was supposed to yield up to the woman, and she had no idea what.

The woman nodded once to herself and pulled the door closed behind her.

Granada remained where she stood. She could still feel the woman’s eyes on her, peeling her back like the skin of an onion, reading her layer by layer. Not since she was a child, with troubling nightmares, had she felt this sense of foreboding. She would wake sweat-soaked from muddled dreams and random visions of people she knew, and those she didn’t—yet somehow was supposed to. They all came seeking, wanting something from her desperately, and she would wake to a terrible silence haunted by their grasping.

This woman’s evil gaze had cast exactly such a mood over Granada.

Aunt Sylvie was upset as well. “I got a bad feeling about this woman coming here,” she said. “Yes, Lord, I got a bad feeling in my bones about her. I know she some kind of conjure woman.”

“A conjure woman?” Granada gasped. Whatever it was, it sounded very bad.

“Uh-huh. Hoodoo woman. Got some Indian in her, too. They’re bad to put a fix on folks. You saw them snapping yellow eyes of hers. Snapping at people’s souls, she was. She’s done put a fix on the master for sure. Running round here like she Queen Sheba.”

Aunt Sylvie turned to the girl and waved a cook spoon in her face. “Granada, that woman’s going to bear watching. Whatever she’s up to, the devil is surely grinning with delight.”