The Healing, page 21
Granada dropped her eyes and tucked her chin. The girl dared not look her way again. The stare had been too intense, the wanting eyes too desperate. But even when Granada shut her eyes, she could see the woman distinctly. Her skin was black, so black it shimmered with a purple sheen. She hadn’t even bothered to fix herself up. Her head rag was sweat-stained and her clothes filthy from field work. She held the hand of a dirty-faced little boy as dark-skinned as she. Her face was so very sad.
The more the face burned into Granada’s memory, the more familiar the woman seemed. Yes, the girl reasoned, she had probably seen the woman before, that’s all. Perhaps she had been one of the sick ones? Maybe Granada had seen the woman at one of the settlements. Or maybe she had found her way to the hospital late at night. There was probably a good reason why the woman stared at her. Plenty of good reasons, other than the one that filled her with dread.
After the bishop said his last amen, he toddled over to his chair, fell back, and mopped his face with a handkerchief now limp with perspiration.
Next the master stood up and looked out over the yard. “I hope y’all heard every word the good bishop said,” he boomed. “I want y’all to meditate on it when you go back to your cabins today.”
“Meditate?” someone chuckled.
“It don’t mean a damned thing except to ponder,” someone else replied.
“Sounds like white man’s work,” observed another.
The master cleared his throat and smiled warmly. “Now there is somebody else I want y’all to hear from today. He told me the Lord has called him forward to deliver the Word, so he’s asked me to let him be a preacher right here on the plantation. A lot of y’all already know him. Him and me cleared most of this land together. We made the very first crop.”
Granada peeked up at the gallery. Master Ben was looking over to where Old Silas stood. “Come on over here, Preacher Silas.”
Old Silas began his slow, proud walk to the podium while the master continued. “I know Old Silas is going to be a fine preacher so y’all heed his words.”
Silas, his face radiant and looking elegant in his new clothes, bowed to the master and his guests and finally turned toward the gathering of slaves.
He grinned at the crowd. “Now I know most of y’all,” he said in a quivering voice. “Some of y’all might think you on up there in years, but I suspect nobody is old as I done been blessed to be. So I reckon the master figured since I done trod so far down life’s ways and byways, he hoped maybe a few cockleburs of wisdom might of clinged onto me in passing.”
The laughter he evoked was warm, from white folks and black. From everybody, that is, except Polly.
“Why’s he talking that way?” Granada whispered to the old woman. This was the first time she had heard him speak more like the other slaves instead of like the master.
“I jest here to testify,” he continued, “to what a blessing it been being up under Master Ben and his daddy afore him and his daddy afore him.”
Old Silas turned to the crowd again and then lay both hands on the lectern, his face solemn. “So we blessed to have found us a home with such a Christian man. Lot of slaves don’t get no church. Don’t get no half days on Saturdays and all day Sunday to praise the Lord and spend with they families.”
There was nodding in agreement, and a few affirming moans from the women.
“Old fool,” Polly said under her breath. Polly stiffened her back and her breathing was short and quick.
“And they is a terrible disease on the foot worser than the cholera or the yellow fever or the blacktongue,” Old Silas called out, now beating the air with a clenched fist. “They call it Freedom. They a place called Freedomland and it be chunked full of the half starved and the homeless. Scrounging in the dirt with the dogs for a crumb of bread. No loving shepherd to look out after them. To go looking for them if they was to get theyselves lost.”
He looked over at the master to show him his face beaming with joy.
Master Ben smiled and then dropped his eyes, brushing his nose with the top of his finger.
He wasn’t the only one appreciating Old Silas’s sermon. Granada might not understand what Old Silas was talking about, but she was struck by how he hitched the cadence of his words to the beat of her heart and took her for an exciting turn around the yard. Granada was about to tell Polly how she much preferred Old Silas’s kind of preaching to the bishop’s, but when she turned to the old woman, she saw fire in her eyes. It looked like she wanted to kill Silas where he stood.
“Liar!” she grumbled. “Judas goat!”
A few heads turned in the crowd and nodded approvingly at Polly’s accusations.
Silas’s eyes went upward. “As for me, when I goes to heaven and the good Lord asks if I been a good and faithful servant, I wants to say, ‘Yes sir, Lord!’ ”
Then Old Silas dropped his voice to a violent whisper. “I want to see the smile on the good Lord’s face when He says to me, ‘Old Silas!’ ” Every head in the crowd was leaning forward to catch each emotion-drenched word. “ ‘Welcome into my kingdom thou good and faithful servant.’ ”
Tears glistened on Old Silas’s wrinkled cheeks, and all around him the master’s friends had produced a flurry of snow-white handkerchiefs and were presently dabbing their eyes and blowing their noses. Even Granada got teary. She still didn’t understand what exactly he had said, but she sure liked the way he said it. She could listen to that kind of preaching all day.
But Polly wasn’t crying. After the master dismissed the slaves, she sprang to her feet and looked as threatening as a thundercloud. Without waiting for any assistance, she took off through the crowd at a furious trot, looking like she was about to spit lightning bolts. “Fool talking ’bout how he going to die and go off to Glory with the master,” Polly fussed aloud to herself, weaving this way and that through the crowd. “I guess the master going to need him a nigger to shine his boots and feed his chickens when he gets to heaven.”
Granada had to hurry to keep up with Polly, who continued her march to the hospital, waving her stick at those in the way. “He ain’t no preacher,” she said, almost shouting now. “His biggest job is to keep our people Freedom-stupid.”
Polly had already stepped into the hospital door when Granada heard the voice.
“Yewande!”
The word stopped Granada like a lightning strike to the heart. “Yewande,” she whispered to herself. Saying the word set off a liquid pounding in her throat and sent shivers shooting down her arms.
“Yewande,” she said again and her head swam with the pure music of the word.
She turned. Coming toward her, with the little boy in tow, was the same woman she had spotted earlier in the crowd, the one with the dark, sorrowful eyes. Granada was seized by an uncontrollable trembling.
“Your name is Yewande, ain’t it?” asked the woman.
Now she knew why the woman looked so familiar! She was from the dream about the mistress. She was the one who tried to grab Granada before she could step through the door of the great house.
Polly came out from the cabin. She looked first at the girl and then into the yard. “What’s the matter with you? What you seen?”
Granada couldn’t say a word nor move a muscle. Her ears roared like a rushing river. Sweat had broken through her dress, darkening the gingham that clung wet to her shoulders. As she kept her gaze fixed on Polly, afraid to look anywhere else, Granada became aware of the slow dawning in the old woman’s straining eyes.
Before Polly could say it, and make it true, Granada blurted “No!” and then found her legs. She stumbled off in a panicked run, fleeing from the women who summoned her by two different names.
Across the yard the open kitchen door loomed like a threshold to another world, the last safe place. She tore across the ground so quickly she was hardly aware of the tree root that threw her flat-faced onto the hard, bare soil. Without brushing off her skinned-up knee she scrambled to her feet and took off again, limping.
“I don’t want your gift,” she called aloud. “Take them all away. The dreams. The remembering. That little room next to my heart. I ain’t going to remember nothing no more,” she promised God. “I’m going to forget how she gaped at me and called me Yewande.”
“No!” she shouted again, trying to submerge the memory. She’s dirty and ugly and she wanted to touch me, she told herself. And if I let her, it won’t never come off. That’s all anybody ever going to see on me.
CHAPTER 31
Granada stumbled breathless up the steps to find the kitchen swarming with servants stirring pots, loading steaming mounds of food onto silver platters, scurrying through the passageway to the great house. Aunt Sylvie was in the middle of it all, sniffing, tasting, and shouting orders, a great sweat draining off her.
The cook glanced up from her work to where Granada stood at the door. She instinctively took hold of her apron and began flapping it like the girl might be a chicken that had got loose in the kitchen.
Sylvie’s frown melted when Granada’s trembling turned to tears. “Girl, what’s done put the fright in you so?”
Granada refused to answer.
“You shaking like a kitten,” Sylvie soothed. “It’s all right now. Nothing going to get you here in my kitchen.”
The cook’s kindness made Granada cry even harder. Sylvie stowed Granada in the little bedroom off the kitchen and told her she could stay as long as she wanted. Before sending her off hours later, Sylvie poked her finger into two cold biscuits and filled them with molasses.
• • •
Granada eased through the door of the hospital, hoping to escape the old woman’s notice. Polly was nowhere to be seen, but before she could take comfort, the sound of hushed voices drifted in from the next room.
“You swear you ain’t going tell nobody I come to see you,” someone pleaded.
“Nobody else’s business,” she heard Polly say.
“Old Silas been telling it around that every child you touch will carry the mark of Satan,” the voice whispered.
Polly laughed. “Most preachers I come across appear to know the devil’s business better than God’s.”
The visitor giggled.
“My momma was a weaver just like you, girl,” Polly said. “You got to keep your eye on the thread, not on the devilment all around you.”
Granada heard the shuffle of the women rising from their chairs, and she quickly plopped down at the table with her two biscuits, pretending she hadn’t been eavesdropping. Granada glanced up when they came into the room and she saw that it was Charity, Barnabas’s wife.
Ignoring Granada, Polly went to the shelf where she kept her bottles and reached for one Granada recognized to be an extract of black-haw-root bark. Then the old woman dipped her hand into a gourd suspended by twine from the rafters and pulled out a fistful of sassafras root, which she placed on a scrap of burlap, folded it over twice, and tied it off at the neck with a length of broom straw.
“Now you brew you some sugared sassafras and mix it with a teaspoon of this here root bark to make it go down good,” she said. “Take a dose every evening, starting two nights after the moon has stood up again.”
Charity took the packet, her eyes misting over. “God bless you, Mother Polly.”
Polly reached out and laid the flat of her hand on Charity’s belly. “This one going to make it, you hear?”
Granada swung her gaze toward the women, forgetting she was pretending not to care. Was Charity asking Polly to give her a baby? Could Polly do that?
“Now you be sure to come tell me when you begin to feel the quickening,” Polly was saying. “Then we start getting you ready for birthing.”
That had to be it! Charity was childless and everybody knew she wanted a baby more than anything, but she kept losing them. Aunt Sylvie said in Charity’s case “the apple kept falling green from the tree.”
“This leopard cub going to stay safe in her cave for nine months.”
“Her? My baby going to be a girl?” Charity asked.
Polly grinned. “She will grow to be a strong, healthy woman, proud like a leopard cat. Though your baby is still but a stone in the river,” she whispered, as if she were reciting a heartfelt prayer, “she’s already a blessing to our people.”
“Who’s our people?” Charity asked curtly. “Satterfield slaves, you mean?”
Polly laid her palm gently against Charity’s reddening cheek. “I mean the people who always was,” Polly said. “The people who will be forever. Your child and her children and her children’s children. The remembered and the remembering. Keep your eye on the thread.”
Charity looked at Polly, amazed at her words. “Our people,” Charity whispered, trying hard to fathom the sense of it. “My baby will be a blessing to our people.”
“Your sons and daughters, your blood will lead the people home.”
“Home,” Granada repeated to herself, scowling. Home was wherever the master said it was. Was Polly talking about stealing folks away from Satterfield Plantation to live with some other master?
“Granada,” Polly called out. “Come here and put your hand on Charity’s belly.”
Granada’s mood instantly lightened and she jumped up from the table.
“Lay it right here,” Polly instructed.
Granada did as she was told. “I don’t feel nothing.”
“No, not yet. I’m asking you to remember this baby under your hand, Granada. This is why I ask you to learn everything else. 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.”
Granada dropped her hand from Charity’s belly, still thinking about this home Polly had mentioned.
“Now go sit down, girl. I need to say something to Charity.”
Granada did as she was told, but she studied them over her shoulder.
“You got to protect this child,” Polly said. “She’s going to be a blessing to all of us.”
“I will.”
“Don’t go eating nothing you ain’t made with your own hand. You mighty light-skinned and some folks don’t think slaves ought to be getting any lighter, especially living this close to white folks. You understand?”
Charity thought for a moment and then her mouth dropped. “You mean Aunt Sylvie …?
“She only does what she’s told. When they bring you food from the kitchen, you just say, ‘Thank you kindly,’ and then go feed it to the hounds. Throw it over the fence when nobody’s looking. We don’t need no more of them rascals multiplying!” Polly laughed. “Besides, them dogs will love you for it. Best friend a slave can make on a plantation is with a bloodhound.”
The old woman laid her cheek against Charity’s and whispered into her ear. This time Granada heard the words clearly: “In the beginning God created.”
Charity’s hands quivered so, Granada thought the woman was going to drop her parcel. Polly put her arm around Charity and led her through the back room to the door at the rear of the hospital. Charity’s astonished gaze never left Polly’s face.
CHAPTER 32
Polly closed the door and finally joined Granada in the front room. For a long while she stood there with her arms crossed over her chest and watched the girl as she sat at the table. Granada did her best to avoid those searching eyes, having no doubt she was being opened up and read like a book.
“They turn you away at the great house again?” Polly said at last.
Granada didn’t deny it. “Told me I had to come back here.”
Polly walked over to Granada where she sat on the stool. “Maybe you ain’t begging hard enough,” she said, snatching up the girl’s dress, revealing her scraped legs. “You get down on your knees this time?” Her stare was hard. “Was your pride worth them two biscuits?”
Granada shielded her prize with both hands. “They’re mine,” she said. “Don’t matter how I got them.”
“You ain’t no better off than that Silas fool. Traded his pride for a biscuit, too, I reckon.”
Granada took a careful bite from her biscuit, catching the crumbs with the other hand, determined to make them last.
“You know,” Polly said, her tone turning casual, “you ain’t the only one been having dreams. I been having me some fearsome dreams, too.”
Granada swung her gaze to Polly. “You?” she exclaimed. Was it possible that the old woman could be scared as well? “What you been dreaming?” she asked.
“Me, I been dreaming about a snake.”
“Snakes!” Granada gasped. “I’ve been dreaming about snakes, too.”
“No, not snakes. Snake. One particular snake. The very one that bit that monkey. Rascal been coming to worry me ever night.”
“What’s it mean?” Granada asked in a low, hushed voice, excited to be working on someone else’s riddle for a change.
“I’m still pondering it,” Polly answered, “but maybe he’s telling me y’all Satterfield slaves won’t see Freedom if it comes up on you like a snake. That’s what I’m thinking. Freedom will bite y’all bigger than a moccasin.” She shook her head sadly and looked at Granada. “Don’t any of y’all got no self-respecting notions about Freedom?”
Granada shrugged. All she knew was she got two biscuits and they tasted good. Freedom couldn’t be any better than that. She heard folks talk about Freedom, but nobody ever explained it to her. Nobody ever laid it out on a map and said, “Here, follow this road and you get to Freedomland.”
“Where this Freedom place you always talking about anyway?” she asked.
Polly gazed at her in disbelief. “What you mean where?”
Granada told Polly she figured Freedom must be some other plantation. Maybe one with more to eat and softer beds.
