The Healing, page 3
At last Mistress Amanda turned her empty gaze to Sylvie and spoke so faintly, Ella could barely make out the words: “Aunt Sylvie,” she said, “bring the baby to me like I asked you to.”
Ella glanced fearfully at Sylvie. The cook’s expression had gone to one of befuddlement. “What’s that you say, Mistress?” Sylvie asked. “I fetched the baby to your room just like you said to.”
“No, I meant bring the child to me.”
Ella stood frozen, her baby clasped tightly in her arms.
“Sylvie, why are you doing this?” The mistress paused, as if to collect herself. Then she caught Ella’s eye. “You, girl. You bring me that baby.” The mistress offered a pitiful smile. “Let me show you how to hold it.”
Ella hesitated, and then looked back to Sylvie. Now Sylvie would not even return her gaze. The cook was silent, shaking her head, like she couldn’t figure out what it was the mistress wanted.
The suffocating silence took Ella’s breath away. The baby began to fidget in her arms.
“Didn’t you hear me, girl!” the mistress cried. “You must do what I tell you!”
Ella turned her shoulder to Mistress Amanda, as if shielding the baby from an advancing gale. She dared to shake her head in protest.
Mistress Amanda gave a pleading look at the cook. “Bring the baby here, Sylvie.”
Sylvie gave a short nod, but instead of reaching for the child, she gripped Ella by the arm and drew the girl to where the mistress sat. The baby began to cry and her feet kicked at the skirt of the gown.
“Now, see? Y’all upset her.” The mistress held her arms out before her. “Give her here.”
Ella took a step back with the bawling child. “No, Mistress! Don’t!” Ella tugged against Sylvie’s grip, trying to make it to the door, but the cook’s hold was tight.
The mistress got herself unsteadily to her feet. Then she reached out for the child as Ella struggled vainly to loose herself. When the mistress got a two-handed grip and began tugging roughly on the infant, Ella finally released Yewande with a heaving sob.
Cradling the child in her emaciated arms, Mistress Amanda gazed into the baby’s face.
“Isn’t she precious? And look at that expression!” She giggled, now childlike. “Like an angry black fist. I’m sure she’s hungry. You see, I know all about babies.”
“No, ma’am,” Ella cried. “She ain’t hungry. She scared.”
“What did the master name her?” Mistress Amanda asked airily.
“Master ain’t said yet. I been calling her Yewande. After my granny.”
“No, no,” the mistress said, speaking to the baby. “That’s not right at all, is it, my little ebony doll? That’s a name for a baboon or an orangutan.” She laughed and then lifted the girl up in the air. “I’ll think of a name. One that favors you.”
The baby calmed with the mistress’s attention, which seemed to delight her to no end. She smiled almost appreciatively at the child.
“Why, your face is like an inky daub in that field of Spanish lace,” Mistress Amanda mused, walking the baby toward the open window. “What was it Daddy always said? Ah, I remember! ‘Black as a Moor.’ ”
Then she exclaimed, “That’s it! We’ll name you after their city.” She giggled, as if delighted with her cleverness. “I christen you Granada, Queen of the Mississippi Moors.”
The mistress’s laughter grew manic as she rocked the baby roughly in her arms. She lurched about the room on unsteady feet.
Ella struggled to break Sylvie’s grip. “Mistress, please. Can I take Yewande back now? She—”
The mistress put a finger to her pale lips to shush Ella. “See? She’s resting so quietly now”—and then abruptly turned her back to the weeping mother. “It’s time for all of you to go, before you upset Granada again.”
“Mistress!” Ella cried. “She’s my baby! Yewande! Please—”
“Aunt Sylvie, you all have got to leave now,” the mistress said over her shoulder. “This girl is upsetting the child. She’s not good for Granada.”
Ella began screaming for her child, fighting Sylvie to get away.
“Silas!” Sylvie shouted. “Get in here!”
It took both Silas and Sylvie to drag the hysterical girl from the room, down the stairs, and out of the house. By the time they made it into the yard, Ella had ceased fighting. She stood forlornly on the bare ground, clutching empty arms to her chest, gazing up at the mistress’s window.
Sylvie pulled Ella to her and let the girl sob inconsolably in her beefy arms.
“Sylvie,” Old Silas said, “it would be best if you got her back to her cabin. The mistress’s window is wide open.”
“I know it hurts, Ella,” Sylvie soothed. “You go ahead and cry your eyes out. Loud as you want to. I got you.”
“Sylvie!” Silas fussed. “What in the world you doing?”
“What I can, Silas!” she said, patting Ella on the back. “I might have to do what mistress says, but I don’t have to make it easy on her. I’m going to remind that fish-blooded woman what it’s like for a momma to lose her child. Maybe she’ll remember. If I have to, I might get Lizzie out here, too, crying for Rubina. It ain’t much, but it’s what I can do. We’ll be out here every night if we have to, every one of us, wailing up a storm.” Sylvie shot her husband a hard look. “Now what you going to do, Silas?”
“All right, Sylvie,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll talk with Master Ben.”
“About both of them? Yewande and Rubina?”
Silas nodded.
Ella quieted her sobbing to look up at the old man, finding a glimmer of hope. Silas was smart and knew the master better than anyone. They say he as good as raised the master. Surely he could get her baby back!
“I should have told him a long time ago, I reckon,” Silas said. “He brought her down too soon. Should have told him to bring her daddy’s money and his slaves, but leave that girl in Kentucky. She’s not the kind you bring at the beginning of things, when there’s nothing but wilderness and sickness. She’s lost one baby after the next and ain’t nothing but a pampered child herself. Broke her spirit. He needs to send her back home before she brings everything down around our ears.”
Aunt Sylvie took Ella by the shoulders and beamed into her face. “Ain’t my man something?” she said. “He’ll get this mess straightened out by breakfast time.”
CHAPTER 3
Violet slept soundly.
Gran Gran eased back in her chair, the old memories rising in her like smoke. Thinking about the dead, she figured, must be akin to breath on a dying ember. As the memory smoldered, she wondered if any of her words had penetrated the girl’s darkness.
“Don’t know what got into me, Violet,” the woman said, “talking to you about folks long passed. Telling you things that might not even be true. But that’s all I got. One day you’ll be telling somebody about all this. You’ll be telling about this old woman who you’d like to strangle in her sleep. I won’t blame you one whit. If that’s what gets you on your feet.”
Through the rest of the day Gran Gran sat watch by the bedside, placing her hands on the girl, forcing broths and potions for the fever, rubbing horse-hoof salve into her chest. But by evening the girl became agitated again. She threw her head from one side of the pillow to the other, as if a heated battle raged in her brain. Her eyes worked determinedly beneath the lids, sketching out pictures the old lady could not read.
The girl’s incessant babbling grew more hysterical until it turned into a terrible shrieking, sending the woman to the window to see if the awful racket had attracted trouble yet.
“Folks going to think I’m up in here murdering you,” she laughed bleakly. “They’ll sic the law on me sure as the world.” She looked at the girl. “I’m sorry, child, but I got to get you quieted down.”
Gran Gran turned to go back to the kitchen to fix a narcotic of jimsonweed, but she stopped short of the door. She glanced back once more at Violet as she lay whimpering in the bed, her face dark and desolate, tormented by some nightmare Gran Gran could not even imagine. It looked as if that child was taking on all the demons of hell single-handedly.
I could drug her, the woman thought, again remembering the mistress, but what about her soul? Probably wind up broken and lost, wandering from pillar to post, like too many others.
“Calming ain’t curing, is it, girl?” the woman asked aloud, shaking her head wearily. “Keeping you hushed might keep me out of jail, but sure as the world, calming ain’t curing.”
Gran Gran watched the girl as she struggled. “And I’d hate to see somebody with so much scrap lose the battle. You a fighter, that’s what you are,” she said, half smiling.
The old woman heaved a long breath. “Lord, help us both.” She returned to her chair by the bed where the girl was kicking at the covers.
“This is your battle, Violet. I can’t fight it for you. Like somebody told me when I was a girl, I can chew your food, but you got to swallow for yourself.” The old woman smiled, thinking how mad it had made her when Polly Shine had told her that. Gran Gran reached to take hold of Violet’s hand.
The girl yelped as if seared by a hot poker and yanked back her arm. The scare threw Gran Gran backward into her chair.
Violet bolted upright. Her face contorted into an expression at once of terror and grief, and then she let out a gut-wrenching shriek. It was like nothing human Gran Gran had heard before.
The girl’s eyes were opened wide and fixed, staring off into some region beyond the old woman. Her skin was afire with fever, and she desperately tried to get free of the covers that held her back. The screams continued, piercing the watchful quiet of the quarter.
The old woman drew Violet to her, stifling the screams in her chest. The girl beat her fists fiercely against Gran Gran’s humped back and clawed her neck, but the old woman continued to hold her tight, unflinching, until the struggling died out and Violet went limp in Gran Gran’s arms.
When she gently lowered the girl’s head to the pillow, her eyes were still open, darting wildly around the room but settling on no one thing. Her breathing was panicked and uncertain.
It was not over yet.
There was nothing Gran Gran understood to do. If the girl had a broken body, that was easy. But this, this was not what she knew. Afraid for both of them now, she did the only thing she could think of. She lay down beside the girl and drew the frail, spent body close, nestling Violet into the protective hollow of herself. She then began to whisper into the girl’s ear the words she had learned long ago, hoping they might seep into Violet’s dreams.
She chanted softly, rhythmically, “In the beginning God created in the beginning God created in the beginning …”
It was late into the night when Violet’s breathing finally took hold of the easy rhythm of the words and evened out.
Through the flickering light of the lamp, Gran Gran could see that the girl’s eyes were still open, but they had calmed. They seemed to have settled intently on the face of the old woman. The look was sad and wanting, but for now, the terror was gone.
The old woman rose from the cramped little cot and when she looked down on the girl, the panic seemed to rise up in her face again.
“No, I ain’t going to leave you, Violet. I’m going to sit right here. And we’ll have us a chat. I’m not sleepy, neither. Don’t sleep much anymore. Older you get, the more sleep seems like practice for dying. What you want to talk about?”
Gran Gran’s eyes fell on the girl’s shoes where they lay on the floor. Even covered in mud, they looked expensive. The woman drew one to her with her cane and picked it up. She wet a finger to clear a window to the leather grain below. The white man said he would send the rest of the girl’s clothes later. Gran Gran wondered if they were all this fine.
Gran Gran recalled the bloodstained dress she had taken off the girl. It was made of blue silk muslin and finely embroidered, stitched by somebody who knew what they were doing. She hated having to toss the ruined garment into the stove. The smell had sickened her. Since she was a girl, she had never forgotten the odor of beautiful things set afire. Such a waste!
She looked upon Violet where she lay watching. “I guess somebody sure loved you to fit you up in these first-class clothes. I know finery when I see it. Right there, you and me got a lot in common.”
Gran Gran ran her hands over the lap of her feed-sack dress, washed so many times she had forgotten what the print pattern used to be.
“I sure loved to wear fancy frocks,” she mused. “Some folks said I had a pretty face. I couldn’t see it. But, oh my! When I put on them dresses, I believed I was the best-looking little thing south of Memphis. I reckon you could say pretty clothes was my downfall.”
CHAPTER 4
1860
What sort a dress you reckon she’ll bring me?” Granada asked for the third time that morning.
It was early dawn and the plantation kitchen was chilly, Granada having neglected the coals in the hearth during the night. The only thing she wore was her rough homespun shimmy. The close-plank floor was cold to her bare feet, but she was too excited to care.
“That dead girl sure got some pretty frocks, don’t she?” Granada asked. “Silk’s my favorite, I reckon.”
When the cook still didn’t respond, Granada called out louder, “Aunt Sylvie! What color you reckon?”
Not bothering to look at Granada, the cook wiped the flour from her hands with the hem of her starched white apron. Sylvie was sturdily built and didn’t stand much taller than the twelve-year-old who presently was doing everything she could think of to get her attention.
“I’m not going to abide no more of this kind of talk in my kitchen,” the cook pronounced, “especially coming from a child as coal black as any swamp slave.” Aunt Sylvie, whose skin was the light color of an underdone biscuit, still hadn’t turned her face from her dough. “You get this way every Preaching Sunday, Granada. Near about wears me out. Please, light somewhere and quiet down.”
Granada wasn’t discouraged. Her mind stayed on the dress and the shoes and the hair ribbons that would be delivered any minute now.
Sylvie clomped to the door in her loose-fitting brogans to peer out across the darkened yard. “Old Silas ain’t even lit a lantern yet,” she grumbled. “I sent that fool Chester over to Silas’s cabin ages ago. He’s going to make my breakfast late sure as the world.”
Though husband and wife, Sylvie and Silas didn’t stay together. Sylvie slept in a room behind the kitchen and Silas stayed alone in his cabin. They both seemed to like it that way. Silas was nearly twice Sylvie’s age, and she said old folks are easier to care for from a distance.
Sylvie turned away from the door and got back to her biscuit dough. “If Silas don’t show pretty soon with some firewood, Granada, I’m going to send you out to the yard and gather some kindling chips. That might work off some of your sass.”
“Aunt Sylvie—”
The cook waved her off. “Baby, stop running your mouth and dip me a cup of sweet milk from the crock. You got me so flustered I done made my dough crumbly.”
Granada stomped her foot at Sylvie, but then did as she was told, with a few groans thrown in for good measure.
She handed the cup to Aunt Sylvie with a dramatic sigh.
“Life must be hard on you Christian martyrs,” Aunt Sylvie said, but Granada saw the smile.
After pouring the milk into her great hickory bowl, Sylvie worked the batter vigorously with her short, blunt fingers. “Thank the Lord Preaching Sunday don’t come every week,” she muttered, lifting her shoulder to wipe her face on the checked gingham dress.
Granada couldn’t understand why the cook didn’t look forward to Preaching Sundays. Everybody else did. Several times a year, the master’s slaves were herded in from miles around, from every settlement the master had built, spread across his four thousand acres of plantation land. Hundreds of black bodies flooded into the yard like a dark, slow-moving river. These were all-day affairs, called by the master when conditions warranted sending for Bishop Kerry to give everybody a good preaching-to. Master Ben invited his white friends from town and neighboring plantations to join him high up on the gallery where they listened to the bishop give the sermon. And Granada got to be at the very center of it all.
Sylvie finally looked down at Granada and shook her head sadly. “You mind your manners today. I don’t think you know how lucky you are not to be out working in them swamps. You come mighty close. Don’t you forget it! If you don’t act right, the mistress can always send you back where she found you, like you know who!”
Granada stuck out her tongue. Aunt Sylvie was always threatening to send Granada to one of the settlements where the field slaves lived. Supposedly that’s where Granada’s mother was moved off to after the cholera. And Sylvie often tried to scare Granada by telling her the story of Lizzie’s little girl with skin the color of cream and eyes like the mistress’s emeralds, all proper and house-raised, now working the swamps like a common field slave. “If it can happen to an almost white girl, it can sure happen to you!”
Granada forced that possibility from her mind. The mistress would never allow it, she told herself. And if that woman who was supposed to be Granada’s mother ever tried to lay claim, the girl would fight tooth and nail. She wanted no mother but the mistress.
Sylvie turned toward the cold fireplace, but Granada again stepped into her path, determined Sylvie would not ignore her this time.
“You think it’s going to be silk this time, Aunt Sylvie?” she asked, her ink-black eyes wide and unblinking.
“Listen at you, a kitchen girl talking like she knows something about silk.” She took Granada by the shoulders and swung her aside like a garden gate. “Don’t matter if it’s made out of corn silk. You best learn now, white folks don’t look at you. They only look at what you toting on your back or carrying in your hands. That don’t change because the wrapping is pretty, Granada. Just don’t bring attention to yourself.”
