The Healing, page 31
She held the lantern over the table and illuminated the photographs. Families gathered in the churchyard at dinners on the ground. A brick bank building. In front were rich-looking colored men wearing suits and high-collar shirts. A photograph of a few dozen youngsters sitting on schoolhouse steps flanked by several prim-looking women—everyone colored. A city hall, and lined up in two rows for the photographer, elegant-looking colored men and women. She had heard of towns like these. Colored towns. Out West.
“But I know these people,” she said. “I see somebody in every face.”
She looked back at the wedding portrait she still held in her hand. When she went to examine the third portrait, on the far right, the old woman’s hand began to shake.
“No,” she gasped. “That can’t be.”
The portrait was partially obscured by the shadow of the couple, but Gran Gran could distinctly make out the round disks that fell from the woman’s wrapped scarf onto her forehead.
“No,” she said again, and shook her head, refusing to believe. “My Lord, Polly, is that really you?”
“Mother Polly,” Violet said. “And Father Silas.”
“These pictures …” Gran Gran stammered. “All these pictures. This town and all these colored—”
“Where my momma come from. I ain’t never been. She showed me the pictures at night and told me the stories. Like you done with the faces.” She laughed. “Y’all tell some of the same stories.”
“Who are you?” Gran Gran asked, dazed now.
“I’m Violet,” the girl answered, suddenly concerned. “You know who I am. Don’t you remember?”
“What game you pulling on me?” Gran Gran now hovered over the girl, her voice frantic. “You taking me for a fool?”
“No, ma’am. I … don’t know.”
Gran Gran held the lantern to the girl’s face. The light flickered in her moistening eyes. “You lying!”
But her eyes weren’t lying. The mournful hazel eyes. Those were Charity’s eyes. The small troubled mouth. It was Charity, and with her name came snatches of memory … Charity, the weaver … never able to have a child … the apple fell green from the tree … until Polly …
“I ain’t lying!” Violet cried. She pulled away from Gran Gran’s panicked anger, and then shielded her hands behind her back. “Why you so mad with me?” she whimpered. “I wanted to surprise you is all!”
Gran Gran struggled to catch her breath. She could see as clear as crystal that day in the hospital. She remembered the words Polly had spoken to Charity. “Your sons and daughters, your blood will lead the people home.” And then Polly asking Granada to put her hand on Charity’s belly. “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.”
“You’re Charity’s blood,” the old woman said in barely a whisper.
The kitchen had become as close as a coffin. From the masks and photographs on the table, one face broke through the darkness like a bubble rising in water, glowing in its own light, the disks gleaming, like the first day she had seen her.
“No,” Gran Gran muttered, shaking her head against the thought. It couldn’t be.
Gran Gran stepped back from the host of faces. She eyed the girl again.
“Polly send you?” Gran Gran asked, her voice raspy. “What she want from me?”
The girl looked at the woman. “I don’t know Mother Polly. She’s dead and buried … next to that church.” Violet motioned with her head to the framed photograph the old woman still held.
Gran Gran shut her eyes. “No! This ain’t nothing but lies.”
The old woman was terrifying the girl and she knew it. She had to get away from Violet. She fled to the porch, stumbling, not wanting to see or hear. Tears brimmed behind her lids, and her breath was short, strangled, like a steel band was tightening around her chest.
A vision of Polly’s little town blazed in her inner eye. Neat white cottages with roses and sunflowers and vegetable gardens out back. Neighbors calling to one another over fences. Children in the streets. So much life! In a great sweep of vision she saw them laughing and crying in each other’s arms; and marrying and bearing children and comforting one another and growing old together; grieving and burying one another and then beginning again.
She let go a great shuddering sob. “Why did you leave me?” Gran Gran covered her eyes with a trembling hand.
The chill night wind carried the sounds of her plea over the empty yard and across the quarter, but no one lit their lanterns to see what ancient heart was breaking. Her ragged cry drifted over the graveyards that hugged tight their silent dead and fluttered through a primeval forest, taking the last leaves of the hardwoods and scattering them over the souls that once had been rooted there. It rippled the surface of the yellow-mud creek, below which lay drowned a secret name that had not been called in seventy years.
The old woman at last opened her eyes and dared to look across the darkened yard. Staring back at her were hundreds of faces, women, men, children, and at once she knew each one of them, their names and their fears and their hopes. The night was full of shining eyes, unblinking, looking up at her, wanting.
There was a great uprushing in her throat and she cried aloud, “You were my people!”
Gran Gran began to quake. It was not just skin and muscle, but something had set her bones to trembling, as if the earth had shuddered. Her cane went rattling down the steps and Gran Gran, unable to bear the weight any longer, crumpled to the porch floor.
She was not aware of how much time had passed before she lifted her head to the velvet star-filled sky. Behind her she heard the careful footsteps, and then felt a hand, small and chilled, take her own. The grasp was tentative but then gathered strength as it warmed like an oven brick, until the girl’s grip was as sure and strong as any the old woman could remember, the heat soothing her ancient sorrow like a salve.
The revelation was neither blinding nor thunderous.
Polly Shine had remembered.
CHAPTER 53
A winter’s twilight found them skirting the puddles and then stepping carefully down a disused path that cut into the overgrowth beyond the house. Picking their way through briars and creeper vines, they passed the falling-down chimney of the old hospital, destroyed at the turn of the century by fire during a lightning storm, and from there proceeded deep into a dark skirt of woods.
It was a path seldom used because it led only to the old slave cemetery, forgotten by most and unrecognized by anyone else who happened to stumble upon it. It was sheltered by hardwoods and carpeted by bramble, underneath which lay the old rotting wooden crosses, rough-hewn stones with scrawl long faded, toppled by the relentless spread of roots.
By the time they arrived, the old woman’s breathing was labored and her step halting. She stood silent for a moment among the graves to catch her breath. In one hand she gripped her cane, in the other she held a lantern, as yet unlit. Over her shoulder hung the leather hunting pouch given to her by a pretty, blue-eyed boy, never grown, and now long dead, buried with his mother over the rise. While Gran Gran waited for her strength to return, she listened to the graves, as if they might remember her. The girl, who toted the cross, listened, too.
But all the graves were silent. Gran Gran heard only the rush of her own breath. It was coming easier now, calmed by the soothing night sounds of the forest. “You and me gone have to get out here one day and clean this mess up. First warm day in spring maybe.”
The girl nodded. “They’s a lot of them.”
“It’s a sight,” Gran Gran said, “but we got time.”
It would have to be later. Today Gran Gran and Violet had other business in the cemetery.
The old woman and the girl found their way to the far side of the ridge to a muddy gash of earth that had not had time to heal over. Gran Gran searched the bramble for signs of another grave, dug before Freedom. Somewhere under the creeping vines was a rusted cast-iron plowshare that Lizzie had cradled through the woods and placed where Rubina’s head rested, disobeying the master’s decree to leave her grave unmarked. It must have been the last thing she did before taking off through the woods to catch up with Polly and Silas.
Gran Gran set the lantern by the more recent grave and then nodded to Violet, who positioned the cross at the head of her mother’s grave. As the girl steadied the cross, Gran Gran pounded it into the ground with a hammer retrieved from her pouch.
The two stood silent over Lucy’s newly marked grave mound for quite a while, Gran Gran remembering the woman as best she could.
“Polly said a soul needed to be grieved out of the world proper to make sure they joined the Old Ones,” Gran Gran said. “If you don’t give them their respect, they might wander until the Second Coming. That means a string of generous words, a grave song, and some praying.”
She had told all this earlier to Violet as they planned the ceremony, but it bore repeating.
Gran Gran spoke serious and slow. “Lucy, me and your girl here, Violet, are standing for you today. We are here to give you a marker for your grave, so you can be remembered. And we come to do what we can to grieve you into heaven.”
She paused for a moment as the chirring sounds of dusk rose around her and then looked down at the girl, who stared pensively at the grave. “Any words you want to say to your momma?”
Violet breathed in deep and then said what she had rehearsed. “Momma, I’m sorry I didn’t hold your hand when you was dying. I love you. I hope you are happy in heaven with Jesus.”
Gran Gran nodded. “Those are some fine words,” she said.
Speaking to the grave once more, the old woman said, “I ain’t much for singing these days, but I’ll sure give you what I got left.”
In a weak voice, quaking with age, she sang what she could remember of the words she had overheard Polly sing so long ago over Rubina’s grave:
In the beginning is the home where I come from.
In the beginning is the home where I’m going.
In the beginning, oh Lord, You created Your children
And told them to come home by and by.
She sang low and gentle, swaying to the rhythm.
The girl held the woman’s arm, steadying her as she knelt down to the grave. Gran Gran opened her pouch and placed some of Lucy’s personal possessions on the grave dirt. A tube of lipstick, a compact mirror, a sewing needle and thread, a necklace of glass beads, a butterfly broach of rhinestones, all things Violet had chosen.
Next she took the bottle from which the woman had drunk the potion, placed it on the grave, and shattered it with the hammer. She buried the pieces in the dirt.
She sang again, her voice stronger this time:
In the beginning is the home we all are coming from.
In the beginning is the home we all are going to.
Oh, Lord, take this child by the hand,
Yes, Lord, see Your children home by and by.
The last word rose toward the bare branches and seemed to hover for a moment in the chill air, before finally fading away into a darkening sky.
Gran Gran dropped her head and prayed. “Lord, we all done left this poor girl alone and I’m sorry for it. She was Your precious daughter and she must have been about as alone as a person can be to do what she done. I don’t know why she done it. But I reckon only You and her know the business of it. Please forgive her if she’s needing forgiveness and let her join You in Glory.”
With Violet’s help, Gran Gran raised herself to her feet and brushed the dirt off her hands. She looked down upon the grave.
“And Lucy,” she continued, “I want you to forgive me for any way I let you down. For not seeing what I should have seen. And this girl Violet sure loves you and she’s going do right by you in the world and ain’t never going to forget you. You going to be remembered, I promise you that. We both going to see to it.”
Violet was weeping now. She held the lantern while the old woman lifted the globe and lit it. The girl placed the lantern on the head of her mother’s grave, so that the shadow of the crossed boards loomed large over the mound.
“Now, by the light of our remembering,” Gran Gran pronounced, “find your way home, Lucy.”
The old woman began singing the grave song again, and now the words were infused with the wistful gladness of crossing over rather than the grief of dying.
Gran Gran reached down and opened her hand. The girl laid hers across the old leathery palm. Gran Gran could feel the warming pulse in the place where they touched, the single beat of a heart.
The woods were dark and the path disappeared beyond the light cast by the lantern. But Gran Gran knew the way home. With her memory and the girl’s sight, they would do fine.
They departed the grave, both of them singing. The lantern still burned, throwing its light in their path. With Gran Gran stabbing the ground before them with her cane, they led each other out of the woods.
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.
