The Healing

The View from Delphi

1933

T
he winter dampness crept through the kitchen door, chilling Gran Gran through her worn, flour-sack shift. The little girl standing in the doorway had not moved since she first appeared, her gaze fixed on the cot across the room where her mother lay.

The room, the kitchen of an old plantation, was immense, and the fire from a claw-footed stove in a far corner cast flickering shadows against walls stained and slick with a century’s worth of wood smoke and bacon grease. Dividing the room was a roughly hewn pine table longer than a ship’s gangplank, big enough to seat a dozen people and heaped with baskets and gourds, clay pots, syrup buckets. One wall was taken up by a massive fireplace, boarded over.

Through the open door the old woman heard the Buick spin its tires furiously in the mud, finally gain traction, and power off in the direction from which it had come, Memphis the man had said, his load lighter now by one dead woman and her child.

“Good news never comes in bad weather,” she had predicted when the white man had driven up less than half an hour ago in his fancy car. She had been right about that.

Again Gran Gran noticed the dark stains on the girl’s baby-blue dress. Violet, they said her name was, just before they had abandoned the girl to her care. With nothing but the clothes on the child’s back.
She couldn’t be more than seven. Her skin the same honey-brown as her mother’s. The same color-shifting eyes.

The old woman released a heavy breath. “You don’t need to be seeing this.” She walked over to a shelf to retrieve a ragged patchwork quilt.

“Nobody got no respect for the healing no more,” she tried explaining as she covered the body. “Can’t take things into your own hands. You got to pay respect.”

Violet showed no sign of hearing Gran Gran’s complaint, but the old woman continued regardless. “Why?” she demanded angrily. “Why did she do that? I explained it to her careful. Teaspoon in the morning. For nine days. It ain’t my fault. And only early on. Never this late. Never after the quickening. I told her that, too. I told her it would kill her and the child both. They had no right to bring her to me like this.”

The old woman shook her head sadly at Violet. “It ain’t my fault, little girl. She went against the healing!”

The girl was motionless, except for the almost imperceptible ticking of her head from side to side, as if marking time to some faint melody. The old woman carefully reached behind Violet to shut the door against the cold. “Might as well get yourself over by the fire.”

Gran Gran reached down for the girl, but Violet jerked her hand away and swung it protectively behind her back.

“Suit yourself.” She gripped the girl firmly by the shoulders and steered her to the stove. Violet didn’t resist, but all the time she kept her eyes on the covered body, her head ticking ever so slightly to the secret rhythm.

The old woman bent down to study the girl’s face in the light of the cookstove, venturing a look into her eyes. They seemed to peer right through her. The girl’s pupils were tiny pinpricks.

“You ain’t heard a word I said, have you?” Gran Gran let out a tired breath. “You ain’t having none of it. I can tell that much.” She touched the child gently on the cheek with the back of her weathered hand. “A shadow been put across your face. You walking with the spirits now.”

Violet’s shivering grew more violent. The old woman led the girl to the pantry, many years ago a bedroom for the plantation cook. It
contained another cot and shelves which were lined with bottles and jars and sacks tied off at the neck. All were marked with what appeared to be a child’s attempt at lettering. After carefully removing the girl’s stained dress and then covering her with quilts, Gran Gran selected a paper sack and went back into the kitchen. She returned shortly with a chipped cup held closely between her palms.

Steadying the murky contents, she sat down on the edge of the bed beside the girl. Violet did not move, but the old woman could see that her eyes were open, staring through the dark. She lifted the back of the girl’s head and put the china cup to her mouth, and slowly, sip by sip, Violet emptied it.

While the girl lay silent, her eyes now closed, Gran Gran studied her, looking for some sign that would tell her what to do.

She carefully placed the heel of her palm against the girl’s forehead, and closed her own eyes tightly, trying to enter the child’s dreams.

“I can’t see nothing,” she said finally. “A darkness been put between me and you.”

Then the old woman shook her head, and sighed. “Who I trying to fool? I can’t see nothing no more. God’s put a darkness between me and His whole damned world.”

She should have known better. The woman had come to Gran Gran months ago for a remedy. She said her name was Lucy. That’s all. No family name. She wanted Gran Gran to unfix an early pregnancy. She had told Gran Gran that if she didn’t help her, the white man she worked for would get his butcher to do it. She never mentioned she already had one child.

White men, Gran Gran thought, forever trying to be master over a black woman’s body. Always been that way. And according to Lucy, still was.

Why had she waited so long? Had she planned on keeping it, then changed her mind, deciding to drink the whole bottle and kill herself along with her unborn child?

They used to say Gran Gran had the sight. No more. There was nothing but darkness.

The old woman returned to her bed in the kitchen, not bothering to undress or even to pull up a cover. She only slept for a few moments when she was startled awake by a wordless murmuring. She lay there, eyes open, exhausted, trying to decipher the hushed whispers, the shadowed faces. But there was nothing that remained of her dream but the shapeless foreboding.

When she was a young girl, she believed that the Old Ones would forever show her the way. She herself had heard their words, as distinct and reassuring as church bells.

Nor was she the only one who heard. In those earlier times, voices seemed to travel on a river of breath and memory through the lives of all the people, looking out for their children, stirring eddies and currents to catch their eye, faithfully giving up signs to help them along the way. All a person had to do was stop and listen to those who came before.

But it was not that way anymore.

The voices came only at night now, when she was asleep in her bed, but she could not make out the words, just their anger. Each night their cries grew more piercing, the current colder, freezing the breath in her lungs and forcing her to awaken gasping for air.

Sometimes she believed the current carried death. Or perhaps her sins, dislodged from the past, circling and reaching for her with icy fingers.

Whatever it was, it had exhausted her. She hoped it would finally arrive and do with her what it would.

• • •

Not yet dawn, the sound of muffled voices woke Violet. At first she believed she was still in the car. “Reach back here and touch your momma’s hand,” her mother’s friend said. It was raining. The only sound, other than her mother’s soft moans, were the wipers, beating back the rain. “Violet,” the woman said, “pet your momma’s hand. She needs you to. She loves you so.” Then silence again. Except for the beat of the wipers. Loud, steady, incessant.

After a moment, Violet knew that she was not in the car but in a strange bed. She strained to peer into the kitchen. Across the cavernous room another door stood open, faintly lit. There were shadows moving about, and she made a motion to rise but was not able to fend off the drugged sleep. Later, even the tap-tap-tapping of the hammer and the loud scuffle of men’s boots didn’t serve to keep her awake long. The tea had been strong and was doing its work.