The Healing (27 page)

But the women on the grounds argued that it did them proud to see one of their own getting so much respect. Whether she was evil or good, it made no difference.

“Same to me if she doing it by foul or by fair,” Charity, the weaver, said. “She’s one slave the white folks can’t own. Always one step ahead, she is.”

Lizzie, who hardly ever said two words on the same day, agreed. She was convinced Polly had set the mistress on fire. “And I don’t give a fig if it was Jesus or the devil who lit her torch. I just wished my poor Rubina could have seen that woman blaze up.”

Even Aunt Sylvie was heard to say behind Old Silas’s back, “Just because the devil brung her, don’t mean God didn’t send her. She saved my Granada and Little Lord from the wolves and raised a monkey from the dead. That got to count for something in heaven.”

Only one group of folks saw eye to eye on the question of Polly Shine. The field slaves—those laboring far away from the great house, working the cotton, clearing the swamps, building the levees, driving the mules, breeding new stock, always the first to be struck down by sickness and disease—had come to a common conclusion: Polly Shine had indeed been sent by God on a holy mission.

The first who had been carried from the swamps to the old woman’s hospital, doomed to die with the blacktongue, only to walk out whole after being touched by Polly Shine, were revered by their people. They called them the Blessed Ones.

Others came now late at night, after Granada and Polly had put out the lanterns and gone to bed. They walked the miles from the fields, under the cover of darkness. Granada saw how they looked at Polly with misty-eyed reverence and called her “Mother Polly,” like children calling to Jesus in their prayers.

The first to come were the mothers, carrying children who suffered from ailments they had hidden from the overseers, afraid their remedies would kill the child along with the disease. Not long after, the women began bringing their men and soon all sorts of folks were visiting the cabin, complaining of stomach pains or achy teeth or boils. Some came with pneumonia or the croup or bilious fever or a sprained back. Some hurt in places they could not point to.

Granada would feign sleep but watched through the slit between her lids as Polly rose up to light a lantern and put on her special head scarf before she walked through the cabin to the door. She turned no one away.

Whether the people who came were sick or not, Polly always gave them a remedy. But before prescribing anything, she asked all manner of questions about their loved ones and about their fears and their dreams. She listened intently, sometimes with her eyes closed and other times moving her gaze very carefully over their entire bodies, studying the color of their eyes and skin and fingernails. Pretty soon she had the person talking about a lot more than stomach pains. Other pains, too.

Pains in here, Granada thought, reaching her hand to her chest where weeks ago she had felt the penetrating burn of Polly’s palm. Soul-sick pains. Grudges they held. Losses they had known. Hopes that had died. Old wounds they had suffered.

They laid themselves bare and then Polly told them what to do. Sometimes she gave them a poultice or a tea to prepare back at their cabins. Sometimes she put dried roots in a pouch and told them to wear it around their necks. Sometimes they went to the big Bible together and Polly found words for them to repeat while they labored. And before they left, she whispered something into their ear and they nodded and smiled gratefully. They all seemed to leave feeling better than when they had come.

That’s when Granada knew.

Polly was doing the same thing to these callers as she did in the forest to the roots and the herbs and the bark. She was peeling back
the skin and tasting their insides and learning their nature. Once she divined their nature, that’s when she did her hoodoo. That was her power!

One night, after Polly shut the door and the last visitor had stolen away, Granada decided it was time. If she was ever going to get the mistress back, she needed to learn the spells that Polly was casting. Granada never wanted to disappoint Little Lord again.

She sprung up in her bed and announced, “I want to learn me some hoodoo, too.”

“What you mean, hoodoo?” Polly answered, turning from the door. “I don’t truck with no hoodoo!”

“I been watching you like you told me to,” Granada said, propping herself up on her elbow. “You been putting hoodoo on all them sick people. I seen it.”

“That what you seen?” Polly answered. “You been watching me all this time and that be the smartest thing you and Silas come up with?”

“Huh …?” Granada stammered. “What you mean?” It had been weeks since she had agreed to help Silas.

The old woman shook her head. “Girl, you can’t fool me. I got eyes in the back of my head.” She gave Granada a look that was dead serious and held the lantern up and turned her head. “See?”

Granada gasped.

Polly squealed with laughter and then reached down and lifted her dress, showing her bare ankles. “Surely! I got them backward eyes the same place I got these scales on my feet. Bought them at the Devil’s Dry Goods Store!” Polly laughed again. “I know what lies that fool Silas been spreading about me. And I know he wanted you to help him.”

Granada opened her mouth to deny it, but thought better of it. “I told him some bad things about you,” she admitted.

“Was they true?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, I reckon I can live with that,” Polly said. “Can you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I guess mostly I’m just proud y’all been talking about me,” Polly chuckled, setting the lantern on the table. She began putting away roots and herbs, remnants from the evening’s work.

“Hoodoo,” she said, getting back to Granada’s question. “Girl, you like a cork on the water, bobbing up and down with every ripple that comes along. You got to learn to reach down deep beneath the surface to get the truth of things.”

Granada thought carefully about this for a moment. “But everybody saying it’s got to be hoodoo,” she finally insisted. “Like what you done with them that had the blacktongue. Them white doctors couldn’t do nothing with them. Everybody saying you made them well because you got the hoodoo.”

Polly scowled at Granada. “If a nigger did it, got to be hoodoo. That right?”

“Then how else you make them well?”

Polly dragged her rocker over to Granada’s bed, bringing her spit cup with her. She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. She began breathing so deeply, Granada thought Polly might have fallen asleep. Finally she opened her eyes. “Child, weren’t magic to see a body starving for more than cornmeal and fatback.” She shrugged her shoulders at the obvious truth of her words. “I fed them so they could make themselves fit. I didn’t do nothing but see what was in front of my face.”

Granada was skeptical. “But the doctors—”

“What did them doctors see when they studied those poor creatures?” Polly said with disgust. “They seen field animals. So they dose them like animals. White man see a mule so he feed him like a mule.” She cast her eyes upon Granada again, her stare intense. “But I seen people, Granada. Don’t you understand yet? I looked at them poor sick folks from here,” she said, putting her hand over her chest. “Soon as I remember them, then my hand knows what to do.”

Polly’s eyes narrowed. “Look to him that suffers. He’ll tell you
what to do,” she said. “The person that wears the shoe knows where it pinches. They was just starving people is all. I fed them. Talked to them. Listened. That ain’t hoodoo. Just plain sense. The magic weren’t in the food. It was in the seeing.”

“But you found me and Little Lord out in the woods. And Daniel Webster—”

“Animals know how to heal themselves,” she said, studying a callus on her dog finger. “They the best doctors they is. He knew; I listened. All there was to it.”

That was not the answer Granada had wanted. “You saying they ain’t no hoodoo?”

“I suppose plain ol’ life is the biggest hoodoo they is. When you got the sight, you know life ain’t never still. Creation is always birthing itself.
That’s
what the sight is.”

“That why you always putting them ‘In the beginning’ words in their ears?” Granada asked, wondering again if that truly might be a magical charm.

“That’s right.”

Granada yawned. Through the window, she could see the dark outline of the trees. Dawn was not that far off and she could feel sleep trying to take her, but she needed to learn.

“It be the very first thing that got writ down in the Bible,” Polly said. “So it got to be powerful. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth …’ It does seem to give a body comfort.”

“That ain’t nothing magic,” Granada said. She had heard Old Silas quoting the Bible a lot lately, gathering up folks in the barn and telling them how Jesus had warned about devils like Polly.

“It ain’t nothing magic in how the white man preaches it. In the white man’s Bible, it means God’s done finished His work. Put out the lights and gone to bed. They think it means God is good and happy with the way things is. White one up and the black one down. White man’s Bible don’t got nothing to say to you and me but ‘No!’ But in my Bible it mean something different.”

Granada looked up at Polly through bleary eyes. “What’s it mean?”

“My Bible say them words ain’t finished leaving the Lord’s mouth. And He ain’t going to be finished saying them words tomorrow. Nor the day after tomorrow. It’s always ‘In the beginning’ with God. Our God is sure enough a starting-over God.”

Granada asked, barely able to keep her eyes open, “How you know?”

“It’s the promise a woman carries in her body,” Polly whispered.

“Oh,” Granada said sleepily, “the river.”

Polly nodded. “That’s right, Granada. The river.”

For a moment Granada forgot about the mistress. There was something else she needed to know, but she couldn’t name it. The river. Something about the river.

“God always creating something,” Polly said, her voice carried away by a strengthening current. “Always something trying to be born, Granada. That’s what I whisper in they ears.”

Granada’s eyes were closed now and she was drifting on the waters between waking and sleeping, between what was and what would be, between childhood and womanhood.

Granada could sense Polly hovering over her, studying her closely through the dark. Then she felt the breath against her ear.

“In the beginning God created. That’s all anybody need to know about God, Granada. It ain’t never over with God.”

G
ranada pulled the corncob through her knots and tangles, trying to get her hair smoothed out before preaching started. Already hundreds of slaves had streamed into the big yard, cleaned up and dressed in their Sunday clothing. Most were barefooted, but some carried shoes freshly polished with fireplace ashes, and they stooped to put them on as they neared the yard. This was the first Preaching Sunday the master had held since Polly had arrived and the mistress had departed.

Polly stood at the window, her brows furrowed and eyes squinting, carefully scrutinizing the passing crowd. Granada knew exactly what the woman was doing. She was tasting the people, peeling back their skin and looking underneath. “Remembering them,” as she would say. It still didn’t make much sense to Granada. Remembering things you’ve never even seen. Remembering things that hadn’t even happened yet.

Listening to Polly you’d think time was a sack full of days you could shake up anyway you wanted. Granada sighed. Just more riddles without answers.

She went to the window and stood with Polly. There was nothing that she hadn’t seen before. Many of the women wore colorful head rags. The younger ones had sprigs of flowers and berries in their hair. Some were sashaying proudly in calico dresses awarded by the
overseers for good work or plentiful breeding. Even those wearing crude homespun had washed and stiffened their dresses with homemade starch. Some women had even sewn onto their dresses patches of cloth dyed with random splashes of color—red from pokeberry and light browns from walnut and rusty orange from elm. A few wore the master’s or mistress’s broken buttons as broaches.

Awhile back many had tried emulating the mistress and made hoops for their skirts out of grapevines, much to her distress. She interpreted their actions as ridicule and told Master Ben to put an immediate stop to it. But today a few had revisited the practice—having heard of the mistress’s recent misfortune—and their skirts billowed out around them like toadstools. Back when Granada lived in the great house, the servants would point and snicker at all the preposterous getups the swamp slaves fashioned for themselves.

“Used to,” Granada said wistfully, as she tugged on the cob, “Aunt Sylvie greased my hair and combed it out with the prettiest silver comb. And I had me real dresses. Not pretend ones like them out there. And I didn’t have to wear no nandina berries in my hair. Mistress gave me store-bought satin bows. Red ones even.”

“You know what the white folks say,” Polly laughed. “ ‘Dog begs for bread, nigger begs for red.’ That’s what they say anyway. Even my momma said she lost her Freedom for a scrap of fine red cloth. First white man she ever seen waved a hank of red in her face. Said that sure cured her from wanting no more red.” Polly looked down at Granada and asked, “Reckon what it’ll take to cure you?”