The Healing (7 page)

The boy’s reaction was all Granada needed to reaffirm her earlier estimation of herself. Little Lord had probably never seen a white girl looking this splendid. Including that dead sister of his.

“What’s your game, Bishop Kerry?” the bald man was saying. “You trying to get a job preaching to all our nigras?”

“I just sow the seeds, Mr. Stogner. They fall where they may and take root where they can.” He drained his goblet and nodded his head with a little quiver of chins to Pomp for another drink. “I sow liberally,” he chirped. “The rest is up to God.”

“Bishop, you can sow until you’re blue in the face, but it won’t change the fact of the matter.”

Granada noticed that the bald-headed man was becoming animated, those caterpillar eyebrows rising higher and higher like they were trying to crawl up his slick-as-an-egg noggin. “Admit it, Bishop,” he said, “everybody knows that the nigra doesn’t have a soul.”

Granada shifted about uncomfortably in her shoes and then stifled a yawn, wishing Little Lord would sneak away again. Which Negroes was he talking about not having souls? she wondered.

“Charles, please,” the man’s pretty wife said, not at all unpleasantly. “We know what you’re going to say before you say it. How will Amanda ever forgive us for spoiling this fine gathering?”

Perhaps hearing her name, or maybe sensing a twinge of tension among her guests, Mistress Amanda smiled instinctively, doing the minimum of what was required of her as a hostess. But just as quickly her face fell back to cloudy dullness.

The bishop bowed politely. “I don’t mind the jousting. Not in the least.” Then he turned to the bald man. “All I tell them is what the Scripture tells them. Obedience here on earth is a qualification for life eternal.”

“You talking about
nigras
in heaven?” the man scoffed, glancing over at Granada and scrunching his eyebrows together so that the two caterpillars merged to become one enormous bug. “Ha! Only if God raises cotton!”

Granada’s cheeks burned with fury. She raised her foot to stomp, but then thought better of it. What she wanted to do was kick this bald-headed man in the shins. Of course she was going to heaven. The mistress would make sure of it, writing Granada a pass if she needed one. Anyway, he was probably talking about those Negroes who lived out in the far-flung settlements. “Swamp slaves” was what Aunt Sylvie called them. They probably didn’t have a white person to recommend them to heaven like Granada did.

As the guests resumed talking in their mechanical fashion, Granada detected the growing sound of chatter in the plantation yard. The slave families from out in the swamps were arriving! Now there were loud calls of recognition followed by outbursts of hooting and sturdy laughter. Soon it would be time for the preaching.

She checked her reflection in the mirror and touched Miss Becky’s pearl necklace. Her stomach tingled, anticipating all the admiring looks that would be cast her way when the preaching commenced.

The bishop had begun to weave a little on his feet. “All I’m saying is religion, sensibly dispensed, only bolsters the proper order of things. That’s what the planter desires above all things, isn’t it? Order?”

“Well, you can preach to Satterfield’s nigras as much as you want. But leave mine alone,” the man said, now sounding like a bully. “I never knew a slave with religion to fetch one dollar more on the block than one without.” He turned to Master Ben. “But of course the slave market doesn’t concern you, does it, Ben? You neither buy nor sell off your place. Breed your own and keep them close. That’s your motto.”

“Why buy trouble?” another guest said. “Isn’t that what you say, Ben?”

“I know when I’m being played the fool,” Master Ben said, his cheeks blazing. “But you’ve got to admit the logic of it. It’s not like the old days of the saltwater Negro, when you could ship your cargo straight from Africa uninfected with the abolitionist’s poison. No, now the domestic market is full up with other planters’ troublesome slaves. Our only salvation is to scientifically breed a stable order of docile Negro. I’ve come up with three tenets: Isolation. Religion. Family.

“First of all,” he began what sounded like the start of a long speech, “keep your stock quarantined from dangerous notions. This Mississippi Delta wilderness is ideal. Most of my young ones have never heard of a free black, much less seen one.”

The men nodded.

“And there are ways to employ both family and religious instincts to instill loyalty. I’ve done experiments on my own stock.”

Granada was becoming impatient. She wondered how long the master was going to lecture his guests. He was typically excited about some new “experiment” he was running and would often produce one of the elegantly bound journals he was always writing in. Sylvie said he had begun a book on every slave, all three hundred of them, keeping track of what they ate, what they weighed, how well they bred, and how much cotton they picked. Sylvie said that after his wife began acting so daft, Master Ben started one on her, too. Last Preaching Sunday the master had read to his guests about how feeding the girls milk from an early age would get them to menstruating two to three years early. He figured he had increased his stock ten percent by that method alone. Granada had asked Sylvie what menstruating was, but
all she would say was, “When it happens, let me know. I’ll tell you then.”

“You’ve done more experiments than the mad scientist,” said the bald-headed man. “What’s his name? You remember. The one that woman writes about.”

“Frankenstein!” someone called out and laughed.

But the laughter only made Master Ben even more shrill. “If Lincoln wins this election and tries to free my slaves, not a one of them will take to the road. They are with me, in slavery or emancipation.” He then said with particular emphasis, “One day soon, mark my words, the slaves are going to have their freedom. The best strategy for us planters is to make sure when they get it, they have no use for it.”

The bald-headed man glanced over at Granada again, catching her in the act of surveying the guests. He smiled and the glint in his eye made her quiver with dread. Then he raised his eyebrows, smirking. “No, I expect you would have to chase off some of your slaves with a stick to get them to leave.”

She quickly dropped her eyes. Daniel Webster reached down from the mantel and pulled at the ribbon in her hair, but the weight of the man’s gaze kept her chin pushed into her chest.

He laughed. “If you ask me, it’s the gators, cottonmouths, and a million acres of swamp that keep your slaves from running off.”

Then he took a drink and his face darkened. “I’ll make you a wager, Ben,” he said, solemn now. “I predict that before this scourge of the blacktongue is through decimating your stock, you’ll be rushing to the market with the rest of us. I buried a dozen of mine already.”

The man’s talk of blacktongue sent a shiver down Granada’s spine. All the servants had been abuzz with rumors about the disfiguring disease. It made your tongue swell up and your fingers and toes fall off. It was said those out in the swamps had been dropping like flies. Again Granada comforted herself with the fact that so far it was only felling the swamp Negroes. The house and yard slaves seemed to be immune.

“Charles, you are disrespecting our host,” his wife admonished
again. “This is Benjamin’s home. As long as we are accepting his gracious hospitality, we should respect his customs.”

The man seemed ready to argue, but then reconsidered. “My wife’s right, as always,” he said and then performed a slight bow to his host. “Sorry, Ben. I know you’ve got your Kentucky ways, and I wouldn’t ever want to place my welcome in jeopardy. The major benefit of these peculiar gatherings is always yours and Amanda’s company. Not to mention Aunt Sylvie’s cooking.”

Master Ben responded with a stiff bow of his own. “Thank you, Charles.”

“I guess we should be thankful this epidemic is playing out like the cholera,” the man added, “another nigra disease.” He raised his empty cup in a toast. “Nigras, or
Negroes
, as Benjamin calls them, can be replaced. Good friends can’t. Again, please forgive me my boorishness.”

Mistress Amanda stirred in her chair and looked around the room with an expression of puzzled concern.

“You honor us,” the master said coldly, cutting his eyes toward his wife. “Isn’t that so, Amanda?”

Mistress Amanda did not speak right away and seemed vaguely surprised that she had been addressed directly by her husband. When the guests looked to her anxiously for a response, they saw that her eyes, once dry and vacant, seemed to tear up.

As she always did when the mistress was troubled and her countenance softened, Granada ached to soothe her, to burrow deep inside the woman’s grief in hopes of locating a home for herself somewhere close to her mistress’s heart. But she had been warned never to address the mistress directly, and as much as she wanted to comfort the mistress, Granada feared disobeying her more. She held her tongue.

“A Negro disease,” Mistress Amanda muttered, her tone unaccountably sad. Then she sighed heavily and with such anguish that Granada thought the mistress was about to cry out in agony. She reached for Granada’s hand, startling the girl, and gripped it tightly.

Everyone saw the gesture, but no one said a word. From out in the
yard, the sound of three hundred congregating field slaves thundered loud against the silence in the room, but louder still was the throbbing of Granada’s heart.

The mistress had reached out for her in front of these white people! Granada stood there with her hand in the mistress’s, holding her breath lest that physical bond be broken. Then she dared to return the mistress’s grip. They held to each other tight, the moment so welcome, yet so foreign, that tears welled up in the girl’s eyes as well.

The guests did not notice. Their gaze was still upon the two clutched hands, the girl’s dark one and the nearly translucent blue-veined one.

Granada was proud that they were seeing it! She would not have released the mistress’s hand now if an entire army of white people had shaken their heads in disgust. This moment belonged to her, not them.

“Amanda!” Master Ben said sternly, but his wife’s eyes did not go to him. She had the look of a person in a dream, witnessing events beyond these four walls.

“I tell you what,” the bald man chirped, drawing attention to himself and ending the awkward moment, “if it will get Aunt Sylvie and her roast lamb into heaven, I’ll attend all the preaching the good bishop can serve up and pray mightily for her ascension! Negro or no Negro!”

“Now you’re being sacrilegious, Charles,” his wife said, but her tone was gentle. She took the goblet from his hand. “This is your last drink before the service. You better watch him, Bishop Kerry. He’s likely to jostle you aside mid-sermon and deliver his own heretical theology.”

They all laughed uncomfortably, and then to everyone’s relief another guest was ushered into the parlor. The men gravitated toward the newly arrived banker, eagerly distancing themselves from Master Ben’s wife and the awkward scene she was presently making. The women, though, hovered around Amanda, discreetly concealing her with their voluminous petticoats and close attention.

“Amanda, my poor dear,” the bald-headed man’s wife said tenderly.
As she spoke she reached up to separate Amanda’s hand from Granada’s, artfully replacing the girl’s with her own gloved one. She did not glance at Granada when she broke that link.

Yet that’s all it took to make Granada once more invisible, aching for the touch of the mistress again.

“They spoke of death,” Amanda said in great agitation. “Has anyone died? Please tell me,” she demanded. “Who is it that’s died?”

“No one, dear Amanda,” said an old woman with a ruby on her finger. “No one has died.”

“Slaves,” said the woman who now held the mistress’s hand, “only slaves,” and this seemed to calm her.

When the last of the guests arrived, Master Ben led them all out onto the grand gallery and bade them sit in the chairs that Pomp had arranged earlier. Bishop Kerry strode up to the polished oak lectern, one that Barnabas, the plantation carpenter, had built especially for these services. The red-faced bishop scanned his audience of black faces down below and then began to speak his big, puzzling words to the population of Satterfield Plantation—the only world that Granada knew existed.

Once she had heard the master say that he could look out from this gallery toward forever, and without lying claim he owned everything and everybody as far as a keen-sighted person could see—more than three hundred slaves housed in three separate settlements and four thousand acres spreading across the western half of Hopalachie County. It took him three days to ride his land. To Granada that had to be the whole world, plus some.

She looked across the sea of black bodies sitting in a yard enclosed by the stable, several barns, the smokehouse, the dairy, the ginhouse, the sawmill, Silas’s cabin, and farther down the cabins for the dozens of family servants. Every plank and board on the place was whitewashed and gleaming in the sun. Beyond them were countless miles of levees and ditches and high ridges, alligator swamps and deep Delta forests.

It was indeed an immense world, a world in which she often felt alien. Like when the house servants laughed at her dark skin or taunted her for wearing a dead white girl’s clothes. Or when Mistress Amanda let weeks pass without sending for Granada to sit with her in the darkened bedroom.

But this moment was different. Granada was as happy as she could ever hope to be. For
in this moment
she knew where she belonged. Hadn’t the touch from the mistress’s hand told her once and for all? She could still almost feel the warmth of it.

Sylvie had warned Granada what a fickle thing belonging was. Perhaps down below in the yard, among all the black faces, looking up at her with emerald-green eyes was a light-skinned woman with fine curly hair, who in another moment, one long ago, most likely stood where Granada stood today.

But Granada could not think of that. Nor could she think about what would happen when the last of Becky’s dresses was drawn from the mahogany wardrobe. Instead Granada told herself: I belong in this dress, wearing these beautiful shoes, standing next to my mistress, warmed by the gentle sunshine of an early-spring afternoon. Why, she wondered, couldn’t one perfect moment such as this be woven into a warm blanket against any chill winds that might come? Perhaps it would last, after all.