The Healing (12 page)

When they reached a rough track that edged rich black fields, Granada noticed they looked abandoned. It was the planting season,
when entire slave families should be out in the newly broken fields spreading seed, but there was not a soul to be seen.

She discovered why after the buggy rounded another stand of cypress. Granada spied two rows of porchless, whitewashed cabins. In the wide lane between stood all the people missing from the fields. There had to be a hundred or more.

Granada sat up straight and rigid next to Polly. The skin quivered across the back of the girl’s neck. Her legs tensed with the thought of jumping out of the buggy and fleeing down the road back to the mansion.

The darkest of the dark were kept here. Granada believed she could smell them already, their unwashed odor sharp to her nose. She began breathing in quick, shallow gulps. This is where Aunt Sylvie said the mistress would send Granada if she misbehaved. “Back to live with your
real
momma,” Sylvie would scold, sending shivers of terror through the girl, who imagined a place worse than the bishop’s hell. She had not been wrong.

As the buggy drew close, Granada’s chest tightened and her temples pounded. She was no longer gazing down on these people safely from the upstairs gallery. She was at eye level and any one of them could reach out and drag her off. She quickly scanned their faces, looking for that one particular woman she had only seen in her darkest dreams. All she knew was her name: Ella.

Long ago Chester had told Granada about the woman, but the girl hadn’t wanted to hear and had covered her ears. She refused to follow his finger when he pointed to the woman from up on the gallery one Preaching Sunday. Granada didn’t want to know the woman’s face.

Now she felt for sure, as she continued to skim the faces, this was where the woman stayed, the woman from whom the mistress had rescued Granada. She wished now she had looked when Chester had pointed. Then she could run and hide if she saw Ella coming.

A March wind, piercing and sodden with swamp dampness, swept
across the settlement and Granada could almost feel the crowd shiver as one. The clothes they wore were filthy and in tatters, and they shuffled about in the yard wearily.

Granada dug her fingernails into the skin of her arms, hating the thing that linked her to them.

Polly jerked the mules to a halt, tied off the reins, and hoisted herself down over the wheel. Granada remained where she sat. She lowered her head to hide her face.

Through the tops of her eyes she saw the master sitting astride his horse beyond the throng of Negroes, talking to a white man on foot. Why was the master letting this happen to her? she wondered. Wait until the mistress found out she was missing!

The master turned his face toward Polly and motioned her over.

Polly grinned at Granada menacingly. “Get down, now,” she commanded and then almost under her breath, she muttered, “we got to go see about
your
people.”

A band of fear tightened around Granada’s chest, making it hard for her to breathe. “My people?” Granada stammered. Again she frantically scanned the faces in the yard and then looked back at the old woman.

She knew!

I’m not one of them, Granada wanted to explain. She might look like them, but her insides were not the same. She had to let the woman know.

“I belong in the great house with the mistress,” Granada whispered. “I’m a house-raised girl.”

“I say, get down!” Polly ordered, her words set with an iron resolve.

Granada winced, and then did as she was told. As they walked over to where the master sat astride his horse, a cold blast of wind swept through the yard, and the rain began falling in drops as big as pennies.

“Let me see them about to die first,” Polly said to the master. “These here can wait.”

Bridger, the overseer, scowled at Polly. He was a sinewy, weather-toughened man with a flint-sharp face who, along with a couple of white hands and several Negro drivers, managed the master’s operations, including all three settlements. “Wait? I just now called them in from the fields,” he fumed. “We wasting time and money here.” He looked up at the master for confirmation.

Master Ben frowned. “Then we best get to it.” He dismounted and handed the reins to one of the drivers.

Bridger went into a sulk. He spun on his heels and stomped off down the foot-worn track between the cabins. When the track played out, he led the group onto a weeded path that wound away from the cabins, through a recently burned-over field and finally to a long hut-like structure built on the edge of the woods. It was constructed from cut saplings set upright in the ground and had three walls and a roof laid with brush. On the open side stood a grizzle-bearded white man cradling a rifle, rain dripping from the crease in his hat. His mouth was stained with tobacco spit and he glared at Polly with small menacing eyes.

“I raised up this here brush arbor to quarantine the sick ones,” the master said. “Least until I know if it’s catching or not.” He didn’t look at Polly, but the words were obviously for her benefit.

Polly grunted irritably at the tobacco-chewing man with the rifle. Again without acknowledging her directly, Master Ben said to nobody in particular, “He’s got orders to shoot anybody that tries to get in or get out.”

Master Ben entered first, followed by Polly and Bridger. After the girl took the first two hesitant steps, she held back. Peering into the gloom, Granada saw nothing but vague shapes. As she stood there waiting for her eyes to adjust, she heard the sounds of raspy breathing and strangled cries emerging from the bowels of the cavernous hovel. The putrid smell was overpowering, like dead animals left out to rot, forcing Granada to put her hand over her mouth and nose. As her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, she was able to make out silhouettes
of bodies on thin pallets spread across the earthen floor. All around she heard the patter of rain dripping through the roof of interwoven branches onto cold, bare earth.

A woman’s ragged scream penetrated the darkness. “There she is!” she screeched in an unearthly voice. “There the witch that been riding me to hell!”

Granada’s legs trembled beneath her.

“Quiet, you!” Bridger snapped. The screaming ceased, only to be replaced by deep sobbing.

“Some gone plum out their heads since you left,” he said. “Hollering out to invisible spirits and such. Big Dante here run off down to the creek and tried to drown hisself. Took four of us to haul him back. I don’t blame him one bit, neither,” Bridger said with a rare inflection of pity, looking down on the man at his feet. “Them that died appear to be the lucky ones.”

The master didn’t respond. He was kneeling on the ground now, gazing into the face of the prostrate body. He removed his hat and leaned over the man.

“Big Dante, it’s Master Ben,” he said. Granada was surprised to hear what she took as tenderness in the master’s voice. “I brought somebody to get you better.”

The man bucked up from the middle at the master’s words and began a frantic, thick-throated grunting. Master Ben reached out to hold him down. Granada saw that it was not a man the master had reached out to but a giant. Master Ben’s hand appeared child-size on Big Dante’s shoulder.

“No, not Dr. Barbour. Somebody else. I sent after one of your own kind. It’s going to be all right, you hear, Big Dante?”

Again the man tried to talk but could only produce garbled sounds.

“I brung you safe all the way down from Daddy’s place in Kentucky, didn’t I?” the master said. “Goddamn if I won’t get you through this, too!”

Big Dante stilled himself and the master nodded for Polly to come
closer. When the master stood to make room for the old woman, Granada got a good look at Big Dante’s face. His tongue was swelled up horribly, too big for his head, lolling out of his mouth. The organ was as black as ink and appeared to be cracking open like a ripe fig. Granada turned her face away lest she retch. She stood for a long while with her eyes closed and a hand over her mouth. She reminded herself that soon she would be back in Aunt Sylvie’s kitchen where the smells would be pleasant and tempting, and where people kept themselves neat and clean.

Granada waited for her stomach to settle and then looked again. Polly was now nose to nose with the diseased man. The old woman was sniffing his horrible breath! Then Polly put her mouth to his ear and whispered something no one could hear. Granada thought she saw the muscles in that grotesque face relax. Polly smiled at the man like he might be her long-lost son. The entire sight had made the bile raise in the girl’s throat.

Polly went on to do the same with every ailing man, woman, and child in the arbor. All of them, regardless of how contorted their faces or how badly their skin had ruptured, seemed more at peace after she whispered the secret words into their ears. Even the woman who had screamed that she was being ridden by a witch stilled herself in Polly’s presence.

When she was done, Polly stepped out of the brush arbor. Without speaking a word she took off at an angry clip down the track toward the quarter. The master and Bridger scrambled after her. Granada was in no such hurry, thinking the woman had obviously left her gentleness and compassion back in the brush arbor.

They all caught up to her in the quarter where the families of the sick and dying were gathering around Polly, studying her face with worried expressions. The rain had stopped and there was a heavy silence all around. No one was sure what to make of the woman, only that she was as much a slave as they and had been allowed to see their family and friends.

The master was breathing hard when he strode up to her. “You
seen it before? Is it catching?” he asked her anxiously. “Do you have a remedy?”

That’s when it occurred to Granada that the master was not simply sorting the sick from the healthy; he was expecting this woman to make them well. He was looking to a
slave woman
to heal them!

The silence grew more intense as they waited for the old woman’s response. But the old witch still held her tongue.

“For all the money I paid,” the master spat, “I expect you to have a ready remedy.”

Polly still didn’t answer Master Ben. She stood there glaring at him, looking as if she might be too angry to speak.

He shook his fist in her face. “I could maybe fix it for you to come down with the same thing. If you can’t save them, I wager you can figure a way to save yourself.”

The old woman finally spoke. “What you feeding them sick ones?” she asked.

“Corn and molasses,” he said.

“No meat? No greens?”

“They on half rations until they get well. That’s my policy. It’s scientific. A body don’t need as much when they’re sick,” he said confidently. “And nobody’s allowed to forage the woods for food. Can’t eat nothing that I don’t approve myself. Leastwise, no telling what they’d get into.”

“You lucky they ain’t all dead,” Polly said, not bothering to hide her contempt. “Bring ever one up to my hospital.”

“
Your
hosp …” the master stammered. Then he said emphatically, “No. Not these. These are to be kept here in quarantine. I’ll not have them near the house. Nothing contagious is to be treated in the hospital.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, like they were in full agreement, “we could leave them here like you say. Without no proper roof over their heads. Sleeping on the sopping-wet ground. That way if the blacktongue don’t kill them, the pneumonia will.”

She spat on the ground and then put her fists on her bony hips.
“Or we can get them gathered up in one place with sound walls, a raised-up floor, and a warming fire so I can keep an eye on this thing. I reckon that hospital you built for me is the only place you got stout enough. Except your own grand house.”

The master stood stone-still with his jaw clenched. His blue eyes blazed with fury. Granada figured Polly Shine had worn out her welcome for good. When the master turned against a slave, if he didn’t have them whipped, he could do worse. He could sell them to labor on a sugarcane plantation down in Louisiana, a certain death sentence.

The woman wouldn’t be rattled. “Master,” she said with a certain bold sympathy in her voice, “I ain’t going to let it carry to your family. I’ll stop this thing in its tracks. Yes, sir. I got me a notion for a remedy, but I need to get them all under the same roof.”

He looked away for a moment, and then turned back to her. “Swear it to me. Swear to me you can make them all well. You swear to it, and I’ll do what you say.”

She shook her head, setting the little brass disks to tinkling. “I can’t swear to what God Hisself got to do.”

“Damn it, woman! You better do more than pray over them. You better have some remedies in them pots and bottles and bushel baskets I hauled halfway across the country.”

“I ain’t got the remedy. You do.”

“Me?” he snapped. “Then tell me what it is and I’ll have some hands go collect it.”

“Yes, sir,” she said and then spat again. “Here’s what I need. I need enough mutton to feed them all for three weeks and enough port wine to get ever last one of them drunk five times over.”

A collective gasp emerged from all around, except from the overseer who burst out laughing. He quickly brought himself up short when he caught the stunned look on the master’s face.

“What? What?” Master Ben began sputtering. “You trying to make a fool out of me? That ain’t no remedy for no Negro! They all get a fair ration of cornmeal and fatback and molasses. That’s all the African
body craves. It’s scientific. I’ve done
proved
it.” He hit the word hard, like it was as unquestionable as one of God’s “Thou shalt”s.

Granada wondered if the master was going to read to the old woman out of one of his journals.

“They don’t even
like
lean meat,” he continued. “Wouldn’t eat it if they tried it.”

Polly said nothing and while the master continued his rant, she looked up at the sun as it began to break through the cloud cover. The first rays caught the disks that framed her face, setting them to winking.

“Negroes eating like white folks,” Master Ben was squawking. “I can’t have it. What next, china plates?”