The Healing (21 page)

Nope, it sure wasn’t magic. It was conniving.

All around Granada rose the shouts of children playing their ring games and mothers singing to their babies and the steady chop-chop-chop of hoes in the gardens. But none of it could disguise the fact that everybody, young and old, was keeping one eye on the sick woman’s cabin.

When a weary, barrel-chested man arrived with two somber-faced boys, Polly cracked the door of the darkened cabin. She told the man that he was welcome to come into his own home, but only for a short while. The big man didn’t argue. He removed his battered hat
and stepped inside, leaving the boys on the porch to stare blankly at Granada like she was nothing more that a porch step.

Granada’s belly began to grumble. The smoke from a multitude of chimneys settled over the quarter, bringing with it the suppertime smell of frying meat, reminding her again that she had not eaten all day. As darkness fell, women began to gather around the house. Some brought plates of corn bread and side meat and shared it with Sarie’s sons.

At last, one woman with a shy, cringing look, like a dog that had been kicked once too often, held out a plate to Granada. When she took it, the woman startled Granada by breaking into a broad, gapped-toothed smile that lit up her face.

Did the woman recognize her? Granada started and the tin plate nearly fell from her hands.

Terrified, Granada dropped her eyes, trying to make the woman disappear, praying that this was not the woman named Ella. The little woman said nothing and at last Granada heard her limping shuffle down the steps.

Now Granada looked up to see that many more people were milling about the yard. Children had gathered dry wood and pine knots, and a fire blazed in the lane. The men talked quietly while the women carried babies on their hips. But whenever some commotion arose from the direction of the cabin, everyone went still, as if they were awaiting some important pronouncement. Firelight reflected the great anticipation in their eyes.

As Granada sat alone, feeling a stranger to everybody and everything around her, the door creaked opened and out came the sick woman’s man. He wiped his hands anxiously on his dirty pants, and then reached into the pocket of a ripped shirt for a clay pipe. He sat down on the bench next to Granada.

“You Polly’s apprentice?” the man asked, twisting the pipe stem with his thick, blunt fingers.

Granada shrugged, not knowing what he meant by the word. He smelled of sweat and tobacco. Granada inched away.

“Well,” he said, taking her lack of response in the affirmative, “don’t reckon you could ask for nobody better to learn under. That’s what I hear anyhow.” He laughed self-consciously and said, “She make the lame walk and the blind sure enough see. Least that’s what they tell me. They right about that?”

He looked at Granada for reassurance. “They say she totes her conjuring herbs in that sack. Some say she do hoodoo on folks.”

When she still didn’t respond, he muttered softly, “Sure hope she knows what she doing.” He tapped the bowl of the pipe against his palm and glanced over at his two sons who stood at the edge of the porch. He lowered his voice and said, “Sarie done lost the three before this one. Last baby nearly took her with him. You ever seen Polly do this before?”

“Do what?” Granada asked. “What she doing?”

“Don’t you even know why you here?”

“She don’t tell me nothing,” Granada grumbled.

“Girl, my woman’s having a baby!” He laughed. “Thought for sure you knew that. Thought you come to help out.”

“She got a baby in her belly?” Granada gasped. She had heard about this happening to women, but had never actually seen it up close. “That why she sick?”

The man laughed. “She ain’t sick. She bigged! And that baby trying to get hisself born this very night.”

Granada thought about that for a moment. Why didn’t Polly want Granada to know anything about babies? she wondered.

Over the next hour, it was Polly’s voice that dominated within the cabin, handing out orders left and right. As the hoarse cries from the woman grew more desperate, Polly’s instructions became more succinct, sometimes comforting and other times insistent.

“Bear down harder!” she would scold.

Then she would croon softly, “That real good, Sarie. Now breathe in and out real easy, like you blowing in a jug.” And in the next moment she would be hollering at the woman again, or commanding the others to get Sarie on her feet and walk her around the room.

Finally, the woman cried out, “Something ain’t right! I can’t do it no more! It wants to kill me!”

There followed the sounds of the women calling out Sarie’s name, telling her she was in God’s hands now. “Let it roll with God,” they cried. “He’ll see you through.”

“Yes, Lord,” the man next to Granada whispered.

Sarie released a heaving groan that threw a deathly quiet over the yard. The only sounds now were pine knots popping in the fire.

Sarie’s man leaned his arms on his knees, clasped his hands together, and mumbled his prayers, while his sons stood wide-eyed against the porch railing, the older boy’s arm wrapped protectively around his little brother. Those in the yard began their silent prayers.

God was beseeched with one voice, and in that long moment, there seemed to beat only one heart, growing stronger and louder. Granada’s entire body throbbed with it, and when she felt that she couldn’t contain the surging force any longer, there came the cry of a newborn baby, breaking over their heads like a sheet of lightning.

The entire community answered the new arrival with a spontaneous cry of its own. Sarie’s man jumped up, flung open the door, and charged into the cabin.

Granada, filled with the wonder of that moment, found her legs and stood to gaze through the door.

The grease lamp on the table cast a golden circle around the group. They were all looking down adoringly at Sarie, whose face radiated light. She held a tiny child close to her, its little arms reaching.

Granada fixed her eyes on Polly as she stood tall and erect, looking down on the mother and child, the disks winking in the lamplight. She neither smiled nor frowned. Her countenance begged no gratitude. Her expression was so complete in itself, nothing was required of those who saw her but to love her, and Granada could not help doing so herself.

Sarie reached out to Polly and, after taking her hand, brought it to her own glistening face. Granada did not know that she herself had begun to weep.

“God bless you, Mother Polly,” Sarie said, her voice liquid with tears. And then she did a surprising thing. She lifted the baby in her hands and offered her child to Polly.

Without speaking, Polly gathered the naked child and swaddled it in a piece of snow-white linen. Then she lifted the child to her lips and kissed it on the brow. When she returned it to the mother’s arms, she leaned over and spoke very softly what Granada thought must have been a single word, but one that could be heard only by mother and child.

S
arie’s man proudly offered his arm to Polly and helped her down the porch steps. Her cloth sack hung from her shoulder, and the clay pot was cradled carefully in the crook of her arm.

Granada followed them into the yard and not until she joined Polly in the track did it dawn upon her that they were going to have to walk the entire distance back to the plantation yard. The overseer and his wagon were nowhere to be seen.

As if reading Granada’s thoughts, Polly turned to the girl. “I know you think you too tired to walk, child. But you just think of Sarie in there. After all she done tonight, tomorrow she going to be put back to the fields. Tonight God made Sarie a mother one more time. Tomorrow, white man turn her back into a mule. Remember that anytime your foots get tired, you hear?”

Polly raised her eyes to the night sky. “Least it’ll be easy walking,” she said in a frail voice that betrayed her exhaustion. “The woman is sitting tonight.”

Granada followed Polly’s gaze into the cloudless night sky. The moon was full and heavy, a “sitting woman,” as Polly called it. “Means she found her home and is full of joy,” she had told Granada once. “She knows where she belongs tonight.”

Polly was right. Tonight the woman above was brilliant enough to illuminate the road before them.

A group of chattering women and sleepy-eyed children, still captivated by Polly’s performance, accompanied the old woman and the girl down the track to the last cabin, beyond which swamp slaves were not allowed to pass. From there the women bid them farewell with extravagant waves and a chorus of “Blessed be” and “ ’Night, Mother Polly” that continued long after the settlement had disappeared from view.

Granada followed at a short distance behind Polly, who trudged on ahead in a world of her own. There were a million questions Granada wanted to ask about the birth, but she could tell from the way the old woman forged her way through the night, her frail body hunched over and both arms around the clay crock, she was in no mood for talk. The sense of magic that Granada felt back in the quarter faded with the voices of the women behind her.

They continued along the narrow road, walled in by a dense canebrake from which emerged the too-real screeching and chirring of the night. Still Polly did not speak nor even glance back to see if Granada was still behind her.

For more than a month now, Polly had forced Granada to stand close by and watch every grisly, bile-raising sight under the sun, but when something that could be fun came along, like watching a woman have a real, live baby, she got the door slammed in her face.

Her thoughts became hot as pokers. “You the meanest, ugliest thing I ever seen,” Granada grumbled to herself, not thinking Polly could hear.

“Beauty don’t lay on the skin,” Polly laughed wearily. “It’s the pleasing face you have to look out for, not the ugly one. A pleasing face ain’t hardly ever what it appears to be.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Granada answered, wondering how in the world Polly had heard her from way ahead.

“All right, tell me. What you riled about?” Polly asked, not looking back.

“You never going to learn me nothing about hoodoo or babies or nothing good. You always keep me away.”

“Once ain’t always. Twice ain’t forever,” Polly answered. “Coming
a time real soon, Granada, when I won’t leave you outside no more. Then you can know it all.”

“I can get to see the baby being born?” Granada asked. She ran to catch up with Polly. “When soon?”

“When you a woman,” Polly said.

“Oh.” Granada was disappointed. To Granada that sure sounded like forever.

“Won’t be long before you see your flowers.” Polly looked down on Granada, squinting the way she did when she studied sick folks. “Most any day now, I figure.”

“What do you mean? Is I sick?” Granada asked. “What flowers you talking about?”

Polly exhaled hard. “Didn’t those people teach you nothing about being a woman? I’m speaking of blood, the flow of life. It will stream out of you like red blossoms.”

“Where’s it come out of me?” Granada gasped.

“From betwixt your legs,” Polly answered.

“No!” Granada gasped and then swallowed hard.

That was the secret all the women in the yard had been carrying! She had seen those red spots that mysteriously appeared on their dresses. And heard the riddling way they talked about bleeding times, special teas they drank when they were visited by “the wound of Eve,” the rags that needed to be washed out secretly. This is what it meant to be a woman?

She reached for Polly’s hand and squeezed it. “Can’t you stop it, Polly? I don’t want to be no woman if I have to bleed to death! You got to make me well.”

“Pooh!” Polly said. “Ain’t nothing to be scared about. Your eyes will see blood, but it ain’t just blood. It’s life itself. God flows through a woman like a living river. My momma said that’s how the moon gets washed new again, from the woman’s river of blood.”

“God put a river in me?” Granada asked skeptically.

“In the beginning God created,” Polly said. “Them words don’t
mean nothing without the woman. When you bleed, you’ll feel the tug of life from as far away as the moon. From ‘In the beginning’ time. God ain’t got no beginning without the woman. Woman is the way God says yes in this here world. He put the promise on us. The woman carries ‘In the beginning’ in her body. And every month God will use your blood to wash the moon so the beginning time can begin again. When you get to be a woman you got to carry the promise with respect, and honor all the mothers who passed it down to us.”

“Then I get to see the babies born?”

“When the flow comes. Then you can help me with the other women. You won’t be a child no more, Granada, and you won’t have to stand outside the circle of woman things.”

“I can have me some babies, too?” Granada squeezed Polly’s hand again, and she noticed how warm it had become. It occurred to the girl that she had never willingly reached out for the old woman before, and this sudden intimacy struck her as curious, but she made no move to break the hold.

“Maybe so,” Polly said. “Soon your body will blossom like a fruit tree. And after it blossoms, you’ll have the authority to bear life. When that happens, you tell me, you hear?”