The Healing (39 page)

Granada took hold of a corner of the document, but Polly didn’t let go at once.

“You can change your mind right now and still go with me … if you want to. After I walk away from here and you can’t see the back of my head no more, you can change your mind and come after me. Just holler my name. That’s the other thing about Freedom. You can change your mind this way and that way until it feels right. You understand?”

Granada nodded, but her head still grappled with the notion. This is not what she expected at all. She thought she would argue awhile with Polly, and then Polly would tell her to shut her mouth and to come on quick.

“Just in case you don’t change your mind, Granada, I got to speak some words to you before I leave this place. I’m going to say them now, but you probably ain’t going to hear them until later. So hold still and look at me when I talk so you don’t forget.”

Granada raised her head and looked up at the old woman’s face,
into those amber eyes that could fix you like a stickpin through a beetle. The notion of forgetting anything about Polly Shine seemed unthinkable.

“Just remember,” Polly said carefully, “these pretty words on this scrap of paper ain’t going to make you free. The master can’t give you your Freedom. The Yankees when they come can’t. I can’t. If you think any somebody can, then you always going to be their slave.”

She grinned a tight little smile. “Truth is, ain’t a soul wants you to have it. You wait and see. One fine day, you go to acting like you got Freedom, then watch how they fight you for it. You got to take your Freedom, and then you got to be ready to take it back the next morning and the next morning after that.”

She released her hold on the papers and gently laid her palm against the girl’s cheek. “Bless you, girl,” she said tenderly. “Walk through life listening for your name, the name that remembers you. Until then, go ahead and be Granada if you want to.”

Her face grew feverishly hot under the old woman’s hand.

“You still got the gift,” Polly said. “Tend to your people the best way you know how. You don’t have to love them to claim them, so claim as many as you can. You’ll love them the second you start to take care of them. Don’t seem right, but that’s the way that works. And you right when you say they need you. They do.” Polly removed her hand and straightened up. “And I promise,” she said in a forbidding tone that chilled Granada’s insides, “one day, you going to need them. Never forget that.”

Polly picked up her sack and hung it off her shoulder. She reached for her snake stick where it leaned against the doorframe. Then she looked back and chuckled. “Like I told you, girl, you ain’t never going to be free of Polly Shine.” Polly’s face warmed to deep affection and a slight tremor came to her voice. “Wherever you be, however old and crooked you get, I promise, you will be remembered.”

The girl’s insides trembled and her throat clenched so tight it hurt. Was this Freedom? she wondered. Why did it hurt so bad?

Polly turned and with the familiar water-jointed gait walked through the door. Granada went to the window to watch her departure.

I could still go, she told herself. I get to change my mind. The papers burned her hand. The thought was foreign and frightening. Her legs went weak, like they wanted to make the decision for her. She gripped the windowsill.

Polly shunned the road and headed for the woods, stepping onto a path that probably only she could see. Granada prayed for the old woman to turn, only once, to look back at her. Then Granada would know for sure. If Polly would do that, Granada promised herself she would go.

But Polly never turned and the sky began to dim as the sun found the clouds.

Granada held her breath and watched as the old woman headed out, her stick feeling the way before her. Only when she had vanished into the dense, rain-washed foliage did Granada dare to breathe.

She knew me before anyone, Granada thought.

“I’ll remember you, Polly!” she shouted from the window, but there came no response.

Granada ran out the cabin door and up to the edge of the wood. “I’ll remember about listening to the beasts and the fowls!” she called out. “About digging holes and breaking pots and rooting babies in the world. About those threads that stitch everybody together. Do you hear me, Polly?” She waited, but there came no answer, only the light rustle of leaves in the wind.

“I’m going to listen, Polly,” Granada said softly now, cradling herself with her arms. “I’ll always be listening for you.”

F
or years to come the puzzling events following Little Lord’s miraculous recovery would be hotly debated by the inhabitants of the Mississippi Delta, both white and black. In fact, most could only agree upon a few things.

First, Master Ben, being a gentleman of his word, gave Polly her Freedom as promised. Of course there were those who insisted nobody gave Polly Shine a thing. She took it.

Second, as soon as her Freedom papers arrived, Polly struck out on foot, alone, carrying only her snake stick and a tote sack swinging from her shoulder.

Third, two nights following her departure, during a rain so heavy it breached the levees in four locations and flooded the great house and all the cabins, sixty-four of the master’s slaves, including his most loyal servant, Silas, went missing, the largest single incident of runaways in the history of the state of Mississippi.

And finally, it was common knowledge that when Master Ben was alerted to the mass escape, he immediately sent for the dogs, and it was Bridger who had the unpleasant task of telling his boss that every one of those ferocious slave-catching hounds was too violently ill to join the hunt, forcing the men to wander the rain-swollen swamps with benefit of neither track nor scent. They spent three miserable days in the swamps only to come back empty-handed.

Other than that, nothing could be said for certain, but that didn’t stop the speculating. Granada discovered everyone had his theory. And each of them put Polly Shine at the center.

Some swore that the band of runaways were biding their time, trapping and fishing on some secret bayou, waiting for the abolitionists to find them and escort them to Freedom.

Those with religion believed that Polly, after bartering for her Freedom with the life of the pharaoh’s son, had led the escaped Negroes right up to the banks of the Mississippi River and commanded it to split wide open like the Red Sea. Some went as far as to say that Polly and her followers carved out their own Promised Land out West, some milk-and-honey Canaan for Negroes only.

A favorite theory held by the master and his fellow plantation owners was that the runaways never got out of the swamps alive.

Granada wasn’t sure where Polly ended up, but the girl was good enough at riddles to figure how she got away. Granada knew that the best riddle is the one whose solution is obvious. You think, “Why didn’t I see that before! The answer was in front of me all the time!”

Indeed, after repeatedly sifting through the facts, Granada decided Polly’s planned escape had been right in front of her. Silas didn’t have some miracle conversion. He had been working with Polly ever since she began taking him his medicine. His access to the settlements through holding preaching meetings was in no doubt beneficial in planning such a large-scale operation. She remembered the stormy night he came into the kitchen out of the rain, quoting Bible verses about the two men working in the field, one being taken up and the other left behind. He had told anybody with ears to hear what was coming. How many times had he preached that same message to his three hundred congregants? Freedom was coming like a thief in the night. Only the Father knew the day. But get ready if you were going.

Charity, who walked her baby out in the open, always chose to circle by the hound pen until the dogs grew accustomed to her presence. Granada had even heard Polly tell Charity to feed the dogs when
she passed. Quietly slipping them the same purgatives the white doctors were so fond of could be done easily, with little fuss.

Charity’s husband, Barnabas, who had hollowed Little Lord’s canoe out of a log and then showed him how to use it, was also one of the runaways. He could certainly be counted on to build a cypress-log armada, keep it hidden in the swamps, and then teach the group what to do with a paddle.

Silas, who had first settled the swamps with the master, mapping every river, stream, tributary, and alligator slough, would know how to captain a fleeing army of canoeing slaves.

Polly had been warning Granada about the snake called Freedom for months, trying her best to get the girl ready without risking the entire scheme. And maybe if things hadn’t happened so suddenly, Granada could have been ready.

The only person to blame was Granada herself. Polly had to speed up her timetable when Granada told the mistress about Rubina. Granada had forced her hand.

With the riddle solved, there was just one lingering question, and it meant more to Granada than any other: Would Polly Shine do as she promised?

Granada could recite aloud the exact words, the last thing she heard Polly say: “Wherever you be, however old and crooked you get, I promise, you will be remembered.”

“Will you really remember me?” Granada asked the night sky from her window. “Years from now, when you cast your eyes at these very stars, wherever you are standing, will you see me in the weave? Will you remember that you loved me?”

If the answer was yes, if Polly, who knew Granada before anyone, remembered her, then Granada believed she could bear anything.

W
hen Violet arose the next morning, she found Gran Gran in her chair before a cold stove, Rubina’s mask in her lap. Her head had dropped to her chest.

“Gran Gran!” Violet cried out. “Are you dead?”

The girl’s outburst startled Gran Gran awake. When she looked up at the girl, she could see the forehead smoothe out and the eyes calm. “I’m all right, Violet. Just resting my eyes.”

“You been talking to Rubina?”

Gran Gran glanced down into her lap. “Rubina. Yes, I guess you can say that’s what I been doing most of the night.”

“Want me to put some kindling in the stove, Gran Gran? You going to be wanting your coffee soon, ain’t you?”

Gran Gran laughed. “Girl, I’m liking this new talking Violet. No sooner she putting words together than she’s asking what she can do for me. I might can get used to that kind of talk!”

Violet got the fire going all by herself. Gran Gran watched the efficiency of the girl’s movements, the confidence she showed in filling the pot with water from the pump and then setting it on the front eye of the stove.

At first Gran Gran guessed the girl had done these things before, but then noticed that each movement—the way she held her head
and leaned one hand on the water shelf as she waited for the water to spill out; how she laid the kindling three sticks on the bottom and two across on top, and how she lit the match to a small splinter and then held it in the stove until the fire caught; the way she tapped the spoon on the table before she put the coffee in the pot; how she retied the coffee sack with a double-loop knot—were all mannerisms Gran Gran recognized as her own. The girl had been studying her close, memorizing her movements. Violet had been watching and listening in a way that would make Polly Shine proud.

Violet managed to pour Gran Gran a cup of coffee without spilling and then got herself a glass of milk from the crock. She pulled a chair up close to Gran Gran and waited.

After taking a sip of coffee and complimenting its strength, Gran Gran said, “Now you got me all pampered, I got the feeling there is something you going to ask me.”

“Gran Gran,” Violet asked, her voice solemn, “did you ever see you a real live baby being born?”

Gran Gran recognized the wonder that shone in the girl’s face. It had to be the same look she had given Polly on their walk back from Sarie’s delivery.

Gran Gran smiled. This was a much better story to tell.