The Healing (15 page)

Teary-eyed, the cook told Granada never to return unbidden. “Master warned me,” Aunt Sylvie said. “You can’t never come back to the kitchen no more. He says anybody lets you through that door will end up draining a swamp and fleeing the gators. And, Granada, he says he don’t want you around Little Lord, neither.”

Sylvie handed the girl two warm biscuits wrapped in a cloth napkin. To Granada’s surprise the old cook reached out and grabbed the girl, holding her for so long that Granada could feel the tears rolling down the back of her neck.

“Remember, Granada,” Sylvie said, “what is bred in the bones will be in the marrow. You ain’t like them out in the swamps that got no behavior. You been brought up around white folks and learned their manners. Don’t forget that, you hear? You a proper house-raised girl, and you pretty as a pea, even if you is black as the bottom of a pot. Remember who you become.”

She gave Granada another long, smothering embrace, as if she were sending the girl off into wildest Delta forest instead of the other side of the plantation yard.

When she was much younger, Granada had seen a man who had been caught escaping into the swamps dragged across the yard to the stables to get fifty lashes from a fellow slave wielding a finely braided cat-o’-nine-tails. Granada now believed she had some idea of how that poor man must have felt. As she inched her way from the kitchen toward the new sick house, she could think of no worse fate than surrendering herself into the hands of the old woman with the eyes of amber, to be tortured by another slave.

Granada stood outside the new hospital. She glanced over her shoulder toward the great house, hoping the mistress would step out onto the gallery and call out to her, pleading with her to return.

When no summons came, the girl cautiously pushed back the rough-plank door and was at once accosted by a rush of heat and steam. She gasped loudly and instinctively threw a hand over her nose and mouth. It was like the woman had brought all the forests and fields and swamps inside with her and then loosed the odors to fight it out in the cabin. Granada nearly fell out from the stench of it all.

Once she’d regained her senses, the first thing she spied was the evil woman standing by the hearth, testing something from a pot hanging from an iron hook in the fireplace. The bone-thin creature was singing to herself, apparently unaware of the girl’s presence.

Polly Shine had fixed up the hospital and, like the woman herself, it was peculiar in a disturbing kind of way. Gourds and clay pots hung from the rafters in concentric circles. Coiled-grass baskets, their lids securely attached by ropes, were stacked on the floor. Stalks of plants Granada didn’t know names for were bound with string and looked to be growing out of the corners of the room. Hanging from the fireplace, pots boiled with vile-colored liquids. In the center of the room was a worktable piled high with cloth scraps, string, and bottles of colored glass. A row of pallet beds ran along the floor.

Collecting her courage, she said from behind her hand, “What you wanting me for?”

Polly said not a word. In fact, she appeared to take no notice of the girl at all. Maybe, Granada thought, the woman was half deaf like Old Silas. The girl raised her voice. “Why I got to be here in this stanky place with you?”

Polly Shine went about her business mixing ingredients from her sacks and gourds in the boiling pots. Granada remembered the picture of the evil witch stirring a big black kettle in one of Little Lord’s fairytale books.

This time Granada cupped a hand to her mouth and shouted at the top of her lungs, “How come you ain’t talking to me?”

Not looking up from her pots, the woman shouted back, “Because you ain’t worth wasting my breath on yet!” She resumed humming her tune.

“Aunt Sylvie say you evil,” Granada said defiantly. “And my mistress say you is a madwoman.”

“Humph, your mistress says I’m mad?” Polly still had not taken her focus from her work. “I think I done seen your mistress. Ain’t she the one who goes around with a monkey shitting down her back?” Polly threw her head back and cackled wildly, setting the shiny disks to jingling.

Granada crossed her arms in protest, but Polly went on about her business with little regard for Granada’s bruised feelings.

She decided to become as tight-lipped as the old woman. Granada held her silence until the muscles in her clinched jaw ached, but the woman still refused to tell her why she had asked for her.

The girl could stand it no longer. “If you ain’t going to talk to me, why don’t you let me go back to the great house where I belong?”

The woman crooked her scrawny neck and looked at Granada with a delighted grin. “Belong?” she repeated. “That sure is a big word, ain’t it? It’s a mouthful, that word.
Beee-long
.” Her tone was now mocking. “The more you chew on it, the bigger it gets.”

Chill bumps rose on Granada’s arms as those yellow eyes peeled her back and peered into her again.

“Why you think you
beee-long
up there?” she asked Granada. “You want to sit pretty, perched up on your mistress’s other shoulder? So everybody can laugh when you play the monkey for the white folks?”

“I ain’t no monkey!”

Polly took her time looking Granada up and down. “No, you ain’t no monkey,” she agreed at last. “You is a damned sight worse than a monkey! You a house nigger that don’t even know it. Them that work the swamps is better off than you is. Least they know they slaves. And y’all say
I’m
the one who is bought!” Polly narrowed those piercing eyes at Granada. “Where’s your natural momma at, anyhow?”

Granada stomped her foot, but the woman only smiled. Then Granada spit at Polly Shine.

“I asked you who your momma was.”

Wiping her mouth, Granada said, “Why should I care? I was picked out special when I was a baby. Handpicked and hand-raised by the mistress herself.”

“That where you was taught to spit on the floor? I said, who’s your momma?”

“I don’t know,” Granada said behind clinched teeth.

“Then you don’t know
who
you is, do you? Might be a nigger or a monkey or a pet goose. That’s what I’m talking ’bout.”

The woman silently studied Granada for what seemed like forever. Polly finally said, “You ain’t never seen yourself, have you?”

“I seen myself all the time. In the mistress’s gold-framed mirror.”

“What you see? You see that skin as black and smooth as God’s night sky? Or them eyes so dark they can hold the glittering stars in heaven? Or that hair as rich and full as God’s own crown? No, you don’t see them things. You see the white man’s gleam and sparkle looking back at you. You don’t have no idea who you are. And if you don’t know
who
you are,” Polly continued, “you can’t know nothing about where you
beee-long
.”

“I told you I belong in the great house,” Granada cried, “looking after the mistress and Little Lord.”

“So you thinking you one of them,” Polly said. “You thinking one bright morning that white woman going to bring you a satin wedding dress? Marry you off to her pretty little white boy? She probably throw you a great big party because she’s so proud!”

Polly snorted loudly, until she began choking on her tobacco. She hawked it up from deep in her throat and then spit a stream that landed exactly between Granada’s shoes.

Granada stepped back and looked down with disdain at the mess the old woman had made.

“That’s how you spit, missy. Until you can best me, I advise you keep your mouth shut.”

“You a evil old witch and ugly, too!”

“Master told me about you,” Polly said scornfully. “You think you a big bug, don’t you? Because you been wearing a dead girl’s clothes. Well, listen to me good. The white man can’t tell you where you belong. I can’t tell you. Nobody can tell a river where its bed is. You got to remember it for yourself, and girl, you don’t remember piddly.”

Granada walked up and stomped Polly Shine on the foot.

Polly hauled back and cuffed the girl across the face, on the opposite side the master had hit her. Granada went stumbling backward. When she caught herself, she waited for the pain, but oddly there was little sting to it, like a mother cat slapping with her claws tucked. Regardless, that made twice today, and Granada decided at least for now to keep out of slapping range.

“Girl, you fighting the wrong person,” Polly said. “I ain’t the one messed with you. I ain’t the one made you forget who you are.”

Aunt Sylvie’s parting advice to Granada about not forgetting who she was rang in her head. “I ain’t forgot nothing,” the girl said. “My name is Granada and I’m a house-raised gal.”

Polly studied Granada for a moment and then said, “Don’t even know your own name.”

“It’s
Granada
, I said!” The girl stomped her foot harder than ever before.

“That ain’t no kind of name. That was made up for you. You got to remember for your own self who you are.”

She poked her bony finger into Granada’s chest until she had back-stepped the girl to the brick hearth. Granada could feel the heat from the fire on the backs of her legs and heard the thick bubbling of liquids behind her.

“You’re soul sick is what you are,” Polly said. “And you can stomp your little footsie all you want to, but you ain’t going to get well until you remember. And you can’t remember until you learn to see.”

“See what?” Granada pressed, tempting her fate. “I can see better than you with your eyes all scrunched up.” Granada made a face at her, mocking the old woman’s squint.

Polly looked at the girl for a brief moment and then grabbed her arm like she was going to toss her in the fire, but instead hauled her over to the table where a giant brass-hinged book lay. With her loose hand Polly flung it open, scattered through the pages, and then pointed at a marked-up verse and read out loud.

“ ‘But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee. Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.’ Right there,” she said with an air of finality. “Book of Job.”

Granada laughed. “What beasts and fowls you meaning? Like a jaybird? You crazy. Birds can’t talk. And if that bird could talk, ain’t no jaybird got nothing to say that I want to hear.”

Polly looked up from the Bible. “It means study with your eyes and ears, not with your mouth. That’s how it’s going to be twixt you and me. Let your eyes see and your ears hear, but let your mouth be silent. No more chattering on about what it is you
think
you know.”

The muscles in Polly Shine’s scowling face relaxed. She silently studied Granada for a long while with a quizzical look in her eye. The girl was pleased to think that she had stumped the old woman and beamed proudly.

Then Polly said, “How you learn to read?”

Granada dropped her smile and swallowed hard. “I … can’t read,” she stammered and then looked down. “No, ma’am, I can’t read a lick. Don’t even know what reading is,” she said, tracing a crack in the plank floor with the toe of her shoe.

Aunt Sylvie had once told Granada what happened when the mistress caught Lizzie, back when she had two good eyes, looking through one of the master’s slave journals. It was just after Rubina went missing, nobody having told Lizzie yet that her girl had been sent to the swamps. Lizzie heard somebody say that Rubina was in one of the master’s books. Lizzie couldn’t read a lick, but she sneaked into the library and began going through the journals trying to find anything that looked like Rubina. When the mistress saw her, she threw a china vase and hit her so hard up against her head that Aunt Sylvie said Lizzie didn’t have another thought about messing in white people’s business again. She said that was how Lizzie got her dead-white eye. If the mistress found out about Granada being able to read, she might never get back in the house.

“You lying to me,” Polly said. “I seen the way your eyes rode them words on the page. How you learn?”

Granada whimpered. “Don’t tell on me, please?”

“I ain’t going to carry it to nobody,” Polly said, raising her hand, “but I’ll plum slap you to Jesus if you don’t fess up.”

Looking up, Granada whispered, “Mistress got Little Lord some ABC books. He learn, I learn.”

Polly now had a smug look on her face. “Uh-huh. See what I mean?”

“No, I don’t!”

“That’s the way you learn from the beasts and the fowls.”

Granada didn’t understand. The woman was still talking nonsense about forest animals.

“That boy. He was your jaybird, you see? You kept your mouth shut and he done learned you A from B.”

Granada began to argue, but Polly held up her hand again. “Now
you do the same with me. Keep that mouth shut and copy on me like you done that white boy. We get along just fine.”

“That’s all you want me to do?” Granada asked. “Just keep quiet?”

“Ain’t going to be as easy as it sounds.”

“Sounds easy to me.”

“Uh-huh,” Polly said, laughing, “I can see how good you doing already.” She poked her finger in Granada’s chest to punctuate her words. “A flapping tongue puts out the light of wisdom.”

Granada laid her hand protectively over her chest. It was becoming tender from all the poking.

“That’s your first lesson,” Polly said. “Can’t learn and talk at the same time.”

Granada didn’t know what that meant, but the one thing she was learning was don’t ask. With her chest still smarting, she waited for the explanation.

“The way you learn to see ain’t by talking about it. Like the white man, all he do is talk to his own echo. Keeps him deaf and blind to the world he claims to own.”

She looked Granada squarely in the eye, and in the same authoritative tone she had used when she read out of the Bible, she said, “The world belongs to them that
sees
it.”

Granada shrugged. Nothing would ever belong to her and she didn’t care. Of course there were things she would like to have close by and touch anytime she wanted, like Miss Becky’s blue satin dress. And the silver comb Sylvie used to fix Granada’s hair. And of course she would like to get that marble back.