Eighteen

Granny

Granny brought calm to the Big House.  She was frequently found sitting in the corner, rocking in her chair, and she never stopped rocking.  She sat there and watched the children playing games, singing songs with them.  The children could be running around the house, as long as the master wasn’t there to scold them, they ran wild.  I don’t know how Granny could even think straight, but straight she thought, because with one look she could let them all know Master was coming and immediately there would be quiet and calm.  If the kids were out of line when he came in, there’d be hell to pay.  He’d throw the kid over his knee and whoop them.  He’d send them out back crying and sniveling and looking for their mommas and they surely wouldn’t be able to sit down again that night and maybe not even the next day.  But Granny had a way of signaling that he was coming to warn the children ahead of time to calm down and play quietly and they’d stay quiet as long as he was nearby or in the house.  As soon as he was gone, all hell would break loose again until he returned.

Granny had a magic touch when it came to flowers and the garden.  She could make magical things grow from nothing, from a tiny seed planted in the ground.  She had a fierce indifference to the fact that things might not grow.  They always did when she was around.  She hoed the ground, planted the seeds, and watered them every day faithfully with no doubt in her mind that a plant would grow to provide food to nourish us.  There was a rhythm and a pattern to her reliability. She faithfully watered her garden every day.

Granny knew how to choose a plant from the wild, and she knew exactly how Momma would prepare it in the kitchen. She could smell a ripe melon from a distance and knew exactly the right moment to pick it from the vine.  She could go in the woods and sniff out a plant that would heal sickness.  She knew the seasons well and knew exactly when it was time to plant the right things in the garden.  She had a special touch for being able to grow the right plants that Momma could take and turn into food for the Master and still have enough leftover to feed the masses of field hands and the slaves from the kitchen.  When the garden turned out ripe vegetables or wild fruits were available from Mother Earth, they had to be eaten when they were ripe or they would spoil.  Like my father, Granny also knew how to take wild greens or leaves or bark from the tree to make medicine to heal her people.  She took the bark of a willow tree, for instance, and ground it up to make a powder she mixed in boiling water to make a tea that would ease the height of a fever and soothe an ill child or adult.  Unlike my father, she did not trust the spirits to heal the infirm.  These were the same spirits who had brought ill upon us by bringing us to this land and the healing ability of those spirits did not sit well with Granny.  She did not like it when we danced for rain, and she did not trust those spirits to heal us when we were sick either. 

She told me a story about a man from the next plantation on the other side of the wooded area behind our sleeping quarters.  He was known to speak tongues over an ill child or woman with a difficult labor and to speak to the elders and call them back from the dead to heal the sick and infirm.  Once, a child, the elder daughter of the overseer on that plantation, was taken sick with a fever.  This medicine man had prayed over her and called to the elders, chanting to the spirits to heal her.  I had seen my father say those prayers over the ill at home.  By the morning, the child was still feverish and finally the doctor had been called to her bedside.  The doctor brought leeches and had even bled the child, but despite his best interventions, he was unable to make her well either.  By the next evening, the child had died.  The master had accused the medicine man of witchcraft, and believed that he had plotted to make the doctor’s efforts wasted, and the overseer did not argue or defend the elder man even thought the two had been close before these events.  They were fearful that he had made the girl’s illness worse, bringing death to her more quickly.  The slave was beaten for his attempts to heal the child and was threatened with hanging if he acted to heal another man, woman, or child.  She warned me against any attempts to speak with the dead or to call to the spirits especially if it was uncertain whether the effort would have good effect, and made me vow that day that I would never attempt such a thing.