In Jonathan Odell’s storytelling tour de force, “The Healing,” a former slave offers hope to a troubled child by weaving a remarkable tapestry of plantation life on the eve of the Civil War.
In 1933, 86-year-old Granada, once a well-respected healer and midwife, still lives in the crumbling mansion of the old Benjamin Satterfield plantation in Mississippi where she grew up.
When a mute, frightened orphan named Violet appears on her doorstep, Granada takes her in and, sensing the little girl’s brokenness, decides on a cure: nightly bedtime stories about the old days and the slaves she knew as a child.
She begins with the day she was taken as an infant from her field hand mother and “adopted” by Master Ben’s grief-stricken wife after an epidemic of cholera swept through the plantation, killing slaves as well as the Satterfields’ young daughter.
Raised as a plaything and a pet, dressed in the dead girl’s clothing and paraded at dinner parties for guests who eyed her with mixed humor and pity, Granada has struggled for most of her life to find where she belongs.
Sharing her memories offers Granada an opportunity to come to terms with her past, especially the events of 1860. By then, she is 13 years old, a sassy, pampered “house-raised girl” who has nothing but disgust for the “dirty swamp slaves” who work the fields, her real mother included. But she also bears a secret fear that she might one day be forced to rejoin them.
When a second epidemic ravages his field hands that spring, Ben Satterfield takes action. He buys a mysterious, charismatic “slave doctoress” who’s rumored to have “studied up under a midwife from Africa and an Indian medicine man in Carolina.”
From the moment she arrives, Polly Shine takes over, moving into a hospital built especially for her, ordering special food and care for the sick. For an assistant, she chooses none other than Granada, in whom she sees a latent gift for healing.
So begins Odell’s master class about a group of women who seem to have disappeared from the history books: slave doctors, once the most powerful slaves on the plantation. In addition to their knowledge of herbs, midwifery and home remedies, they offered a vital curative the white doctors of the day left out. They treated their patients like human beings.
Polly carries something even more potent in her medicine chest, a subtle message that the master’s most loyal slave is the first to notice. “She’s doing more than tending to their bodies,” he warns. “She’s meddling with their minds. If the master’s not careful, this tale that’s being brewed will let loose a plague among his slaves a lot more dangerous than the cholera or the blacktongue or the yellow fever.”
The centerpiece of “The Healing” is that tale, an elixir of past, present and future that Polly brews to heal the shattered selves of a people who have spent their entire lives isolated deep in the Mississippi Delta wilderness, generations removed from the culture of their “saltwater” ancestors.
None of them know who they are. “You all soul sick as can be,” Polly notes. “Ain’t got no history. Ain’t got no memory to lift you up. No threads to weave you all together.”
As Polly gains the trust of some but not all, the resulting struggles — between slaves who’ve survived through complicity with the master and those less privileged who see the truth of Polly’s message — test the limits of her powers.
But it will be with Granada that Polly discovers just how dangerous it can be to disabuse people of their conditioning, especially a girl who will stop at nothing to regain her treasured place in “the great house” and whose biggest fear is of being reunited with her real mother.
Comparisons with “The Help” are inevitable. Mississippi-born Kathryn Stockett, a white author, spoke for African-American maids from the 1950s while Odell, another white, Mississippi native, channels the voices of female slaves during the 1860s. But “The Healing” parts company on the subject of well-meaning white people.
“I ain’t got no use for that trash them white folks put in your head,” Polly tells Granada from the beginning. “You can’t get nothing from them because they ain’t got nothing to give. It ain’t theirs to give. Never was.”
As long as the girl pines for her white mistress and the clownish lifestyle she once enjoyed, Polly says, “You’ll be blind to your own lights. You got to break the lie.”
Even Granada’s fellow house slaves have told her this. “You the mistress’s little joke on the master,” they say. But Granada’s programming is foolproof and is the biggest obstacle to using her gift of healing.
Whether Granada and the other Satterfield slaves will sever their ties to generations of lies and enslavement depends on their ability to agree on a new truth, a fabric of memories, dreams and visions that link and empower them.
In lessons that ring true for any generation and all ages, “The Healing” reminds us that when one is not free, none are. “Sometimes,” Granada realizes, “it takes a whole lifetime to get the story right.”
Fiction
“The Healing”
Jonathan Odell
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25, 352 pages
Meet the author
Jonathan Odell will be at two free talk and signings:
● 7 p.m. Monday, FoxTale Book Shoppe, 105 E. Main St., Woodstock, 770-516-9989
www.foxtalebookshoppe.com/
● 7 p.m., Tuesday, Toco Hill-Avis G. Williams Library, 1282 McConnell Drive, Decatur, 404-370-8450, Ext. 2225, www .georgiacenterforthebook.org/
About the Author
