Read Online The Healing by Jonathan Odell - Free Book Online

to him. She had the look of a person in a dream, witnessing events beyond these four walls.
    “I tell you what,” the bald man chirped, drawing attention to himself and ending the awkward moment, “if it will get Aunt Sylvie and her roast lamb into heaven, I’ll attend all the preaching the good bishop can serve up and pray mightily for her ascension! Negro or no Negro!”
    “Now you’re being sacrilegious, Charles,” his wife said, but her tone was gentle. She took the goblet from his hand. “This is your last drink before the service. You better watch him, Bishop Kerry. He’s likely to jostle you aside mid-sermon and deliver his own heretical theology.”
    They all laughed uncomfortably, and then to everyone’s relief another guest was ushered into the parlor. The men gravitated toward the newly arrived banker, eagerly distancing themselves from Master Ben’s wife and the awkward scene she was presently making. The women, though, hovered around Amanda, discreetly concealing her with their voluminous petticoats and close attention.
    “Amanda, my poor dear,” the bald-headed man’s wife said tenderly.As she spoke she reached up to separate Amanda’s hand from Granada’s, artfully replacing the girl’s with her own gloved one. She did not glance at Granada when she broke that link.
    Yet that’s all it took to make Granada once more invisible, aching for the touch of the mistress again.
    “They spoke of death,” Amanda said in great agitation. “Has anyone died? Please tell me,” she demanded. “Who is it that’s died?”
    “No one, dear Amanda,” said an old woman with a ruby on her finger. “No one has died.”
    “Slaves,” said the woman who now held the mistress’s hand, “only slaves,” and this seemed to calm her.
    When the last of the guests arrived, Master Ben led them all out onto the grand gallery and bade them sit in the chairs that Pomp had arranged earlier. Bishop Kerry strode up to the polished oak lectern, one that Barnabas, the plantation carpenter, had built especially for these services. The red-faced bishop scanned his audience of black faces down below and then began to speak his big, puzzling words to the population of Satterfield Plantation—the only world that Granada knew existed.
    Once she had heard the master say that he could look out from this gallery toward forever, and without lying claim he owned everything and everybody as far as a keen-sighted person could see—more than three hundred slaves housed in three separate settlements and four thousand acres spreading across the western half of Hopalachie County. It took him three days to ride his land. To Granada that had to be the whole world, plus some.
    She looked across the sea of black bodies sitting in a yard enclosed by the stable, several barns, the smokehouse, the dairy, the ginhouse, the sawmill, Silas’s cabin, and farther down the cabins for the dozens of family servants. Every plank and board on the place was whitewashed and gleaming in the sun. Beyond them were countless miles of levees and ditches and high ridges, alligator swamps and deep Delta forests.
    It was indeed an immense world, a world in which she often felt alien. Like when the house servants laughed at her dark skin or taunted her for wearing a dead white girl’s clothes. Or when Mistress Amanda let weeks pass without sending for Granada to sit with her in the darkened bedroom.
    But this moment was different. Granada was as happy as she could ever hope to be. For
in this moment
she knew where she belonged. Hadn’t the touch from the mistress’s hand told her once and for all? She could still almost feel the warmth of it.
    Sylvie had warned Granada what a fickle thing belonging was. Perhaps down below in the yard, among all the black faces, looking up at her with emerald-green eyes was a light-skinned woman with fine curly hair, who in another moment, one long ago, most likely stood where Granada stood today.
    But Granada could not think