Read Online The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara - Free Book Online Page B

helping and healing and nosing around was about being good. It was only that I was … available.”
    “Hmph, I say, Min. Beggin your pardon.”
    “You a blip, Old Wife.”
    “Well, it takes one to know one.”
    “But mostly you a stick-in-the-mud,” turning to watch the young doctor, Dr. Meadows, stroll over toward the stereo where the loa were setting up—drums, tambourines, flutes,chekere, gourds—walking right through them.
    “I swear by Apollo the physician”—members of The Master’s Mind glancing up at this odd chanting—“by Aesculapius, Hygeia and Panacea”—Cora Rider muttering—“and I take to witness all the gods, all the goddesses”—the loa nudging each other, puffing on cigars and rearing back on their heels—“to keep according to my ability and my judgment the following oath …”
    “Quiet.” Mr. Daniels dropped hands to wheel around from the prayer circle to jab Dr. Meadows in the chest.
    “That’s no proper kind of prayer,” Cora Rider muttered hoarsely, making it clear to all within ear and eyeshot that nothing a redbone said or did could be in any wise proper.
    “Shush.”
    “Shush, nothin. Coming in here with all that superstitious hocus-pocus like the good woman Ransom is some Count damn Dracula he got to protect his mariny self from.”
    “Cora, if you please.”
    Minnie sliding her palms down her thighs and winking at her companion. “No, good ain’t got a blessed thing to do with it, Old Wife.”
    “Which it?”
    “Any of it. Now here I am and there I am and all I am, free to be anywhere at all in the universe. And where I choose to be in just a little while is on my front porch having a nice tête-à-tête over tea with that Dr. Meadows, who would, I’m sure, be most interested in learning about the ancient wisdoms, the real, the actual, the sho-nuff original folk stuff behind them Greek imposters he’s calling up and they’re already there. Right there in the treatment room, if he’d only see.”
    “Beggin your pardon, Min, but you color struck.”
    “Anywhere at all in the universe, but I choose to be here with this growler scowler. And good ain’t the key. It’s just thatI’m available to any and every adventure of the human breath.”
    “You always were one for capers, Min.”
    “But just look at the chile’s face. And I bet she had parents that told her, grandparents I’m sure, that God don’t like ugly.”
    “God like it all, Min.”
    “Just a frowning and contorting up her face. A divine creation, the human face. And just look at her. One rough customer, that one.”
    “Just like you for the world, Min.”
    “I ain’t studying you, Old Wife,” hunkering down among the flowers by the chapel doors. “But I’ll tell you this. The face is a wondrous thing. You can go anywhere, anywhere at all with a human face, journey straight into the Fifth Kingdom of Souls if that’s your pleasure.”
    “Say which?”
    “You heard me, the Fifth. Seems to me, Old Wife, that by now you should so well know all these things, you’d have things to tell me. You been dead long enough?”
    “There is no age nor death in spirit, Min. Besides, I do tell you things soon’s they come to me.”
    “Where from? I’ve been asking you that for years. You don’t explain things clearly, Old Wife.”
    “You don’t listen good, Min. Or maybe it’s me. I never was too bright.”
    “When I was a young girl I thought you were the wisest.”
    “You thought I was crazy as a loon.”
    “Well, what with never combing your hair and coming to church in men’s overshoes and talking to snakes and things—you were crazy as could be. But I used to watch you, slip up alongside you in the tobacco sheds and listen to you hum and talk, cause I knew you were special.”
    “You said I smelled, Min.”
    “Well, you did smell. Of dirt and gumbo and wintergreenand nasty salves and pitch. Girl, you smelled of everything. But so wise. You had a way of teaching us kids