The Healing Read Online Free PDF

the words she had learned long ago, hoping they might seep into Violet’s dreams.
    She chanted softly, rhythmically, “In the beginning God created in the beginning God created in the beginning …”
    It was late into the night when Violet’s breathing finally took hold of the easy rhythm of the words and evened out.
    Through the flickering light of the lamp, Gran Gran could see that the girl’s eyes were still open, but they had calmed. They seemed to have settled intently on the face of the old woman. The look was sad and wanting, but for now, the terror was gone.
    The old woman rose from the cramped little cot and when she looked down on the girl, the panic seemed to rise up in her face again.
    “No, I ain’t going to leave you, Violet. I’m going to sit right here. And we’ll have us a chat. I’m not sleepy, neither. Don’t sleep much anymore. Older you get, the more sleep seems like practice for dying. What you want to talk about?”
    Gran Gran’s eyes fell on the girl’s shoes where they lay on thefloor. Even covered in mud, they looked expensive. The woman drew one to her with her cane and picked it up. She wet a finger to clear a window to the leather grain below. The white man said he would send the rest of the girl’s clothes later. Gran Gran wondered if they were all this fine.
    Gran Gran recalled the bloodstained dress she had taken off the girl. It was made of blue silk muslin and finely embroidered, stitched by somebody who knew what they were doing. She hated having to toss the ruined garment into the stove. The smell had sickened her. Since she was a girl, she had never forgotten the odor of beautiful things set afire. Such a waste!
    She looked upon Violet where she lay watching. “I guess somebody sure loved you to fit you up in these first-class clothes. I know finery when I see it. Right there, you and me got a lot in common.”
    Gran Gran ran her hands over the lap of her feed-sack dress, washed so many times she had forgotten what the print pattern used to be.
    “I sure loved to wear fancy frocks,” she mused. “Some folks said I had a pretty face. I couldn’t see it. But, oh my! When I put on them dresses, I believed I was the best-looking little thing south of Memphis. I reckon you could say pretty clothes was my downfall.”

CHAPTER 4

    1860
    W hat sort a dress you reckon she’ll bring me?” Granada asked for the third time that morning.
    It was early dawn and the plantation kitchen was chilly, Granada having neglected the coals in the hearth during the night. The only thing she wore was her rough homespun shimmy. The close-plank floor was cold to her bare feet, but she was too excited to care.
    “That dead girl sure got some pretty frocks, don’t she?” Granada asked. “Silk’s my favorite, I reckon.”
    When the cook still didn’t respond, Granada called out louder, “Aunt Sylvie! What
color
you reckon?”
    Not bothering to look at Granada, the cook wiped the flour from her hands with the hem of her starched white apron. Sylvie was sturdily built and didn’t stand much taller than the twelve-year-old who presently was doing everything she could think of to get her attention.
    “I’m not going to abide no more of this kind of talk in my kitchen,” the cook pronounced, “especially coming from a child as coal black as any swamp slave.” Aunt Sylvie, whose skin was the light color of an underdone biscuit, still hadn’t turned her face from her dough. “You get this way every Preaching Sunday, Granada. Near about wears me out. Please, light somewhere and quiet down.”
    Granada wasn’t discouraged. Her mind stayed on the dress and the shoes and the hair ribbons that would be delivered any minute now.
    Sylvie clomped to the door in her loose-fitting brogans to peer out across the darkened yard. “Old Silas ain’t even lit a lantern yet,” she grumbled. “I sent that fool Chester over to Silas’s cabin ages ago. He’s going to make my breakfast late sure as the