Consider the term magic. More specifically, good magic when good trumps the bad, when someone with powers beyond our understanding does or says something that turns despair into hope and healing. In The Healing, there is a lot of this kind of magic. Three black women—Gran Gran, Polly Shine and Violet—possess this power but note that they are not possessed by it. What makes the magic in this book magically real is applied wisdom and knowledge of herbs and human nature with large doses of heart and soul. Of course, some of the magically real is timing—there is a right time to do, to know, to heal, and to be patient.
Like the book, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, the protagonists are black women. Like The Help, the victims are a whole community of black people at the mercy of money and the white folks that own it all. And like The Help the black women are there to maintain the living quarters and raise the children.
The profound social/political issues in the book that interest this reader are slavery, midwifery, and genetic engineering. A black mother having just given birth must be back in the swampy, mosquito infested fields the very day after delivery. Black women are at the lustful mercy of the all powerful master, lord of the plantation. People can be bought and sold. Newborns can be grabbed right out the hands of mothers and given to a childless white mother.
Midwifery has always existed and once was the time honored way of bringing children into this world. Trust by the expectant mother and her whole clan of family, friends and neighbors in the black women midwives was at the heart of the mystery of childbirth. Professional medicine seemed more like voodoo in those pre-Civil War days on the plantation. What the medical doctors prescribed often led to addiction and failure to heal in the long run. The Healing gives us a glimpse into the history of medicine from rural treatment by nonprofessionals to the strict licensing of medical doctors after extensive study at universities and the ultimate demise of the unlicensed midwife. What those wise women did know was the good food is the best medicine. Good magic, indeed.
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The master of the plantation is quite an engineer, specifically a genetic engineer, trying to improve his working stock of slaves through selective breeding, isolation from outside influences and rumors. An invisible acoustic wall keeps the rumors of the coming Freedom (always capitalized in the book) at bay. What you don’t know can’t hurt you (or the master). The master makes a tragic mistake, though, when he decides to bring some healing for his slaves ravaged by various plagues (black tongue, cholera) in the form of an old and wrinkly mostly black woman of unknown origin. Polly Shine is her name. What she brings will make all the difference in the world. She will heal and she will teach and she will whisper in the ears of those she has healed.
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As in many good books dealing with change and resistance to it and in the transformation inherent in change,
The Healing follows a certain pattern of creation, fall, consequences, forgiveness, redemption (but not for all). What makes this book one of my favorites is that a man wrote this book with such depth of understanding and power of storytelling that you would almost believe he was Gran Gran himself. And to get right down to what makes it so readable is it is sheer entertainment, meaning this reader was completely immersed in the story, never wanted to put it down, and was always pulled through the story, as though, to use a phrase earlier in this blog, possessed by it.
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Join us Wednesday at 5:00 for a signing with Jonathan Odell. A reading will follow at 5:30.
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