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.
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.
In my own home Daddy was in charge of the checkbook, continually adding and subtracting, making sure the bottom line balanced to the penny. Mother, on the other hand, was in charge of the picture box, a tattered Keds shoebox stuffed full of family photos that spanned five generations. I’d pluck them at random and say, “Tell this one, Momma.”
An uncle killed in Korea, then a picture of his son — a near duplicate – with his own boy; depression-era dirt-farm poverty, then the first family automobile, shiny new; and skeletal, half-starved girls who later show up beautiful and buxom, with beauty parlor perms. There was direction to our story and it leaned toward hope. No single event was so burdensome or shameful that it could not be redeemed. The women who preserved my family’s history taught me early the truth in that old saying, “facts can explain us, but only story can save us.”
My breakthrough came while I was doing research in the oral history library at USM and happened to strike up a conversation with the department head, a scholar in Southern gender studies. I mentioned that I had come across many stories midwives until the 1940’s, when public health services began replacing them. I guess she noticed the dismissive tone in my voice. I may have even referred to them as granny doctors.
She firmly let me know I had missed the point. “You’re talking about black women at a time when they had less authority in their lives than anyone. Many were illiterate. When one chose to be a midwife, it was a challenge to the power structure, to the established order of being subservient not only to whites, but to black men as well. The vocation took them out of the home, away from their families and out of the domestic control of their husbands, and into the homes of other men, at all times of day and night. How were they to obtain consent for such an undertaking? Black women had no voice. To do this under their own authority would be futile. But to say, ‘God told me to do it,’ was a way of taking the decision out of the hands of those who normally regulated their lives. It was not sentimental to say God chose you. It was defiant.”
As for those superstitious practices like burying the placenta or putting a knife under the bed to “cut the pain”, she challenged me to look deeper for cultural explanations. “The midwives tended not only to the physical wellbeing of the woman, but to her place in the community, and in a larger sense, to the soul of her people. For four hundred years, the message of slavery was that a black man belonged wherever a white man told him. He could be sold the next day. Or his children. During Jim Crow, with sharecropping, black families couldn’t be sure if they would be in the same place year-by-year. Imagine a midwife, who takes the placenta and buries it, emphasizing the message, or perhaps the prayer, that this child belongs in the world, in a greater web of community, with his people. That he indeed has a place. Can you imagine the power of that?”
During my research I learned that during and after slavery these women tended to the soul and heart of the community. The slave master and the architects of Jim Crow derived their power by reinforcing the belief that God and scripture placed African Americans on the lowest rung of humanity. By treating their patients as deserving children of an inclusive God, the midwives subverted the message. They proved to young black girls that women could occupy powerful roles in the community. To black mothers that they were worthy of admiration and respect. These midwives were part of a resistance on whose shoulders King, Parks and Malcolm X stood.
I was privileged to interview several elderly women who had “caught” thousands of children in their communities. Over their lives, they had bonded communities together with a common sense of history, pride, and belonging. Being with them brought me closer to my own grandmother.
I am not sure where to begin when it comes to writing about William Gay. His books do not need my praise, as they were lauded by great artists and reviewers alike long before I ever knew his name. In the past I’ve upheld and celebrated Gay’s work as some of the finest I had ever come across, but that alone won’t do anymore. I can no longer just recommend him; I must lay emphasis upon the need read to him, and more than ever now that he is gone.
I remember where I was when I read that sentence: alone in a dorm room at Mississippi College, a single lamp on beside my bed with I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down open on my chest. I kept having to lay the book down, to close my eyes and run Gay’s words over in my mind. They were like water surging over stones, moving and powerful. I had bought the book from Lemuria, before I worked here, and had discovered Gay while browsing through Barry Hannah’s books. In Barry’s section was a DVD, a conversation between him, Ron Rash, and William Gay: the latter two being authors I’d never heard of before, and had certainly never come across in the big box bookstores I’d been frequenting. Gay spoke calmly and seemed so gentle and easygoing that one struggled to understand how a story as thrilling and horrifying as “The Paperhanger” emerged from someone so meek. I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down was pivotal for me, and pulled me to the other side of the river in terms of reading and writing.
For those not familiar with his work, Gay did a fine job of writing in a literary style while keeping the story thrilling and urgent. Anyone who frequents Lemuria’s crime and mystery section should most definitely step over into Southern Fiction and pick up one of Gay’s books. Each book provides a texture of the noir genre, while maintaining the southern literary lifeblood at its heart. William Faulkner once said that there was nothing worth writing about outside of love, money, and death, and Gay certainly knew the power these themes had over the human heart when woven through a gripping narrative. Still, literary and poetic language is never sacrificed in Gay’s work for the attempt to thrill a reader. One who sticks with Gay’s work will be rewarded with memorable and heartbreaking lines. I pray there are more of them to read.
To see Jesmyn Ward accept The National Book Award fast forward the video to 35:00. Don’t miss the part where she mentions Lemuria!
Before I perused this book, I was not aware that as Eudora was establishing her writing career in her late twenties, she was also becoming an adept gardener thanks to her mother Chestina’s guidance. Sadly the gardens of Chestina’s generation did not last, but towards the end of Welty’s life, the restoration of her “mother’s garden” was underway and the results continue to impress at the 