Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

The subject of a voodoo practitioner, a root worker, entered Dr. Glynnis Holloway’s home with Madeleine “Maddie” Williams, who had been hired to be Alberta’s day companion after that last hospitalization. Maddie, a few years younger than Alberta, had a brother who had murdered his wife in cold blood while their two children slept, and the killing had taught her something about herself. During the interview for the companion job, Alberta’s husband discovered that Maddie had come from the same spot in Person County, North Carolina, where he and Alberta had been born. Morton Holloway had not seen any of his family in North Carolina for almost as many years as his daughter Glynnis had been alive. But Maddie brought up name after name of the dead or the vanished, and each name relit a flame in Morton’s heart so that before the end of the interview, he wanted no one else to companion his wife. Glynnis the doctor was less impressed but said nothing to her father, a chauffeur and a good man.

“Mr. Morton,” Maddie said not a month after becoming companion to Alberta, “can I speak some words to you?” The murder of her best friend by Maddie’s brother had awakened Maddie to the fact that she had been rather blind to the pain of others, even those close to her. “Just a few words, Mr. Morton,” Maddie said. She spoke not long after lunch one day in late May, a rare mild day in a month that had seen more violently hot weather than even Washington was used to. Alberta was napping comfortably after her meal and after a long walk with Morton. And after the blue pill. Dr. Glynnis Holloway, a general practitioner, was in her basement office, seeing the nineteenth patient of the day. “Can I ask a few words about my patient, Mr. Morton?” “Patient” was how Maddie referred to all those she was companion to, although the firm she worked for referred to them as “clients” or “customers.”

“I told you bout that ‘Mr.’ stuff,” Morton said. It was a day off for the chauffeur, and while he had wanted to be with Alberta alone, Maddie had insisted on coming in, promising to stay out of the way. It had rained in the morning, but then the day turned kind. “I never know when my patient might need me,” Maddie had said that morning, taking off her rain-soaked hat and coat in the front hall. The niece and nephew orphaned when her brother killed their mother were grown now, and her brother had long ago come out of Lorton Prison to face a world crippled by what he had done.

Morton said to Maddie, “Leave that ‘Mr.’ stuff for white folks. They got a need greater than mine.” He was drinking his post-lunch coffee as he stood looking out the back window, at the miniature apple tree, at the garden in its first days of life, at the lovely winding brick path. The witches could come to ride anyone any time of the day, but they preferred a home when relatives or friends of victims were not up and about, so Alberta was sleeping peacefully.

Maddie asked how long Alberta had been suffering with “the head plague.” He had not heard that phrase for some time, and he tried not to remember if it had last been in reference to his wife. In any case, the chauffeur was not offended. He set his cup and saucer on the table and lifted with one hand a chair up and away from the table and sat down. The maid/cook was quietly cleaning in the living room. Maddie sat as well, something she felt she could do, since they were of the same race. Two minutes later, she mentioned “head plague” again, and five minutes after that she began talking about witches, and Morton remembered that it had been some fifteen years since he had heard talk of witches. And it had not been in reference to his Alberta.

It would be days and days before Morton acquired heart enough to mention the conversation to his daughter Glynnis, and by then he had already decided he and Alberta would visit the root worker in North Carolina. He had long had faith in St. Elizabeths and their medicine, but now that faith was dying. They would have to go to North Carolina because the only competent root worker Maddie knew in D.C. had died the year before during her very first ride on the Metro. Cars and aboveground trains and buses and trucks were one thing, but a train snaking through the darkness of the Earth had done not very kind things to the root worker’s heart.

After that final hospitalization at St. Elizabeths, Alberta would get sleepy in the evening far earlier than her husband and daughter, since the yellow pill was more effective at its job than the blue and magenta pills. Around nine o’clock, but never later than ten. And then about one in the morning, after a few hours of fitful sleep, Alberta, who slept alone after hospitalization and almost always slept on her back with a small Bible under her pillow, would usually become paralyzed after the first witch stepped boldly into the locked bedroom and took up her place across Alberta’s legs. The second witch was a middle-body person, and she entered the room sitting on the whitest cloud through the window, open or closed, curtained or uncurtained. She sat on her haunches over Alberta’s chest, her hands spread across the poor woman’s breasts. Along about here Alberta, her heart and all the rest of her insides struggling to rise out of paralysis, began to sense some danger out there in the dark for her daughter and her husband. But never a thought for herself. We’ll kill em both….

Physician-to-be, never heal thyself. Not one soul in this room will ever, no matter what skills you acquire and master here, be able to cure fully the mechanisms of your own machine.

Glynnis Holloway’s practice could have afforded her and her parents the kind of material life that they had not dared dream of as Glynnis was growing up in Washington, as Morton made a living for them as a chauffeur for the big boys with their big cigars at the Department of Labor. But, owing to Alberta’s illness, so much was forbidden, like trips across the seas, or many consecutive nights of peaceful sleep, which even some of the poor in D.C. could afford. Glynnis could have paid for any psychiatric facility in the country, places the world had euphemisms for because fashion models and politicians and movie stars and the very wealthy went to them, people who—given their stations in life far above the nobodies who worshipped them—should have known better than to do such a common thing as lose their minds. But Morton had forever believed in St. Elizabeths. One day in 1963, not long after Alberta’s troubles began, he had taken his wife to D.C. General with the hope that they could help Alberta, who had, among other things, begun to neglect eleven-year-old Glynnis and her own appearance and so much else that had once come easily to her. Morton had met a psychiatrist at D.C. General, a woman who was losing her sight, and she had told Morton that first day, “We together will find a way to get your wife back to you.” He had not wanted to believe anything as much as he wanted to believe that doctor’s words. And even after the doctor, still wearing that tiny cross around her neck, had moved to St. Elizabeths and gone completely blind, he had clung to her words and would not take his wife anywhere but across the river to that place in Anacostia where they carted mad housewives, oppressed by a normal sunny day, and mad would-be assassins, launched by a kind of love, and even madder poets, crushed between the well-measured lines. And they carted in a few children who never knew that they had, in their own innocent ways, wandered off the civilized path. Alberta limped along, with good years and bad years.

Honey, you ever hear tell about root work?” Morton asked Glynnis as they sat side by side at the kitchen table two weeks after Maddie had spoken to him. Supper was over and the maid was gone and Alberta and the night companion, a young woman who did not yet believe in her own abilities, were in the living room, laughing at something on the big television. The witches had not come for two nights, and they would not arrive again for another night. Whenever Alberta screamed in the night, it was always Glynnis who reached her first, entering Alberta’s second-floor bedroom with the key she kept around her neck. Alberta had insisted on the room being locked. The night companion, who slept on the third floor, did not have a key.