Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

In the quiet of the kitchen, Morton and Glynnis were holding hands, two-thirds of an army that had fought battle after battle. She looked at the side of her father’s face, at the well-trimmed hair and mustache. At a gray hair or two or three that were not easy to spot. Earlier that week, she had come upon her father looking for a long time at the labels on his wife’s medicine. Glynnis had recently turned thirty-six, and it was only a year before that that she had started learning to measure men by a father who had read no more than ten books in his lifetime. Had started learning after Dr. John. After Dr. Theodore. In bed—with sex and the sweat and spit and other fluids the human body loved to produce—that was how she liked to call out to her lovers. After Dr. Frank. But she had never wanted them to call her Dr. Glynnis.

“You mean voodoo?” Glynnis said.

“Some’s call it that. But when I was comin up in North Carolina, they was roots, done by a root worker.” He knew well he was speaking to a woman who put her faith in science. I know, I know, she had thought as she watched him read the medicine labels, I know science has failed us . Morton now stood and placed both dessert dishes and forks into the sink and began washing them. He and the dishwashing machine did not get along. He knew well to whom he was speaking about root workers because that was how he had steered her life. Education. Once they turn the lights on in your head, they can’t turn em off.

Glynnis laughed, and again the chauffeur was not offended. “Since when have you started to believe in that stuff, Daddy?” She could tell by the thoroughness with which he washed the dishes that his mind was made up about something. Already he had put a deposit on the chartered bus and already he had spoken four times to the root worker in North Carolina, a woman who sounded as if she had not had many conversations on the telephone. Each time they talked it seemed to take her nearly a minute to figure out which part of the telephone to speak into.

“I don’t believe,” Morton said, drying the second fork. “I can’t says I ever will, but the world don’t tell time by my watch. If the world say it’s ten after seven”—he pointed to the clock on the wall—“and my faithful watch say it ain’t even six o’clock, I got next to no choice but to change my watch around if I want to get there on time.” Some ten years before, behind his daughter’s back, he had put a little faith in a televangelist. Five hundred dollars of “love offerings.” Seven prayer cloths. Eight little gold-plated crosses. A visit with Alberta to the D.C. Armory where the televangelist showed up drunk, though most of the four hundred desperate people there didn’t notice because they thought the man was just broadcasting God’s words on one of the man’s weaker channels.

“What about the vacation, what about Massachusetts?” Glynnis said after Morton finally said he was planning a trip down to the root worker. Alberta did not enjoy going away from Washington, but she had found some peace in Massachusetts, in an enclave where many well-off blacks vacationed.

“Later in the summer, maybe,” Morton said.

“I won’t be going with you, Daddy,” Glynnis said. She told herself she would not cry. He had always said no to one psychiatric facility after another, the ones with the wonderful brochures and the ones that had no brochures, just word of mouth among the wealthy who had fallen down and needed to be taught how to get up. “I am going to Massachusetts, just as I planned,” Glynnis said. Morton went to her and held her. “I am going to Massachusetts to walk along the beach and read books that I should be ashamed to read.”

“She wants me to bring the whole family,” Morton said into his daughter’s ear, speaking of the root worker.

“She wants the wrong thing,” Glynnis said. She had considered becoming a psychiatrist, but in her second year in medical school, under the sway of the first woman to chair the neurology department, she had begun thinking that the entire human body was the larger territory she wanted to conquer. There were even things in the body that, if cured, could heal a sick mind.

St. Elizabeths Hospital across the Anacostia River was a very big place of land and many buildings and a few devoted workers. And some housewives and poets and a few children, the most innocent, had managed to find their lost minds there, only to lose them again. Morton Holloway, the father of the future doctor, would say to Glynnis, newly twelve, that day on K Street, N.E., “Child, whas done got into you? You lost your ever lovin mind?”

With the second witch now on her haunches across Alberta’s chest, the doctor’s mother sometimes got a feeling in her soul that there was a gas leak from the stove in the new kitchen on the first floor of Glynnis’s home, a kitchen that should not have had any problems, since it cost more than some homes in the Washington area. I must rise and warn them! Alberta’s mind told her. Please, Lord, let me get up so my family won’t die with all that gas! (There was not always a threat to her family, but there was always paralysis.) Other times—and this was most common for Alberta, even with the increased police presence in the still-black neighborhood to protect the few white “pioneers” in their own renovated houses—the paralyzed Alberta became aware of robbers down at the back door. She could hear the thieves whispering, planning how to dismantle the alarm system and enter the house and kill her Morton and Glynnis and then steal, first, before anything, the drugs from her daughter’s gleaming and glassy cabinets in the basement office. Comfortably perched on Alberta’s chest, her hands over the mother’s breasts, the second witch always twisted her upper body to acknowledge her sister, the first witch, with the slightest nod. Nothing more, for while they were family, they were not that kind of family. The greeting and the response—a deeper nod and two hissing bursts of breath into the second witch’s face—were always the same. Downstairs, at the back door, one robber said to another, I’ll take the husband and you help me, cause he got them muscles. And a third robber, coming leisurely up the lovely, winding brick path from the back gate to the steps, said, I’ll kill the daughter. I’ll kill the doctor myself. We’ll kill em both….

Physician-to-be, there are patients, and not very rare ones, who will come your way and tell you what is wrong with them and demand you follow along with a treatment they believe is best. First, physician-to-be, you must cure them of this barbarism that you are not the one who knows best, best about knowing what is wrong and best about knowing how to cure the machine and set it upright.

Her left hand holding a walking stick far older and far taller than she was, Imogene Satterfield was standing on her porch when the group from Washington rode up and parked across the two-lane road from her cottage of a house in the empty lot of Standing Rock Baptist Church. The driver of the chartered bus stuck her head out of the window and looked about, and when she noticed Imogene across the way, she shouted Hi and then she pulled her head in and stuck a hand out the window and waved to her. Imogene raised high the walking stick in greeting, the friendly though noncommittal one she reserved for people she could not remember if she had met before. She lowered the stick inch by slow inch, and when it touched the floor of the porch, the rubber tip said nothing. Snakes, each swallowing the tail of the one before it, were wrapped around the walking stick, and at the top there was a final snake with two heads, one looking up and the other looking down. Imogene was all dressed up, the way she would have been had she been going across the road to services at Standing Rock. It was late Thursday afternoon, and they were all about a mile outside of Roxboro, North Carolina.