Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

I will have to trust that she will be fine, Glynnis thought as she turned and surveyed the kitchen, which in the end was nothing special. Two plates with half-eaten toast on them testified to the fact that her mother had at least gone out with something in her stomach. Whether she had taken her medicine was another matter. To the right was an open door she had not seen when she came into the kitchen. She entered the small room, which she noticed had been built onto the original structure, and immediately became breathless at a grand and colorful array of thirty-five small jars on the five shelves facing her. Part of the grandness came from the simple uniformity of the lines of jars, all the size of the one Imogene had taken from her sweater the evening before. And the color was the ultimate result of the sun flowing into a window on the same side of the little room as the shelves. It poured in, rich and thick with yellow, and hit a series of framed photographs on the opposite wall, bounced and was transformed prismlike as it went back across the room to paint the jars in dozens of colors. And with those colors, the jars twinkled and shone and winked at Glynnis. She stepped closer and saw that none of the jars had labels, but it was obvious from the texture and gradations of limited colors that the contents were all different. The contrast between the world outside and inside the jars was great; everything inside them was dull, uninspiring, and so disappointing that she had to pull back her head and take in all the different lights again.

She picked up a few jars. So this is it, she thought, this is all the mumbo-jumbo shit, the workings of a cross-eyed root worker. She was tempted to open each one she held, but feared some pernicious odor would escape and overwhelm her. D.C. Physician, a Credit to Her Race, Dies in Mishap at Crone’s House.

Once back in the kitchen, she was even hungrier. She found a box of crackers and stood at the entrance of the little room and ate them. She stepped in to see the photographs across from the jars. There were fifty or so, and they were all of babies and children, mostly black, but a good many were white and Indian. Some pictures, it seemed, had been taken ages ago. It was only now, her fingers finally touching the bottom of the box, that she wondered why she had not asked Miss Imogene what she had put into the tea.

“I have noticed,” the dreadlock man with the black car was to say to Glynnis in two weeks, “that you have been calling her ‘Miss Imogene.’ I know it’s routine to say it that way, but my grandmother has been conjuring for nearly seventy years, and no one around here, even white people, calls her anything but ‘Dr. Imogene.’”

“I meant no disrespect,” Glynnis was to say.

“I know you didn’t, Dr. Holloway,” the dreadlock man said, and when he lowered his eyes and then raised them again, she could see clearly that his blood and the old woman’s blood were indeed the same. “And my grandmother would never say a word. Probably doesn’t even notice that’s what you are saying. But if people start hearing you call her like that, they will think less of you, Dr. Holloway. They will think you have no home training.”

After the first two witches had taken their places on Alberta’s body, she was never certain how the third witch entered the room. (Imogene Satterfield was to say offhandedly one day that while a human being might live in a one-room house with one door and one window, the Devil had a habit of making four more doors and four more windows just for his own convenience.) Alberta simply became aware that the third witch’s upper body was suddenly across her face and neck, and her breathing became an awful struggle so that it was all she could do to suck in sufficient air that somehow found its way around the witch and through her clothes and into Alberta’s mouth. I’ll kill the daughter. I’ll kill the doctor myself. Time was out of sorts. Once, only days after coming out of the hospital, she had managed to turn to look at the illuminated clock hands on the bedside table. Just before the paralysis—the riding—started, the clock had said 1:13, and when it ended, the clock told her 1:49. And another time, five days later, the elapsed time was but seven minutes. We’ll kill em both….

Maddie and Sandra left North Carolina, promising to return when they got the call. Glynnis’s father spent his nights with Maddie’s cousin, less than two miles down the road, and in the morning he walked back up that road to have breakfast with his family and Imogene. The old woman never called him anything but brother, and at first he, like his daughter, thought she did not even know his name.

For many nights, Glynnis, ever the good sentinel, stayed awake until well after one, waiting to hear her mother’s screams, or some whimper of incapacitation. But her mother always slept through the night, and at first Glynnis was disappointed because the hum of nocturnal nothing, accompanied by a chorus of crickets and bullfrogs, would not get her to a shore in Massachusetts. Disappointed, too, that decades of science, hers and the world’s, had not done the trick. Then, as they neared the end of the second week in North Carolina, as she started to simply give herself over to a full night’s sleep, she saw how bad a daughter she was in being, at last, such a jealous soul. She did not know if her mother was still taking the medicine from St. Elizabeths.

It was in the third week that she began to suspect that they had fully turned a corner and that they might not have to go back to the old ways. That Monday Glynnis awakened in the late morning and looked down to Dr. Imogene attending to the garden in the back. The old woman was doing nothing special, simply going to various plants, bending down and touching them momentarily with her fingers. Caressing a few with the back of her hand. Her other hand held a watering jug, and to some plants she gave water, and to those she did not, she merely shook her head, not to them, but to herself. Since the last day of the second week, when Glynnis decided to stay even longer, she had been searching her memory. How long a period over the years had her mother gone without the witches riding, how long a time had she gone without doing something no sane person would do? She did not believe it had ever been more than a week. And now they were quickly approaching a month. Dr. Imogene stepped out to the path that divided the sections of her garden and took off her hat and fanned herself. She was mumbling. Dr. Imogene stepped into the other section of the garden, and Glynnis, still not fully awake, thought she saw the plants part to make way. A generous breeze came through and it moved the plants and it moved Dr. Imogene’s red dress and it moved the curtain at Glynnis’s window and it moved the babyish hairs on her arms. Glynnis raised her hands to her face and cried.

After showering and dressing, she came down and stood looking out the parlor window. There was not much in her view beyond the empty church across the road. Two mornings before she had stood at the window and saw her parents across that road in the church parking lot. Her father sat on the hood of the car he had rented for them. His back was to Glynnis and her mother stood just a tad to the side in front of him and her daughter could see her whole face. Alberta was talking and Morton did nothing but nod all the while. Alberta raised her arm and seemed to indicate with the movement of her hand something far off in the distance. Then Morton, as if he could no longer contain himself, pulled Alberta closer and kissed her for a long time. If they had ever kissed that way in Glynnis’s lifetime, she could not remember. It would be another week before Dr. Imogene could disabuse her of the notion that there was anything magical in any of it. Her parents spent that night in a bed-and-breakfast in Roxboro, and they were there now. “Is it magic what sugar do to tea and cornflakes and cake batter, Dr. Holloway?”