and Charlie Kate said, ‘By God, I am telling you to let this woman’s arm loose!’ The wringer widened and out flopped Tessa’s arm, flat as a breadboard. Everybody there, like me, who had come running on account of Tessa’s screaming, felt the Holy Spirit in the wash shed. Rosalinda Herbert’s neuralgia was healed on the spot. Amos Johnson’s hair started to grow. Buttercup Spivey’s dropped kidneys rose. Malcolm Taylor stopped wanting to scratch his missing leg. Everybody saw the miracles all around.”
More than once, she told the men as she was packing her bag to leave, “I will remind every one of you that a drunkard makes an ugly corpse.” They would cock their heads and regard her words like a bunch of scholars who had just heard something wise and true, and never before considered.
My grandmother’s grand reputation was made more so by, of all people, the real doctor who had earlier sent her ten dollars. He caused marvelous opportunities to come her way after she told him she knew of his grave and shameful error. One night in January of 1937 she was called out to the long row of mill houses on Beale Street to treat a tiny blind baby racked with whooping cough. My mother and I went with her and took turns jumping out of the automobile to run ahead and salt icy patches on the road to town. We sat in the backseat with a large bag of salt between us, and when my grandmother stopped, predicting a slick place ahead, one of us would scoop into the bag with a measuring cup and then hop out. We did this because the chains for the tires had been stolen from our garage, along with tools, old toys, anything that could be traded for food or whiskey at the Hooverville by the railroad yard.
I knew that my mother had grown up in this mill section, but I had difficulty imagining her running about, playing with these ragged children who were still outside in the raw cold of midnight, chasing each other up and down the street with icicle daggers. As we walked up the steps and into the sick baby’s house, I heard her shrieking, but that was the only sound. It seemed so very strange to me, and then I realized that between the sharp cries I was not hearing a mother saying everything would be all right. There was no mothering sound.
The mother looked to be my age. She stood holding the baby in the middle of a room that might have been a pretty little space the first fifteen minutes it was in use. But now the stains on the walls had stains, and the one electric bulb overhead dangled like something one would expect to see in a cell on death row. She was doing such a useless job of comforting the baby that she may as well have laid her in her crib to scream alone and walked out. My grandmother said to her very directly, “Give me the baby.” She took her to the settee to examine her abdomen. I was asked to come hold the baby’s legs still. They were jerking violently up into her chest, and although she was only about two years old, she seemed to have in her legs the power of five grown men.
My mother went out to the car and brought in four wooden poles and one of the bronchitis tents we always packed when a case of whooping cough was suspected. The tents were nothing more than sheets, but my mother had embroidered baby animals on them, so a sick and miserable child could have some sort of pleasure. During that bad winter and early spring, thirty or forty children used this tent. After my mother constructed the tent over the crib, she sat down with the young woman and took the baby’s medical history, which proceeded along a string of “I don’t know” and “I can’t remember” until the question of the baby’s blindness arose. My mother asked if she had been born that way.
The baby’s mother said, “The doctor, he caught her and then he put the drops in and sort of spilled some on her and I sort of got the feeling he did it.”
My grandmother had placed the baby on her stomach, and I was still holding the legs.
More than once, she told the men as she was packing her bag to leave, “I will remind every one of you that a drunkard makes an ugly corpse.” They would cock their heads and regard her words like a bunch of scholars who had just heard something wise and true, and never before considered.
My grandmother’s grand reputation was made more so by, of all people, the real doctor who had earlier sent her ten dollars. He caused marvelous opportunities to come her way after she told him she knew of his grave and shameful error. One night in January of 1937 she was called out to the long row of mill houses on Beale Street to treat a tiny blind baby racked with whooping cough. My mother and I went with her and took turns jumping out of the automobile to run ahead and salt icy patches on the road to town. We sat in the backseat with a large bag of salt between us, and when my grandmother stopped, predicting a slick place ahead, one of us would scoop into the bag with a measuring cup and then hop out. We did this because the chains for the tires had been stolen from our garage, along with tools, old toys, anything that could be traded for food or whiskey at the Hooverville by the railroad yard.
I knew that my mother had grown up in this mill section, but I had difficulty imagining her running about, playing with these ragged children who were still outside in the raw cold of midnight, chasing each other up and down the street with icicle daggers. As we walked up the steps and into the sick baby’s house, I heard her shrieking, but that was the only sound. It seemed so very strange to me, and then I realized that between the sharp cries I was not hearing a mother saying everything would be all right. There was no mothering sound.
The mother looked to be my age. She stood holding the baby in the middle of a room that might have been a pretty little space the first fifteen minutes it was in use. But now the stains on the walls had stains, and the one electric bulb overhead dangled like something one would expect to see in a cell on death row. She was doing such a useless job of comforting the baby that she may as well have laid her in her crib to scream alone and walked out. My grandmother said to her very directly, “Give me the baby.” She took her to the settee to examine her abdomen. I was asked to come hold the baby’s legs still. They were jerking violently up into her chest, and although she was only about two years old, she seemed to have in her legs the power of five grown men.
My mother went out to the car and brought in four wooden poles and one of the bronchitis tents we always packed when a case of whooping cough was suspected. The tents were nothing more than sheets, but my mother had embroidered baby animals on them, so a sick and miserable child could have some sort of pleasure. During that bad winter and early spring, thirty or forty children used this tent. After my mother constructed the tent over the crib, she sat down with the young woman and took the baby’s medical history, which proceeded along a string of “I don’t know” and “I can’t remember” until the question of the baby’s blindness arose. My mother asked if she had been born that way.
The baby’s mother said, “The doctor, he caught her and then he put the drops in and sort of spilled some on her and I sort of got the feeling he did it.”
My grandmother had placed the baby on her stomach, and I was still holding the legs.
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