The Healer's Daughter

by Charlotte Hinger

  “That’s the most despicable thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Purple taffeta,” Dolly blurted again. “A beautiful, beautiful piece of purple taffeta. I knowed what it was the minute I seed that purple. I first seed that fine, fine cloth at her housewarming. Can’t imagine anyone cutting up a piece of purple taffeta like it was just nothing at all.” She dabbed at a tear.

  “She must be touched in the head, or she must have magical powers,” said a woman in back.

  “Must be powers. Magic. Witching powers.”

  Queen Bess’s throat tightened. “You don’t understand. There’s medicine doings my people know about that your people don’t.”

  “Quite right, your people know things,” Estelle said. “Do you keep little dolls, old woman? Do you stick pins in them?”

  “No,” said Queen Bess. “I just praise Jesus’s name. I belongs to Jesus. Just Jesus. I telling you, I saved her.”

  But her words were drowned out as the chants of “witching woman” grew louder and louder.

  “No, no, no!” someone called shrilly. “Stop!” Bethany wriggled through the group of women like a little terrier. “Stop.” She threw her arms around her mother, who was kneeling in the manure. She pulled Queen Bess to her feet and wrapped her arms around her. Then, trembling, too shocked to speak, she turned to face the women.

  “What in God’s name is going on here?” A man’s voice vibrated like a clap of thunder through the air. Elam Bartholomew pushed through the circle of women.

  “I asked you, what is going on?” Elam’s voice boomed through the silence.

  One of the white women said, “We were just talking to this woman about Miz Becker, Mr. Bartholomew. Everyone knows she tried to kill her.”

  “That is an outrageous lie. Outrageous. Whoever is spreading such nonsense should be horsewhipped.”

  “It true,” said Dolly. “God’s truth. I seed it with my own eyes. Maggots. She sealed in maggots with a piece of purple taffeta.” Her voice trembled. “Taffeta. She ruined a fine piece of taffeta.”

  Bartholomew’s little spectacles glinted in the sun as he walked over to Bethany and Queen Bess. He stood quietly beside them. Only the whiteness of his knuckles atop his walking stick betrayed his fury. He was a scientist, a man used to reasoning with fools. He kept his voice calm, his words measured.

  “To begin with, ladies, I’m sure all of you know I have a few credentials for what I’m about to tell you. In addition to my degree in science, I was a medic in the Late Rebellion. A major. I assisted surgeons. I have seen things so terrible I shall never speak of them again. But I can assure you that many a life was saved on the battlefield because the poor soul was lying next to a dead man, because then sometimes the maggots on the corpse . . .”

  He paused and removed his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose, and closed his eyes for a moment before he could continue. “Sometimes the maggots would crawl over to the wounded man and cleanse the infection.”

  Bethany’s arms tightened around her mother’s bony shoulders. She looked at the white stranger with wonder.

  “And as to the taffeta . . . It’s nearly non-porous. It’s so tightly woven that when it’s coated with wax nothing can contaminate a wound further. Dirt can get around the edges though.” He looked at Queen Bess curiously. “Unless Missus Herbert found a way to take care of that, too.”

  Queen Bess nodded and peered up at the proud old white man as though they were having one of their private conversations.

  “Candle wax,” she mumbled. “You waxes the taffeta, and then you makes a trail with candle wax to seal it. Gotta be careful you don’t burn no flesh, though.”

  Bartholomew looked tenderly at Queen Bess. “Moreover, this woman is my friend.”

  No one spoke.

  “I have no idea how she acquired the skills to perform an emergency caesarean, but she did.”

  Queen Bess’s eyes sparkled with pride.

  “Furthermore, I have no idea where she could acquire maggots in such a short order.” At this, he raised his eyebrows. “You can’t just call them up out of thin air. It takes death, and in this case it wasn’t Mrs. Becker’s.”

  Queen Bess sensibly suppressed a wee smile. She would tell him later about keeping a killing chicken handy to bring on the maggots. A doctoring woman couldn’t do nothing without a killing chicken.

  “Madam, clearly you sealed in the maggots with the waxed taffeta.”

  Queen Bess nodded.

  “We have often consulted,” Bartholomew announced to the group, feigning amicability. “Discussed methods, and traded medicines. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, I believe you intended to pay me a visit on this trip.”

  He extended his elbow to Queen Bess. She tucked her arm under it, the women parted, and the elderly white botanist and the old black granny walked toward his house on the edge of town.

  Queen Bess’s hands trembled beneath the buffalo robe Jed had draped over her and Bethany for the long ride home. Bone weary, she slumped listlessly and stared straight ahead.

  Bethany had just finished telling Teddy and Jed about their terrifying experience with Estelle and Dolly Redgrave.

  “Dolly’s dangerous,” Jed said. He looked at Teddy. They were both horrified. “We won’t let this pass.”

  “Tried to tell you that little high yeller girl was no good,” Queen Bess mumbled. “And that Sinclair woman, she meaner’n a snake.”

  “Momma, where did you meet that Mr. Bartholomew? Why did he stick up for you? I told you when you first came about the Indian woman. The last thing she said to me was ‘Bartholomew.’ I told you that. I know you remembered. You remember everything.”

  Queen Bess said nothing.

  “I didn’t know what she meant. Could have been a person, or a place, or something else. I wasn’t even sure I heard her right. So why didn’t you tell me you had come across someone by that name?”

  “Daughter, I wasn’t going to tell you nothing until I looked this man over myself. How I know he safe for you to be around? And you knows, I has always had white gentlemen doctoring friends. Like he said. We done been consulting for the last couple of months. He tells me things. I tells him things.”

  “Momma, why didn’t you tell me you were learning new things about medicine?”

  Queen Bess looked across the prairie and chose her words carefully. The truth was—and it was a growing sorrow like fluid around her heart—truth was, she was beginning to doubt if her daughter, her very own daughter, the last of the great Herbert women, had a true calling. If Bethany did not, she could not bear the grief. Truth was, she couldn’t stand to know. Not just yet.

  “You was busy,” Queen Bess said finally. “Busy at your school. Don’t see you much since I got my place.”

  Bethany reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Momma, my teaching work is going to lighten up. We’ll have time to visit. Kulp, McBane, and Jed are rounding up different teachers for different subjects.” Bethany’s face glowed in the setting sun. “And books. Fine, fine books. Kulp and McBane brought a bunch with them, and they have connections.” Her eyes sparkled.

  Queen Bess stared at her for an instant. Motherwit was passed on through the milk. This child of hers must have sucked printers’ ink from her tits instead of granny smarts.

  She all fired up. Bess had known other owl women. But hardly ever a black one came along. She was losing her daughter to scribbles on a piece of paper. Worse, Bethany thought she loved children, but Queen Bess knew she did not. She was not a natural comforting woman like LuAnne that little ones just naturally sidled up to. It was ideas Bethany loved. Seeing the children understand.

  Lofty thoughts got her daughter going. Caused her to wander off from a cooking pot. Caused her to forget herself and leave clothes outside with a rain coming on. No motherwit atall.

  Queen Bess looked away.

  “Momma!” Bethany reached for her. “I’m going on about the school again like I don’t care about what happened to you.”
She put her arms around Queen Bess’s shoulders. “I nearly died when I thought those vicious women were going to hurt you.”

  Queen Bess reached up and patted her daughter’s dear face. This truthful, ripped-up, half-white child of hers. Truth didn’t set you free. It pierced. Jesus tried to tell them, but they wanted it all prettied up.

  “It done,” she said heavily. “No point in getting all riled up again.”

  “But I am. Dolly is one of our own.”

  “No, she not.”

  “Maybe not in spirit, but she’s from Nicodemus. She’s supposed to be one of us. And she was ready to sell you down the river.” Suddenly, Bethany burst into tears of helpless rage. “She was going to sell you down the river over a piece of purple taffeta. Purple taffeta.”

  “Betrayal from within,” Jed said as he angrily flicked the reins across the horses’ backs. “Can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it myself and read about it even more. Have you heard of Gabriel, Bethany? And others. Every time some slaves tried to do something, one of their own would pass their plans on to the Man. Ruin everything.”

  “But Gabriel’s Rebellion was for freedom,” Bethany said through her tears. “Something important. Our natural rights. And the ones who betrayed him did so out of fear. That little slut was selling Momma South over a piece of purple taffeta.”

  The next day, Bethany stood in the doorway of her schoolhouse and watched Earnest Jones lead the class. True to their word, Kulp, McBane, and Jed had rounded up volunteers. Earnest had warmed to teaching arithmetic like it was his natural calling. He’d told Jed, “Can’t talk real good, but I can teach little children how to figure well enough to know when someone is cheating them. Not if,” he added, “not a matter of if, if he the Man. It’s a matter of how much. Then I’m going to teach them how to figure out what to do about it without getting themselves killed.”

  Bethany was bone weary from a sleepless, haunted night. Rage-wracked and grief-stricken from the memory of her mother kneeling in manure. She shuddered. What if Mr. Bartholomew hadn’t been there? What if her mother had never met this important white man? They could not let this go, but what could they do?

  Wearily, she smiled at Jones’s zest, picked up the basket she used for gathering plants, and headed out across the prairie. Little grasshoppers flew up wherever she stepped. She once saw the prairie as empty, but it teemed with insects. Life. For the rest of her days she would feel a subtle vibration emanating from the ground. She would never forget the drums and feet of that first large September colony. Surging over the rise like a colorful cloud. Old folks, young folks. People throbbing with eagerness to start a new life. Denied Africa, they were coming home to Nicodemus.

  Lulled by the swaying grass, the peace she now found in the emptiness, she spread her shawl out on the ground, stretched out, and fell sound asleep. She awoke to a roll of thunder in the distance. Startled, she watched the wind-spanked clouds, tucking in their tails, moving fast and high.

  She brushed a tendril of hair out of her eyes, then gasped. She knew what to do. Somewhere between sleeping and waking and the first streak of lightning, it had come to her. She knew what to do. For all of them. Dream sure, it had come to her whole.

  She leaped to her feet and watched the clouds whipped around like stampeding cattle. Lightning crackled, and her blood leaped with each bolt. Mindlessly, she reached for the bundle of hair secured at the back of her neck and pulled out the pins. She reached for her shawl and, hair streaming, ran for the schoolhouse.

  She would not spend the rest of her life being rescued by white men, if they managed to show up at all. LuAnne had scolded her for not paying more attention to the Scriptures. Well, she was going to do exactly what the Bible said: fight the lying Josiah Sinclair and Aaron Potroff with the truth. Jesus had said, “The truth will set you free.” People in the state of Kansas were going to get a stiff dose of the truth.

  When she reached the schoolhouse, the children were dashing for their own homes, and Earnest Jones stopped just long enough to tell her he would come back in two days.

  Bethany immediately ran to her dugout and hurried inside. She went to the shelf where she kept the precious sheets of paper Libby Hays had given her. Remembering the Founding Fathers, whose skill with words had freed a nation, she carefully sharpened her quill pen.

  She first wrote what she wanted to say in the margins of one of Meissner’s patent sheets:

  “A great war is being fought right here in Kansas. A war of the angels. It is the age-old struggle of good and evil fought on the high plains of Kansas over a valiant Negro community. All eyes are turned toward Nicodemus, as they must be at this great juncture in our state’s history. Unfortunately, this community of industrious and talented settlers is being threatened, besieged by a neighboring town, Wade City, whose newspaper editor is bent on destroying Nicodemus. The people of Nicodemus plan to vote for Millbrook as the county seat instead of Wade City. Why would persons want to destroy Nicodemus? The answer, of course, is as old as the world: money. Therefore, a campaign of lies and disinformation has begun. Lies calculated to ruin the reputations of two of the finest medical women in Northwest Kansas.”

  She outlined the stakes involved in creating school districts, then exposed the treacherous nature of the letters protesting township organization. When the wording was perfect she copied it onto the heavy vellum paper and addressed it to the Topeka Daily Capital, where it would get the widest possible circulation.

  She signed it Sunflower.

  A week later, when Teddy went to Oberlin, she asked him to bypass the post office and carry the letter directly to the mail sack when the train came through. He glanced at the elegant envelope. Bethany saw the quick question in his eyes.

  “Teddy, I know I can count on you not to tell anyone where you got this. Not even Jed. It’s best to mix it in with a bunch of other letters.”

  When Joseph Hudson, editor of the Topeka Daily Capital, received the letter, he did not consider the signature of “Sunflower” unusual. Many of his correspondents used pen names lifted from Greek gods or Shakespeare. Noting the exquisite quality of the stationery, the fine accomplished hand, and the well-reasoned words, he decided it had to come from an educated gentleman of good standing.

  He was only too happy to print the letter from the mysterious “Sunflower” if for no other reason than to curry favor with Governor St. John, who was on a crusade to welcome blacks into Kansas. Editor Hudson scoffed at the pretense of disguising gender with the rather feminine pseudonym of Sunflower. No woman could have communicated so intelligently.

  When the letter was published, the black elite of Topeka were outraged over the incident of the imaginary dead baby, and the white intelligentsia was incensed by the treachery of the Wade City politicians. Hudson wrote editorials about the underhandedness of white folks in Graham County. His circulation increased by at least fifty that week alone. Everywhere people were debating the effect of the Negro vote on Kansas politics.

  Governor John Pierce St. John immediately began doubting the motives of white settlers in Graham County who had protested the organization of Nicodemus Township.

  When the copy of the Topeka Capital containing the letter from Sunflower arrived at the office of the Wade City Chronicle, Josiah Sinclair stormed out and headed toward the hotel. Potroff was playing poker with Clyde McCall and Stanley Bradley. Josiah shoved the paper at the townsman and pointed at the article.

  Potroff’s face whitened as he read.

  “Do you have any idea why this ‘Sunflower’ would want to turn people against us? Who is he, and why would he give a damn what we do out here?”

  “If I knew who the sumbitch was, Josiah, I never would have let this happen,” Potroff said coldly. He folded his cards.

  “Well, we’d better find out before all Kansas starts watching the town of Nicodemus and sticking up for those uppity niggers.”

  “They owe me,” Potroff mumbled. “Ungrateful black bastards.”

>   “They don’t owe you a damn thing.”

  “They wouldn’t have come here if it hadn’t been for me.”

  “You brought them here to make you rich, and it didn’t work out,” Sinclair snapped. “I tried to tell you those people have their own minds.”

  “Are you telling me it’s wrong to want to get rich?” Potroff slammed his fist down on the table, scattering chips. “Isn’t that why most of us came here? To get hold of some land and better ourselves?”

  “Yes, but it was the lies you told that got you in trouble. Not just us wanting land.”

  “It’s no different from the lies we tell white people,” Potroff said. Other men had gathered around the paper. They laughed at what he had just said.

  “Kansas is built on lies,” argued Sinclair. “Nothing wrong with a little lie. It’s what keeps most people going. Give a man a choice between the truth and a lie, and he’ll take the lie every time, and mostly be better off for liking it.”

  “Some people,” snapped old Pete Olive. “Some of us can handle the truth just fine.”

  Sinclair shook his head. “For a while, maybe.”

  Grant Peabody, who had kept quiet, spoke up from his chair next to the stove. “Depends. Moving on kinds of people like lies the best. Stayers get plumb riled up when folks don’t tell them the truth. I think we want stayers here in this town. In this state. Liars mostly move on.”

  “Those Nicodemus folks are stayers,” Josiah admitted. “I’ve been there, and they have that look of people who are going to fight to the death. I know exactly how that kind of person thinks. That kind of thinking cost me my father and two uncles and my brother. Even knowing that now, we’d do it all over again to keep our homes and our way of life.”

  “Those niggers ain’t got no natural way of life.”

  “Mebbe so, but they want one. They’ve got it in their minds they’re entitled to one. That’s what that town of theirs is all about,” Pete Olive said. But then, Olive was a Yankee. A natural born contrarian.

  “Ain’t gonna be no town by the time we get through,” Josiah said coldly.