The Healing

by Gayl Jones

  Bird of paradise, I used to think that they were mystical birds—mythical birds, I mean—but they’re real, them birds of paradise. Norvelle had this book about this man who went on this trek to New Guinea to discover them, and it was full of their pictures. Dancing on the ground and in treetops in their courtship dance. Norvelle said that was the sort of book he’d like to write, a pure naturalist’s book. The man who’d written this pure naturalist’s book had also formed a foundation to protect these birds, these birds of paradise, because they got the most beautiful feathers, and so they’s hunted, and it’s becoming harder and harder to find them. I guess that’s why a lot of people don’t know that they’s real birds. Norvelle, of course, sent in some bucks to this foundation to protect the birds of paradise. Then he sent in some bucks to another foundation to help protect the human species. He didn’t think it was right protecting birds and not protecting humanity. But he’d wanted to be a naturalist before he’d decided to become a medical anthropologist. He was in college during the 1960s and becoming a naturalist didn’t seem “relevant” and certainly he didn’t know of any African Americans who were naturalists, not pure naturalists, so he decided to become a medical anthropologist instead. He could’ve been a naturalist in Africa, but in those days people wouldn’t have considered it relevant, the young militant students who were his schoolmates and who once took over an administration building. He wasn’t one of the spokesmen for the group or even a mediator; he went back and forth bringing them food and water and made sure that they had enough to sustain themselves while they kept the administration building. The situation he said was resolved peacefully, though, and they got certain of their demands: an African and African-American Studies Department, more “teachers of color”—not just African-American teachers, but other teachers of color, more students of color, and assorted other demands that seem trivial now. From Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where all the African Americans he knew had always been self-reliant, he’d felt ambivalent about some of the demands himself. He’d wanted to be relevant, though, so he made sure they had enough food and water.

  Pretty-eyed birds, them birds of paradise, though. And of course it was the males who did the courtship dance, and like most bird species, it was the males who were the brightly colored, attractive ones.

  When I told Paradise about the birds of paradise and why I was calling him out of his name—Nathaniel Bower—to call him a better name, he told me about the bower bird and its nest of shells and fruit and feathers, He’d been searching for the meaning of his name once, like we all sometimes do, and discovered the bowerbird. It built a nest of shells and fruit and feathers to attract female birds. But the female birds didn’t even use the nest. They were attracted to the male birds that built the best nest. They’d allow themselves to be mated in that nest, but then they’d lay their eggs in their own nest somewhere else. But he liked Paradise better. Or that I called him that, though most people just called him Nat.

  So you want to travel the road back to him, he said when I told him about Norvelle. We were sitting on the porch of the hotel where both of us was staying there in Saratoga. A hotel with a long porch.

  The road back to him got twisted, I said.

  Then untwist it. But I don’t think his bower is better than mine.

  I didn’t answer. Paradise said he liked to see me at the racetrack. At the racetrack, I sprang to life, and I was fun. And when I talked of Keeneland or the Kentucky Derby or the Santa Anita Derby or the San Felipe Stakes, or some new Thoroughbred or even some new jockey, or who won what race by what length victory. . . . But when I talked about Norvelle I just sounded like a fool.

  Let’s have dinner, Paradise suggested.

  Sure.

  He seemed surprised.

  Look, I don’t want you to have any illusions about me, though, I said.

  Old jockeys ain’t got no illusions. Old black jockeys got fewer than none.

  Pictures of celebrities decorated the walls, movie stars like Clark Gable and singers like Billy Eckstine. And there was the other Billie, the Holiday, in her gardenias. So young then. The woman who owned the place said it was from an advertisement of her for her first performance in New York. In the thirties, she’d taken a train from New Orleans, the woman who owned the place. She’d seen the movie starring Clark Gable and Carole Lombard—no, it was Jean Harlow, The one that had put Saratoga in the limelight, or on the map, and so she’d opened a restaurant specializing in southern cooking.

  I always look forward to seeing you, he said after we’d ordered. He had a way of talking that surprised me. Sometimes it was what you call proper, I guess from being around West Virginia bluebloods—or did they have bluebloods in West Virginia or just Virginia? He was born, though, he said, in New York, in Harlem, but his family, unlike most families in those days, had migrated south to West Virginia. While other people were moving north to the promised land, they were traveling south. His father he said had an obsession with trees and wanted his children to grow up around trees and not concrete, When he’d thought of West Virginia, though, he’d always thought of the mountains, of the West Virginia coal mines. But his father worked on farms, mostly, in tobacco and racehorse country, the part of West Virginia near the Virginia border. He stayed small, and around horses it just had seemed natural that he’d become a jockey. But his father would talk and talk and talk and talk about trees and being able to ride for miles and see nothing but trees and green. He taught his children to appreciate the green. Not the green of the dollar bill, but the green of nature, of the countryside. But then he stopped talking, because he was making the South sound like a paradise, and it wasn’t no paradise.

  I bit into a spicy chicken wing. I thought he was going to tell me some southern nightmare that his father had encountered, some southern nightmare like in that Billie Holiday’s song, but he didn’t. So I ate my chicken and looked at Billy Eckstine, then at Nathaniel. Then at Billie Holiday.

  She says that’s the very first advertisement of Billie Holiday’s very first concert, I said. I wonder how much a collector would pay for that. She didn’t have it framed or anything. I’m the one told her to frame it. I wonder if Billie Holiday ever come to Saratoga to bet on the horses. Did you see that movie Lady Sings the Blues?

  Yeah.

  I seen it two or three times. Read the book too. It’s based on her autobiography. The book moves back and forth in time, though, more than the movie. You think you’re in one time and the next chapter you’re in another, Joan says it’s kinda like jazz. That that’s what she’s trying to do in that autobiography, kinda suggest the improvisations of jazz. Joan says she sing like her voice is a horn. You know, try to do with her voice the same thing them horn players do. Like what Satchmo would try to do with his horn, she would try to do with her voice. That’s why her voice ain’t like no other woman voice. On account of that horn. I don’t know if she ever been to Saratoga, though.

  Seem like once I was here, somebody said “the lady” here. And there only one lady so I know who they talking about. I didn’t see her myself, though, but somebody said “the lady” here and that the only lady I know anybody to be talking about. I remember when there were black jockeys up and down, though, he said. Now I’m ’bout the only old spook around. Oh, plenty of us come up here to bet on the horses, but ain’t none of us riding them. I heard a man to say that if we weren’t riding ’em and owning ’em we shouldn’t bet on ’em. But you know we’ll bet on ’em anyhow, ’cause that’s how we are. I don’t ride the horses anymore, though. I don’t bet on ’em much myself. Sometimes I escort folks to the track, show them around the city.

  I tried to imagine him as a young jockey, but I couldn’t. When he retired he stayed in Saratoga, I guess for the green. There was still some green here. I looked at Billy Eckstine again, and then at Billie Holiday, and then at Paradise. I thought of that story by Carson McCullers about the jockey. I wondered if anybody had written any tales about jockeys like him.

  The
waitress set a shot of whiskey on the table for him and a sloe gin fizz for me.

  Were you ever married? I asked.

  Naw. In those days I wasn’t taking any chances with a woman. I was too intent on being the best jockey around, you know. I had a few girls. You attract girls. No one like you.

  I said nothing. I grabbed an ashtray from another table and lit a cigarette.

  Is this your first time in the States? someone at a table behind us asked. Yes, I was in San Francisco first. I thought all Americans were like that, without values. Oh yeah? Is that jean Harlow? Jean Harlow or Carole Lombard one, Carole Lombard? I wouldn’t be knowing that one. Clark Gable married her. Oh, that one. I’d be knowing that one for certain.

  Bird of Paradise gave me a large, warm smile. I tried to picture him in the winner’s circle.

  You still wear his ring, he noticed.

  Yeah.

  I did have a woman I almost married, once, I’d just had me a good season, my best season in the world and I was making a whole lotta bread, you know, and it turned out to be the bread and not me the girl was after. She’d take me for sure as long as I was dressed like a king.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Statuettes of saints crowded the shelves in my mother’s and grandmother’s beauty shop. They were my mother’s saints because my grandmother thought it was merely entertaining to have them. No one in the family was Catholic. But a customer and a Catholic, pleased with a new hairdo, had given them to my mother and she’d kept them. Though a Southern Baptist, she was convinced they were holy. There was a little Peruvian saint who was our complexion, but the other saints were white. At least the one who’d imagined them had painted them white. Every time they got dusty, she’d diligently take them down and clean and polish them. Grandmother called them whatnots.

  My mother attended church regularly and believed in the Bible passage which said: Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me. Something like that. She interpreted it to mean that you should treat everybody as if they were Christ. Whenever you’re about to do something mean or disrespectful to someone imagine they’re Christ, she’d say, and then decide how to treat them. That was superior, she felt, even to the Golden Rule. So, among some, she got the reputation for being a good and wise woman. Among others, she was considered a fool and a pushover. Needy people crowded to her door. So, as a child, I grew up thinking the whole world was needy, except for blue-haired and blue-veined Mrs. Smoot, who somehow kept above need. When I discovered there were other kinds of people in the world, people who weren’t needy, though, I found them more interesting because less familiar.

  When I got a chance to leave Louisville, even to go to beauty school in Cincinnati, I took it. But I had aspirations beyond beauty school. I audited a few courses at the University of Cincinnati. I remember once I went to a lecture on Nietzsche. At the reception I was standing at a table eating cheese and one of the girls in one of the classes I was auditing spotted me and came over.

  I didn’t know you were interested in Nietzsche, she said. She said something about our reading assignment, Camus’ The Rebel. She didn’t think Camus’ book was genuine philosophy—literature but not philosophy.

  But you’ll probably ace it, she said.

  I explained that I was just auditing the course, that I wasn’t a regular student but studying cosmetology at the local beauty school. She laughed, picked up a piece of cheese and an oyster cracker and moved toward others, glancing back at me, whispering, laughing. “She’s a beautician,” I thought I heard her say. “I thought she was a philosophy major.” I stopped auditing the university courses and concentrated on beauty, though I wasn’t too sure what beauty was.

  When I returned home one summer vacation my mother was entertaining some visiting African Baptists. Sometimes she rented rooms above the beauty shop and several of them were staying in those rented room, for free, because she wouldn’t take money from visiting African Baptists. I knew there were Catholics in Africa, because there were Catholics everywhere, but I didn’t know that Africa had any Baptists. Anyway, my future husband was escorting them and acting as their guide and interpreter. But since they spoke impeccable English themselves, his duties were mainly to interpret for them our curious idioms, colloquialisms and peculiar southern turns of phrase. They’d just been on a trip to Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, and it was all their talk—not of religious things. They kept talking about the transparent fish that swim in the underground streams at Mammoth Cave, what the tour guide had called spirit fish.

  Norvelle and I watched each other before we even said a word. But it was only when the group was about ready to leave—still talking of the cave fish—that Norvelle spoke to me.

  I enjoyed our stay very much, he said, as we stood together in the supply room where rows and rows of cosmetics and hair care products were stored. He’d seen me come back there and followed.

  I’m sorry I didn’t really get a chance to talk to you.

  Well, I’m shy as the devil too, I said.

  I lifted a jar of Ultra Sheen hair dressing. He smiled, reached into his pocket and took out a pad.

  I’m an anthropologist, he explained. It’s my first year at Bloomington, I mean the university there. I teach during the year, but in the summer I escort various African groups.

  Mom says you know a lot of African languages.

  A few. He kept both eyes on me, but I kept peering from him to the jar of Ultra Sheen. Well, I’ve always been good with languages. I just seem to pick them up, especially African languages. I just seem to pick them up. Anyway, here’s my address, if you’re ever in Bloomington.

  You a real professor? I asked, looking at the card.

  Of course I’m real.

  You don’t act like no professor.

  He laughed. How’s a professor s’posed to act?

  Not like you.

  I prefer fieldwork to the classroom, though, he said. I’ve never much liked the classroom actually. So I’m in blue jeans most of the time. I collect folklore, medical lore from different African tribes, to help to preserve it. You know, I’m what they call a medical anthropologist. But I’m boring you. Well, if you’re ever in Bloomington. . . .

  One rainy day after I’d finished beauty school and had worked for a couple of months in the family business as a licensed beautician, I appeared on the porch of a little stucco house in Bloomington. When he opened the door, I said, Surprise.

  When I got inside he hugged me. I kept looking around. There was nothing but books and papers piled to the ceiling and photographs and sketches of Africa and Africans and masks and sculptures and drawings. I recognized none of them then, of course, except that they were African. Only later under his tutelage could I distinguish an Igbo mask from a Bambara, an Ife sculpture from one from Benin. And I thought the painted calabashes were also sculptures. And I had no idea who Skunder Boghasian was, but I thought the name sounded Scandinavian, not African. Nor had I heard of Lamidi Fakeye or Yemi Bisiri. I didn’t know a Ashanti sculpture from an Anyi.

  What are you looking for? he asked.

  Another woman. Maybe you married or something. Maybe you got yourself a wife I ain’t know about. I just remembered, you might be married or something.

  Naw, I’m not married. He was wearing blue jeans and a light green sweater over a polo shirt. Except for the blue jeans, he looked kinda like a professor.

  Ain’t you surprised I’m here? I asked.

  I’m happy.

  I bet you angry I didn’t write and tell you I was coming.

  No, I’m just glad you’re here.

  I wasn’t sure I’d show up. Didn’t want to tell you I was coming and then not show up. You know, chicken out, or something. And then I wasn’t sure if you really wanted me to look you up if I ever came to Bloomington. You know, how some people tell you that, just to be polite. Mi casa es su casa. But they don’t actually mean it. Then I was thinking you couldn’t really be interested in me, because if you’re a
real college professor then you’d want yourself a professional-type woman.

  I don’t say what I don’t mean, he said. Then he kissed my jaw, then my mouth, then he took off my coat. And I ain’t always been a professional-type man myself.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  I was a turtle before I became a human being, said my grandmother. She was taking a new order of beauty products out of the boxes and restocking the shelves. The beauty products were from a wholesaler in New York. She thought New York beauty products were superior to local and regional products, even when the beauty products were manufactured by the same company and only distributed by a local or regional company. Perhaps she believed that the beauty products which they allowed to be distributed by local or regional companies had inferior ingredients. She didn’t seem to notice the contradiction: that if those products allowed to be distributed by local or regional companies contained inferior ingredients, then wouldn’t they sell her products with inferior ingredients? She said, though, that she could get a discount when she ordered the products in bulk from New York, whereas she didn’t get a discount when ordering them from a local distributor. She even had the ambition of manufacturing her own beauty products, but said she would only manufacture them if she could make a better beauty product than those already on the market. And the beauty products that she herself manufactured would all contain superior ingredients no matter to what region they were marketed. Her beauty products marketed out West would have the same superior ingredients as those marketed to the Northeast or the South. She was however negotiating with the wholesaler in New York so that Cornelia and Jaboti’s Beauty Shop, Inc., could become a local distributor of their products. But wouldn’t they sell her inferior products? Again, she didn’t seem to notice the contradiction. Cornelia and Jaboti, though, would advertise their New York connection, which would make them the superior beauty shop. In fact, they would advertise their international connections, for she was always sending to different parts of the world, wherever there were colored people, for samples of their beauty products. She was certain, though, that other nations wouldn’t ship beauty products with inferior ingredients to America.