All Aunt Hagar's Children

ROOT WORKER

The witches began riding Dr. Glynnis Holloway’s mother again almost as soon as the older woman returned that third and final time from St. Elizabeths Hospital. As before, the medicine—this time, a new brew of three different pills and a mauve liquid—that the St. Elizabeths people gave her did very little for the mother, Alberta Holloway; it served mostly to prevent her from knowing her own name for a few hours during the day. Dr. Glynnis Holloway and her father brought Alberta back to the doctor’s $650,000 renovated home on S Street, N.W. In that house with three stories and a large basement where she practiced, the unmarried doctor had been living with her parents before the hospitalization. The witches had been riding Alberta off and on since her daughter had turned eleven, more than two decades before. Family love was a good thing, but it seemed that there was not enough love—from husband or from daughter—to stop the witches when they wanted to ride Alberta.

The subject of a voodoo practitioner, a root worker, entered Dr. Glynnis Holloway’s home with Madeleine “Maddie” Williams, who had been hired to be Alberta’s day companion after that last hospitalization. Maddie, a few years younger than Alberta, had a brother who had murdered his wife in cold blood while their two children slept, and the killing had taught her something about herself. During the interview for the companion job, Alberta’s husband discovered that Maddie had come from the same spot in Person County, North Carolina, where he and Alberta had been born. Morton Holloway had not seen any of his family in North Carolina for almost as many years as his daughter Glynnis had been alive. But Maddie brought up name after name of the dead or the vanished, and each name relit a flame in Morton’s heart so that before the end of the interview, he wanted no one else to companion his wife. Glynnis the doctor was less impressed but said nothing to her father, a chauffeur and a good man.

“Mr. Morton,” Maddie said not a month after becoming companion to Alberta, “can I speak some words to you?” The murder of her best friend by Maddie’s brother had awakened Maddie to the fact that she had been rather blind to the pain of others, even those close to her. “Just a few words, Mr. Morton,” Maddie said. She spoke not long after lunch one day in late May, a rare mild day in a month that had seen more violently hot weather than even Washington was used to. Alberta was napping comfortably after her meal and after a long walk with Morton. And after the blue pill. Dr. Glynnis Holloway, a general practitioner, was in her basement office, seeing the nineteenth patient of the day. “Can I ask a few words about my patient, Mr. Morton?” “Patient” was how Maddie referred to all those she was companion to, although the firm she worked for referred to them as “clients” or “customers.”

“I told you bout that ‘Mr.’ stuff,” Morton said. It was a day off for the chauffeur, and while he had wanted to be with Alberta alone, Maddie had insisted on coming in, promising to stay out of the way. It had rained in the morning, but then the day turned kind. “I never know when my patient might need me,” Maddie had said that morning, taking off her rain-soaked hat and coat in the front hall. The niece and nephew orphaned when her brother killed their mother were grown now, and her brother had long ago come out of Lorton Prison to face a world crippled by what he had done.

Morton said to Maddie, “Leave that ‘Mr.’ stuff for white folks. They got a need greater than mine.” He was drinking his post-lunch coffee as he stood looking out the back window, at the miniature apple tree, at the garden in its first days of life, at the lovely winding brick path. The witches could come to ride anyone any time of the day, but they preferred a home when relatives or friends of victims were not up and about, so Alberta was sleeping peacefully.

Maddie asked how long Alberta had been suffering with “the head plague.” He had not heard that phrase for some time, and he tried not to remember if it had last been in reference to his wife. In any case, the chauffeur was not offended. He set his cup and saucer on the table and lifted with one hand a chair up and away from the table and sat down. The maid/cook was quietly cleaning in the living room. Maddie sat as well, something she felt she could do, since they were of the same race. Two minutes later, she mentioned “head plague” again, and five minutes after that she began talking about witches, and Morton remembered that it had been some fifteen years since he had heard talk of witches. And it had not been in reference to his Alberta.

It would be days and days before Morton acquired heart enough to mention the conversation to his daughter Glynnis, and by then he had already decided he and Alberta would visit the root worker in North Carolina. He had long had faith in St. Elizabeths and their medicine, but now that faith was dying. They would have to go to North Carolina because the only competent root worker Maddie knew in D.C. had died the year before during her very first ride on the Metro. Cars and aboveground trains and buses and trucks were one thing, but a train snaking through the darkness of the Earth had done not very kind things to the root worker’s heart.

After that final hospitalization at St. Elizabeths, Alberta would get sleepy in the evening far earlier than her husband and daughter, since the yellow pill was more effective at its job than the blue and magenta pills. Around nine o’clock, but never later than ten. And then about one in the morning, after a few hours of fitful sleep, Alberta, who slept alone after hospitalization and almost always slept on her back with a small Bible under her pillow, would usually become paralyzed after the first witch stepped boldly into the locked bedroom and took up her place across Alberta’s legs. The second witch was a middle-body person, and she entered the room sitting on the whitest cloud through the window, open or closed, curtained or uncurtained. She sat on her haunches over Alberta’s chest, her hands spread across the poor woman’s breasts. Along about here Alberta, her heart and all the rest of her insides struggling to rise out of paralysis, began to sense some danger out there in the dark for her daughter and her husband. But never a thought for herself. We’ll kill em both….

Physician-to-be, never heal thyself. Not one soul in this room will ever, no matter what skills you acquire and master here, be able to cure fully the mechanisms of your own machine.

Glynnis Holloway’s practice could have afforded her and her parents the kind of material life that they had not dared dream of as Glynnis was growing up in Washington, as Morton made a living for them as a chauffeur for the big boys with their big cigars at the Department of Labor. But, owing to Alberta’s illness, so much was forbidden, like trips across the seas, or many consecutive nights of peaceful sleep, which even some of the poor in D.C. could afford. Glynnis could have paid for any psychiatric facility in the country, places the world had euphemisms for because fashion models and politicians and movie stars and the very wealthy went to them, people who—given their stations in life far above the nobodies who worshipped them—should have known better than to do such a common thing as lose their minds. But Morton had forever believed in St. Elizabeths. One day in 1963, not long after Alberta’s troubles began, he had taken his wife to D.C. General with the hope that they could help Alberta, who had, among other things, begun to neglect eleven-year-old Glynnis and her own appearance and so much else that had once come easily to her. Morton had met a psychiatrist at D.C. General, a woman who was losing her sight, and she had told Morton that first day, “We together will find a way to get your wife back to you.” He had not wanted to believe anything as much as he wanted to believe that doctor’s words. And even after the doctor, still wearing that tiny cross around her neck, had moved to St. Elizabeths and gone completely blind, he had clung to her words and would not take his wife anywhere but across the river to that place in Anacostia where they carted mad housewives, oppressed by a normal sunny day, and mad would-be assassins, launched by a kind of love, and even madder poets, crushed between the well-measured lines. And they carted in a few children who never knew that they had, in their own innocent ways, wandered off the civilized path. Alberta limped along, with good years and bad years.

Honey, you ever hear tell about root work?” Morton asked Glynnis as they sat side by side at the kitchen table two weeks after Maddie had spoken to him. Supper was over and the maid was gone and Alberta and the night companion, a young woman who did not yet believe in her own abilities, were in the living room, laughing at something on the big television. The witches had not come for two nights, and they would not arrive again for another night. Whenever Alberta screamed in the night, it was always Glynnis who reached her first, entering Alberta’s second-floor bedroom with the key she kept around her neck. Alberta had insisted on the room being locked. The night companion, who slept on the third floor, did not have a key.

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.

While the bus driver remained behind to nap, Maddie, Alberta, Morton, and Glynnis crossed the road to Imogene’s yard. The house, Glynnis could see while still in the road, was not large or small, and she decided as they came through the gate that it was just right for an old woman. A little less or a little more and it would not do. Imogene came down the stairs and put her arms about Maddie. The walking stick never left her hand. Maddie introduced her to the other three. “You’s prettier than you was the last time,” Imogene said to Maddie. “Them Washington waters got powers, I see.” “I’m nearin fifty-five,” Maddie said, blushing. “I know,” Imogene said. “I was there at the birth fence.” Glynnis saw that the old woman was cross-eyed, with thick eyeglasses. There was a medical term for cross-eyes, even though nothing could be done about it. Two weeks from now I will beach myself in Massachusetts like a lost whale. Imogene shook their hands and touched Alberta’s cheek and then turned and led them into the house and set the walking stick down into a velvet-lined container just inside the door.

She settled them in the parlor and offered them something to eat and drink, “fresh mints” was how she put it. Maddie told Imogene to sit still, that she would bring in everything since she knew the kitchen. After Maddie left, Imogene devoted almost all her attention to Alberta, speaking comfortably to her, as if they had shared a womb together and had never lived apart aside from the last few weeks. And now they needed to catch up. While she had recalled many of Morton’s people after Maddie’s fourth telephone call to her from D.C., Imogene did not remember any of Alberta’s people, and most of her gentle questions were about her family. Who was her mama? Who was her daddy? Imogene sat in an armchair at the edge of the couch where Alberta was sitting, and with just about every question, Imogene would lean forward and place her hand over Alberta’s. Glynnis sat next to her mother, and Morton was across the room in a wooden chair next to a sealed box with a new television. Any sisters and brother around? Who was her grandparents on both sides of “the birth fence”?

Almost invariably, Glynnis would answer for her mother. It was a habit that had started in the early days of her mother’s illness, one of many efforts to stand between her increasingly defenseless mother and a Washington world that mostly thought no one was safe when crazy people were roaming around among the sane. Roaming, like Alberta sometimes did, in her slip and no shoes and hair full of feathers because everything in the K Street, N.E., apartment, including the pillows, seemed to be coming apart. Glynnis, once one of the most popular girls on K Street where the witches began their campaign, had had her first fight at eleven with a girl who said she could get twenty-five dollars if she called St. Elizabeths. That had long been the rumor in Washington—St. Elizabeths gave twenty-five dollars in brand-new bills for every insane person that was turned in.

For a few questions, Imogene allowed Glynnis to speak for her mother, but then, just as Maddie was entering the room with a tray of drinks, Imogene excused herself to Alberta and reached across her and tapped Glynnis’s knee with her crooked index finger. “Dr. Holloway, your mama deaf and dumb?” She was too old now for many of the courtesies once practiced. Time was no longer on her side. But she was not old enough to forget how she had been raised, and so the question came out in the sweetest of old-lady ways.

Glynnis was quite surprised at what she thought to be a derogatory term. She first looked at her mother and then over to her father, who had the look of a man very interested in what her answer might be. And as she looked down at the glass of orange juice Maddie placed on the coffee table, Glynnis realized that “dumb” for the old woman was not an ill-considered word for “mute.”

“Please let her tell me, Dr. Holloway, with her own mouth words.” Glynnis had been holding Alberta’s hand, and now, embarrassed, she reluctantly let the hand go. “Please, Dr. Holloway,” Imogene said, watching the hands come apart, “try some orange juice. It ain’t fresh squeezed like Washington people might like it, but it be fresh and cold anough.” Glynnis had been fortunate to find a doctor to replace her for what she told friends was a vacation that had to start earlier than planned. She had promised her father two weeks in North Carolina. But she was to be there seven weeks and would have to make a dozen calls before she could find two more doctors able to make way in their schedules for her additional time in a place not known for burning witches at the stake.

The questions from Imogene were ones that Alberta had not had to think about for a long time (“What crops your daddy grow?” “You look like a fresh butter woman, like me. You ever get that butter straight from them clappers?”), and she did not find it easy to root about the locked attic and come up with the answers. But as the afternoon wore on, she seemed to enjoy answering them, as if they were part of a difficult puzzle she was proud of finally coming to master.

Long before Alberta reached that point, Glynnis excused herself, rose, and left the room. She stood on the porch. The windows of the house were up and she could hear all of them, especially her mother, conversing. Maybe it was a North Carolina thing she, a D.C. baby, couldn’t be party to. Maybe it was something put in the orange juice before their arrival. Her mother had said little all the way down from Washington. On the couch, with Imogene dominating her mother’s attention, Glynnis had begun feeling something akin to what she felt way past the midpoint of so many relationships with men she had come to care about, something akin to what she felt when a professor in medical school praised a fellow student only minutes after the praise had come just as enthusiastically her own way.

She went down the three steps. There was a kind of garden on both sides of the pathway to the gate, a small garden, small enough, Glynnis decided with a smile, for a cross-eyed old woman given to dabbling in the black arts. There were no pretty flowers in the garden, nothing to please, nothing to say, “Come hither and feast of me with thy eye and thy nose.” All of the garden, on both sides, was harsh-looking and forbidding, and of only a few colors, but particularly a kind of green, a green, one of Imogene’s neighbors had once commented, that must have been painted by a tired God way late on the sixth day of Creation. No plant rose more than a foot above the ground. Glynnis smelled nothing but the warm earth. No problems with aphids or bunnies in this jungle, she thought. She did not know the names of anything in the garden and she shivered as she realized this, as she looked down and saw that her feet were but inches from whatever plant might assume a different life and slither from the garden.

She came to the gate and looked about at what was beyond the fence. North Carolina was nobody’s Massachusetts. The name for what she felt as she listened to Imogene and her mother talking was coming to her, but it was not coming fast enough for the scientist in her. Across the road the bus driver was talking to a fellow with long dreadlocks. A black car was across the parking lot from the bus. It had been her father’s idea for the bus, something, he said, with a comfortable cot or two and a place to prepare food and many cozy places to sit as they traveled from Washington to North Carolina. Like them big-time singers use when they go on the road, he said. The bus driver, Sandra, was the daughter of her father’s friend, the woman who owned the chartered bus company. Sandra had shown up at the S Street house early that morning in the short skirt she was wearing now. Hoop earrings. Glynnis had been surprised at how well she drove.

Sandra now pointed across the road and waved at Glynnis, who nodded. Then the bus driver spoke to the dreadlock man, who looked at Glynnis only a moment, as if unimpressed. He finally shook the driver’s hand and turned to the black car. His tied locks came down more than six inches below his neck and their tips flopped against his back as he moved. His hair reminded Glynnis of a mythological creature whose name escaped her as well. He drove to the edge of the lot and paused before going to Glynnis’s right. He did not look her way again.

Sandra returned to the bus, and Glynnis went back to the steps. She reached the top of the steps, one hand on the post, and as her mother’s laughter came to her through the light blue curtains that were blowing out the windows, through the tall lattice of the backs of the unmoving rocking chairs, the word also came to her. “I’ll hold you tight, Mama, and nothin will get you tonight, you’ll see.” Many, many nights, after her mother began losing her mind, she had slept with her mother in her parents’ bed. To make ends meet, her father, after chauffeuring all day, had begun taking odd jobs from seven in the evening until about two in the morning. Cleaning the floors of the bakery where they made Wonder bread. Holding the lamps for the skilled men who went down into manholes at night to fix leaking pipes or to turn the electricity back on. Shine her a little brighter there, Morty. Just shine her that much brighter…. “I’ll hold you real tight, Mama. Don’t worry.” After Alberta told Glynnis about the riding witches, about how they came to her and threatened her family, the woman and the girl—slowly becoming mother to the mother—would plan how to fight the witches. She never told her husband. The fight amounted to no more than a Bible under Alberta’s pillow and a butcher’s knife under Glynnis’s pillow. Weapons from an old wives’ tale Alberta remembered from childhood. But they came anyway, after the two, exhausted, had fallen asleep. And in the day, from time to time, saying nothing to a sleeping Alberta, Glynnis would set out after the meanest girl in that K Street neighborhood, the meanest and the baddest among those who might have said something about her crazy-ass mama who shoulda had her flicted butt locked up in St. Elizabeths. Rocks, soda bottles, tree limbs, any weapon would do. Her fists still up, the toughest girl crying on the ground at her feet, Glynnis would sneer and threaten to beat them all up. The boys, liking her spunk, stayed out of it.

Imogene Satterfield was to say not a word about the fighting, but she would say, in six weeks, “They spit on the Bible, Dr. Holloway. Thas why it never helped. It ain’t but a bunch of pages anyway. If every single Bible just up and disappeared from the Earth, Dr. Holloway, just about every last one a us would drop off to the fires cause all we ever had was pages to walk on.” Imogene, that day, would test the moving water with the tip of the walking stick and then, in seconds it seemed to Glynnis, be on the other side. “And a witch ain’t got blood to spill so a butcher knife is nothin but paper to them.”

Glynnis now turned and looked about from the top of the porch. Jealousy was the word. Through all that time it had been her and her father who fought against the world. And when her father was away, she alone had barred the doors and dared the world and the witches to come in and touch one hair on her mother’s head. “I’ll hold you tight, Mama.” And then, just that quick, she would wake to her mother crying or screaming beside her. No one knew what she and her father had gone through. No one knew her mother’s pain. Not all the people at St. Elizabeths. She looked at Imogene’s garden and heard music from the bus. She closed her eyes. Certainly not a cross-eyed woman.

Maddie came out to the porch. She said, “Dr. Holloway, you feelin all right?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.” She opened her eyes. “I wanted to thank you for coming down with us.”

“I must go with my patient,” Maddie said. “I know you’d rather be someplace else on a vacation, Dr. Holloway, but sometimes black people from the South need to go back home. I’m sure your parents done said that.” They had not. She herself had never seen North Carolina before that day, and she could not remember if her parents had ever seen the state again after her birth. “We leave, we run away and don’t realize how much we’ll need to go back home one day. The South is like that. It’s the worst mama in the world and it’s the best mama in the world.” Maddie sighed and stepped closer. “Dr. Holloway, I needs to prepare you: she’ll bring up the subject of you and Miss Alberta stayin here with her tonight. I just want to let you know.”

“We have hotel rooms reserved, Maddie. For all of us, for you and Sandra, too.” The plan had been for Sandra to leave the next day with the bus and return for them in two weeks. But the plan Imogene had, as Maddie had guessed, was for Glynnis and Alberta to stay with Imogene. Morton could stay in the bus parked in a larger lot on the other side of the church. Close but not too close.

“I know bout them reservations, Dr. Holloway, but thas why they invented the phone, for times like these. To say, ‘I done changed my mind.’ I’ve called my cousin and he’ll take me and Sandra to his place.” Maddie touched Glynnis’s arm so that the younger woman was forced to turn and face her. “Dr. Holloway, your mama is fine and maybe we should let that go on right now.” They heard Imogene say something and then Alberta nearly shouted, “Yes, thas right. I almost forgot that, but that is right.”

Glynnis woke about nine in the morning in a tiny back room of Imogene’s house. She came from a dream in which several giggling girls were clustered in a corner talking about her mother. She, though a woman in the dream, was about to go to them and break it up. She had just raised her dukes when she told herself she was too old for such things and woke up. Glynnis sat on the side of the bed for several minutes and then went to the window and pulled aside the curtains and looked down at her mother and Imogene strolling through a garden far larger than the one at the front of the house. They were arm in arm and they were giggling and laughing. She did not feel the jealousy of the day before, and she wondered what could have gotten into her.

After she had showered and dressed in the bathroom adjoining the room where her mother had slept, she went downstairs. She was hungry but wary of eating anything in a voodoo woman’s house. She went through the cabinets and the icebox and saw nothing appetizing. As she looked, she was trying to remember more of the evening before. After the entire group had eaten in the kitchen, Maddie and Sandra had been picked up, and her father had gone across the road to the bus. The last thing she fully remembered was sitting with her mother on the couch as Imogene poured tea from a cracked pot. Imogene then sat in her easy chair and took from a sweater pocket a small jar. After the teaspoon of sugar, after the wedge of lemon, she sprinkled dull green crushed leaves from the jar into her own cup. “A little for me,” she said. “And a little less for you, sweet Alberta.” And then, as her hand hovered over Glynnis’s cup, she said, “And even less for the doctor from the state of Washington, D.C., where the president hangs his derby and picks his nose.” Alberta laughed and picked up her cup. “Pinky out now, honey, like them white folks do,” Imogene said. Alberta laughed again and Glynnis, before the leaves could fall, said she would pass on the tea.

The kitchen door had a window, and Glynnis could see her mother and Imogene, still arm in arm, come to the end of the garden. If the witches came during the night, she had not heard her mother scream. Beyond the garden, there was a wide field of green grass sprinkled with a few yellow and white flowers. Imogene raised her walking stick and pointed first right and then left. Alberta separated from Imogene and walked a few feet, pointed to the left and then turned and waved Imogene to her. The two entwined their arms again and stepped off to the left where, when the field ended, Glynnis could see the beginning of a kind of forest.

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?”

Glynnis went out to the porch. She wanted to take a walk, she wanted lots of greasy food, she wanted a man to pull her close and put his hands over her behind and talk nasty to her, she wanted to get loud after two and a half beers in a bar surrounded by her girlfriends, she wanted to raise her eyes from a book and look briefly at the sea and think Lord what a dirty read. She went down the steps and stopped at the edge of one part of the garden. She knelt and took first one plant and then another in her fingers. There, close to them, she could see how different in color and texture was each section of plants on that side. But that was all she could see, and she sighed. “Is it magic what a little mint do to stinky breath? Is it magic that water be wet?”

Back in the house she found Dr. Imogene in her armchair holding the television remote control and pointing it at the television with channel after channel going by. Until the evening before, the machine had been in the box, and then, after Glynnis had gone to bed, Dr. Imogene’s grandson, the dreadlock man, had taken it out and set it up. The old woman now punched button after button, trying to lower the volume. “May I?” Glynnis said and took the remote control, looked at it and cut the sound in half.

“Oh, dear,” Dr. Imogene said. “Oh, dear dear dear. I never once wanted somebody’s television box. I done had radios all my life and they done right by me, so what good would a TV do me? Till this one, I don’t think I ever been in the same room with one for more than a hour or so.”

“Then why one now, Dr. Imogene?” Glynnis asked. After five days of it, she had gotten used to calling her “doctor.” She handed the control back to the old woman. On the television, a white man, his face red and very mean, was shouting at a woman, who was doing nothing in response but looking down at her feet.

“Jesse got it for me for my birthday. But I told him to keep it in the box till I got used to havin it. Last night he said it was time.” She leaned her head to the side and looked puzzled. “Hmm…What done happened to those ladies talkin bout that princess lady? Where they done got to? Hmm…” Glynnis sat on the couch, her eyes fully on Dr. Imogene, who touched a button and watched as the channels sailed by again, her face growing ever puzzled. “Oh, dear. Where could they be?”

“Who?”

“The ladies on the TV talkin bout that po princess. I got sleepy last night and turned it off just when it was gettin interestin. I figured I’d get back to them ladies this mornin, but they gone. Where they could be?”

Glynnis began to realize what the root worker was thinking. “Doctor?” The old woman looked at her. “It does not stop, the things on the television. It all goes on, just as if you were still watching it. It isn’t like a film you can stop.” Dr. Imogene, reluctant to accept what she was hearing, pressed the button again, and the channels went on by. At last the old woman’s shoulders drooped and she let out a breath. She gave the control to Glynnis as if to apologize for not believing at first. “I’ll find out what happened to the princess and let you know. Every detail. I promise.”

Glynnis would note the beginning of everlasting affection for the old woman from that moment. She had seen her do something extraordinary for Alberta, and the small jars and the pictures of the children on the tiny room’s wall hinted at what she had done for others, but she did not know what a simple television could and could not do.

“Maybe we should turn it off for now,” Dr. Imogene said and Glynnis did so. “We might as well go get some breakfast.”

Physician-to-be, when it is all said and done, and the patient has recovered or is well on the way to recovery, you must not hesitate to say good-bye. By this point, you should have given only the prescribed amount of comfort and understanding. There should have been no love, because love, especially in its rawest form, risks wrecking the machine again and doing more harm to the mechanisms than what brought the machine to you in the first place.

As for the absence of recovery, as for death, there are machines that were not meant for the road.

They sat for a long time at the breakfast table, and somewhere toward the end of the meal of toast and one shared egg, Glynnis felt comfortable enough to ask about what had helped her mother, about the jars and the plants. The old woman pushed her glasses back on her nose and hunched her shoulders, as if all of it was no big deal, a mere stroll out to the end of the garden and back again.

She led Glynnis into the small room next to the kitchen and said, “Jesse once tried to put labels on them with some cellophane tape, but I always knew what I put in em, so them labels never done me no good. They got to fallin off them jars after a time, I guess cause they knew I didn’t no more care bout em than the man in the moon.”

“Which one sent the witches away from my mother? Which one gave her peace?”

Dr. Imogene reached up to the second shelf and took down a jar third from the end of the row. She handed it to Glynnis, who saw that while the dominant color was a muddy green, there were purple flecks along the edges of the leaves. “I was taught the names for all them things,” Dr. Imogene said, “but then the root worker—bless her heart—who taught me died when I was young. I still didn’t have a fixed mind, and it whatn’t long fore I forgot the names of most things. My mind ain’t never worked that way, even when sweet Evelyn was alive. This one”—she tapped the top of the jar in Glynnis’s hand—“I just call Purple Mess. A body gets tired of callin em green this and green that. When Jesse was still in college, he brought by this book and showed me Purple Mess and a lotta other ones that was in it. Pictures pretty anough to frame, but none of that helped me member what the book was callin em.”

“A rose by any—” Glynnis stopped as the old woman turned and considered the photographs of the children on the other wall.

“These many of the chirren I help bring into the world,” Dr. Imogene said. “These was all trouble births. A root worker gotta know to fix them hands on a woman’s stomach somewhere after the fourth month and know if the baby wants to come out easy anough or take the road harder than ordinary. Then you gotta know what to do to help em both.” She turned back to the jars and the first fullness of the sun came through the window, hit the photographs and rested upon the women’s backs. What was left of the sun went around them and over them and between them to hit the jars. “I failed many a one, but what root worker puts that up on the wall. You can see that clearer than a picture every minute of God’s day you look inside.”

Glynnis returned Purple Mess to the shelf, and it was then that the old woman told her there was no magic in any of it, for she had begun to feel that the younger woman was headed that way. She led Glynnis out to the garden in the back. She pointed to a patch of less than one square foot and told Glynnis that was Purple Mess. “It grows wild down at the creek. It’s a nice spot and a body can sit there all day on it and watch the water flow on by.” In the garden, Purple Mess was the smallest patch of all. “Not many people suffer with witches ridin em, but you can’t stop growin it cause who knows what God’ll put in front a you.” Glynnis stood at the edge of the garden. “Go over to it, Dr. Holloway. Go on in there and see that Purple Mess ain’t nothin special.”

Talk of the jars and the photographs and the garden seemed to have opened a sad room in Dr. Imogene’s heart, and she was mostly quiet throughout the last of the morning and into the first touches of the afternoon. She busied herself with minor chores—from washing the breakfast dishes to fluffing the couch pillows—and Glynnis followed her about, helping where she could, waiting in case the root worker needed to share something. Now and again Dr. Imogene would stop in the midst of some job and stare into the eyes of the younger woman, as if the latter could read her mind and aid by putting into words what the root worker could not say. In her beginning days as a doctor, Glynnis had had a patient who, a month or so into her treatment for hyperthyroidism, would stand silent for several minutes after her session. Glynnis, uncomfortable, new to it all, used the time at first to make notes as the patient stood with her back to the door, her eyes to the floor. Then, toward the end of a year of treating her, Glynnis learned to rid herself of the woman by asking before even a minute of silence had gone by, before she had started to wash her hands, “Will that be all, Mrs. Evans?” Hyperthyroidism became hypothyroidism, and the treatment and the seconds of silence at the door went on, until one day in their third year together Mrs. Evans failed to show up for an appointment, and her file was returned that very morning to the cabinet where it was even now.

Just before two Glynnis suggested that she fix lunch, and Dr. Imogene said that was the best idea of the day. As Glynnis stood at the kitchen counter, preparing the sandwiches, the root worker came up beside her and touched the young woman’s shoulder and Glynnis decided right then to cut the sandwiches into fours rather than halves. “You know, Dr. Holloway, I must say the truth of it, but you would make somebody a good mama.” Glynnis was both puzzled and moved by the statement. It was as if someone, seeing her step deftly over a small puddle, had told her she would make a good trapeze artist. “I’m not sure that’s on the horizon for me.” “It all be on the horizon, Doctor, until the horizon goes away and never comes back.”

With each bite, the root worker returned to her old self, and before she had eaten half of her sandwich, she said out of the blue, “You know, I knew bout a root worker not far from here when I was just a little old girl who took to sittin under people’s windows at night. I woke up with her on my mind this mornin for some reason.”

“A Peepin Tom, huh?”

“Oh, no, Dr. Holloway, I don’t think she was impish bad that way.” The old woman leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “She just listened to what folks was sayin inside. She thought it was a way of gettin the rest of the story when folks came for help. A body comes to you for help, say like the witches with our Alberta. Maybe she thought it helped to know that her neighbor wanted her outa the way for somethin. Had it in bad for her.”

Glynnis said, “There was no one like that around us.”

“No, no, Doctor, I’m usin that as a xample of what that long-gone root worker was up to.” She sensed that Glynnis had misunderstood and she endeavored to choose the right words. “She figured if she could know what folks did when the day was bein put to bed, then she could know more about treatin em. Or say you got a woman heartsick ova some no-good man and wants to keep him close. Maybe that worker thought it good to know what went on at night, and for every bad thing a woman would say about that, there’d be five good ones, and not very good ones. ‘But he bathes every day…But he always says he sorry…’ Why help a woman keep that kinda man? When a man’s heart is rotten, no amount of bathin gonna help.”

Glynnis nodded. “I can’t see you listening outside someone’s window.”

“Oh, I neva thought of goin that route, Dr. Holloway. One little ‘Boo’ and I’m outa my skin.” She smiled. “And cause I knew I ain’t nobody’s nightwalker, I knew I had to try to read folks as best I could, and thas somethin I ain’t neva done well. Maybe it was better if I was one for the night. Woulda made things easier. You try not to do the wrong thing, but sometimes, many’s the time, you fall down short.” She drank from the coffee cup and set the empty cup in the middle of the plate. “I wish I could know what it was that happened to our sweet Alberta…. I knew of a situation where this woman carried this hatred for her friend—her best friend, mind you, Dr. Holloway—for years, clean outa the time they was chirren and into them bein grown women. Grown and owin to not one soul, but that hatred wouldn’t ever go away. She carried it like we carry babies, only this neva got old anough to come out. So we gets round to one evenin. Maybe they was drinkin. Celebratin, maybe. And this pain, it just took a hold on the hurtin woman and she stole somethin from the friend’s place. Only she took a thing that belonged to the woman the friend was stayin with. A handkerchief, a brush fulla hair. And the hurtin woman couldn’t see cause the hurtin wouldn’t let her. She just took it to a root worker, and that friend’s friend neva walked again.”

A few ticks beyond four o’clock, Jesse came. Glynnis and Dr. Imogene, who was holding the walking stick with the snakes, were standing on the porch. “I have a body comin,” the root worker had said before rising from the lunch table. “We can talk some more later.” Jesse parked in the church lot, got out, opened the door for a woman who was almost as old as Dr. Imogene, and helped her out, aided by someone Dr. Imogene said was her daughter. That woman was about Glynnis’s age. The root worker went down the steps to the path leading to the gate, and Glynnis thought that that was how she was the day they all arrived from Washington, a long, long time ago. She watched the group cross the road, and before they had reached the gate, Dr. Imogene raised the empty hand Hello and the old woman coming her way raised her hand as well. Once they were inside the gate, the old women kissed, lips to lips, and the younger woman kissed the root worker on the cheek. And after the mother and daughter and the root worker went inside, Jesse asked Glynnis how the vacation was going.

“It’s getting to be more and more like a busman’s holiday,” she said. Then she nodded toward the house and asked, “What’s wrong with her, if I can ask?”

“Who?”

“The mother.”

“It isn’t the mother, Dr. Holloway. It’s the daughter.” The week before, Jesse had told her about not calling his grandmother “Miss Imogene.” He was nearest the gate, and now he went past Glynnis toward the house, and as he went along the path, he seemed to scrutinize the plants on either side, as a gardener might look over the work to be done. He walked to the side of the house and down along the narrow passage that led to the back. “They’re the richest people about,” he said quietly, and she followed. In the back, he knelt and leaned forward and smelled several of the plants on either side. “Black or white. They are undertakers, but she and my grandmother grew up like sisters, with practically nothing.” He stood up and went to the gate, and she continued to follow.

“She looks so healthy, the daughter. Extraordinarily beautiful and healthy.”

“You should know better, Dr. Holloway. You of all people.” He opened the gate. “Why don’t we walk along. I have to return in a bit and take them back. I’ve become a jack-of-all-trades for my grandmother.” He closed the gate after her, and they crossed to the field. “My grandmother has a saying—‘The wellest day you ever had, you sick anough to die.’ That means a pack of stampeding elephants could come down this way and run over you, Dr. Holloway, and no matter how perfect and beautiful you are, that would be it. Or a plane could drop from the sky onto your pretty head. What could your healthy body do against that? Healthiness certainly didn’t help my parents in that collision with that fuck of a drunken driver. Going to church, no less.” She would remind him of his words four years later, some weeks after the funeral, where the two, in utter mourning and despair, sat side by side as the crowd flowed down and about and then out the cemetery, beyond the road and all over the land of the old white farmer and his wife, who had not suffered headaches many a day and who themselves were standing but three feet from the preacher as the man of God spoke about her, failing even with his hour of talking to do her justice.

The field ended and they stepped into the forest. “I got to know this place quite well as a boy, after I became an orphan.” There was a band holding his dreadlocks together and he took it off and shook the locks and put the band around his wrist. “I got a sense that you want to learn what she has. You should tell her. You should tell her you wouldn’t mind being her student. After my mother died, I think she felt no one would ever come along. Then you show up, a little uppity, but still teachable. God knows I could never do it. Men don’t make the best conjurers.”

“Why?”

“I suppose we can be slow learners, Dr. Holloway. And by the time we get it, it’s time to die.” He laughed. The forest smelled as it might after a heavy rain, though it had not rained in several days. “I read this article once about the discovery of aspirin. Maybe the writer made the whole thing up. The aspirin plant, the guy said, was found near some riverbank. A woman with a bad headache wandered in pain and just started eating the plant, that’s how crazy the headache had made her. She didn’t know it would do anything. She was just crazy with pain. But it did the trick. Only steps from her front door. I told that to my grandmother and she said maybe that was a lesson for all those people who go around the world to India and Tibet and places, trying to find a cure for what ails them. They come back chanting and all, but that cure never lasts.” They went deeper into the forest, and soon Glynnis heard the creek several yards ahead, a soothing sound that she thought must have been the same decades before when he was a boy. “The undertaker family has traveled everywhere trying to help the daughter, and now they are with my grandmother just up the road from that mansion.” She asked if the undertaker’s daughter was among the children on Dr. Imogene’s wall. “No,” he said, “but that would not have saved her. My father is on that wall. That did not save him….” He came to a tree and touched the trunk. “I could have sworn I put initials here.” He walked around the tree. “They aren’t here now…. God how I loved that girl when we were young.” Glynnis looked at him and he looked away from her because that was not a thought he had ever put into words. “We best be getting back, Dr. Holloway.”

Her parents came early that evening to take her and the root worker to dinner, and during the trip to and from the restaurant, she watched from the back as Alberta would now and again reach over and pat Morton’s thigh. Jesse had said he would join them, but he never showed. After Alberta had a glass of wine, she decided it was the perfect time to talk about the first time she and Morton met. It was on a narrow street in Durham and it was morning and there was fog, which lasted the whole day.

With the third witch covering Alberta’s face and neck, the first robber opened the glass storm door at the back of Glynnis’s house on S Street and turned the knob of the mahogany door that weighed almost as much as a small man, and despite the expensive lock and the expensive alarm, the door came open, as if someone on the inside had simply unlocked it. The robbers entered one by one, an orderly, unhurried line. We’ll kill em both…. It was about here that Alberta’s struggle for release from the witches began with a greater effort, and it always began with moving her left big toe. The first witch did her best, but Alberta’s legs were a lot of territory to be covered. The toe was a summons, and its moving would lead to the slightest twitching of a muscle in the lower leg and gradually, as her body came back to life with movement—from legs to stomach to the twisting of her head—escape would arrive some time after a final heaving of her chest, and Alberta would sit up, clutching her throat and listening to the quiet of a house well made all over again. No sounds from departing witches or robbers, but somehow the quiet was even more frightening, and Alberta, a kind and generous woman created to one day accompany God sometimes as he strolled and pondered in the gardens of heaven, would find enough air to scream, the same kind of scream she had been uttering for more than two decades, whether her husband or Glynnis or the Bible was sleeping with her.

The night of the dinner with her parents, with the image of Alberta at the restaurant table stuck in her mind’s eye, Glynnis asked Dr. Imogene about learning some things from her, that there were more than a few souls in Washington, D.C., who might be helped. The root worker nodded several times, but she said nothing, simply leaned forward and sprinkled into Glynnis’s tea a third of the many crushed leaves she put into her own cup.

It hurt more than she had realized that Dr. Imogene had not responded, and Glynnis awoke the next morning knowing that despite the things of North Carolina, her place as a physician was in Washington where in twenty or thirty years few would know that there had ever been root workers. She showered, and as she dressed in her tiny room, she saw the old woman and Jesse in the back garden. The root worker’s head was down, and she seemed to be shaking. Let North Carolina stay where it was. She could rent a car and be in Washington before nightfall. Jesse now put his arms around Dr. Imogene, whose back was to Glynnis.

She went downstairs and out to the porch. Her parents planned to travel to Florida. If the witches never returned, then the trip would have been worth it. She did not know what had become of the St. Elizabeths medicine. As she thought of the days in North Carolina, she began to think so much of it was like a spell, and to ask about the medicine might cause everything to fall apart. So let the death of the witches be the best thing that happened. She had always done well by her patients, and that would continue to be the case. What shit in a little jar could cure a broken leg?

A silver Cadillac came into the church lot and parked next to Jesse’s car. A man in an off-white suit got out of the Cadillac and stepped away from the car and looked at it for a long time. If his face showed nothing else, it showed how proud he was of the automobile. The man came across and with every step he would look back at the car. As he opened and closed the gate, he was taking off his hat and smiling at Glynnis, looking up and down her body.

“And a good mornin to you, beautiful lady,” he said, coming up the path and never taking his eyes from her body.

“Good morning.”

Dr. Imogene and Jesse came out onto the porch, and the man said good morning to them. “Dr. Imogene, had I’da known you had such awful good-lookin company, I’da come along sooner.” He put his hat on.

Dr. Imogene introduced Glynnis as “a professor doctor from the state of Washington, D.C.” She added that Glynnis was a friend of long standing and, pointing to the man, told Glynnis that George was a patient of many years. He took off his hat again and kissed Glynnis’s hand, which he had to pull from her side. “Dr. Imogene brought me into this world,” George said. He went on to say that he had come with a problem of “the utmost urgency.”

“Then les you and me go into the kitchen, George.”

“And les bring along your mighty good-lookin company since she is a professor doctor. I love the ladies, Dr. Imogene. I have no secrets from those I love, and there is nothin I love more than the ladies. I love them in the mornin, in the afternoon, in the evenin, in the night. Ladies all the time.”

He went on until the root worker opened the screen door and said, “If Holloway wants to come along, she is more than welcome.” Glynnis followed George and looked a moment at Jesse, who smiled at her and went down to the path and out the gate.

In the kitchen, George continued about how much he loved women and everything that had anything to do with them. Dr. Imogene seemed to have nothing better to do than listen to him. Where, Glynnis wondered with amusement, was all that patience when she was answering for her mother that first day? In the end George turned in his chair at the table and winked at Glynnis, who was sitting off to the side. His two front teeth were gold, and even in the poor light of the kitchen, they shone. “But I must say that lately my potency has been sufferin and thas why I’m here.” He looked back at the root worker, who was across the table from him. “What is any man to do in such situations who cherishes and treasures the ladies? I ask you, what is any man to do?”

Dr. Holloway, when you hear a man going on and on about his love for women, he is talking pussy,” Jesse said. They were in the front yard and George was gone and Dr. Imogene had gone into the backyard. “It’s a sad truth, but a truth nevertheless.” He would say a long time from that day that he sensed her drifting away from what he was saying and that the only way to bring her back was to use a crude word.

“You sound like you know all about it,” Glynnis said.

“Only a sinner can tell you about sin, Dr. Holloway. And when the pussy is done, such a man would want the woman to turn into a pool table with one good opponent waiting at the other end. Or a lake full of the biggest fish around.”

“What will she do for him?” George had left with only the promise by Dr. Imogene “to study on the matter.”

“I don’t know, but it won’t be anything he’s thinking. It might just be something to give him aura so that even the dumbest woman will know what she’s in for. Unless she likes being a fish or an eight ball.” He opened the gate and stepped to the other side and closed the gate. “If you’re wondering why she hasn’t spoken about telling you about that root work stuff, I think she was overwhelmed, rather amazed that someone like you would care enough to know what is in her head.”

“I do care. I did not think I would, but I do. I was beginning to think I wasn’t worthy of all those jars with the green stuff.”

“Take her by the hand and walk out to the forest this evening after supper. You’ll find that she is terrified of death. Not so much the dying part, but of dying with all that stuff in her head.” He turned and looked up and down the road before crossing. “I was such a disappointment to her.” He went to the other side of the road.

I had a little talk with Dr. Imogene day fore yesterday,” Maddie said to Glynnis. They were alone in Dr. Holloway’s kitchen. “She said give you all the love she has in her.” It was Sunday morning in October, and Maddie had come at Glynnis’s invitation to talk about what Maddie could do now that Alberta might not need the same kind of care. Glynnis’s parents were at church, and they would be there most of the day. The doctor had been thinking that Maddie might assist in the basement office, especially with patients who would, with word spreading, come in search of help that came out of small mason jars, help from plants that were now growing in the backyard on either side of the lovely, winding path. She had spoken with Jesse only a few days before, because, strangely, the plants that received the most light were not doing as well as those with less light.

“How is she?” Glynnis asked. “I’ll be calling her tonight. If I don’t speak to her at least twice a week, I feel out of touch.” Jesse had promised to come up that coming week. The problem, he had said of the plants, might be a fixable case of “a failure to thrive” under the Washington sun.

“She’s well,” Maddie said. “We didn’t talk about you necessarily, Dr. Holloway, but somethin just stepped into my head no sooner I hung up that telephone. Somethin about Alberta.”

“Oh?” Glynnis said. They were drinking tea. Half a pinch of Imogene’s leaves in Maddie’s. Two full pinches in Dr. Holloway’s. It looks nice, Jesse was to say of her hair on Wednesday, as he stood less than a foot behind her. And she would say as she turned to face him, They treat you well at Cleopatra’s Hair Emporium. It would not be Dr. Jesse.

“Yes. It occurred to me to wonder, Dr. Holloway, if you knew just how all the witches and everything started with your mother. Was there such a such somethin that happened on such a such a day that you can remember? Did Alberta bother such a such somebody without even knowin it?”

“No. I can’t think of Mama hurting a living soul. You know her.”

“I do. I do. I know her heart. I know my patient well,” Maddie said and took her saltless cracker and dipped it into her cup and put the cracker into her mouth.

Glynnis told Maddie she knew where it had started, but very little beyond that, and Maddie dipped another saltless cracker into the cup. This one dissolved immediately and she had to spoon it out bit by bit and ate. She looked up at Glynnis with the last bit and said in a most offhanded way, as if the idea had only that second come to her, “Maybe if we went there, somethin might come back to you. That is, if you have a little time.” The doctor knew enough by then to take seriously any suggestion from this woman. “It ain’t a bad day out there.”

Long before they reached 1st Street, N.E., Glynnis found that so much had changed, disappeared, but everything that was important to white people remained. Gonzaga High School. The railroad. After 1st Street, she saw that many of the places she had known as a girl were still standing, and that gave her heart some relief. She turned off K onto 6th and found a parking space and then she and Maddie walked down to K and turned east, toward the house at 727 where she as a girl had lived on the second floor. She recalled some houses from childhood as they went along, though many had been renovated and repainted. She had expected more white faces, but there were not very many. At the corner of 7th and K, Glynnis looked back and then forward again and wondered if the world seemed smaller because she was bigger or because she knew more about that world. “It might be,” Maddie had said just before they crossed from Northwest into Northeast, “that our sweet Alberta was conjured and thas why the witches was ridin. Who can know the truth, Dr. Holloway?”

Glynnis, with Maddie only two feet behind her, stepped onto 7th Street and immediately a car horn honked. She looked to the left, saw a car heading toward her and was confused about what it meant until the car braked only a few feet from her. She jumped back and Maddie took her by the arm. The car rolled forward and the driver leaned across the seat and said, “Sister, me and you both glad it wasn’t your day.” Glynnis, still somewhat confused, said quietly, “I’m on K Street. I’m walking on K Street, mister.” The man blinked, looked at Maddie, sat up straight and went on.

The doctor crossed 7th Street and Maddie followed. A woman was coming toward them. Beside her was a boy on a small bicycle. On the woman’s black sweatshirt were the red and green words IT’S A BLACK THING.…The boy, unlike any of the children when she was growing up, was wearing a helmet. Jack fell down and didn’t break his crown…. The woman with the boy said Good afternoon and Maddie nodded and Glynnis only partly understood the words and could manage nothing more than a smile. A smile because though she didn’t know all of what the woman was saying, she still didn’t want the woman to think her parents had not given her the proper home training. The woman and the boy passed and Glynnis turned and looked at them. The back of the woman’s sweatshirt offered the red and green words…YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. At the 7th Street corner, the two stopped and the woman leaned to the side and cupped her hand over the boy’s shoulder farthest from her.

When the doctor turned back, she found that she was in front of 727 and she looked up to the second floor to see her mother standing between the parted blue curtains, blowing a kiss at her. Alberta was healthy, and Glynnis knew that because when she looked down K she saw herself at ten walking hand in hand with her father toward 8th Street. All that week of being ten her father had promised her a Saturday of shopping and a movie at the Atlas theater and a half smoke from Mile Long as they went up and down the busy commercial H Street. Just him and her, and no going away to work for him. She looked up again at Alberta, who blew her another kiss. She looked back down K and saw Maddie several feet behind, her hands behind her back. There was no look on Maddie’s face that Glynnis could decipher.

And when she turned around, she saw a woman come around the corner of 8th and K. Morton took off his hat as he did with all women and he and the woman began talking. Had Glynnis let go of her father’s hand and gone to the corner, she might have been able to look down toward H and see all the excitement of a Saturday on H Street. The happy children. The Atlas announcing in big letters on its marquee what extraordinary movie awaited a child just steps beyond the ticket booth. And candy without end that might rot a girl’s teeth on any other day of the week, but not on a special Saturday.

The woman Morton was talking to had five children and a husband dying of a disease that was squeezing his lungs into balls no bigger than a child’s fists. In fifteen years they would have a cure for that. Alberta and Morton had given the family money and groceries because once upon a time the family had done well and Alberta and Morton knew that that could be their lot one day. “Go by and see Alberta,” Morton said to the woman, “and set your troubles aside for a bit. A little coffee, a little pastry might be just the medicine for a nice Saturday mornin.” The woman said that was where she was headed, to thank Alberta for the ham. “We’ll eat for days.” And down on H Street there was Morton’s Department Store, which Glynnis and Morton always joked was owned by him, but it had to be kept secret or the world would come knocking at his door wanting free clothes. Glynnis the girl thought she could hear the H Street gaiety, could smell the half smokes and hot dogs, could see some undeserving girl getting some dress that would be perfect for her.

But Morton and the woman talked on, for hours and hours and hours, it seemed, and not a single word of it was as important as H Street, and all the people passed on either side of them, no doubt heading down beyond I Street to H where everything wonderful was happening. The sun grew higher and all the precious time in the world drifted on by the girl who was destined to become a doctor. In the end, Glynnis, squirming as the pleasures sailed out of reach, said to the woman, “You so black and fat and ugly, I don’t know why my daddy even talkin to you,” and she pulled impatiently at her father’s hand. “I wish your black self was dead.” The woman, injured deep, all the way into the bone, could manage only a nearly silent “What?” She fell back half a step. “I meant to do no harm,” the woman said to Morton, as if he shared what his daughter, in her pretty dress and her pretty shoes, was thinking.

The woman went back the way she had come. “Millie, wait now,” Morton said, but in a twinkle the woman was gone. Morton jerked on Glynnis’s hand as people came and went on K Street. “Child,” he said, “whas done got into you? You lost your ever lovin mind?” Had a root worker, on her way to get eggs and milk or meet up with her boyfriend or take coffee with a relative, heard Glynnis and decided to come to Millie’s aid? Les teach that naughty child a lesson.

Glynnis watched as Morton and the child she had been came back to 727. He was shaking with each step and he was calling for Alberta, who was darker than Millie. And the day—and many days after—was dead for Glynnis. She had bragged all that week to friends about the day she would have with her father, about all the things she would get. Less than two months later, the witches began riding Alberta.

Dr. Holloway, with Maddie still several feet behind her, now walked to 8th and looked down toward H and saw and heard nothing special. Had Millie gone to some root worker and asked for help in getting rid of Alberta so Morton would be free to be with her? But that was not the Millie she remembered. No, perhaps it had begun with her, with the future physician who wished the poor woman dead. Glynnis’s words heard by some mischievous or well-meaning root worker strolling by, a misguided woman from the same school of roots attended by the worker in North Carolina who listened outside windows at night. Maddie came up behind Glynnis and called her by her full name without the doctor title, and Glynnis heard her. Yes, perhaps a passing root worker who had heard Glynnis that Saturday morning and seen Millie’s pain and was determined to set the world straight. A root doctor who did not know or care about the facts and history of the case, but had decided nevertheless to prescribe, to grant, unasked, the lonely woman abused by a child—however innocent, however good and obedient all the other days of the year—one wish for free. Granted the wish with a brew of mumbo-jumbo and an innocent mother’s hair and fingernail clippings and God only knew what else scrounged from the trash in the witch deadness of night. Granted the wish and then never came back to review and perhaps undo what she had done.