Review
Jonathan Odell's powerful novel takes us to a familiar place: a plantation in the Deep South before the Civil War. Readers will recognize the columned house, the working slaves, the inhumane master, but
The Healing is not merely a portrait of slave life. It is a penetrating analysis of identity - the acquisition of it and the ways in which a person can claim an independent self when all forces seem to be against them. In this case, the forces are the slave system and the individual struggling to understand her role in the world is a young slave girl named Granada, who has the misfortune of crossing the path of her sociopathic mistress. Mistress Amanda believes she can reclaim some semblance of her daughter's life by dressing up Granada in the dead girl's old clothes and parading the slave girl in front of white guests, just as she would a real daughter. The result is half-comic,...
Beyond the Book
Slave Healers in the Antebellum South
Polly Shine's arrival at the Satterfield's plantation is a remarkable sight to the slaves in Jonathan Odell's The Healing as she was a "bought" slave, not bred on the plantation, and she was a costly purchase. Their astonishment continues when, soon after her arrival, she starts to give orders regarding the slaves' health and the Master goes along with them. While slave healers were relatively common in the antebellum South, it was unusual for an owner to encourage one. According to Working Cures: Healing, Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (which Odell says he relied on heavily for his research) white doctors usually treated plantation slaves. Indeed some doctors specialized in slaves...
