In giving me life, she lost her own. I was the only girl. The last child of six : five sons and one daughter. I was the daughter she never had, but that she had always wanted. The midwife took me to her home after my mother died. I called her Marraine. Marraine was ancient, as old as the cypress trees that towered over her tiny shack. She called them her “ladies,” and they did look like tall slender women with long wavy hair and wide skirts. She said the trees were her friends, and the little animals that lived in them -- birds, raccoons, possums, and squirrels – were her children. She was a small, stooped woman with charcoal skin and curly gray hair. Deep wrinkles encircled her dark eyes that could flash like lightening in her brief moments of anger, but were most often crinkled up in laughter. She had no teeth, but never seemed to care and smiled easily just the same. She wore a dingy housedress and slippers almost every day but Sunday when she would dress in bright purples and oranges and wrap her hair up in an elaborate tignon with long feathers. She was Creole, and she knew the mysteries of natural medicine. Her little hands, gnarled with arthritis, possessed extraordinary powers, but they touched me with tenderness.
What do You think about The Devil In Canaan Parish?
