Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez Read Free Book Online

second, believe you. But I hoped you were living a better life in Chicago, that your lies hid the joyous freedom of an eligible young widow in a large city. The war frightened us so, and Samuel had presented as a respectable man, eager to wed after having seen so much. What I now understand, and what you must know, is how much those men needed something to hold on to, something more than love of country.
    Sadie drew a breath, afraid the spirit would end the message too soon. Her mother had been an accomplice in the decision to marry her off. A conspiracy between the two of them and no one had thought to ask Sadie’s opinion. Her fury swelled, then flattened. She began to weep.
    For days, she roamed the house, grief-stricken. It took weeks for her head to clear. If he could bring forth her mother, who else could he summon? He’d claimed he came to her because he wanted to help the families, and Chicago was full of widows. He suggested she could be avehicle for them. She was still thinking of this when Olga delivered a newspaper along with her breakfast one morning.
    â€œI don’t subscribe to this one.”
    â€œWe may as well keep it,” said Olga.
    Sadie leafed through the paper, scanning the columns. “Communications from the Inner Life.” She turned to the back page, reading the advertisements. The breadth of them fascinated her: clairvoyant physicians and counsels, healing mediums, prophetic mediums, magnetic physicians, electropathists, spirit painters, psychometrics, telegraphic and inspirational mediums, business mediums, homeopathists. She could not believe there were others like her, people who could open doors to the other side. She had read of this spiritualist movement, but mostly the stories she’d heard told of men and women rapping on tables. She did not view her spirit as one of these; he was merely a voice in her head. But the sheer variety of people claiming to possess telepathic powers meant that there was more to the movement than she’d realized. She pored over the essays, poetry, and announcements.
    Ultimately, it was the prospect of earnings that did it. The thought woke her up in the morning and kept her awake at night. Fifty cents per visitor was not much, but it wasn’t the amount that convinced her. Earnings meant something else. With more than a little trepidation, and without telling anyone, she placed an advertisement in the spiritualist newspaper announcing that she would offer “spirit intercourse” between 9:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. for entranced communication with the dead.

6
    E ARLY , BEFORE THE HAIRS SPROUTED BENEATH HER arms like fungi, Madge understood the joy of the complaint. To ache was to long. To long was to be human. There was ecstasy even in the anguished telling of it. Unknowingly, folks were pleasured by a strained back, a rheumatic knee, a stiff neck, a burning pisshole, their suffering both comfort and grievance. Her task was not just to relieve them of it. First she had to listen, allow them to tell of it, so they could be, in that moment, fully alive. They needed her to acknowledge that this tale was not imagined. This pain that had not allowed them to work or have sex or hoist a musket or shell a pea mattered. And after her full acknowledgment of its power over them, she had to declare that they would be freed of it, and she would be the one to do it. Sometimes just this glimmer of hope was enough. The thought of relief proved relief itself. It was a mercy to allow the moment of diagnosis to linger as they weighed the news.
    Finally, the pronouncement.
    In the dark of a shed in the Tennessee countryside, she’d planned her decoctions. In the city, she worked to build a similar store in the widow’s pantry: roots, herbs, powders, ointments, solutions, tonics. Working with plants, Madge knew exactly who she was. She was more than a woman who stuck her hand in fire for money. More than a Negro servant to a well-meaning white