By Gail Sealy

I was about eight years old when my mother took me to the Healer — under the secret cover of night — to the outskirts of Kingston, far from the leafy suburbs of home and polite society. Amid unpaved, unlit streets, we entered a dark and dank room in a tenement-like dwelling. My mother had a brief and muffled exchange with the solitary occupant, a woman with a tie-head, whose face was barely visible in the dim light of her kerosine lamp. With visible tufts of grey hair and black skin, her gravelly voice and use of patois convinced she was an elderly Afro-Jamaican. She studied me, but I don’t recall a greeting.
Glancing around the room at the threadbare furnishings and shredding, plastic, tablecloth with pink roses, my heart sank. I began to suspect that it would be an outlandish encounter. My mother undressed me and stayed reassuringly close as I was made to stand in a shallow basin of water which wafted a mildly nauseating and strange mélange of boiled garlic, redolent herbs, and Kananga water, a sickly-sweet, local cologne. The woman, whom I later concluded was the Healer or Obeah woman, a practitioner of the occult arts, proceeded to bathe me, scrubbing me vigorously with the soaked leaves. I mentally connected her unintelligible incantations with the familiar, African-infused, spiritual invocations emitted from Revivalist church meetings, dotted across the city of Kingston, on Sunday evenings.
Till that occasion, my life had been deliciously cocooned and predictable. I received all the creature comforts of a middle-class life in Kingston: domestic house help, a gardener, my father’s reliable Ford Anglia; medical doctors who made house calls whenever I had an ailment; and uninspired, Sunday school services at the basilica-like, Anglican church. From the Healer’s furtive exchange with my mother, I understood that I was receiving a Bush Bath. I silently questioned my mother’s strange choice of remedy for whatever ailed me, surmising that it was for something she found deeply troubling. Of African (and possibly Amerindian origin), the Bush Bath is a bath with a secret formula of compounds, intended to ritually cleanse the patient from intractable illness, bad luck, or evil curses. Administered by an Obeah or herbalist practitioner, it remains among the last redoubts of the mentally and physically afflicted in Jamaica and indeed much of the Caribbean — when medical and religious prescriptions fail to deliver. In my case, was it an herbal exorcism?
I steeled myself against the crude and violating scrubs. Anxious, but trusting that my mother would allow no harm to befall me, I concluded that I was here because of the Bedspread Incident. Plaguing my mother for months, the Bedspread Incident had been without logical explanation.
The event happened on a restless, hot, and particularly solitary, summer afternoon after elementary school. All my neighbourhood playmates had gradually disappeared — moved away or migrated — sent for by parents in the United States or England. Alone at home with Jackie, the domestic helper, who was in the kitchen or in her back room, I sat on my mother’s bed, idly viewing her gaily embroidered, yellow, cotton bedspread. I mused what it would be like to light the coverlet afire. And following through on the random thought, I grabbed the matches from the kitchen and executed my experiment. As the small flame steadily spread from the edge of the cloth, I realised that it could soon become dangerous and quickly gutted it with a splash of water from the nearby bathroom.
Jackie came into the room and seeing the smoke and blackened chunks of cloth on the floor, proceeded to bawl and place her hands on her head, “Lawd ha’ massy! A wah dis ’pon us? Wah yuh do? Wah me a go tell yuh mother?”
“A leaf blew in from outside and lit it.” My explanation was faint. Jackie sucked her teeth and muttered while she swept up the debris.
The rest of the afternoon was a blur until my mother came home from work.
“What?!” my mother asked, incredulous, glaring at me.
I tried my version of the event once more. “A leaf blew in through the window from a fire next door and lit the bed ….”
I pointed to the open bedroom window. It was common for leaves to be burned in the backyard of the semi-commercial, neighbouring property. So, it was not exactly impossible that a burning leaf could float into the house, just a feat of physics.
My mother interrogated Jackie and me, desperate for a logical explanation. “Are you sure? How could that have happened? I told those people not to burn things over there. Jackie, why weren’t you watching her?”
She grasped at any explanation to avoid concluding that her child could perform so perverse (or demonic?) an act. So deep was her consternation that she failed to employ her usual punishment for my extreme acts of mischief: throwing her stilettoes at my buttocks, from across the room.
And yes, I confess that there were previous escapades, which included: removing a pearl-inlaid ring from mother’s jewellery box, flaunting it on my finger for passers-by on the street, only to return home to discover that the pearl was now missing from the ring; opening and accidentally breaking her perfume while exhibiting it to front school friends whom I’d invited home after school; leaving home (barefoot) — without telling Jackie — to visit a nearby schoolmate and not returning home till nightfall; blowing my nose with multiple Kleenexes and throwing them outside the bedroom window into the garden.
But it was this latest bedspread mischief that my mother pondered for weeks. I overheard her telling a visiting friend and confidante, Toots, “Something strange is troubling this child.”
My act fed her conviction that mystifying forces were being employed by neighbours, former friends, and even her own mother to commit imagined acts of malice against her. She had — in the past—bitterly cautioned me against speaking to my grandmother, who was banished from visiting. I struggled to comprehend the bizarre episodes Mummy would recount. How could Grandma, who used to walk me to kindergarten, always gave me a shilling, and showered me with affection, be so evil? And was “Mother Dear” (a next-door neighbour) really banging pots and pans at midnight in nefarious rituals? I passionately wanted to protect my mother from these perceived forces and make the world better for her.
As my mother and I made our way home from the Bush Bath, no words were spoken, and I strived to quell my sense of shame that my mother could succumb to beliefs in evil forces. The bush bath remained our secret and was never discussed. Any acknowledgement of intimacy with occult practices would have opened my mother to censure from my father and mockery from our social circle. I wanted to protect her.
The Bush Bath gave my mother a feeling of empowerment that she had conquered the evil forces that propelled me to light the fire. But I knew that my anguish and self-reproach over her mental distress — caused by my reckless act — effected my lasting cure.