Chapter Nine

A Strange Journey: Miss Helen

 

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Nine of Mama Root: The Old Woman of Loop Road

 

 

~~~     “Anyway, she finally confided to great-grandma that her name was Marguerite MacDomangairt and that her folks had passed, and how she had been on her own for some years.  That sweet young thing had made it all by herself from Louisiana down to Myakka City where grandma Henrietta lived.  Yes indeed, once that girl started talking it was like water breaking over a levee.  She said that she had lived with a band of gypsies for a spell while still in Louisiana.  Then she took up with a traveling medicine show around Georgia, then was befriended by small groups of Creek and Apalachee Indians north of the Big Bend that managed to survive the wars.  Folks seemed to come under this girl’s spell.  No matter who she fell in with, they’d give her food, shelter and teach her their ways.  She even claimed to have stayed with a Timucuan holy man.  Now folks said that was nonsense since the Timucua were thought to be wiped out sometime in the 1700’s.  He claimed to be the last of his people and told her that he had lived one hundred and fifty-five summers.  Seems he knew the secret of a very long life.  You ask some folks and they’ll tell you that he passed that wisdom along to her.  By the time she showed up on my great-grandma’s doorstep she knew a good deal about herbs, healing and all sorts of otherworldly things my grandma was none too comfortable with, being the good Christian woman she was.  She’d sit in the evenings and read to Marguerite from the Good Book.  The girl had a willing ear and seemed to enjoy what she heard, but it never replaced her other beliefs – it just became a part of them.”~~~