she knew Sarah had come to torment her about, that she had been going to the faith healers. To the voudou.
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One, she said, called himself a prophet, but "all he had me do was read scriptures" from her large print Bible, especially the twenty-third Psalm and Romans 10:8 ("But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach.") She read them, she said, "but neither one changed me."
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Sarah listened with an almost beatific smile. Actually, she was just waiting for Yolanda to stop talking. It wasn't that Sarah was bored. She just wanted her friendher depressed, ailing, and, very probably, bedeviled friendto see the broom.
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Earlier, Sarah had winked at me and slipped into the kitchen, returning with a big straw broom, placing it flat on the wooden floor. I thought the action odd, and Yolanda's failure to comment on it equally strange. But given the dynamic between the two women that afternoon, who knew what was going on? Then I realized it wasn't that Yolanda hadn't seen the broom. It was exactly the opposite.
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As soon as Yolanda finished a long and dreary tale about a healer known as Reverend Gray, who had been known to have people soak their feet in Clorox and had humiliated Yolanda by demanding she take off her wig so he could rub her head with expensive oils, Sarah called out, sweetly, "Hand me that broom, will you?"
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Yolanda tightened instantly.
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Sarah repeated the question.
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Yolanda looked at the broom and then, as though the sweep of her vision were the edge of a cutlass, at Sarah.
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Sarah turned to me. Loud enough for Yolanda to hear, she said, "She won't pick it up."
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"Why?" I resigned myself to playing straight man.
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"She afraid to," Sarah said sarcastically. "She superstitious."
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