This is a spiritual coming of age story about a young man from the South who is born with an amazing gift. He has no interest in it, preferring to do what young men do to find excitement. The story is about how he comes to terms with his gift.
Charles is raised in the mystical world of his grandmother in the backwoods of Alabama. She has passed to him the gift of healing. He has no desire to explore the gift and heads out for California to seek the pleasures of the world. There he meets a singer/songwriter and the two of them set out of another journey, one that will make them the most famous young men in America. Healing Charles is the story of how he comes to terms with his gift.
Excerpt
The oil lamp was turned up and the yellow light caused the man’s skin to glow as the boy was led to him. He was coal black and his skin was deeply wrinkled. The man was very old and he lay on Nana’s divan and stared at the boy as he walked with the tiny woman who was his grandmother. Nana held his hand. It was his first memory of it, the gift, as she called it. They were in the old wooden house and he was ten.
The house was set back in a grove of trees and it was hard to find if you didn’t know where it was. A rutted road circled up the mountain and crossed a small stream that washed out the road when the rain was heavy. Nana called it God’s way of protecting them from the flat land people. On this day she had used the old shovel to fill in the washout and had taken the mule to do the heavy work to fix the road and had hitched the animal to the wagon to bring the old man to the house.
The man’s eyes were yellow and run through with red veins. They were watery as he looked up at the boy through a lifetime of sadness and humiliation. He was very thin and sickly and his bony chest was scarred. Charles had seen such scars on men who had been cut in fights and assumed that this old man had seen a share of violence.
Nana placed the boy’s hands on the man’s stomach. “He’s got powerful pain, Charles. He needs the touch.” She stepped back as Charles gently pressed his hands to the man’s skin and slowly moved them to his chest. The aura came to him and the room and the man and he came together in a light that was also a sound. The sound was like a tuning fork on the lower register and the light was like a candle glow. He had no sense of his body, only the light and the sound and the man under his hands. The man took a deep breath and looked startled, and then he smiled as his stomach issued small vibrations. His yellow eyes opened wider and he whispered, “Thank you, boy.” He relaxed and turned his head as he closed his eyes. Charles could not tell if the man was dead or asleep until he saw the man’s chest rise and fall. The aura went away.
“You did a good deed, Charles,” Nana said in a low voice as she placed her arms around the boy’s shoulders. “You got the gift. I gave it to you just as my people gave it to me. Don’t be shy with it, boy.”
He did not remember having the gift before that moment and he would spend years denying it. Nana told him that her gift was gone, used up, and that was a sign that it had been passed to him. He left the house that afternoon and tried to forget about the old man. Charles walked across the porch and jumped over the stones that served as stairs, landing in the dirt hard. He ran down the path that took him to the town and he ran and walked through the spring woods for over an hour.
Nana took the old man home, where he would die in a few days, thanking Jesus and the boy for taking away his pain in the final hours of his life. The last words to issue from the sad mouth that had spent decades paying humble tribute to the white trash that lived all around him were, “I’ve come to freedom.”
His family laughed and cried and praised Jesus for delivering the man from the hard life he had lived. They walked around the man’s bed and told stories about him and how he had overcome the white men who tried to kill him or make him a new kind of slave, one who works for free out of fear. They told themselves that one day they will be free and then they talked about the boy and his gift and how the old woman had the spirit of the old ones, the first people, who knew how God ruled the land and was one with it.
The mountain woods in northern Alabama blend into Tennessee and Georgia and in those days the city of Chattanooga served as an unofficial regional capital, a place where country people went to marvel at the swells who wore suits and fancy hats, but the town where Charles lived was just a mean settlement of mountain people who were called Hillbillies by outsiders. Paved highways could get you to Chattanooga in less than an hour, but the distance was far greater for Charles, Nana and the others who lived back up in there, as the modern world described it. Back up in there meant dirt roads or no roads at all. No indoor plumbing. Some places had electricity or even propane heat, but no one had a television and the term “modern convenience” was confined to a pump handle over a metal sink in the kitchen. Nana cooked on a wood stove and began her day well before dawn, making biscuits and gathering eggs.
So had this day begun, with the smell of her cooking pulling Charles out of the bed he slept in on the landing at the top of the ladder. He came down in his bib overalls, no shirt, no shoes, no underwear. His hair was thick, straight and black and he had the cheekbones of the first people, but his eyes were grey and his skin was pale.
Nana smiled at him and stared into his eyes. “This is the day, Charles.” She handed him a plate of eggs and biscuits that were dripping with the butter she had churned.
“What day?” he asked, shoving an entire fried egg into his mouth.
“I’ve told you about the gift, boy. You are going to use the magic in your hands today. God himself is going to use you to bring peace to Elias Eely. “
“Why does he want peace from me?”
“He needs you, boy. Many people need you. They need to be healed, don’t you see it? Do you feel it, boy?”
“I don’t feel anything. I don’ want that kind of gift. I want a radio.”
“Hush. God don’t want to hear you talk like that. He gave you something more precious than a radio. He gave you the power to heal people with your hands. He gave it to you through my people, boy.” She spoke the words with kindness and a soft, sweet Southern voice. She smiled when she spoke and tilted her forehead so that her gaze was intimate and, he admitted only to himself, seductive. Her thin grey hair was pulled back and held in a knot at the back of her head. Her wide cheekbones gave strength to her face and offset the sweet, shy grin that was formed by her thin lips and small chin. Her skin looked sunburned and she had almost no wrinkles for a woman her age.
Professional Reviews
Healing Charles
From Allie Povall, author of "The Time of Eddie Noel"
In this finely crafted work, Larry Matthews tells the story of Charles, a young man raised by his grandmother in the hardscrabble mountains of north Alabama. The reader travels with Charles on a journey that takes him across country, searching for self-realization and fulfillment in the counterculture of early-1960’s San Francisco. Charles soon realizes, however, that what he seeks is not to be found in California, or in sex or in drugs, so he heads east and returns to the mountains, this time landing in the coal-mining country of Virginia. There, Charles works as a disc jockey at a radio station while wondering about -- and resisting -- his gift, the source of the word “healing” in the title of the book.
Larry Matthews has crafted a tightly woven, moving story of an era, as seen through the eyes of Charles and his traveling companion, the talented but tormented musician Johnny. In the end, the story also draws in Darlene, a beaten and broken young woman whom Charles – through his gift -- enables to overcome a brutal childhood. Together, these three compelling characters find what they are seeking, and Charles finally accepts his gift, which he uses to help his fellow man.
“Healing Charles” is a moving story that rivets the reader from the first paragraph to the last. Kudos to Larry Matthews for this outstanding work of fiction.
rants and raves
Copyright 2009. Lawrence Charles Matthews,Jr. All rights reserved.
Dedicated Servers
Healing Charles
Reviews
"A remarkable story."
Jim Bohannon, host, The Jim Bohannon Show/America in the Morning
Finally, the commentary that adds even more to the diagramed version of The Easy Study Bible. Follow the diagramed verses of this new clear translation with a verse by verse commentary. Understand even better the New Testament book of Philippians.
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