Why I Became an Herbalist

By Piper Dunlap, L.Ac.

When I was nine my parents hired a Grenada woman named Louisa as a cook at our hotel in the islands. Louisa was tall, tidy, and lighter in complexion than most Grenadians. She wore her coal black hair pulled back into a tight bun, which revealed her freckles and intense hazel eyes, signs of her melting pot ancestry. Louisa could cook a mean conch curry and an equally delicious bull foot stew. She was what the down islanders called a bush healer. I was never sure whether this name came from the fact that she got her medicine from the bush or that back home she treated people in the bush. Probably both. I would often accompany her into the bush, which is more like jungle, to collect herbs for her pharmacy.

On several occasions Louisa swore me to secrecy about what she did and where we found her ingredients. Whenever we left the road or returned to it, she would take care that there were no pedestrians or cars around who might discover our trail head. "Dere are some who would call dis witchcraf’, Master Dunlap. You mus’n’t tell nobody about dis medicine! 'Person like m’self is a vexation to the schooled doctors."

She would pick various lianas, flowers and seed pods, and we would dig the aromatic roots of a few different unassuming shrubs, cutting them into pieces with the ubiquitous sharp machete. I would carefully load our botanical treasures into an old frame pack and follow behind Louisa who seemed never to take the same route twice. Often Louisa would sing while we foraged or tell me embellished homilies from the Old Testament. She was a devout Christian, and it seemed she always had in her apron pocket some lavishly illustrated pamphlets which she would pull out just when she noticed my attention wandering in order to show me the rendering of, say, Abraham and Isaac at the altar or the Tower of Babel.

I tolerated Louisa’s bible stories, which, to her credit, were delivered far more compellingly than the versions we got at the parish school five days a week. But what really fascinated me was that we were harvesting medicine in the bush directly from Nature. Eventually I got to know Louisa’s more common and easily identifiable herbs and would collect them on my own or with my little brother in tow. We spent hours in the bush chasing lizards, climbing trees, gathering wild mangos, guavas, genips, soursop, and sugar apple, and of course collecting herbs for Louisa. She would praise us in whispers when we brought home particularly fine specimens, and reward us with coconut candy or sugared ginger.

The other employees would often seek out Louisa with their aches and pains, visiting her at the little cottage at the perimeter of the hotel property where she lived. Her "clinic" was simple: a makeshift counter in the corner of her living room opposite her altar to Saints Mary and Lazarus (patron saint of the sick and lepers). On this counter were jars of the dried herbs we had collect, and some root tinctures made with white rum and water. She also used poultices and compresses on many of her patients. These were made of ground herbs and either calcium carbonate (lime), corn meal, or the red earth from our property, finely sifted. Sometimes Louisa would send me away when giving a consultation, but often I was free to stay. She treated everything from stomach pain to rashes, sepsis to nightmares. Because I was a white son of a continental innkeeper many of Louisa’s patients assumed I didn’t understand their thick calypso and patois dialects, so I was often privy to eye opening conversations and concerns. On a few occasions Louisa even explained that my presence was appropriate because I was her apprentice and herb collector. It was meant as a typical West Indian half joke, and accompanied by her smiling glance which was both conspiratorial and reassuring to the patient. Sometimes she would softly sing a hymn while changing a bandage or compress. Other times she seemed short and dismissive, sending the patient off with a packet of herbs and terse boiling instructions. I figured out later that those herbs were for hangover.

In the late summer of my tenth year I was sent off to the States to visit grandparents and old friends. Though I didn’t get to see any snow as I had hoped because of the time of year, it was a trip full of wonders and indulgences – whitewater canoeing in Maine, Mystic seaport, a Broadway musical, the Empire State Building. It ended with a bout of influenza, complete with a hallucinatory fever, which subsided long enough for the plane ride home but returned with a vengeance once I was back in the tropics. I have never since been so delirious, thirsty or weak. One night I was so deranged by the fever that I was certain my father was JFK and would die when they sent him to the moon on the upcoming Apollo 11 expedition. It took him hours to convince me otherwise. I was delirious for days, but conscious enough to appreciate that this was no ordinary cold and that my parents and the doctors were more than a little concerned. I couldn’t keep down anything including broth or water and was administered intravenous hydration on at least two occasions. After what seemed like weeks of strange dreams, alternating fever and chills and gut wrenching cramps, on a particularly bright, humid late afternoon an angel visited me. I felt her cool dry hand on my forehead. I remember thinking that it would be fine to be escorted to heaven now. I might never see snow again and I might miss my family, but friendly angels would replace them. Then I heard her voice: 'Lord have mercy, Master Dunlap! You lookin’ a might peaked and tin! Mistress Dunlap tell me dat de doctors ain’t done much for you. Perhaps ‘tis time for a bush remedy – herbs you yourself gathered!

The angel left and I dozed off. When she returned and I opened my eyes, she was sitting on the bed folding a mixture of dried herbs into a bowl of viscous oily liquid. Suddenly the room filled with a pungent, earthy aroma – nutmeg, mace, dirt, mint, citrus. She sat me up and smeared copious amounts of the liquid into my hair. It was very hot. She put a flowered shower cap on my head and helped me to lie down again. As I drifted off I thought, 'Shower cap in heaven?!"

They told me they changed my sheets twice that night. All I remember is drinking delicious water and feeling what felt like Vaseline in my hair. The next day I returned to the living, still weak, but without fever or delirium. Louisa brought me some Johnny cakes and fish broth, and I found my appetite. Then I washed my hair three times to remove most of the herb/lard poultice. Within a week I was strong enough to head into the bush with my machete and fill Louisa’s latest order – frangipani bud, strangling love, turpentine root, and gut vine.

Piper Dunlap practices Traditional Chinese Medicine in Port Townsend, WA. You can reach him at 360.385.3882 or at piperdunlap@gmail.com.