Wench

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

  “Relax, Lizzie. We’ve had your kind in our house before,” Glory said.

  Lizzie stuck to her choice and retreated to stand next to the wall behind her. Roosters cackled outside of the open window. She was aware that Glory’s man was home earlier than sunset, and she tried to guess why he might have returned. He placed his hat on the table.

  “Glory, I hope you didn’t bring one of them girls home from Tawawa.”

  “No, sir. She came here on her own.”

  Lizzie could feel him studying her.

  “Well, what does she want? Don’t go making me lose my work. That’s good money we make from Dr. Silsbee.”

  “Nobody saw her.”

  He addressed Lizzie directly. “Anybody see you walk out here?”

  Since Lizzie had chosen rule number one, she didn’t answer. She would only answer if Glory encouraged it.

  “What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “Is she dumb?”

  “Naw, she’s not dumb. You’re scaring her is all.”

  “Get her out of here, Glory. We don’t need any trouble.”

  He stooped and dragged a box from under the table.

  “And you call yourself a Quaker,” Glory said quietly.

  He hoisted the box up and tucked it beneath his arm before tossing his hat back onto his head and leaving out again without another word. Lizzie watched him from the corner of her eye.

  “You better get going,” Glory said in a flat tone that was neither rude nor friendly.

  The swath of familiarity they had cut minutes earlier dissolved. Lizzie retied her scarf and hurried through the still-open door.

  Morning sunlight peeked into the cottage. The spirited whistles of sparrows did not move the melancholy resting on the women’s faces. Sweet’s too-quiet baby suckled at her breast. The mother rested peacefully. Mawu washed the birthing cloths with a steady brushing sound against the washboard in the yard behind the cottage. Sweet’s man believed that dirty birthing linens were diseased, and he had instructed them to wash and hang the linens as soon as the child was born.

  Lizzie found solace working with the women to clean the cottage and prepare it for the return of Sweet’s master. She wanted the time she was spending with them to last for just a little while longer. Despite the doctor’s intrusion, Sweet’s labor had been women’s time. And cleaning, yet another form of labor, was also women’s time.

  But she knew that this time would end and the others would remember her betrayal. Lizzie was of two minds. She wished she had not told. But if she hadn’t, Mawu might be dead. If she had run and been caught, there was no doubt in Lizzie’s mind that her friend wouldn’t have allowed herself to be taken alive. And what if the others had followed? Drayle had done the right thing. So had she. She wished they could understand why.

  For now, she just kept in step with the chorus of chores.

  The next morning, while Sweet was still asleep and her master had not yet returned to the cottage as he waited for the “air to clear,” the women discovered the baby dead in her arms. They wrapped it in layers of cloth and took it to Philip who summoned the other men to help him prepare a small grave. Then they returned to Sweet’s doorstep and lingered outside as they searched for the plainest words of compassion. The sound of her voice from inside broke their trance and quickened them into action.

  “The baby? Where my baby? Where my girl?”

  Reenie, in her usual manner, delivered the news. “Her Father took her.”

  “Her father?” Sweet’s voice was hopeful, but in less time than it took to blink twice she understood, knew in her heart that Reenie meant Father and not father. And her face did not crack. She lay back, silent, as if all the wailing of childbirth had sucked her clean of any more sounds. And the trio of women who had known their own share of this kind of grief left her there, not coldly or callously, but with the understanding that she needed to be alone. Later, they would return to clean and dress her labor wound. But for now, they filed out, heads up, eyes as dry as they could muster.

  Lizzie returned to her cottage to find Drayle just rousing from his sleep. He took the news quietly and asked if she wanted to kneel in prayer and she said yes. She whispered a fierce prayer, a tangled mess of biblical verses and cries of “have mercy, have mercy.”

  When she was finished, he placed his hand on her head reverently, devoutly, as if he were a preacher anointing her. Something in his touch flowed through her and helped her to make peace with the loss, which for some reason felt like her own. Then he left her kneeling there in her own thoughts, just as they had left Sweet. And she stayed there for a moment, disoriented, alone.

  Then she walked out of the cottage, down the worn path that led between the houses toward the woods. There was a post where Glory delivered eggs and freshly slaughtered chickens or hogs to the hotel each morning. It was a white post and on it was painted: TAWAWA HOUSE each morning, two servants, colored women from the hotel, met Glory there and took her bundle. Sometimes they were late, and often Lizzie had walked by and seen Glory standing there, waiting patiently with her bundle on the ground beside her.

  It was early, and Lizzie was almost certain that Glory had not yet arrived for her daily delivery. She spied the white post in the blue light of the morning, its natural wood already beginning to etch through the paint.

  She sat on the ground and waited for Glory, her legs tucked beneath her. She wondered if Glory knew the pain of a dead child. The woman did not have children even though she had long been of childbearing age. Surely she did, Lizzie thought. Surely she had her own heft of memories.

  Lizzie watched the sun break over the tops of the trees and listened to the gurgle of a nearby creek. She witnessed two sparrows play catch-and-kiss. She waited patiently for the white woman.

  PART II

  1842–1849

  TWELVE

  The first night he went to Lizzie, she was soaked with a sticky wetness that clung to her. The door was more than cracked, but it hadn’t done much to relieve her in the small storeroom. She had extinguished her candle because even its flame sent off more heat than she could bear. One arm rested above her head on the moss-filled pallet and a foot was planted against the shelf, her legs propped wide. Looking back, she reckoned she must have looked as if she were waiting for him.

  She had been owned by the Drayles for six full crop cycles before her master finally followed up on his incessant staring and came to her. Before she moved into the big house, she lived in a cabin with the blind woman they called Big Mama. Big Mama was known for her soap made from lye and crackling. It was good enough to sell to nearby plantations, and had turned a pretty good profit over the years. But the woman had been blinded when a vat of lye sputtered into both eyes. Lizzie spent the early years in the workyard with her. An area of the quarters sectioned off by chicken wire, the workyard was where clothes were sewn, mended, and boiled, slave food prepared, candles made, sausage ground, and butter churned. It also contained a small vegetable patch. At one end of the yard sat a long trough where the children ate their midday meal, sometimes scooping up the mush with long-handled wooden spoons but mostly using their fingers since there weren’t enough spoons to go around. Those who didn’t work in the fields stayed in the workyard most of the day. Lizzie had never been ordered to the fields. She stayed close by Big Mama’s side, filling in for the old woman’s eyes.

  According to Big Mama, the Drayle plantation had originally belonged to Miss Fran’s family. Big Mama had nursed Fran as a baby. That’s how long she had lived there. Although the slave cabins remained the same, Drayle had added a kitchen onto the original house, ignoring his father-in-law’s fears of a kitchen fire. The main house was larger on the inside than it appeared from the outside. But the grounds were impressive. A long dirt driveway wound through two acres of flat manicured land and ended at the red brick colonial. Behind the main house, the slave cabins lined up in three neat rows. The fronts of the cabins all faced the back of the main house, as if Fran’s father h
ad wanted his slaves to keep an eye on his back, or as if to keep them from looking out beyond the property and envisioning escape.

  When Fran married the horse breeder, her parents took off to live in Mississippi, leaving the house in Shelby county for good. They did not approve of the marriage mainly because Drayle had no wealth.

  Gradually, however, they came to accept Drayle’s marriage to their daughter even though he did not give them the grandchildren they craved. Their son-in-law managed to turn a steady profit from the hundred and twenty acres of mostly soybean and cotton fields. And even though his horse breeding had never amounted to more than a hobby, Drayle had attained a certain status in the surrounding community due to his equine knowledge.

  Later Lizzie would reason that perhaps Drayle really was just passing through the kitchen and noticed her door open and only meant to close it. Perhaps he did think he heard a disturbing noise and came to check it out. And it was certainly possible he didn’t even know that the house girl slept in the storeroom off the kitchen. It was closer to dawn than dusk when she removed most of her clothes and propped the door open. If someone came in the kitchen, they would have to light a lantern, giving her time to cover herself.

  But there was no warning light and he appeared in the doorway like an apparition, a sudden whistle of breath, a book tucked beneath his arm, a glass in his hand.

  “It’s terribly hot in here,” he said.

  She didn’t have time for a “yessir,” rolling over until her body was safely wrapped in the pallet, the muslin shirt too far to reach without exposing even more than she already had. What had moments before seemed like utter darkness now looked like blue light, and she could easily make out his form. She hoped her dark skin offered some cover.

  Once, she had fancied a slave called Baby on account of his round, boyish face. The most tender moment of their relationship had been when he brought her a dead squirrel for supper. She’d fried it in bacon fat and they’d picked the meat off the scrawny animal with their fingers. Grease smeared over his face while he ate and when he smiled at her she’d wanted to lick it right off. The relationship had never gone beyond their awkward groping.

  “I’m very sorry,” her master said.

  “Yessir.” She wasn’t sure what he was talking about or what to answer. Big Mama had taught her when these moments happened to just say “sho” or “yessir.”

  There were so many things to remember. It had taken a full week to remember to answer to her new name. The first change after she moved into the main house was that her mistress renamed her. She had been Eliza, but she became Lizzie because Miss Fran felt it was easier to say. The second change was that she was told to forget the slave cooking ways she’d learned down in the workyard. At her previous plantation, the cooking had been done in a cabin separate from the big house. It had been a larger plantation, and there had been much more to prepare. The location of the kitchen within the big house at the Drayle plantation threw Lizzie into closer proximity to whites than she had ever been.

  “Here,” he said. “Take my water.”

  She stared at his outstretched arm. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, but she still couldn’t see his expression well enough to tell if he was setting a trap for her. Sometimes they set traps for you, Big Mama had said. You got to be awares at all times. Ain’t no such thing as a truth-telling nigger. They’s only a dead nigger and a live one.

  “Oh, no sir.” Then a pause. “Do you needs something?”

  “Please.” he moved into the storeroom, so close his toe touched the edge of her pallet. “I won’t leave until you drink every bit of this here water.”

  She sat up and pressed her back to the wall. She stared at the cup as if it contained poison. What do I do, Big Mama? Lord knows I is thirsty.

  “Please,” he repeated. He set it on the floor in front of him as if he knew she would not take it from his hand.

  Something about the way he said it the second time made her think for a moment that he was being kind. She looked down at her hand as it made its way across the bare mattress and finally closed around the cold, sweating glass. She touched it to her lips and drank it down. When the glass was almost empty, she stopped.

  “Go on,” he said. “Drink it all, now.”

  She felt done, but she drank the rest of it, hoping it would make him leave.

  “You get some rest now,” he said.

  For the next week or so, he brought her cold water in the middle of the night, and each time, she took it more and more willingly until she was waiting expectantly, her body tense with restlessness and thirst while she anticipated his low rumbling voice. He changed glasses twice, until finally he brought a large jar she couldn’t finish off at once. Now he sat down to wait.

  And with each visit, he moved closer and closer to her on the pallet, until finally he was lying beside her, his smooth skin slick against hers as he touched the cold glass to her face.

  THIRTEEN

  He brought her books. The first word she learned to read and write was “she” and it delighted her so much she wrote it everywhere she could. She wrote it in the biscuit batter with her spoon. She dug it in the dirt out back with a stick. She sketched it in the steamy windows when it rained. When she pricked her palm with a kitchen knife, she squeezed the skin until she could write her new word out with blood on a scrap of cloth. She traced the word with her fingers on the smooth parts of his body while they lay together in the storeroom at night.

  She was afraid of him, but with each reading lesson she allowed him to take one more step with her. At first, he told her he just wanted to touch her tiny breast. Then he said he just wanted to place his hand on her hip. At first, he asked to touch her. Later, he did not. Each touch was like a payment for his kindnesses.

  She waited for him without clothes because he liked her that way. He said he wanted to drink her. He stared as if her thirteen-year-old body held a great secret, a miracle milk that would cure him if he drank of it only once. He seemed to savor each night, the anticipation arousing him to a point that stretched his penis as taut as a pig’s belly.

  She gathered a stockpile of books, precious gifts from him, and hid them behind the flour sacks in the storeroom. She couldn’t read most of them yet, but she enjoyed turning the pages, fingering each book’s binding, making out the page numbers as she learned how to count and figure.

  He told her to call him Drayle, his last name only. Most of the slaves called him Master. He asked her to drop the title. At first she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She felt if she dropped it he would take the final step and hurt her in the way she hoped he wouldn’t.

  Big Mama had once told her she had to prepare for a life in which she would be violated: it hurt the first time, she’d said, but you get used to it. It was that first time that frightened her, and Lizzie hoped that for him, looking and touching would be enough. It had been for Baby.

  He asked her if she had a wish and taught her the word genie. She said she’d once heard she had a sister. Somewhere close by. Her only living blood relation that she knew of. Could he find her? he promised with a serious face. She believed him and permitted him an extra touch.

  He said he enjoyed teaching her to read because she had a keen intellect. She liked the word keen and turned it over in her mouth. She realized her phonetic ability to sound out words. He appeared to have endless patience as she mouthed the words on the page with her lips before saying them. He only interrupted to remind her to lower her voice. The nights were quiet, and they remained undisturbed in their secret meetings. He had been educated in the north and she admired his knowledge.

  When she had no more room to store her books, he brought her food. She enjoyed the food more than she had thought she would. She already ate better than the field slaves, but he showed her there was even more food to discover. He brought her cocoa, which she mixed with hot milk and sugar in the dark kitchen. They drank it together, sucking its thick sweetness with their tongues. He brought her johnnyca
kes from town, and she made a gravy to go with them. They devoured them, licking the gravy from their lips.

  When he learned how much she craved sugar, he used it to tease her. When he didn’t have any more sweets, she stole sugar cubes from the kitchen and sucked on them while she worked.

  Finally, she dropped the Master and called him Drayle.

  These were the things that happened in the night. In the day, she had to hide that she now looked at the other slave women through new eyes. Before, she had felt like a child among them. But she was no longer the timid girl they’d given a bucket of potatoes and ordered to peel on her first day in the house kitchen. She felt she was something else. Her skin had begun to clear, her shoulders broadened, and even though she still did not believe in her beauty, she was aroused by this new awareness of her body.

  She moved quickly around Miss Fran, Drayle’s wife, certain that if the woman looked her in the eye, she would know her newest house slave was betraying her. Fran’s eyes were never the same. Sometimes, they were listless and empty, staring down at her needlework as if wondering how it had appeared in her hands. Other times, they were alert and watchful. At these moments, they looked as though they could see right through Lizzie.

  As Lizzie learned the meanings of new words and what the letters looked like on the page, it became more difficult to hide the fact that she could read. She wanted to read everything. She scanned the spines of books along the shelves in Drayle’s library. She looked over Fran’s shoulder as she cleaned around her, straining to make out the handwriting of Fran’s mother. She wanted to read to the slaves in the cabins. There was only one man among them who could read the newspaper, and Lizzie thought she might be able to read as well as he could. She wanted to show him up, prove that women could learn, have everyone’s eyes hungry for her mouth to open and turn the piece of pulp in her hands into hope.