Wench

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

  “For real?”

  He nodded.

  She studied him for a moment, then leaned down and kissed the stinking, sweating toe.

  This time, Philip and George joined them. The four slaves sat mute before Lizzie as she read.

  What is the denunciation with which we are charged? It is endeavoring, in our faltering human speech, to declare the enormity of the sin of making merchandise of men,—of separating husband and wife,—taking the infant from its mother, and selling the daughter to prostitution,—of a professedly Christian nation denying, by statute, the Bible to every sixth man and woman of its population, and making it illegal for ‘two or three’ to meet together, except a white man be present! What is this harsh criticism of motives with which we are charged?

  “Slow down, Miss Lizzie. I don’t want to miss a thang,” George interrupted.

  Lizzie’s next words were slow and deliberate:

  The South is one great brothel, where half a million of women are flogged to prostitution, or, worse still, are degraded to believe it honorable. The public squares of half our great cities echo to the wail of families torn asunder at the auction-block; no one of our fair rivers that has not closed over the negro seeking in death a refuge from a life too wretched to bear; thousands of fugitives skulk along our highways, afraid to tell their names, and trembling at the sight of a human being; free men are kidnapped in our streets, to be plunged into that hell of slavery; and now and then one, as if by miracle, after long years, returns to make men aghast with his tale.

  Lizzie stopped reading. She paused for a minute although no one asked her to explain.

  Drayle told Lizzie that while camping he had decided to let Philip go. But first, the barber would have to agree to a price Drayle would set himself. A price that would allow him to buy another slave with a reputation as good as Philip’s. He had come to this decision because Reenie’s man had convinced him the slave would be no good anymore. He would either try to flee or spend the rest of his days resenting Drayle for it. Philip had a permanent pass that allowed him to run Drayle’s errands or exercise the horses throughout the woods. Sir insisted that those days were over. And even though Drayle objected, Sir ominously reminded him that some slaves had even killed their masters over such disappointments.

  Drayle convinced Lizzie he was doing this for her as well. Because she’d asked and he respected her wishes. She’d known it all along, she said to herself. This would be the good deed to answer all other favors. A man, he would most likely argue later, could only give up so much of his property.

  When the barber arrived to bring the money, the small group of slaves watched from afar, Philip among them. The daughter was not present to help, so the assistant laid out the tools and rinsed the brass bowl. It appeared to Lizzie that the barber’s arms moved with especially exaggerated flourishes as he whisked the cloth off Drayle’s face and brushed the white man’s shoulders clear of fallen clips of hair.

  The assistant removed the rocks from the back legs of the rocking chairs so the men could sit upright. The other three white men paid the barbers and took their leave. The assistant cleaned up the tools and left Drayle and the head barber on the porch alone. The slaves could see the gray-haired man resting against the rail, his white coat blending with the white of the wood.

  “You reckon you gone be able to leave with him today?” George asked.

  It sank in for Lizzie that Philip would not be returning to Tennessee this time. And if this were really their last summer at the resort, she would never see him again. She tried to etch his features into her memory as she had done to her friends when she was nine years old and being sent to the auction block. She hoped this time the memory would stick.

  “I don’t know,” Philip said, unable to hide his joy.

  “Well, it ain’t like you got nothing to pack,” Mawu said. “You probably just gone climb in that there wagon and be on your way.”

  “Maybe you’ll get a whole new suit of clothes,” George said. “You gone enter the barbering trade?”

  “I don’t know. I gots to pay the man back his money. But the onliest thing I know is horses. I ain’t like these cityfied folks.” Philip brushed at a fly crawling on his forehead.

  “You gone learn quick,” Reenie said. “Tell me, Philip. How do freedom taste?”

  Philip looked at her and smiled. “Miss Reenie, I got to say I honestly don’t know just yet. I reckon I won’t know till I get my free papers.”

  Lizzie studied Drayle and the barber and saw that neither had changed position. She knew that Drayle had Philip’s papers in his pocket. She had looked at them just that morning and run her fingers over them. The papers looked real, sure enough. Written up by someone in a flowing and official-looking script, even better than those of the old man on the train up from cincinnati.

  “You be sure to send me a letter, Philip. Even if you’ve got to get somebody to write it for you.” Philip could not read and write, and Lizzie wondered if he would learn now that he was free.

  Philip reached out for her, and she hugged him for a long time. His chest felt warm against hers. She remembered the nights she had spent in his cabin, how he had kept a respectful distance. She’d always appreciated that. But now she wished she would have let him take her just one time. To remember him by. It wouldn’t have been much for her to give herself to him. At the time, though, she’d felt differently. She’d seen being with Philip as a way of disrespecting her children’s father. But now she knew she could have done it. She could have shared something with him a little more than friendship and a little less than love.

  The good news was that now he would get real happiness. She felt protective of him. Tender. And jealous all at the same time.

  “He got them!” George exclaimed. “He got the papers!”

  Philip released her and they both strained their eyes to see if it was, indeed, a paper in the barber’s hand.

  “Hallelujah!” Reenie shouted.

  Mawu turned to Lizzie and spoke quietly. “That was a good thing you done.”

  Just as they’d thought, Philip left with the barber that very afternoon. Each of the slaves gave him a token to take with him. Reenie gave him a wooden cross her brother had carved for her years before. George gave him a nectarine he had stolen from a nearby orchard. Mawu gave him a sack containing some herbs she said would protect him from evil spirits. Lizzie gave him a note she had carefully written the night before containing the address of the plantation in Tennessee.

  That night, Reenie told Lizzie as they drew water at the well she would no longer have sex with the hotel manager. Lizzie replied she had not known that it was still going on. Reenie looked at her with a half-surprised expression and continued to pump water. Lizzie remembered the summer before when Reenie’s own brother and master had promised her to the hotel manager. All of them had seen Reenie making the evening walk to the hotel for the remaining days of the summer. But since none of them had seen Reenie making that walk this summer, they’d figured that the relationship had ended.

  But it obviously hadn’t. If he was bold enough to continue the relationship across summers, then he would not take no for an answer. Reenie’s master had made a trade of some kind, and most likely he would have to give up whatever the manager was giving him in order to free Reenie of her obligation.

  In the days that followed, Lizzie saw less and less of Reenie. A week after their conversation, she went to Reenie’s cabin to see if the woman had really been able to end it. The men were gone for the night on an overnight camping trip, and since she figured Reenie would be obligated to the hotel manager on a night they were gone, she wanted to see if her friend was in the cottage.

  She saw a light in the window and went around to the back door. She tapped.

  “Miss Reenie?”

  She saw the lace curtain in the kitchen window inch back. A moment later, she heard the floorboards creak. The door cracked open.

  “What you want?” Reenie answered. Her
eyes moved past Lizzie.

  “I just came to talk.”

  “You by yourself?”

  “Course I’m by myself.” Lizzie looked behind her just in case. Reenie was making her nervous.

  Reenie opened the door just enough for Lizzie to slide through.

  Lizzie looked around once she had entered. “Are you alone?”

  Reenie grabbed her arm. “What you mean?”

  “What’s wrong with you? I’m just asking. And I thought I heard something besides.”

  Reenie scooted a chair into the middle of the floor. “Sit,” she commanded.

  Lizzie obeyed.

  Reenie went to the closet and stood before it. “If you tell anybody, she dead. If you tell anybody, you gone have blood on your hands.”

  “Tell what?”

  Reenie opened the closet door. A girl peeked out.

  Lizzie’s hand flew to her mouth. “Who is this?”

  “Shh!”

  The girl began to cry.

  “Hush, baby,” Reenie said. “Miss Reenie gone take care of you.” She took a piece of bread out of the basket and handed it to the girl. The child broke through its hard crust with her teeth. Then she scooped out its soft whiteness with her finger and stuck it in her mouth.

  Lizzie looked the girl up and down. She was dressed like a slave. Or, at least, she was dressed like a slave trying not to dress like a slave, wearing pants like a boy and a large shirt tucked into them. The shirt wore a patch across the arm as if the sleeve had been ripped off and then put back on. Her hair was cut short like a boy, too, but there was no mistaking the soft feminine features.

  Reenie wiped the girl’s runny nose with her own sleeve. Then she tucked her sleeve in to hide the wet spot.

  “Whose child is this?” Lizzie wondered if the older woman was going crazy. They had all been grieving since Sweet’s death. And Reenie had been through a lot over the past year.

  Reenie pulled the girl in close. “She mine and she yourn, too. She belong to all of us.”

  “What are you saying?”

  The child relaxed and leaned against Reenie. “She come up from Kentucky. Them free women in the hotel done asked me to look after her for one night. She be on her way tomorrow.”

  Lizzie finally understood. She rose to her feet and glanced nervously toward the open window. The air in the cottage had cooled noticeably since she’d arrived.

  Reenie was watching her closely. “What you thinking?”

  Lizzie felt it. A test. Even after all this time, a grain of mistrust remained. “But how?”

  “I can’t…” Reenie stopped as if trying to think of the word. “I can’t explain. A lot of people help this here child. I ain’t the only one.”

  “Oh.” That was all Lizzie could think to say.

  The child took another nibble of bread. Lizzie looked around the cottage, trying to determine if this was the first runaway slave Reenie had helped. Nothing looked out of place. Only the child.

  “When?” Lizzie asked.

  “After Sweet died. Didn’t something change for you after that?”

  Lizzie searched inside herself. Something had, but she couldn’t really give expression to it. And she certainly hadn’t gone as far as Reenie to act upon it.

  “Why you come over here tonight anyway?”

  Lizzie looked at her friend. She couldn’t say she had come over to see if Reenie was still seeing the hotel manager. She couldn’t say she had come over to ask how Reenie had gotten away from him and taken back her body. And ask how she could take hers back from Drayle and still maintain favor. The child watched as if awaiting her answer as well.

  “Well,” Lizzie began. “I really just came over cause I’m lonely, what with Sweet gone and all.” There. That was enough of the truth to be counted as honest.

  “You want a piece of bread?” Reenie asked.

  Lizzie nodded.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Later, Lizzie would try to put the pieces together and would wonder if the first fire provided the idea for the second. She would recount every little moment of the summer in her mind—from Sweet’s death to Philip’s freedom—and wonder how she’d missed the little signs that had, no doubt, been there all along. She would experience a store of emotions, and it would be months before she would boil it all down to grief.

  The crowd at the picnic was the lightest it had been all summer. There were more Southerners in the crowd than northerners, the thick drawls and parasols a telltale sign that the Southern visitors outnumbered the others. Reenie reported that she’d overheard the hotel manager speaking about the situation. Apparently, the northerners no longer wanted to come to the resort as it was being overrun by Southerners. Most of them had shortened their visits. Some were said to be offended by the presence of negro wenches.

  Lizzie and Reenie were standing together when a colored child unwrapped a muslin cloth, exposing a small fish inside. She pulled a few sprigs of some kind of herb from her pocket and tucked them one by one into the folds of the fish. Then she wrapped the fish again and placed it on the outer edges of the fire.

  Neither of the women knew where the child had come from. They assumed that she belonged to one of the hotel servants and had been assigned to perform some chores for the day. Lizzie and Reenie each held the end of a long stick skewering partridges. They had spent the entire morning plucking the feathers from the birds and cleaning out the organs. Now they held the stick just high enough where it would not catch fire, and rotated it slowly so the birds would cook on the inside before they charred on the outside. Once the birds were done, they slid them off and piled them onto a long board. Then Reenie carried the board over to another table where Mawu and two other colored women from the hotel ladled sauce onto them.

  Each time she was given a pail of fresh raw partridges, Lizzie slid the birds onto the sticks, careful to pierce each at its thickest point. As she held the birds over the fire, she searched for Drayle’s face in the crowd. She had not often seen him in the company of the other resort guests, and she wondered what he would be like.

  He was standing about thirty feet away from her in a group of men who were smoking. He only smoked when they came to Tawawa because Fran didn’t allow it at home. The men laughed, the scent of their cigars mingling in the air with the scent of the meat.

  Lizzie looked with wonder at the colored child kneeling beside her. She was fascinated by free colored children. She wanted to reach out and touch the girl’s head, but she could not take either hand off the heavy stick of partridges. She was so busy looking between the birds and the girl that she didn’t see the white woman approach her.

  “What’s your name?”

  Lizzie looked around for someone else. But when she glanced into the white woman’s eyes, they were fixed on her. She looked down. She could tell from the accent that the woman was a northerner.

  “Lizzie, ma’am.”

  “Lizzie. Is that short for something? Elizabeth?”

  “Eliza, ma’am.”

  “Who do you belong to, Eliza?”

  Lizzie tried to figure out where the question was coming from and where it was going. “I belong to Master Drayle, ma’am.”

  Lizzie peeked over at the woman and saw her eyes searching the crowd of men.

  “Which one is he?”

  Lizzie tilted her head. “The one in the tall boots, ma’am.”

  Despite the heat, Drayle had not taken off his riding boots and still held his crop in one hand.

  “Is he good to you, Eliza?”

  Lizzie nodded and said what she knew was expected of her. She remembered Mawu’s question, He God to you?

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said.

  Lizzie took a chance and looked up into the woman’s eyes. The woman looked visibly relieved. “Good. ’cause I can’t stand men who are brutes. A lot of slave owners are brutes, aren’t they? At least, that’s what I hear. That’s why I detest slavery.”

  She wanted to ask the woman about the pamphlet, abo
ut this Wendell Phillips. Did she know him?

  The woman moved on. When she joined the next group of women, she must have said something about Lizzie because they all looked over at her and gave her little half smiles. Lizzie looked at them for a moment and then turned her attention back to the partridges. Her arm was tired. She needed to relieve herself, but her partridges were still too raw to eat.

  The child’s fish had cooked more quickly. She unwrapped the cloth to check on it, and Lizzie guessed from its aroma that it was probably just about done.

  A white child approached the colored girl and sank to her knees. “Is that fish ready yet?”

  The colored child nodded reluctantly. Lizzie could feel the child’s disappointment as she realized that her treasure was about to be taken from her. The servant child put the wrapped fish on the ground. She knew she had to give the fish to the other girl, but her anger would not allow her to hand it over just yet. If the girl wanted it, she would have to pick it up and take it herself.

  The white girl smiled triumphantly, and as she leaned over to take the fish, the end of her dress grazed the hot ember. Lizzie saw it when it happened, but she did not know it had caught fire until the child had already felt the heat of the burn on her leg. The white girl screamed and the fish flew out of her hands. She jumped up and ran. Reenie put down the partridges and ran to the well. The colored girl picked up the fish and stuffed its slippery flesh into her mouth with her fingers, sliding the bones out between her teeth.

  A white woman threw the quilt she had been sitting on over the child. It, too, caught fire. There were shouts all around as people realized what was happening. One of the men ran after the child and caught up with her before throwing himself on her. They rolled on the ground. The child was still screaming loudly, and the smell of burnt flesh filled the air as the doctor yelled, “Let me through! Let me through!”

  Lizzie looked around for Drayle and saw him standing alone, a bit off from the crowd. The ground around him was littered with forgotten cigar ends, still glowing. Only he remained, his fingers grasping the butt of his cigar and his mouth frozen in the round shape of a deep exhale.