Although they never said it outright, it was clear to Lizzie the women were upset that she had told. Yet even their anger could not compete with her guilt. She was the one who took tense breaths each time she saw Mawu’s bruised face. She was the one who recoiled when one of them turned a stiff, humped shoulder in her direction.
Shame stretched Lizzie’s face into false smiles, placed a kind word here and there on her lips, extended a ready helping hand. She imagined them talking about her in the quiet when she wasn’t around.
She had been dreaming of the path to Glory’s farm, so she found it without a problem. After catching sight of the lone figure in the field and glancing around for watchful eyes, Lizzie rapped on the door. Glory answered and stared at her evenly, either unsurprised or hiding it. Only when the two women had settled comfortably in the main room of the cabin near the window where Glory could keep an eye out for her husband did Lizzie shake off her head scarf, swat at the fly that had been nagging her since she entered, and relax her hands in her lap.
Thin, faded quilts sagged across the backs of each chair. Out of respect, Lizzie tried not to lean back into the one on her chair. In the corner, a pot-bellied stove sat rusted, still full of the ash of the winter, as a reminder the hot, sultry summer would soon end and snow would fill the cabin doorstep once more. Three hooks on the wall, two holding overalls for a smallish man, freshly washed, as if each morning Glory’s man stepped into his slops, laced up his boots, spooned up his meal, and walked out the door.
“Thirsty?”
Lizzie nodded and started to get up, but Glory beat her outside and returned in a moment with a tin of cold water.
“Best thing about living around here.”
“What?” Lizzie patted her neck dry with her scarf. The air in the room felt oily.
“The water.”
Lizzie took the cup, announced a clear distinct thank you. She felt she was mimicking somebody else’s manners. It was odd, having this waxy-faced white woman serve her. The cup might even be the same one Glory’s husband drank out of. Northern white folks were something else entirely.
“Something bothering you?”
Lizzie hadn’t known it until that very moment, but something was bothering her. Her feet. The blister on her left thumb. Her stuff down there, worn sore by the endless nighttime activity. She fumbled with embarrassment, tried to forget she was sitting before a strange white woman, groped with the knowledge that Glory could not understand her. The gulf was too deep, too wide.
Lizzie, wake up! come quick!”
Lizzie heard the sibilant whisper through her window. It was loud enough to wake her but not Drayle. She hurried out of bed, knowing the nighttime call could only mean one thing. Sweet was ready to deliver. By the time she got outside her cottage, the servant was gone, returned to her room, her errand complete. A light flickering in one of the cottage windows beckoned Lizzie like a finger.
Lizzie got to work before they had a chance to ignore her. Reenie sat beside Sweet drying her forehead with a cloth. Mawu dipped a pile of rags into a pot of boiling water. Lizzie gathered a stack of blankets, linens, some moth-eaten, others torn, stained. In the quarters back at her plantation, the women used a birthing chair. Here, Sweet would deliver on the bed. Lizzie shook out the blankets and layered them, one on top of the other, so they would provide a barrier between Sweet’s labor fluids and the hard bed below. Momentarily disturbed, dust swirled and hovered in the moist air like stars.
Lizzie gave Reenie the signal everything was ready. Reenie spoke softly to Sweet who lay there, wet with exhaustion, her eyes slits of discomfort.
“I need for you to stand.”
As soon as she said it, a labor pain racked Sweet’s body and she heaved herself up, the bones in her neck jutting out like cords. She moaned, low and vicious, more like a growl. She was a mean birthing woman and spit venom at Reenie. As the pain gathered strength, Sweet grew louder. Even though the cottage was already so hot the walls were damp with moisture, Lizzie closed the windows. It would do none of them any good if Sweet’s swearing woke the men. She slid a pasteboard square from beneath the stove, shook off the loose soot, and fanned Sweet with it.
“Get up, now. Get up,” Reenie urged when Sweet’s pains had subsided.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. You got to get up and walk so you can bust your bag of waters.”
Reenie helped to lift her up. She and Mawu walked Sweet around the room for over an hour, supported her when she had a pain so strong it made her collapse. Lizzie sat and watched.
“I can’t walk no more,” Sweet said.
They got her back onto the bed. Lizzie sat behind her and cradled Sweet’s head between her legs. She remembered her own labors. Reenie reached into Sweet’s womb and worked her hand around. They waited, hoping Reenie would be able to find the bag quickly.
When the pain started up again, Reenie drew her hand out. Sweet had several more labor motions while Mawu rubbed her feet and Reenie talked her through it.
Reenie was as good as anybody at birthing a baby. But Sweet didn’t look good. No birthing woman ever looked good in Lizzie’s opinion. She had seen what looked to be easy, quiet, and simple turn into a death scene. She had seen woman and child survive large amounts of blood while another woman and child died in the clean of a warm blanket.
So the bloody patch that spread like a flower on the linens beneath Sweet’s womb only mildly stirred them. Mawu rearranged the blankets to keep her dry. Reenie said “somebody take hold of a leg” and reached her long fingers into Sweet’s womb once again, working furiously. Sweet let out an open and full scream from the middle of her belly, and it lasted so long that she wore herself out.
“I think us need to go fetch her man,” Mawu said.
Lizzie pictured the man sleeping soundly in one of the rooms in the hotel. He was far from being a worried father. His celebration would be less over a newborn child and more over a newly acquired piece of property. She was pretty sure he hoped for a son. Sweet did, too. Three of her four children were girls. Tomorrow, he would sit with the other men and debate over when would be too soon to put the child to work. They would argue over whether it was better to put him in the fields or treat him like the halfway son, halfway human they believed he was and allow him to work and live in the house.
“Yeah, maybe he wants to be here,” Lizzie said.
“I ain’t talking to you,” Mawu snapped.
“Shut up, both of you,” Reenie said. “You thinks her man gone appreciate you waking him up in the middle of the night? Us can catch this baby our own selves.”
So they waited. And after some time had passed, Sweet’s bag of waters finally burst.
Me too,” Glory said.
“You too what?”
“I’m lonely out here too. I don’t really have too many friends.”
“What makes you think I’m lonely? I’ve got the other womenfolks.” Lizzie finished her water and aligned her feet beneath the rough-hewn table. She placed her features exactly where she wanted them. She didn’t want this white woman figuring her thoughts anymore.
“That’s right. So why else would you come here? You know me and you both could get in trouble.”
“Tell me something. Why do you and your man live out here all by yourself? Why don’t you live around the rest of society?”
“My husband, he likes it. He likes living out here.”
“How come?”
“This is where he’s from. The country.”
“He owns all this land?”
“No. He just farms it.”
Lizzie considered that.
“You like it out here, too?”
“I suppose it’s all right. I ran away from my family to marry him. They didn’t approve.”
“Were you rich and he poor?” Lizzie thought of Fran and Drayle and how her family had disapproved of him. The only thing that had saved him was his talent with horses. He had been little more than a horse tra
iner, a hired hand, a mouthy charmer when she met him.
“Naw. Simpler than that. They just didn’t like the looks of him. Said it was something about him they didn’t trust.”
“Were your parents like you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know.” Lizzie couldn’t express what she meant in words. Were they like you, a white woman that doesn’t mind us, she wanted to say. A white woman that doesn’t mind sharing her cup with a slave-woman.
“Huh uh. I suppose that’s what made it so easy for me and him to become religified. Being disowned makes you change a lot of things about yourself.”
Lizzie studied Glory with a freedom she had never exercised with a white woman. She wanted to ask about her religion, why she dressed the way she did—the gray dress, bonnet, long hair—but instead, she said: “how do you feel about him?”
“What do you mean? he’s my husband.”
“You feel something in your insides for him?”
Glory paused. “I suppose he’s all right.” Lizzie noted that she spoke of him in the same voice she’d spoken of living in the country. “Yeah. I do love him.”
Lizzie smiled. At least they had that in common.
The baby would not come.
They did everything they could to get the baby out. Mawu stretched Sweet’s leg out wide while Lizzie lay across her belly and pushed down as hard as she could. As the labor pains came closer together, Reenie rubbed more oil onto Sweet’s perineum. They all had sense enough to know that if the baby didn’t come soon, as fast as the labor pains were coming, both Sweet and the baby would be in trouble. When Lizzie wasn’t bearing down, she was praying, sometimes in her head, sometimes out loud.
Sweet’s cursing had progressed from them to their mammies, and she was now working on cursing God. Her palms were scratched where she had balled her fists hard enough to break the skin with her fingernails.
Sweet’s man came by after the sun was up, the smell of coffee and whiskey on his breath, and ordered somebody to fetch the doctor. He struck Reenie across the back of the head with a rolled-up newspaper for allowing Sweet to suffer through the night. He swore that if his baby died, he would blame them all. Lizzie smiled. He shouldered his rifle and left.
“Told you,” Mawu couldn’t resist saying.
Reenie looked up. “Don’t you know nothing? If us had of woke him, he would of struck me for disturbing his sleep. Ain’t no way to win, child.”
When Lizzie had given birth to her second child, Drayle hadn’t slept the entire night. She had learned this firsthand from one of the house slaves who waited on him while he sat in the parlor drinking. He had been determined that the medicine woman who was called upon to help birthing slaves in trouble would not maim his child with her herbs so Lizzie had been given nothing for her pain. There were a couple of white doctors in the area of the plantation whose main duty was to tend animals. But rarely was a doctor in that part of Tennessee sent for a laboring woman, white or colored.
This Ohio doctor arrived more rapidly than they would have expected. He was a young man who would have looked older had he worn a mustache. His bearing was not a convincing one for someone who was supposed to possess a secret knowledge. He carried a wide, thin box and placed it on the table beside the bed. His first words were to order them to open the windows, and he hadn’t been there five minutes before he requested a bowl of cold water. Lizzie brought it in, thinking he would use it to douse Sweet. Instead, he dipped his hands into it and splashed the water onto his own face. Lizzie handed him a dry cloth.
“How long has she been laboring?” he asked.
“All night, sir,” Reenie said.
“Hmph,” he said. He sat in Reenie’s chair and after a few minutes seemed to nod off into his own thoughts.
“She doesn’t appear to want to open up,” Lizzie said, trying to rouse him.
“Huh? Where is her husband?” he asked.
The women halted in their places. He had not asked, and they had assumed that he knew that Sweet was negro. Sweet was pale with clear gray eyes and a wide flat face. Her top lip was smaller than her bottom, and her thick hair was pulled back off her face. They could see how he made the mistake even if she did appear plainly colored to them. But hadn’t the person who fetched the doctor told him that a slave woman was having a baby? It wasn’t unusual that colored women would be attending a white laboring woman, especially one from the South. Lizzie felt disoriented by northern ways. What would he do if he knew? Perhaps he was a kind man. On the other hand, perhaps he would feel misled by their unintentional dishonesty. Sweet was almost unconscious with pain. They couldn’t let him leave just yet.
“He went hunting,” Reenie said.
A half-truth. Yes, he had gone hunting. No, he was not her legal husband and never would be.
“Well, he should know that his wife and the child are in grave danger,” the doctor said.
He opened a box and selected a metal tool with handles like scissors and two long arms. Mawu opened her mouth as if about to say something, but then closed it.
“Get some more dry cloths,” he told them.
Lizzie did as she was told. When she returned, the doctor had taken hold of the baby with the ends of his clamp and was pulling the baby out by the head.
“It’s coming, it’s coming,” Reenie told Sweet who was too weak to push any longer.
A head full of black curly hair. It entered Lizzie’s mind for only a moment that the doctor might soon understand the true “nature” of his patient, but she forgot all about it as she marveled at the instrument he was using to pull the baby out. She had never seen anything like it. He wasn’t as ignorant as he looked after all. She couldn’t wait to go back to the plantation and tell. He stretched Sweet with one hand while he tugged with his clamp with the other.
“Lay across her belly,” he instructed Reenie. Reenie bore down on Sweet’s belly and pushed while the doctor pulled and Lizzie stood by ready to swaddle the baby.
And now I got a question for you,” Glory said.
Before she asked, Lizzie knew that Glory’s question would mirror her own. It was a question many people thought about—slaves who watched as they went around in their better, but not quite good clothes and softer, but not quite soft feet, northern whites as they sat at the dining table and chose decorum over curiosity, wives who pretended to be asleep when their husband rose from their beds or never came to bed at all.
Did they love them? She couldn’t speak for the others. She could only speak for herself. And she could say, without reservation, that she did. During his last days, she knew she would care for him. And upon his death, she knew she would grieve like a widow although she could make no such claims.
Glory listened to this and something rose between the women. Lizzie couldn’t tell if it was mistrust or understanding, a rift or a tenderness. All she knew was something grew between the two women sitting at the oak table, sipping on empty cups, ignoring the fly buzzing around them. It grew between them like a tree trunk planted firmly in their wake. It mounted into a quiet that Lizzie would often think about when she remembered Glory years later.
Then he walked in.
Sweet gave birth to a dead thing. Dead in that it did not cry, did not move except to wave its nubbed hands and feet as if still scrambling in the womb. Reenie smacked it good and hard and it showed life by jerking in recoil. A day later it would be dead in the earthly sense. But for now, the doctor pronounced it healthy despite its hands and turned Sweet over to make her expel the afterbirth while Lizzie cleaned it off and tried to suck out whatever might be blocking its windpipe with her mouth.
The baby was a girl, her tiny body wrinkled with newborn worry.
The doctor did not wait for them to finish swaddling the baby. He left his bill on the table and told the women to bid the manager hello.
Lizzie believed there were only three ways to act when in the company of strange white men:
Don’t look them in the ey
e. In fact, pretend they’re not there. Walk a wide circle around them unless your master tells you otherwise.
Don’t look them in the eye, but wait on them without being asked. Get their water before they even know they’re thirsty.
Don’t look them in the eye, but answer. And if your eyes should meet theirs, give them a stern look that lets them know you are not available for their whims.
When Glory’s husband walked into his house, Lizzie went through the three choices in her mind. She couldn’t choose number two as his wife was right there. So it was either number one or three. She considered the choices before her and chose the first one. As soon as he entered, she sprang up from the table as if she had been caught looking through his personal things. But she had already caught a glimpse of him. He was older than Glory.
“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?”
Wench: A Novel Page 7