SIXTEEN
He was tall and wore a crisp black hat that he did not take off even though he was standing inside the house. He sucked on something that smelled like tobacco, a hard lump in his lower right jaw, and Lizzie waited anxiously for him to spit on the clean wood floors. His shirt was wrinkled and loosely tucked into pants that bulged across his distended belly. He didn’t look like family and was dressed too shabbily to be a reverend.
Fran watched his expression so intently that a blue vein stretched taut against the white skin of her neck.
“So?”
Lizzie looked at the floor and grabbed both sides of her dress with her hands. She waited for the person who Fran wanted her to meet to jump out of the shadows. Surely it was not this tall, strange white man with whom she could have no business. He pulled his pants up.
“You say she can cook?”
“Of course.”
“You say she ain’t got no pickaninnies?”
“Not a one.” Fran looked over at her.
“Clean?”
“As a whistle.”
The lines of the hardwood floor converged in front of Lizzie.
“Healthy?”
“As a horse.”
“What’s the catch?”
“There’s no catch, Mr. Simpson.”
He paused and pulled up his pants again. Lizzie lifted her eyes to look at him. The light outside had turned dusky red and he squinted in the dim light of the hallway, as if trying to ascertain if there were certain things wrong with her that were invisible to the naked eye. Reading his face, Fran lit another lamp and the foyer brightened a bit.
Lizzie could taste her last meal on her tongue, and she tried to separate out each flavor in her throat. As the knowledge of what was happening to her rose fully in her mind, she tried to remember the last time a trader had entered their place. She vaguely remembered a slave who had tried to escape three times, the last time taking his bow-legged woman with him. She remembered they had spoken some other language, a bastardized echo of what their mothers had taught them, and she remembered the two had been cousins. The slave patrollers returned with the bow-legged woman but without her cousin. No one knew what happened to him, but soon it was clear the woman was big with a child. She gave birth soon thereafter, early, to a tiny baby that didn’t look quite ready for the world. The baby lived, but the woman never knew that because she was sold off to a trader who had stood outside in the swirling dust and eyed her just as this man was now eyeing Lizzie. Lizzie remembered that day. She had been a young girl, only a year on Drayle’s place, but old enough to hear and understand the whispers circling through the slave cabins and the dead expression on the woman’s face as she climbed into the back of the wagon.
Now here Lizzie stood in the same space, searching inside herself for her own response, wondering if the nothing she was feeling was the same nothing the bow-legged woman had felt.
He ordered her to open her mouth. She did. He poked around inside her mouth with his finger. Then he squeezed a breast. She flinched. He ordered her to take off her apron. She dropped it to the floor. While he ran his hand down the front of her dress, she saw Fran look nervously toward the window.
“What’s it going to be?” Fran looked as if she were ready to be done with the whole thing.
“I’ll take her.” he picked up something from the floor beside him and undid the piece of cord around it. He unfolded a musty blanket, and it coughed up dust as he wrapped it around her shoulders.
Lizzie didn’t protest, allowing him to lay the blanket across her shoulders like a shawl. She didn’t protest when he opened the front door and she followed him out to a horse tied to a ram-shackle cart. He pushed her onto the cart and tied her hands and ankles. He tightened the rope around her ankles and she felt it cut into her skin. She bit her lip until it bled. He turned to Fran and exchanged the money with her wordlessly.
The evening was quiet, save for the bowing wings of crickets. Dessie was in the kitchen working, and the rest of the slaves were still in the fields. There was no one around to witness Fran’s betrayal. Lizzie did not know where Drayle was, and she figured that to protest would be futile. A passivity settled upon her along with the blanket. This resignation was a feeling she would not soon forget.
The man in the hat climbed onto the horse and picked up the reins. As soon as the cart lurched forward, Lizzie put her hand over her mouth and vomited through her fingers. It went down the front of her dress. Everything in her stomach came up until she was heaving air.
“What the devil?” The man in the hat stopped the horse and turned around to look at her.
“What’s wrong with her?” he shouted at Fran.
“Nothing, nothing,” Fran waved him on. “Just scared. She’ll get over it.”
“I asked you if she was healthy.”
“She is. I’m telling you she is.”
“Well, why’d you rush me? And why is she getting sick all over the place?”
“I’m not rushing and I’m not deceiving you.”
“Well, what is it?” now that Lizzie’s belly was empty, she found her voice and began to cry.
“May I remind you, Mr. Simpson, that I am a lady.”
“Well, lady, you best give me my money back.”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
“Oh, yes you will.”
“What’s going on here?” Drayle walked around from the back of the house, clapping the dirt off his hands.
Lizzie shook off the blanket.
“I want my money back. I got to head to Missouri tomorrow morning and I don’t need to add no sick slave to my bunch, infecting everybody else.”
“Fran, what are you doing?” Drayle turned to his wife.
“I’m selling her, Drayle. She’s no good,” Fran said. But the look in her eyes said she knew that her chance had passed.
“What do you mean? We didn’t talk about selling any of the slaves.”
“Well, we need the money.”
“For what?”
“I don’t care to discuss our financial matters in front of strangers.”
“Lizzie, get down off that cart,” Drayle said.
The man untied her, and Lizzie gathered her stained dress and hopped off the cart. She wobbled on her feet. She saw Fran reach into the front of her dress and pull out the crumpled wad of bills. She handed the money back to Mr. Simpson without counting it out.
Lizzie didn’t stay around to see what happened next. She headed straight for the slave quarters. For now, it seemed safer to be there than anywhere else.
SEVENTEEN
Word made it back to the quarters that Fran had tried to sell Lizzie, and it made the rest of them nervous the mistress might bring a trader around for one of them next. The Drayles weren’t known for selling off hard-working, peaceful slaves, but someone said the Drayles might be in financial trouble. First, talk of selling a horse and now talk of selling a slave. If creditors came, they might pick off slaves, animals, property, and anything else that would satisfy the debt. The women shot questions at Lizzie about what had happened, what the man looked like, what Fran said. Lizzie did not tell them the real reason Fran wanted to get rid of her.
For the first few nights, Lizzie shared a pallet in a small cabin with four other slave women. They did not like Lizzie staying there in the cramped one-room cabin, but they felt a temporary pity since the mistress had tried to sell her.
Lizzie was too frightened to go back to work and sleep in the big house, and no one came for her over the next couple of days. Instead, she helped the women with their chores in the workyard. The women were kind to her, grateful for the extra help. But on the third morning, she was too tired to get out of bed. She was so exhausted that each time she moved to rise up, a headache forced her to lie back down.
Philip carried her all the way to Big Mama’s cabin himself. The old woman knelt beside her.
“What’s wrong with you, child?”
“I don’t feel well,
Big Mama. I think I might be sick.”
“Too sick to work?”
Lizzie nodded.
Big Mama rose and went outside. She returned with a dipper full of water. “Sit up and take a drank so as I can look at you.”
When Lizzie tried to pull herself up, her head split into three daggers of pain. She sipped the water. For Big Mama, taking a look meant feeling her forehead and putting her ear to Lizzie’s chest.
“What’s wrong with me, Big Mama? I ain’t never felt so bad in my life.”
Big Mama rolled out a pallet for Lizzie to lay down. When she was done, she took out her sewing and felt around for the stitches. She sat on a chair with a cowhide bottom and rocked back and forth. Lizzie waited.
“Big Mama?”
The old woman turned her way. She put down her sewing and said: “he done finally done it. Nobody thought he could.”
As soon as Big Mama told Drayle that Lizzie was pregnant, he ordered her back into the house. The first three months were difficult for her. She almost fell asleep while cutting up onions and shelling peas. The only thing she felt like doing was lying down. The vomiting stopped, but the unsettled feeling in her stomach did not. She couldn’t help but wonder how the women in the quarters continued to work in the fields while they were carrying a child.
The slave women commented on her spreading nose. They checked her neck to see if it had darkened. Dessie stuck a bucket under her chin when she had to vomit and no sooner than Lizzie was done did Dessie push the bucket into the younger girl’s chest so she could empty her own mess.
Fran took the news with what appeared to be a debilitating sadness. She stayed in her room all day and slept. She ceased going into town. As the Christmas holidays neared, she did nothing to prepare. It was as if Christmas was not coming that year in the Drayle household, except for in the slave quarters where the slaves were preparing to take off a few days.
Fran ordered Lizzie to come into her room and rub her feet. Lizzie rubbed the white woman’s feet with liniment oil until she fell asleep. Each night Lizzie went to Fran’s room, lifted the blanket, and rubbed the oil onto Fran’s feet until the woman dozed off. Eventually, Fran moved the two of them to the front parlor. Lizzie would massage while Fran urged her on. That first morning, as she tried to stifle the taste of vomit in her throat, the smell of the liniment rising through her nostrils like gas, the slave women going about their duties around her, her face growing hot, eyes burning, she had thought to herself that if Fran offered up one word of criticism, one negative comment, she would surely grab a knife and hold it to the woman’s throat.
Since she’d moved back into the house, Drayle spent most evenings in his library reading. He still visited Lizzie in the bedroom across the hall, sometimes only to caress her belly and talk about what he was certain would be a son.
As the early sickness subsided, Lizzie started to enjoy the changes in her body. Her tender nipples were puckered and swollen, her breasts bigger than they had ever been. Her figure was rounding out a bit, and she felt more womanly. The slave men noticed as well, and she was aware they had begun to look at her in a new way. She frequently caught them watching her.
She took sugar to the one-eyed horse one day and found Philip brushing him. If Lizzie was the closest female slave to Drayle on the plantation, then Philip was the closest male slave to him. He was the most trusted hand with Drayle’s precious horses. Philip had grown up around horses and there wasn’t a wild one he couldn’t break and bring under his spell. He was a powerfully built man with a big head of hair that stuck out of his head like raw cotton. In return for his loyalty, Philip was trusted enough to have a permanent pass allowing him to ride off the plantation. He also had been given the materials to build his own cabin.
Lizzie stood outside the fence, patting Mr. Goodfellow with one hand. The horse poked his nose through the fence and nuzzled against her.
“You likes that horse, don’t you?” Philip said.
“Yeah.”
“He a good horse even if he do just got one eye. I’m sho glad Marsuh didn’t sell him off.”
Lizzie smiled. That had been her doing, a reward for the baby she was about to give him. It hadn’t been exactly a fair trade in her opinion, but it had been a small way for Drayle to show his satisfaction with her.
Her stomach wasn’t big yet, but she thought Philip might have noticed the other changes. She shook the corners of her dress off her shoulders so he could see her neck and the way it curved down into her ripening chest.
“Everybody got some good in them,” she said.
They stood easily in the silence that followed. She listened for the sound, and after a few minutes she heard it. Cluck. Cluck.
He spoke again: “hey, when you gone read to us on Sundays again? That Jessie can’t read half as good as you.”
Lizzie was flattered. She’d never known they missed her. They didn’t know it, but sometimes Jessie made things up when he didn’t know a word exactly. She didn’t do that. She hadn’t been there lately because Drayle had been keeping a close watch on her.
“I was awful sorry when I heard they tried to sell you off.”
His words touched her, and before she knew it, she was reaching out for his hand which rested on the other side of the fence. She placed her fingers on top of his.
He jerked back as if she had burned him.
“What?”
“Why you touching me?”
“I-I-don’t know.”
He stepped back.
“I ain’t for sale.”
“What?”
“Ain’t that white man good enough for you? Gone back to him.”
He walked away and the horse followed him obediently. Then it threw a look back as if it, too, stood in judgment of her.
EIGHTEEN
Her pregnancy changed. From the moment his eyes caught the hilly landscape dimpling her thighs and the bumpy terrain of her buttocks, Drayle retreated. Each time he moved to take her, his penis got soft. He told her he was afraid he would hurt the baby. She became terrified by thoughts of him with other women. A whisper reached her that he had taken up with another woman down in the quarters. She felt a pain in her stomach during those months that she feared had nothing to do with the baby’s strengthening kicks.
And that wasn’t all. Drayle had never asked her to put her mouth down there, and she never would have thought of such a thing. But in the final weeks of her pregnancy, that was what he wanted. Each time he made her do it, stroking the curls around the nape of her neck, he told her she would grow to like it. But she never did. When her feet became too swollen to fit into her shoes, Drayle had a new pair made for her. He thought this would be enough to change her mind about the thing he wanted her to do.
She gave birth to a boy that winter and the first thing she did when they lay the baby on her chest was count out the toes and fingers. As a house slave, she wasn’t allowed to nurse, so she sent him down to a woman in the quarters who’d been nursing babies for the past seven years straight. Drayle resumed his regular visits soon after the baby was born. She wasn’t ready, but he didn’t appear to care. The only good thing was that he no longer asked her to do that other thing.
Before she could get used to the idea of being a new mother, she was pregnant again. By the time she came into her sixteenth year, she had two children, a boy and a girl. When her daughter was born, Lizzie examined the skin around her nails and waited anxiously for it to darken. The child had smooth pale skin with watery blue eyes and a bald head. She had expected the baby to be light in color but she was whiter than Drayle. After nine months, the girl baby still had not darkened. The only change was a new sprout of yellow curls on her head. Lizzie kept the baby covered as much as she could, both to protect her from the sun and because she was ashamed of her appearance.
She named the boy Nate after his father and the girl May because that was the month she was born. But one day, when the child was hopping around the workyard, Big Mama called th
e girl Rabbit and it stuck.
As the years passed, Lizzie learned to use her new status as the mother of Drayle’s children more and more. But she was unable to help the field slaves out of a situation that all started when the overseer Roberts fell out of a tree. Roberts had been on the plantation for over two years, but was still widely mistrusted. Overworking or beating was not what they feared most about him. He fancied himself a doctor of sorts. Whenever a slave complained they could not work or that they weren’t feeling well, he would examine them. He had a wooden table in his cabin expressly for this purpose. Whatever the injury—stubbed toes, broken fingers, stiff wrists, sprained ankles, knee pain—it required a full-body examination. The possibility of an exam had the same effect as overworking the slaves since no one wanted to complain they weren’t feeling well. Rather than mention whatever was bothering them, they worked through it.
Roberts usually sat in a big hickory nut tree, cracking nuts between his teeth as he watched the slaves work. One day he dozed off and fell out of the tree, breaking his leg. A doctor was called who set the leg, but Roberts did not heal. He stayed in bed and sent his wife to watch over the slaves. She was a tall woman covered in a thin coat of white hair, a fair amount of it grazing her upper lip and chin. She assumed the same position in the tree as her husband. When someone slowed, she called out to them in a great booming voice that sounded so much like her husband’s a few of the slaves forgot it was a woman in a dress straddled across the largest branch.
She began to walk between the slave cabins and peer through open windows and doors in the evenings after work hours. Up until this time she had mostly kept to her cabin, but her curiosity seemed to get the better of her as she strode down the lane shamelessly staring at children playing and women preparing the evening’s supper. For those first few days, she didn’t say much but after a while she called out a short greeting here and there. The slaves did not raise their eyes when they spoke back.
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