Wench: A Novel

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

  Afterwards, she delivered them to Fran’s room with a playful shove through the door that masked her real feelings. She stood outside in the hallway, her hands shaking, listening to Fran read a bedtime story.

  When she returned to the room she shared with Drayle, he said she should be grateful that at least the children would learn to read. Lizzie tried to focus on this thought.

  “One more time. And then I promise to leave you alone,” he said.

  She had determined she was not going to allow him to force her to do that again. Since the children had been born, he only asked her to do it every so often, usually when she was bleeding. As much as she hated it, her children were receiving special treatment, and she knew Drayle could stop it if he wanted to. She was living in a bedroom in the big house, wearing finer clothes than any of the other slaves. Her children drank milk and ate the best cuts of meat. She knew she had to weigh her answer carefully.

  When he saw her indecision, he said: “I’ll write you a pass to see your sister. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Lizzie frowned. She hadn’t seen her sister in almost a year of Sundays. She had asked Drayle for a pass, but he had put her off. Polly’s master never wrote passes for his slaves. He would beat a slave for even asking for one, according to Polly. She had sneaked off to see Lizzie a couple of times, but Lizzie discouraged her from doing it, afraid of what would happen if she were caught. It hurt to have blood kin so close but be unable to see her. If allowed a pass, she could find out for herself if the terrible rumor that her sister had been sold were true or not.

  Drayle pulled his penis out and rubbed the shaft of it.

  She turned her face away. She felt a sour taste rise in her throat. She blew out the stench between her lips.

  “Lizzie, there are some things you don’t understand.”

  “What do you want me to understand, Drayle? I understand you want me to do that nasty thing.”

  “What are you talking about? It’s not some nasty thing. Women do it all the time for their men. Why there’s a woman in town who—”

  “I ain’t like them women in town,” she stated.

  “I’m not like those women in town. How many times do I have to tell you not to use the word ain’t?”

  “You use it sometimes.”

  He picked up her hand. “If you loved me like you say you do, this wouldn’t be a problem. Shoot, I bet it’s a dozen gals down in the quarters who would take your place no sooner than you could shake a stick.”

  “Yeah well, they ain’t got your children neither.” As soon as she said it, Lizzie regretted it. That was the last thing she wanted. If Drayle wanted children by another slave, it would be easy, especially now that he knew he could make them. This was the only power she held over him. And now it was the only power she held over Fran. She had to be careful she didn’t push him out there.

  Her head moved and she felt Drayle tense. He placed his hand on the back of her neck and pushed.

  Fran had decided Rabbit and Nate’s clothes would no longer do. When she went to pick up her dress made in the silky blue fabric given to her by Yancy, she took the children with her.

  Lizzie swept near the door so she could look through the front window. She knew Fran would protect the children as if they were her own, but Lizzie worried all the same. What would happen once Fran lost interest? What if her children mistook this for real love?

  She looked up and caught Dessie staring at her.

  “They be all right. Just one of them thangs slave children got to go through. Different ways to learn they lessons. Your childrens got to learn theirs thisaway, that’s all.”

  Lizzie nodded. The floor creaked beneath her. The night before had been especially cold, and one of the cows had gone into labor and given birth to babies that had frozen during the night. The mother had abandoned her calves instead of keeping them close to her and warm. The story had shaken Lizzie when she heard it.

  Lizzie polished the tall grandfather clock in the hallway, and took a rag to the floorboards. She walked and wiped until she got to the room she now thought of as Fran’s instead of Fran’s and Drayle’s. A miniature wooden statue of Jesus on the crucifix. A snuffbox. There was no sign of Drayle in the room other than his clothes in the closet. Lizzie searched the closet for a box or some other container holding memories of Drayle’s family and life before marriage to Fran. She found nothing. When she had asked Drayle about his family, he had only mentioned that both of his parents were dead and he had no siblings. It was as if he was as alone in the world as she was.

  Lizzie opened the closet and fingered the dresses inside. She took one out and held it up in front of her. She was bigger than Fran now that she’d had children. But the dress had enough fabric to be let out and fit her just right. She put it back in the closet.

  She found a book on the closet shelf and took it down and opened it. It was a child’s catechism, and Lizzie could imagine the excitement of her children as they examined the pictures and Fran pointed out the large letters printed on the page. Lizzie lay across Fran’s bed with the book open before her. She read softly as if her children were there listening. She had not read in the quarters lately. It struck her that her children did not know she could read. She would have to tell them. She would sneak a book out of Drayle’s library and take it down to Big Mama’s house. And the first chance she got, she would read to them just as Fran did. She didn’t want them to think white people were the only ones to hold the magic key to these letters.

  She put the book back on the shelf and smoothed out the bedcovers. She refilled the lamp with oil and polished the posts of the bed until they shone. She went over the windowsills with her rag until not a speck of dust remained.

  She brushed her hair. Her thick naps didn’t require much. She pinned them in her usual style. Fran had prohibited her having a mirror in the bedroom. She’d also limited Lizzie’s clothes. She was not allowed to have more than three dresses.

  Lizzie heard the clop of Drayle’s boots on the stairs and hurried out of the room. She was bent down wiping the floor when he walked right into her.

  “How are the cows doing?”

  “We put them in the barn. There’s four pregnant cows. Would you believe it? I put all four of them in the barn even though only two are due any day now. I figure they could keep each other company in case one starts whelping in the middle of the night.”

  Lizzie nodded.

  “Where’s Fran?” he asked.

  “She took Nate and Rabbit to town.”

  Drayle scratched the back of his neck. He moved past her.

  “I’ll have my supper upstairs.” When he got to the doorway of the bedroom they shared most nights, he turned around and looked at her.

  “Hurry with your chores and come to bed,” he said.

  As she slowly made her way to the kitchen, she heard the excited voices of her children entering the house.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Fran got out of the house more. She dressed the children in the finery she had bought them and took them on walks through the woods. When Rabbit scuffed her new shoes, Fran laughed. When Nate fell and got grass stains on his knees, she brushed him off and rubbed at his dirty face with a spit-moistened thumb. She walked the children through the slave quarters, pointing out various work tools and explaining the names of things. The slaves did not allow Fran to catch them observing the spectacle.

  Eventually, Nate and Rabbit took note of their new status among the other slave children, refusing to play with them. The children made fun of the way they spoke. Nate kicked dirt at them and dared them to kick it back. The children did not dare, for they knew his threat was real. He would tell Miss Fran. Or Bossman Roberts. Or his pa. Nate had finally realized that Drayle was something more than his Master. Rabbit simply refused to speak to other girls her age.

  The children still craved Lizzie’s attention, but they preferred the time they spent with Fran because she gave them things. When Fran tired of them, Lizzie
came and got them. They willingly went with their mother, but after a while with Lizzie they would begin to ask about Miss Fran again.

  Lizzie saw how her children were changing, and tried to steer them back to their reality by secretly forcing them to continue with their chores. In the afternoons she made them change into their regular clothes. Both Rabbit and Nate knew better than to allow the other children to see them back in their old clothes. When they saw the other children coming, they ran and hid. After a few weeks of this, they told Fran what Lizzie was making them do and Fran put a stop to it.

  Drayle delighted in Fran’s new attachment to the children, but Lizzie was determined to change his mind.

  “It ain’t good, Drayle.”

  He fastened his belt and pulled her close to him even though the door to the bedroom was wide open. He was taking more and more liberties in the house, especially now that Fran was distracted by the children. “Not this again.”

  He turned toward the door and stepped into a wide beam of sunlight. Lizzie caught her breath. For a moment, she imagined Nate standing there in his shoes, filling out his clothes. The boy was the spitting image of his father for sure.

  “I just don’t want the children to be hurt is all. They’ve really taken to her.”

  “They’ll be fine, Lizzie.”

  She pursed her lips after he was gone.

  Nate ran out of Fran’s room with Rabbit in pursuit.

  “Give it to me I said!” Rabbit’s face was pink.

  “Hey!” Lizzie yelled.

  They turned to her, ready to protest. She silenced them with a hand held up in the air.

  “What are y’all doing running through the house? Nate, what do you have that belongs to your sister?”

  “I ain’t got nothing.”

  “He’s a liar, Mama.”

  “I haven’t got nothing,” Lizzie corrected. She grabbed his balled fist and pried it open. A blue ribbon lay crumpled in his palm.

  Lizzie took the ribbon from him and popped him on the back of the head with her hand. “I have told you about lying. And you know better than to run through this house like wild animals.”

  “Lizzie!”

  Fran stood on the stairs, her face surrounded by a mass of curls. “What on earth are you doing?”

  Lizzie pulled the children close. “Nothing, ma’am.”

  Fran rushed at her and slapped Lizzie on the face hard. “Don’t you ever touch my children again, do you hear me?”

  Lizzie nodded into the back of her hand. The children shrank back as if they were more afraid of their mother than the woman who had just struck her.

  Nate began to cry. Fran grabbed May’s hand and ordered Nate to follow. They disappeared into Fran’s room and closed the door behind them.

  Less than two weeks before Christmas, they received a telegram that Fran’s sister and nephew were coming to spend the holiday with them. The house was thrown into a frenzy with Fran at the head of it all.

  “I want all of the silverware polished once more,” Fran said amidst a neck of family jewels, as if she had brought out everything she owned and donned it at once. “This is Christmas, after all.”

  Fran lifted doilies and opened drawers, moved vases and scooted chairs, sniffed meat and tasted milk, beat pillows and pointed out cobwebs. She moved about the house like a high priestess as she had not done all year, her velvet gown smelling faintly of mold and the bowels of the attic.

  While Fran moved things around, Drayle tended to the moths. A sack of flour had been infested with worms and in the months since, slender moths had been fluttering out of closets and cupboards, lingering around candles, resting on walls. They nested in wools and silks, spun their sticky substance and left a trail of holes. Drayle brushed cocoon shells from the edges of floorboards and the creases of ceilings with a broom. They fell like gun casings, and Lizzie followed behind Drayle, sweeping.

  Dessie made everyone wash up before entering through the back. She put a small tub of water by the door for any field slave entering the main house to wash their bare feet.

  In the slave quarters, preparations were no less intense. The slaves worked in the fields an extra hour each day in preparation for the Christmas break Drayle would allow them. The overseer Roberts and his wife would also be leaving to see their family, so they worked the slaves extra hard to finish the list of tasks Drayle had set out for them.

  Drayle directed the men, led by Philip, to groom and shoe the horses. When the horses grazed in the pasture, their heads down in relaxed concentration, they looked like statues except for the occasional swish of a tail. There were two Tennessee walking horses, three American Saddlebreds, and a Peruvian Paso bought for Fran’s birthday by her father when she was a girl. Mr. Goodfellow also remained.

  Fran rarely entertained her family. In fact, Lizzie could not remember the last time any of Fran’s family had visited. The Drayles always traveled to Mississippi to see her folks.

  After the house had been cleaned better than it had been in months. After the vegetables had been washed and stacked in piles on the scratched wooden table in the center of the kitchen. After the salted ham had been brought in from the meat house and several chickens had been slaughtered and plucked. After the riding horses were shoed and the slave quarters had been tidied. After all this, they learned that Fran’s sister would not be coming after all.

  Two nights before Christmas, a carriage pulled up in front of the house. As the driver approached, the two women in the kitchen peeped out of the window to see who it was. Lizzie put down the jar of preserved berries and walked to the window to stand behind Dessie. They saw a man in a hat driving a carriage. He dropped the reins and proceeded to get down. Although they had not gotten snow that year, it was blustery cold outside. The slim figure pulled his coat about him and walked to the side of the carriage to open the door. A small child emerged.

  “Who is that?” Lizzie whispered.

  “I’ll get the tea going. You get the door,” Dessie instructed.

  Lizzie did as she was told. She opened the door before the man had a chance to knock.

  The child stood right in front of her and peeked around Lizzie into the hall of the house. Somewhere upstairs, the sound of Nate and May’s chatter drifted down to them. It was after dinner and Fran was preparing them for bed.

  The boy turned an ear toward the stairs.

  “Is the mistress of the house here?” asked the citified coach driver.

  “Yessir,” Lizzie said. She watched as Philip unloaded a small trunk out of the back of the carriage. She let the man in out of the cold and went upstairs to tell Fran they had a visitor.

  Fran came down the stairs and stared at the man who was now standing in her foyer with the boy, untying the scarf around the child’s neck. Dessie stood by, ready to usher him into the parlor where a tray of hot tea waited.

  “What can I do for you?” Fran asked.

  “Mrs. Drayle, this here is little Master Billy. He has been sent by your sister to spend the holidays with you.”

  The child stuck his hand out, as if he had been properly rehearsed. “It’s nice to meet you, Aunt Francesca.”

  Fran sputtered. “What? My sister? Where is she? I received a telegram that said she wasn’t coming. She’s sick.” Fran emphasized the word sick as if she did not believe it.

  He cleared his throat. “Yes, it appears that your sister has…ah…some health difficulties. She is hoping that you will do her the favor of looking after her boy for a while.”

  “For how long?”

  “A few weeks, ma’am.”

  Fran looked down at the child in confusion. He looked past her at Nate, who was now standing behind her.

  “Of course, of course.” She reached into the front of her dress and drew out a piece of candy. The child walked forward and took it.

  “That’s mine!” Nate screamed.

  Lizzie instantly knew things had taken a turn for the worse for her children.

  TWENTY-TWOr />
  His clothes were genteel but worn. He wore a set of blue knickers that were white at the knees. The ruffles on his shirt were no longer crisp, crumpled from napping in the back of the carriage. His reddish hair was straight with curly ends, as if it were just beginning to lose the last of its baby curls. He took the candy from Fran, but kept his eyes on Nate who stared at him unabashedly.

  Fran opened her mouth to speak, but her voice sounded choked. “You’re taller than I expected. You’re welcome here, of course.” She looked at the driver.

  “He’s six, ma’am. He explained to me during the trip that he just had a birthday.” he paused. “I hope you won’t mind if I go on my way. I have a schedule to keep, and I’m afraid I’m already behind. I have accommodations in the next town over, and I’d like to arrive before my host retires for the night. Tomorrow morning, I’m headed north—”

  “Would you like to see your room, Billy?” Fran interrupted.

  The child nodded in response.

  “Lizzie, prepare the room across from mine. Dessie, have Philip take that trunk upstairs.” Fran walked to the door with the driver. “I do hope you’ll give my sister regards for me. Are you a friend of hers?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m just a driver. She hired me to bring him. She regrets that she is not able to come herself.”

  “Yes, that’s too bad.” Fran looked back at the child.

  As Lizzie took the child’s hand and ascended the stairs, Nate followed.

  When she got to the top of the stairs, Nate stood there looking curiously at Billy. It struck Lizzie that her son was dressed better than the white boy. Nate offered the wooden train car in his hand. The boy walked forward and accepted it.

  “What’s your name?” Nate asked softly.

  “Billy.”

  “Do you like trains?”