Wench: A Novel

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

“What you got to cook in that cabin?” Mawu asked.

  “Some potatoes. A fresh rabbit,” Glory answered.

  “Well, that’s all us need. My mammy taught me how to make the best rabbit stew you ever sank your teeth into.”

  Mawu showed a mouth of crooked teeth as if to prove it. Glory removed her capelet. In a few moments, the three women were walking toward the cabin, Mawu stopping here and there to pick an herb.

  Lizzie couldn’t help but wonder what the sight of them must have looked like: a brown woman, a red woman, and a white woman. Thin, short, and fat. Tennessee, Louisiana, and Ohio.

  The three women were just as different on the inside, too. One of them was hoping to give up what the other cherished and the third longed for.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The hastily dispatched telegraph from Georgia said it might be cholera. Diarrhea that spread as rapidly as a brushfire in the woods. The women never got a copy of the telegraphed note themselves. But they knew from the cook who heard it from the maid who heard it from the horse groom that the place back where Sweet lived was in trouble.

  For days, Sweet waited to hear word of her children. That week was a difficult time, not only for Sweet but for all of the women. Each of them remembered Sweet’s dead baby from the summer before. And they knew she could not handle any more dead babies. There were four children left: three girls, one boy. Each one with the light skin born of the nightly couplings with her master. And as she walked around the place, stiff as stone, it was hard for those who watched her petite frame to believe she had birthed so many.

  The women knew better than to ask. They could tell from the look on her face she knew no more than they did. So they all prayed silently at night, into sheets, pillows, blankets. Lizzie asked Drayle after the third night of no news if Sweet’s master would send her back to check on her young ones. Surely her master needed to go back to check on his plantation himself. Surely he was worried about his own family, if not the coloreds then the whites. Even though his wife was long dead, he had five white children of his own. But according to Drayle, he had made no such plans, perhaps afraid if he did go back, he would fall victim to the illness as well.

  Then they learned that his white children had been evacuated from the place. And those who were sick had been separated from those who were well. And the sick ones had been taken off the land and put away somewhere safe. Temporarily, those still there believed that this had stopped the rage of the infection.

  Sweet didn’t know if her children were with the healthy ones or the sick ones. So the women waited, wondering what kinds of midnight supplications Sweet made to her master to find out about her children. Wondering if he cared that these were his children, too. Not just his property, but his own flesh and blood.

  But they also knew that for white men there was no such thing as separating the two. They were his children, yes. But they were also his property. And like most property they could be replaced.

  This was the women’s deepest fear. That a white man would feel his slave children could easily be replaced with new ones, as if it were an exchange at a dry goods store.

  Mawu, Lizzie, and Reenie sat on the low bank of the pond, each keeping her hands occupied with different tasks while their minds focused on one thing. They spoke of things light, like what they would cook for dinner and how quickly dust seemed to gather in the corners of their cottages. They watched as white hotel guests walked by. Mawu spun a story about a man back on her place who could catch flies in his mouth, snapping them up like a frog.

  Chew them and eat them? Reenie asked.

  Well, if he ain’t eating them, he holding them in there mighty long, Mawu answered.

  Tomfoolery, Lizzie said.

  The three women allowed themselves a welcome chuckle. Until they saw Sweet approaching them, carrying something spread across her arms. It looked like a garment of some kind. The three women waited. Lizzie scooted over to make a space for Sweet in the middle, so that she would be flanked by the rest of them.

  When Sweet made it over to them, they could see she was carrying a dress. She passed through Lizzie and Mawu and stretched the dress out on the ground between them. She arranged the folds of it. The dress was black, but varying shades of black. Sweet must have run out of fabric; it was clear that she had stitched together all the black fabric she could find. Only the neckline and the sleeves were edged in white lace. Lizzie recognized the lace as the same fabric the hotel used for the cottage tablecloths. This made Lizzie study the rest of the dress and wonder where Sweet had gotten the other pieces of mismatched cloth.

  “This for my baby. My Sarah.”

  “Dead?” Reenie put down the potato she was peeling. “Your child dead?”

  Only Sweet’s mouth moved. “My oldest. The one that took care of the others. She had a face from the heavens.”

  “I’m so sorry, Sweet,” Lizzie whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  Sweet shook her head. “No. This a good thing, in a way. I was worried about her. She was too pretty. Some old man was bound to start trying to mess with her. I didn’t want her to end up like me. So now she gone to the Lord where she can be a true angel.”

  Lizzie reached out and touched the dress. “You made this for her?”

  “Ain’t it pretty?”

  “When you leaving?” Mawu asked.

  Sweet smiled. “We ain’t going.”

  “What you mean, you ain’t going?” Mawu’s eyes flashed.

  “It’s all right, Mawu. I just need y’all to do this.”

  “Just say it,” Lizzie said.

  “Go and bury this here dress in the woods. Next to my other baby. The one without a name. I can’t stand to be there myself. But I know y’all will do right by her.”

  “I is gone say a prayer,” Reenie said.

  Sweet closed her eyes and then opened them. She nodded her gratitude and headed back to her cottage.

  All three women stood, and Reenie looked off at the sun to see how much time they had.

  “Supposing we ask one of the men to come help us?” Lizzie asked.

  “No,” Reenie said. “Us can do this our ownselves.”

  Lizzie and Mawu picked up the dress and carried it between them as if there were really a body in it. Lizzie carried the top portion and Mawu carried the bottom. Reenie led. On the way, they stopped and got a shovel.

  They found the spot where Sweet’s infant girl was buried, near the intersection of two forest paths that crossed one another. It was marked by a small tree. Lizzie took the shovel and dug while Mawu and Reenie folded the dress into a bulky square. The hole wasn’t man-sized. It was just large enough for the folded dress. Reenie placed the dress in the hole while Mawu hunted for rocks. They covered the hole with a hill of smooth rocks.

  The three of them held hands and formed a circle around the two graves. Mawu said a prayer in a language neither Lizzie nor Reenie understood, but they all felt the spirit of it. When Mawu got quiet, Reenie withdrew a wooden cross from beneath her dress and kissed it.

  Three nights later, there was a knock at Lizzie’s back door. Drayle was sleeping on the sofa, so she opened the door quietly. Sweet stood there with a shirt and pants, already folded.

  “This here for my boy. My only boy.”

  And then she disappeared into the darkness.

  The next day, the women repeated their ritual.

  Two days later, Lizzie woke and found a dress folded so tightly on her back porch step that she did not know what it was at first. She looked around, but no one seemed to notice the bundle. She took it to Reenie who immediately put down her washing and nodded. Mawu couldn’t join them that morning because her master was home. Reenie said a few words so powerful and angry they made Lizzie cry a bit.

  It had been two weeks since the first word of the sickness. And Sweet had one child left. They were afraid to ask, dreading more news of the dead. And knowing that if three of her children were gone, and they all lived in the same cabin, then it was likely t
he other was sick as well. They didn’t want to believe that God would be so cruel to take her last child.

  But they imagined feverish nights, nights of stomachaches and loose bowels and cold rags on foreheads, one sick caring for another.

  Sweet stayed in her cottage, and when the women knocked on the door after witnessing her master leaving with the other men, there was no answer. They peeked through the window and saw her sleeping on the bed. They watched for the rise and fall of her chest. They knew grief like this could kill you. They left her alone after they saw signs of life.

  Three days later, Lizzie could no longer wait and decided to enter Sweet’s cottage. She had heard of other plantations being in trouble like this, but she had never known any slaves on them well enough to feel the effects of it.

  As she walked, she was conscious of the burden of her steps and tried to think of what she would say. She stood outside the back door of Sweet’s cottage for several minutes. And when the proper healing words did not enter her mind, she decided her presence would have to do.

  She found Sweet in the middle of the room, sitting amidst a mountain of shredded fabric. Her hair was disheveled, lips covered with the white crust of dehydration.

  “What are you making, Sweet?”

  “Making.”

  “We ain’t seen you around in a few days.”

  “I told you. Making.”

  Lizzie took up some of the fabric in her hands. Some of it was coarse cloth. But some of it was good—muslin, cotton, wool. Parts of it looked like undergarments, lace, sackcloth.

  Lizzie recognized the top portion of a girl’s dress. The lower half of it was a neverending patchwork of textures. Lizzie went into the bedroom and saw that the bed was barren of sheets, the closets empty of clothes. Everything had been used. Maybe Sweet’s man was grieving, too. Surely he knew Sweet had sewn up everything in the cottage.

  The stitches weren’t even either. Some were loose, others bunched the fabric into uneven folds.

  “You got some more?” Sweet licked her lips.

  Lizzie quietly observed the odd look in Sweet’s eyes. Then she left and went back to her own cottage and got a pair of pants she had discovered behind the stove, left by some previous guest. She went to the kitchen at the back of the hotel and asked the women if they had any fabric to spare. They wouldn’t give it to her until she told them Sweet was making a dress for one of her children. The cook who ran the kitchen must have understood because she commanded the younger women to gather every scrap of cloth they could find in the house that wouldn’t be missed. They came back with heaps in their arms.

  Lizzie took it all back to Sweet’s cottage and dumped it in a pile on the floor in front of her. The grin on Sweet’s face motivated Lizzie to go and search again. This time, she visited Reenie and Mawu to ask for fabric. Both of them gave her what they could spare.

  “She all right?” Reenie asked as she handed over a pair of worn bloomers.

  “She all right,” Lizzie repeated in a low voice.

  “She making it?” Mawu called through her cottage window.

  “She making it,” Lizzie said.

  When Lizzie returned to Sweet’s cottage, she saw the woman had hungrily grabbed up the nearest piece of cloth to her and ripped it apart. She was sewing it onto the neverending dress and as she worked, drool made its way down her chin. Lizzie decided to leave her alone.

  Two days later, they were sorting eggs when Sweet came to them. Mawu had just accidentally broken an egg and found a tiny leg inside. She had thrown the egg into the grass, frightened by the omen. Sweet lay the dress out in front of them on the ground.

  “They all dead now. They all gone to meet the Lord. They in a better place. They crossed over.” She spoke in a loud, clear voice as if she had rehearsed the lines. She touched the dress lovingly. Then she stretched out on it, rolled over on it.

  She stood and faced the women. “Now bury her. Bury my last baby girl.”

  She walked off. The women wrapped the delicate eggs and tied their bundles around their waists. They folded the dress to lessen the weight of it, and Mawu took it and balanced it on her head, holding it with one hand as she walked.

  They dug the hole beside the other four mounds. Mawu wanted to stick flowers between the rocks. Reenie said the flowers would die, just like everything else. Lizzie thought it was a good idea. Mawu found yellow daisies and stuck them among the rocks. She promised to come back later and freshen the flowers. They looked down at the rock-covered mounds. They didn’t quite look like human graves because of their small size. But they did look like something human hands had touched.

  The three women knew there was no telling what had actually happened to the bodies of Sweet’s children. They knew that when sicknesses like this happened bodies were burned. Even if they hadn’t been, it was likely Sweet would never see her children’s graves. They would not be marked. Her children would now be among the missing. But it wasn’t as bad as if they were sold off. Nothing was worse than that.

  The three women held hands again. But this time, none of them said a prayer out loud. Instead, they prayed in their hearts and sent their pleadings through palm kissing palm. And although they didn’t admit it to one another, both Lizzie and Mawu thanked God that their own children were safe and sound back on their plantations.

  THIRTY

  When the women did not see Sweet the next day, they decided to go to her cottage. The door was open and the women passed through the front room. They found Sweet lying naked on the bed, no sign of her master ever having been there in the night. The cottage was bare, as if someone had swept up the bits of thread and fabric that had been strewn throughout the rooms, erasing the evidence of her grief.

  Sweet had developed a rash. It covered her face and neck and part of her shoulders. Mawu went out and filled a tin cup with water. Reenie pulled Sweet up and put the cup to her lip. Later the women would have to cut Sweet’s hair, it was so tangled and matted with dirt.

  Reenie said, “Drink this. Drink up.”

  Sweet drank without protest. There was nothing to wipe the wetness from Sweet’s chin, so Lizzie used her dress.

  “You still got a life, don’t you?” Mawu said. “You still got a life?”

  Lizzie didn’t know what to say. Four children gone. Five in the last year. She just didn’t know what one mother could say to another when her own children were safe and sound, bellies full, cheeks fat, backs smooth, soft hands, soft feet, minds that could read, lips that could pronounce words grown slaves had never heard of. She was trying not to feel her own fortune. Trying not to feel that this could have been her laying in this puddle of stink, sewing big chunks of cloth into a dress for a child she would never see again.

  “You ate anything yet?” Lizzie asked.

  Sweet looked up, her eyes glassy.

  “You hungry?”

  Sweet’s eyes rolled back in her head before she looked in Lizzie’s direction. Lizzie gently lay Sweet’s head back. She went out to the hotel.

  At the back of the hotel, all she had to do was mention Sweet’s name and they pressed a loaf of bread under her arm and a bowl of creamed corn into her hands. The cook said, “God bless her. God bless her.”

  Mawu fed Sweet as if she were a baby. She broke off a piece of the bread, dipped it in the water, and put it into Sweet’s mouth. Sweet chewed slowly. Between bites, Reenie put the cup of water to Sweet’s lips to make sure she didn’t choke.

  When they were reasonably certain Sweet had had enough, Lizzie took the bowl and washed it at the well and set it outside the cottage door.

  When she went back in, she heard Reenie talking, “You cry, now. You hear me? You let it out. You got to get it out your body. This thing you making, it ain’t gone do you no good.”

  When Lizzie looked down, Sweet’s hands were moving. At first, she didn’t know what Sweet was doing. Then she understood. As if the fabric were still in her hands, Sweet was sewing away, her thumb pressed against an invisible th
read, as if holding her place.

  Lizzie found a small square of slate framed by wood. The cook managed to get her a piece of chalk. It was a precious find and Lizzie planned to take it back to her children. In the meantime, however, she would use it to teach Reenie a few of her letters. Reenie had been practicing with her primer since the summer before, but this was their first formal lesson.

  Lizzie had thought to begin with A since that was the first letter of the alphabet. But then she changed her mind and began with teaching Reenie how to read and write her own name.

  “How you keep track of them big letters and little letters? how you know which is which?”

  Lizzie smiled. Reenie smelled of lavender. The older woman gripped the sides of the slate until the bones flexed over her knuckles.

  “R-E-E-”

  “How many e’s in my name?”

  “Three,” Lizzie answered. “Can you count, Miss Reenie?”

  “Not much.” The chalk slipped out of her hand.

  “Like this.” Lizzie showed her how to hold it.

  “I can add little numbers like two plus two and four plus four. But something climb over ten and I gets myself in trouble.”

  Lizzie wiped the slate. “Let’s try again.”

  Reenie concentrated and the chalk slipped out of her hand again. She threw the slate into the dust.

  “I is too old, Miss Lizzie!”

  Lizzie picked it up. “No you ain’t. Let’s try it again.”

  “Miss Lizzie, I want to tell you something. About my finger. How I lost part of my finger.”

  Lizzie put the slate down.

  Mawu was running toward them from the main hotel. Reenie straightened her back and her face hardened. News was coming their way and whatever she’d had to confide in Lizzie would have to wait.

  THIRTY-ONE

  They wore the same dresses they’d worn the summer before during the dinner in the hotel, dresses carefully tucked away in trunks stored in the hotel attic over the last year. Dresses they’d instinctively protected when Sweet was sewing up everything in sight. Dresses they’d often thought about over the winter months when they were back home on their plantations, trying to make it through each day.