Wench: A Novel

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

  They’d tried to forget what happened to Reenie the night of the dinner when they’d first worn them, only speaking of it once. Reenie had described the night in a hushed tone early one morning. She’d told of how she’d carefully taken the dress off before she let the manager touch her. So that it, unlike her body, would remain inviolate. Every time he came for her, she made certain she never looked as enticing as that first night, so that each coming was a bigger disappointment than the last.

  They should have been surprised the white men allowed them to go to Dayton. But they had come to learn that in this place with the magical water, things were different. Later, they would learn the trip was a gift for Sweet. It was her master’s way of giving her a piece of joy. Henry had not returned that summer, but his more vocal brother George had. George had been ordered to stay behind at the hotel. His owner had work for him to do.

  One of the colored hotel porters was entrusted with money to buy Sweet something nice, but he would steal half of it and spend the rest on their meals and a cheap trinket for her. The slaves did not trust the porter because it was rumored he had turned in more than one runaway slave for the reward money. The word on him was that he believed slaves needed to earn their freedom by saving up for it. His own grandfather had done this very thing, buying his own freedom and his wife’s before settling in Ohio. Born into freedom, the porter believed in the legal rights of white men.

  The slaves could not help but envy him. They observed the neat coat he wore with the shiny buttons, the polished black-soled shoes, and how he, every now and then, extracted a watch from his inner pocket and flicked open its lid at just an angle where they could not see its face.

  Without the whites, the five slaves and one free colored weren’t allowed to ride the omnibus that shuttled Tawawa house visitors between the railroad depot and the resort. So they took a wagon. When they got to the depot, they piled into the back car of the train.

  “I heard something,” Mawu whispered to Lizzie after the two had squeezed into the narrow seat.

  “What’s that?” Lizzie asked.

  “Ain’t you noticed it’s not that many folks here this year?”

  “I guess.”

  “They closing it. They selling it.”

  “What?” Lizzie asked.

  “Hush. Don’t want that porter to hear us talking.”

  Lizzie lowered her voice. “What’s this you’re saying?”

  “You ain’t gone see none of us again. They closing the hotel,” Mawu said.

  Lizzie had heard nothing about this, and she intended to ask Drayle about it. She did not believe it was true.

  She leaned back over and spoke closer to Mawu’s ear. “What about fixing yourself? You know. So you won’t have children again. Are you still going to do it?”

  Mawu looked at her lap. “I reckon not, Miss Lizzie. I can’t do it round Sweet. It ain’t right.”

  Philip opened a window to let some air into the stuffy car, and Mawu’s hair, having grown even longer over the winter, flew out around her face, the hair so thick as if a scalp did not exist. She held it back with one hand and placed the other in her lap.

  The six brown-faced men and women were mostly silent the rest of the trip. The train rocked them into intermittent naps. It was as dark as nighttime when they left the resort, and by the time they arrived in Dayton, the sun had risen high over the buildings on the outskirts of the city.

  The four women were unable to control their excitement as the city came into view. Even Sweet, who had been so quiet in the days following the death of her last child, spoke up. A servant from the hotel had given Sweet a steel needle as a gift, and she used it to make sure their dresses still fit, mending holes, tightening bodices, and letting out seams. And she had done it all in what appeared to be a healed spirit.

  The women did their best to dry their faces and air out the spaces beneath their arms. They did not want to look like slaves. Lizzie patted Sweet’s wet forehead with a small square of cloth.

  The hotel porter whistled and a tall, thin boy ran to the back of the station and came back driving a wagon. The wheels on the wagon were slightly bent and looked as if they would wobble right off.

  “I want some sweets,” Mawu said.

  “I want to go into a store and buy something,” Lizzie said.

  “Your man give you money?” Sweet asked.

  “A little,” Lizzie said, feeling selfish. She didn’t want to share.

  “You think they gone let us go into a store and buy something without no note from our master?” Mawu asked.

  “This ain’t the South,” said the porter. “Colored folks go in stores all the time here.”

  When they got to the center of downtown, the women eased themselves off the wagon, taking care to hide their ragged shoes beneath their dresses.

  The streets of the city were just starting to fill with people, mostly looking as if they were going to work. One group of leisurely white women passed by, the women turning and raking their eyes over the colored women’s dresses. The four slave women sped up. Only Lizzie glanced back. She noted that none of the women wore the wide hoops of the white women vacationers back at the hotel.

  The porter suggested they get breakfast. He led them to an alley where they found an open door to a colored diner. Some of the diners turned to look; others ignored them and continued slurping down their breakfasts. The tables turned over quickly as men pushed back wooden chairs, scraping the floor, then put on their hats and headed off to their daily lives.

  The six of them found a large enough table in the back, and a woman approached them. None of the slaves had ever been waited on before in a public establishment. Lizzie sat high and straight, and when her breakfast came, she tried not to eat too quickly. Reenie studied the other diners to see how they did it. Mawu stared at the menu written on the wall above the counter. The diner was quiet except for the noise of forks against plates. There was only one other woman in the entire place.

  After breakfast, they walked through the streets. The porter explained that they were in the colored section of town known as Little Africa. Lizzie delighted at this. She waved at a woman who mistook her for someone else. She was surprised that so many of the buildings were made of brick. Large windows covered the fronts of businesses. Lizzie and Sweet read the names of signs for Reenie and Mawu. Blacksmith. Shoemaker. Dry goods. The porter explained that they were walking down Franklin Street.

  Lizzie knew clearly in her mind that the men had not known how dangerous it was to allow their slaves to go into Dayton. Then again, perhaps whites did not understand how it felt not to be able to go where one wanted to go, dress how one wanted to dress. They took simple things like movement for granted.

  She turned around and saw Philip hanging back, talking to a large woman wearing a dress even nicer than hers. Philip touched the woman inside of her elbow and Lizzie recognized her. The barber’s daughter. They were standing in front of a shop with a red, white, and blue pole with gold finials hanging outside. Inside, three colored men wearing white coats stood behind chairs raised high off the floor. Lizzie recognized the tall, straight profile of the girl’s father.

  Philip and the woman walked over to Lizzie.

  “This here be Lizzie,” Philip said. “She from back home.”

  Even though Lizzie had seen the woman working in the hotel during the previous two summers, they had never had an opportunity to speak. She took Lizzie’s hand in a proper way, the way Lizzie had seen white women take other white women’s hands. She brought the slave’s hand to her mouth and kissed it, smiling at Lizzie from a wide, pleasant face. “Pleased to meet you.”

  And Lizzie knew then that she would not let another night pass without talking to Drayle. She made up her mind while standing on the street in Dayton. Even before she confirmed the truth of the rumor that they were, indeed, selling the place, she knew that she would use her favored status to pay Philip back for his kindnesses. If her children could not be free and f
illed with new possibilities, then maybe Philip could.

  That evening, Drayle heated a kettle of water on the stove. Lizzie took off her dress. It was something they weren’t able to do back at their place, one of the rules Fran had established with her husband and his mistress. In minutes, Lizzie was soaking in the tub. He ladled the water over each of her shoulders.

  After the water had grown chilly and Drayle had emptied a fresh kettle of hot water into the tub for the final time, she stood and he dried her, reaching beneath her armpits, ordering her to squat so he could dry between her legs.

  “Drayle. I’ve got to ask something.”

  He shook his head and tensed, as if he expected the usual question. It angered her that he always became so upset at the prospect of her asking to free their children. She closed her eyes and tried to press down on the sick feeling in her stomach.

  “I want to talk to you about Philip.”

  Drayle turned and faced her. Lizzie read the relief clearly written across his features. “What is it?”

  “Drayle,” she began. “You know that Philip is a man, don’t you?”

  “A man?”

  “He’s always done everything you asked of him. He’s been faithful to you. In fact, he’s one of the best slaves you own.”

  “True,” Drayle said.

  “And now it’s time,” she said, “to give back to him. To thank him for all those years he gave you. To thank him for being faithful.”

  “What are you talking about, Lizzie?”

  “Drayle, you’ve got to free him. You know it. You’ve got to free that man!”

  “Free him? What on God’s earth—?” he paused and looked at her suspiciously as if trying to ascertain whether another escape plot was being hatched.

  “The time has come. You can’t keep a man like him in chains forever.”

  “But he’s one of the most valuable slaves I own. You’re telling me to just give up my valuable property. Free him. Just like that. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “No, Drayle, let the old man buy him. The man offered to buy him. Sell him and get your money. If you got your money, would that make you happy?”

  She felt chilled. She was still naked and Drayle held her gown in his hands, suspended. Then he pulled the gown over her body. She picked her fingers through a knot of tangles in the back of her head that had clenched up in the steam of the water.

  “Drayle, you’ll do it, won’t you? You’ll do what’s right?”

  “Come on, woman.” he grabbed her arm and pulled her into the bedroom.

  She yanked back. “No, not this time. This time you give me an answer. You won’t give me an answer about my children. You won’t give me an answer about anything. But…” She lowered her voice. “Give me an answer about Philip.”

  She understood the risk she was taking. White folks had a way of having a limited number of acts of generosity. If he listened to her about Philip, the chances of freeing her children would decrease. She tried not to dwell on this.

  “Why are you pleading his case all of a sudden?” he looked around the cottage, as if searching for clues of betrayal.

  “You know that man is like a brother to me. He ain’t never been more than that, and he never will be. Now what are you going to do? Are you going to be a man and free him?”

  “Shut up, woman. Don’t you call me out of my name.”

  “I didn’t call you out of your name. Tell me something, Drayle. Are you the kind of master everybody back home makes you out to be? Or are you something else?”

  He looked down at the brown nipples peeking through the thin fabric of her shirt. “I’ll think about it. Is that good enough for you? I won’t say no and I won’t say yes. I’ll say—”

  “What?”

  “Let me think about it. How about that?” he reached for her hand.

  But for the first time since she could remember, she refused him. And that was the way it was that night. And that was the way it would be for a few nights more.

  The last words out of his mouth before he fell off to sleep were: “We never should’ve allowed y’all to go off to Dayton.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Early the next morning Lizzie rose and lit the outside fire in preparation for breakfast. On her way back from the hotel, laden with the day’s provisions, she spotted Mawu running toward her. “Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie,” Mawu was saying over and over. Not loudly, but enough where Lizzie could hear the z’s carrying through the air.

  When Mawu reached her, she circled her arms around Lizzie.

  “What is it?” Lizzie asked. She peeked over Mawu’s shoulder at the sun and could see it was perched at breakfast time.

  “What is it, Maw?”

  Mawu pulled back and put both hands on Lizzie’s shoulders. “Sweet.”

  Even before the words that followed, the words that would deliver Mawu’s message, Lizzie knew something was wrong.

  She clenched her teeth and dropped her bundle, leaving it on the ground where it fell. Mawu led her away from the cottages into the woods. Lizzie knew where they were headed. The five little graves. For a moment, hope flickered inside of her. Maybe it wasn’t bad. But as Lizzie and Mawu approached the bodiless mounds of dirt covering the dresses and pants and shirt, she saw her friend laid out on her back, on the ground, hands folded across her chest, as if she had already been carefully laid to rest. Her eyes were closed, one side of her face covered with a cloth, the other side smooth as if recently wiped clean. She was still wearing the dress she had worn to Dayton the day before.

  Reenie was already there, standing off to one side. Mawu pulled Lizzie right up to Sweet, and they both dropped to their knees.

  Lizzie’s eyes roamed over Sweet’s body. “What happened?”

  Reenie shook her head and told the women that Sweet had been discovered in the ravine by early morning hunters.

  Lizzie shook her head. “I don’t understand. She fell?”

  “Must be,” Reenie said. “I guess she lost her way in the dark.”

  Lizzie started to cry.

  “But she do look happy, don’t she?” Reenie said.

  “How could she be happy?” Lizzie spoke to Reenie in a tone she had never used with the elder one before.

  “Because there’s a afterworld,” Reenie said. “And in that afterworld, all our sadness go away. The Bible say that the Lord will wipe your tears away.”

  Mawu spat on the ground. “The Bible! The Bible! That’s all you niggers talk about!”

  “She freer than you is. That’s for sho!” Reenie’s spittle flew in Mawu’s face.

  They were silent.

  Finally, Lizzie whispered, “Sweet.”

  They held the ceremony for Sweet at night, after the day’s chores were done. All of the slaves were in attendance and a few of the house servants. None of the white men came, although Sweet’s man had been there earlier, knelt over the body for some time. At least that’s what Philip told Lizzie. While Philip and George dug the grave, the white man sat beside her. And although they did not see tears, the men witnessed the hump of his back, the shake of his shoulders.

  It was late when it all began. The men brought tall candles set into stakes. They planted them into the ground around Sweet’s body. It was a dark night, the crescent moon barely lighting the clearing. There was no box to put her in. The men had not had time to build one because the white men had insisted her body be buried quickly. There was also no cooling board on which to lay the body. So they just dug the hole as deeply as they could, nearly six feet under, so that the smell of her decaying body would not reach the surface.

  There was no preacher to stand over her and make sure her soul made it to the right place. They all stood silently, waiting for someone to step forward and give Sweet’s body the honor it deserved.

  It began with a song.

  Mary had a baby.

  Yes Lord.

  Mary had a baby.

  Yes my Lord.

  Mary had a baby.
r />   Yes Lord.

  People keep a coming

  But the train done gone.

  They listened to the song as if they had never heard it sung before. And it did not matter that they usually sang it at Christmas. Reenie’s voice lifted over the other night sounds and floated into the darkness. She had a rich, deep voice. And although she rarely sang and wouldn’t ever call herself a singer, she barely missed a note that night. She sang the song slowly, befitting a funeral, not rapidly like they sang it when they were working.

  Only Mawu stood a bit apart from the group, her face a mask, a chicken dangling from her hand. After Reenie had finished her song, Mawu opened her mouth: “They say he fed the hungry with a few loaves of bread. They say he turned water into wine. They say he walked on water. They say he calmed storms. They say he healed the blind and the deaf. That’s what they say.”

  The chicken clucked, a string connecting its tiny neck to her wrist. She stopped speaking and picked the chicken up, spun it around until its neck broke. The wings started to flap. She turned it upside down and stuck a small knife in its mouth, making a slicing motion. Blood spilled onto the front of her dress. She lifted the chicken in the air and closed her eyes, mumbling something inaudible over the wind and rustling trees.

  “Enough!” Philip shouted. He looked upset.

  The two men rolled Sweet’s body into the grave. George shoved dirt into the hole, mumbling “God bless you” as he worked.

  Reenie took Lizzie’s hand and walked away. Behind them, Mawu walked, holding the chicken out in front of her. Philip and George moved pile after pile of dirt into the hole, the blood of the dead fowl splattered on the ground around them.

  THIRTY-THREE

  It was only after Sweet’s death that they decided to read the pamphlet, as if the loss of her had stirred in them a more urgent reason to know about these freedom-loving whites. On the first morning that she read, only Mawu and Reenie sat beside her. Later, Philip and George would join them. But that first time, it was just the three women sitting in the parlor of Lizzie’s cottage. Lizzie pulled the couch over to sit just in front of the two women. Reenie put out a plate of bread, and Mawu sipped from a cup of tea.