Wench: A Novel Read online

  Lizzie had finally caught sight of Tip, Mawu’s master, and she couldn’t help but think he didn’t deserve to feel the tender scratch of that fingernail along his back.

  “You listening?”

  Lizzie nodded her head yes and looked back into the skillet.

  “My mammy taught me how to make this. She said—”

  “Your birth mammy?” interrupted Lizzie.

  “Course my birth mammy. Ain’t you got a mammy?”

  Lizzie shook her head. “She died before I remember. But I’ve got other ones. Aunt Lu raised me before I came to the Drayle place. Then after I was sold, Big Mama became my mammy. But when I moved into the big house…”

  The unfinished sentence did not hover. They both knew what moving into “the big house” meant. They both knew the way it affected relationships in the slave quarters. This understanding was the main reason Lizzie liked coming to Tawawa. She didn’t have to always explain herself. And sometimes that was a good thing since she didn’t always have the words for it.

  “Well, you take this here lesson on how to fix this stew back to your Big Mama. She gone love you for it. No reason why they can’t eat like this in Tennessee.”

  Mawu tossed a careless smile in her direction. Lizzie didn’t say that Big Mama was dead.

  Instead, Lizzie looked off at the circle of twelve cottages that flanked the hotel, arcing around a pond. Most of the guests stayed in the main hotel, but the Southern men preferred to rent the cottages for the privacy. The hotel was a lofty white structure, three stories high, with twenty-four pane windows. Rocking chairs sat in groups of two on a wide porch verandah that ran across the front of the building. Six columns lined the verandah, forming a colonnade. In the middle of the pond, a wooden water wheel turned slowly, patiently, as if to signal that the days at the resort would turn just as steadily and would be in no hurry to cease. Drayle had described to Lizzie how the encompassing forest had not been decimated, only thinned, so that the most majestic trees remained. Meandering paths throughout the property led to the main building from various directions. The hotel sank into the hills, hugging the curve of the earth. An American flag topped a small carousel that perched above the hotel’s highest point. When Lizzie first laid eyes on the resort, she thought it was a plantation, the grandest plantation she had ever seen.

  Mawu explained how she had chosen the spot because the wind was coming from the east and “that big old tree blocked the wind like a giant woman.” She said she figured her fire would stay lit long enough for the stew to simmer for a couple of hours.

  Lizzie had been taking down laundry behind her master’s cottage when Mawu came up from behind and put her arms around Lizzie’s thick waist.

  “Come help me cook these here birds.”

  Lizzie turned around, trying to hide her pleasure at the first sign of Mawu’s interest in her. “A stew?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I make a real good stew. Beef stew, mostly. Or pork.”

  “Yeah. Bet you don’t make no stew like this.”

  Lizzie trailed after Mawu as they weaved between the cottages. “Wait, girl. These shoes are too small.”

  But Mawu didn’t wait. She hurried on, never once turning around to see if Lizzie was keeping up. She just called back over her shoulder, “Your man ain’t gave you no proper shoes?”

  Lizzie slipped out of the shoes and continued on, her bare feet slick against the grass.

  When they got to the spot Mawu had chosen, the bird pieces were spread out on a fresh cloth, already cut and partially cooked. Mawu had built a small fire out of six pieces of wood.

  But as she stood watching and listening to Mawu’s instructions, Lizzie could barely concentrate. Mawu looked down into the pot, and the taller Lizzie stood just behind her. There was something different about this one. Something about the way she set her shoulders, placed her lips, slit her eyes, planted her feet, swayed her hips. As if something bubbled beneath her surface just like the flesh simmering beneath the thick soup in the iron pot beside them. Lizzie started to ask her if she ever got beat. But what she really wanted to know was why this girl was so carefree in a world full of nothing if not care.

  Mawu poured oil into the flour and stirred until it thickened into a gravy.

  “I make my gravy with water,” Lizzie said.

  “Girl, that be your problem right there.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t half listen. Here I is, teaching you how to make my ma’s stew and you still talking about what y’all do back in Tennessee.”

  Lizzie worked on being quiet.

  “Now while I is making this here, you get them thangs over there ready.”

  “Your mammy was a white woman?”

  “What?”

  Lizzie inched closer. “Your mammy. Was she a white woman?”

  “Why you ask that?”

  “Cause I ain’t never seen hair that color.” Lizzie finally got close enough to touch it.

  Mawu pulled her head back. “No, my mammy wasn’t no white woman.”

  “Oh.” Lizzie studied Mawu’s light freckles that seemed to shift colors. One moment they were dark and the next they disappeared into the blush of her skin.

  “But hers was a white woman. My granny. Can you believe that? A white woman fooling with a slave man. She disappeared.”

  “Your mammy did?”

  “No, my granny. Ain’t you listening? After she birthed my mammy, she disappeared two days later, they say. Left the baby behind.” Mawu put the skillet aside and settled a deep cast-iron pot onto the fire.

  “They killed her?” Long forgotten names came back to Lizzie, names of ones who had disappeared.

  Mawu stopped and looked at her. “Girl, you got gizzards for brains? no, she just went away. She a white woman. She somewhere living but not somewhere where no slave daughter can find her.”

  “But ain’t the baby free if the mammy is white?”

  Mawu motioned toward the pot. “Put those carrots and thangs in this here pot. Us got to let them boil a bit. Then when us get everything in here, us gone add this here.”

  Lizzie did as she was told while Mawu cut up a big chunk of ham and dropped the pieces into the pot.

  “I ain’t never heard no such thing. Sides. That baby was rightful property,” Mawu said.

  The smell was making Lizzie sick with hunger. It didn’t smell like her stew at all. And the bird wasn’t even in there yet.

  Mawu scooped up some in a spoon and fed Lizzie from it. Lizzie blew on it and sipped.

  “This here the secret,” Mawu said. She took a tiny sack from inside her dress and opened it. She poured what looked like ground-up herbs into the stew.

  “What’s that?” Lizzie asked.

  “This what can soften the white man.”

  “Does it work?”

  Mawu stirred.

  “What’d you put in there?”

  Mawu kept stirring and didn’t answer.

  Soften the white man. Lizzie turned the words over in her head as she waited for Mawu to tell her what to do next.

  Once they had dropped the pieces of bird into the pot and Mawu had poked the fire down a bit, they lay beside each other on the ground and Mawu stroked between her teeth with a blade of grass. The wind had slowed to a crawl and the humid air beaded on their skin.

  Lizzie raised up on her elbows and thought vaguely of the laundry still hanging. Then she turned back to Mawu and studied her again, wondering if she was some kind of witch. Soften the white man?

  “You talk different.” Mawu tossed the blade of grass aside. “Like the white folk.”

  “I can read,” Lizzie said, as if that explained it.

  Mawu stared at her for a few minutes. “You like coming here?”

  “I like having a vacation like the white folks. And I like getting to spend time with my man.” Lizzie had never met a witch before. But she’d heard about them. Mawu didn’t look like any witch she’d ever dreamed up.

 
“He not your man, you know.”

  “Course I know that. But I don’t mind spending time with him.”

  Lizzie figured that Mawu understood what she meant when she said spending time with him. Drayle said he brought Lizzie to tend his cooking. Sweet’s master said he brought her to mend his clothes. Reenie’s man didn’t offer a reason. Lizzie wondered what lie Tip, Mawu’s master, had told the wife he left behind.

  “You don’t?” Mawu tossed the grass away and sat up. She looked Lizzie full in the face as if seeing her for the first time. “You think you love him?”

  Lizzie felt the “course” rise in her throat, but stopped herself as she registered Mawu’s disapproving tone. She felt if she answered no, she would be betraying Drayle. If she answered yes, she would be betraying something else.

  “What is love?” Lizzie decided to say instead.

  “How old you is?”

  “Twenty-three.” Lizzie didn’t know her birthdate exactly. But she had always been told her age by Big Mama who had overheard Drayle telling it to his wife when they first bought Lizzie. Ever since, Lizzie had carved each year in the wall of Big Mama’s cabin.

  “You gone learn when you get to be a little older.”

  “How old are you?”

  Mawu shrugged. “I don’t know. Twenty-five maybe.”

  “That ain’t so old. You’ve just got two years on me.” Lizzie was quick to display her figuring abilities.

  Mawu’s face looked confused for a moment, and Lizzie guessed she didn’t know how to figure numbers. She immediately resolved to teach her.

  “Two years is a lifetime when you a slave.”

  Ain’t that the truth, thought Lizzie.

  “I ain’t never loved Tip.”

  Lizzie nodded. Reenie and Sweet had said just about the same thing.

  “So why are you with him?”

  Mawu looked at her as if she were plain stupid. “Cause I belongs to him.”

  They sat beside the pot until after dark, Lizzie asking Mawu about life in Louisiana and Mawu asking questions of her own. When they saw the first of the white men walking back to his cottage, sweaty with fatigue and drink, they knew it was time to pack up. They split the stew between them and went their separate ways.

  Lizzie held the hot pot out in front of her, hurrying back to her cottage so she could bring in the laundry before Drayle returned.

  THREE

  Inside the cottage, Lizzie felt human. She could lift her eyes and speak the English Drayle had taught her. She could run her hands along the edges of things in the parlor—two chairs, a sofa, a wooden table, a tall oil lamp with a milkglass base, a cast-iron stove—as if they were hers. And she could sit.

  When she cleaned, she could do so with the satisfaction of knowing it was for her own enjoyment. After sweeping the floor, she could slide her feet along the smoothness of it. And she made sure every soup bowl was unsoiled because it would be her lips and her mouth that drank from it.

  She heard Drayle remove his boots on the porch and listened to the familiar scrape as he lined them up, leaned his fishing pole against the side of the house. Then the swish of clothes as he stripped off what he did not want to bring inside, shedding them like a second skin. Without seeing, she knew he would fold them over the porch rail, neither touching the other.

  “What’s that smell, girl?”

  “Stew.” She accepted his kiss. He smelled of pine and dirt. A piece of cottonweed had folded itself into his hair like a patch of gray. She plucked it out and slid it into the pocket of her dress.

  “I don’t reckon that’s a stew I’ve ever smelled.”

  She smiled. “Tip’s woman taught me how to make it. Say it’s Louisiana style.”

  “Who?”

  “Tip—I mean Mr. Taylor’s girl.”

  He laughed. “Oh yeah? Tip. That new fellow. He sure caught a big one today. And he didn’t share it at all. I suppose his gal will have a hell of a time cleaning it and cooking it up this evening.”

  This evening? After spending hours over her mama’s stew, Lizzie thought. She imagined Tip being true to his name, “tip-ping” over the bowl set before him until its contents ran red over the tablecloth, then shoving a pail of stinking fish meat into Mawu’s arms. She could see Mawu standing behind the cottages near the creek, slitting the fish under its gill, tossing the guts into the water.

  While Drayle went and washed up, Lizzie finished setting the table. Each time she did this, she felt the presence of the other slave women scattered among the cottages. All of the dishes in the little white houses were alike. Rumor had it that the wife of the owner had chosen them, and while she had been frugal with the furniture, she had splurged on the dishes. It seemed silly to Lizzie because so many of the dishes were broken that first summer. In this kind of place, the men grew careless with their living—fell asleep in their plates, belched freely, pissed close enough to the house to be seen, took their slaves on the tables. Even Drayle, who was the most orderly of men, sometimes took her in odd places. No. Dishes didn’t have a chance.

  Gold writing on the bottom of each dish curled into itself, too small for Lizzie to read even if she squinted. But she knew they were from some place special. Europe, maybe. The only thing Lizzie knew of Europe was that it was another land where white men ruled.

  Drayle’s wife, Miss Fran, said slaves should eat with their hands because that was the way they did it in Africa. She said slaves didn’t need dishes and such. Some slaves back on Lizzie’s place had fashioned plates and spoons out of metal or wood. But many of them still ate with their hands.

  Lizzie arranged the dishes just so, striving for perfection in the table. Drayle expected it. Even though she measured the distances between everything, he would sit down and rearrange everything one more time. He would judge her table with his eyes. This evening, she was especially aware of how important the table was. They had not had this talk in a while. It was time again. And she wanted nothing to distract him.

  Wait till he has just finished the first bowl and is about to ask for the second. Stand, take his bowl and comment on how intelligent and well dressed the children are. Neat and respectful. Tell him to picture his beautiful children as slaves, sold off after his death to some mean old buzzard (not like him, nossir!) who would likely put them in rags and take away their books. Drop a dollop of cream on top of his stew and rub his shoulders. Remind him of that lawyer who always comes in the fall. Kiss him behind both ears…Be quiet and wait…

  This was the plan, a variation of the script in her head she had repeated to herself all day. On the boat ride up, she had decided she would use time with him this summer to speak about her children once more. It was her second time crossing the Ohio River into free territory, and she felt the burning in her chest stronger than ever. Something in her moved as she thought of her children back on the place, unprotected by their mother, left to the whims of Drayle’s wife who sometimes favored them and sometimes didn’t.

  And then there was this Mawu’s stew. Soften the white man. Lizzie usually didn’t trouble herself too much with religion, let alone superstition, but she was counting on this stew. She’d tasted it, and it was some of the best stew she’d ever had. It was so good she’d made gurgling sounds as she sloshed it down, spread it across her lips, stained them tomato-red. She wiped her mouth on the rag she used to lift the pot. Then she ladled some more. It tasted good, even cooled. The cottage was too hot to eat the soup too warm. The spices awakened her tongue in unfamiliar places.

  Final touch: daylilies in a cup on the table.

  All she had to do was get him to talk with that lawyer so she could make sure her children would be free. She would need to see the papers herself, of course. He would have to show them to her because she had heard stories of owners lying to their slave women about their fates should their masters die, and then when the time came, the women ending up on the auction blocks just like the others, removed of their favored status, stripped of their illusions.
/>   Drayle drank the first bowl of stew faster than she could get her nerve up. She walked right up behind him and refilled the bowl, reminding herself to mention the beauty of their children. She counted four deep breaths.

  “You know, Drayle. We’ve got these two beautiful children that look just like you. Your only son bearing your Christian name.”

  “No doubt about that.”

  “Our little Rabbit is so white, one day she could just up and disappear into the white race altogether.”

  Drayle paused his spoon in midair for a second as if this thought had never occurred to him. Lizzie was glad she had named her son after him. Nathaniel Drayle, just like his daddy. Fran had opposed it, of course. At first, she had refused to call Drayle’s son anything at all, simply referring to him as boy. Get that boy a rag and wipe his nose. Put that boy outside, he’s mussing up my parlor.

  Lizzie went on. “Just think. Our beautiful children sold off to some mean old slaveholder who doesn’t realize how precious they are. Nate beat till he has forgotten all of his catechism. Rabbit picking cotton. Your grandchildren slaves forever.”

  “Oh, Lizzie,” he said, cleaning his lips with his tongue. “You imagine too much. I never should have taught you to read. Slavery won’t last forever, what with all this abolitionist talk going on. Shoot, I reckon by the time my grandchildren are born, they’ll be free as a bird. They’ll be little schoolteachers helping lift up all the other nigger children.”

  Lizzie dropped the spoon.

  “I’m sorry, Lizzie. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to upset you.”

  Lizzie forgot all about her carefully constructed plan.

  “Drayle, free the children,” she whined. “For God’s sake, what kind of man lets his children be property? They are too soft for slavery. You have done nothing but protect us, but what’ll happen when you’re dead? What’ll happen if that old witch Francesca outlives you?”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  She stared into her cold stew.

  He wiped the bowl with his finger, then stuck it in his mouth and sucked. He froze just as he was pulling the finger out of his mouth, as if remembering his manners. He rose, came around to her chair, and lifted her by the sides of her torso. She felt a bit of panic. She was supposed to have stood behind him, working on his shoulders. Maybe the spell had worked on her and not him.