Wench: A Novel Read online

  “Come on, Lizzie. Haven’t I done right by you? haven’t I always treated you like you were my very own wife?”

  He kissed her behind her right ear, whispered the word wife as if it had a magical property all its own. Although he had washed up in the basin set up for him, he still smelled like the outdoors. She closed her eyes, searching behind her eyelids for the script she had practiced.

  He pulled her up and led her into the other room, standing behind her, fitting his body into hers. Then he pushed her onto the bed. She lay flat on her stomach and waited.

  He drowned her thoughts by saying: don’t you know how special you are? Don’t you know I picked you out of all the slave women? Don’t you know you’re the first slave girl I’ve ever brought into my house? Don’t you know you’re the mother of my firstborn?

  The words came faster, sinking into her kinks. He touched the back of her neck along the edge of her hair with his lips and rubbed his face down her loose-fitting dress. As he talked, he stuck it inside of her and she did what she always did: clung to the words, wrapped them up inside, let them work her over. It was mainly this, his careful voicing of loving things that kept her in this place of uncertainty about her children.

  When he was finished, he did not turn her over. She waited for him to start up again. When she heard heavy breathing, she lifted her head.

  She slipped from beneath him. The breeze from the open window cooled her face. She stood up gingerly, so as not to wake him, and went back to clean up the dishes.

  Soften the white man. Hmph. Some stew. It occurred to her he had not even noticed her new hairstyle, the careful plaits that had taken Sweet the better part of an afternoon to complete.

  When all of the dishes were stacked, she went out and sat on the porch. She thought of her children back at the place, already working and doing chores around the big house. It had begun with pulling weeds in the garden patch, but soon that would amount to something more. Full work days were just over the horizon for her son, the older of the two.

  The sound of Drayle’s snores drifted through the window. He would sleep through the night. She observed the windows of the eleven other cottages that curved around the lake. Perhaps in those rooms, stifled with the nighttime heat, the other white men were all sleeping, too. And their slave women, all slumbering in the same dreamland.

  A trio of ducks slept on the bank, their heads turned around and tucked under their wings. A nearby creek bubbled, and she let a mosquito whine in her ear until it stung her. She clapped it in her hand and studied the smear of blood in her palm.

  FOUR

  They had been given that Sunday off with one condition. Sweet would stay at the resort. If any members of the group were so much as a few minutes late for evening chores, she would be beaten, pregnant or not. It was a cruel bargain—one harsh enough to make them sit around the camp for three hours that morning wondering if they should venture off anywhere at all. It was a promise layered on top of other unspoken threats, hinting at violence to their children, parents, siblings back at the plantations should they overestimate the men’s pity for a pregnant woman. This was a most trusted group of slaves, so none of the white men actually believed their slaves would run off. But they were in free territory and had to take precautions. Lizzie tried not to think about Drayle’s silence that morning as the slaves had lined up before the men, waiting to receive their gift of a day’s rest.

  That morning, they’d discussed making their way to Xenia. The omnibus that had brought them from the railroad depot in town had taken almost thirty minutes on the turnpike, but they weren’t allowed to use it without the presence of their white masters. Reenie and Lizzie suggested they stay close to the resort out of loyalty to Sweet. None of them wanted to separate. None of them wanted to be the first to suggest the colored resort. So they sat around the camp that morning behind a curtain of indecision.

  It was Mawu who finally pushed them. “I is going.”

  They all knew where she meant. Her cheeks were slightly burned by the sun. She folded her arms across her chest, pressed her knotted fists into the creases of her arms. She started off, and the rest of them followed. Reenie stumbled over a rock in her haste. Philip picked up a rag and ripped it. He tied the pieces to the low branches of trees as they walked.

  “But you don’t even know how to get there,” Lizzie said.

  “I’ll find it. These ain’t the first woods I done worked my way through. Just follow the path. Bound to lead somewhere.” The path was so faint it threatened to disappear, too narrow to have been sliced through the forest by horse hooves. Insect clouds broke before them.

  The voice approached from behind, breathless, as if trying to catch up. “I know how to get there.”

  They heard, but kept on walking. The instinct of the men at the sound of what was obviously a white woman’s voice was to keep moving. Only Lizzie turned her head.

  It was the white woman who delivered the eggs and dairy. Her husband was a local farmer who provided necessities to the hotel and each morning this woman could be seen wheeling a cart to the meeting place where two black servants would unload her bundle and take it from her. Lizzie studied the woman’s calm face and watched as she pointed to the rag ends poking from Philip’s hand.

  “You won’t be needing those.” The woman relaxed into an expression that said don’t be afraid of me. She worked to slow her breaths, her colossal bosom heaved, rising and falling in short bursts.

  The slaves had not admitted this to one another, but each had memorized her features. Eyes the color of grit. Hair the color of wheat. Lips a thin line of pink. There was something about the way in which she shared the air with them. As if it belonged to all of them and was not hers alone.

  These slaves had been around northern whites long enough to recognize one who didn’t understand the rules. But they were all bred in the South, which said they did not go up to strange white women with whom they had no business and strike up a conversation. So it was up to this young woman who moved as if she knew exactly where she was going.

  The white woman had approached Lizzie just days before when Lizzie was alone, picking flowers for the cottage. Lizzie guessed it had taken the woman a full year’s span between summers to get up the nerve. It was just the two of them that day. “There are some pretty flowers over thataway. The color of sunset,” the woman had said to Lizzie.

  Lizzie turned, but decided against looking the woman in the eye.

  “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  Lizzie hesitated, but the woman touched her arm. The contact was enough to quell the tension.

  So she followed her. From the way she stepped, Lizzie had been certain this white woman knew these woods as well as she knew the ones back on her place in Tennessee.

  The woman looked back at her and Lizzie finally returned the look. A smile pleated the woman’s face, and Lizzie struggled to determine if it was a real one.

  “Thisaway.”

  Lizzie rushed behind her, carefully holding her cloth sack of flowers away from her hips so the flowers would not get crushed.

  They came to a round grove. The woman had told the truth. The flowers were the color of sunset. And not the yellowish tinge of a lazy sun either, but the intense orange of a sun refusing to set on anyone else’s terms. The flowers were at their full height, their stems as straight as backs, the petals at full blossom.

  “I love flowers. I’ve probably got more on my land than you’ve ever seen in one place,” the woman said. She stooped over and picked the flowers one by one. Lizzie didn’t move. She wasn’t sure what was expected of her. So she just stood there and watched. The woman picked until the folds of her dress were full. Lizzie watched her meticulously choose where she broke off a flower, careful not to disturb the ones she left. Then she dumped the flowers out of her dress into a sack on the ground. She pushed the sack into Lizzie’s hand.

  “You take them,” she said.

  Lizzie felt trapped. She looked around to see i
f she could find her way back to the resort on her own. Once she determined that she could, she clutched the bag of flowers to her chest and took off running.

  She had not seen the white woman since. But she had told Mawu about it. Now Mawu was watching her watch the white woman, as if to see what Lizzie would do.

  “My name is Glory. I’m a friend.”

  “We just taking a walk,” Philip said after several moments of silence. The slaves had all stopped. Glory now blocked the path in front of them, the sun facing her back and casting her wide body in silhouette so that her face appeared darkened. They squinted at her.

  “No, you aren’t,” said the woman who called herself Glory. “I know exactly where you’re going. And I don’t blame you, either.”

  Mawu studied the face beneath the bonnet. Then she said, “Take us then, why don’t you?”

  Glory led them, her long skirt sweeping the ground as she ambled along. Lizzie watched it gather dirt. Philip stopped now and again to tie a rag to a tree. The other slaves patiently slowed for him, sharing in his mistrust.

  Lizzie’s ears tingled, and she wondered if the others might be feeling the same unease. She imagined her Rabbit walking beside her, and she knew she would gladly leave her at this colored place and risk her own flogging and Sweet’s too for the chance that a well-to-do colored family might raise her.

  The woods were bisected by a long ravine east of the resort, and Glory led them along the edge of it to a place where they could safely descend into it. The men went first; then they reached up their arms and helped the women down. They waded through a shallow creek, hopping from one stone to the next. The sides of the ravine were high, and they searched for a vine to pull themselves out of it on the other side.

  The heat caressed them, opened their pores, greased their faces with exertion. They walked in a line, shawdowless beneath the midday sun, the women ahead of the men, George and henry bringing up the rear. The fauna gradually changed the farther they got from the resort. Lizzie’s feet registered one hour. Her thoughts shuffled between a pack of images—her children, Drayle, the place, the cottage.

  Oh, if she could just set eyes upon this place—this oasis that would confirm for her the glory of free colored people, the limitlessness of her children once Drayle set them free. Her left foot began to ache and she knew it was rubbing against her shoe’s hard sole. Her feet had always been delicate for a slave woman, perhaps a sign of her relatively light workload. She felt a limp coming on. But she had to see this dream for herself so she could pass it on to Rabbit and Nate. She had to know if there really was such a thing as free and fancy colored folk.

  The sunlight guttered through the trees. And then a flat sketch of land spread itself out before them like a readied banquet table. Glory stopped and the rest of them formed a semicircle about her at the edge of the clearing. Lizzie pushed her way between George and Philip who had rushed ahead.

  They took it in amidst a prayerful silence. The feeling in their hearts made it easy for them to overlook the discrepancy between the place of their imaginings and the place that appeared before them. Unlike Tawawa house, there were no individual cottages edged around a pond with a grand, white hotel at its head. There was only one structure, a gray saltbox house with a sloping gabled roof. Lizzie counted five windows along the top floor and four along the bottom, each framed by black shutters. For a moment everything appeared still, lifeless, unreal. Then they saw a small body bound through the door, and from the sweep of her dress, they could see it was the figure of a pale-skinned colored girl.

  Lizzie almost dropped to her knees. Nate’s catechism with the handwriting of four different white children. Rabbit’s roughened feet. Nate’s insolent defiance of his father. Rabbit’s trembling lip when she was scared. Nate’s memory. Rabbit’s natural tendency to play the fiddle. Lizzie wove these thoughts together like chicken wire.

  “This is it,” Glory said. “Lewis house. Around here, white folks call it Dumawa house. Mimicking Tawawa house, they say, even though the colored place was built first. I’ll take you just a bit closer, but we can’t get too close. This is slave-catcher territory, and I wouldn’t want you to be mistaken for the wrong runaway slave.”

  “What about the free mens who stay here?” Philip asked. “How they tell who free and who ain’t?”

  No one spoke.

  “They come here for the water,” Glory said.

  “The water?” Lizzie repeated.

  “Yeah. Don’t you know why the Southern white men come so far to this place? It’s said that if you take the water, it’ll cure you. It’ll get rid of diseases and cure mental states and things like that. Some folks think the water around here is magic. Colored folks included.”

  “What you mean ‘take’ the water?” Mawu asked.

  “Bathe in it. Drink it,” Glory answered.

  Lizzie sniffed and caught the scent of a nearby spring pulsing through the air. She put a hand to her damp forehead and patted. Drayle had never told her this. Was he sick? She remembered the water she’d drunk earlier that morning. From the pump. Had it been special water? It hadn’t tasted any differently than the water back at the place. It had made her urinate more. In fact, the summer before, she had urinated so much she thought she might be pregnant. But this Glory was saying the white men bathed in it, too. Some of the water smelled rotten. Surely that water couldn’t be good for you.

  Glory went on to explain that the hotel was even named after this water. “Tawawa” was the Shawnee Indian word for “clear water,” she said.

  “Sometimes you can see them on the back lawn playing games or their fiddles,” Glory said in a way that made the others think she was a regular spy on the colored vacationers.

  A woman came out of the main door and said something to the girl. It looked like a mild scolding. It was strange for Lizzie to see a colored woman and child using the front door of what looked to be a white man’s house.

  Mawu stretched and popped her neck. “Well, I is going over to introduce myself to that there lady.” She sprang up and ran off.

  “Mawu!” Lizzie rose up.

  Reenie grabbed Lizzie’s dress. “Don’t you run after that fool woman.”

  Philip had run after her, though. The rest of them watched as Mawu gained speed, surprisingly quick on her short legs. Philip eventually caught up with her and grabbed her arm. Mawu jerked free and ran off. Philip took off after her again. By the time he caught up with her, they had been spotted by the woman on the porch. She disappeared into the door, and returned a few seconds later with a tall, dark man wearing bright trousers. The woman pushed the child back into the house and pointed at the two running slaves.

  “Get back, get back behind the trees so they don’t see us.” Glory waved her arm, a flap of bare skin swinging like a signpost. The slaves obeyed and stepped back into the cover of the woods. Lizzie and Reenie shared the refuge of an oak tree.

  “Would he turn us over to the slave catchers?” George asked.

  Glory shrugged. “You never know.”

  They peeked through the trees and caught the tail end of Mawu’s dress as she disappeared inside the big door of the house. Philip was nowhere to be seen.

  “They went inside the house,” henry said, his voice high and scared.

  Lizzie turned on Reenie. “Why did you hold me back?”

  “That girl done turned you crazy. Have you forgot about Sweet? Us gots to get back. I say us head on back, with or without them.”

  “I ain’t going back without Philip,” Lizzie said, knowing that what she really meant was she wasn’t going back without Mawu. The throbbing sore on the bottom of her foot reminded her that she didn’t have much choice in the matter. She had to get back to tend to it.

  “We’ll give them a few minutes,” Glory said. “If they don’t come out before we leave, they’ll just have to follow those rags back.”

  They sat in the prickly grass, shooing bugs. Several times, people came in and out of the house, but n
one of them was Philip or Mawu. To these slaves, these free colored people were different from the free servants working at Tawawa house. Those were working people. These were free coloreds on free territory having vacation. Lizzie tried to wrap her mind around what it would feel like not to have to work. Even though they were having a free day, there was really no such thing. Work was always just around the corner. These free coloreds probably didn’t think of themselves as a free slave at all, she thought. They probably thought of themselves as a free free. It tickled her to think of it, and once or twice a little laugh escaped her, attracting concerned looks from Reenie and Glory.

  When they caught the first sign of the sun dipping in the sky overhead, Glory rose and leaned on a walking stick she had scavenged halfway there. “We better get back,” she said.

  Reenie stood and looked down at Lizzie who had not moved or taken her eyes off the sight of the two young children playing tag while their mother looked on from the porch. From time to time, the woman looked right into the trees where the four slaves and one white woman were hiding.

  “Sweet,” was all Reenie had to say to prod Lizzie.

  Lizzie gave Lewis house one last look before turning around and following Glory and the others back through the brush. Each time they passed a rag, Lizzie looked at it and thought of Mawu, picturing the world of treasures she was surely seeing inside that house.

  FIVE

  The slaves had been back at Tawawa house for only a short time before Mawu was spotted sweeping her cottage porch as if she’d never left. As they passed one another, they gave the silent signal to meet at the stables that night: eye contact, a glance in the direction of the stables, and brushed fingertips down the forearm to signal dusk.