Wench: A Novel Read online

  At the appointed hour, while the white men were having their dinner in the hotel, the slaves gathered at the edge of the resort grounds. The light was orange and cast a glow over everything around them. One thin cloud sat high and alone above them like a raised eyebrow. Horses whinnied softly from within the building.

  Mawu and Philip shared a tree stump, back to back, his legs out long and her skirt spread like a fan. The twins lay sprawling on the grass. Reenie shook out a blanket for the three women. Sweet rearranged herself over and over again so she could get comfortable enough to listen without interruption.

  “Tell us,” Sweet said when she had finally settled. “Tell us.”

  Mawu hunched her shoulders, licked her lips, and leaned in.

  “The dining room table must’ve been built out the largest tree you ever did see,” she said. “I imagine it was big and long enough to seat at least thirty white folks. All shiny and dark. So shiny, you could eat right off it with nary a splinter. The womens was sitting around sewing, but they put it away soon as us come in the house.”

  Philip nodded as if to confirm the truth of her words.

  “One of the childrens was playing the piano when us come in and another boy was reading a book.”

  “A piano.” Lizzie had dreamed of such a thing for Rabbit.

  “That’s what I said, Miss Lizzie. He played that thang like he was an angel and the other one carried that book around as if it was a bag of money. I couldn’t have grabbed it from him if I’d tried.”

  Philip looked as if he were about to say something, but Mawu only paused long enough to catch her breath.

  “There was a big old bowl of fresh peaches, and I saw one of the menfolks walk by and pick one right up and take a bite out of it. And they was walking on this fancy rug that felt like a bed of cotton right beneath your feet.”

  Philip’s words tripped over Mawu’s. “And two men smoking.”

  “The womenfolks was just sitting about,” Mawu continued. “They had servants serving them just like rich white ladies. And a big wide staircase. You could hear people moving about. It was families all up in that house just minding they own business.”

  Lizzie stopped listening. Families. The word aroused her.

  “…they sho acted like they was scared when us walked up to that door, snatched us right in, they did. Said it’s slavecatchers all over here and us had every bit the mark of a slave,” Mawu was saying.

  “They feed you?” George asked.

  “You bet they did!” Philip slid off the stump and wiped his hands on the backs of his pants. He gesticulated wildly, as if the table of food were right there before him. “They fed us till we couldn’t move. Seem like they think slaves ain’t used to getting a bellyful, so they all sit around watching us while we eat. Even the childrens.”

  Lizzie pictured them sitting at a long table with platters of food before them: wild duck, stuffed potatoes, loaves of bread, bowls of greens, mash, cornmeal cakes. She could taste mounds of cranberries on her tongue, as if she’d just smeared it across her mouth with the back of a spoon.

  “But what were the people like?” Lizzie asked.

  “They was fine, Miss Lizzie,” Mawu said. “They minded they manners better than the whitefolks. And I didn’t even mind the stares. The children wanted to play in my hair, and the mens asked Philip a lot of questions about his place back in Tennessee.”

  Philip sat back down on the stump.

  Mawu scratched her foot in the dirt. “They wanted to know if I could read, and they seem real sad when I say I can’t.”

  Lizzie sucked her lip. She had not known that Mawu couldn’t read.

  Philip shook his head and chuckled. “I knew it was time to go, but I tell you after my belly got full, I just wanted to stay there forever. I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up.”

  “You think if y’all was escaped slaves they would of took you in?” George asked.

  The ensuing silence held their feelings in check, and none dared speak.

  “Well…” Mawu began. “Let me put it this way—they sho know where to send us if’n they don’t.”

  “Yessir,” Philip said. “Whitefolks burn that house down to the ground if they even ’spected they was hiding runaway slaves. But I is pretty sho it’s some slaves hiding hereabouts in these woods.”

  Quiet again.

  “I just don’t understand y’all,” Mawu said. “Us is here in free territory and ain’t nobody thinking about making a run for it?”

  “Shhh!” Reenie put a finger to her lips.

  Mawu’s eyes narrowed into fissures of shiny black rock. “I is tired, Miss Reenie. I is real, real tired.”

  Lizzie turned on Mawu. “Don’t even think about it. If you get caught, that’ll be the end of all of us. Won’t none of us be able to return.”

  “Us on free land. This here is free land. Folks die trying to cross that river and here us is done crossed it.” Mawu was talking quickly now.

  “Yeah,” George said in a questioning tone, as if he’d already thought of this and now wanted to know where Mawu was headed with it.

  “So what’s stopping us? Why not break and run for it?” Mawu pressed on.

  “I don’t know what’s stopping you,” Sweet said. “But I got childrens. Four of them. We all got childrens or folks back at the place. If we run for it, what’ll happen to them? Don’t you got little ones, too?”

  Mawu rolled her eyes at Sweet. “Who don’t got childrens? But what I’m gone do for my child as a slave woman? I need to run off so as I can try to get my boy out. As long as I is a slave, ain’t nothing gone change.”

  “What ideas you got, girl?” George asked in an almost-whisper.

  Mawu’s words hummed in Lizzie’s ears as she murmured her plan. But even more disturbing was the penetrating concentration of the others, the rapt attention of their bodies and barely audible breaths. Even Reenie. Only Lizzie looked from face to face.

  “I figure us can get that white woman to help us get a letter to the high yellow woman I met at that there resort.” Mawu looked around. “But I can’t read nor write.”

  George spoke again: “Lizzie know how to write the best.”

  Lizzie’s throat narrowed and she had to open her mouth to breathe. Once, when she’d first been bought by Drayle, she and another child had sneaked off to the woods to play. They’d witnessed a line of slaves whose ankles and feet were chained, led by a young white boy with a rifle almost bigger than he was propped on his shoulder. Lizzie had just been a child, her hair still in pigtails, but the memory had never left her. The girl hiding behind the bush with her had pointed to the group and whispered “runaways.” As the slaves walked by, Lizzie could smell something like fresh feces. One of the men was wearing a shirt and no pants, and she caught a glimpse of an oozing scar tucked into his thigh as he walked by. Flies flew around the limp hand of a woman that was blackened with the dried blood of what looked like fresh bite marks.

  Drayle rarely beat his slaves. He preferred to sell what he called a bad slave rather than break him. The fear of being sold off what they figured was a good plantation to a lowdown slave trader was enough to keep them in line. Most of the time. Since he sold off the rebellious ones, Lizzie could not remember a slave trying to escape the Drayle plantation.

  “How we find that woman when she the one what find us?” George asked.

  Mawu turned to look at Lizzie once more, and this time the others followed her eyes. Lizzie looked down at her hands. They were soft and smooth, not work-worn like field hands. Her nails were a bit yellowed, but they were strong, not peeling and withered like those of the women who lived down in the quarters. She could feel Nate’s soft curls stretched between her fingers.

  “She know.” Mawu said it quietly, so quietly that Lizzie could barely hear. Lizzie tried to shift her eyes around to the others, still not believing they were serious. There was a canyon to cross—as wide as the Ohio River—and Lizzie was being told to take the first leap.<
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  SIX

  Mawu was from a plantation in Louisiana about twenty miles west of the Mississippi border. Her master, Tip, owned a modest thirty-six adult slaves—twenty-five men and nine women. Of the eighteen children living in the slave quarters, more than a dozen were tan-colored.

  Tip’s wife had died years before and it was agreed among the slaves that the man had gotten meaner each passing year since her death. Mawu had been a child when her mistress died, but she remembered that the death had been a slow one. Many moons had passed as the woman lay there wasting away until her frame was covered by a thin layer of yellowed skin.

  Tip didn’t believe in hiring an overseer. He said he could oversee his own farm. He’d sit astride a giant horse and watch the slaves as they plowed, hoed, and tilled the crops. If someone failed to work or lagged behind, he beat them himself. When he didn’t feel like doing the beating—which was rarely—he had a young slave do it for him.

  Tip visited the women in the slave quarters even before his wife was dead. After the mistress was gone, his visits increased. He barely waited for the young girls to stain their pallets red before he took them. Mawu held him off longer than most. The first time he came for her, she bit him and kicked him in the leg. The second time, she dropped an iron on his foot that broke a toe. After that, he brought her down to the barn for her first beating. When he told her to strip off her clothes, she refused. Even though he was smaller than the average man, she was even smaller. He took her afterwards while she was still sick in bed healing from the lashes. The more Mawu fought, the more determined he became to have her over and over again. He had her strapped to the bed on more than one occasion.

  She’d given Tip four children, but he’d sold three of them outright. The last child left was a four-year-old boy with a lazy blue eye. He’d been dropped as a child—fallen out of the cloth tying him to Mawu’s back while she worked in the fields. The ground might have served as a cushion as it was still soggy from the previous night’s rain, but the baby had the bad fortune of hitting his head on a rock hiding amid the cornstalks. When he finally started talking at three years old, he had difficulty answering straightaway and often gave a blank stare when he was told what to do. His mind wasn’t right, they said. Tip denied that the “slow blue-eyed nigger” was his.

  Once Mawu’s third child was sold, she told Lizzie that she just stopped loving. She knew she couldn’t bear losing another child, so she figured it was better not to think of her youngest as her youngest anymore. Now he was a pickaninny just like any other pickaninny. She didn’t allow him to suckle like she had the others. She had loved them so—light skin, silky hair, and all—but now, she told Lizzie and Sweet and Reenie that she knew all her children had been born of evil spirits.

  After the sale of her three children she took the name Mawu and started spending time with an old conjuring man the slaves called Doctor who lived back of the plantation. Even though Tip owned the elderly slave, he left him alone. Some said Tip was scared of him. Mawu took the Doctor his meals, and soon began asking him questions about the sacks hanging around his neck. The old man did not answer at first, but once he was convinced of her belief he emptied out some of the sprinkling powder and demonstrated Mawu’s first conjuring trick. It was a spell to keep the bad spirits away from her boy. Mawu was surprised that the Doctor even knew she had a son. It wasn’t long before she was asking him how she could keep Tip away. The Doctor gave her a bag of herbs that she tied inside her skirt. It worked for a while. Then Tip started up again. The old man gave her a bitter root to chew that made her breath so foul it was difficult for anyone to be within five feet of her. Whenever Tip got close, she spat on the ground near his feet. That worked for a while, too. But Tip just took her from behind. She continued to go to the Doctor’s cabin, begging for new tricks, paying him with stolen food from the big house, learning as much as she could about his magic. He taught her to mix her Christian religion with the spells, neither upsetting the other. It turned out that she liked the spells better than Jesus.

  When Tip announced he was going to Ohio for the summer, he chose Mawu as his companion. She had been as surprised as the others. She had never performed her duty like the rest of them—quietly and without complaint. And she wasn’t considered his favorite by any means although they all admitted that she stood out from the rest of them, both in looks and spirit.

  Tip’s cousin would run the plantation while he was away. They did not know how this cousin would treat them, they said. They feared Tip would not return. Ohio seemed like another country. Someone said it was God’s country. Another called it Canaan. Mawu did not know what they meant.

  It was only after she reached the train depot in Cincinnati and overheard two white men referring to Ohio as a “free state” that she understood. She’d tried to calm the new feelings in her chest.

  Mawu told all this and more to the women as they went through their daily chores. She talked about laying tricks and mixing powders, claiming she knew how to ward off evil spirits and put somebody in a good humor.

  Reenie dismissed Mawu’s conjuring talk as superstition. But Lizzie pressed Mawu to keep talking. Sweet listened, too.

  Mawu told them she was telling her story so they would know why she couldn’t go back to Louisiana, why she didn’t feel the same pull they felt toward their children. She didn’t live in the big house like Lizzie. Her children had not had special favors like Sweet’s. She hadn’t had a cabin built for her like Reenie. She was just a slave like any other—beaten, used, and made to feel no different than a cow or a goat or a chicken.

  Each day she spoke of yet another violation, another wrong committed by Tip over the years. As each memory sprang forth, she shared it with them.

  Next she pointed out how their own men were no different: Sweet’s master worked her despite her pregnancy; Reenie’s master never looked her in the face; Drayle refused to free the children he claimed to love. Mawu worked on them in the days following their visit to Lewis house—nudging, cajoling, infusing them with thoughts of escape. She asked them: How can you stand being a slave? Don’t you want to claim that arm? That leg? That breast? She declared that no one would suckle her titty again—man or child.

  Lizzie felt each defense of Drayle die in her throat. At night, she felt safe and certain, protected in his arms. In the day, she felt unsure of anything.

  Then Mawu said she’d caught Drayle staring at her breasts. even though the thought of his betrayal made her want to vomit, Lizzie believed the newcomer.

  The four women stacked the preserved fruit against the wall of the ice house. The ice house was thirteen feet long and twelve feet wide, a nearly perfect square. A ten-foot-deep hole was dug into the ground and filled with ice from the pond during the winter. After the ice was buried, the hole was covered with straw. The house remained cool throughout the summer. The resort used it for storing various foods such as fruit and eggs. Barrels of whiskey sat in the corner.

  Sweet leaned against the wall. “Y’all mind if I rest a bit? My back ain’t holding up too well.”

  “Naw, you go on and rest yourself,” Reenie said.

  “This ground sho is cold,” Sweet said.

  Mawu stooped and touched the ground. “This ice house wouldn’t last a Louisiana summer. Ain’t cold enough.”

  “Louisiana ain’t no hotter than Tennessee,” Lizzie said.

  “Hmph. You ain’t seen one of our summers.” Mawu’s voice was quiet. “You write it yet?”

  Lizzie could make out the shapes of the women. Sweet formed an r. Her baby face—the origin of her name—led into a thick neck, wide bust, and sloping belly. Reenie’s older, thinner form was ramrod straight, her boniness cutting a sharp edge in the dim light of the ice house. Mawu’s hair was tied back into an uncharacteristic bun and covered with a yellow cotton handkerchief. Lizzie traced the woman’s body with her eyes: the small high breasts that had caught Drayle’s attention.

  “You write it yet girl?” Mawu repeated.<
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  Reenie and Lizzie stood side-by-side, stacking the jars in six neat rows: peaches, nectarines, plums, cherries.

  “I ain’t sure I want to,” Lizzie said. She could feel the cool air creep through the folds of her dress. She cleared her throat.

  “Do it,” Sweet said.

  Both Lizzie and Reenie stopped working and looked down at the pregnant woman.

  “I had a man once,” Sweet said. “He escape and leave me behind. I keep thinking he gone come back and get me. I wait and I wait. But he don’t never come.”

  Lizzie wondered why Sweet had never told them this.

  “I ain’t going nowhere,” Sweet went on. “Got too many childrens back home. I reckon I ain’t gone never leave Master. But the ones that wants to go oughts to be able to go.”

  “Who exactly are the ones that want to go?” Lizzie pursed her lips until the words came out in a whistle. “I ain’t leaving my children neither. Nobody but Mawu wants to go.” Lizzie looked at Reenie when she said it. Surely the woman was too old to start over.

  “I is still collecting my thoughts,” Reenie said.

  “Collecting your thoughts?” Lizzie repeated.

  Mawu walked over and grabbed Lizzie’s arm. She bit down into the flesh with her nails. Lizzie tried to pull away, but Mawu’s grip was firm.

  “You write that letter, you hear?”

  The salted carcass of a pig swung in the side vision of Lizzie’s eye, its broad back as purple as a bruise.

  SEVEN

  It began with a flurry of excitement over wearing a new dress. The news they would be dining in the main hotel with the men was strange, but welcome. The four couples—along with a northern businessman—were to dine in the library on the top floor of the hotel. The northerner’s presence would be as unusual as that of the women. The Southerners and northerners did not interact often at the resort, particularly when the slave women were around.

  A colored woman with a wooden foot and a cane traveled nineteen miles from Dayton to bring nine dresses. She took them out of a trunk and spread them out in the main room of Lizzie’s cottage. Then she leaned on the carved head of a duck and studied the four slaves as she waited. The promise of business kept her from commenting, but a mean-spirited little “bah” escaped her lips every few seconds.