Wench (19 page)

Reenie wiped the girl’s runny nose with her own sleeve. Then she tucked her sleeve in to hide the wet spot.

“Whose child is this?” Lizzie wondered if the older woman was going crazy. They had all been grieving since Sweet’s death. And Reenie had been through a lot over the past year.

Reenie pulled the girl in close. “She mine and she yourn, too. She belong to all of us.”

“What are you saying?”

The child relaxed and leaned against Reenie. “She come up from Kentucky. Them free women in the hotel done asked me to look after her for one night. She be on her way tomorrow.”

Lizzie finally understood. She rose to her feet and glanced nervously toward the open window. The air in the cottage had cooled noticeably since she’d arrived.

Reenie was watching her closely. “What you thinking?”

Lizzie felt it. A test. Even after all this time, a grain of mistrust remained. “But how?”

“I can’t…” Reenie stopped as if trying to think of the word. “I can’t explain. A lot of people help this here child. I ain’t the only one.”

“Oh.” That was all Lizzie could think to say.

The child took another nibble of bread. Lizzie looked around the cottage, trying to determine if this was the first runaway slave Reenie had helped. Nothing looked out of place. Only the child.

“When?” Lizzie asked.

“After Sweet died. Didn’t something change for you after that?”

Lizzie searched inside herself. Something had, but she couldn’t really give expression to it. And she certainly hadn’t gone as far as Reenie to act upon it.

“Why you come over here tonight anyway?”

Lizzie looked at her friend. She couldn’t say she had come over to see if Reenie was still seeing the hotel manager. She couldn’t say she had come over to ask how Reenie had gotten away from him and taken back her body. And ask how she could take hers
back from Drayle and still maintain favor. The child watched as if awaiting her answer as well.

“Well,” Lizzie began. “I really just came over cause I’m lonely, what with Sweet gone and all.” There. That was enough of the truth to be counted as honest.

“You want a piece of bread?” Reenie asked.

Lizzie nodded.

L
ater, Lizzie would try to put the pieces together and would wonder if the first fire provided the idea for the second. She would recount every little moment of the summer in her mind—from Sweet’s death to Philip’s freedom—and wonder how she’d missed the little signs that had, no doubt, been there all along. She would experience a store of emotions, and it would be months before she would boil it all down to grief.

The crowd at the picnic was the lightest it had been all summer. There were more Southerners in the crowd than northerners, the thick drawls and parasols a telltale sign that the Southern visitors outnumbered the others. Reenie reported that she’d overheard the hotel manager speaking about the situation. Apparently, the northerners no longer wanted to come to the resort as it was being overrun by Southerners. Most of them had shortened their visits. Some were said to be offended by the presence of negro wenches.

Lizzie and Reenie were standing together when a colored
child unwrapped a muslin cloth, exposing a small fish inside. She pulled a few sprigs of some kind of herb from her pocket and tucked them one by one into the folds of the fish. Then she wrapped the fish again and placed it on the outer edges of the fire.

Neither of the women knew where the child had come from. They assumed that she belonged to one of the hotel servants and had been assigned to perform some chores for the day. Lizzie and Reenie each held the end of a long stick skewering partridges. They had spent the entire morning plucking the feathers from the birds and cleaning out the organs. Now they held the stick just high enough where it would not catch fire, and rotated it slowly so the birds would cook on the inside before they charred on the outside. Once the birds were done, they slid them off and piled them onto a long board. Then Reenie carried the board over to another table where Mawu and two other colored women from the hotel ladled sauce onto them.

Each time she was given a pail of fresh raw partridges, Lizzie slid the birds onto the sticks, careful to pierce each at its thickest point. As she held the birds over the fire, she searched for Drayle’s face in the crowd. She had not often seen him in the company of the other resort guests, and she wondered what he would be like.

He was standing about thirty feet away from her in a group of men who were smoking. He only smoked when they came to Tawawa because Fran didn’t allow it at home. The men laughed, the scent of their cigars mingling in the air with the scent of the meat.

Lizzie looked with wonder at the colored child kneeling beside her. She was fascinated by free colored children. She wanted to reach out and touch the girl’s head, but she could not take either hand off the heavy stick of partridges. She was so busy look
ing between the birds and the girl that she didn’t see the white woman approach her.

“What’s your name?”

Lizzie looked around for someone else. But when she glanced into the white woman’s eyes, they were fixed on her. She looked down. She could tell from the accent that the woman was a northerner.

“Lizzie, ma’am.”

“Lizzie. Is that short for something? Elizabeth?”

“Eliza, ma’am.”

“Who do you belong to, Eliza?”

Lizzie tried to figure out where the question was coming from and where it was going. “I belong to Master Drayle, ma’am.”

Lizzie peeked over at the woman and saw her eyes searching the crowd of men.

“Which one is he?”

Lizzie tilted her head. “The one in the tall boots, ma’am.”

Despite the heat, Drayle had not taken off his riding boots and still held his crop in one hand.

“Is he good to you, Eliza?”

Lizzie nodded and said what she knew was expected of her. She remembered Mawu’s question,
He God to you?

“Yes, ma’am,” she said.

Lizzie took a chance and looked up into the woman’s eyes. The woman looked visibly relieved. “Good. ’cause I can’t stand men who are brutes. A lot of slave owners are brutes, aren’t they? At least, that’s what I hear. That’s why I detest slavery.”

She wanted to ask the woman about the pamphlet, about this Wendell Phillips. Did she know him?

The woman moved on. When she joined the next group of women, she must have said something about Lizzie because they all looked over at her and gave her little half smiles. Lizzie looked
at them for a moment and then turned her attention back to the partridges. Her arm was tired. She needed to relieve herself, but her partridges were still too raw to eat.

The child’s fish had cooked more quickly. She unwrapped the cloth to check on it, and Lizzie guessed from its aroma that it was probably just about done.

A white child approached the colored girl and sank to her knees. “Is that fish ready yet?”

The colored child nodded reluctantly. Lizzie could feel the child’s disappointment as she realized that her treasure was about to be taken from her. The servant child put the wrapped fish on the ground. She knew she had to give the fish to the other girl, but her anger would not allow her to hand it over just yet. If the girl wanted it, she would have to pick it up and take it herself.

The white girl smiled triumphantly, and as she leaned over to take the fish, the end of her dress grazed the hot ember. Lizzie saw it when it happened, but she did not know it had caught fire until the child had already felt the heat of the burn on her leg. The white girl screamed and the fish flew out of her hands. She jumped up and ran. Reenie put down the partridges and ran to the well. The colored girl picked up the fish and stuffed its slippery flesh into her mouth with her fingers, sliding the bones out between her teeth.

A white woman threw the quilt she had been sitting on over the child. It, too, caught fire. There were shouts all around as people realized what was happening. One of the men ran after the child and caught up with her before throwing himself on her. They rolled on the ground. The child was still screaming loudly, and the smell of burnt flesh filled the air as the doctor yelled, “Let me through! Let me through!”

Lizzie looked around for Drayle and saw him standing alone, a bit off from the crowd. The ground around him was littered with forgotten cigar ends, still glowing. Only he remained, his fingers
grasping the butt of his cigar and his mouth frozen in the round shape of a deep exhale.

She turned back to the birds on the ground beside her, and felt her eyes sting from the heat of the fire. Then she looked again at Drayle, and as the burning child’s screams simmered, she saw him take another puff of his cigar and wipe his forehead.

Lizzie was so busy watching Drayle that she had no memory of Mawu at that moment. She wished she had looked her way. Later, she wondered if she would have seen the reflection of the fire in her eyes.

T
he second fire happened that very night. The men poured out of the cottages in their dressing gowns, faces lined with the tension of sleep. The fire rose like a vengeful ancestor over the lot of them.

Mawu and Tip. It was their cottage. Lizzie searched the faces for her friend and found her, standing on the fringe, indecent in her gown, arms hanging slack at her sides, crying and choking through something that resembled tears.

Lizzie saw Reenie hurrying along with a pail of water in each hand. Out of the darkness, Drayle pushed two pails stuck inside of each other into Lizzie’s fist and commanded her to the pond. She joined the long line of frantic men and women, sooty-faced colored and white, slave and free, who moved back and forth between the pond and the cottage. One of the men yelled something unintelligible, and Mawu reached out into the darkness as if trying to clutch someone. Swollen white sores ran the length of her arm.

“She hurt. Mawu hurt,” Lizzie said to the closest passing negro.

In a moment, Reenie was there. Both of Mawu’s arms had been burned from the shoulder down to the hand. The skin had started to pucker, a fret of scales and blisters. Mawu looked down at her arms as if they belonged to someone else. Her face appeared untouched, smooth as a speckled stone, brown and iridescent in the light of the moon and the fire.

“I tried, I tried.”

“Hush. We gone take care of you.” Reenie had to yell over the shouts of the men.

Lizzie wanted to ask. What had she tried to do? had she tried to save Tip and failed? Lizzie looked off toward the cottage. It was a lick of flames, dark smoke blasting into the air and sending down a sprinkle of ashes.

“But you don’t understand, Miss Reenie. You don’t understand. I tried, I tried.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Lizzie heard Reenie say. “Anybody ask, you tell them she burnt and I is taking her back to my cottage, you hear?”

Lizzie nodded, the empty pails swaying in her hands.

“Is she all right?”

Reenie shook her head. It surprised Lizzie. Like asking the doctor if someone was going to be all right and hearing the truth for a change.

“She got more than burns to deal with.”

“Lizzie! Fill them buckets, girl!” Drayle shouted at her as Reenie and Mawu hurried off.

Lizzie ran back to the pond. One of the slaves standing knee deep in the water helped her get them full. When she turned around, she saw Tip waiting behind her, an outstretched pail in his hand and a pasty look on his white face that made him appear ghostlike.

But he was not a ghost. He was just as real as the fire still panting hungrily behind him. She glanced off in the direction that Reenie and Mawu had gone. Now she understood. She understood what Mawu had tried to do.

And while she had a strange feeling in her belly she might never see Mawu again, it never crossed her mind she might never see Reenie again, either.

W
hen she heard that both Reenie and Mawu were missing, Lizzie felt as if her insides had been broken into a thousand pieces. She wanted to crawl inside herself like a turtle. Later, she would describe it to Glory as time moving at an indescribable speed, carrying buckets of water one minute and carrying her heart in her hands the next.

After the news spread through the resort, Drayle changed toward her. Everything became a barked order and she was locked in a room at night.

Lizzie ran the day over and over through her mind. From the girl with the burned legs—the way the skin merely looked sunburned—to the oozing sores on Mawu’s arms. From the dark smoke rising from the cottage to the empty feeling in her stomach that came with the knowledge that she was the only one of the four left. She could not understand what she had missed, why they had not included her in their plans. She wasn’t sure how she
would have responded if they had, but she mourned the lack of invitation.

The only thing she could come up with was that they had not forgiven her for the summer she told on Mawu. They still thought of her as a traitor.

After the cottage fire was put out, Drayle had told her to make her way back. She had considered sneaking off to Reenie’s cottage, but she had thought better of it. Drayle’s eyes had made two holes in her back, and she’d figured it wasn’t smart to anger him at that point.

She couldn’t keep her face out of the window that night. Drayle followed her home soon after and made her come to bed. But after he was asleep, she got up and sat in the window again. The smell of ash was still in the air and the moon was bright enough for her to just make out Tip’s cottage where two men were still dousing the smallest flames. It wasn’t really a cottage anymore, just a black shell standing.

How long had they known they were making a run for it?

Two days later, Drayle shouted orders to George to get their trunks up to the hotel where the omnibus would pick them up. There was still no news of Reenie and Mawu’s whereabouts, but every day she could hear the dogs. The same dogs they’d used to hunt wild birds and pheasants and possum were now being used to hunt her friends. She had heard that the reward money was so big, every slave catcher in the county was out looking for the women.

She hoped Mawu had covered her hair. In her mind, she warned the woman like a mother would a child. She advised the two to split up. She wrapped hot biscuits in a cloth and tucked it into their aprons.

Tip walked around the resort with a righteous anger on his face, as if someone had kidnapped his mother. She wondered if
he was angrier that Mawu had escaped or that she had tried to kill him first.

You ain’t the only one wondering about a betrayal
, she wanted to say to him. But she didn’t say anything because whatever rights she’d had before Reenie and Mawu had escaped had ended. Now it seemed everyone was watching her. Reenie’s Sir even tore a piece of her dress one day and gave it to one of the dogs. The dog smelled and licked it while she watched. Then Sir grinned at her, as if to let her know that he could find her, that he would find her if she had a mind to take off after the others.

Each hour that passed by that she didn’t hear they had been caught was like a jubilation. She hoped they made it all the way to Canada. She had heard that in Canada coloreds and whites could marry. She wondered if there was a country north of Canada, and what possibilities existed there.

She also wished for two more things: that she could be with them and that she could return to her children. It felt like her right arm was being pulled one way and her left arm being pulled the other. She knew it wasn’t a right way to feel.

While she was packing her trunk, she tried to pack her fancy dress, but Drayle told her to leave it behind. Leaving the dress, saying goodbye to it, was like leaving a part of her new self. She wished she had given the dress to Sweet to tear up and sew. Maybe it would be of better use in the ground where they’d buried the clothes in honor of her children.

On the day they woke up to leave, it was still dark outside. As she walked to the hotel, she found no joy in the early morning bird chirps.

She moved slowly because she wanted to remember every moment of the free soil. She remembered Reenie asking Philip to tell her what freedom tasted like, and she felt a thrill at the knowledge that Reenie would be getting her own taste now.

Drayle watched her. He appeared to be half asleep, his eyes drooping low, but when she glanced his way, she sensed the alertness. What did he think she was going to do? Try to make a run for it? There were dogs and slavecatchers throughout the woods. She supposed that Drayle was already regretting his decision to sell Philip. His eyes were saying he had no intention of letting her go.

The walk from the cottage to the hotel seemed longer than it had ever been. Even though the air still carried an early morning chill, she felt sticky beneath her breasts. Drayle walked behind her, and it felt like he would walk behind her for the rest of her days.

Once the omnibus was loaded, she climbed onto it. Drayle sat beside her the way he always did, as if she were his real woman. She pulled the cloth tight around her hair and the sides of her face.

As the omnibus rolled forward, she thought to herself that this would be the final time she would feel
this
human. She thought about her children and how overjoyed they would be to see her again. Both of them. The slate board was wrapped carefully in a cloth and tucked into her things. Drayle had taken the dress, but he hadn’t known about the slate. She had also managed to bring along two pieces of chalk. She thought of the free child at the picnic and wondered if she could read. The girl had been about Rabbit’s age.

And there was one more thing she had managed to escape with: the pamphlet. She needed to find a safe place for it, somewhere it could sit for a few years. She planned to give it to Nate once he was a man, so that he too could feel the heat of the words and channel his young anger into the righteous fury of this Wendell Phillips.

She tried not to look back at the cottages or the hotel because she did not want to feel any worse. She just wanted to think of her
children and not think about Reenie or Mawu or anybody else. She took solace in knowing that there would be no more goodbyes.

But just as they rounded the bend in the road, she couldn’t stop herself. She looked back anyway. It was too late. The hotel and cottages were too far back behind the trees.

But there was a figure. Lizzie closed her eyes and opened them again. The woman was still there.

In the middle of the road, smaller after she opened her eyes the second time, was Glory. She didn’t have on her bonnet, so Lizzie could just make out her face, the square of her chin. Glory lifted her arm up and did something like a wave.

Lizzie waved back. There had been someone to say goodbye to after all.