Wench (7 page)

H
ow many?” he asked her.

She had heard that some rivers flowed upstream, but she did not believe it. A slave had once told her that some insects and animals did not need a mate to have a baby. She did not believe that either. She’d once watched two flies, one humpbacked on the other, as if hitching a ride.

“How many?” he grabbed her by the shoulders and started to shake her.

Recently, Lizzie had stared into Massie’s creek and understood with a surprising clarity that life did not imitate its peaceful ripples. Her own experiences had always been as rutted as a rotting log. Even now things seemed to move without any kind of structure. She could see Drayle throwing things about, spit sliding down his chin.

And far away, she could hear her own voice murmuring inside her head.

“…And you were a part of this plot as well?” he demanded.

“No, no,” she protested, wondering how long she had been silent. “There weren’t any others. It was just Mawu’s idea. She’s the one who planned to run.”

“Should’ve known, should’ve known better.”

“What are you talking about? Any slave with half a mind would try it, Drayle.”

“So you’re saying you did think about running?” he grabbed her by the shoulders again.

Lizzie squeezed her eyes shut, trying to figure out how to lessen his anger. He was reacting worse than she had anticipated. His face was red. They weren’t back on the plantation. And it wasn’t like she had told him that Philip was plotting to escape. It was Philip who had every reason to run. Mawu wasn’t even his slave.

But Lizzie understood the anger even if she hadn’t expected it. She forgave him for it. He loved her, and he was afraid she would leave him, too. That was what made him so upset. Her leaving. His beloved Lizzie. The mother of his children.

“Don’t let him hurt her, Drayle. I just told you so you’d stop her.”

“I’ve got to tell Tip, Lizzie. I wouldn’t be a man if I didn’t.”

Lizzie kissed him. “I’m just saying. Talk to him and don’t let him beat her hard. Just enough to keep her from—”

In the past week or so, after telling Philip that Drayle had refused to sell him to the free colored barber, she had noticed something new between the slaves. Tremors in their hands, unusually meek mock-smiles, glib “yessirs” and “thank yuhs.” Their movements were slack, tame, sluggish. She recognized the overextended supplications. And between the words, there was a quiet.

Lizzie did not believe Reenie would really try to escape. Reenie had family back at her place. But the forced nights with the manager could make any woman reckless. And George might follow her, if given a plausible chance. Maybe henry. Philip was
more distant than she’d ever seen him, so she was counting him as a possible runaway, too.

She would have to warn Mawu, caution her to lay a trick on Tip so he wouldn’t beat her too hard. Lizzie didn’t believe in spells, but since Mawu did it ought to work. She began to think of ways to sneak out to Mawu’s cabin before the night was over.

Drayle planted both hands on her shoulders. “What am I thinking, my sweet Lizzie. Of course you wouldn’t leave me. Why would you come tell me about these plans if you were going to go with this woman? come here.”

Lizzie walked willingly into the trap of his arms.

Y
’all need to know one thang and one thang only. These here United States will
never
be free for you. Y’all are slaves today and you will be slaves tomorrow. Your children will be slaves. And your children’s children will be slaves.”

He wielded the riding crop onto Mawu’s back. He was the only white man present. The others had excused themselves. Lizzie stood among the slave men and women. Even Sweet, with her protruding belly, was made to stand witness. Two white women sat on chairs fanning themselves and watching intently from a distance.

The whip was small, a thin riding crop that barely broke the skin. But just as Lizzie congratulated herself on Drayle keeping his promise by making sure that the whipping would not be so severe, Tip showed them who he really was. He stripped off Mawu’s clothes, tearing her dress into shreds until she was lying flat naked.

“Look at her! Look at her!” Tip prodded Mawu between her butt cheeks with the whip. “I won’t stop until every eye is on me.”

They all turned in Tip’s direction, but Lizzie knew they had
each carefully shuttered their eyes to keep from seeing. From the look of Mawu’s limp body, it appeared the girl had passed out. Lizzie thought she herself would pass out, too. She could not pick up her feet, move her arms. She had only told on Mawu because she cared about the woman, admired her.

Tip undid his pants and mounted Mawu from behind, pulled her up onto her knees. With the first thrust into her, Lizzie knew Mawu was still conscious. Mawu yelled like an animal, a shriek so cold and shrill that Lizzie knew that he had done something unnatural. And he had done it in front of all of them.

One of the white women uttered a high-pitched “oh” and placed a handkerchief to her mouth. But neither of them stopped looking. A line of blood trailed down Mawu’s thigh.

When he was done, he said in a hoarse whisper that carried above the wind as he turned toward them: “If I hear word that any of you other niggers is thinking about escaping, I swear as God is my witness I will do that and worst to every last one of you. I will make you
wish
you was in the fields under the lash. I will make you
wish
you was dead. And I won’t leave a mark.”

Lizzie tried to stop the pain in her head. The resort had lulled her into feeling human again. Had she glanced around at the others, she would know it had done the same to them. They had forgotten to protect themselves.

“Don’t touch her. Don’t nobody touch her,” Tip said, stumbling back to his cottage.

The slaves started to move off, heading back to their unfinished tasks as if nothing had happened. Only Lizzie stood rooted. Her eyes clung to the ground a few feet away from Mawu’s still body. She put her forearm into her mouth and bit down until she tasted blood. She wanted to hurt herself.

She sucked at the blood until it no longer flowed, until she felt dizzyingly empty.

S
omewhere between Mawu’s beating and Philip’s disappointment and Reenie’s long walks to the hotel each evening, their spirits buckled one by one. Sweet allowed her pregnancy to get the better of her and simply sat down. Reenie’s lips set into a straight, emotionless line. Mawu no longer talked back, the words she did speak taking on an air of vapidity. Philip was chained at night, no longer trusted. So it was no wonder that Lizzie sought out the white woman then.

Although they never said it outright, it was clear to Lizzie the women were upset that she had told. Yet even their anger could not compete with her guilt. She was the one who took tense breaths each time she saw Mawu’s bruised face. She was the one who recoiled when one of them turned a stiff, humped shoulder in her direction.

Shame stretched Lizzie’s face into false smiles, placed a kind word here and there on her lips, extended a ready helping hand.
She imagined them talking about her in the quiet when she wasn’t around.

She had been dreaming of the path to Glory’s farm, so she found it without a problem. After catching sight of the lone figure in the field and glancing around for watchful eyes, Lizzie rapped on the door. Glory answered and stared at her evenly, either unsurprised or hiding it. Only when the two women had settled comfortably in the main room of the cabin near the window where Glory could keep an eye out for her husband did Lizzie shake off her head scarf, swat at the fly that had been nagging her since she entered, and relax her hands in her lap.

Thin, faded quilts sagged across the backs of each chair. Out of respect, Lizzie tried not to lean back into the one on her chair. In the corner, a pot-bellied stove sat rusted, still full of the ash of the winter, as a reminder the hot, sultry summer would soon end and snow would fill the cabin doorstep once more. Three hooks on the wall, two holding overalls for a smallish man, freshly washed, as if each morning Glory’s man stepped into his slops, laced up his boots, spooned up his meal, and walked out the door.

“Thirsty?”

Lizzie nodded and started to get up, but Glory beat her outside and returned in a moment with a tin of cold water.

“Best thing about living around here.”

“What?” Lizzie patted her neck dry with her scarf. The air in the room felt oily.

“The water.”

Lizzie took the cup, announced a clear distinct thank you. She felt she was mimicking somebody else’s manners. It was odd, having this waxy-faced white woman serve her. The cup might even be the same one Glory’s husband drank out of. Northern white folks were something else entirely.

“Something bothering you?”

Lizzie hadn’t known it until that very moment, but something
was bothering her. Her feet. The blister on her left thumb. Her stuff down there, worn sore by the endless nighttime activity. She fumbled with embarrassment, tried to forget she was sitting before a strange white woman, groped with the knowledge that Glory could not understand her. The gulf was too deep, too wide.

L
izzie, wake up! come quick!”

Lizzie heard the sibilant whisper through her window. It was loud enough to wake her but not Drayle. She hurried out of bed, knowing the nighttime call could only mean one thing. Sweet was ready to deliver. By the time she got outside her cottage, the servant was gone, returned to her room, her errand complete. A light flickering in one of the cottage windows beckoned Lizzie like a finger.

Lizzie got to work before they had a chance to ignore her. Reenie sat beside Sweet drying her forehead with a cloth. Mawu dipped a pile of rags into a pot of boiling water. Lizzie gathered a stack of blankets, linens, some moth-eaten, others torn, stained. In the quarters back at her plantation, the women used a birthing chair. Here, Sweet would deliver on the bed. Lizzie shook out the blankets and layered them, one on top of the other, so they would provide a barrier between Sweet’s labor fluids and the hard bed below. Momentarily disturbed, dust swirled and hovered in the moist air like stars.

Lizzie gave Reenie the signal everything was ready. Reenie spoke softly to Sweet who lay there, wet with exhaustion, her eyes slits of discomfort.

“I need for you to stand.”

As soon as she said it, a labor pain racked Sweet’s body and she heaved herself up, the bones in her neck jutting out like cords. She moaned, low and vicious, more like a growl. She was a mean
birthing woman and spit venom at Reenie. As the pain gathered strength, Sweet grew louder. Even though the cottage was already so hot the walls were damp with moisture, Lizzie closed the windows. It would do none of them any good if Sweet’s swearing woke the men. She slid a pasteboard square from beneath the stove, shook off the loose soot, and fanned Sweet with it.

“Get up, now. Get up,” Reenie urged when Sweet’s pains had subsided.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You got to get up and walk so you can bust your bag of waters.”

Reenie helped to lift her up. She and Mawu walked Sweet around the room for over an hour, supported her when she had a pain so strong it made her collapse. Lizzie sat and watched.

“I can’t walk no more,” Sweet said.

They got her back onto the bed. Lizzie sat behind her and cradled Sweet’s head between her legs. She remembered her own labors. Reenie reached into Sweet’s womb and worked her hand around. They waited, hoping Reenie would be able to find the bag quickly.

When the pain started up again, Reenie drew her hand out. Sweet had several more labor motions while Mawu rubbed her feet and Reenie talked her through it.

Reenie was as good as anybody at birthing a baby. But Sweet didn’t look good. No birthing woman ever looked good in Lizzie’s opinion. She had seen what looked to be easy, quiet, and simple turn into a death scene. She had seen woman and child survive large amounts of blood while another woman and child died in the clean of a warm blanket.

So the bloody patch that spread like a flower on the linens beneath Sweet’s womb only mildly stirred them. Mawu rearranged the blankets to keep her dry. Reenie said “somebody take hold of a leg” and reached her long fingers into Sweet’s womb once
again, working furiously. Sweet let out an open and full scream from the middle of her belly, and it lasted so long that she wore herself out.

“I think us need to go fetch her man,” Mawu said.

Lizzie pictured the man sleeping soundly in one of the rooms in the hotel. He was far from being a worried father. His celebration would be less over a newborn child and more over a newly acquired piece of property. She was pretty sure he hoped for a son. Sweet did, too. Three of her four children were girls. Tomorrow, he would sit with the other men and debate over when would be too soon to put the child to work. They would argue over whether it was better to put him in the fields or treat him like the halfway son, halfway human they believed he was and allow him to work and live in the house.

“Yeah, maybe he wants to be here,” Lizzie said.

“I ain’t talking to you,” Mawu snapped.

“Shut up, both of you,” Reenie said. “You thinks her man gone appreciate you waking him up in the middle of the night? Us can catch this baby our own selves.”

So they waited. And after some time had passed, Sweet’s bag of waters finally burst.

M
e too,” Glory said.

“You too what?”

“I’m lonely out here too. I don’t really have too many friends.”

“What makes you think I’m lonely? I’ve got the other womenfolks.” Lizzie finished her water and aligned her feet beneath the rough-hewn table. She placed her features exactly where she wanted them. She didn’t want this white woman figuring her thoughts anymore.

“That’s right. So why else would you come here? You know me and you both could get in trouble.”

“Tell me something. Why do you and your man live out here all by yourself? Why don’t you live around the rest of society?”

“My husband, he likes it. He likes living out here.”

“How come?”

“This is where he’s from. The country.”

“He owns all this land?”

“No. He just farms it.”

Lizzie considered that.

“You like it out here, too?”

“I suppose it’s all right. I ran away from my family to marry him. They didn’t approve.”

“Were you rich and he poor?” Lizzie thought of Fran and Drayle and how her family had disapproved of him. The only thing that had saved him was his talent with horses. He had been little more than a horse trainer, a hired hand, a mouthy charmer when she met him.

“Naw. Simpler than that. They just didn’t like the looks of him. Said it was something about him they didn’t trust.”

“Were your parents like you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know.” Lizzie couldn’t express what she meant in words.
Were they like you
,
a white woman that doesn’t mind us
, she wanted to say.
A white woman that doesn’t mind sharing her cup with a slave-woman.

“Huh uh. I suppose that’s what made it so easy for me and him to become religified. Being disowned makes you change a lot of things about yourself.”

Lizzie studied Glory with a freedom she had never exercised with a white woman. She wanted to ask about her religion, why she dressed the way she did—the gray dress, bonnet, long hair—but instead, she said: “how do you feel about him?”

“What do you mean? he’s my husband.”

“You feel something in your insides for him?”

Glory paused. “I suppose he’s all right.” Lizzie noted that she spoke of him in the same voice she’d spoken of living in the country. “Yeah. I do love him.”

Lizzie smiled. At least they had that in common.

T
he baby would not come.

They did everything they could to get the baby out. Mawu stretched Sweet’s leg out wide while Lizzie lay across her belly and pushed down as hard as she could. As the labor pains came closer together, Reenie rubbed more oil onto Sweet’s perineum. They all had sense enough to know that if the baby didn’t come soon, as fast as the labor pains were coming, both Sweet and the baby would be in trouble. When Lizzie wasn’t bearing down, she was praying, sometimes in her head, sometimes out loud.

Sweet’s cursing had progressed from them to their mammies, and she was now working on cursing God. Her palms were scratched where she had balled her fists hard enough to break the skin with her fingernails.

Sweet’s man came by after the sun was up, the smell of coffee and whiskey on his breath, and ordered somebody to fetch the doctor. He struck Reenie across the back of the head with a rolled-up newspaper for allowing Sweet to suffer through the night. He swore that if his baby died, he would blame them all. Lizzie smiled. He shouldered his rifle and left.

“Told you,” Mawu couldn’t resist saying.

Reenie looked up. “Don’t you know nothing? If us had of woke him, he would of struck me for disturbing his sleep. Ain’t no way to win, child.”

When Lizzie had given birth to her second child, Drayle hadn’t
slept the entire night. She had learned this firsthand from one of the house slaves who waited on him while he sat in the parlor drinking. He had been determined that the medicine woman who was called upon to help birthing slaves in trouble would not maim his child with her herbs so Lizzie had been given nothing for her pain. There were a couple of white doctors in the area of the plantation whose main duty was to tend animals. But rarely was a doctor in that part of Tennessee sent for a laboring woman, white or colored.

This Ohio doctor arrived more rapidly than they would have expected. He was a young man who would have looked older had he worn a mustache. His bearing was not a convincing one for someone who was supposed to possess a secret knowledge. He carried a wide, thin box and placed it on the table beside the bed. His first words were to order them to open the windows, and he hadn’t been there five minutes before he requested a bowl of cold water. Lizzie brought it in, thinking he would use it to douse Sweet. Instead, he dipped his hands into it and splashed the water onto his own face. Lizzie handed him a dry cloth.

“How long has she been laboring?” he asked.

“All night, sir,” Reenie said.

“Hmph,” he said. He sat in Reenie’s chair and after a few minutes seemed to nod off into his own thoughts.

“She doesn’t appear to want to open up,” Lizzie said, trying to rouse him.

“Huh? Where is her husband?” he asked.

The women halted in their places. He had not asked, and they had assumed that he knew that Sweet was negro. Sweet was pale with clear gray eyes and a wide flat face. Her top lip was smaller than her bottom, and her thick hair was pulled back off her face. They could see how he made the mistake even if she did appear plainly colored to them. But hadn’t the person who fetched the doctor told him that a slave woman was having a baby? It wasn’t
unusual that colored women would be attending a white laboring woman, especially one from the South. Lizzie felt disoriented by northern ways. What would he do if he knew? Perhaps he was a kind man. On the other hand, perhaps he would feel misled by their unintentional dishonesty. Sweet was almost unconscious with pain. They couldn’t let him leave just yet.

“He went hunting,” Reenie said.

A half-truth. Yes, he had gone hunting. No, he was not her legal husband and never would be.

“Well, he should know that his wife and the child are in grave danger,” the doctor said.

He opened a box and selected a metal tool with handles like scissors and two long arms. Mawu opened her mouth as if about to say something, but then closed it.

“Get some more dry cloths,” he told them.

Lizzie did as she was told. When she returned, the doctor had taken hold of the baby with the ends of his clamp and was pulling the baby out by the head.

“It’s coming, it’s coming,” Reenie told Sweet who was too weak to push any longer.

A head full of black curly hair. It entered Lizzie’s mind for only a moment that the doctor might soon understand the true “nature” of his patient, but she forgot all about it as she marveled at the instrument he was using to pull the baby out. She had never seen anything like it. He wasn’t as ignorant as he looked after all. She couldn’t wait to go back to the plantation and tell. He stretched Sweet with one hand while he tugged with his clamp with the other.