Six slaves sat in a triangle, three women, three men, the men half nestled in the sticky heat of thighs, straining their heads away from the pain of the tightly woven ropes. The six chatted softly among themselves, about the Ohio weather, about how they didn’t mind it because they all felt they were better suited to this climate. They were guarded in their speech, as if the long stretch between them and the resort property were just a Juba dance away.
The men nibbled and sucked at yellow flowers, spitting the seeds into the water tins beside them, offerings they would make to the women when they were done. The women parted the hair with their fingertips, meticulously straightened lines crisscrossed like checkerboards. They warmed a waxy substance in their hands and spread it onto the hair. Two of the men had silky coils that stretched long. The other one had hair so short the plaits stuck out like quills.
They watched as the stranger approached. She balanced a basket on her head, the way they had in the old country. They could tell from the way the woman’s skirt moved the fabric was a good one. But what was most striking about her was the bush of red hair that sprayed out from beneath the basket like a mane. None of them had ever seen hair so red on a colored woman.
Reenie, the oldest of the group, spoke first. “You staying at Tawawa?”
“Yeah.” The red-headed woman took a careful survey of the group. Two of the women looked to be about her age. The oldest of them, the one questioning her, had yellowed, rheumy eyes that still maintained a sharpness. The men-twins and a third one with a flickering cheek-looked well fed and healthy. “Mawu.”
“What?” said the old woman.
“That be my name. Mawu.”
“I ain’t never heard a name like that,” Lizzie said. “How do you spell it?” Lizzie was proud of the fact that she could spell.
Mawu did not answer. She pulled at her left earring.
The slaves examined the red-headed woman as if she had just dropped from another world. They were unashamed in their curiosity, boldly eyeing the freckled hands, the unruly hair, and the two small earrings that bent the sunlight.
The stranger let them look, accustomed to such invasions.
Sweet spoke up. “Us can plait your hair.”
Lizzie instantly wished she had thought first to ask. She wanted this creature with the strange name to be trapped in the curve of her own strong thighs.
Yet Mawu only regarded Sweet and her swollen stomach with a pitying look. She lifted a hand to her crotch, as if to warn off the misfortune that had resulted in Sweet’s circumstance.
“No,” said Mawu. “Tip wouldn’t like it.” She gathered the skirt and waved it about, boasting that the fabric was the result of keeping this “Tip” happy. But the three slave women responded with a tacit acknowledgment that this Tip was no different from theirs.
“Sit with us for a spell,” one of the twins offered, pointing to the thickest patch of grass.
Lizzie was certain Mawu would decline the invitation, so she was surprised when the woman set down her basket, pulled up her skirt, and gathered her legs beneath her.
“They call me Philip,” said the man between Lizzie’s legs. He liked the looks of this one. He also liked the way she talked-a melodic accent that pulled at the corners of her mouth. He hadn’t taken a woman in months, and hadn’t had a woman of his own in years. But something about her-maybe it was the hair-warned Philip that his interest shouldn’t be of the permanent kind. “And this here is henry and this is George. They brothers. I suppose these here women can introduce theyselves, but I can save them the trouble. This here is Reenie, they call this one Sweet, and the one here behind me is Lizzie. Me and Lizzie from the same plantation down in Tennessee.”
Mawu added, “I come from Louisiana,” although no one had asked.
Reenie nodded briefly and the other two women took that as a sign to go back to their work. The men tilted their heads again and popped the flowers into their mouths. Lizzie’s hands were working on Philip, but her eyes were working on the lioness. She watched as Mawu looked off into nowhere, and so was the first to see Mawu’s lips pucker and begin to hum something light. It sounded like it had some spirit in it, but it was no tune Lizzie had ever heard.
Mawu adjusted her melody, stringing together short rhythmic phrases here and there, the way the conjuring man had taught her. The mustard seeds plunked into the tin cups like drumbeats beneath her voice. When the seeds were all spent, she ended with a flourish. An appreciative silence followed.
“How long y’all gone be up here this summer?” Reenie asked, resuming their lazy conversation.
“Drayle says he wants to stay four weeks,” Lizzie answered for her and Philip. “The missus says she wants Philip back so he can train this new hand they’re buying.”
“Us too,” Reenie said. “Four weeks.”
This was the second summer at the vacation resort for the six slaves. Three of the Southern men brought their slave women with them, first on ships and then riding in separate train cars after they entered free territory and boarded the Little Miami Railroad in Cincinnati. None of the Southern men brought their wives. Reenie’s master had brought his wife up close to the end of the previous summer, and Sweet’s mistress was dead. Lizzie’s master, Drayle, had never mentioned the possibility of bringing his wife.
It was no secret many of the northern whites who stayed at the resort disliked slavery. Even more, they disapproved of the slave women staying in the cottages with the white men. The resort was set in an area populated by Quakers and Methodists who declared themselves antislavery. East of columbus, west of Dayton, sixty-four miles north of cincinnati, the resort cast together an unlikely association of white Southern planters, white northerners, free coloreds, and slaves. So the six slaves stuck close together, even avoiding the free black servants who worked in the hotel.
Now there would be one more, upsetting the easy balance of six. Lizzie guessed that Mawu was staying in a cottage like the rest of them. Surely Mawu’s man wouldn’t put her in the hot hotel attic with the rest of the servants and male slaves. She wanted Mawu to be in a cottage near hers. Even with Reenie and Sweet, Lizzie sometimes got lonely at this place. Reenie was always working, and Sweet was always tired. They all speculated on whether the woman was pregnant with twins, big as she was.
The twin named George switched positions so that Reenie could finish the other side of his head. “I hear tell of this place nearby. Colored folk. Free and fancy colored folk.”
“What you talking about, George?” Philip faced him.
“I heard them talking. It’s a place on the other side of them woods. It’s where the free folk go to have summertime. Just like this place, excepting it’s for us’n. All you got to do is walk right through them there woods.”
“Well, I ain’t never heard of such,” Lizzie said. “Free colored folk having summertime!”
Mawu edged so close Lizzie could smell her. “Well, Miss…what you say your name was?”
“Lizzie.”
“Miss Lizzie, you must not ever been off your place before. It’s plenty of free colored folk. Rich, too.”
“I know it’s free colored folk,” Lizzie snapped. “I am just saying I ain’t never heard of them having summer in the country the way the white folks do.”
“George is right,” Reenie said. “I hear the white folks talking, too. Say they can’t understand why they build this place so close to that one.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment. They knew that Reenie, the oldest of the women, didn’t lie. If she said she heard it, there wasn’t a truer fact.
“Just how far is it?” Philip asked as Lizzie braided the next to last plait.
“Close enough to walk. Yessir it is.” George rocked back and forth.
“Shh…” Reenie said. “Calm yourself. You know these trees got ears.”
They all looked around as if Reenie had actually seen the trees lean forward. Except for Mawu. She looked right at George.
“So when us going?” Mawu asked.
Sweet stopped plaiting. “Us? Go? Ain’t no womenfolks going nowhere.”
“Well, you sho ain’t going seeing as to your condition and all. But I want to see these rich colored folks.” Mawu challenged them all with her voice. Lizzie tried to picture this Mawu’s master, what kind of man Tip might be, what kind of place she lived on down in Louisiana.
“All right,” Lizzie said and patted Philip on the shoulder.
“Your hair look real nice,” Sweet said. “That ought to keep for as long as you here.”
“It’ll help with the heat. This sun is hot for sho,” Philip said. He stood and stretched his legs and caught Mawu admiring his body as he did so. He knew he was something to look at. He knew it from the comments of slave owners and slave traders. He stole a peek at the new woman.
Lizzie sensed something between them. He cast his eyes back at the ground, but Lizzie thought there might be a secret meeting later. She had known Philip since she was a girl.
George stood, too, as Sweet gave him a final pat.
“I don’t know why you don’t want us to plait your hair,” Reenie said to Mawu. Any of the other women would have heard and obeyed the command in Reenie’s voice, but Mawu just shook her head.
“Come on, Miss Lizzie.” Sweet beckoned her over. “Let me do your head.” Lizzie planted herself on the ground and leaned forward so Sweet could start in the back.
Reenie pushed henry out from her legs so he could follow the other two men who were already walking off. There was nothing left for her to do, so Reenie sat there glaring at Mawu as if her sudden uselessness were all her fault.
“You even know how to plait,” Reenie said in what didn’t even try to pass as an asking tone.
“Course I do. What kind of woman you think I is?” Mawu folded her arms across her chest.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Lizzie said, rising to the defense of Reenie. That woman had been too good to her to allow this red-headed, slow-talking woman to insult her.
“Well, I can sho see what kind of womens y’all is.”
Sweet let out a high-pitched belch. “What?”
“You heard me. Y’all ain’t talking about nothing, ain’t doing nothing. You probably run behind your mens all day sweeping up they dirt.”
Reenie calmed Lizzie with a touch of her toe on her friend’s calf.
Instead of words, instead of a tongue lashing she would remember until she left the camp, they gave Mawu silence. They rewarded the arrival of this seventh slave with a cold, thick wall of disregard. Treated her as if she weren’t there. Treated her as if she were an unfamiliar white woman sitting among them to whom they had no obligation. Sweet braided, Lizzie closed her eyes, and Reenie picked through the seeds the men had left.
Mawu sat there for a moment, waiting. Then she picked up her basket, perched it on her head, and walked stiff backed toward the resort.
Mawu waved her hands when she talked. She fluttered them about as if rearranging the air around her. There was a fluidity about the woman that made Lizzie take notice. At that very moment, she was stroking her bare chest right above her left breast, and Lizzie couldn’t stop following the movement.
Lizzie compared her own dark brownness to Mawu’s lighter hue. In her mind, she lined the two of them up side-by-side: legs, arms, waists, shoulders. Drayle had told Lizzie countless times she was pretty, but she’d never really believed it about herself. The shape of Lizzie’s face was squarish and strong. Someone had once commented that her thick eyebrows were becoming, but she’d always thought of herself as too hairy-it covered her legs and arms in a soft down, and instead of freckles like Mawu, she had been cursed with moles-fleshy ones, large and small across her chest and back. A particularly juicy one lay tucked in the corner above her left nostril, a final unfair flourish to her mannish face.
Mawu was freckled red, specks dotting her face like rain. She was petite with a short torso and long, thin legs. Her neck stretched long and seemed to be the only part of her body left unmarked. She had one pointed pinky nail that made Lizzie wonder how she worked with such a thing.
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.
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.
“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.
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 if 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 none 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The four women eyed the dresses with the knowledge that they only had two days to sew. Some of the dresses were ripped, torn. Others had holes still bearing the cracked, empty shells of moth cocoons. But they were a far cry from the “negro cloth” some of the slaves wore back on the plantations. Negro cloth was just another name for a coarse cotton, and when they wore it, it scratched their skin.
Lizzie chose one that the woman said was made of something called batiste and the color of a tangerine. Mawu commented that the dress was the perfect color for Lizzie’s dark skin and black hair. Mawu took a liking to a blue dress. It was not often that she got to wear color, and she didn’t believe she had ever worn anything blue.
For Sweet, it was docility unleashed. She chose the only empire waistline dress of the bunch and ripped the sleeves off because they were too tight on her arms. Even after she had let the dress out, the constricted bodice would push her breasts into two engorged maternal mounds.
Although they insisted that she choose first, Reenie chose an unbecoming dress. She was the only one of the four who did not plan a complete transformation. The dress she chose was out of season and would surely be too hot for a summer evening. It had a long train and high neckline. There were so many buttons down the back that it took two women to secure it. Some of the buttons were tight, and they decided they would need to let out an inch so the buttons wouldn’t bulge and pop. Sweet said it looked like Reenie was going to a funeral.
On the night of the dinner, when the dresses had been sewn and they had oiled their hair and faces and Mawu had rubbed aloe onto an unexplained fresh scar on her right cheek and Lizzie had darkened each woman’s eyes with a smudge of shadow, they walked to the hotel, unescorted by the men, holding each other through the arms, coupled two by two, excited about being ladies for a change. Reenie walked in front with Sweet, and Lizzie and Mawu walked just far enough behind so they wouldn’t trip on Reenie’s train.
The servants did not hide their curiosity as the slave women walked through the kitchen. Each woman had experienced a range of reactions from the slaves back home: jealousy, pride, pity. Here in Ohio, they had not spoken much about what the free colored people thought of women like them. This was partly because they did not care. They had each other, unlike down south. There, it was a lonely battle.
They stepped carefully because the servants’ stairs were steep. At the top of the stairs, another servant met them and pointed the way to the library that had been set up as a dining room so as to spare the other guests the sight of white men and slave women eating together.
They could hear the voices of the men as they approached the door. Once they were inside, the doors were closed behind them with a firm click of the lock. Each of them took in the room: the soft glow of the lamps casting an amber light, the smell of the leather-bound books, the white tablecloth and delicate dishes, the freshly cleaned floors. The room had no windows, and this fact along with the low ceiling made the room, despite its spaciousness, feel intimate.
A trio of colored musicians filed into the room from a door within the bookcase and collected themselves in the corner. Sweet admired their clothing. She knew firsthand the difficulty of sewing the ruffles that streamed down the front of their white shirts. Their pants were black and tight like riding pants. Faces greased to a shine, they moved as if one body, silent and practiced. Once they had set up, one of them lifted his head and when he lowered it, they all hit the first note together.
The music was light. It made Lizzie feel as if she would rise up off the floor. Even though there wasn’t even a hint of religiosity in the music, Lizzie couldn’t help but be moved by the unfettered talent of the freedman. She tried not to stare at the musicians as she took her place beside her Master. She did not want him to think she found them attractive.
Lizzie knew for a fact that Drayle had suggested an evening such as this the summer before. The other men had protested, and it had never happened. Imagine, they’d said, if their wives knew they were letting these slave women dress up like ladies and dine with them at a full-service dinner table! This summer, the men had finally agreed to Drayle’s suggestion. It made Lizzie proud to know her Master had been so thoughtful.
Drayle held out his hand. She reached out for him. He wore a thin summer suit and his sun-chapped face was freshly shaven. In her eyes, he was as handsome as a preacher. She touched his face. His cheek was cool in her palm.
“Would you care to dance?”
She answered in a voice that didn’t quite sound like her own. “Why thank you, Nathan.” She called him by the name that only Fran used. It was not lost on him. Three lines appeared in his forehead, and then relaxed into faint etchings.
Lizzie sneaked a quick peek at the others. Mawu was standing next to Tip looking bored. From the looks of him, he was already drunk. Reenie was filling Sir’s pipe with tobacco as he engaged in a conversation with a man sitting in a high-backed leather chair beside him. Reenie tapped the edge of the pipe bowl against a nearby bookcase to settle the tobacco. She performed her chore methodically, as if she had done it countless times. Sweet’s man had plunged his face into her cleavage and Lizzie could hear her tinny laugh.
“That’s some dress.”
“Tangerine,” Lizzie said.
“What?”
“The lady that brought it said it is tangerine.”
“Ah,” he said.
Drayle moved her hips back and forth, and once they had settled into a comfortable rhythm, he rested the tip of his chin on her head.
The lighting in the room was dim, so dim Reenie had trouble filling the pipe. It was as if the white men were afraid that if it were too bright in the room, they might remember they were about to dine with a group of well-dressed colored women.
The hotel manager entered and stood in the corner, surveying the room. His eyes kept returning to the women. When the manager’s eyes found Lizzie, she tried to steer Drayle around so she could put her back to the manager, but Drayle was leaning too heavily on her. She knew that look in the manager’s eyes, and she did not want to be the object of it. She turned her head into Drayle’s chest and when she took another peek, she saw he was now focused on Reenie. Reenie’s high-necked stance had stiffened. The bag of tobacco dangled from her fingers as if forgotten.
Someone rang a glass dinner bell and the couples took their places at the table. Mawu maneuvered Tip around to Lizzie’s side and slipped into the seat next to her. The northern guest sat on one side of the table, unaccompanied. No introductions of any kind were made.
“They gone serve us?” Mawu whispered.
“I reckon so,” Lizzie answered.
A servant with bumps covering his chin and neck unfolded Mawu’s napkin and spread it across her lap with a flourish.
“Ain’t this something?” Mawu fingered the cloth.
Lizzie was fascinated by the free servants. They floated into the room like angels and held the dishes aloft like sacrificial offerings, announcing each dish as if they were presenting a guest. Lizzie tucked the display into her mind so she could try to emulate it later. She wanted to serve dinner back at the place like free colored folk did it. She wanted to slide the spoons onto the table with crisp, little movements, pour wine with a flourish at the end, shake out a napkin with a soft pop of the fabric. The servants announced a turtle soup. Lizzie could smell it as the bowl came her way. She did not wait for the others to be served, plunging her spoon into the thick, red soup. She tried to separate the flavors in her mouth: onion, tomato, cayenne. The turtle meat was a bit chewy, but well flavored.
“I can make a real good turtle soup,” Mawu whispered to Lizzie, leaning over Tip. “This ain’t nothing.”
“You mentioned this morning that you might have a horse for sale?” asked Sweet’s Master.
“Yes, yes,” answered Drayle. “He’s only got one eye, but he’s fast as lightning.”
“Good with children?”
Drayle put down his spoon. “What age are we talking?”
Sweet’s master pawed her hand. She rested the other hand on the lid of her stomach. “For Sweet’s oldest boy,” he said.
Drayle picked his spoon back up. He did not look at Lizzie who was watching him and waiting for his response. Surely he would be honest about the horse, she thought.
“A horse with only one good eye? That doesn’t sound like a deal,” said the northerner. He had a thick mustache that he kept licking with quick darts of his tongue. He obviously had not caught that Sweet’s master was intending to buy the horse for his slave son. “How much you want for it?”
Drayle laughed. “We’re old friends. We can talk price later. I’ll make it worth the trip out to my farm, I can promise-”
“Horses won’t do you no good if we go to war.” Sir sniffed.
“Nobody’s going to war,” Tip said, belching loudly. “I’ll be damned if I let some Yankee take away my hard-earned property.”
The northerner laughed nervously as if to assure them that although he was a northerner, he was no Yankee. “What would the country do with a bunch of freed niggers anyway?”
The servant announced a beef dish.
Mawu spoke. “Master Taylor say if us go to war, he gone free me first. Say he’ll be damned if the Yankees get me.”
“Shut up, Betsy. I never said nothing like that.”
This caught the attention of the other three women. Betsy? That was her given name?
“Yeah, you did.”
Tip pinched her on the arm, and although it looked playful, Mawu rubbed the flesh he had grabbed.
The manager of the hotel entered the room again. He said something to one of the servants who came and leaned down beside Sir and whispered in his ear. Sir excused himself and followed the manager into the corridor.
“Let’s talk about more pleasant things,” said the northerner. He rested his small hands on each side of his plate and licked his mustache. “How is the new Fugitive Slave Law working, do you think?”
Drayle pulled at the lapels of his dinner jacket. “I’m proud to say that I don’t have such problems. My slaves are all trustworthy and docile. They would rather live on my farm any day than try to come up north and deal with these cold northern winters. Isn’t that right, Lizzie?”
“Yessir,” she said in a soft voice.
“If the federal government keeps sticking their nose in places it doesn’t belong,” said Tip, “then the Fugitive Slave Law won’t make any difference whatsoever. We’ve got to protect our own interests. Who are they to tell me, a God-fearing man, how to run my business affairs?”
Lizzie had heard about this law. That was one reason she was scared of Mawu’s plan. She had tried to explain that to the other slaves, but they didn’t seem to care. They were used to slave patrols, they said. A northern dog was no different than a Southern dog, they said.
“All you got to do is make the reward money high enough. That’ll catch a slave, for sure,” Tip continued.
“I’m not worried about anybody ending slavery anytime soon.” Drayle stared directly at the northerner. “This country has been built by men like us.”
The bumpy-faced servant refilled the men’s glasses with wine.
Sir returned and Reenie searched his face.
The manager beckoned to Sir from the doorway again, and he stood once more. They discussed something heatedly for a moment. Then Sir called Reenie over.
Reenie’s napkin fell to the floor as she got up from the table. Sir took her by the elbow and a loud “no” erupted from her.
“What’s going on?” Mawu asked no one in particular.
The dessert plates sat untouched. Reenie and Sir’s voices drifted over to the table.
“Naw, naw, naw.”
“Shut up woman and do as I say.”
“I ain’t doing it. Sir, please!”
Lizzie pushed back her chair, but Drayle grabbed the loose fabric of her dress.
Sir pushed Reenie into the hallway, and she pushed back. The manager stood looking up at her, for now that she was standing next to him, it was clear she was the taller of the two.
Mawu managed to escape Tip and made her way over to the struggling couple.
“Let her go.” Mawu grabbed Reenie’s other arm.
“You stay out of this and mind your business,” the manager said. When he turned his head and the light caught his profile, Lizzie and Sweet could see that he was sweating.
“Let her go, let her go, let her go,” Mawu said, pulling and breathing heavily.
“Drayle,” Lizzie whispered. Drayle took a sip of his wine.
Sweet whimpered and started to cry. Her master rubbed her back.
Lizzie watched as Reenie’s body went limp, as if breathing out its last bit of energy into the darkened room. The soft sound of her false teeth clicking together ebbed until there was silence. Sir and Mawu let go of her.
The manager raised his head. “There, there now,” he said to Reenie. Lizzie could see Reenie’s face clearly now. She had the look. The look of a woman who is done fighting. The look of a woman months after her children have been sold from her. The look of a slave who has decided it is better not to feel. All three of the women recognized what they saw on her face.
Reenie followed the manager into the corridor and they disappeared. Lizzie watched the gaping hole, the space where Reenie had just stood.
“How could you?” Mawu said to Sir.
He cracked his hand across her cheek.
“Don’t you ever come between me and my slave woman again, you hear me?”
Tip rose out of his seat. “Goddamnit, that’s my property!”
Mawu felt her face where the still-fresh scar had just been opened up again. She examined the blood on her fingers as if it weren’t her own. Sir returned to the table and a servant slipped through the side door and passed him a wet cloth to wipe the blood from his hands.
“Now, what’s this y’all are saying about a one-eyed horse?” Sir curled his lips into a grin. The servant returned with a bottle of wine. Sir took it from him and drank a long swallow directly from the lip of the bottle.
Lizzie looked at the light twisting through her empty glass. She couldn’t drink or eat another bite. The music and the sound of the men’s voices faded. She let the silence take her. When she finally looked up, the seat beside her was empty and Mawu was nowhere to be seen. Her master Tip was gone also.
But across from Lizzie, in the place where Reenie was supposed to be sitting, was a yellow-haired white woman with red-rouged cheeks. Sir had his face in her neck.
Reenie and Lizzie were told to pluck and prepare the birds the men brought back from their hunting trip. The two women sat on the ground and spread the dozen or so birds out. The evening sun was behind them and the half moons in their armpits had dried. Each woman took a bird, dipped it in a washtub of hot water, and pulled out the feathers in handfuls, their hands slick against the warmed skin. Once they had established an easy, quiet rhythm, they spoke in hushed tones.
“Tell me your story, Reenie.”
Reenie looked up at her younger friend sharply. Stories didn’t get told unless they had to. Stories were for remembering, and none of the women wanted to tell how they had gotten there. When they told their stories, they preferred to tell the ones about that faraway place. They preferred to tell ones they had patched together in their heads, hundreds of oral remnants whispered in dark slave cabins.
This was what Lizzie knew about Reenie: She lived on a plantation not far from Lizzie in Tennessee. They hadn’t known each other before visiting Tawawa, but when they spoke about it, they thought they might be kin. Two of Reenie’s cousins had been hired out the previous winter to work where Lizzie lived, and she had gotten to know them well. The first summer at Tawawa, Lizzie and Reenie had spent hours exchanging names, searching for a real connection and the fact that they hadn’t discovered any blood didn’t lessen the affection between them.
Reenie had an extended family on her plantation, and though some had been sold off over the years, they were remarkable for the numbers that remained. In fact, her plantation was made up of several families. The way Reenie told it, each of these families did their work together, and if one member fell ill, the others took up the slack. If a new slave was bought, the families would meet to decide which “family” he would join. Sometimes, according to Reenie, there was even a bit of friendly competition between families. This was different from Lizzie’s plantation, where the slaves toiled each for himself, suffering their individual punishments if they failed to complete a day’s work.
“Why you asking?”
Lizzie shrugged. “Wondering is all.” She did not say she had been worried about Reenie ever since the older woman had begun her nightly visits to the manager’s suite in the hotel.
Reenie stuck her finger in a hole on the bare skin and dug out the bird shot. She tossed it to the side and continued to pull feathers, more slowly and deliberately than before.
“He my brother,” she said, her voice low and flat.
Lizzie almost dropped the bird she was dipping into the tub. “Who’s your brother?”
She wiped at her runny eye with the back of her arm. “Sir.”
Lizzie tried to digest the news. She had heard about such things.
“So your daughter, the one that got sold off…”
“Sho. She my daughter and my niece.” now Reenie was yanking the feathers out, one by one. Her dark forehead shone in the red dusk.
“So I fixed myself,” Reenie said. “I fixed myself so he couldn’t make no more childrens. My family helped me. All the womens and mens gathered round me and prayed over me. All night, they went right on praying. Then right before the sun started to gather herself up, us fixed it so it wouldn’t happen no more.”
Lizzie heard the crack of a rifle in the distance.
“Wasn’t the first time the womens had done it. But I was a youngun. Fourteen and my baby was still nursing. I was still peering in her face near about every day wondering when God was gone strike his fury on her.” The dead bird lay limp, belly up in her lap, its head cradled in the crook of her groin. “But didn’t nothing happen. She just got prettier and prettier. And smaaaaaart, too. No sooner than her teeth start to growed, and she was walking and talking.”
“Did he…did he still mess with you?”
Reenie grinned, her false teeth eerily large and white. “Sho, honey. Ain’t nothing change. Ain’t nothing gone ever change about that, I reckon.”
So different from what she had with Drayle. She loved him. He loved her. And even more, he was good to her. Hadn’t he fixed the leaky cabin roof that was dripping on his children’s heads? hadn’t he given the slaves Sunday mornings off when she told him about their secret worship meetings? hadn’t he rubbed her feet countless times when she was tired from cooking all day? hadn’t he protected her after she was attacked on the ship?
“Sir’s daddy took my own mammy before she got her first blood. She give him three childrens before he died. He weren’t yet cold in the ground when the missus had my ma whipped in front of everybody. As a punishment for her sins, she called it. Not long after, my ma disappeared. Just up and disappeared while we was working in the fields one day. None of us knowed what happened. Maybe she run off. Maybe she was sold off by the missus in the middle of the night. Maybe she dead.”
Lizzie tried to picture Reenie’s mammy. Such things were possible. A proud woman, tall with Reenie’s stiff back and long neck, rose in Lizzie’s mind. Like Reenie, she would be so strong that even a beating couldn’t break her. Some folks couldn’t be broken. Lizzie didn’t believe a woman in her right mind would just “up and leave” her children.
“Us wasn’t treated right, but the missus kept us on. Me and my two brothers still live in the same cabin Sir’s daddy built for my ma. When the missus got married again, her new husband decent enough. At least he ain’t go messing off in the slave cabins, and I reckon she would shoot him dead if he did.”
“But his son…”
“Made us call him Sir when he was still a boy right after his daddy died. Only took one beating for the whole lot of us to get the hang of it. I been calling him Sir ever since.”
Reenie picked up the bird in her lap and stretched out a wing. She pulled at the feathers along its edge.
But Lizzie didn’t feel like pulling feathers anymore. She took one of the birds that had already been plucked and cut through its neck with a small, sharp knife. She removed its head and pulled out the bloody gullet and the windpipe. She kept digging, and she was only satisfied when she had hooked her fingers into the lungs, pulled them out, and tossed them into the dust beside her.
Nearly a week after the dinner, more than ten days into the collective breath holding that had been gathering pressure since Mawu issued her challenge, the colored barber arrived to line the white men up in chairs along the porch of the hotel. The barber visited the resort once or twice a week. Some of the men wore beards, and would have the barber trim them after their haircuts. Others such as Drayle preferred a more clean-shaven look, and the barber would use a straight razor over their faces. This barber had a sterling reputation for keeping his razors sharp.
The barber’s daughter typically helped him. She worked as a maid in the hotel, but whenever her father visited she would come outside to assist. She’d wheel a tray onto the porch and open the leather carrying case holding his tools. Straight steel razors. Brushes. Scissors. Two leather strops. Cup and soap. She would moisten the bar of soap in the bowl of hot water so the lather would be ready to spread. Or she would hold the brass shaving bowl at the man’s neck if her father requested it.
She was a prettier and fatter version of her father, with softly rounded cheeks and light brown eyes. She had the kind of skin that came alive in the heat, glowed like a smooth dark stone. She kept her hair bound in a dirty rag, as if to diminish her beauty so the white men would not notice.
The white women had left early that morning to go bathe in one of the resort’s five mineral springs. The men stayed behind to be trimmed and shaved, and those who were not patiently waiting for the barber to service them had ventured out on the fifty-four-acre property to hunt for passenger pigeons. Except for the steady toil of the servants inside, the hotel was quiet.
Sweet was in her cottage repairing pants. Back on her plantation, she was considered a wizard with a needle and thread. So her master had given her several pants belonging to men staying at the resort. Reenie was in the private room of the hotel’s manager, waiting for him to return as he had ordered her to do.
Lizzie and Mawu stood at the well near the hotel pumping water into pails. Every few minutes, a hotel servant came out with two empty pails and carried two more full ones inside. His task was to empty and refill the washbasin in each room with fresh water. The two slave women had been instructed to help. Even among the most free-thinking of whites at the resort, no one seemed to relish the sight of the colored visitors idling. It was recognized that their primary duty was to their rightful owners, so the slaves tried to appear busy at all times. Lizzie and Mawu had been caught sitting under the tree in the shade, trying to escape the heat, when the manager ordered them to the well.
The two women could hear Drayle and Sir chatting on the porch. They had seen the ritual enough to know what was happening. The daughter was lathering the soap. The barber was stroking the razor across the strop. Back and forth in long even strokes, they could hear the whisking sound. Then silence. Then metal against leather again as he worked to keep the razor sharp.
“Sho, Mr. Drayle. I bought a slave before. They learn under me the barbering business.” The gray-haired barber was speaking exaggeratedly, as if he were not accustomed to the southern way of speaking but was making every effort to imitate it. They could tell when he was talking because air slipped through his teeth with a whistling sound.
Lizzie and Mawu strained to hear what they could. Mawu kept edging closer to the porch until she was crouched just beneath it. Lizzie continued to pump. It was hard to hear over the squeak of the pump, and she did not want to get in trouble. But Mawu changed the air around Lizzie, made her do things she normally wouldn’t. She stopped pumping.
“How do I know you’re going to treat my Philip right? he’s a right good hand, and I treat him better than most. What are you going to do with him? he doesn’t know anything about city living,” Drayle was saying. “He’s a horse man.”
Lizzie heard the words, but she was not sure she believed them. Was it possible the barber was trying to buy Philip? Mawu waved at her, then crouched down and disappeared beneath the porch. Lizzie looked at the back door, and ran over to the dark space beneath the porch to join Mawu. She crawled under it and followed. She looked behind her and saw the hotel servant come out of the back door. He put his hand to his eyes. He set down the empty pails and grabbed the remaining full ones. Then he went back into the hotel.
The ground was hard and dry against Lizzie’s knees. She placed a palm against it to steady herself. Sunlight peeked through the cracks of the porch. She looked up. She could just make out their silhouettes.
“You right, Mr. Drayle. I couldn’t never treat him good as you. I ain’t rich and powerful like you-”
Lizzie and Mawu waited tensely, listening to the dull scrape of the razor gliding across a face.
“Well, how can you afford his price? I don’t get how you can afford to just throw away that kind of money and get nothing in return,” Sir said.
“Oh, he’s getting something,” Drayle said. “Philip is a first-class nigger.”
“That nigger is liable to run off and leave you,” Sir added, ignoring Drayle’s comment. The last couple of words were muffled as if the barber working on him had placed a hot towel over his mouth.
“You right, you right. I can’t afford it. Your man is gone have to pay me back,” the barber said.
“Philip is one of my best hands. I just don’t think I can let go of him.”
“I understand, Mr. Drayle. I do understand.”
The girl coughed. She placed the strop back into its carrying case. The barber tipped Sir up and brushed the clipped hair off his shoulders.
Hard-soled shoes dragged across the wood porch and stopped with a thud right above their heads.
There was silence for a few long minutes. Lizzie frowned. True, Philip was a hard worker and a good slave, but Drayle could buy another horse man. And it sounded as if this barber had offered Drayle a fair price. It wasn’t like they were haggling over price. Drayle could easily buy a new slave the next time the trader came through. If Drayle wouldn’t let Philip have a fair shake, then…She couldn’t complete the thought.
“Well, what you say?” It was Sir’s voice. “You gone sell the nigger or what?”
“That’s my final answer, I’m afraid,” Drayle said, so softly they almost didn’t hear him. “I just couldn’t let go of Philip. Francesca-that’s my wife-would never forgive me.”
“I understand, Mr. Drayle. I do understand,” the barber said.
Even though the bargain had not been struck, Lizzie couldn’t help but be proud of Drayle. He had discussed the matter with the barber as if he were a white man. Most slave owners wouldn’t even have entertained the discussion, particularly with a free colored. They would have dismissed him outright. They might have even dealt him a blow just to remind him that his papers meant nothing, that he was only a train ride away from washing a white man’s feet, sharing his woman’s bed, toting bales of hay across his striped back.
Mawu motioned to her. It was time for them to leave. In a few minutes, the men would be up and moving quickly and the house servant would be returning for the next buckets.
“What you think about that girl?” Mawu asked. “The barber daughter.”
“What?”
“She clean rooms in the hotel.”
Lizzie thought it was an odd question. Why was Mawu asking her about the barber’s daughter? What did she have to do with this? Didn’t Mawu understand the significance of what they’d just heard?
“You don’t know?” Mawu looked at her.
“Know what?”
“The barber’ daughter and Philip. Them two got something going on.”
“Since when?”
“Hell, I don’t know girl. Ain’t this your second summer?”
So that was how Philip had gotten the barber to make an offer for him. “And the daddy is already trying to buy him?”
“I reckon so.”
“What kind of love is that?”
Mawu looked at her. “The real kind, I reckon.”
Something had definitely been going on with Philip. Lizzie and Philip were as close as brother and sister, and Lizzie knew when his mind was occupied. She had thought he might have a thing for Mawu. Why hadn’t he told her? Lizzie squinted at the sun as they pumped.
“Girl, it’s only one way out of slavery,” Mawu said once the hotel servant came out and told them these were the final two buckets of water. They splashed water onto their faces and dried their hands on their dresses. Lizzie fingered her mole, and Mawu walked toward the cottages. Lizzie tried to catch up.
“What do you mean?” Lizzie asked.
They spotted Philip helping a white man load large sacks onto a cart. He looked over at them. Mawu sped up without giving Philip a second look and without answering Lizzie’s question. And Lizzie realized she would be the one giving him the bad news.
How 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.
Somewhere 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.
Lizzie, 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.
Me 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.
The 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.
“Lay across her belly,” he instructed Reenie. Reenie bore down on Sweet’s belly and pushed while the doctor pulled and Lizzie stood by ready to swaddle the baby.
And now I got a question for you,” Glory said.
Before she asked, Lizzie knew that Glory’s question would mirror her own. It was a question many people thought about-slaves who watched as they went around in their better, but not quite good clothes and softer, but not quite soft feet, northern whites as they sat at the dining table and chose decorum over curiosity, wives who pretended to be asleep when their husband rose from their beds or never came to bed at all.
Did they love them? She couldn’t speak for the others. She could only speak for herself. And she could say, without reservation, that she did. During his last days, she knew she would care for him. And upon his death, she knew she would grieve like a widow although she could make no such claims.
Glory listened to this and something rose between the women. Lizzie couldn’t tell if it was mistrust or understanding, a rift or a tenderness. All she knew was something grew between the two women sitting at the oak table, sipping on empty cups, ignoring the fly buzzing around them. It grew between them like a tree trunk planted firmly in their wake. It mounted into a quiet that Lizzie would often think about when she remembered Glory years later.
Then he walked in.
Sweet gave birth to a dead thing. Dead in that it did not cry, did not move except to wave its nubbed hands and feet as if still scrambling in the womb. Reenie smacked it good and hard and it showed life by jerking in recoil. A day later it would be dead in the earthly sense. But for now, the doctor pronounced it healthy despite its hands and turned Sweet over to make her expel the afterbirth while Lizzie cleaned it off and tried to suck out whatever might be blocking its windpipe with her mouth.
The baby was a girl, her tiny body wrinkled with newborn worry.
The doctor did not wait for them to finish swaddling the baby. He left his bill on the table and told the women to bid the manager hello.
Lizzie believed there were only three ways to act when in the company of strange white men:
Don’t look them in the eye. In fact, pretend they’re not there. Walk a wide circle around them unless your master tells you otherwise.
Don’t look them in the eye, but wait on them without being asked. Get their water before they even know they’re thirsty.
Don’t look them in the eye, but answer. And if your eyes should meet theirs, give them a stern look that lets them know you are not available for their whims.
When Glory’s husband walked into his house, Lizzie went through the three choices in her mind. She couldn’t choose number two as his wife was right there. So it was either number one or three. She considered the choices before her and chose the first one. As soon as he entered, she sprang up from the table as if she had been caught looking through his personal things. But she had already caught a glimpse of him. He was older than Glory.
“Relax, Lizzie. We’ve had your kind in our house before,” Glory said.
Lizzie stuck to her choice and retreated to stand next to the wall behind her. Roosters cackled outside of the open window. She was aware that Glory’s man was home earlier than sunset, and she tried to guess why he might have returned. He placed his hat on the table.
“Glory, I hope you didn’t bring one of them girls home from Tawawa.”
“No, sir. She came here on her own.”
Lizzie could feel him studying her.
“Well, what does she want? Don’t go making me lose my work. That’s good money we make from Dr. Silsbee.”
“Nobody saw her.”
He addressed Lizzie directly. “Anybody see you walk out here?”
Since Lizzie had chosen rule number one, she didn’t answer. She would only answer if Glory encouraged it.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “Is she dumb?”
“Naw, she’s not dumb. You’re scaring her is all.”
“Get her out of here, Glory. We don’t need any trouble.”
He stooped and dragged a box from under the table.
“And you call yourself a Quaker,” Glory said quietly.
He hoisted the box up and tucked it beneath his arm before tossing his hat back onto his head and leaving out again without another word. Lizzie watched him from the corner of her eye.
“You better get going,” Glory said in a flat tone that was neither rude nor friendly.
The swath of familiarity they had cut minutes earlier dissolved. Lizzie retied her scarf and hurried through the still-open door.
Morning sunlight peeked into the cottage. The spirited whistles of sparrows did not move the melancholy resting on the women’s faces. Sweet’s too-quiet baby suckled at her breast. The mother rested peacefully. Mawu washed the birthing cloths with a steady brushing sound against the washboard in the yard behind the cottage. Sweet’s man believed that dirty birthing linens were diseased, and he had instructed them to wash and hang the linens as soon as the child was born.
Lizzie found solace working with the women to clean the cottage and prepare it for the return of Sweet’s master. She wanted the time she was spending with them to last for just a little while longer. Despite the doctor’s intrusion, Sweet’s labor had been women’s time. And cleaning, yet another form of labor, was also women’s time.
But she knew that this time would end and the others would remember her betrayal. Lizzie was of two minds. She wished she had not told. But if she hadn’t, Mawu might be dead. If she had run and been caught, there was no doubt in Lizzie’s mind that her friend wouldn’t have allowed herself to be taken alive. And what if the others had followed? Drayle had done the right thing. So had she. She wished they could understand why.
For now, she just kept in step with the chorus of chores.
The next morning, while Sweet was still asleep and her master had not yet returned to the cottage as he waited for the “air to clear,” the women discovered the baby dead in her arms. They wrapped it in layers of cloth and took it to Philip who summoned the other men to help him prepare a small grave. Then they returned to Sweet’s doorstep and lingered outside as they searched for the plainest words of compassion. The sound of her voice from inside broke their trance and quickened them into action.
“The baby? Where my baby? Where my girl?”
Reenie, in her usual manner, delivered the news. “Her Father took her.”
“Her father?” Sweet’s voice was hopeful, but in less time than it took to blink twice she understood, knew in her heart that Reenie meant Father and not father. And her face did not crack. She lay back, silent, as if all the wailing of childbirth had sucked her clean of any more sounds. And the trio of women who had known their own share of this kind of grief left her there, not coldly or callously, but with the understanding that she needed to be alone. Later, they would return to clean and dress her labor wound. But for now, they filed out, heads up, eyes as dry as they could muster.
Lizzie returned to her cottage to find Drayle just rousing from his sleep. He took the news quietly and asked if she wanted to kneel in prayer and she said yes. She whispered a fierce prayer, a tangled mess of biblical verses and cries of “have mercy, have mercy.”
When she was finished, he placed his hand on her head reverently, devoutly, as if he were a preacher anointing her. Something in his touch flowed through her and helped her to make peace with the loss, which for some reason felt like her own. Then he left her kneeling there in her own thoughts, just as they had left Sweet. And she stayed there for a moment, disoriented, alone.
Then she walked out of the cottage, down the worn path that led between the houses toward the woods. There was a post where Glory delivered eggs and freshly slaughtered chickens or hogs to the hotel each morning. It was a white post and on it was painted: TAWAWA HOUSE each morning, two servants, colored women from the hotel, met Glory there and took her bundle. Sometimes they were late, and often Lizzie had walked by and seen Glory standing there, waiting patiently with her bundle on the ground beside her.
It was early, and Lizzie was almost certain that Glory had not yet arrived for her daily delivery. She spied the white post in the blue light of the morning, its natural wood already beginning to etch through the paint.
She sat on the ground and waited for Glory, her legs tucked beneath her. She wondered if Glory knew the pain of a dead child. The woman did not have children even though she had long been of childbearing age. Surely she did, Lizzie thought. Surely she had her own heft of memories.
Lizzie watched the sun break over the tops of the trees and listened to the gurgle of a nearby creek. She witnessed two sparrows play catch-and-kiss. She waited patiently for the white woman.