The first night he went to Lizzie, she was soaked with a sticky wetness that clung to her. The door was more than cracked, but it hadn’t done much to relieve her in the small storeroom. She had extinguished her candle because even its flame sent off more heat than she could bear. One arm rested above her head on the moss-filled pallet and a foot was planted against the shelf, her legs propped wide. Looking back, she reckoned she must have looked as if she were waiting for him.
She had been owned by the Drayles for six full crop cycles before her master finally followed up on his incessant staring and came to her. Before she moved into the big house, she lived in a cabin with the blind woman they called Big Mama. Big Mama was known for her soap made from lye and crackling. It was good enough to sell to nearby plantations, and had turned a pretty good profit over the years. But the woman had been blinded when a vat of lye sputtered into both eyes. Lizzie spent the early years in the workyard with her. An area of the quarters sectioned off by chicken wire, the workyard was where clothes were sewn, mended, and boiled, slave food prepared, candles made, sausage ground, and butter churned. It also contained a small vegetable patch. At one end of the yard sat a long trough where the children ate their midday meal, sometimes scooping up the mush with long-handled wooden spoons but mostly using their fingers since there weren’t enough spoons to go around. Those who didn’t work in the fields stayed in the workyard most of the day. Lizzie had never been ordered to the fields. She stayed close by Big Mama’s side, filling in for the old woman’s eyes.
According to Big Mama, the Drayle plantation had originally belonged to Miss Fran’s family. Big Mama had nursed Fran as a baby. That’s how long she had lived there. Although the slave cabins remained the same, Drayle had added a kitchen onto the original house, ignoring his father-in-law’s fears of a kitchen fire. The main house was larger on the inside than it appeared from the outside. But the grounds were impressive. A long dirt driveway wound through two acres of flat manicured land and ended at the red brick colonial. Behind the main house, the slave cabins lined up in three neat rows. The fronts of the cabins all faced the back of the main house, as if Fran’s father had wanted his slaves to keep an eye on his back, or as if to keep them from looking out beyond the property and envisioning escape.
When Fran married the horse breeder, her parents took off to live in Mississippi, leaving the house in Shelby county for good. They did not approve of the marriage mainly because Drayle had no wealth.
Gradually, however, they came to accept Drayle’s marriage to their daughter even though he did not give them the grandchildren they craved. Their son-in-law managed to turn a steady profit from the hundred and twenty acres of mostly soybean and cotton fields. And even though his horse breeding had never amounted to more than a hobby, Drayle had attained a certain status in the surrounding community due to his equine knowledge.
Later Lizzie would reason that perhaps Drayle really was just passing through the kitchen and noticed her door open and only meant to close it. Perhaps he did think he heard a disturbing noise and came to check it out. And it was certainly possible he didn’t even know that the house girl slept in the storeroom off the kitchen. It was closer to dawn than dusk when she removed most of her clothes and propped the door open. If someone came in the kitchen, they would have to light a lantern, giving her time to cover herself.
But there was no warning light and he appeared in the doorway like an apparition, a sudden whistle of breath, a book tucked beneath his arm, a glass in his hand.
“It’s terribly hot in here,” he said.
She didn’t have time for a “yessir,” rolling over until her body was safely wrapped in the pallet, the muslin shirt too far to reach without exposing even more than she already had. What had moments before seemed like utter darkness now looked like blue light, and she could easily make out his form. She hoped her dark skin offered some cover.
Once, she had fancied a slave called Baby on account of his round, boyish face. The most tender moment of their relationship had been when he brought her a dead squirrel for supper. She’d fried it in bacon fat and they’d picked the meat off the scrawny animal with their fingers. Grease smeared over his face while he ate and when he smiled at her she’d wanted to lick it right off. The relationship had never gone beyond their awkward groping.
“I’m very sorry,” her master said.
“Yessir.” She wasn’t sure what he was talking about or what to answer. Big Mama had taught her when these moments happened to just say “sho” or “yessir.”
There were so many things to remember. It had taken a full week to remember to answer to her new name. The first change after she moved into the main house was that her mistress renamed her. She had been Eliza, but she became Lizzie because Miss Fran felt it was easier to say. The second change was that she was told to forget the slave cooking ways she’d learned down in the workyard. At her previous plantation, the cooking had been done in a cabin separate from the big house. It had been a larger plantation, and there had been much more to prepare. The location of the kitchen within the big house at the Drayle plantation threw Lizzie into closer proximity to whites than she had ever been.
“Here,” he said. “Take my water.”
She stared at his outstretched arm. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, but she still couldn’t see his expression well enough to tell if he was setting a trap for her. Sometimes they set traps for you, Big Mama had said. You got to be awares at all times. Ain’t no such thing as a truth-telling nigger. They’s only a dead nigger and a live one.
“Oh, no sir.” Then a pause. “Do you needs something?”
“Please.” he moved into the storeroom, so close his toe touched the edge of her pallet. “I won’t leave until you drink every bit of this here water.”
She sat up and pressed her back to the wall. She stared at the cup as if it contained poison. What do I do, Big Mama? Lord knows I is thirsty.
“Please,” he repeated. He set it on the floor in front of him as if he knew she would not take it from his hand.
Something about the way he said it the second time made her think for a moment that he was being kind. She looked down at her hand as it made its way across the bare mattress and finally closed around the cold, sweating glass. She touched it to her lips and drank it down. When the glass was almost empty, she stopped.
“Go on,” he said. “Drink it all, now.”
She felt done, but she drank the rest of it, hoping it would make him leave.
“You get some rest now,” he said.
For the next week or so, he brought her cold water in the middle of the night, and each time, she took it more and more willingly until she was waiting expectantly, her body tense with restlessness and thirst while she anticipated his low rumbling voice. He changed glasses twice, until finally he brought a large jar she couldn’t finish off at once. Now he sat down to wait.
And with each visit, he moved closer and closer to her on the pallet, until finally he was lying beside her, his smooth skin slick against hers as he touched the cold glass to her face.
He brought her books. The first word she learned to read and write was “she” and it delighted her so much she wrote it everywhere she could. She wrote it in the biscuit batter with her spoon. She dug it in the dirt out back with a stick. She sketched it in the steamy windows when it rained. When she pricked her palm with a kitchen knife, she squeezed the skin until she could write her new word out with blood on a scrap of cloth. She traced the word with her fingers on the smooth parts of his body while they lay together in the storeroom at night.
She was afraid of him, but with each reading lesson she allowed him to take one more step with her. At first, he told her he just wanted to touch her tiny breast. Then he said he just wanted to place his hand on her hip. At first, he asked to touch her. Later, he did not. Each touch was like a payment for his kindnesses.
She waited for him without clothes because he liked her that way. He said he wanted to drink her. He stared as if her thirteen-year-old body held a great secret, a miracle milk that would cure him if he drank of it only once. He seemed to savor each night, the anticipation arousing him to a point that stretched his penis as taut as a pig’s belly.
She gathered a stockpile of books, precious gifts from him, and hid them behind the flour sacks in the storeroom. She couldn’t read most of them yet, but she enjoyed turning the pages, fingering each book’s binding, making out the page numbers as she learned how to count and figure.
He told her to call him Drayle, his last name only. Most of the slaves called him Master. He asked her to drop the title. At first she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She felt if she dropped it he would take the final step and hurt her in the way she hoped he wouldn’t.
Big Mama had once told her she had to prepare for a life in which she would be violated: it hurt the first time, she’d said, but you get used to it. It was that first time that frightened her, and Lizzie hoped that for him, looking and touching would be enough. It had been for Baby.
He asked her if she had a wish and taught her the word genie. She said she’d once heard she had a sister. Somewhere close by. Her only living blood relation that she knew of. Could he find her? he promised with a serious face. She believed him and permitted him an extra touch.
He said he enjoyed teaching her to read because she had a keen intellect. She liked the word keen and turned it over in her mouth. She realized her phonetic ability to sound out words. He appeared to have endless patience as she mouthed the words on the page with her lips before saying them. He only interrupted to remind her to lower her voice. The nights were quiet, and they remained undisturbed in their secret meetings. He had been educated in the north and she admired his knowledge.
When she had no more room to store her books, he brought her food. She enjoyed the food more than she had thought she would. She already ate better than the field slaves, but he showed her there was even more food to discover. He brought her cocoa, which she mixed with hot milk and sugar in the dark kitchen. They drank it together, sucking its thick sweetness with their tongues. He brought her johnnycakes from town, and she made a gravy to go with them. They devoured them, licking the gravy from their lips.
When he learned how much she craved sugar, he used it to tease her. When he didn’t have any more sweets, she stole sugar cubes from the kitchen and sucked on them while she worked.
Finally, she dropped the Master and called him Drayle.
These were the things that happened in the night. In the day, she had to hide that she now looked at the other slave women through new eyes. Before, she had felt like a child among them. But she was no longer the timid girl they’d given a bucket of potatoes and ordered to peel on her first day in the house kitchen. She felt she was something else. Her skin had begun to clear, her shoulders broadened, and even though she still did not believe in her beauty, she was aroused by this new awareness of her body.
She moved quickly around Miss Fran, Drayle’s wife, certain that if the woman looked her in the eye, she would know her newest house slave was betraying her. Fran’s eyes were never the same. Sometimes, they were listless and empty, staring down at her needlework as if wondering how it had appeared in her hands. Other times, they were alert and watchful. At these moments, they looked as though they could see right through Lizzie.
As Lizzie learned the meanings of new words and what the letters looked like on the page, it became more difficult to hide the fact that she could read. She wanted to read everything. She scanned the spines of books along the shelves in Drayle’s library. She looked over Fran’s shoulder as she cleaned around her, straining to make out the handwriting of Fran’s mother. She wanted to read to the slaves in the cabins. There was only one man among them who could read the newspaper, and Lizzie thought she might be able to read as well as he could. She wanted to show him up, prove that women could learn, have everyone’s eyes hungry for her mouth to open and turn the piece of pulp in her hands into hope.
The summer stretched into August, and work around the farm picked up as the season for cotton harvesting began. Drayle came to the storeroom less and less, and gave fewer gifts. Lizzie was relieved she had escaped unharmed. She believed she had been like a toy to Drayle, and he was now tired of playing with her. He gave no explanation as to why he stopped coming, but she saw how hard he was working. It was the first time she’d examined the great muscles in his back and the texture of his face. He was built like a slave, only white. She did not know how old he was, but his hair was a vibrant blond color and his skin reddened in the sun. She thought his face might have been perfect were it not for his slightly long nose. She was enchanted by the color of his eyes.
And then she discovered something she had never before seen in her life: a mirror. She had seen her reflection in the nearby pond many times, but this piece of glass was magical. It was in Fran’s bedroom, and each time she passed it she found herself pausing to get a good look at herself.
She stole a brush from Fran’s drawer, stripped the hairs from it, and boiled it. She tried to brush out her knots. It took her three days of brushing and cutting the tangles. But when she was finished, she discovered she had a mound of hair that hung in frazzled coils around her face. She made excuses to be in Fran’s room every chance she got.
There was only one other slave woman who lived in the house. Lizzie sensed the older woman’s demeanor begin to change toward her a few weeks after Drayle began visiting her at night. Not long after his visits subsided, Lizzie found Dessie in the store-room, holding the brush in her hand as if it were a giant vermin. Lizzie tried to figure out how she could have forgotten to put it away.
“Where you get this from, ’liza?”
“My name be Lizzie,” she said.
Dessie had lived in the house attic for years. Lizzie knew her from the shape of her back; it was a form she was used to seeing bent over a tub or the fire in the kitchen. Her face looked as if it had been pretty once.
“Give it,” Lizzie said, her lip twitching.
“Not unlessen you tell me where you got it. Is you a plum fool, girl?”
She started toward her but something in Dessie’s posture stopped her. Lizzie was certain that had she been within arm’s reach, the woman would have knocked her in the head with the brush.
“You don’t know what you done brung in this house,” Dessie said, setting the brush on the shelf with a loud clap.
Lizzie moved to the side as the older woman, stooped again, walked past her. “You don’t know what you done brung in here,” she repeated as she scooted through the kitchen.
Lizzie was too frightened to move. Dessie knew. She was sure of it. She wanted to tell her that she hadn’t asked Drayle to come in the first place. And he had stopped coming anyway. Not altogether, but mostly. She wanted to tell her that. She wanted to say more than “give it.” She wanted to ask her what she meant about bringing something into the house.
Two nights later, Lizzie knew. Two nights later, when Drayle finally took what he had been lusting after for so long, Lizzie understood the something that had been brought into the house was her.
They entered the woods behind the slave cabins, the one-eyed horse following a barely cleared trail. Fat spiders rested in opalescent traps. Drayle brushed at his face, cleared the webs for her. Lizzie reached out to pull at a strand of web lingering in his hair and stretched it out, stronger than she’d expected, tensile.
“This here is what they call a smooth-gaited horse.”
Lizzie wanted to laugh. Smooth-gaited? She was certain she would tumble off at any moment. If this was smooth, she didn’t want to ride the others. She held on.
After a few minutes of walking, she felt him squeeze his legs and they took off into the woods at a slow trot. She bounced in the saddle. She clenched Drayle’s waist, feeling for hardness beneath the fat of his stomach. When the trail split, Drayle merely looked the way he wanted to go and the horse followed.
She felt sore in her saddle area and asked Drayle to slow down. He responded after she had repeated her request twice.
When Drayle had told her that morning they would be taking a ride, she tried to hide her fear. As friendly as she knew the horse to be, it was massive, the haunches of the beast taller than her shoulders. She followed Drayle, praying the horse would recognize her as the girl who sometimes stopped and gave him a bit of sugar or a pat on the head. Until recently, she had been afraid to do even that, the mouth of the horse a giant hole threatening to swallow her up.
Philip had walked the one-eyed horse down to the woods from the barn. Drayle mounted first, and Philip gave her a hand while she stepped into the stirrup. After trying to gain her balance for a few moments, she felt comfortable enough to let Philip go. She tied a cloth around her hair.
“Hold on tight now,” Drayle said.
“Where we going?”
“Where are we going?”
“Where are we going,” she repeated.
“You’ll see,” he answered.
Now they were stopped in the middle of a trail and the horse had begun to empty its bladder. Lizzie felt the urge to empty hers.
“Drayle?”
He turned around to look at her.
“I got to do it, too.”
He eased himself off the horse before helping her down.
Lizzie looked behind her at the stretch of trees. She’d only left the place two or three times in recent memory. Drayle had bought her when she was seven years old. In the years since, his farm had become her most familiar place.
He pointed to an area behind a bush, and she went behind it grateful for the privacy. It occurred to her that some white men wouldn’t think enough to point to a bush. Modesty was for ladies. When she’d been brought to the auction block, she’d been chained to a line of slave women, ready to board the trader’s wagon. As the smallest, Lizzie had led, but she’d felt the jingle of metal when two of the women in the back kneeled down so the very last woman could squat right there in the middle of the road. Her skirt was the only privacy she had, and Lizzie had noticed the woman’s eyes close as if to shut out her audience.
When Lizzie was done, she came back to him. She listened to him breathing in the air, his nostrils flaring like the horse’s. His tall form cast a shadow over her, and she felt safe in the cool of it. They walked along for a bit. He did not hold her hand as she had seen some slaves in love do from time to time, but she felt his nearness. She looked over at the horse to see if it was watching her as it had so many times before, but its good eye was focused straight ahead. After a while, they climbed back onto the horse.
A barn peeked over the crest of the hill and she shaded her eyes with her hands. They reached a small house. Drayle whistled and a slave girl of about ten years old came out onto the porch. Lizzie took off her cloth to better show her face.
“You belong to Leo nesbitt?”
The girl nodded.
“I’m looking for his slave Polly.”
“Which one?” the girl said. “They’s two.”
Drayle shrugged. “How the hell should I know?” he pointed back at Lizzie. “Is there one that looks like this one?”
Lizzie was sweating beneath her dress. She did not like that he referred to her as “this one” although she was not sure why.
The girl came off the porch to get a closer look. “I’ll be right back, sir.” She ran off, leaving a cloud of dust behind her.
It took the girl a while. Drayle got off the horse and helped Lizzie down.
“What you up to?” Lizzie asked.
“Didn’t you tell me you heard you had a sister around these parts?”
Lizzie was finding it hard to breathe. She shook her head back and forth and patted down her hair.
“Didn’t I tell you I’d do anything for you?” he said.
The girl returned with a woman following her. The woman carried a basket.
“Polly?” Drayle called out.
The woman stopped about five yards away. She was staring at Lizzie.
“Yessir?”
“I believe that this here is your sister. Come here. Let me get a closer look at you,” he said.
The woman didn’t move, but Lizzie did. She closed the distance between them until she was standing right in front of the woman. Although the slave was older than Lizzie, they were the same height, the same shade of mud brown. And even more, both were covered with a spattering of moles that ringed their necks like precious stones. Lizzie did not know how to feel. It was as if she had been locked in a closet all her life, and someone had just opened the door to reveal her first bit of light.
“You my sister?” Lizzie asked.
The woman studied her. “Maybe you wants the other Polly. I don’t know nothing bout no sister.”
“My mammy died when I was young. But they say I got an older sister who lives in Shelby county. Where were you born?”
The woman’s face lit up as if this would solve the mystery. “Weakley.”
Lizzie’s hand flew to her mouth. She turned back to Drayle. He nodded.
Polly put down the basket. Then she stretched back up, as if ready to examine this stranger who might not be a stranger after all.
“What your name is?” she said.
“Lizzie. I mean, Eliza. But they call me Lizzie.”
She touched Lizzie’s face and ran her fingers along Lizzie’s jawbone. Then she took Lizzie’s hand and turned it over in her own, as if the lines would reveal the truth.
“You my sister?” Polly said, finally.
Lizzie blew out a yes.
Polly reached out and slowly folded Lizzie in her arms. Their embrace was awkward. Neither seemed to know what to do. The slave girl who had fetched Polly sat on the edge of the porch, legs dangling, watching them.
“That’s enough,” Drayle said after a few minutes. “You can come back to visit her, Lizzie.”
Lizzie held fast to the woman, not believing him. Polly kissed her on the eyelids. Her lips were wet. She smelled like peaches, and Lizzie sucked the scent through her mouth. For the first time in months, Drayle did not exist. This was her blood, her real blood kin. But Polly felt fragile, light, as if she would disappear. She was thinner than Lizzie, not as well fed. Lizzie had a strange thought. If she could crush this woman, crumble her into dust and take her back to Drayle’s plantation, she would.
“I promise,” he said. “I’ll write you a pass. Long as you don’t try to run off. I’ll write you all the passes you need.”
He walked over and pulled Lizzie by the hand. He helped her onto the horse. He turned the horse, but Lizzie did not take her eyes off the woman. She turned almost completely around in the saddle as they rode off. Polly waved and Lizzie tried to memorize her face. The barn disappeared behind the hill.
When they arrived back at the edge of Drayle’s place, he told her to get off the horse. Then he rode on up through the cabins without her. He did not have to tell her it would not look good if they returned together. He did not have to tell her to hang back and wait until she thought he’d had a chance to dismount and hand the horse over to Philip.
That night, she thanked him by giving him what he wanted.
When it was almost morning, she thought she heard something in the kitchen. Drayle never stayed all night, but they had both fallen asleep. When she saw the lantern light up in the kitchen, she shoved Drayle awake. He jumped up while she pulled the shirt over her head. He leaned to peek through the door, but whoever it was must have been headed straight for the storeroom because before he could open it, the door pushed toward him.
Fran. Matter-of-fact. Unsurprised. As if she had not just caught him in the room where the slave girl slept.
“Nathan? I thought I heard something. Did you hear something?”
Drayle shielded Lizzie with his body. “I didn’t hear anything,” he said. “Go back to bed, dear.”
Lizzie could not see Fran’s face, but she imagined it wore a quizzical expression. She wanted to shrink into the corner until she became another lump in the blanket Drayle had given her.
He closed the door behind his wife and returned to her. She didn’t realize she was shivering until he touched her.
After a while, she said: “She might sell me.”
“Oh hush, Lizzie. Besides, I reckon Fran doesn’t mind. She’s a Southern woman. She expects a man to do certain things.”
Lizzie didn’t believe him, but he kissed her and she convinced herself his words were enough. Nothing would come between them. Drayle was the man of the house.
He reached beneath the blanket and pinched her nipple until it hurt. She had told him that she did not like her nipples pinched, but he did it anyway. He trailed his fingertips down the front of her stomach, dipped into her navel, and circled it.
“I want you to have my child, Lizzie,” he said between his lips and her skin. “Can you do that for me?”
Lizzie went soft. “Your child?” she repeated.
“I gave you your sister. Now you give me a son. Can you do that for me?”
He pressed against her.
Lizzie tried to think straight. Tried to keep her mind and body separate. She had never been drunk before, but she imagined this was what it felt like.
Drayle didn’t stop. “A son, Lizzie. My first son.”
She had not thought of this. She did not feel ready to be a mother. She knew Fran hadn’t given him a child, and she tried to think of what it would mean for her to do this for him.
He entered her forcefully while she was still muddled in her thoughts. And then she could think no more except to understand that his desire for her was all she had. He moved on top of her, and it was as if a world moved on top of her, its weight at once delightful and burdensome.
When he was done, when they were done, she fell asleep.
Drayle did something that astounded his wife. Tired of sleeping on the storeroom floor with his new lover, he moved her into the guest bedroom across from his own. That was when Fran began to pinch Lizzie.
The pinches were hard enough to bruise. Fran did it secretly-in the kitchen, on the stairs, in the hallway, in the yard. She searched for new places, beginning with Lizzie’s cheek. Then an arm. Thigh. Side. Shoulder. She seemed to relish discovering each new point of hurt. Sometimes Lizzie even caught the woman examining her body, as if searching for a new place. Lizzie tried to stay out of her way. Tried to bypass her in the familiar layout of rooms.
At night, Drayle came to her, but Lizzie didn’t tell him about Fran’s game. Instead, she made excuses for the bruises. She told him that colored people bruise easier than whites. This explanation seemed to satisfy him and he took care not to touch her in those places.
After two weeks, Fran grew tired of her pinches and left Lizzie alone. Lizzie was grateful and went out of her way to make Fran pleased. She cleaned the woman’s room without being asked, ironed her clothes, and put extra sausage on the breakfast trays delivered to Fran in the mornings.
The house slaves had accepted Lizzie as Drayle’s woman, and they now looked to her to convince him of favors. If someone was sick down in the quarters, they asked Lizzie to whisper the news to him so the person would be granted a reprieve. Another time, Lizzie convinced Drayle to let the slaves have extra rations of meat. Each time Lizzie was able to redeem a request, the field slaves accepted her position a bit more.
Now that she could read, Drayle gave her the leftover weekly newspaper. She asked him questions about current events. She wanted to know about these fights over expanding United States territory. She had read about it aloud to the slaves in the quarters. She repeated Drayle’s words and told them any fight over new land was connected to their fate. The more slave states acquired, the greater the chance of slavery enduring. They wanted to believe in the whispers of abolitionism that came their way, stories of slaves freed up north, of rebellious uprisings, promises that there were white men out there who wanted to do away with this system of human bondage. But their everyday reality was bleak. Their work days were too predictable for them to imagine any other way of living. They did not know where this Texas was or what it had to do with them. A couple of the older slaves remembered the Missouri compromise, and they expected some other kind of compromise this time, too.
She was in the quarters reading to the slaves when she first learned Drayle planned to sell the one-eyed horse they’d taken to meet her sister the first time. She had learned the horse’s name was Mr. Goodfellow. Each time she walked past Mr. Goodfellow, it turned its human-like eye and studied her. She felt an affection for him that she did not feel for the other horses.
“But why are you selling him? Ain’t he a good horse?”
She stood up straight. She had been picking herbs out of the garden, folding them into the front of her shirt. The rosemary had finally rewarded her efforts, stretching long and elegant across the garden bed. It was an herb she had only recently discovered. Her sister Polly had given her a bit to chew on when she’d visited last. She’d planted it, hoping the seeds would take root. They had.
“Yes, he’s a good horse. But I just got word on another horse I’ve been wanting, and I’ve got to make a trade.”
“Don’t sell him, Drayle.”
“Lizzie, there are better horses on this farm. Besides, he only has one eye.”
“One good eye,” she said. “The other eye is there underneath that patch.”
“Say your goodbyes,” he said.
When she reached the pasture, she found Mr. Goodfellow grazing. Four horses stood off to one side, as if they had no time for a one-eyed horse. She tried calling out to the horse, but it only lifted its head for a moment and then went back to eating.
She went to find Philip. He was in the barn shoeing the Saddlebred. She told him she wanted to ride the one-eyed horse. She knew Philip as a quiet man who didn’t smile much. In the long stretches of silence that he made no effort to fill, one could hear him making a low clucking noise in the back of his throat from time to time.
He put down his tools and took a saddle off the wall. They walked out to the field together. When he whistled, the horse came. He saddled the horse, and helped her up onto it. She tried to steady herself. It was her first time on a horse alone.
“I’ll lead you,” he said. He led her around the field once and she stroked the horse’s mane. When she was done, she patted it on the face and whispered in its ear while Philip untied the saddle. Then he slapped the horse on its hindquarters and it moved back out into the field.
She circled the barn and slave cabins and made her way to the back entrance of the house. The women were scuttling around the kitchen with their heads bowed. Their movements were mindful, and Lizzie guessed there were guests in the house. She tied on an apron.
Fran appeared in the doorway, rubbing a sweaty forehead with the back of her hand.
“Lizzie, I have someone I’d like for you to meet,” she said. She stared at Lizzie’s equally tall but more youthful figure. Then she narrowed her eyes at Lizzie and sniffed, as if she could smell the reek of the horse sweat between Lizzie’s legs. “But clean yourself up first.”
He was tall and wore a crisp black hat that he did not take off even though he was standing inside the house. He sucked on something that smelled like tobacco, a hard lump in his lower right jaw, and Lizzie waited anxiously for him to spit on the clean wood floors. His shirt was wrinkled and loosely tucked into pants that bulged across his distended belly. He didn’t look like family and was dressed too shabbily to be a reverend.
Fran watched his expression so intently that a blue vein stretched taut against the white skin of her neck.
“So?”
Lizzie looked at the floor and grabbed both sides of her dress with her hands. She waited for the person who Fran wanted her to meet to jump out of the shadows. Surely it was not this tall, strange white man with whom she could have no business. He pulled his pants up.
“You say she can cook?”
“Of course.”
“You say she ain’t got no pickaninnies?”
“Not a one.” Fran looked over at her.
“Clean?”
“As a whistle.”
The lines of the hardwood floor converged in front of Lizzie.
“Healthy?”
“As a horse.”
“What’s the catch?”
“There’s no catch, Mr. Simpson.”
He paused and pulled up his pants again. Lizzie lifted her eyes to look at him. The light outside had turned dusky red and he squinted in the dim light of the hallway, as if trying to ascertain if there were certain things wrong with her that were invisible to the naked eye. Reading his face, Fran lit another lamp and the foyer brightened a bit.
Lizzie could taste her last meal on her tongue, and she tried to separate out each flavor in her throat. As the knowledge of what was happening to her rose fully in her mind, she tried to remember the last time a trader had entered their place. She vaguely remembered a slave who had tried to escape three times, the last time taking his bow-legged woman with him. She remembered they had spoken some other language, a bastardized echo of what their mothers had taught them, and she remembered the two had been cousins. The slave patrollers returned with the bow-legged woman but without her cousin. No one knew what happened to him, but soon it was clear the woman was big with a child. She gave birth soon thereafter, early, to a tiny baby that didn’t look quite ready for the world. The baby lived, but the woman never knew that because she was sold off to a trader who had stood outside in the swirling dust and eyed her just as this man was now eyeing Lizzie. Lizzie remembered that day. She had been a young girl, only a year on Drayle’s place, but old enough to hear and understand the whispers circling through the slave cabins and the dead expression on the woman’s face as she climbed into the back of the wagon.
Now here Lizzie stood in the same space, searching inside herself for her own response, wondering if the nothing she was feeling was the same nothing the bow-legged woman had felt.
He ordered her to open her mouth. She did. He poked around inside her mouth with his finger. Then he squeezed a breast. She flinched. He ordered her to take off her apron. She dropped it to the floor. While he ran his hand down the front of her dress, she saw Fran look nervously toward the window.
“What’s it going to be?” Fran looked as if she were ready to be done with the whole thing.
“I’ll take her.” he picked up something from the floor beside him and undid the piece of cord around it. He unfolded a musty blanket, and it coughed up dust as he wrapped it around her shoulders.
Lizzie didn’t protest, allowing him to lay the blanket across her shoulders like a shawl. She didn’t protest when he opened the front door and she followed him out to a horse tied to a ram-shackle cart. He pushed her onto the cart and tied her hands and ankles. He tightened the rope around her ankles and she felt it cut into her skin. She bit her lip until it bled. He turned to Fran and exchanged the money with her wordlessly.
The evening was quiet, save for the bowing wings of crickets. Dessie was in the kitchen working, and the rest of the slaves were still in the fields. There was no one around to witness Fran’s betrayal. Lizzie did not know where Drayle was, and she figured that to protest would be futile. A passivity settled upon her along with the blanket. This resignation was a feeling she would not soon forget.
The man in the hat climbed onto the horse and picked up the reins. As soon as the cart lurched forward, Lizzie put her hand over her mouth and vomited through her fingers. It went down the front of her dress. Everything in her stomach came up until she was heaving air.
“What the devil?” The man in the hat stopped the horse and turned around to look at her.
“What’s wrong with her?” he shouted at Fran.
“Nothing, nothing,” Fran waved him on. “Just scared. She’ll get over it.”
“I asked you if she was healthy.”
“She is. I’m telling you she is.”
“Well, why’d you rush me? And why is she getting sick all over the place?”
“I’m not rushing and I’m not deceiving you.”
“Well, what is it?” now that Lizzie’s belly was empty, she found her voice and began to cry.
“May I remind you, Mr. Simpson, that I am a lady.”
“Well, lady, you best give me my money back.”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
“Oh, yes you will.”
“What’s going on here?” Drayle walked around from the back of the house, clapping the dirt off his hands.
Lizzie shook off the blanket.
“I want my money back. I got to head to Missouri tomorrow morning and I don’t need to add no sick slave to my bunch, infecting everybody else.”
“Fran, what are you doing?” Drayle turned to his wife.
“I’m selling her, Drayle. She’s no good,” Fran said. But the look in her eyes said she knew that her chance had passed.
“What do you mean? We didn’t talk about selling any of the slaves.”
“Well, we need the money.”
“For what?”
“I don’t care to discuss our financial matters in front of strangers.”
“Lizzie, get down off that cart,” Drayle said.
The man untied her, and Lizzie gathered her stained dress and hopped off the cart. She wobbled on her feet. She saw Fran reach into the front of her dress and pull out the crumpled wad of bills. She handed the money back to Mr. Simpson without counting it out.
Lizzie didn’t stay around to see what happened next. She headed straight for the slave quarters. For now, it seemed safer to be there than anywhere else.
Word made it back to the quarters that Fran had tried to sell Lizzie, and it made the rest of them nervous the mistress might bring a trader around for one of them next. The Drayles weren’t known for selling off hard-working, peaceful slaves, but someone said the Drayles might be in financial trouble. First, talk of selling a horse and now talk of selling a slave. If creditors came, they might pick off slaves, animals, property, and anything else that would satisfy the debt. The women shot questions at Lizzie about what had happened, what the man looked like, what Fran said. Lizzie did not tell them the real reason Fran wanted to get rid of her.
For the first few nights, Lizzie shared a pallet in a small cabin with four other slave women. They did not like Lizzie staying there in the cramped one-room cabin, but they felt a temporary pity since the mistress had tried to sell her.
Lizzie was too frightened to go back to work and sleep in the big house, and no one came for her over the next couple of days. Instead, she helped the women with their chores in the workyard. The women were kind to her, grateful for the extra help. But on the third morning, she was too tired to get out of bed. She was so exhausted that each time she moved to rise up, a headache forced her to lie back down.
Philip carried her all the way to Big Mama’s cabin himself. The old woman knelt beside her.
“What’s wrong with you, child?”
“I don’t feel well, Big Mama. I think I might be sick.”
“Too sick to work?”
Lizzie nodded.
Big Mama rose and went outside. She returned with a dipper full of water. “Sit up and take a drank so as I can look at you.”
When Lizzie tried to pull herself up, her head split into three daggers of pain. She sipped the water. For Big Mama, taking a look meant feeling her forehead and putting her ear to Lizzie’s chest.
“What’s wrong with me, Big Mama? I ain’t never felt so bad in my life.”
Big Mama rolled out a pallet for Lizzie to lay down. When she was done, she took out her sewing and felt around for the stitches. She sat on a chair with a cowhide bottom and rocked back and forth. Lizzie waited.
“Big Mama?”
The old woman turned her way. She put down her sewing and said: “he done finally done it. Nobody thought he could.”
As soon as Big Mama told Drayle that Lizzie was pregnant, he ordered her back into the house. The first three months were difficult for her. She almost fell asleep while cutting up onions and shelling peas. The only thing she felt like doing was lying down. The vomiting stopped, but the unsettled feeling in her stomach did not. She couldn’t help but wonder how the women in the quarters continued to work in the fields while they were carrying a child.
The slave women commented on her spreading nose. They checked her neck to see if it had darkened. Dessie stuck a bucket under her chin when she had to vomit and no sooner than Lizzie was done did Dessie push the bucket into the younger girl’s chest so she could empty her own mess.
Fran took the news with what appeared to be a debilitating sadness. She stayed in her room all day and slept. She ceased going into town. As the Christmas holidays neared, she did nothing to prepare. It was as if Christmas was not coming that year in the Drayle household, except for in the slave quarters where the slaves were preparing to take off a few days.
Fran ordered Lizzie to come into her room and rub her feet. Lizzie rubbed the white woman’s feet with liniment oil until she fell asleep. Each night Lizzie went to Fran’s room, lifted the blanket, and rubbed the oil onto Fran’s feet until the woman dozed off. Eventually, Fran moved the two of them to the front parlor. Lizzie would massage while Fran urged her on. That first morning, as she tried to stifle the taste of vomit in her throat, the smell of the liniment rising through her nostrils like gas, the slave women going about their duties around her, her face growing hot, eyes burning, she had thought to herself that if Fran offered up one word of criticism, one negative comment, she would surely grab a knife and hold it to the woman’s throat.
Since she’d moved back into the house, Drayle spent most evenings in his library reading. He still visited Lizzie in the bedroom across the hall, sometimes only to caress her belly and talk about what he was certain would be a son.
As the early sickness subsided, Lizzie started to enjoy the changes in her body. Her tender nipples were puckered and swollen, her breasts bigger than they had ever been. Her figure was rounding out a bit, and she felt more womanly. The slave men noticed as well, and she was aware they had begun to look at her in a new way. She frequently caught them watching her.
She took sugar to the one-eyed horse one day and found Philip brushing him. If Lizzie was the closest female slave to Drayle on the plantation, then Philip was the closest male slave to him. He was the most trusted hand with Drayle’s precious horses. Philip had grown up around horses and there wasn’t a wild one he couldn’t break and bring under his spell. He was a powerfully built man with a big head of hair that stuck out of his head like raw cotton. In return for his loyalty, Philip was trusted enough to have a permanent pass allowing him to ride off the plantation. He also had been given the materials to build his own cabin.
Lizzie stood outside the fence, patting Mr. Goodfellow with one hand. The horse poked his nose through the fence and nuzzled against her.
“You likes that horse, don’t you?” Philip said.
“Yeah.”
“He a good horse even if he do just got one eye. I’m sho glad Marsuh didn’t sell him off.”
Lizzie smiled. That had been her doing, a reward for the baby she was about to give him. It hadn’t been exactly a fair trade in her opinion, but it had been a small way for Drayle to show his satisfaction with her.
Her stomach wasn’t big yet, but she thought Philip might have noticed the other changes. She shook the corners of her dress off her shoulders so he could see her neck and the way it curved down into her ripening chest.
“Everybody got some good in them,” she said.
They stood easily in the silence that followed. She listened for the sound, and after a few minutes she heard it. Cluck. Cluck.
He spoke again: “hey, when you gone read to us on Sundays again? That Jessie can’t read half as good as you.”
Lizzie was flattered. She’d never known they missed her. They didn’t know it, but sometimes Jessie made things up when he didn’t know a word exactly. She didn’t do that. She hadn’t been there lately because Drayle had been keeping a close watch on her.
“I was awful sorry when I heard they tried to sell you off.”
His words touched her, and before she knew it, she was reaching out for his hand which rested on the other side of the fence. She placed her fingers on top of his.
He jerked back as if she had burned him.
“What?”
“Why you touching me?”
“I-I-don’t know.”
He stepped back.
“I ain’t for sale.”
“What?”
“Ain’t that white man good enough for you? Gone back to him.”
He walked away and the horse followed him obediently. Then it threw a look back as if it, too, stood in judgment of her.
Her pregnancy changed. From the moment his eyes caught the hilly landscape dimpling her thighs and the bumpy terrain of her buttocks, Drayle retreated. Each time he moved to take her, his penis got soft. He told her he was afraid he would hurt the baby. She became terrified by thoughts of him with other women. A whisper reached her that he had taken up with another woman down in the quarters. She felt a pain in her stomach during those months that she feared had nothing to do with the baby’s strengthening kicks.
And that wasn’t all. Drayle had never asked her to put her mouth down there, and she never would have thought of such a thing. But in the final weeks of her pregnancy, that was what he wanted. Each time he made her do it, stroking the curls around the nape of her neck, he told her she would grow to like it. But she never did. When her feet became too swollen to fit into her shoes, Drayle had a new pair made for her. He thought this would be enough to change her mind about the thing he wanted her to do.
She gave birth to a boy that winter and the first thing she did when they lay the baby on her chest was count out the toes and fingers. As a house slave, she wasn’t allowed to nurse, so she sent him down to a woman in the quarters who’d been nursing babies for the past seven years straight. Drayle resumed his regular visits soon after the baby was born. She wasn’t ready, but he didn’t appear to care. The only good thing was that he no longer asked her to do that other thing.
Before she could get used to the idea of being a new mother, she was pregnant again. By the time she came into her sixteenth year, she had two children, a boy and a girl. When her daughter was born, Lizzie examined the skin around her nails and waited anxiously for it to darken. The child had smooth pale skin with watery blue eyes and a bald head. She had expected the baby to be light in color but she was whiter than Drayle. After nine months, the girl baby still had not darkened. The only change was a new sprout of yellow curls on her head. Lizzie kept the baby covered as much as she could, both to protect her from the sun and because she was ashamed of her appearance.
She named the boy Nate after his father and the girl May because that was the month she was born. But one day, when the child was hopping around the workyard, Big Mama called the girl Rabbit and it stuck.
As the years passed, Lizzie learned to use her new status as the mother of Drayle’s children more and more. But she was unable to help the field slaves out of a situation that all started when the overseer Roberts fell out of a tree. Roberts had been on the plantation for over two years, but was still widely mistrusted. Overworking or beating was not what they feared most about him. He fancied himself a doctor of sorts. Whenever a slave complained they could not work or that they weren’t feeling well, he would examine them. He had a wooden table in his cabin expressly for this purpose. Whatever the injury-stubbed toes, broken fingers, stiff wrists, sprained ankles, knee pain-it required a full-body examination. The possibility of an exam had the same effect as overworking the slaves since no one wanted to complain they weren’t feeling well. Rather than mention whatever was bothering them, they worked through it.
Roberts usually sat in a big hickory nut tree, cracking nuts between his teeth as he watched the slaves work. One day he dozed off and fell out of the tree, breaking his leg. A doctor was called who set the leg, but Roberts did not heal. He stayed in bed and sent his wife to watch over the slaves. She was a tall woman covered in a thin coat of white hair, a fair amount of it grazing her upper lip and chin. She assumed the same position in the tree as her husband. When someone slowed, she called out to them in a great booming voice that sounded so much like her husband’s a few of the slaves forgot it was a woman in a dress straddled across the largest branch.
She began to walk between the slave cabins and peer through open windows and doors in the evenings after work hours. Up until this time she had mostly kept to her cabin, but her curiosity seemed to get the better of her as she strode down the lane shamelessly staring at children playing and women preparing the evening’s supper. For those first few days, she didn’t say much but after a while she called out a short greeting here and there. The slaves did not raise their eyes when they spoke back.
But one of the slaves did not like the overseer’s wife at all. Jeremiah wasn’t known to speak much, but the longer folks were around him, the more they got to know his way of communicating. His right eyelid jumped twice when he was angry. He shook his knee when he was impatient. He’d had a nervous way about him since he was a child.
But that Sunday, after prayer meeting, Jeremiah had something to say.
“Ain’t right, I tell you,” he said.
“What’s that?” mumbled one of the men. The women had gone back to the quarters. Four men sat around chewing leaves, whittling, resting for a few minutes before returning to the labor that never ceased.
“A woman bossing us round, that’s what. Woman ain’t sposed to boss a man.” Jeremiah’s right shoulder flinched.
“That ain’t just any old lady. That’s the bossman wife. We got to do right by her till he get well.” Young Joe sat next to his daddy who would be too old to work in the fields within the year, leaving Drayle with the decision of what to do with him. The old man’s hand shook and Young Joe placed his own on top of it.
“That don’t make it right,” Jeremiah said.
“At least she don’t doctor on us,” Young Joe added.
“You does have a good point,” said the one they’d always called Baby.
“Well what do you plan on doing about it?” Young Joe said. “March your nappy-headed self on up to Marsuh’s house and tell him you ain’t working for no woman?”
“I aims to do just that,” Jeremiah said.
“Y’all hush up,” Old Joe said. “Ain’t nobody marching up to Marsuh house. Bossman’ll be back in no time and won’t nobody have to work under no woman no more.”
Baby rested a hand on his wide thigh. “It ain’t right for no nigger to work under no white man and it sho ain’t right for no man to work under no woman. I say we all sits down in the fields tomorrow and don’t start working till Bossman Roberts come back out here.”
“The man can’t walk,” Young Joe said. “How he gone come back out here?”
“He can pick up a stick and use it, same as everybody. Remember that time I broke my leg?” Jeremiah said. “I was made to hop right back out in that there field, cripple and all. Ain’t nobody care. And I did it, too. Roberts don’t want to work. He just trying to shame us by sending his woman out here.”
The men weighed Jeremiah’s words as he shook his knee. Somebody rang the supper bell in the slave quarters and the men stirred. Young Joe held on to his father. Jeremiah had to hold onto the tree for support as he helped pull Baby to his feet. They walked slowly to the quarters.
By the time the slaves heard about Jeremiah’s visit to the big house, it was dusk. Bellies were as full as they were going to get, and the children had finished the final chores of washing plates and cups. A group of women sat around the workyard mending shirts.
The word passed with the speed of most rumors on a plantation. Jeremiah had gone to the house and their master was coming down to see about Roberts. From the cracks of their cabin doors, women watched the path leading from the Big house. One woman sat her five-year-old out in the yard to keep watch. They figured they would not know the outcome of it all until the next morning when they had to report to the fields again.
As the night grew dark and they sank into the thin soft of their pallets, they slept lightly, anticipating the crowing of the cock so they would know if they would have to work under the white-haired woman again.
In the morning, the slave women rose earlier than usual to begin breakfast. They looked to their tow sacks for the grain they used to round out their meals, but found that the sacks were empty. The women went from cabin to cabin to see if the same was true for everyone. And then the slow realization sank in that the food had been rationed.
Master Drayle had taken their food in order to punish them for complaining about the woman overseer. They were certain of it. When they reported to the fields that morning, there perched the hefty, white-haired white woman high in the tree, the heavy folds of her dress snapping off tips of branches.
“Get to work!” she yelled, fiercer than usual.
The slaves began their toil, their stomachs rumbling with emptiness. No one spoke to Jeremiah, even those who had encouraged him. He was back to his usual silent self. A sack of nuts made its way from slave to slave, and the sound of shells being crunched between teeth rumbled among them. That night, the women barely spoke to their men, blaming the lot of them for the empty sacks hanging slack by their doors.
On Fran’s fortieth birthday that year, the slaves cooked a celebration dinner. Fran’s best childhood friend, Yancy Butterfield, arrived in a sea of green. Taffeta, earrings, necklace, jingling bracelets. Green shoes peeking from beneath her dress. All set against a skin so translucently white that Lizzie had to force herself not to stare. Mr. Butterfield and Drayle retired to the library where they defied Fran’s wishes by having a before-dinner cigar.
The two women settled in the parlor and waited for Lizzie to stoke the fire.
They began their visit by taking turns admiring each other’s jewels. Lizzie couldn’t help but notice that Yancy’s were more exquisite. Fran seemed to note it, too.
“What a lovely dress, Yancy. You outdo me on my own birthday.”
“It’s all in the fabric, dear. That’s why I brought you something special.” She lifted her chin toward Lizzie. “Miss Dessie. Would you mind fetching that box out of my carriage?”
Lizzie forgave Yancy for calling her the wrong name. All because she said “miss.” Because she said “would you mind.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Wash up first,” Fran added.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Lizzie knew that the women had grown up together and were closer than Fran was to her own sister, but the two friends seemed different to Lizzie. Whereas Fran was moody and subject to extreme changes in temperament, Yancy exhibited a mild steadiness. There was a genuine pleasantness to her that Lizzie sensed to be more than a public offering, and when Lizzie saw the woman sitting next to her husband in the parlor, she observed a tenderness between them that she had never seen between Drayle and Fran. At one point, the man had even fondled the bracelets on her arm. Lizzie felt that if she lived with the Butterfields, she would not be so guiltless in her betrayal of the mistress. In a way, Fran’s spite made it easier.
Lizzie was transfixed by the Butterfield carriage. She had never seen one so fine. Leaves swirled around it, its dark fabric a stark contrast to the fall foliage. She poked her head inside and inhaled. Lilac sweet, just like Yancy Butterfield. Lizzie climbed into the carriage and closed the door behind her. She shut her eyes and pictured her and Drayle, riding along, his head on her shoulder, her hand on his knee.
She leaned back into the seat and felt a soft package dig into her back. She pulled it from beneath her, hoping it wasn’t ruined. She perched it on her shoulder and went into the house where she carefully deposited it in front of their guest.
“Thank you, dear.”
Yancy placed the package in Fran’s lap. “Why don’t you open your present now? The men don’t have much interest in these things, and I can hardly wait.”
“Why not?” said Fran. She tore back the paper.
“I hope you like it.”
Lizzie took her time exiting the room.
“Oh my. Ohhhh my.” Fran pulled out yards and yards of blue fabric, the same fabric as Yancy’s green.
“This is why I wore this dress. I wanted you to see how beautiful it looked all put together.”
“I love it, Yancy. I just love it.” Fran disappeared with the fabric trailing behind her. “This must have cost you a fortune,” she called from in front of the hall mirror.
“If you need me to, I can get my seamstress to make the dress for you,” Yancy said. “You don’t want slaves fooling with this fabric.”
“A slave? With my fabric down in that old nasty workyard? I wouldn’t dream of having a slave touch this!” Fran came back into the room, her hand on her cheek as if the very thought made her flushed. “And I don’t need your seamstress. What would I need your seamstress for? I have my own.”
Dessie brought in cold drinks on a wooden tray and placed them on the table beside the women. Fran watched Dessie closely as she took the blue fabric and folded it into a neat square before placing it on the settee.
“Y’all be needing something else ’fore dinner, Missus?”
“No, Dessie. That’ll be all.”
Lizzie and Dessie nodded at the women before they went back to the kitchen.
Lizzie’s children sat at the table slurping milk, white mustaches above their lips. Nate was big for his age-only five and already taller than other boys his age. His legs bumped against the chair beneath him. Although Rabbit was just a year younger, she was smaller. She held the cup in her pale hands and smiled at her mother.
“Who gave y’all milk?”
“Master Drayle,” Nate said. He had learned recently that Drayle was his father, but was still unsure what this meant. He called Drayle by the name everyone else did-Master-and he had not connected that Drayle was his “pa” as some of the other slave children called their fathers or called men who were like fathers to them.
Lizzie patted at the milk stains above their lips with the tail of her apron. “Well stay out of the way, y’all hear? We’ve got to serve this dinner. If y’all want to play, go on back in the storeroom. Go on now.”
Dessie stirred a big pot of onion soup, bringing up slivers of the red and white bulbs to the surface. That would be followed by fried frog legs, Fran’s favorite. The rest of the meal had been planned by Drayle who insisted the only thing Fran cared about were the frog legs. So he’d ordered up his favorites: pork roast, mashed potatoes, collard greens. Dessie had made soda biscuits from scratch, the same kind she made for breakfast. Mrs. Butterfield’s husband still remembered Dessie’s soda biscuits from his previous visit, years before.
During dinner, Lizzie tried not to concentrate on the conversation. Serving dinner when there were guests present, whether a special occasion or no, was always a serious affair in the Drayle household. Nothing could be spilled on Fran’s hand-tatted tablecloth. Plates had to be taken at exactly the right time. Lizzie and Dessie had to distinguish between when a guest was actually finished and when they were merely taking a break. On days when there was no company Fran played games with them by pretending she was done-nudging her empty plate away from her and then picking up her spoon as soon as one of them approached. Whenever they made a mistake, she shouted at them so loudly that whenever they did have guests, the memory of her criticism was strong enough to make them nervous.
The dinner went off without any major slip-ups, and Lizzie offered dessert-a blackberry pie. Everyone declined except Mr. Butterfield who looked pleased with everything that had been served so far.
The others asked for coffee and Dessie instructed Lizzie to pour the coffee while she spooned up some dessert for Mr. Butterfield. Lizzie hated pouring coffee because the slightest mistake could cause it to spill into the saucer. She was convinced Dessie had assigned the task to her on purpose. But the head cook was older, and among slaves that meant something.
Lizzie managed to pour all of the coffee without any mistakes, but as she moved to go back through the kitchen door, the door swung back toward her. The coffee pot hit her chest and the hot brown liquid soaked the front of her dress.
“I didn’t mean to do it!” Nate’s voice was shrill and scared.
Dessie grabbed Nate’s shoulder and pushed him into the kitchen. Lizzie rushed through the kitchen to the well outside to pour cold water over her dress.
When she returned to the dining room, she found Rabbit on Yancy’s lap. Nate stood behind the woman’s chair watching his sister. His thick eyebrows came together between his eyes. Lizzie tried to think of something to say. The room was dead silent. Surely everyone at the table knew these were Drayle’s children, especially the boy who looked just like him.
Yancy kissed and hugged May. “She’s like a little white doll!” she murmured. Rabbit fingered the woman’s bracelets and stared at her earrings.
“You didn’t tell me you had such lovely new slave children, Fran.”
“Well, they’re not that lovely.”
Drayle cleared his throat. “If you’re done with that dessert, we could have another drink in the library.”
“Sure thing,” said Mr. Butterfield, following Drayle’s lead.
The two men left their cooled coffee on the table.
Yancy reached for Nate to pull him onto her lap, but he stepped back. He didn’t appear to be as enthralled with her as his sister was.
“Boy, go to Mrs. Butterfield. She asked for you. Now go on,” Fran said.
Nate shook his head. Lizzie looked helplessly from one to the other. She wanted to entice her children back to the kitchen with the promise of more milk, but Fran was giving a different order.
Yancy reached out to touch Nate’s hair. This time, he didn’t retreat.
“Such lovely children,” Yancy said.
“I suppose,” Fran said.
Yancy waved her hand. “Now you know I would give anything to have some little colored children in my house. Now that we live in town, Mr. Butterfield only allows us to keep that old couple we’ve had for so long. I tried to convince him to buy me a girl-especially after our own children grew up-but he wouldn’t have it. Said he didn’t want a nigger child living in our house. Do these live in the house with you?” She tilted her face down, as if smelling Nate’s hair.
“No,” Fran said, watching Yancy. Then she did something that surprised Lizzie. She reached out for Rabbit and brought her close. The child leaned back between Fran’s legs. “It’s too bad you don’t have children in your house, Yancy. I’ll have to speak to Mr. Butterfield and convince him to buy you a new slave.”
“Lizzie, have these children eaten?” Fran said without looking up.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, bring them some dessert. Do you like blackberries, boy?”
Nate was unable to resist the offer. “Yes, missus.”
Lizzie didn’t move.
“That’s a great idea!” Yancy said. “Let’s take it in the parlor. Let’s take the children with us and fill them with sweets.”
Lizzie stood there for a moment after the women and children had left the room.
When she returned to the kitchen, Dessie hissed at her: “Your childrens don’t do what they told. You told them to stay out the way. Even you won’t be able to save them this time. And they gone deserve whatever they get.”
“You leave me and my children alone,” Lizzie said.
Lizzie stood outside the parlor door listening with the plates of pie in her hands. Yancy Butterfield was laughing.
Lizzie pushed open the door with her foot and found the two women sitting with a child perched in each lap. Nate was telling them about Brother Rabbit and Brother Partridge. He was telling them how both Rabbit and Partridge liked the same girl. Partridge pretended his head was cut off by tucking it in his feathers, and convinced Rabbit that he should do the same because it was a noble thing. So Brother Rabbit went around trying to find someone to cut off his head. When no one agreed to do it, Partridge obliged him. After Partridge cut off Rabbit’s head, he untucked his own and went down to the dance where he could have the girl all to himself.
Lizzie had not known Nate knew the story well enough to tell someone else. His speech came in short, excited bursts. The women laughed hard, as if they had never heard such a story.
Lizzie backed into the kitchen.
“What’s wrong now?” Dessie asked when she saw Lizzie.
That night Drayle slept beside Lizzie while Rabbit and Nate slept beside Fran in her bed.
And Lizzie didn’t sleep at all.
After Yancy Butterfield’s visit, things changed. Lizzie had not thought Fran’s momentary change of heart would last. She had been fully convinced Fran was only acting that way to impress her wealthier friend. But after Yancy’s visit, Fran continued to spoil the children.
Never mind that Nate’s skin was unmistakably brown and that he continued to wrestle with the decision of whether or not to trust her. Never mind that Rabbit was unnaturally pale with kinky blond hair. Fran was smitten and it showed.
Since Fran’s love was expressed in short gusts of affection, the children still spent part of the day with Big Mama. But they stayed in the quarters under the strict instructions they were not to work. Fran ignored the fact that all of the slave children on the plantation had chores. The general belief among a southern slaveholder was that slaves must be introduced to work early so they would know no other way of being.
The children were now sleeping in Fran’s bed regularly. It worried Lizzie at first, but Drayle assured her it was good for both Fran and the children. Lizzie suspected he liked it because Fran no longer expressed an interest in his nighttime activities. If she had been uninterested before, she was now almost impatient for him to clear the room so the two freshly scrubbed children could climb into her bed and bury themselves beneath the covers.
Lizzie had never been allowed to sleep with her children. They had always slept in the quarters with Big Mama while Lizzie stayed in the house with Drayle at night. So it was with bittersweet tenderness that she prepared them for Fran’s bed each evening. She bathed them in the quarters, in the big tub that sat behind a hanging quilt in the workyard. First, she heated the cast-iron kettle on the open fire. As she waited for the water to cool, she watched as they ran around naked and wrestled in the dirt. When everything was ready, she picked each of them up and set them down into the tub together. There wasn’t much time for them to soak, so she started right in wiping and scrubbing the dirt from them. She took care to wipe behind their ears and scrub the creases of their necks. Each leaned forward as she scrubbed their backs. Then they stood while she washed between their legs.
Afterwards, she delivered them to Fran’s room with a playful shove through the door that masked her real feelings. She stood outside in the hallway, her hands shaking, listening to Fran read a bedtime story.
When she returned to the room she shared with Drayle, he said she should be grateful that at least the children would learn to read. Lizzie tried to focus on this thought.
“One more time. And then I promise to leave you alone,” he said.
She had determined she was not going to allow him to force her to do that again. Since the children had been born, he only asked her to do it every so often, usually when she was bleeding. As much as she hated it, her children were receiving special treatment, and she knew Drayle could stop it if he wanted to. She was living in a bedroom in the big house, wearing finer clothes than any of the other slaves. Her children drank milk and ate the best cuts of meat. She knew she had to weigh her answer carefully.
When he saw her indecision, he said: “I’ll write you a pass to see your sister. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Lizzie frowned. She hadn’t seen her sister in almost a year of Sundays. She had asked Drayle for a pass, but he had put her off. Polly’s master never wrote passes for his slaves. He would beat a slave for even asking for one, according to Polly. She had sneaked off to see Lizzie a couple of times, but Lizzie discouraged her from doing it, afraid of what would happen if she were caught. It hurt to have blood kin so close but be unable to see her. If allowed a pass, she could find out for herself if the terrible rumor that her sister had been sold were true or not.
Drayle pulled his penis out and rubbed the shaft of it.
She turned her face away. She felt a sour taste rise in her throat. She blew out the stench between her lips.
“Lizzie, there are some things you don’t understand.”
“What do you want me to understand, Drayle? I understand you want me to do that nasty thing.”
“What are you talking about? It’s not some nasty thing. Women do it all the time for their men. Why there’s a woman in town who-”
“I ain’t like them women in town,” she stated.
“I’m not like those women in town. How many times do I have to tell you not to use the word ain’t?”
“You use it sometimes.”
He picked up her hand. “If you loved me like you say you do, this wouldn’t be a problem. Shoot, I bet it’s a dozen gals down in the quarters who would take your place no sooner than you could shake a stick.”
“Yeah well, they ain’t got your children neither.” As soon as she said it, Lizzie regretted it. That was the last thing she wanted. If Drayle wanted children by another slave, it would be easy, especially now that he knew he could make them. This was the only power she held over him. And now it was the only power she held over Fran. She had to be careful she didn’t push him out there.
Her head moved and she felt Drayle tense. He placed his hand on the back of her neck and pushed.
Fran had decided Rabbit and Nate’s clothes would no longer do. When she went to pick up her dress made in the silky blue fabric given to her by Yancy, she took the children with her.
Lizzie swept near the door so she could look through the front window. She knew Fran would protect the children as if they were her own, but Lizzie worried all the same. What would happen once Fran lost interest? What if her children mistook this for real love?
She looked up and caught Dessie staring at her.
“They be all right. Just one of them thangs slave children got to go through. Different ways to learn they lessons. Your childrens got to learn theirs thisaway, that’s all.”
Lizzie nodded. The floor creaked beneath her. The night before had been especially cold, and one of the cows had gone into labor and given birth to babies that had frozen during the night. The mother had abandoned her calves instead of keeping them close to her and warm. The story had shaken Lizzie when she heard it.
Lizzie polished the tall grandfather clock in the hallway, and took a rag to the floorboards. She walked and wiped until she got to the room she now thought of as Fran’s instead of Fran’s and Drayle’s. A miniature wooden statue of Jesus on the crucifix. A snuffbox. There was no sign of Drayle in the room other than his clothes in the closet. Lizzie searched the closet for a box or some other container holding memories of Drayle’s family and life before marriage to Fran. She found nothing. When she had asked Drayle about his family, he had only mentioned that both of his parents were dead and he had no siblings. It was as if he was as alone in the world as she was.
Lizzie opened the closet and fingered the dresses inside. She took one out and held it up in front of her. She was bigger than Fran now that she’d had children. But the dress had enough fabric to be let out and fit her just right. She put it back in the closet.
She found a book on the closet shelf and took it down and opened it. It was a child’s catechism, and Lizzie could imagine the excitement of her children as they examined the pictures and Fran pointed out the large letters printed on the page. Lizzie lay across Fran’s bed with the book open before her. She read softly as if her children were there listening. She had not read in the quarters lately. It struck her that her children did not know she could read. She would have to tell them. She would sneak a book out of Drayle’s library and take it down to Big Mama’s house. And the first chance she got, she would read to them just as Fran did. She didn’t want them to think white people were the only ones to hold the magic key to these letters.
She put the book back on the shelf and smoothed out the bedcovers. She refilled the lamp with oil and polished the posts of the bed until they shone. She went over the windowsills with her rag until not a speck of dust remained.
She brushed her hair. Her thick naps didn’t require much. She pinned them in her usual style. Fran had prohibited her having a mirror in the bedroom. She’d also limited Lizzie’s clothes. She was not allowed to have more than three dresses.
Lizzie heard the clop of Drayle’s boots on the stairs and hurried out of the room. She was bent down wiping the floor when he walked right into her.
“How are the cows doing?”
“We put them in the barn. There’s four pregnant cows. Would you believe it? I put all four of them in the barn even though only two are due any day now. I figure they could keep each other company in case one starts whelping in the middle of the night.”
Lizzie nodded.
“Where’s Fran?” he asked.
“She took Nate and Rabbit to town.”
Drayle scratched the back of his neck. He moved past her.
“I’ll have my supper upstairs.” When he got to the doorway of the bedroom they shared most nights, he turned around and looked at her.
“Hurry with your chores and come to bed,” he said.
As she slowly made her way to the kitchen, she heard the excited voices of her children entering the house.
Fran got out of the house more. She dressed the children in the finery she had bought them and took them on walks through the woods. When Rabbit scuffed her new shoes, Fran laughed. When Nate fell and got grass stains on his knees, she brushed him off and rubbed at his dirty face with a spit-moistened thumb. She walked the children through the slave quarters, pointing out various work tools and explaining the names of things. The slaves did not allow Fran to catch them observing the spectacle.
Eventually, Nate and Rabbit took note of their new status among the other slave children, refusing to play with them. The children made fun of the way they spoke. Nate kicked dirt at them and dared them to kick it back. The children did not dare, for they knew his threat was real. He would tell Miss Fran. Or Bossman Roberts. Or his pa. Nate had finally realized that Drayle was something more than his Master. Rabbit simply refused to speak to other girls her age.
The children still craved Lizzie’s attention, but they preferred the time they spent with Fran because she gave them things. When Fran tired of them, Lizzie came and got them. They willingly went with their mother, but after a while with Lizzie they would begin to ask about Miss Fran again.
Lizzie saw how her children were changing, and tried to steer them back to their reality by secretly forcing them to continue with their chores. In the afternoons she made them change into their regular clothes. Both Rabbit and Nate knew better than to allow the other children to see them back in their old clothes. When they saw the other children coming, they ran and hid. After a few weeks of this, they told Fran what Lizzie was making them do and Fran put a stop to it.
Drayle delighted in Fran’s new attachment to the children, but Lizzie was determined to change his mind.
“It ain’t good, Drayle.”
He fastened his belt and pulled her close to him even though the door to the bedroom was wide open. He was taking more and more liberties in the house, especially now that Fran was distracted by the children. “Not this again.”
He turned toward the door and stepped into a wide beam of sunlight. Lizzie caught her breath. For a moment, she imagined Nate standing there in his shoes, filling out his clothes. The boy was the spitting image of his father for sure.
“I just don’t want the children to be hurt is all. They’ve really taken to her.”
“They’ll be fine, Lizzie.”
She pursed her lips after he was gone.
Nate ran out of Fran’s room with Rabbit in pursuit.
“Give it to me I said!” Rabbit’s face was pink.
“Hey!” Lizzie yelled.
They turned to her, ready to protest. She silenced them with a hand held up in the air.
“What are y’all doing running through the house? Nate, what do you have that belongs to your sister?”
“I ain’t got nothing.”
“He’s a liar, Mama.”
“I haven’t got nothing,” Lizzie corrected. She grabbed his balled fist and pried it open. A blue ribbon lay crumpled in his palm.
Lizzie took the ribbon from him and popped him on the back of the head with her hand. “I have told you about lying. And you know better than to run through this house like wild animals.”
“Lizzie!”
Fran stood on the stairs, her face surrounded by a mass of curls. “What on earth are you doing?”
Lizzie pulled the children close. “Nothing, ma’am.”
Fran rushed at her and slapped Lizzie on the face hard. “Don’t you ever touch my children again, do you hear me?”
Lizzie nodded into the back of her hand. The children shrank back as if they were more afraid of their mother than the woman who had just struck her.
Nate began to cry. Fran grabbed May’s hand and ordered Nate to follow. They disappeared into Fran’s room and closed the door behind them.
Less than two weeks before Christmas, they received a telegram that Fran’s sister and nephew were coming to spend the holiday with them. The house was thrown into a frenzy with Fran at the head of it all.
“I want all of the silverware polished once more,” Fran said amidst a neck of family jewels, as if she had brought out everything she owned and donned it at once. “This is Christmas, after all.”
Fran lifted doilies and opened drawers, moved vases and scooted chairs, sniffed meat and tasted milk, beat pillows and pointed out cobwebs. She moved about the house like a high priestess as she had not done all year, her velvet gown smelling faintly of mold and the bowels of the attic.
While Fran moved things around, Drayle tended to the moths. A sack of flour had been infested with worms and in the months since, slender moths had been fluttering out of closets and cupboards, lingering around candles, resting on walls. They nested in wools and silks, spun their sticky substance and left a trail of holes. Drayle brushed cocoon shells from the edges of floorboards and the creases of ceilings with a broom. They fell like gun casings, and Lizzie followed behind Drayle, sweeping.
Dessie made everyone wash up before entering through the back. She put a small tub of water by the door for any field slave entering the main house to wash their bare feet.
In the slave quarters, preparations were no less intense. The slaves worked in the fields an extra hour each day in preparation for the Christmas break Drayle would allow them. The overseer Roberts and his wife would also be leaving to see their family, so they worked the slaves extra hard to finish the list of tasks Drayle had set out for them.
Drayle directed the men, led by Philip, to groom and shoe the horses. When the horses grazed in the pasture, their heads down in relaxed concentration, they looked like statues except for the occasional swish of a tail. There were two Tennessee walking horses, three American Saddlebreds, and a Peruvian Paso bought for Fran’s birthday by her father when she was a girl. Mr. Goodfellow also remained.
Fran rarely entertained her family. In fact, Lizzie could not remember the last time any of Fran’s family had visited. The Drayles always traveled to Mississippi to see her folks.
After the house had been cleaned better than it had been in months. After the vegetables had been washed and stacked in piles on the scratched wooden table in the center of the kitchen. After the salted ham had been brought in from the meat house and several chickens had been slaughtered and plucked. After the riding horses were shoed and the slave quarters had been tidied. After all this, they learned that Fran’s sister would not be coming after all.
Two nights before Christmas, a carriage pulled up in front of the house. As the driver approached, the two women in the kitchen peeped out of the window to see who it was. Lizzie put down the jar of preserved berries and walked to the window to stand behind Dessie. They saw a man in a hat driving a carriage. He dropped the reins and proceeded to get down. Although they had not gotten snow that year, it was blustery cold outside. The slim figure pulled his coat about him and walked to the side of the carriage to open the door. A small child emerged.
“Who is that?” Lizzie whispered.
“I’ll get the tea going. You get the door,” Dessie instructed.
Lizzie did as she was told. She opened the door before the man had a chance to knock.
The child stood right in front of her and peeked around Lizzie into the hall of the house. Somewhere upstairs, the sound of Nate and May’s chatter drifted down to them. It was after dinner and Fran was preparing them for bed.
The boy turned an ear toward the stairs.
“Is the mistress of the house here?” asked the citified coach driver.
“Yessir,” Lizzie said. She watched as Philip unloaded a small trunk out of the back of the carriage. She let the man in out of the cold and went upstairs to tell Fran they had a visitor.
Fran came down the stairs and stared at the man who was now standing in her foyer with the boy, untying the scarf around the child’s neck. Dessie stood by, ready to usher him into the parlor where a tray of hot tea waited.
“What can I do for you?” Fran asked.
“Mrs. Drayle, this here is little Master Billy. He has been sent by your sister to spend the holidays with you.”
The child stuck his hand out, as if he had been properly rehearsed. “It’s nice to meet you, Aunt Francesca.”
Fran sputtered. “What? My sister? Where is she? I received a telegram that said she wasn’t coming. She’s sick.” Fran emphasized the word sick as if she did not believe it.
He cleared his throat. “Yes, it appears that your sister has…ah…some health difficulties. She is hoping that you will do her the favor of looking after her boy for a while.”
“For how long?”
“A few weeks, ma’am.”
Fran looked down at the child in confusion. He looked past her at Nate, who was now standing behind her.
“Of course, of course.” She reached into the front of her dress and drew out a piece of candy. The child walked forward and took it.
“That’s mine!” Nate screamed.
Lizzie instantly knew things had taken a turn for the worse for her children.
His clothes were genteel but worn. He wore a set of blue knickers that were white at the knees. The ruffles on his shirt were no longer crisp, crumpled from napping in the back of the carriage. His reddish hair was straight with curly ends, as if it were just beginning to lose the last of its baby curls. He took the candy from Fran, but kept his eyes on Nate who stared at him unabashedly.
Fran opened her mouth to speak, but her voice sounded choked. “You’re taller than I expected. You’re welcome here, of course.” She looked at the driver.
“He’s six, ma’am. He explained to me during the trip that he just had a birthday.” he paused. “I hope you won’t mind if I go on my way. I have a schedule to keep, and I’m afraid I’m already behind. I have accommodations in the next town over, and I’d like to arrive before my host retires for the night. Tomorrow morning, I’m headed north-”
“Would you like to see your room, Billy?” Fran interrupted.
The child nodded in response.
“Lizzie, prepare the room across from mine. Dessie, have Philip take that trunk upstairs.” Fran walked to the door with the driver. “I do hope you’ll give my sister regards for me. Are you a friend of hers?”
“No, ma’am. I’m just a driver. She hired me to bring him. She regrets that she is not able to come herself.”
“Yes, that’s too bad.” Fran looked back at the child.
As Lizzie took the child’s hand and ascended the stairs, Nate followed.
When she got to the top of the stairs, Nate stood there looking curiously at Billy. It struck Lizzie that her son was dressed better than the white boy. Nate offered the wooden train car in his hand. The boy walked forward and accepted it.
“What’s your name?” Nate asked softly.
“Billy.”
“Do you like trains?”
Billy nodded. “I rode on one before. Have you?”
“No,” Nate said, his eyes wide for a moment. “But I’ve got a whole train set. You want to see it?”
Billy shrugged as if he had seen a million train sets.
“Come on.” Nate took his hand and guided him to Fran’s bedroom, Rabbit following at a close distance behind them.
Lizzie heard Drayle stamping his boots as he entered the front door.
“We have visitors?” he asked.
“Yessir,” Dessie answered.
“I’m not properly dressed to receive anyone. Tell them I’ll wash up and be there in a few moments.”
“It’s just the child, sir,” Dessie said.
And that was all Lizzie heard. She helped to carry the train set into the bedroom where Billy would be staying. She took her two dresses out of the closet, folded them, and made a stack on the floor outside the door. She guessed she would be sent back to the storeroom, but she wasn’t sure. She turned back the bedcovers. The sheets had just been changed that day. It was late for a child. He would want to go to bed soon.
“You’re probably tired from your trip,” she said to Billy.
“Yes, ma’am.”
The child had manners, she thought. And he hadn’t been around slaves much. Philip entered the room with the trunk.
“Heavy?” she asked.
“Not so much,” Philip answered.
Both of them knew what this question meant. Slaves always had an interest in knowing how long a guest would be staying. Each extra body meant more work.
“Where you want me to put it?” he asked.
“Just put it over yonder.” After he had set the trunk down, Lizzie opened it and unpacked the boy’s clothing, counting each piece as she went. As Philip left, she saw him look briefly down at her pile of belongings outside the bedroom door.
When she had finished putting away Billy’s things, she turned and saw Drayle’s figure in the doorway.
“Hello, youngster,” he said. Both Nate and Billy looked up. Drayle looked confused for a moment.
Lizzie left them to get a washbasin. She went to the kitchen where Dessie filled it with hot water from a kettle on the fire. When she returned, Drayle was no longer in the room. Nate and Billy were sitting on the floor playing with the train set. Rabbit perched on a chair watching them. Lizzie placed the washbasin on the bureau.
“You’ve got to wash up,” she said.
Nate smiled at Billy. “They always make you wash up in this house before you go to bed.”
Drayle returned as she was cleaning behind Billy’s ears. He watched Lizzie lay out sleepwear for the child. Nate and Rabbit had been sent down to the kitchen. After Billy was tucked into the bed, the two of them stepped out into the hallway.
“Lizzie, I’m afraid that you and the children will have to move out to the quarters. For now.”
“The children? Why?” She understood that she would have to move. But the children?
“Because my nephew will use this bedroom.”
He had not answered her question. She understood that Drayle would move back into the bedroom with Fran. But Lizzie had hoped the children could all play together, even sleep together in the extra bedroom.
She nodded and said “Yessir.”
When she got to the kitchen, the children were sitting at the table. The kitchen was clean, and everything was put away. Dessie had already retired for the night.
“Miss Fran says we’ve got to move out to the quarters,” Lizzie announced. She wanted them to believe their beloved Fran had decided upon this loss of status, not their father. It was better, she figured, for them to know sooner rather than later that the white people they loved would disappoint them.
Two days after she’d moved back in with Big Mama, the old woman died in her sleep. Although Lizzie believed in religion, she wasn’t big on signs. Big Mama had been, though. And Lizzie figured Big Mama would have said God sent her and the children down there to be with her so she wouldn’t die alone.
Lizzie expected Drayle and Fran to do something special to honor Big Mama since she was the oldest slave on the plantation, but they simply told the slaves to bury the woman however they saw fit. On the day of the funeral, Lizzie kept looking up toward the big house to see if either of them would come down, but they didn’t.
Someone quoted a scripture and Lizzie read a poem from a book in Drayle’s library by someone named William Wordsworth. The children cried the hardest. Lizzie returned to Big Mama’s cabin alone and lit a fire. She had never talked much to Big Mama about her relationship with Drayle, and now she wished she had.
Philip had recently been over to the plantation where Polly lived and confirmed to Lizzie that her sister had been sold. When the fire finally died down after a couple of hours, she wrapped herself in Big Mama’s shawl. She cried for a little while. Rocked herself. Wondered if she would ever see Polly again. Polly had not had children. She had been alone before Lizzie. Now she was alone again, on another plantation somewhere. Lizzie had asked Drayle about finding her, but he reported that her former owner had been uncooperative. Without Big Mama and Polly, all Lizzie had were her children.
The longer she stayed there, the more she realized that sleeping in the slave quarters was difficult for a house slave. Each morning, while the slaves tied cloths around their heads and layered whatever clothing they could find to protect themselves from the cold before hustling out to the fields, she put on a dress and walked toward the house.
Her children still refused to play with the other slave children. Fran had filled their bellies and heads with false dreams, and they had a difficult time letting go of this. Rabbit became sullen and withdrawn, and Nate kicked when he was angry.
At first, the slave women barely spoke to Lizzie. But as the months passed, they included her in their conversations. Lizzie’s speech fell back into the rhythm of her youth.
One unusually warm spring night, Lizzie went to bed in just a shirt. When she rolled over, she felt a hand between her thighs. She pushed it away, thinking one of the children was using her as a pillow. Then she felt the sticky hand wedge itself again between her legs.
She opened her eyes and a fat face loomed over her. He put a hand over her mouth. It was Baby. She hadn’t spoken to Baby in a long time, and she could instantly sense that he was different. Not the Baby she’d known. She felt him try to pry her legs apart. She yelled and he punched her in the face. Her jaw burned. She kicked and arched her back. Even though she couldn’t see around her, she guessed there was no one in Big Mama’s cabin with her. The children were gone. She could hear singing. They were all outside and they wouldn’t hear her even if she did manage to move his hand from her mouth. But he covered her mouth so tightly she could barely breathe. The look in his eyes scared her. He would do this to her. He would do this to her and the next day he wouldn’t even glance in her direction. For once, she was glad her children had sneaked off.
He pinned one of her legs beneath his knee. She kicked with the other leg. And she understood what he wanted from her: just one push. He wouldn’t even wait to satisfy himself. He just wanted to violate the master’s woman. He’d do it with a finger if he could, but she kept his hands busy holding her down.
I’ll tell. If she could speak, she would threaten him. But she wasn’t sure if it would mean anything. Sleeping in the slave quarters meant she was subject to its rules. She could appeal to the elders. She could try to get somebody to beat him. But she had no family. Some women had brothers who provided this protection. Others had lovers who let it be known their women were not to be messed with. Lizzie had no one.
Except Drayle.
I’ll tell. The words died in her throat as his fat finger made its way inside of her. He groaned. His grip on her mouth loosened and she bit him. Then she heard a loud thud.
He fell back and Lizzie rolled from beneath him and covered herself. She heard the skillet drop to the floor and then the sound of her son crying. She lifted herself up.
“Nate, come here.”
Philip kicked the pan away and knelt beside her. “You al-right?”
She nodded.
“Nate came here and found him on top of you. He came and got me. Why you in here sleeping when everybody else outside having a good time?”
“Nate, come here,” Lizzie said. She didn’t want to talk. She just wanted her son next to her.
A field hand stood in the doorway. “He dead?” he asked.
“Naw,” said Philip. “He all right. Just help me get him out of here.”
Lizzie scooted back into the corner, still holding on to Nate. “Where’s Rabbit?”
“Outside,” he said. They dragged Baby’s big bulk out of the door.
Lizzie touched her hand to her sore cheek and knew it would be swollen by morning.
Lizzie and her children moved into Philip’s cabin, the only one on the plantation built with hewed logs. He kept a neat and tidy room despite being a single man. Lizzie found Drayle in the kitchen one day and told him she was now living with Philip.
“Philip? That’s fine, I suppose. He’ll take good care of you and the children.”
Drayle was right. Philip treated her and the children respectfully. He always left when she needed to undress.
Each morning, he left to give little Billy riding lessons. This kept Philip busy, and Lizzie and the children were often asleep by the time he returned. Lizzie was grateful for Philip’s protection, so she kept the cabin as a wife would. She tended his laundry, brought back leftovers from the big house. He didn’t say much, just clucked his appreciation and went back on his way. He grew closer to Nate, sharing more animal stories with the boy once he learned he liked them.
Lizzie wished Billy would leave. She did not feel any ill will toward him, but he was the sole reason she and her children were back in the slave quarters.
Fran never once inquired about Nate and May. It was as if they had never existed. Sometimes Lizzie’s children came to the kitchen door to fetch something or run an errand. If they caught sight of Fran, she turned the other way. The children now looked as ragged as the other slave children. Despite their protests, Lizzie had finally taken away their fine clothes for good. There was no use for them in the quarters. The next time a slave with a pass visited the plantation, Lizzie gave them the clothes to sell in town.
Eventually the hurt looks on Nate and May’s faces lessened as they realized Fran would not be their special mistress anymore. Lizzie dampened the hurt by bringing them treats from the house. She also took to hitting her children more, especially Nate. She didn’t want a white man to be the first to beat her son. When he received his first beating, he would take it with the knowledge that a beating couldn’t hurt him. He would have to learn how to be a slave now.
One day while Lizzie was shelling peas in the kitchen, she heard Fran scream from somewhere inside the house. She had never heard Fran scream like that, so she wiped her hands and hurried out to the front. Fran was kneeling over a small body and when she lifted her hands, Lizzie saw they were covered in blood.
Lizzie rushed forward, then stopped. It wasn’t Nate. It was Billy. His head was bleeding and his eyes were closed.
“Lord!” Lizzie said.
Philip was talking fast. “He was riding. He was all right. And Mr. Goodfellow just bucked.”
“Why did you put him on that one-eyed bastard? he’s too big for a child!”
Drayle slammed the front door behind him. “What happened?”
“Your slave. He did this.” Fran pointed at Philip. “He did this to my boy.”
“No, no, no,” moaned Philip. “I swear, Marsuh Drayle. I was right there. That one-eyed horse just bucked.”
Dessie came out of the kitchen. “I sent for the doctor.”
“Help me get him on the table,” Drayle said to Philip.
“Don’t touch him!” Fran screamed.
“We’ve got to get him off the floor, Fran.”
Lizzie took Fran by the arms and pulled her up.
Dessie cleared the table, and the men lifted the child onto it. Dessie brought out a wet cloth and wiped at the blood on the boy’s head. Lizzie sat Fran down and rubbed her arms.
“He’ll be fine,” Lizzie said.
Drayle stood in the corner, watching Dessie clean the child up. He was trembling and it took everything Lizzie had not to walk over to him.
Because first, she had to tend to Fran.
Sunday morning. Two male slaves jumped. The preacher hummed a tune and the elder women moaned. A young woman shook her hands in the air. Drums had been outlawed in the entire county so two young male slaves tapped out a blunt rat-a-tat on a tree stump. Others clapped a rhythm.
Then the singing began. A woman with a strong, clear voice stepped forward and sang. When she stopped and sat down, a man stepped forward and picked up where she left off, lyrics choppy and improvised. When he paused, another one took it up. The preacher shook his leg in obvious delight.
Lizzie sat back, slightly outside of the circle, each child perched on a leg. They stared curiously. Although several of the slave women danced with babies tied to their backs, Lizzie’s children had never been to a Sunday meeting. During the last decade of Big Mama’s life, she claimed she was too old to make it down the hill, and had made her own Sunday morning right there in her cabin where she quoted Bible verses from memory, holding the Bible right up to her nose as if she were actually reading it. Once Lizzie learned to read, she read the Bible to Big Mama on Sunday mornings while the children restlessly fidgeted before they were allowed to go outside and roam the empty quarters.
Sunday morning meeting was held a slight ways off from the plantation in a hollow. Most of the slaves eagerly made their way down the hill to the grassy clearing where their own homegrown preacher took up his most respectable aspect and preached to them. He couldn’t read, but his memory was such that he could recite all of the books of the Bible in order, backwards and forwards. He had been raised by a Bible-loving woman who had a smattering of reading knowledge but had been too intimidated by her master to pass along that precious knowledge to her son. Instead, she taught him to memorize the passages. Pretty soon, the slaves learned the litany he recited at the beginning of each meeting: MatthewMarkLukeJohnActsRomans… naming the books of the Bible was a prayer in itself.
Lizzie knew her children were frightened by the dancing and shouting, but she also wanted them to know something about religion, especially now that Big Mama was dead. She put her arms around them. She closed her eyes and let the music seep into her.
She began to pray. She could not remember the last time she’d prayed so hard. She prayed for Billy who was back with his mother and recovering from the gash in his scalp. She even prayed for Fran who was heartbroken now that her nephew was gone. She prayed the Lord would straighten out Dessie’s back. She prayed for Big Mama who was sleeping with the angels. She prayed that she would see her sister Polly again. But most of all, she prayed Drayle would free her children.
And then one of the women took her children from her and another lifted her to her feet. They pulled her into the dance, and Lizzie tried to imitate their movements. They swished their skirts around and Lizzie did the same. They shook and trembled and some even spoke in tongues. Lizzie did the same, the language coming from somewhere inside of her she had not found before. They surrounded her. The elders moaned while the men and women welcomed her into their circle.
“Hallelujah!” the women shouted.
Despite the clumsiness of her steps, they forgave her mistakes. She danced and the women embraced her.
The drumbeats slowed and the women knelt to the ground. They clasped their hands together in supplication, and the preacher spoke above them all. He spoke of trials and tribulations, rivers and mountains, and paradises. Oh, if they could only make it to the other side. They just had to hold on.
As she walked back from the meeting, her children skipping happily behind her, she felt lifted. A light filled her chest.
The three of them entered Philip’s cabin, a noisy bunch. Lizzie swung the door open wide.
Standing in the center of the one-room cabin was Drayle. He held his arms out.
He had come for her, and she willingly went to him.