Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench

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

“I can’t.”

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

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

“I can’t walk no more,” Sweet said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me too,” Glory said.

“You too what?”

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

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

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

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

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

“How come?”

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

“He owns all this land?”

“No. He just farms it.”

Lizzie considered that.

“You like it out here, too?”

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

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

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

“Were your parents like you?”

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

“What do you mean? he’s my husband.”

“You feel something in your insides for him?”

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

Lizzie smiled. At least they had that in common.

The baby would not come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All night, sir,” Reenie said.

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

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

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