Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench

“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.