Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench

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.