Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench

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?”