Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Wench

Mawu explained how she had chosen the spot because the wind was coming from the east and “that big old tree blocked the wind like a giant woman.” She said she figured her fire would stay lit long enough for the stew to simmer for a couple of hours.

Lizzie had been taking down laundry behind her master’s cottage when Mawu came up from behind and put her arms around Lizzie’s thick waist.

“Come help me cook these here birds.”

Lizzie turned around, trying to hide her pleasure at the first sign of Mawu’s interest in her. “A stew?”

“Yeah.”

“I make a real good stew. Beef stew, mostly. Or pork.”

“Yeah. Bet you don’t make no stew like this.”

Lizzie trailed after Mawu as they weaved between the cottages. “Wait, girl. These shoes are too small.”

But Mawu didn’t wait. She hurried on, never once turning around to see if Lizzie was keeping up. She just called back over her shoulder, “Your man ain’t gave you no proper shoes?”

Lizzie slipped out of the shoes and continued on, her bare feet slick against the grass.

When they got to the spot Mawu had chosen, the bird pieces were spread out on a fresh cloth, already cut and partially cooked. Mawu had built a small fire out of six pieces of wood.

But as she stood watching and listening to Mawu’s instructions, Lizzie could barely concentrate. Mawu looked down into the pot, and the taller Lizzie stood just behind her. There was something different about this one. Something about the way she set her shoulders, placed her lips, slit her eyes, planted her feet, swayed her hips. As if something bubbled beneath her surface just like the flesh simmering beneath the thick soup in the iron pot beside them. Lizzie started to ask her if she ever got beat. But what she really wanted to know was why this girl was so carefree in a world full of nothing if not care.

Mawu poured oil into the flour and stirred until it thickened into a gravy.

“I make my gravy with water,” Lizzie said.

“Girl, that be your problem right there.”

“What?”

“You don’t half listen. Here I is, teaching you how to make my ma’s stew and you still talking about what y’all do back in Tennessee.”

Lizzie worked on being quiet.

“Now while I is making this here, you get them thangs over there ready.”

“Your mammy was a white woman?”

“What?”

Lizzie inched closer. “Your mammy. Was she a white woman?”

“Why you ask that?”

“Cause I ain’t never seen hair that color.” Lizzie finally got close enough to touch it.

Mawu pulled her head back. “No, my mammy wasn’t no white woman.”

“Oh.” Lizzie studied Mawu’s light freckles that seemed to shift colors. One moment they were dark and the next they disappeared into the blush of her skin.

“But hers was a white woman. My granny. Can you believe that? A white woman fooling with a slave man. She disappeared.”

“Your mammy did?”

“No, my granny. Ain’t you listening? After she birthed my mammy, she disappeared two days later, they say. Left the baby behind.” Mawu put the skillet aside and settled a deep cast-iron pot onto the fire.

“They killed her?” Long forgotten names came back to Lizzie, names of ones who had disappeared.

Mawu stopped and looked at her. “Girl, you got gizzards for brains? no, she just went away. She a white woman. She somewhere living but not somewhere where no slave daughter can find her.”

“But ain’t the baby free if the mammy is white?”

Mawu motioned toward the pot. “Put those carrots and thangs in this here pot. Us got to let them boil a bit. Then when us get everything in here, us gone add this here.”

Lizzie did as she was told while Mawu cut up a big chunk of ham and dropped the pieces into the pot.

“I ain’t never heard no such thing. Sides. That baby was rightful property,” Mawu said.

The smell was making Lizzie sick with hunger. It didn’t smell like her stew at all. And the bird wasn’t even in there yet.

Mawu scooped up some in a spoon and fed Lizzie from it. Lizzie blew on it and sipped.

“This here the secret,” Mawu said. She took a tiny sack from inside her dress and opened it. She poured what looked like ground-up herbs into the stew.

“What’s that?” Lizzie asked.

“This what can soften the white man.”

“Does it work?”

Mawu stirred.

“What’d you put in there?”

Mawu kept stirring and didn’t answer.

Soften the white man. Lizzie turned the words over in her head as she waited for Mawu to tell her what to do next.

Once they had dropped the pieces of bird into the pot and Mawu had poked the fire down a bit, they lay beside each other on the ground and Mawu stroked between her teeth with a blade of grass. The wind had slowed to a crawl and the humid air beaded on their skin.

Lizzie raised up on her elbows and thought vaguely of the laundry still hanging. Then she turned back to Mawu and studied her again, wondering if she was some kind of witch. Soften the white man?

“You talk different.” Mawu tossed the blade of grass aside. “Like the white folk.”

“I can read,” Lizzie said, as if that explained it.

Mawu stared at her for a few minutes. “You like coming here?”

“I like having a vacation like the white folks. And I like getting to spend time with my man.” Lizzie had never met a witch before. But she’d heard about them. Mawu didn’t look like any witch she’d ever dreamed up.

“He not your man, you know.”

“Course I know that. But I don’t mind spending time with him.”

Lizzie figured that Mawu understood what she meant when she said spending time with him. Drayle said he brought Lizzie to tend his cooking. Sweet’s master said he brought her to mend his clothes. Reenie’s man didn’t offer a reason. Lizzie wondered what lie Tip, Mawu’s master, had told the wife he left behind.

“You don’t?” Mawu tossed the grass away and sat up. She looked Lizzie full in the face as if seeing her for the first time. “You think you love him?”

Lizzie felt the “course” rise in her throat, but stopped herself as she registered Mawu’s disapproving tone. She felt if she answered no, she would be betraying Drayle. If she answered yes, she would be betraying something else.

“What is love?” Lizzie decided to say instead.

“How old you is?”

“Twenty-three.” Lizzie didn’t know her birthdate exactly. But she had always been told her age by Big Mama who had overheard Drayle telling it to his wife when they first bought Lizzie. Ever since, Lizzie had carved each year in the wall of Big Mama’s cabin.

“You gone learn when you get to be a little older.”

“How old are you?”

Mawu shrugged. “I don’t know. Twenty-five maybe.”

“That ain’t so old. You’ve just got two years on me.” Lizzie was quick to display her figuring abilities.

Mawu’s face looked confused for a moment, and Lizzie guessed she didn’t know how to figure numbers. She immediately resolved to teach her.

“Two years is a lifetime when you a slave.”

Ain’t that the truth, thought Lizzie.

“I ain’t never loved Tip.”

Lizzie nodded. Reenie and Sweet had said just about the same thing.

“So why are you with him?”

Mawu looked at her as if she were plain stupid. “Cause I belongs to him.”

They sat beside the pot until after dark, Lizzie asking Mawu about life in Louisiana and Mawu asking questions of her own. When they saw the first of the white men walking back to his cottage, sweaty with fatigue and drink, they knew it was time to pack up. They split the stew between them and went their separate ways.

Lizzie held the hot pot out in front of her, hurrying back to her cottage so she could bring in the laundry before Drayle returned.