Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench

“We’ve got to get him off the floor, Fran.”

Lizzie took Fran by the arms and pulled her up.

Dessie cleared the table, and the men lifted the child onto it. Dessie brought out a wet cloth and wiped at the blood on the boy’s head. Lizzie sat Fran down and rubbed her arms.

“He’ll be fine,” Lizzie said.

Drayle stood in the corner, watching Dessie clean the child up. He was trembling and it took everything Lizzie had not to walk over to him.

Because first, she had to tend to Fran.

Sunday morning. Two male slaves jumped. The preacher hummed a tune and the elder women moaned. A young woman shook her hands in the air. Drums had been outlawed in the entire county so two young male slaves tapped out a blunt rat-a-tat on a tree stump. Others clapped a rhythm.

Then the singing began. A woman with a strong, clear voice stepped forward and sang. When she stopped and sat down, a man stepped forward and picked up where she left off, lyrics choppy and improvised. When he paused, another one took it up. The preacher shook his leg in obvious delight.

Lizzie sat back, slightly outside of the circle, each child perched on a leg. They stared curiously. Although several of the slave women danced with babies tied to their backs, Lizzie’s children had never been to a Sunday meeting. During the last decade of Big Mama’s life, she claimed she was too old to make it down the hill, and had made her own Sunday morning right there in her cabin where she quoted Bible verses from memory, holding the Bible right up to her nose as if she were actually reading it. Once Lizzie learned to read, she read the Bible to Big Mama on Sunday mornings while the children restlessly fidgeted before they were allowed to go outside and roam the empty quarters.

Sunday morning meeting was held a slight ways off from the plantation in a hollow. Most of the slaves eagerly made their way down the hill to the grassy clearing where their own homegrown preacher took up his most respectable aspect and preached to them. He couldn’t read, but his memory was such that he could recite all of the books of the Bible in order, backwards and forwards. He had been raised by a Bible-loving woman who had a smattering of reading knowledge but had been too intimidated by her master to pass along that precious knowledge to her son. Instead, she taught him to memorize the passages. Pretty soon, the slaves learned the litany he recited at the beginning of each meeting: MatthewMarkLukeJohnActsRomans… naming the books of the Bible was a prayer in itself.

Lizzie knew her children were frightened by the dancing and shouting, but she also wanted them to know something about religion, especially now that Big Mama was dead. She put her arms around them. She closed her eyes and let the music seep into her.

She began to pray. She could not remember the last time she’d prayed so hard. She prayed for Billy who was back with his mother and recovering from the gash in his scalp. She even prayed for Fran who was heartbroken now that her nephew was gone. She prayed the Lord would straighten out Dessie’s back. She prayed for Big Mama who was sleeping with the angels. She prayed that she would see her sister Polly again. But most of all, she prayed Drayle would free her children.

And then one of the women took her children from her and another lifted her to her feet. They pulled her into the dance, and Lizzie tried to imitate their movements. They swished their skirts around and Lizzie did the same. They shook and trembled and some even spoke in tongues. Lizzie did the same, the language coming from somewhere inside of her she had not found before. They surrounded her. The elders moaned while the men and women welcomed her into their circle.

“Hallelujah!” the women shouted.

Despite the clumsiness of her steps, they forgave her mistakes. She danced and the women embraced her.

The drumbeats slowed and the women knelt to the ground. They clasped their hands together in supplication, and the preacher spoke above them all. He spoke of trials and tribulations, rivers and mountains, and paradises. Oh, if they could only make it to the other side. They just had to hold on.

As she walked back from the meeting, her children skipping happily behind her, she felt lifted. A light filled her chest.

The three of them entered Philip’s cabin, a noisy bunch. Lizzie swung the door open wide.

Standing in the center of the one-room cabin was Drayle. He held his arms out.

He had come for her, and she willingly went to him.

Once again, Drayle and his two slaves took the steamship up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Ohio River. All slaves traveling on the Madison slept on deck, chained to iron posts, surrounded by cargo that included bales of cotton, bundles of sugar, hemp, and tobacco. Although they had always worked in the sun, the slaves’ skin turned even darker on the river and they eagerly awaited the cool of sunset when the shadows would stretch long again. Most slaves were headed downriver, so by the time Lizzie and Philip reached Cairo, Illinois, and veered northeast on the Ohio, most of the other people sleeping on deck were roustabouts and deckhands. By her third summer of travel, Lizzie had become accustomed to the strange accents, mostly German and Irish, of the poor whites. Yet she was still confused by the sight of these whites working alongside the free blacks on the ship.

The first time she saw a steamboat she could not believe her eyes. She stared at the wide hurricane deck, small pilothouse, two chimneys shooting black smoke. How on earth did the ship move against the powerful downstream river current, which any slave knew could sweep you to your death in seconds? She feared the floating house would sink. Or explode. On the first day, there was a storm and the boat swayed dangerously. She became so sick she thought she might be pregnant. But she learned quickly that this feeling in her stomach was not uncommon on the water. One of the chambermaids gave her a brew to drink and it helped. Lizzie wanted to ask the woman about life aboard the ship, but the woman’s hardened face did not invite idle chatter.

The ship made stops along the way. Even before it reached the riverbank, the passengers could hear a cacophony of noises-bells ringing, people shouting, horses clattering. Lizzie watched as men loaded even more cargo onto the decks, sometimes piling it so high the passengers could not see out of their stateroom windows. It took several men to roll a single bale of cotton up the gangway. Then they tied a rope around it and pulled it up using a capstan until they had secured its place among the stacks.

Lizzie tried hard to forget the voyage that first summer. Instead, she concentrated on Drayle’s desire to protect her. She tried not to remember the man’s body on top of hers, pinning her down on the rough sack of cotton seed she’d made her bed. When the memory threatened to surface, she focused on the image of the black sky she’d watched as the man moved on top of her. She’d flexed her arms so tightly that the chains had gouged her wrists and left her bleeding, but she tried not to remember that as well. In her rearrangement of this memory, the ordeal had not lasted long.

Philip had been nearby, seen the entire incident, helpless in the chains that prevented him from moving close enough to help. Her shouts had been lost in the sound of the river current and steam engine. In the end, she’d had no choice but to acquiesce to the violence and pray it would end quickly.

Philip told Drayle what happened the next day, and he immediately moved Lizzie to his stateroom. The room was small, about six feet square, with a bed, small table, and chair. Despite its size, it was as fine a room as Lizzie had ever seen, but she chose to sleep on a narrow slip of floor. When he saw that he could not convince her to share the bed with him, he made a sleeping pallet for her out of his own clothes and Lizzie lay there at night. In the daytime, she was taken back to the upper deck and chained near Philip where he kept a close eye on her. The head deckman ordered his hands to leave this particular favored slave alone. Then, at night, Lizzie retreated again to the protection of Drayle’s room where he let her sleep undisturbed.