Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench

Just as Mawu gave a look to signal they should turn back, they heard someone moving. Then they saw her. She looked the same from a distance. Hair covered. Long plain dress. Wide hips and shoulders ambling along and then as she neared them, slowing down. She squatted down before a patch of yellow flowers and rifled through them. She searched carefully, as if for the perfect one, finally selecting four. She stretched and stood, rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead.

“Hey!” Mawu called out.

Glory turned around. Even though Mawu had called out to her, neither she nor Lizzie revealed themselves. Glory pulled the bonnet back a bit so she could see around her. The sun peeked from behind a cloud.

“Who’s that?”

Lizzie stepped out from behind the tree. “Us.”

Glory shocked them with the speed with which she dropped her bag of flowers and rushed toward them. Lizzie thought the woman would hug them both. But just as she got close to the two slave women, she stopped, as if she had checked herself.

“You’re back. I knew you’d be back,” Glory said, breathless.

“How come us ain’t seen you around the place?” Mawu asked.

“Some other farmer is providing for the hotel this summer.”

“Why?” Lizzie asked.

Glory rubbed at her cheek. “My husband took sick this winter. He really never got better. A bad cough. He still works as much as he can, but he can’t do too much. It’s just enough to keep us fed and to sell some in town.”

Glory was still stout and healthy looking, but her eyes had taken on more of a sunken quality. “Everybody come back?”

Lizzie nodded.

“What brings y’all out here?”

There was no hiding the fact they were too close to Glory’s cabin to just happen to be nearby. There was nothing else nearby but the cabin. So the question was really, what do y’all want with me?

Lizzie looked at Mawu and waited to see what her friend would say.

“Where your husband at?” Mawu asked.

“Gone,” Glory replied, falling easily into the clipped cues the women knew they had to speak in order for their friendship to remain secret. What she meant was that he is gone for a spell and yes we have time.

“I got something to ask,” Mawu said.

Lizzie scratched a bug bite. She had no idea what Mawu was about to say.

“Shoot,” Glory said.

“I need you to help fix me.” Mawu looked down at her waist. Then she put her hand over her private area. “I need you to help fix me permanent.”

Glory shook her head.

“I don’t aim to give him no more childrens,” Mawu said, eyeing Glory steadily.

Lizzie coughed and then coughed again, as if there were a hair in her throat that she couldn’t get to.

Mawu hit her on the back. “You all right, girl?”

Lizzie nodded.

“What you got to cook in that cabin?” Mawu asked.

“Some potatoes. A fresh rabbit,” Glory answered.

“Well, that’s all us need. My mammy taught me how to make the best rabbit stew you ever sank your teeth into.”

Mawu showed a mouth of crooked teeth as if to prove it. Glory removed her capelet. In a few moments, the three women were walking toward the cabin, Mawu stopping here and there to pick an herb.

Lizzie couldn’t help but wonder what the sight of them must have looked like: a brown woman, a red woman, and a white woman. Thin, short, and fat. Tennessee, Louisiana, and Ohio.

The three women were just as different on the inside, too. One of them was hoping to give up what the other cherished and the third longed for.

The hastily dispatched telegraph from Georgia said it might be cholera. Diarrhea that spread as rapidly as a brushfire in the woods. The women never got a copy of the telegraphed note themselves. But they knew from the cook who heard it from the maid who heard it from the horse groom that the place back where Sweet lived was in trouble.

For days, Sweet waited to hear word of her children. That week was a difficult time, not only for Sweet but for all of the women. Each of them remembered Sweet’s dead baby from the summer before. And they knew she could not handle any more dead babies. There were four children left: three girls, one boy. Each one with the light skin born of the nightly couplings with her master. And as she walked around the place, stiff as stone, it was hard for those who watched her petite frame to believe she had birthed so many.

The women knew better than to ask. They could tell from the look on her face she knew no more than they did. So they all prayed silently at night, into sheets, pillows, blankets. Lizzie asked Drayle after the third night of no news if Sweet’s master would send her back to check on her young ones. Surely her master needed to go back to check on his plantation himself. Surely he was worried about his own family, if not the coloreds then the whites. Even though his wife was long dead, he had five white children of his own. But according to Drayle, he had made no such plans, perhaps afraid if he did go back, he would fall victim to the illness as well.

Then they learned that his white children had been evacuated from the place. And those who were sick had been separated from those who were well. And the sick ones had been taken off the land and put away somewhere safe. Temporarily, those still there believed that this had stopped the rage of the infection.

Sweet didn’t know if her children were with the healthy ones or the sick ones. So the women waited, wondering what kinds of midnight supplications Sweet made to her master to find out about her children. Wondering if he cared that these were his children, too. Not just his property, but his own flesh and blood.

But they also knew that for white men there was no such thing as separating the two. They were his children, yes. But they were also his property. And like most property they could be replaced.

This was the women’s deepest fear. That a white man would feel his slave children could easily be replaced with new ones, as if it were an exchange at a dry goods store.

Mawu, Lizzie, and Reenie sat on the low bank of the pond, each keeping her hands occupied with different tasks while their minds focused on one thing. They spoke of things light, like what they would cook for dinner and how quickly dust seemed to gather in the corners of their cottages. They watched as white hotel guests walked by. Mawu spun a story about a man back on her place who could catch flies in his mouth, snapping them up like a frog.

Chew them and eat them? Reenie asked.

Well, if he ain’t eating them, he holding them in there mighty long, Mawu answered.

Tomfoolery, Lizzie said.

The three women allowed themselves a welcome chuckle. Until they saw Sweet approaching them, carrying something spread across her arms. It looked like a garment of some kind. The three women waited. Lizzie scooted over to make a space for Sweet in the middle, so that she would be flanked by the rest of them.

When Sweet made it over to them, they could see she was carrying a dress. She passed through Lizzie and Mawu and stretched the dress out on the ground between them. She arranged the folds of it. The dress was black, but varying shades of black. Sweet must have run out of fabric; it was clear that she had stitched together all the black fabric she could find. Only the neckline and the sleeves were edged in white lace. Lizzie recognized the lace as the same fabric the hotel used for the cottage tablecloths. This made Lizzie study the rest of the dress and wonder where Sweet had gotten the other pieces of mismatched cloth.

“This for my baby. My Sarah.”

“Dead?” Reenie put down the potato she was peeling. “Your child dead?”

Only Sweet’s mouth moved. “My oldest. The one that took care of the others. She had a face from the heavens.”