Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench

“I’m so sorry, Sweet,” Lizzie whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Sweet shook her head. “No. This a good thing, in a way. I was worried about her. She was too pretty. Some old man was bound to start trying to mess with her. I didn’t want her to end up like me. So now she gone to the Lord where she can be a true angel.”

Lizzie reached out and touched the dress. “You made this for her?”

“Ain’t it pretty?”

“When you leaving?” Mawu asked.

Sweet smiled. “We ain’t going.”

“What you mean, you ain’t going?” Mawu’s eyes flashed.

“It’s all right, Mawu. I just need y’all to do this.”

“Just say it,” Lizzie said.

“Go and bury this here dress in the woods. Next to my other baby. The one without a name. I can’t stand to be there myself. But I know y’all will do right by her.”

“I is gone say a prayer,” Reenie said.

Sweet closed her eyes and then opened them. She nodded her gratitude and headed back to her cottage.

All three women stood, and Reenie looked off at the sun to see how much time they had.

“Supposing we ask one of the men to come help us?” Lizzie asked.

“No,” Reenie said. “Us can do this our ownselves.”

Lizzie and Mawu picked up the dress and carried it between them as if there were really a body in it. Lizzie carried the top portion and Mawu carried the bottom. Reenie led. On the way, they stopped and got a shovel.

They found the spot where Sweet’s infant girl was buried, near the intersection of two forest paths that crossed one another. It was marked by a small tree. Lizzie took the shovel and dug while Mawu and Reenie folded the dress into a bulky square. The hole wasn’t man-sized. It was just large enough for the folded dress. Reenie placed the dress in the hole while Mawu hunted for rocks. They covered the hole with a hill of smooth rocks.

The three of them held hands and formed a circle around the two graves. Mawu said a prayer in a language neither Lizzie nor Reenie understood, but they all felt the spirit of it. When Mawu got quiet, Reenie withdrew a wooden cross from beneath her dress and kissed it.

Three nights later, there was a knock at Lizzie’s back door. Drayle was sleeping on the sofa, so she opened the door quietly. Sweet stood there with a shirt and pants, already folded.

“This here for my boy. My only boy.”

And then she disappeared into the darkness.

The next day, the women repeated their ritual.

Two days later, Lizzie woke and found a dress folded so tightly on her back porch step that she did not know what it was at first. She looked around, but no one seemed to notice the bundle. She took it to Reenie who immediately put down her washing and nodded. Mawu couldn’t join them that morning because her master was home. Reenie said a few words so powerful and angry they made Lizzie cry a bit.

It had been two weeks since the first word of the sickness. And Sweet had one child left. They were afraid to ask, dreading more news of the dead. And knowing that if three of her children were gone, and they all lived in the same cabin, then it was likely the other was sick as well. They didn’t want to believe that God would be so cruel to take her last child.

But they imagined feverish nights, nights of stomachaches and loose bowels and cold rags on foreheads, one sick caring for another.

Sweet stayed in her cottage, and when the women knocked on the door after witnessing her master leaving with the other men, there was no answer. They peeked through the window and saw her sleeping on the bed. They watched for the rise and fall of her chest. They knew grief like this could kill you. They left her alone after they saw signs of life.

Three days later, Lizzie could no longer wait and decided to enter Sweet’s cottage. She had heard of other plantations being in trouble like this, but she had never known any slaves on them well enough to feel the effects of it.

As she walked, she was conscious of the burden of her steps and tried to think of what she would say. She stood outside the back door of Sweet’s cottage for several minutes. And when the proper healing words did not enter her mind, she decided her presence would have to do.

She found Sweet in the middle of the room, sitting amidst a mountain of shredded fabric. Her hair was disheveled, lips covered with the white crust of dehydration.

“What are you making, Sweet?”

“Making.”

“We ain’t seen you around in a few days.”

“I told you. Making.”

Lizzie took up some of the fabric in her hands. Some of it was coarse cloth. But some of it was good-muslin, cotton, wool. Parts of it looked like undergarments, lace, sackcloth.

Lizzie recognized the top portion of a girl’s dress. The lower half of it was a neverending patchwork of textures. Lizzie went into the bedroom and saw that the bed was barren of sheets, the closets empty of clothes. Everything had been used. Maybe Sweet’s man was grieving, too. Surely he knew Sweet had sewn up everything in the cottage.

The stitches weren’t even either. Some were loose, others bunched the fabric into uneven folds.

“You got some more?” Sweet licked her lips.

Lizzie quietly observed the odd look in Sweet’s eyes. Then she left and went back to her own cottage and got a pair of pants she had discovered behind the stove, left by some previous guest. She went to the kitchen at the back of the hotel and asked the women if they had any fabric to spare. They wouldn’t give it to her until she told them Sweet was making a dress for one of her children. The cook who ran the kitchen must have understood because she commanded the younger women to gather every scrap of cloth they could find in the house that wouldn’t be missed. They came back with heaps in their arms.

Lizzie took it all back to Sweet’s cottage and dumped it in a pile on the floor in front of her. The grin on Sweet’s face motivated Lizzie to go and search again. This time, she visited Reenie and Mawu to ask for fabric. Both of them gave her what they could spare.

“She all right?” Reenie asked as she handed over a pair of worn bloomers.

“She all right,” Lizzie repeated in a low voice.

“She making it?” Mawu called through her cottage window.

“She making it,” Lizzie said.

When Lizzie returned to Sweet’s cottage, she saw the woman had hungrily grabbed up the nearest piece of cloth to her and ripped it apart. She was sewing it onto the neverending dress and as she worked, drool made its way down her chin. Lizzie decided to leave her alone.

Two days later, they were sorting eggs when Sweet came to them. Mawu had just accidentally broken an egg and found a tiny leg inside. She had thrown the egg into the grass, frightened by the omen. Sweet lay the dress out in front of them on the ground.

“They all dead now. They all gone to meet the Lord. They in a better place. They crossed over.” She spoke in a loud, clear voice as if she had rehearsed the lines. She touched the dress lovingly. Then she stretched out on it, rolled over on it.

She stood and faced the women. “Now bury her. Bury my last baby girl.”

She walked off. The women wrapped the delicate eggs and tied their bundles around their waists. They folded the dress to lessen the weight of it, and Mawu took it and balanced it on her head, holding it with one hand as she walked.

They dug the hole beside the other four mounds. Mawu wanted to stick flowers between the rocks. Reenie said the flowers would die, just like everything else. Lizzie thought it was a good idea. Mawu found yellow daisies and stuck them among the rocks. She promised to come back later and freshen the flowers. They looked down at the rock-covered mounds. They didn’t quite look like human graves because of their small size. But they did look like something human hands had touched.