Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench

The three women knew there was no telling what had actually happened to the bodies of Sweet’s children. They knew that when sicknesses like this happened bodies were burned. Even if they hadn’t been, it was likely Sweet would never see her children’s graves. They would not be marked. Her children would now be among the missing. But it wasn’t as bad as if they were sold off. Nothing was worse than that.

The three women held hands again. But this time, none of them said a prayer out loud. Instead, they prayed in their hearts and sent their pleadings through palm kissing palm. And although they didn’t admit it to one another, both Lizzie and Mawu thanked God that their own children were safe and sound back on their plantations.

When the women did not see Sweet the next day, they decided to go to her cottage. The door was open and the women passed through the front room. They found Sweet lying naked on the bed, no sign of her master ever having been there in the night. The cottage was bare, as if someone had swept up the bits of thread and fabric that had been strewn throughout the rooms, erasing the evidence of her grief.

Sweet had developed a rash. It covered her face and neck and part of her shoulders. Mawu went out and filled a tin cup with water. Reenie pulled Sweet up and put the cup to her lip. Later the women would have to cut Sweet’s hair, it was so tangled and matted with dirt.

Reenie said, “Drink this. Drink up.”

Sweet drank without protest. There was nothing to wipe the wetness from Sweet’s chin, so Lizzie used her dress.

“You still got a life, don’t you?” Mawu said. “You still got a life?”

Lizzie didn’t know what to say. Four children gone. Five in the last year. She just didn’t know what one mother could say to another when her own children were safe and sound, bellies full, cheeks fat, backs smooth, soft hands, soft feet, minds that could read, lips that could pronounce words grown slaves had never heard of. She was trying not to feel her own fortune. Trying not to feel that this could have been her laying in this puddle of stink, sewing big chunks of cloth into a dress for a child she would never see again.

“You ate anything yet?” Lizzie asked.

Sweet looked up, her eyes glassy.

“You hungry?”

Sweet’s eyes rolled back in her head before she looked in Lizzie’s direction. Lizzie gently lay Sweet’s head back. She went out to the hotel.

At the back of the hotel, all she had to do was mention Sweet’s name and they pressed a loaf of bread under her arm and a bowl of creamed corn into her hands. The cook said, “God bless her. God bless her.”

Mawu fed Sweet as if she were a baby. She broke off a piece of the bread, dipped it in the water, and put it into Sweet’s mouth. Sweet chewed slowly. Between bites, Reenie put the cup of water to Sweet’s lips to make sure she didn’t choke.

When they were reasonably certain Sweet had had enough, Lizzie took the bowl and washed it at the well and set it outside the cottage door.

When she went back in, she heard Reenie talking, “You cry, now. You hear me? You let it out. You got to get it out your body. This thing you making, it ain’t gone do you no good.”

When Lizzie looked down, Sweet’s hands were moving. At first, she didn’t know what Sweet was doing. Then she understood. As if the fabric were still in her hands, Sweet was sewing away, her thumb pressed against an invisible thread, as if holding her place.

Lizzie found a small square of slate framed by wood. The cook managed to get her a piece of chalk. It was a precious find and Lizzie planned to take it back to her children. In the meantime, however, she would use it to teach Reenie a few of her letters. Reenie had been practicing with her primer since the summer before, but this was their first formal lesson.

Lizzie had thought to begin with A since that was the first letter of the alphabet. But then she changed her mind and began with teaching Reenie how to read and write her own name.

“How you keep track of them big letters and little letters? how you know which is which?”

Lizzie smiled. Reenie smelled of lavender. The older woman gripped the sides of the slate until the bones flexed over her knuckles.

“R-E-E-”

“How many e’s in my name?”

“Three,” Lizzie answered. “Can you count, Miss Reenie?”

“Not much.” The chalk slipped out of her hand.

“Like this.” Lizzie showed her how to hold it.

“I can add little numbers like two plus two and four plus four. But something climb over ten and I gets myself in trouble.”

Lizzie wiped the slate. “Let’s try again.”

Reenie concentrated and the chalk slipped out of her hand again. She threw the slate into the dust.

“I is too old, Miss Lizzie!”

Lizzie picked it up. “No you ain’t. Let’s try it again.”

“Miss Lizzie, I want to tell you something. About my finger. How I lost part of my finger.”

Lizzie put the slate down.

Mawu was running toward them from the main hotel. Reenie straightened her back and her face hardened. News was coming their way and whatever she’d had to confide in Lizzie would have to wait.

They wore the same dresses they’d worn the summer before during the dinner in the hotel, dresses carefully tucked away in trunks stored in the hotel attic over the last year. Dresses they’d instinctively protected when Sweet was sewing up everything in sight. Dresses they’d often thought about over the winter months when they were back home on their plantations, trying to make it through each day.

They’d tried to forget what happened to Reenie the night of the dinner when they’d first worn them, only speaking of it once. Reenie had described the night in a hushed tone early one morning. She’d told of how she’d carefully taken the dress off before she let the manager touch her. So that it, unlike her body, would remain inviolate. Every time he came for her, she made certain she never looked as enticing as that first night, so that each coming was a bigger disappointment than the last.

They should have been surprised the white men allowed them to go to Dayton. But they had come to learn that in this place with the magical water, things were different. Later, they would learn the trip was a gift for Sweet. It was her master’s way of giving her a piece of joy. Henry had not returned that summer, but his more vocal brother George had. George had been ordered to stay behind at the hotel. His owner had work for him to do.

One of the colored hotel porters was entrusted with money to buy Sweet something nice, but he would steal half of it and spend the rest on their meals and a cheap trinket for her. The slaves did not trust the porter because it was rumored he had turned in more than one runaway slave for the reward money. The word on him was that he believed slaves needed to earn their freedom by saving up for it. His own grandfather had done this very thing, buying his own freedom and his wife’s before settling in Ohio. Born into freedom, the porter believed in the legal rights of white men.

The slaves could not help but envy him. They observed the neat coat he wore with the shiny buttons, the polished black-soled shoes, and how he, every now and then, extracted a watch from his inner pocket and flicked open its lid at just an angle where they could not see its face.

Without the whites, the five slaves and one free colored weren’t allowed to ride the omnibus that shuttled Tawawa house visitors between the railroad depot and the resort. So they took a wagon. When they got to the depot, they piled into the back car of the train.

“I heard something,” Mawu whispered to Lizzie after the two had squeezed into the narrow seat.