Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench

“What’s that?” Lizzie asked.

“Ain’t you noticed it’s not that many folks here this year?”

“I guess.”

“They closing it. They selling it.”

“What?” Lizzie asked.

“Hush. Don’t want that porter to hear us talking.”

Lizzie lowered her voice. “What’s this you’re saying?”

“You ain’t gone see none of us again. They closing the hotel,” Mawu said.

Lizzie had heard nothing about this, and she intended to ask Drayle about it. She did not believe it was true.

She leaned back over and spoke closer to Mawu’s ear. “What about fixing yourself? You know. So you won’t have children again. Are you still going to do it?”

Mawu looked at her lap. “I reckon not, Miss Lizzie. I can’t do it round Sweet. It ain’t right.”

Philip opened a window to let some air into the stuffy car, and Mawu’s hair, having grown even longer over the winter, flew out around her face, the hair so thick as if a scalp did not exist. She held it back with one hand and placed the other in her lap.

The six brown-faced men and women were mostly silent the rest of the trip. The train rocked them into intermittent naps. It was as dark as nighttime when they left the resort, and by the time they arrived in Dayton, the sun had risen high over the buildings on the outskirts of the city.

The four women were unable to control their excitement as the city came into view. Even Sweet, who had been so quiet in the days following the death of her last child, spoke up. A servant from the hotel had given Sweet a steel needle as a gift, and she used it to make sure their dresses still fit, mending holes, tightening bodices, and letting out seams. And she had done it all in what appeared to be a healed spirit.

The women did their best to dry their faces and air out the spaces beneath their arms. They did not want to look like slaves. Lizzie patted Sweet’s wet forehead with a small square of cloth.

The hotel porter whistled and a tall, thin boy ran to the back of the station and came back driving a wagon. The wheels on the wagon were slightly bent and looked as if they would wobble right off.

“I want some sweets,” Mawu said.

“I want to go into a store and buy something,” Lizzie said.

“Your man give you money?” Sweet asked.

“A little,” Lizzie said, feeling selfish. She didn’t want to share.

“You think they gone let us go into a store and buy something without no note from our master?” Mawu asked.

“This ain’t the South,” said the porter. “Colored folks go in stores all the time here.”

When they got to the center of downtown, the women eased themselves off the wagon, taking care to hide their ragged shoes beneath their dresses.

The streets of the city were just starting to fill with people, mostly looking as if they were going to work. One group of leisurely white women passed by, the women turning and raking their eyes over the colored women’s dresses. The four slave women sped up. Only Lizzie glanced back. She noted that none of the women wore the wide hoops of the white women vacationers back at the hotel.

The porter suggested they get breakfast. He led them to an alley where they found an open door to a colored diner. Some of the diners turned to look; others ignored them and continued slurping down their breakfasts. The tables turned over quickly as men pushed back wooden chairs, scraping the floor, then put on their hats and headed off to their daily lives.

The six of them found a large enough table in the back, and a woman approached them. None of the slaves had ever been waited on before in a public establishment. Lizzie sat high and straight, and when her breakfast came, she tried not to eat too quickly. Reenie studied the other diners to see how they did it. Mawu stared at the menu written on the wall above the counter. The diner was quiet except for the noise of forks against plates. There was only one other woman in the entire place.

After breakfast, they walked through the streets. The porter explained that they were in the colored section of town known as Little Africa. Lizzie delighted at this. She waved at a woman who mistook her for someone else. She was surprised that so many of the buildings were made of brick. Large windows covered the fronts of businesses. Lizzie and Sweet read the names of signs for Reenie and Mawu. Blacksmith. Shoemaker. Dry goods. The porter explained that they were walking down Franklin Street.

Lizzie knew clearly in her mind that the men had not known how dangerous it was to allow their slaves to go into Dayton. Then again, perhaps whites did not understand how it felt not to be able to go where one wanted to go, dress how one wanted to dress. They took simple things like movement for granted.

She turned around and saw Philip hanging back, talking to a large woman wearing a dress even nicer than hers. Philip touched the woman inside of her elbow and Lizzie recognized her. The barber’s daughter. They were standing in front of a shop with a red, white, and blue pole with gold finials hanging outside. Inside, three colored men wearing white coats stood behind chairs raised high off the floor. Lizzie recognized the tall, straight profile of the girl’s father.

Philip and the woman walked over to Lizzie.

“This here be Lizzie,” Philip said. “She from back home.”

Even though Lizzie had seen the woman working in the hotel during the previous two summers, they had never had an opportunity to speak. She took Lizzie’s hand in a proper way, the way Lizzie had seen white women take other white women’s hands. She brought the slave’s hand to her mouth and kissed it, smiling at Lizzie from a wide, pleasant face. “Pleased to meet you.”

And Lizzie knew then that she would not let another night pass without talking to Drayle. She made up her mind while standing on the street in Dayton. Even before she confirmed the truth of the rumor that they were, indeed, selling the place, she knew that she would use her favored status to pay Philip back for his kindnesses. If her children could not be free and filled with new possibilities, then maybe Philip could.

That evening, Drayle heated a kettle of water on the stove. Lizzie took off her dress. It was something they weren’t able to do back at their place, one of the rules Fran had established with her husband and his mistress. In minutes, Lizzie was soaking in the tub. He ladled the water over each of her shoulders.

After the water had grown chilly and Drayle had emptied a fresh kettle of hot water into the tub for the final time, she stood and he dried her, reaching beneath her armpits, ordering her to squat so he could dry between her legs.

“Drayle. I’ve got to ask something.”

He shook his head and tensed, as if he expected the usual question. It angered her that he always became so upset at the prospect of her asking to free their children. She closed her eyes and tried to press down on the sick feeling in her stomach.

“I want to talk to you about Philip.”

Drayle turned and faced her. Lizzie read the relief clearly written across his features. “What is it?”

“Drayle,” she began. “You know that Philip is a man, don’t you?”

“A man?”

“He’s always done everything you asked of him. He’s been faithful to you. In fact, he’s one of the best slaves you own.”

“True,” Drayle said.

“And now it’s time,” she said, “to give back to him. To thank him for all those years he gave you. To thank him for being faithful.”

“What are you talking about, Lizzie?”

“Drayle, you’ve got to free him. You know it. You’ve got to free that man!”

“Free him? What on God’s earth-?” he paused and looked at her suspiciously as if trying to ascertain whether another escape plot was being hatched.