Dolen Perkins-Valdez - Wench

The good news was that now he would get real happiness. She felt protective of him. Tender. And jealous all at the same time.

“He got them!” George exclaimed. “He got the papers!”

Philip released her and they both strained their eyes to see if it was, indeed, a paper in the barber’s hand.

“Hallelujah!” Reenie shouted.

Mawu turned to Lizzie and spoke quietly. “That was a good thing you done.”

Just as they’d thought, Philip left with the barber that very afternoon. Each of the slaves gave him a token to take with him. Reenie gave him a wooden cross her brother had carved for her years before. George gave him a nectarine he had stolen from a nearby orchard. Mawu gave him a sack containing some herbs she said would protect him from evil spirits. Lizzie gave him a note she had carefully written the night before containing the address of the plantation in Tennessee.

That night, Reenie told Lizzie as they drew water at the well she would no longer have sex with the hotel manager. Lizzie replied she had not known that it was still going on. Reenie looked at her with a half-surprised expression and continued to pump water. Lizzie remembered the summer before when Reenie’s own brother and master had promised her to the hotel manager. All of them had seen Reenie making the evening walk to the hotel for the remaining days of the summer. But since none of them had seen Reenie making that walk this summer, they’d figured that the relationship had ended.

But it obviously hadn’t. If he was bold enough to continue the relationship across summers, then he would not take no for an answer. Reenie’s master had made a trade of some kind, and most likely he would have to give up whatever the manager was giving him in order to free Reenie of her obligation.

In the days that followed, Lizzie saw less and less of Reenie. A week after their conversation, she went to Reenie’s cabin to see if the woman had really been able to end it. The men were gone for the night on an overnight camping trip, and since she figured Reenie would be obligated to the hotel manager on a night they were gone, she wanted to see if her friend was in the cottage.

She saw a light in the window and went around to the back door. She tapped.

“Miss Reenie?”

She saw the lace curtain in the kitchen window inch back. A moment later, she heard the floorboards creak. The door cracked open.

“What you want?” Reenie answered. Her eyes moved past Lizzie.

“I just came to talk.”

“You by yourself?”

“Course I’m by myself.” Lizzie looked behind her just in case. Reenie was making her nervous.

Reenie opened the door just enough for Lizzie to slide through.

Lizzie looked around once she had entered. “Are you alone?”

Reenie grabbed her arm. “What you mean?”

“What’s wrong with you? I’m just asking. And I thought I heard something besides.”

Reenie scooted a chair into the middle of the floor. “Sit,” she commanded.

Lizzie obeyed.

Reenie went to the closet and stood before it. “If you tell anybody, she dead. If you tell anybody, you gone have blood on your hands.”

“Tell what?”

Reenie opened the closet door. A girl peeked out.

Lizzie’s hand flew to her mouth. “Who is this?”

“Shh!”

The girl began to cry.

“Hush, baby,” Reenie said. “Miss Reenie gone take care of you.” She took a piece of bread out of the basket and handed it to the girl. The child broke through its hard crust with her teeth. Then she scooped out its soft whiteness with her finger and stuck it in her mouth.

Lizzie looked the girl up and down. She was dressed like a slave. Or, at least, she was dressed like a slave trying not to dress like a slave, wearing pants like a boy and a large shirt tucked into them. The shirt wore a patch across the arm as if the sleeve had been ripped off and then put back on. Her hair was cut short like a boy, too, but there was no mistaking the soft feminine features.

Reenie wiped the girl’s runny nose with her own sleeve. Then she tucked her sleeve in to hide the wet spot.

“Whose child is this?” Lizzie wondered if the older woman was going crazy. They had all been grieving since Sweet’s death. And Reenie had been through a lot over the past year.

Reenie pulled the girl in close. “She mine and she yourn, too. She belong to all of us.”

“What are you saying?”

The child relaxed and leaned against Reenie. “She come up from Kentucky. Them free women in the hotel done asked me to look after her for one night. She be on her way tomorrow.”

Lizzie finally understood. She rose to her feet and glanced nervously toward the open window. The air in the cottage had cooled noticeably since she’d arrived.

Reenie was watching her closely. “What you thinking?”

Lizzie felt it. A test. Even after all this time, a grain of mistrust remained. “But how?”

“I can’t…” Reenie stopped as if trying to think of the word. “I can’t explain. A lot of people help this here child. I ain’t the only one.”

“Oh.” That was all Lizzie could think to say.

The child took another nibble of bread. Lizzie looked around the cottage, trying to determine if this was the first runaway slave Reenie had helped. Nothing looked out of place. Only the child.

“When?” Lizzie asked.

“After Sweet died. Didn’t something change for you after that?”

Lizzie searched inside herself. Something had, but she couldn’t really give expression to it. And she certainly hadn’t gone as far as Reenie to act upon it.

“Why you come over here tonight anyway?”

Lizzie looked at her friend. She couldn’t say she had come over to see if Reenie was still seeing the hotel manager. She couldn’t say she had come over to ask how Reenie had gotten away from him and taken back her body. And ask how she could take hers back from Drayle and still maintain favor. The child watched as if awaiting her answer as well.

“Well,” Lizzie began. “I really just came over cause I’m lonely, what with Sweet gone and all.” There. That was enough of the truth to be counted as honest.

“You want a piece of bread?” Reenie asked.

Lizzie nodded.

Later, Lizzie would try to put the pieces together and would wonder if the first fire provided the idea for the second. She would recount every little moment of the summer in her mind-from Sweet’s death to Philip’s freedom-and wonder how she’d missed the little signs that had, no doubt, been there all along. She would experience a store of emotions, and it would be months before she would boil it all down to grief.

The crowd at the picnic was the lightest it had been all summer. There were more Southerners in the crowd than northerners, the thick drawls and parasols a telltale sign that the Southern visitors outnumbered the others. Reenie reported that she’d overheard the hotel manager speaking about the situation. Apparently, the northerners no longer wanted to come to the resort as it was being overrun by Southerners. Most of them had shortened their visits. Some were said to be offended by the presence of negro wenches.

Lizzie and Reenie were standing together when a colored child unwrapped a muslin cloth, exposing a small fish inside. She pulled a few sprigs of some kind of herb from her pocket and tucked them one by one into the folds of the fish. Then she wrapped the fish again and placed it on the outer edges of the fire.

Neither of the women knew where the child had come from. They assumed that she belonged to one of the hotel servants and had been assigned to perform some chores for the day. Lizzie and Reenie each held the end of a long stick skewering partridges. They had spent the entire morning plucking the feathers from the birds and cleaning out the organs. Now they held the stick just high enough where it would not catch fire, and rotated it slowly so the birds would cook on the inside before they charred on the outside. Once the birds were done, they slid them off and piled them onto a long board. Then Reenie carried the board over to another table where Mawu and two other colored women from the hotel ladled sauce onto them.