Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Wench

“Watch your mouth.”

She stared into her cold stew.

He wiped the bowl with his finger, then stuck it in his mouth and sucked. He froze just as he was pulling the finger out of his mouth, as if remembering his manners. He rose, came around to her chair, and lifted her by the sides of her torso. She felt a bit of panic. She was supposed to have stood behind him, working on his shoulders. Maybe the spell had worked on her and not him.

“Come on, Lizzie. Haven’t I done right by you? haven’t I always treated you like you were my very own wife?”

He kissed her behind her right ear, whispered the word wife as if it had a magical property all its own. Although he had washed up in the basin set up for him, he still smelled like the outdoors. She closed her eyes, searching behind her eyelids for the script she had practiced.

He pulled her up and led her into the other room, standing behind her, fitting his body into hers. Then he pushed her onto the bed. She lay flat on her stomach and waited.

He drowned her thoughts by saying: don’t you know how special you are? Don’t you know I picked you out of all the slave women? Don’t you know you’re the first slave girl I’ve ever brought into my house? Don’t you know you’re the mother of my firstborn?

The words came faster, sinking into her kinks. He touched the back of her neck along the edge of her hair with his lips and rubbed his face down her loose-fitting dress. As he talked, he stuck it inside of her and she did what she always did: clung to the words, wrapped them up inside, let them work her over. It was mainly this, his careful voicing of loving things that kept her in this place of uncertainty about her children.

When he was finished, he did not turn her over. She waited for him to start up again. When she heard heavy breathing, she lifted her head.

She slipped from beneath him. The breeze from the open window cooled her face. She stood up gingerly, so as not to wake him, and went back to clean up the dishes.

Soften the white man. Hmph. Some stew. It occurred to her he had not even noticed her new hairstyle, the careful plaits that had taken Sweet the better part of an afternoon to complete.

When all of the dishes were stacked, she went out and sat on the porch. She thought of her children back at the place, already working and doing chores around the big house. It had begun with pulling weeds in the garden patch, but soon that would amount to something more. Full work days were just over the horizon for her son, the older of the two.

The sound of Drayle’s snores drifted through the window. He would sleep through the night. She observed the windows of the eleven other cottages that curved around the lake. Perhaps in those rooms, stifled with the nighttime heat, the other white men were all sleeping, too. And their slave women, all slumbering in the same dreamland.

A trio of ducks slept on the bank, their heads turned around and tucked under their wings. A nearby creek bubbled, and she let a mosquito whine in her ear until it stung her. She clapped it in her hand and studied the smear of blood in her palm.

They had been given that Sunday off with one condition. Sweet would stay at the resort. If any members of the group were so much as a few minutes late for evening chores, she would be beaten, pregnant or not. It was a cruel bargain-one harsh enough to make them sit around the camp for three hours that morning wondering if they should venture off anywhere at all. It was a promise layered on top of other unspoken threats, hinting at violence to their children, parents, siblings back at the plantations should they overestimate the men’s pity for a pregnant woman. This was a most trusted group of slaves, so none of the white men actually believed their slaves would run off. But they were in free territory and had to take precautions. Lizzie tried not to think about Drayle’s silence that morning as the slaves had lined up before the men, waiting to receive their gift of a day’s rest.

That morning, they’d discussed making their way to Xenia. The omnibus that had brought them from the railroad depot in town had taken almost thirty minutes on the turnpike, but they weren’t allowed to use it without the presence of their white masters. Reenie and Lizzie suggested they stay close to the resort out of loyalty to Sweet. None of them wanted to separate. None of them wanted to be the first to suggest the colored resort. So they sat around the camp that morning behind a curtain of indecision.

It was Mawu who finally pushed them. “I is going.”

They all knew where she meant. Her cheeks were slightly burned by the sun. She folded her arms across her chest, pressed her knotted fists into the creases of her arms. She started off, and the rest of them followed. Reenie stumbled over a rock in her haste. Philip picked up a rag and ripped it. He tied the pieces to the low branches of trees as they walked.

“But you don’t even know how to get there,” Lizzie said.

“I’ll find it. These ain’t the first woods I done worked my way through. Just follow the path. Bound to lead somewhere.” The path was so faint it threatened to disappear, too narrow to have been sliced through the forest by horse hooves. Insect clouds broke before them.

The voice approached from behind, breathless, as if trying to catch up. “I know how to get there.”

They heard, but kept on walking. The instinct of the men at the sound of what was obviously a white woman’s voice was to keep moving. Only Lizzie turned her head.

It was the white woman who delivered the eggs and dairy. Her husband was a local farmer who provided necessities to the hotel and each morning this woman could be seen wheeling a cart to the meeting place where two black servants would unload her bundle and take it from her. Lizzie studied the woman’s calm face and watched as she pointed to the rag ends poking from Philip’s hand.

“You won’t be needing those.” The woman relaxed into an expression that said don’t be afraid of me. She worked to slow her breaths, her colossal bosom heaved, rising and falling in short bursts.

The slaves had not admitted this to one another, but each had memorized her features. Eyes the color of grit. Hair the color of wheat. Lips a thin line of pink. There was something about the way in which she shared the air with them. As if it belonged to all of them and was not hers alone.

These slaves had been around northern whites long enough to recognize one who didn’t understand the rules. But they were all bred in the South, which said they did not go up to strange white women with whom they had no business and strike up a conversation. So it was up to this young woman who moved as if she knew exactly where she was going.

The white woman had approached Lizzie just days before when Lizzie was alone, picking flowers for the cottage. Lizzie guessed it had taken the woman a full year’s span between summers to get up the nerve. It was just the two of them that day. “There are some pretty flowers over thataway. The color of sunset,” the woman had said to Lizzie.

Lizzie turned, but decided against looking the woman in the eye.

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

Lizzie hesitated, but the woman touched her arm. The contact was enough to quell the tension.

So she followed her. From the way she stepped, Lizzie had been certain this white woman knew these woods as well as she knew the ones back on her place in Tennessee.

The woman looked back at her and Lizzie finally returned the look. A smile pleated the woman’s face, and Lizzie struggled to determine if it was a real one.

“Thisaway.”

Lizzie rushed behind her, carefully holding her cloth sack of flowers away from her hips so the flowers would not get crushed.