Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Wench

They came to a round grove. The woman had told the truth. The flowers were the color of sunset. And not the yellowish tinge of a lazy sun either, but the intense orange of a sun refusing to set on anyone else’s terms. The flowers were at their full height, their stems as straight as backs, the petals at full blossom.

“I love flowers. I’ve probably got more on my land than you’ve ever seen in one place,” the woman said. She stooped over and picked the flowers one by one. Lizzie didn’t move. She wasn’t sure what was expected of her. So she just stood there and watched. The woman picked until the folds of her dress were full. Lizzie watched her meticulously choose where she broke off a flower, careful not to disturb the ones she left. Then she dumped the flowers out of her dress into a sack on the ground. She pushed the sack into Lizzie’s hand.

“You take them,” she said.

Lizzie felt trapped. She looked around to see if she could find her way back to the resort on her own. Once she determined that she could, she clutched the bag of flowers to her chest and took off running.

She had not seen the white woman since. But she had told Mawu about it. Now Mawu was watching her watch the white woman, as if to see what Lizzie would do.

“My name is Glory. I’m a friend.”

“We just taking a walk,” Philip said after several moments of silence. The slaves had all stopped. Glory now blocked the path in front of them, the sun facing her back and casting her wide body in silhouette so that her face appeared darkened. They squinted at her.

“No, you aren’t,” said the woman who called herself Glory. “I know exactly where you’re going. And I don’t blame you, either.”

Mawu studied the face beneath the bonnet. Then she said, “Take us then, why don’t you?”

Glory led them, her long skirt sweeping the ground as she ambled along. Lizzie watched it gather dirt. Philip stopped now and again to tie a rag to a tree. The other slaves patiently slowed for him, sharing in his mistrust.

Lizzie’s ears tingled, and she wondered if the others might be feeling the same unease. She imagined her Rabbit walking beside her, and she knew she would gladly leave her at this colored place and risk her own flogging and Sweet’s too for the chance that a well-to-do colored family might raise her.

The woods were bisected by a long ravine east of the resort, and Glory led them along the edge of it to a place where they could safely descend into it. The men went first; then they reached up their arms and helped the women down. They waded through a shallow creek, hopping from one stone to the next. The sides of the ravine were high, and they searched for a vine to pull themselves out of it on the other side.

The heat caressed them, opened their pores, greased their faces with exertion. They walked in a line, shawdowless beneath the midday sun, the women ahead of the men, George and henry bringing up the rear. The fauna gradually changed the farther they got from the resort. Lizzie’s feet registered one hour. Her thoughts shuffled between a pack of images-her children, Drayle, the place, the cottage.

Oh, if she could just set eyes upon this place-this oasis that would confirm for her the glory of free colored people, the limitlessness of her children once Drayle set them free. Her left foot began to ache and she knew it was rubbing against her shoe’s hard sole. Her feet had always been delicate for a slave woman, perhaps a sign of her relatively light workload. She felt a limp coming on. But she had to see this dream for herself so she could pass it on to Rabbit and Nate. She had to know if there really was such a thing as free and fancy colored folk.

The sunlight guttered through the trees. And then a flat sketch of land spread itself out before them like a readied banquet table. Glory stopped and the rest of them formed a semicircle about her at the edge of the clearing. Lizzie pushed her way between George and Philip who had rushed ahead.

They took it in amidst a prayerful silence. The feeling in their hearts made it easy for them to overlook the discrepancy between the place of their imaginings and the place that appeared before them. Unlike Tawawa house, there were no individual cottages edged around a pond with a grand, white hotel at its head. There was only one structure, a gray saltbox house with a sloping gabled roof. Lizzie counted five windows along the top floor and four along the bottom, each framed by black shutters. For a moment everything appeared still, lifeless, unreal. Then they saw a small body bound through the door, and from the sweep of her dress, they could see it was the figure of a pale-skinned colored girl.

Lizzie almost dropped to her knees. Nate’s catechism with the handwriting of four different white children. Rabbit’s roughened feet. Nate’s insolent defiance of his father. Rabbit’s trembling lip when she was scared. Nate’s memory. Rabbit’s natural tendency to play the fiddle. Lizzie wove these thoughts together like chicken wire.

“This is it,” Glory said. “Lewis house. Around here, white folks call it Dumawa house. Mimicking Tawawa house, they say, even though the colored place was built first. I’ll take you just a bit closer, but we can’t get too close. This is slave-catcher territory, and I wouldn’t want you to be mistaken for the wrong runaway slave.”

“What about the free mens who stay here?” Philip asked. “How they tell who free and who ain’t?”

No one spoke.

“They come here for the water,” Glory said.

“The water?” Lizzie repeated.

“Yeah. Don’t you know why the Southern white men come so far to this place? It’s said that if you take the water, it’ll cure you. It’ll get rid of diseases and cure mental states and things like that. Some folks think the water around here is magic. Colored folks included.”

“What you mean ‘take’ the water?” Mawu asked.

“Bathe in it. Drink it,” Glory answered.

Lizzie sniffed and caught the scent of a nearby spring pulsing through the air. She put a hand to her damp forehead and patted. Drayle had never told her this. Was he sick? She remembered the water she’d drunk earlier that morning. From the pump. Had it been special water? It hadn’t tasted any differently than the water back at the place. It had made her urinate more. In fact, the summer before, she had urinated so much she thought she might be pregnant. But this Glory was saying the white men bathed in it, too. Some of the water smelled rotten. Surely that water couldn’t be good for you.

Glory went on to explain that the hotel was even named after this water. “Tawawa” was the Shawnee Indian word for “clear water,” she said.

“Sometimes you can see them on the back lawn playing games or their fiddles,” Glory said in a way that made the others think she was a regular spy on the colored vacationers.

A woman came out of the main door and said something to the girl. It looked like a mild scolding. It was strange for Lizzie to see a colored woman and child using the front door of what looked to be a white man’s house.

Mawu stretched and popped her neck. “Well, I is going over to introduce myself to that there lady.” She sprang up and ran off.

“Mawu!” Lizzie rose up.

Reenie grabbed Lizzie’s dress. “Don’t you run after that fool woman.”

Philip had run after her, though. The rest of them watched as Mawu gained speed, surprisingly quick on her short legs. Philip eventually caught up with her and grabbed her arm. Mawu jerked free and ran off. Philip took off after her again. By the time he caught up with her, they had been spotted by the woman on the porch. She disappeared into the door, and returned a few seconds later with a tall, dark man wearing bright trousers. The woman pushed the child back into the house and pointed at the two running slaves.