When she was finished, he placed his hand on her head reverently, devoutly, as if he were a preacher anointing her. Something in his touch flowed through her and helped her to make peace with the loss, which for some reason felt like her own. Then he left her kneeling there in her own thoughts, just as they had left Sweet. And she stayed there for a moment, disoriented, alone.

Then she walked out of the cottage, down the worn path that led between the houses toward the woods. There was a post where Glory delivered eggs and freshly slaughtered chickens or hogs to the hotel each morning. It was a white post and on it was painted: TAWAWA HOUSE each morning, two servants, colored women from the hotel, met Glory there and took her bundle. Sometimes they were late, and often Lizzie had walked by and seen Glory standing there, waiting patiently with her bundle on the ground beside her.

It was early, and Lizzie was almost certain that Glory had not yet arrived for her daily delivery. She spied the white post in the blue light of the morning, its natural wood already beginning to etch through the paint.

She sat on the ground and waited for Glory, her legs tucked beneath her. She wondered if Glory knew the pain of a dead child. The woman did not have children even though she had long been of childbearing age. Surely she did, Lizzie thought. Surely she had her own heft of memories.

Lizzie watched the sun break over the tops of the trees and listened to the gurgle of a nearby creek. She witnessed two sparrows play catch-and-kiss. She waited patiently for the white woman.

PART II. 1842-1849

TWELVE

The first night he went to Lizzie, she was soaked with a sticky wetness that clung to her. The door was more than cracked, but it hadn’t done much to relieve her in the small storeroom. She had extinguished her candle because even its flame sent off more heat than she could bear. One arm rested above her head on the moss-filled pallet and a foot was planted against the shelf, her legs propped wide. Looking back, she reckoned she must have looked as if she were waiting for him.

She had been owned by the Drayles for six full crop cycles before her master finally followed up on his incessant staring and came to her. Before she moved into the big house, she lived in a cabin with the blind woman they called Big Mama. Big Mama was known for her soap made from lye and crackling. It was good enough to sell to nearby plantations, and had turned a pretty good profit over the years. But the woman had been blinded when a vat of lye sputtered into both eyes. Lizzie spent the early years in the workyard with her. An area of the quarters sectioned off by chicken wire, the workyard was where clothes were sewn, mended, and boiled, slave food prepared, candles made, sausage ground, and butter churned. It also contained a small vegetable patch. At one end of the yard sat a long trough where the children ate their midday meal, sometimes scooping up the mush with long-handled wooden spoons but mostly using their fingers since there weren’t enough spoons to go around. Those who didn’t work in the fields stayed in the workyard most of the day. Lizzie had never been ordered to the fields. She stayed close by Big Mama’s side, filling in for the old woman’s eyes.

According to Big Mama, the Drayle plantation had originally belonged to Miss Fran’s family. Big Mama had nursed Fran as a baby. That’s how long she had lived there. Although the slave cabins remained the same, Drayle had added a kitchen onto the original house, ignoring his father-in-law’s fears of a kitchen fire. The main house was larger on the inside than it appeared from the outside. But the grounds were impressive. A long dirt driveway wound through two acres of flat manicured land and ended at the red brick colonial. Behind the main house, the slave cabins lined up in three neat rows. The fronts of the cabins all faced the back of the main house, as if Fran’s father had wanted his slaves to keep an eye on his back, or as if to keep them from looking out beyond the property and envisioning escape.

When Fran married the horse breeder, her parents took off to live in Mississippi, leaving the house in Shelby county for good. They did not approve of the marriage mainly because Drayle had no wealth.

Gradually, however, they came to accept Drayle’s marriage to their daughter even though he did not give them the grandchildren they craved. Their son-in-law managed to turn a steady profit from the hundred and twenty acres of mostly soybean and cotton fields. And even though his horse breeding had never amounted to more than a hobby, Drayle had attained a certain status in the surrounding community due to his equine knowledge.

Later Lizzie would reason that perhaps Drayle really was just passing through the kitchen and noticed her door open and only meant to close it. Perhaps he did think he heard a disturbing noise and came to check it out. And it was certainly possible he didn’t even know that the house girl slept in the storeroom off the kitchen. It was closer to dawn than dusk when she removed most of her clothes and propped the door open. If someone came in the kitchen, they would have to light a lantern, giving her time to cover herself.

But there was no warning light and he appeared in the doorway like an apparition, a sudden whistle of breath, a book tucked beneath his arm, a glass in his hand.

“It’s terribly hot in here,” he said.

She didn’t have time for a “yessir,” rolling over until her body was safely wrapped in the pallet, the muslin shirt too far to reach without exposing even more than she already had. What had moments before seemed like utter darkness now looked like blue light, and she could easily make out his form. She hoped her dark skin offered some cover.

Once, she had fancied a slave called Baby on account of his round, boyish face. The most tender moment of their relationship had been when he brought her a dead squirrel for supper. She’d fried it in bacon fat and they’d picked the meat off the scrawny animal with their fingers. Grease smeared over his face while he ate and when he smiled at her she’d wanted to lick it right off. The relationship had never gone beyond their awkward groping.

“I’m very sorry,” her master said.

“Yessir.” She wasn’t sure what he was talking about or what to answer. Big Mama had taught her when these moments happened to just say “sho” or “yessir.”

There were so many things to remember. It had taken a full week to remember to answer to her new name. The first change after she moved into the main house was that her mistress renamed her. She had been Eliza, but she became Lizzie because Miss Fran felt it was easier to say. The second change was that she was told to forget the slave cooking ways she’d learned down in the workyard. At her previous plantation, the cooking had been done in a cabin separate from the big house. It had been a larger plantation, and there had been much more to prepare. The location of the kitchen within the big house at the Drayle plantation threw Lizzie into closer proximity to whites than she had ever been.

“Here,” he said. “Take my water.”

She stared at his outstretched arm. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, but she still couldn’t see his expression well enough to tell if he was setting a trap for her. Sometimes they set traps for you, Big Mama had said. You got to be awares at all times. Ain’t no such thing as a truth-telling nigger. They’s only a dead nigger and a live one.

“Oh, no sir.” Then a pause. “Do you needs something?”

“Please.” he moved into the storeroom, so close his toe touched the edge of her pallet. “I won’t leave until you drink every bit of this here water.”