The twin named George switched positions so that Reenie could finish the other side of his head. “I hear tell of this place nearby. Colored folk. Free and fancy colored folk.”

“What you talking about, George?” Philip faced him.

“I heard them talking. It’s a place on the other side of them woods. It’s where the free folk go to have summertime. Just like this place, excepting it’s for us’n. All you got to do is walk right through them there woods.”

“Well, I ain’t never heard of such,” Lizzie said. “Free colored folk having summertime!”

Mawu edged so close Lizzie could smell her. “Well, Miss…what you say your name was?”

“Lizzie.”

“Miss Lizzie, you must not ever been off your place before. It’s plenty of free colored folk. Rich, too.”

“I know it’s free colored folk,” Lizzie snapped. “I am just saying I ain’t never heard of them having summer in the country the way the white folks do.”

“George is right,” Reenie said. “I hear the white folks talking, too. Say they can’t understand why they build this place so close to that one.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment. They knew that Reenie, the oldest of the women, didn’t lie. If she said she heard it, there wasn’t a truer fact.

“Just how far is it?” Philip asked as Lizzie braided the next to last plait.

“Close enough to walk. Yessir it is.” George rocked back and forth.

“Shh…” Reenie said. “Calm yourself. You know these trees got ears.”

They all looked around as if Reenie had actually seen the trees lean forward. Except for Mawu. She looked right at George.

“So when us going?” Mawu asked.

Sweet stopped plaiting. “Us? Go? Ain’t no womenfolks going nowhere.”

“Well, you sho ain’t going seeing as to your condition and all. But I want to see these rich colored folks.” Mawu challenged them all with her voice. Lizzie tried to picture this Mawu’s master, what kind of man Tip might be, what kind of place she lived on down in Louisiana.

“All right,” Lizzie said and patted Philip on the shoulder.

“Your hair look real nice,” Sweet said. “That ought to keep for as long as you here.”

“It’ll help with the heat. This sun is hot for sho,” Philip said. He stood and stretched his legs and caught Mawu admiring his body as he did so. He knew he was something to look at. He knew it from the comments of slave owners and slave traders. He stole a peek at the new woman.

Lizzie sensed something between them. He cast his eyes back at the ground, but Lizzie thought there might be a secret meeting later. She had known Philip since she was a girl.

George stood, too, as Sweet gave him a final pat.

“I don’t know why you don’t want us to plait your hair,” Reenie said to Mawu. Any of the other women would have heard and obeyed the command in Reenie’s voice, but Mawu just shook her head.

“Come on, Miss Lizzie.” Sweet beckoned her over. “Let me do your head.” Lizzie planted herself on the ground and leaned forward so Sweet could start in the back.

Reenie pushed henry out from her legs so he could follow the other two men who were already walking off. There was nothing left for her to do, so Reenie sat there glaring at Mawu as if her sudden uselessness were all her fault.

“You even know how to plait,” Reenie said in what didn’t even try to pass as an asking tone.

“Course I do. What kind of woman you think I is?” Mawu folded her arms across her chest.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Lizzie said, rising to the defense of Reenie. That woman had been too good to her to allow this red-headed, slow-talking woman to insult her.

“Well, I can sho see what kind of womens y’all is.”

Sweet let out a high-pitched belch. “What?”

“You heard me. Y’all ain’t talking about nothing, ain’t doing nothing. You probably run behind your mens all day sweeping up they dirt.”

Reenie calmed Lizzie with a touch of her toe on her friend’s calf.

Instead of words, instead of a tongue lashing she would remember until she left the camp, they gave Mawu silence. They rewarded the arrival of this seventh slave with a cold, thick wall of disregard. Treated her as if she weren’t there. Treated her as if she were an unfamiliar white woman sitting among them to whom they had no obligation. Sweet braided, Lizzie closed her eyes, and Reenie picked through the seeds the men had left.

Mawu sat there for a moment, waiting. Then she picked up her basket, perched it on her head, and walked stiff backed toward the resort.

TWO

Mawu waved her hands when she talked. She fluttered them about as if rearranging the air around her. There was a fluidity about the woman that made Lizzie take notice. At that very moment, she was stroking her bare chest right above her left breast, and Lizzie couldn’t stop following the movement.

Lizzie compared her own dark brownness to Mawu’s lighter hue. In her mind, she lined the two of them up side-by-side: legs, arms, waists, shoulders. Drayle had told Lizzie countless times she was pretty, but she’d never really believed it about herself. The shape of Lizzie’s face was squarish and strong. Someone had once commented that her thick eyebrows were becoming, but she’d always thought of herself as too hairy-it covered her legs and arms in a soft down, and instead of freckles like Mawu, she had been cursed with moles-fleshy ones, large and small across her chest and back. A particularly juicy one lay tucked in the corner above her left nostril, a final unfair flourish to her mannish face.

Mawu was freckled red, specks dotting her face like rain. She was petite with a short torso and long, thin legs. Her neck stretched long and seemed to be the only part of her body left unmarked. She had one pointed pinky nail that made Lizzie wonder how she worked with such a thing.

Lizzie had finally caught sight of Tip, Mawu’s master, and she couldn’t help but think he didn’t deserve to feel the tender scratch of that fingernail along his back.

“You listening?”

Lizzie nodded her head yes and looked back into the skillet.

“My mammy taught me how to make this. She said-”

“Your birth mammy?” interrupted Lizzie.

“Course my birth mammy. Ain’t you got a mammy?”

Lizzie shook her head. “She died before I remember. But I’ve got other ones. Aunt Lu raised me before I came to the Drayle place. Then after I was sold, Big Mama became my mammy. But when I moved into the big house…”

The unfinished sentence did not hover. They both knew what moving into “the big house” meant. They both knew the way it affected relationships in the slave quarters. This understanding was the main reason Lizzie liked coming to Tawawa. She didn’t have to always explain herself. And sometimes that was a good thing since she didn’t always have the words for it.

“Well, you take this here lesson on how to fix this stew back to your Big Mama. She gone love you for it. No reason why they can’t eat like this in Tennessee.”

Mawu tossed a careless smile in her direction. Lizzie didn’t say that Big Mama was dead.

Instead, Lizzie looked off at the circle of twelve cottages that flanked the hotel, arcing around a pond. Most of the guests stayed in the main hotel, but the Southern men preferred to rent the cottages for the privacy. The hotel was a lofty white structure, three stories high, with twenty-four pane windows. Rocking chairs sat in groups of two on a wide porch verandah that ran across the front of the building. Six columns lined the verandah, forming a colonnade. In the middle of the pond, a wooden water wheel turned slowly, patiently, as if to signal that the days at the resort would turn just as steadily and would be in no hurry to cease. Drayle had described to Lizzie how the encompassing forest had not been decimated, only thinned, so that the most majestic trees remained. Meandering paths throughout the property led to the main building from various directions. The hotel sank into the hills, hugging the curve of the earth. An American flag topped a small carousel that perched above the hotel’s highest point. When Lizzie first laid eyes on the resort, she thought it was a plantation, the grandest plantation she had ever seen.