At the back of the hotel, all she had to do was mention Sweet’s name and they pressed a loaf of bread under her arm and a bowl of creamed corn into her hands. The cook said, “God bless her. God bless her.”

Mawu fed Sweet as if she were a baby. She broke off a piece of the bread, dipped it in the water, and put it into Sweet’s mouth. Sweet chewed slowly. Between bites, Reenie put the cup of water to Sweet’s lips to make sure she didn’t choke.

When they were reasonably certain Sweet had had enough, Lizzie took the bowl and washed it at the well and set it outside the cottage door.

When she went back in, she heard Reenie talking, “You cry, now. You hear me? You let it out. You got to get it out your body. This thing you making, it ain’t gone do you no good.”

When Lizzie looked down, Sweet’s hands were moving. At first, she didn’t know what Sweet was doing. Then she understood. As if the fabric were still in her hands, Sweet was sewing away, her thumb pressed against an invisible thread, as if holding her place.

Lizzie found a small square of slate framed by wood. The cook managed to get her a piece of chalk. It was a precious find and Lizzie planned to take it back to her children. In the meantime, however, she would use it to teach Reenie a few of her letters. Reenie had been practicing with her primer since the summer before, but this was their first formal lesson.

Lizzie had thought to begin with A since that was the first letter of the alphabet. But then she changed her mind and began with teaching Reenie how to read and write her own name.

“How you keep track of them big letters and little letters? how you know which is which?”

Lizzie smiled. Reenie smelled of lavender. The older woman gripped the sides of the slate until the bones flexed over her knuckles.

“R-E-E-”

“How many e’s in my name?”

“Three,” Lizzie answered. “Can you count, Miss Reenie?”

“Not much.” The chalk slipped out of her hand.

“Like this.” Lizzie showed her how to hold it.

“I can add little numbers like two plus two and four plus four. But something climb over ten and I gets myself in trouble.”

Lizzie wiped the slate. “Let’s try again.”

Reenie concentrated and the chalk slipped out of her hand again. She threw the slate into the dust.

“I is too old, Miss Lizzie!”

Lizzie picked it up. “No you ain’t. Let’s try it again.”

“Miss Lizzie, I want to tell you something. About my finger. How I lost part of my finger.”

Lizzie put the slate down.

Mawu was running toward them from the main hotel. Reenie straightened her back and her face hardened. News was coming their way and whatever she’d had to confide in Lizzie would have to wait.

THIRTY-ONE

They wore the same dresses they’d worn the summer before during the dinner in the hotel, dresses carefully tucked away in trunks stored in the hotel attic over the last year. Dresses they’d instinctively protected when Sweet was sewing up everything in sight. Dresses they’d often thought about over the winter months when they were back home on their plantations, trying to make it through each day.

They’d tried to forget what happened to Reenie the night of the dinner when they’d first worn them, only speaking of it once. Reenie had described the night in a hushed tone early one morning. She’d told of how she’d carefully taken the dress off before she let the manager touch her. So that it, unlike her body, would remain inviolate. Every time he came for her, she made certain she never looked as enticing as that first night, so that each coming was a bigger disappointment than the last.

They should have been surprised the white men allowed them to go to Dayton. But they had come to learn that in this place with the magical water, things were different. Later, they would learn the trip was a gift for Sweet. It was her master’s way of giving her a piece of joy. Henry had not returned that summer, but his more vocal brother George had. George had been ordered to stay behind at the hotel. His owner had work for him to do.

One of the colored hotel porters was entrusted with money to buy Sweet something nice, but he would steal half of it and spend the rest on their meals and a cheap trinket for her. The slaves did not trust the porter because it was rumored he had turned in more than one runaway slave for the reward money. The word on him was that he believed slaves needed to earn their freedom by saving up for it. His own grandfather had done this very thing, buying his own freedom and his wife’s before settling in Ohio. Born into freedom, the porter believed in the legal rights of white men.

The slaves could not help but envy him. They observed the neat coat he wore with the shiny buttons, the polished black-soled shoes, and how he, every now and then, extracted a watch from his inner pocket and flicked open its lid at just an angle where they could not see its face.

Without the whites, the five slaves and one free colored weren’t allowed to ride the omnibus that shuttled Tawawa house visitors between the railroad depot and the resort. So they took a wagon. When they got to the depot, they piled into the back car of the train.

“I heard something,” Mawu whispered to Lizzie after the two had squeezed into the narrow seat.

“What’s that?” Lizzie asked.

“Ain’t you noticed it’s not that many folks here this year?”

“I guess.”

“They closing it. They selling it.”

“What?” Lizzie asked.

“Hush. Don’t want that porter to hear us talking.”

Lizzie lowered her voice. “What’s this you’re saying?”

“You ain’t gone see none of us again. They closing the hotel,” Mawu said.

Lizzie had heard nothing about this, and she intended to ask Drayle about it. She did not believe it was true.

She leaned back over and spoke closer to Mawu’s ear. “What about fixing yourself? You know. So you won’t have children again. Are you still going to do it?”

Mawu looked at her lap. “I reckon not, Miss Lizzie. I can’t do it round Sweet. It ain’t right.”

Philip opened a window to let some air into the stuffy car, and Mawu’s hair, having grown even longer over the winter, flew out around her face, the hair so thick as if a scalp did not exist. She held it back with one hand and placed the other in her lap.

The six brown-faced men and women were mostly silent the rest of the trip. The train rocked them into intermittent naps. It was as dark as nighttime when they left the resort, and by the time they arrived in Dayton, the sun had risen high over the buildings on the outskirts of the city.

The four women were unable to control their excitement as the city came into view. Even Sweet, who had been so quiet in the days following the death of her last child, spoke up. A servant from the hotel had given Sweet a steel needle as a gift, and she used it to make sure their dresses still fit, mending holes, tightening bodices, and letting out seams. And she had done it all in what appeared to be a healed spirit.

The women did their best to dry their faces and air out the spaces beneath their arms. They did not want to look like slaves. Lizzie patted Sweet’s wet forehead with a small square of cloth.

The hotel porter whistled and a tall, thin boy ran to the back of the station and came back driving a wagon. The wheels on the wagon were slightly bent and looked as if they would wobble right off.

“I want some sweets,” Mawu said.

“I want to go into a store and buy something,” Lizzie said.

“Your man give you money?” Sweet asked.

“A little,” Lizzie said, feeling selfish. She didn’t want to share.

“You think they gone let us go into a store and buy something without no note from our master?” Mawu asked.

“This ain’t the South,” said the porter. “Colored folks go in stores all the time here.”