She turned back to the birds on the ground beside her, and felt her eyes sting from the heat of the fire. Then she looked again at Drayle, and as the burning child’s screams simmered, she saw him take another puff of his cigar and wipe his forehead.
Lizzie was so busy watching Drayle that she had no memory of Mawu at that moment. She wished she had looked her way. Later, she wondered if she would have seen the reflection of the fire in her eyes.
THIRTY-SIX
The second fire happened that very night. The men poured out of the cottages in their dressing gowns, faces lined with the tension of sleep. The fire rose like a vengeful ancestor over the lot of them.
Mawu and Tip. It was their cottage. Lizzie searched the faces for her friend and found her, standing on the fringe, indecent in her gown, arms hanging slack at her sides, crying and choking through something that resembled tears.
Lizzie saw Reenie hurrying along with a pail of water in each hand. Out of the darkness, Drayle pushed two pails stuck inside of each other into Lizzie’s fist and commanded her to the pond. She joined the long line of frantic men and women, sooty-faced colored and white, slave and free, who moved back and forth between the pond and the cottage. One of the men yelled something unintelligible, and Mawu reached out into the darkness as if trying to clutch someone. Swollen white sores ran the length of her arm.
“She hurt. Mawu hurt,” Lizzie said to the closest passing negro.
In a moment, Reenie was there. Both of Mawu’s arms had been burned from the shoulder down to the hand. The skin had started to pucker, a fret of scales and blisters. Mawu looked down at her arms as if they belonged to someone else. Her face appeared untouched, smooth as a speckled stone, brown and iridescent in the light of the moon and the fire.
“I tried, I tried.”
“Hush. We gone take care of you.” Reenie had to yell over the shouts of the men.
Lizzie wanted to ask. What had she tried to do? had she tried to save Tip and failed? Lizzie looked off toward the cottage. It was a lick of flames, dark smoke blasting into the air and sending down a sprinkle of ashes.
“But you don’t understand, Miss Reenie. You don’t understand. I tried, I tried.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Lizzie heard Reenie say. “Anybody ask, you tell them she burnt and I is taking her back to my cottage, you hear?”
Lizzie nodded, the empty pails swaying in her hands.
“Is she all right?”
Reenie shook her head. It surprised Lizzie. Like asking the doctor if someone was going to be all right and hearing the truth for a change.
“She got more than burns to deal with.”
“Lizzie! Fill them buckets, girl!” Drayle shouted at her as Reenie and Mawu hurried off.
Lizzie ran back to the pond. One of the slaves standing knee deep in the water helped her get them full. When she turned around, she saw Tip waiting behind her, an outstretched pail in his hand and a pasty look on his white face that made him appear ghostlike.
But he was not a ghost. He was just as real as the fire still panting hungrily behind him. She glanced off in the direction that Reenie and Mawu had gone. Now she understood. She understood what Mawu had tried to do.
And while she had a strange feeling in her belly she might never see Mawu again, it never crossed her mind she might never see Reenie again, either.
THIRTY-SEVEN
When she heard that both Reenie and Mawu were missing, Lizzie felt as if her insides had been broken into a thousand pieces. She wanted to crawl inside herself like a turtle. Later, she would describe it to Glory as time moving at an indescribable speed, carrying buckets of water one minute and carrying her heart in her hands the next.
After the news spread through the resort, Drayle changed toward her. Everything became a barked order and she was locked in a room at night.
Lizzie ran the day over and over through her mind. From the girl with the burned legs-the way the skin merely looked sunburned-to the oozing sores on Mawu’s arms. From the dark smoke rising from the cottage to the empty feeling in her stomach that came with the knowledge that she was the only one of the four left. She could not understand what she had missed, why they had not included her in their plans. She wasn’t sure how she would have responded if they had, but she mourned the lack of invitation.
The only thing she could come up with was that they had not forgiven her for the summer she told on Mawu. They still thought of her as a traitor.
After the cottage fire was put out, Drayle had told her to make her way back. She had considered sneaking off to Reenie’s cottage, but she had thought better of it. Drayle’s eyes had made two holes in her back, and she’d figured it wasn’t smart to anger him at that point.
She couldn’t keep her face out of the window that night. Drayle followed her home soon after and made her come to bed. But after he was asleep, she got up and sat in the window again. The smell of ash was still in the air and the moon was bright enough for her to just make out Tip’s cottage where two men were still dousing the smallest flames. It wasn’t really a cottage anymore, just a black shell standing.
How long had they known they were making a run for it?
Two days later, Drayle shouted orders to George to get their trunks up to the hotel where the omnibus would pick them up. There was still no news of Reenie and Mawu’s whereabouts, but every day she could hear the dogs. The same dogs they’d used to hunt wild birds and pheasants and possum were now being used to hunt her friends. She had heard that the reward money was so big, every slave catcher in the county was out looking for the women.
She hoped Mawu had covered her hair. In her mind, she warned the woman like a mother would a child. She advised the two to split up. She wrapped hot biscuits in a cloth and tucked it into their aprons.
Tip walked around the resort with a righteous anger on his face, as if someone had kidnapped his mother. She wondered if he was angrier that Mawu had escaped or that she had tried to kill him first.
You ain’t the only one wondering about a betrayal, she wanted to say to him. But she didn’t say anything because whatever rights she’d had before Reenie and Mawu had escaped had ended. Now it seemed everyone was watching her. Reenie’s Sir even tore a piece of her dress one day and gave it to one of the dogs. The dog smelled and licked it while she watched. Then Sir grinned at her, as if to let her know that he could find her, that he would find her if she had a mind to take off after the others.
Each hour that passed by that she didn’t hear they had been caught was like a jubilation. She hoped they made it all the way to Canada. She had heard that in Canada coloreds and whites could marry. She wondered if there was a country north of Canada, and what possibilities existed there.
She also wished for two more things: that she could be with them and that she could return to her children. It felt like her right arm was being pulled one way and her left arm being pulled the other. She knew it wasn’t a right way to feel.
While she was packing her trunk, she tried to pack her fancy dress, but Drayle told her to leave it behind. Leaving the dress, saying goodbye to it, was like leaving a part of her new self. She wished she had given the dress to Sweet to tear up and sew. Maybe it would be of better use in the ground where they’d buried the clothes in honor of her children.
On the day they woke up to leave, it was still dark outside. As she walked to the hotel, she found no joy in the early morning bird chirps.
She moved slowly because she wanted to remember every moment of the free soil. She remembered Reenie asking Philip to tell her what freedom tasted like, and she felt a thrill at the knowledge that Reenie would be getting her own taste now.