Mawu told all this and more to the women as they went through their daily chores. She talked about laying tricks and mixing powders, claiming she knew how to ward off evil spirits and put somebody in a good humor.
Reenie dismissed Mawu’s conjuring talk as superstition. But Lizzie pressed Mawu to keep talking. Sweet listened, too.
Mawu told them she was telling her story so they would know why she couldn’t go back to Louisiana, why she didn’t feel the same pull they felt toward their children. She didn’t live in the big house like Lizzie. Her children had not had special favors like Sweet’s. She hadn’t had a cabin built for her like Reenie. She was just a slave like any other-beaten, used, and made to feel no different than a cow or a goat or a chicken.
Each day she spoke of yet another violation, another wrong committed by Tip over the years. As each memory sprang forth, she shared it with them.
Next she pointed out how their own men were no different: Sweet’s master worked her despite her pregnancy; Reenie’s master never looked her in the face; Drayle refused to free the children he claimed to love. Mawu worked on them in the days following their visit to Lewis house-nudging, cajoling, infusing them with thoughts of escape. She asked them: How can you stand being a slave? Don’t you want to claim that arm? That leg? That breast? She declared that no one would suckle her titty again-man or child.
Lizzie felt each defense of Drayle die in her throat. At night, she felt safe and certain, protected in his arms. In the day, she felt unsure of anything.
Then Mawu said she’d caught Drayle staring at her breasts. even though the thought of his betrayal made her want to vomit, Lizzie believed the newcomer.
The four women stacked the preserved fruit against the wall of the ice house. The ice house was thirteen feet long and twelve feet wide, a nearly perfect square. A ten-foot-deep hole was dug into the ground and filled with ice from the pond during the winter. After the ice was buried, the hole was covered with straw. The house remained cool throughout the summer. The resort used it for storing various foods such as fruit and eggs. Barrels of whiskey sat in the corner.
Sweet leaned against the wall. “Y’all mind if I rest a bit? My back ain’t holding up too well.”
“Naw, you go on and rest yourself,” Reenie said.
“This ground sho is cold,” Sweet said.
Mawu stooped and touched the ground. “This ice house wouldn’t last a Louisiana summer. Ain’t cold enough.”
“Louisiana ain’t no hotter than Tennessee,” Lizzie said.
“Hmph. You ain’t seen one of our summers.” Mawu’s voice was quiet. “You write it yet?”
Lizzie could make out the shapes of the women. Sweet formed an r. Her baby face-the origin of her name-led into a thick neck, wide bust, and sloping belly. Reenie’s older, thinner form was ramrod straight, her boniness cutting a sharp edge in the dim light of the ice house. Mawu’s hair was tied back into an uncharacteristic bun and covered with a yellow cotton handkerchief. Lizzie traced the woman’s body with her eyes: the small high breasts that had caught Drayle’s attention.
“You write it yet girl?” Mawu repeated.
Reenie and Lizzie stood side-by-side, stacking the jars in six neat rows: peaches, nectarines, plums, cherries.
“I ain’t sure I want to,” Lizzie said. She could feel the cool air creep through the folds of her dress. She cleared her throat.
“Do it,” Sweet said.
Both Lizzie and Reenie stopped working and looked down at the pregnant woman.
“I had a man once,” Sweet said. “He escape and leave me behind. I keep thinking he gone come back and get me. I wait and I wait. But he don’t never come.”
Lizzie wondered why Sweet had never told them this.
“I ain’t going nowhere,” Sweet went on. “Got too many childrens back home. I reckon I ain’t gone never leave Master. But the ones that wants to go oughts to be able to go.”
“Who exactly are the ones that want to go?” Lizzie pursed her lips until the words came out in a whistle. “I ain’t leaving my children neither. Nobody but Mawu wants to go.” Lizzie looked at Reenie when she said it. Surely the woman was too old to start over.
“I is still collecting my thoughts,” Reenie said.
“Collecting your thoughts?” Lizzie repeated.
Mawu walked over and grabbed Lizzie’s arm. She bit down into the flesh with her nails. Lizzie tried to pull away, but Mawu’s grip was firm.
“You write that letter, you hear?”
The salted carcass of a pig swung in the side vision of Lizzie’s eye, its broad back as purple as a bruise.
SEVEN
It began with a flurry of excitement over wearing a new dress. The news they would be dining in the main hotel with the men was strange, but welcome. The four couples-along with a northern businessman-were to dine in the library on the top floor of the hotel. The northerner’s presence would be as unusual as that of the women. The Southerners and northerners did not interact often at the resort, particularly when the slave women were around.
A colored woman with a wooden foot and a cane traveled nineteen miles from Dayton to bring nine dresses. She took them out of a trunk and spread them out in the main room of Lizzie’s cottage. Then she leaned on the carved head of a duck and studied the four slaves as she waited. The promise of business kept her from commenting, but a mean-spirited little “bah” escaped her lips every few seconds.
The four women eyed the dresses with the knowledge that they only had two days to sew. Some of the dresses were ripped, torn. Others had holes still bearing the cracked, empty shells of moth cocoons. But they were a far cry from the “negro cloth” some of the slaves wore back on the plantations. Negro cloth was just another name for a coarse cotton, and when they wore it, it scratched their skin.
Lizzie chose one that the woman said was made of something called batiste and the color of a tangerine. Mawu commented that the dress was the perfect color for Lizzie’s dark skin and black hair. Mawu took a liking to a blue dress. It was not often that she got to wear color, and she didn’t believe she had ever worn anything blue.
For Sweet, it was docility unleashed. She chose the only empire waistline dress of the bunch and ripped the sleeves off because they were too tight on her arms. Even after she had let the dress out, the constricted bodice would push her breasts into two engorged maternal mounds.
Although they insisted that she choose first, Reenie chose an unbecoming dress. She was the only one of the four who did not plan a complete transformation. The dress she chose was out of season and would surely be too hot for a summer evening. It had a long train and high neckline. There were so many buttons down the back that it took two women to secure it. Some of the buttons were tight, and they decided they would need to let out an inch so the buttons wouldn’t bulge and pop. Sweet said it looked like Reenie was going to a funeral.
On the night of the dinner, when the dresses had been sewn and they had oiled their hair and faces and Mawu had rubbed aloe onto an unexplained fresh scar on her right cheek and Lizzie had darkened each woman’s eyes with a smudge of shadow, they walked to the hotel, unescorted by the men, holding each other through the arms, coupled two by two, excited about being ladies for a change. Reenie walked in front with Sweet, and Lizzie and Mawu walked just far enough behind so they wouldn’t trip on Reenie’s train.
The servants did not hide their curiosity as the slave women walked through the kitchen. Each woman had experienced a range of reactions from the slaves back home: jealousy, pride, pity. Here in Ohio, they had not spoken much about what the free colored people thought of women like them. This was partly because they did not care. They had each other, unlike down south. There, it was a lonely battle.