New author explores rarely talked about side of slavery in ‘Wench’

Photos courtesy of Amistad/HarperCollins

POWER OF PROSE. Author Dolen Perkins-Valdez will present a reading from her new book “Wench” in Tacoma on March 24, 7 p.m., at UPS in Wheelock Student Center’s Murray Boardroom.

For her very first novel, author and Harvard University graduate Dolen Perkins-Valdez, a creative writing instructor at University of Puget Sound (UPS), has penned an engrossing story sure to capture the imagination – and heart – of any reader.  

Set in the pre-Civil War-era South, in a time when the American institution of slavery was slowly dying, “Wench” focuses on the lives of four black slave women: Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu. Each one from a different plantation, Lizzie, Reenie and Sweet have become friends over the years of being taken every summer to Tawawa House as enslaved mistresses to their white masters. An idyllic vacation resort for rich whites in Ohio back then, Tawawa House eventually became our nation’s first black college, Wilberforce University.

Their lives a daily struggle, each of these women dream of better days, dreams that become all the more real when the threesome meet Mawu at the resort one summer. Mawu talks about running away, and she gets the others thinking, too, about what it would be like to finally taste freedom.

With Tawawa House situated in the free territory of Ohio, a hub of the Underground Railroad, the prospect of liberation seems somewhat more real to slaves like Lizzie, but that would also mean leaving her master behind, which poses its own dilemmas in Lizzie’s heart. This is where Perkins-Valdez’s writing in “Wench” reaches its crescendo – she deftly peels back the outward layers of the master/slave relationship to “look underneath the covers,” if you will, at the emotional ties that often bound the two together.

Lizzie feels she could not run away, for she professes deep love for her master, Drayle, who owned the orphaned girl ever since she was a child, and took her sexually when she was about 14 years old. Thoughts of leaving him cut as deeply through her as through Shakespeare’s lovelorn Juliet, but in this case Lizzie’s Romeo owns her as his property and uses her as such, just like Reenie’s, Sweet’s and Mawu’s masters do. Rape is used as seduction, and babies were born of these unions, making for a muddled, cruel relationship for the slave who had no choice in the matter.

Perkins-Valdez shows brilliantly that there was much bubbling underneath the surface of these liaisons, built upon years of intimacy that collected like layers of a quilt. Some of these slave women, like Lizzie, wrapped this quilt around themselves for a sense of safety and comfort, and although it did not quite fend off the chill of Lizzie’s trapped situation, it helped the days to pass and gave her hope for better tomorrows.

This is not to say that “Wench” is merely a romance novel by any means. Falling more under the category of historical fiction, Perkins-Valdez says her book was inspired by history more than it is a pure reflection of it. “I did all the research I could,” she said. “I found everything I could about the resort, but the dead end of the street was there was no record left behind by the women (who stayed there).”

To construct the lives of her main characters, Perkins-Valdez relied on her own vivid imagination. Her writing reveals a remarkable compassion for her forebears, and she does an amazing job at exploring interpersonal dynamics between the races one might not always associate with slavery but were definitely there. This “putting herself in their shoes” challenged Perkins-Valdez in her writing in ways that made her set aside modern viewpoints and look at things during Lizzie’s era through yesteryear’s lens.

“People ask me whether Lizzie truly loved Drayle, but I don’t have an answer to that question. I feel it is beyond my grasp as a 21st century person.” She said readers should set aside what they know, and instead try to imagine how much harder life was in Lizzie’s day. “The choices they made weren’t easy and don’t necessarily coalesce with how we think we would answer them. There’s a context (readers) have to take into consideration…it was about survival.”

Currently on sabbatical from UPS in Washington, D.C., Perkins-Valdez has been on a four-month, cross-country book tour since January. She has two stops in this area: in Seattle on March 22, 6:30 p.m. at Douglass-Truth Library (hosted by Elliott Bay Book Company) at 2300 E. Yesler Way; and in Tacoma on March 24, 7 p.m., at UPS in Wheelock Student Center’s Murray Boardroom. “Wench” is available at Barnes and Noble, through Amazon and other book retailers. To learn more, visit http://www.dolenperkinsvaldez.com.

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