Wench

In the years before the Civil War, Tawawa House is an Ohio resort where wealthy Southern men vacation with the enslaved women they keep as mistresses. Because Ohio is free soil, the women who summer there stand a step from freedom every year, and every year most of them go home. Lizzie has borne two children to her master and believes, against everything, that he loves her. Her friends Reenie, Sweet, and the fierce newcomer Mawu see the resort differently, and Mawu's talk of escape forces each woman to reckon with what she would risk and what she would leave behind. Perkins-Valdez follows them across several summers, drawing the bonds among the women and the impossible calculus of loving and being owned by the same man.