Kindred

by Butler, Octavia

  Then about four months after we’d met, Kevin said, “How would you feel about getting married?”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. “You want to marry me?” “Yeah, don’t you want to marry me?” He grinned. “I’d let you type all

  my manuscripts.”

  I was drying our dinner dishes just then, and I threw the dish towel at him. He really had asked me to do some typing for him three times. I’d done it the first time, grudgingly, not telling him how much I hated typ- ing, how I did all but the final drafts of my stories in longhand. That was why I was with a blue-collar agency instead of a white-collar agency. The second time he asked, though, I told him, and I refused. He was annoyed. The third time when I refused again, he was angry. He said if I couldn’t do him a little favor when he asked, I could leave. So I went home.

  When I rang his doorbell the next day after work, he looked surprised. “You came back.”

  “Didn’t you want me to?”

  “Well … sure. Will you type those pages for me now?” “No.”

  “Damnit, Dana …!”

  I stood waiting for him to either shut the door or let me in. He let me in.

  And now he wanted to marry me.

  I looked at him. Just looked, for a long moment. Then I looked away because I couldn’t think while I was watching him. “You, uh … don’t have any relatives or anything who’ll give you a hard time about me, do you?” As I spoke, it occurred to me that one of the reasons his proposal surprised me was that we had never talked much about our families, about how his would react to me and mine to him. I hadn’t been aware of us avoiding the subject, but somehow, we’d never gotten around to it. Even now, he looked surprised.

  “The only close relative I’ve got left is my sister,” he said. “She’s been trying to marry me off and get me ‘settled down’ for years. She’ll love

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  you, believe me.”

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  I didn’t, quite. “I hope she does,” I said. “But I’m afraid my aunt and uncle won’t love you.”

  He turned to face me. “No?”

  I shrugged. “They’re old. Sometimes their ideas don’t have very much to do with what’s going on now. I think they’re still waiting for me to come to my senses, move back home, and go to secretarial school.”

  “Are we going to get married?”

  I went to him. “You know damn well we are.”

  “You want me to go with you when you talk to your aunt and uncle?” “No. Go talk to your sister if you want to. Brace yourself though. She

  might surprise you.”

  She did. And braced or not, he wasn’t ready for his sister’s reaction. “I thought I knew her,” he told me afterward. “I mean, I did know her.

  But I guess we’ve lost touch more than I thought.” “What did she say?”

  “That she didn’t want to meet you, wouldn’t have you in her house— or me either if I married you.” He leaned back on the shabby purple sofa that had come with my apartment and looked up at me. “And she said a lot of other things. You don’t want to hear them.”

  “I believe you.”

  He shook his head. “The thing is, there’s no reason for her to react this way. She didn’t even believe the garbage she was handing me—or didn’t used to. It’s as though she was quoting someone else. Her husband, prob- ably. Pompous little bastard. I used to try to like him for her sake.”

  “Her husband is prejudiced?”

  “Her husband would have made a good Nazi. She used to joke about it—though never when he could hear.”

  “But she married him.”

  “Desperation. She would have married almost anybody.” He smiled a little. “In high school, she and this friend of hers spent all their time together because neither of them could get a boyfriend. The other girl was black and fat and homely, and Carol was white and fat and homely. Half the time, we couldn’t figure out whether she lived at the girl’s house or the girl lived with us. My friends knew them both, but they were too young for them—Carol’s three years older than I am. Anyway, she and this girl sort of comforted each other and fell off their diets together and planned to go to the same college so they wouldn’t have to break up the

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  partnership. The other girl really went, but Carol changed her mind and trained to become a dental assistant. She wound up marrying the first dentist she ever worked for—a smug little reactionary twenty years older than she was. Now she lives in a big house in La Canada and quotes clichéd bigotry at me for wanting to marry you.”

  I shrugged, not knowing what to say. I-told-you-so? Hardly. “My mother’s car broke down in La Canada once,” I told him. “Three people called the police on her while she was waiting for my uncle to come and get her. Suspicious character. Five-three, she was. About a hundred pounds. Real dangerous.”

  “Sounds like the reactionary moved to the right town.”

  “I don’t know, that was back in nineteen sixty just before my mother died. Things may have improved by now.”

  “What did your aunt and uncle say about me, Dana?”

  I looked at my hands, thinking about all they had said, paring it down wearily. “I think my aunt accepts the idea of my marrying you because any children we have will be light. Lighter than I am, anyway. She always said I was a little too ‘highly visible.’”

  He stared at me.

  “You see? I told you they were old. She doesn’t care much for white people, but she prefers light-skinned blacks. Figure that out. Anyway, she ‘forgives’ me for you. But my uncle doesn’t. He’s sort of taken this personally.”

  “Personally, how?”

  “He … well, he’s my mother’s oldest brother, and he was like a father to me even before my mother died because my father died when I was a baby. Now … it’s as though I’ve rejected him. Or at least that’s the way he feels. It bothered me, really. He was more hurt than mad. Honestly hurt. I had to get away from him.”

  “But, he knew you’d marry some day. How could a thing as natural as that be a rejection?”

  “I’m marrying you.” I reached up and twisted a few strands of his straight gray hair between my fingers. “He wants me to marry someone like him—someone who looks like him. A black man.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was always close to him. He and my aunt wanted kids, and they couldn’t have any. I was their kid.”

  “And now?”

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  “Now … well, they have a couple of apartment houses over in Pasadena—small places, but nice. The last thing my uncle said to me was that he’d rather will them to his church than leave them to me and see them fall into white hands. I think that was the worst thing he could think of to do to me. Or he thought it was the worst thing.”

  “Oh hell,” muttered Kevin. “Look, are you sure you still want to marry me?”

  “Yes. I wish … never mind, just yes. Definitely, yes.”

  “Then let’s go to Vegas and pretend we haven’t got relatives.”

  So we drove to Las Vegas, got married, and gambled away a few dol- lars. When we came home to our bigger new apartment, we found a gift—a blender—from my best friend, and a check from The Atlantic waiting for us. One of my stories had finally made it.

  2

  I awoke.

  I was lying flat on my stomach, my face pressed uncomfortably against something cold and hard. My body below the neck rested on something slightly softer. Slowly, I became aware of sunlight and shadow, of shapes.

  I lifted my head, started to sit up, and my back suddenly caught fire. I fell forward, hit my head hard on the bare floor of the bathroom. My bathroom. I was home.

  “Kevin?”

  I listened. I could have looked around, but I didn’t want to. “Kevin?”

  I got up, aware that my eyes were streaming muddy tears, aware of the pain. God, the pain! For several seconds, all I could do was lean against the wall an
d bear it.

  Slowly, I discovered that I wasn’t as weak as I had thought. In fact, by the time I was fully conscious, I wasn’t weak at all. It was only the pain that made me move slowly, carefully, like a woman three times my age.

  I could see now that I had been lying with my head in the bathroom and my body in the bedroom. Now I went into the bathroom and turned

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  on the water to fill the tub. Warm water. I don’t think I could have stood hot. Or cold.

  My blouse was stuck to my back. It was cut to pieces, really, but the pieces were stuck to me. My back was cut up pretty badly too from what I could feel. I had seen old photographs of the backs of people who had been slaves. I could remember the scars, thick and ugly. Kevin had always told me how smooth my skin was …

  I took off my pants and shoes and got into the tub still wearing my blouse. I would let the water soften it until I could ease it from my back.

  In the tub, I sat for a long while without moving, without thinking, lis- tening for what I knew I would not hear elsewhere in the house. The pain was a friend. Pain had never been a friend to me before, but now it kept me still. It forced reality on me and kept me sane.

  But Kevin …

  I leaned forward and cried into the dirty pink water. The skin of my back stretched agonizingly, and the water got pinker.

  And it was all pointless. There was nothing I could do. I had no con- trol at all over anything. Kevin might as well be dead. Abandoned in

  1819, Kevin was dead. Decades dead, perhaps a century dead.

  Maybe I would be called back again, and maybe he would still be there waiting for me and maybe only a few years would have passed for him, and maybe he would be all right … But what had he said once about going West watching history happen?

  By the time my wounds had softened and my rag of a blouse had come unstuck from them, I was exhausted. I felt the weakness now that I hadn’t felt before. I got out of the tub and dried myself as best I could, then stumbled into the bedroom and fell across the bed. In spite of the pain, I fell asleep at once.

  The house was dark when I awoke, and the bed was empty except for me. I had to remember why all over again. I got up stiffly, painfully, and went to find something that would make me sleep again quickly. I didn’t want to be awake. I barely wanted to be alive. Kevin had gotten a pre- scription for some pills once when he was having trouble sleeping.

  I found what was left of them. I was about to take two of them when I got a look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. My face had swollen and was puffy and old-looking. My hair was in tangled patches, brown with dirt and matted with blood. In my semihysterical state earlier, I had not thought to wash it.

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  I put the pills down and climbed back into the tub. This time I turned on the shower and somehow managed to wash my hair. Raising my arms hurt. Bending forward hurt. The shampoo that got into my cuts hurt. I started slowly, wincing, grimacing. Finally I got angry and moved vigor- ously in spite of the pain.

  When I looked passably human again, I took some aspirins. They didn’t help much, but I was sane enough now to know that I had some- thing to do before I could afford to sleep again.

  I needed a replacement for my lost canvas bag. Something that didn’t look too good for a “nigger” to be carrying. I finally settled on an old denim gym bag that I’d made and used back in high school. It was tough and roomy like the canvas bag, and faded enough to look properly shabby.

  I would have put in a long dress this time if I’d had one. All I had, though, were a couple of bright filmy evening dresses that would have drawn attention to me, and, under the circumstances, made me look ridiculous. Best to go on being the woman who dressed like a man.

  I rolled up a couple of pairs of jeans and stuffed them into the bag. Then shoes, shirts, a wool sweater, comb, brush, tooth paste and tooth brush—Kevin and I had really missed those—two large cakes of soap, my washcloth, the bottle of aspirins—if Rufus called me while my back was sore, I would need them—my knife. The knife had come back with me because I happened to be wearing it in a makeshift leather sheath at my ankle. I didn’t know whether to be glad or not that I hadn’t had a chance to use it against Weylin. I might have killed him. I had been angry enough, frightened enough, humiliated enough to try. Then if Rufus called me again, I would have to answer for the killing. Or maybe Kevin would have to answer for it. I was suddenly very glad that I had left Weylin alive. Kevin was in for enough trouble. And, too, when I saw Rufus again—if I saw him again—I would need his help. I wouldn’t be likely to get it if I had killed his father—even a father he didn’t like.

  I stuffed another pencil, pen, and scratch pad into the bag. I was slowly emptying Kevin’s desk. All my things were still packed. And I found a compact paperback history of slavery in America that might be useful. It listed dates and events that I should be aware of, and it contained a map of Maryland.

  The bag was too full to close completely by the time everything was in, but I tied it shut with its own rope drawstring, and tied the drawstring

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  around my arm. I couldn’t have stood anything tied around my waist.

  Then, incongruously, I was hungry. I went to the kitchen and found half-a-box of raisins and a full can of mixed nuts. To my surprise, I finished both, then slept again easily.

  It was morning when I awoke, and I was still at home. My back hurt whenever I moved. I managed to spray it with an ointment Kevin had used for sunburn. The whip lacerations hurt like burns. The ointment cooled them and seemed to help. I had the feeling I should have used something stronger, though. Heaven knew what kind of infection you could get from a whip kept limber with oil and blood. Tom Weylin had ordered brine thrown onto the back of the field hand he had whipped. I could remember the man screaming as the solution hit him. But his wounds had healed without infection.

  As I thought of the field hand, I felt strangely disoriented. For a moment, I thought Rufus was calling me again. Then I realized that I wasn’t really dizzy—only confused. My memory of a field hand being whipped suddenly seemed to have no place here with me at home.

  I came out of the bathroom into the bedroom and looked around. Home. Bed—without canopy—dresser, closet, electric light, television, radio, electric clock, books. Home. It didn’t have anything to do with where I had been. It was real. It was where I belonged.

  I put on a loose dress and went out to the front yard. The tiny blue- haired woman who lived next door noticed me and wished me a good morning. She was on her hands and knees digging in her flower garden and obviously enjoying herself. She reminded me of Margaret Weylin who also had flowers. I had heard Margaret’s guests compliment her on her flowers. But, of course, she didn’t take care of them herself …

  Today and yesterday didn’t mesh. I felt almost as strange as I had after my first trip back to Rufus—caught between his home and mine.

  There was a Volvo parked across the street and there were powerlines overhead. There were palm trees and paved streets. There was the bath- room I had just left. Not a hole-in-the-ground privy toilet that you had to hold your breath to go into, but a bathroom.

  I went back into the house and turned the radio on to an all-news sta- tion. There, eventually, I learned that it was Friday, June 11, 1976. I’d gone away for nearly two months and come back yesterday—the same day I left home. Nothing was real.

  Kevin could be gone for years even if I went after him today and

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  brought him back tonight.

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  I found a music station and turned the radio up loud to drown out my thinking.

  The time passed and I did more unpacking, stopping often, taking too many aspirins. I began to bring some order to my own office. Once I sat down at my typewriter and tried to write about what had happened, made about six attempts before I gave up and threw them all away. Someday when this was over, if it was ever over,
maybe I would be able to write about it.

  I called my favorite cousin in Pasadena—my father’s sister’s daughter

  —and had her buy groceries for me. I told her I was sick and Kevin wasn’t around. Something about my tone must have reached her. She didn’t ask any questions.

  I was still afraid to leave the house, walking or driving. Driving, I could easily kill myself, and the car could kill other people if Rufus called me from it at the wrong time. Walking, I could get dizzy and fall while crossing the street. Or I could fall on the sidewalk and attract atten- tion. Someone could come to help me—a cop, anyone. Then I could be guilty of taking someone else back with me and stranding them.

  My cousin was a good friend. She took one look at me and recom- mended a doctor she knew. She also advised me to send the police after Kevin. She assumed that my bruises were his work. But when I swore her to silence, I knew she would be silent. She and I had grown up keeping each other’s secrets.