Kindred

by Butler, Octavia

  She could have been his mother, caught between anger and concern and not knowing which to express. She took away the basin Nigel had brought me and returned it full of clean cool water.

  “Where’s his mother?” I asked her softly as she was leaving. She drew back from me a little. “Gone.”

  “Dead?”

  “Not yet.” She glanced at Rufus to see whether he was listening. His face was turned away from us. “Gone to Baltimore,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you ’bout it tomorrow.”

  I let her go without questioning her further. It was enough to know that I would not be suddenly attacked. For once, there would be no Margaret to protect Rufus from me.

  He was thrashing about weakly when I went back to him. He cursed the pain, cursed me, then remembered himself enough to say he didn’t mean it. He was burning up.

  “Rufe?”

  He moved his head from side to side and did not seem to hear me. I dug into my denim bag and found the plastic bottle of aspirin—a big bot- tle nearly full. There was enough to share.

  “Rufe!”

  He squinted at me.

  “Listen, I have medicine from my own time.” I poured him a glass of water from the pitcher beside his bed, and shook out two aspirin tablets. “These could lower your fever,” I said. “They might ease your pain too. Will you take them?”

  “What are they?”

  “They’re called aspirin. In my time, people use them against headache, fever, other kinds of pain.”

  He looked at the two tablets in my hand, then at me. “Give them to me.”

  He had trouble swallowing them and had to chew them up a little. “My Lord,” he muttered. “Anything tastes that bad must be good for

  you.”

  I laughed and wet a cloth in the basin to bathe his face. Nigel came in with a blanket and told me the doctor was held up at a difficult childbirth. I was to stay the night with Rufus.

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  I didn’t mind. Rufus was in no condition to take an interest in me. I would have thought it would be more natural, though, for Nigel to stay. I asked him about it.

  “Marse Tom knows about you,” said Nigel softly. “Marse Rufe and Mister Kevin both told him. He figures you know enough to do some doctoring. More than doctoring, maybe. He saw you go home.”

  “I know.”

  “I saw it too.”

  I looked up at him—he was a head taller than me now—and saw noth- ing but curiosity in his eyes. If my vanishing had frightened him, the fear was long dead. I was glad of that. I wanted his friendship.

  “Marse Tom says you s’pose to take care of him and you better do a good job. Aunt Sarah says you call her if you need help.”

  “Thanks. Thank her for me.”

  He nodded, smiled a little. “Good thing for me you showed up. I want to be with Carrie now. It’s so close to her time.”

  I grinned. “Your baby, Nigel? I thought it might be.” “Better be mine. She’s my wife.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Marse Rufe paid a free preacher from town to come and say the same words they say for white folks and free niggers. Didn’t have to jump no broomstick.”

  I nodded, remembering what I’d read about the slaves’ marriage cere- monies. They jumped broomsticks, sometimes backward, sometimes for- ward, depending on local custom; or they stood before their master and were pronounced husband and wife; or they followed any number of other practices even to hiring a minister and having things done as Nigel had. None of it made any difference legally, though. No slave marriage was legally binding. Even Alice’s marriage to Isaac was merely an infor- mal agreement since Isaac was a slave, or had been a slave. I hoped now that he was a free man well on his way to Pennsylvania.

  “Dana?”

  I looked up at Nigel. He had whispered my name so softly I had hardly heard him.

  “Dana, was it white men?”

  Startled, I put a finger to my lips, cautioning, and waved him away. “Tomorrow,” I promised.

  But he wasn’t as co-operative as I had been with Sarah. “Was it

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  Isaac?”

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  I nodded, hoping he would be satisfied and let the subject drop. “Did he get away?”

  Another nod.

  He left me, looking relieved.

  I stayed up with Rufus until he managed to fall asleep. The aspirins did seem to help. Then I wrapped myself in the blanket, pulled the room’s two chairs together in front of the fireplace, and settled in as comfortably as I could. It wasn’t bad.

  The doctor arrived late the next morning to find Rufus’s fever gone. The rest of his body was still bruised and sore, and his ribs still kept him breathing shallowly and struggling not to cough, but even with that, he was much less miserable. I had gotten him a breakfast tray from Sarah, and he had invited me to share the large meal she had prepared. I ate hot biscuits with butter and peach preserve, drank some of his coffee, and had a little cold ham. It was good and filling. He had the eggs, the rest of the ham, the corn cakes. There was too much of everything, and he didn’t feel like eating very much. Instead, he sat back and watched me with amusement.

  “Daddy’d do some cussin’ if he came in here and found us eating together,” he said.

  I put down my biscuit and reined in whatever part of my mind I’d left in 1976. He was right.

  “What are you doing then? Trying to make trouble?” “No. He won’t bother us. Eat.”

  “The last time someone told me he wouldn’t bother me, he walked in and beat the skin off my back.”

  “Yeah. I know about that. But I’m not Nigel. If I tell you to do some- thing, and he doesn’t like it, he’ll come to me about it. He won’t whip you for following my orders. He’s a fair man.”

  I looked at him, startled.

  “I said fair,” he repeated. “Not likable.”

  I kept quiet. His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordi- nary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper. But I had seen no particular fairness in him. He did as he pleased. If you told him he wasn’t being fair, he would whip you for talking back. At least the Tom Weylin I had known would have. Maybe

  he had mellowed.

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  “Stay,” said Rufus. “No matter what you think of him, I won’t let him hurt you. And it’s good to eat with someone I can talk to for a change.” That was nice. I began to eat again, wondering why he was in such a good mood this morning. He had come a long way from his anger the

  night before—from threatening not to tell me where Kevin was.

  “You know,” said Rufus thoughtfully, “you still look mighty young. You pulled me out of that river thirteen or fourteen years ago, but you look like you would have been just a kid back then.”

  Uh-oh. “Kevin didn’t explain that part, I guess.” “Explain what?”

  I shook my head. “Just … let me tell you how it’s been for me. I can’t tell you why things are happening as they are, but I can tell you the order of their happening.” I hesitated, gathering my thoughts. “When I came to you at the river, it was June ninth, nineteen seventy-six for me. When I got home, it was still the same day. Kevin told me I had only been gone a few seconds.”

  “Seconds …?”

  “Wait. Let me tell it all to you at once. Then you can have all the time you need to digest it and ask questions. Later, on that same day, I came to you again. You were three or four years older and busy trying to set the house afire. When I went home, Kevin told me only a few minutes had passed. The next morning, June tenth, I came to you because you’d fallen out of a tree…. Kevin and I came to you. I was here nearly two months. But when I went home, I found that I had lost only a few min- utes or hours of June tenth.”

  “You mean after two months, you …”

  “I arrived home on the same day I had left. Don’t ask me
how. I don’t know. After eight days at home, I came back here.” I faced him silently for a moment. “And, Rufe, now that I’m here, now that you’re safe, I want to find my husband.”

  He absorbed this slowly, frowning as though he was translating it from another language. Then he waved vaguely toward his desk—a new larger desk than he had had on my last visit. The old one had been nothing more than a little table. This one had a roll-top and plenty of drawer space both above and below the work surface.

  “His letters are in the middle drawer there. You can have them if you want them. They have his addresses … But Dana, you’re saying while

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  KINDRED

  I’ve been growing up, somehow, time has been almost standing still for you.”

  I was at the desk hunting through the cluttered drawer for the letters. “It hasn’t stood still,” I said. “I’m sure my last two visits here have aged me quite a bit, no matter what my calendar at home says.” I found the let- ters. Three of them—short notes on large pieces of paper that had been folded, sealed with sealing wax, and mailed without an envelope. “Here’s my Philadelphia address,” Kevin said in one. “If I can get a decent job, I’ll be here for a while.” That was all, except for the address. Kevin wrote books, but he’d never cared much for writing letters. At home he tried to catch me in a good mood and get me to take care of his correspondence for him.

  “I’ll be an old man,” said Rufus, “and you’ll still come to me looking just like you do now.”

  I shook my head. “Rufe, if you don’t start being more careful, you’ll never live to be an old man. Now that you’re grown up, I might not be able to help you much. The kind of trouble you get into as a man might be as overwhelming to me as it is to you.”

  “Yes. But this time thing …” I shrugged.

  “Damnit, there must be something mighty crazy about both of us, Dana. I never heard of anything like this happening to anybody else.”

  “Neither have I.” I looked at the other two letters. One from New York, and one from Boston. In the Boston one, he was talking about going to Maine. I wondered what was driving him farther and farther north. He had been interested in the West, but Maine …?

  “I’ll write to him,” said Rufus. “I’ll tell him you’re here. He’ll come running back.”

  “I’ll write him, Rufe.”

  “I’ll have to mail the letter.” “All right.”

  “I just hope he hasn’t already taken off for Maine.”

  Weylin opened the door before I could answer. He brought in another man who turned out to be the doctor, and my leisure time was over. I put Kevin’s letters back into Rufus’s desk—that seemed the best place to keep them—took away the breakfast tray, brought the doctor the empty basin he asked for, stood by while the doctor asked Weylin whether I had any sense or not and whether I could be trusted to answer simple ques-

  tions accurately.

  THE FIGHT 137

  Weylin said yes twice without looking at me, and the doctor asked his questions. Was I sure Rufus had had a fever? How did I know? Had he been delirious? Did I know what delirious meant? Smart nigger, wasn’t I?

  I hated the man. He was short and slight, black-haired and black-eyed, pompous, condescending, and almost as ignorant medically as I was. He guessed he wouldn’t bleed Rufus since the fever seemed to be gone— bleed him! He guessed a couple of ribs were broken, yes. He rebandaged them sloppily. He guessed I could go now; he had no more use for me.

  I escaped to the cookhouse.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked Sarah when she saw me.

  I shook my head. “Nothing important. Just a stupid little man who may be one step up from spells and good luck charms.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t pay any attention to me, Sarah. Do you have anything for me to do out here? I’d like to stay out of the house for a while.”

  “Always something to do out here. You have anything to eat?” I nodded.

  She lifted her head and gave me one of her down-the-nose looks. “Well, I put enough on his tray. Here. Knead this dough.”

  She gave me a bowl of bread dough that had risen and was ready to be kneaded down. “He all right?” she asked.

  “He’s healing.”

  “Was Isaac all right?”

  I glanced at her. “Yes.”

  “Nigel said he didn’t think Marse Rufe told what happened.” “He didn’t. I managed to talk him out of it.”

  She laid a hand on my shoulder for a moment. “I hope you stay around for a while, girl. Even his daddy can’t talk him out of much these days.” “Well, I’m glad I was able to. But look, you promised to tell me about

  his mother.”

  “Not much to tell. She had two more babies—twins. Sickly little things. They lingered awhile, then died one after the other. She almost died too. She went kind of crazy. The birth had left her pretty bad off any- how—sick, hurt inside. She fought with Marse Tom, got so she’d scream at him every time she saw him—cussin’ and goin’ on. She was hurtin’ most of the time, couldn’t get out of bed. Finally, her sister came and got

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  her, took her to Baltimore.” “And she’s still there?”

  KINDRED

  “Still there, still sick. Still crazy, for all I know. I just hope she stays there. That overseer, Jake Edwards, he’s a cousin of hers, and he’s all the mean low white trash we need around here.”

  Jake Edwards was the overseer then. Weylin had begun hiring over- seers. I wondered why. But before I could ask, two house servants came in and Sarah deliberately turned her back to me, ending the conversation. I began to understand what had happened later, though, when I asked Nigel where Luke was.

  “Sold,” said Nigel quietly. And he wouldn’t say anything more. Rufus told me the rest.

  “You shouldn’t have asked Nigel about that,” he told me when I men- tioned the incident.

  “I wouldn’t have, if I’d known.” Rufus was still in bed. The doctor had given him a purgative and left. Rufus had poured the purgative into his chamber pot and ordered me to tell his father he’d taken it. He had had his father send me back to him so that I could write my letter to Kevin. “Luke did his work,” I said. “How could your father sell him?”

  “He worked all right. And the hands would work hard for him— mostly without the cowhide. But sometimes he didn’t show much sense.” Rufus stopped, began a deep breath, caught himself and grimaced in pain. “You’re like Luke in some ways,” he continued. “So you’d better show some sense yourself, Dana. You’re on your own this time.”

  “But what did he do wrong? What am I doing wrong?”

  “Luke … he would just go ahead and do what he wanted to no matter what Daddy said. Daddy always said he thought he was white. One day maybe two years after you left, Daddy got tired of it. New Orleans trader came through and Daddy said it would be better to sell Luke than to whip him until he ran away.”

  I closed my eyes remembering the big man, hearing again his advice to Nigel on how to defy the whites. It had caught up with him. “Do you think the trader took him all the way to New Orleans?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He was getting a load together to ship them down there.”

  I shook my head. “Poor Luke. Are there cane fields in Louisiana now?”

  “Cane, cotton, rice, they grow plenty down there.”

  “My father’s parents worked in the cane fields there before they went

  THE FIGHT 139

  to California. Luke could be a relative of mine.” “Just make sure you don’t wind up like him.” “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Don’t go teaching nobody else to read.” “Oh.”

  “Yes, oh. I might not be able to stop Daddy if he decided to sell you.” “Sell me! He doesn’t own me. Not even by the law here. He doesn’t

  have any papers saying he owns me.” “Dana, don’t talk stupid!”

  “But …”

  “In town, once
, I heard a man brag how he and his friends had caught a free black, tore up his papers, and sold him to a trader.”

  I said nothing. He was right, of course. I had no rights—not even any papers to be torn up.

  “Just be careful,” he said quietly.

  I nodded. I thought I could escape from Maryland if I had to. I didn’t think it would be easy, but I thought I could do it. On the other hand, I didn’t see how even someone much wiser than I was in the ways of the time could escape from Louisiana, surrounded as they would be by water and slave states. I would have to be careful, all right, and be ready to run if I seemed to be in any danger of being sold.