Kindred

by Butler, Octavia

  “I’m surprised Nigel is still here,” I said. Then I realized that might not be a very bright thing to say even to Rufus. I would have to learn to keep more of my thoughts to myself.

  “Oh, Nigel ran away,” said Rufus. “Patrollers brought him back, though, hungry and sick. They had whipped him, and Daddy whipped him some more. Then Aunt Sarah doctored him and I talked Daddy into letting me keep him. I think my job was harder. I don’t think Daddy relaxed until Nigel married Carrie. Man marries, has children, he’s more likely to stay where he is.”

  “You sound like a slaveholder already.” He shrugged.

  “Would you have sold Luke?” “No! I liked him.”

  “Would you sell anyone?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “I hope not,” I said watching him. “You don’t have to do that kind of thing. Not all slaveholders do it.”

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  I took my denim bag from where I had hidden it under his bed, and sat down at his desk to write the letter, using one of his large sheets of paper with my pen. I didn’t want to bother dipping the quill and steel pen on his desk into ink.

  “Dear Kevin, I’m back. And I want to go North too …” “Let me see your pen when you’re finished,” said Rufus. “All right.”

  I went on writing, feeling myself strangely near tears. It was as though

  I was really talking to Kevin. I began to believe I would see him again. “Let me see the other things you brought with you,” said Rufus.

  I swung the bag onto his bed. “You can look,” I said, and continued writing. Not until I was finished with the letter did I look up to see what he was doing.

  He was reading my book.

  “Here’s the pen,” I said casually, and I waited to grab the book the moment he put it down. But instead of putting it down, he ignored the pen and looked up at me.

  “This is the biggest lot of abolitionist trash I ever saw.”

  “No it isn’t,” I said. “That book wasn’t even written until a century after slavery was abolished.”

  “Then why the hell are they still complaining about it?”

  I pulled the book down so that I could see the page he had been read- ing. A photograph of Sojourner Truth stared back at me solemn-eyed. Beneath the picture was part of the text of one of her speeches.

  “You’re reading history, Rufe. Turn a few pages and you’ll find a white man named J. D. B. DeBow claiming that slavery is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites someone to look down on. That’s history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” And there was other history that he must not read. Too much of it hadn’t happened yet. Sojourner Truth, for instance, was still a slave. If someone bought her from her New York owners and brought her South before the Northern laws could free her, she might spend the rest of her life picking cotton. And there were two important slave children right here in Maryland. The older one, living here in Talbot County, would be called Frederick Douglass after a name change or two. The second, growing up a few miles south in Dorchester County was Harriet Ross, eventually to be Harriet Tubman. Someday, she was going to cost Eastern Shore planta-

  THE FIGHT 141

  tion owners a huge amount of money by guiding three hundred of their runaway slaves to freedom. And farther down in Southampton, Virginia, a man named Nat Turner was biding his time. There were more. I had said I couldn’t do anything to change history. Yet, if history could be changed, this book in the hands of a white man—even a sympathetic white man—might be the thing to change it.

  “History like this could send you down to join Luke,” said Rufus. “Didn’t I tell you to be careful!”

  “I wouldn’t have let anyone else see it.” I took it from his hand, spoke more softly. “Or are you telling me I shouldn’t trust you either?”

  He looked startled. “Hell, Dana, we have to trust each other. You said that yourself. But what if my daddy went through that bag of yours. He could if he wanted to. You couldn’t stop him.”

  I said nothing.

  “You’ve never had a whipping like he’d give you if he found that book. Some of that reading … He’d take you to be another Denmark Vesey. You know who Vesey was?”

  “Yes.” A freedman who had plotted to free others violently. “You know what they did to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then put that book in the fire.”

  I held the book for a moment, then opened it to the map of Maryland. I tore the map out.

  “Let me see,” said Rufus.

  I handed him the map. He looked at it and turned it over. Since there was nothing on the back but a map of Virginia, he handed it back to me. “That will be easier to hide,” he said. “But you know if a white man sees it, he’ll figure you mean to use it to escape.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  He shook his head in disgust.

  I tore the book into several pieces and threw it onto the hot coals in his fireplace. The fire flared up and swallowed the dry paper, and I found my thoughts shifting to Nazi book burnings. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of “wrong” ideas.

  “Seal your letter,” said Rufus. “There’s wax and a candle on the desk there. I’ll send the letter as soon as I can get to town.”

  I obeyed inexpertly, dripping hot wax on my fingers. “Dana …?”

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  I glanced at him, caught him watching me with unexpected intensity. “Yes?”

  His eyes seemed to slide away from mine. “That map is still bothering me. Listen, if you want me to get that letter to town soon, you put the map in the fire too.”

  I turned to face him, dismayed. More blackmail. I had thought that was over between us. I had hoped it was over; I needed so much to trust him. I didn’t dare stay with him if I couldn’t trust him.

  “I wish you hadn’t said that, Rufe,” I told him quietly. I went over to him, fighting down anger and disappointment and began putting the things that he had scattered back into my bag.

  “Wait a minute.” He caught my hand. “You get so damned cold when you’re mad. Wait!”

  “For what?”

  “Tell me what you’re mad about.”

  What, indeed? Could I make him see why I thought his blackmail was worse than my own? It was. He threatened to keep me from my husband if I did not submit to his whim and destroy a paper that might help me get free. I acted out of desperation. He acted out of whimsy or anger. Or so it seemed.

  “Rufe, there are things we just can’t bargain on. This is one of them.” “You’re going to tell me what we can’t bargain on?” He sounded more

  surprised than indignant.

  “You’re damn right I am.” I spoke very softly. “I won’t bargain away my husband or my freedom!”

  “You don’t have either to bargain.” “Neither do you.”

  He stared at me with at least as much confusion as anger, and that was encouraging. He could have let his temper flare, could have driven me from the plantation very quickly. “Look,” he said through his teeth, “I’m trying to help you!”

  “Are you?”

  “What do you think I’m doing? Listen, I know Kevin tried to help you. He made things easier for you by keeping you with him. But he couldn’t really protect you. He didn’t know how. He couldn’t even protect him- self. Daddy almost had to shoot him when you disappeared. He was fighting and cursing … at first Daddy didn’t even know why. I’m the one who helped Kevin get back on the place.”

  “You?”

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  “I talked Daddy into seeing him again—and it wasn’t easy. I may not be able to talk him into anything for you if he sees that map.”

  “I see.”

  He waited, watching me. I wanted to ask him what he would do with my letter if I didn’t burn the map. I wanted to ask, but I didn’t wan
t to hear an answer that might send me out to face another patrol or earn another whipping. I wanted to do things the easy way if I could. I wanted to stay here and let a letter go to Boston and bring Kevin back to me.

  So I told myself the map was more a symbol than a necessity anyway. If I had to go, I knew how to follow the North Star at night. I had made a point of learning. And by day, I knew how to keep the rising sun to my right and the setting sun to my left.

  I took the map from Rufus’s desk and dropped it into the fireplace. It darkened, then burst into flame.

  “I can manage without it, you know,” I said quietly.

  “No need for you to,” said Rufus. “You’ll be all right here. You’re home.”

  7

  Isaac and Alice had four days of freedom together. On the fifth day, they were caught. On the seventh day, I found out about it. That was the day Rufus and Nigel took the wagon into town to mail my letter and take care of some business of their own. I had heard nothing of the runaways and Rufus seemed to have forgotten about them. He was feeling better, looking better. That seemed to be enough for him. He came to me just before he left and said, “Let me have some of your aspirins. I might need them the way Nigel drives.”

  Nigel heard and called out, “Marse Rufe, you can drive. I’ll just sit back and relax while you show me how to go smooth over a bumpy road.”

  Rufus threw a clod of dirt at him, and he caught it, laughing, and threw it back just missing Rufus. “See there?” Rufus told me. “Here I am all crippled up and he’s taking advantage.”

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  I laughed and got the aspirins. Rufus never took anything from my bag without asking—though he could have easily done so.

  “You sure you feel well enough to go to town?” I asked as I gave them to him.

  “No,” he said, “but I’m going.” I didn’t find out until later that a visi- tor had brought him word of Alice and Isaac’s capture. He was going to get Alice.

  And I went to the laundry yard to help a young slave named Tess to beat and boil the dirt out of a lot of heavy smelly clothes. She had been sick, and I had promised her I would help. My work was still pretty much whatever I wanted it to be. I felt a little guilty about that. No other slave—house or field—had that much freedom. I worked where I pleased, or where I saw that others needed help. Sarah sent me to do one job or another sometimes, but I didn’t mind that. In Margaret’s absence, Sarah ran the house—and the house servants. She spread the work fairly and managed the house as efficiently as Margaret had, but without much of the tension and strife Margaret generated. She was resented, of course, by slaves who made every effort to avoid jobs they didn’t like. But she was also obeyed.

  “Lazy niggers!” she would mutter when she had to get after someone. I stared at her in surprise when I first heard her say it. “Why should

  they work hard?” I asked. “What’s it going to get them?”

  “It’ll get them the cowhide if they don’t,” she snapped. “I ain’t goin’

  to take the blame for what they don’t do. Are you?” “Well, no, but …”

  “I work. You work. Don’t need somebody behind us all the time to make us work.”

  “When the time comes for me to stop working and get out of here, I’ll do it.”

  She jumped, looked around quickly. “You got no sense sometimes! Just talk all over your mouth!”

  “We’re alone.”

  “Might not be alone as we look. People listen around here. And they talk too.”

  I said nothing.

  “You do what you want to do—or think you want to do. But you keep it to yourself.”

  I nodded. “I hear.”

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  She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You need to look at some of the niggers they catch and bring back,” she said. “You need to see them— starving, ’bout naked, whipped, dragged, bit by dogs … You need to see them.”

  “I’d rather see the others.” “What others?”

  “The ones who make it. The ones living in freedom now.” “If any do.”

  “They do.”

  “Some say they do. It’s like dying, though, and going to heaven. Nobody ever comes back to tell you about it.”

  “Come back and be enslaved again?”

  “Yeah. But still … This is dangerous talk! No point to it anyway.” “Sarah, I’ve seen books written by slaves who’ve run away and lived

  in the North.”

  “Books!” She tried to sound contemptuous but sounded uncertain instead. She couldn’t read. Books could be awesome mysteries to her, or they could be dangerous time-wasting nonsense. It depended on her mood. Now her mood seemed to flicker between curiosity and fear. Fear won. “Foolishness!” she said. “Niggers writing books!”

  “But it’s true. I’ve seen …”

  “Don’t want to hear no more ’bout it!” She had raised her voice sharply. That was unusual, and it seemed to surprise her as much as it surprised me. “Don’t want to hear no more,” she repeated softly. “Things ain’t bad here. I can get along.”

  She had done the safe thing—had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman who might have been called “mammy” in some other household. She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties. The house-nigger, the handkerchief-head, the female Uncle Tom—the fright- ened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose, and who knew as little about the freedom of the North as she knew about the hereafter.

  I looked down on her myself for a while. Moral superiority. Here was someone even less courageous than I was. That comforted me somehow. Or it did until Rufus and Nigel drove into town and came back with what was left of Alice.

  It was late when they got home—almost dark. Rufus ran into the house

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  shouting for me before I realized he was back. “Dana! Dana, get down here!”

  I came out of his room—my new refuge when he wasn’t in it—and hurried down the stairs.

  “Come on, come on!” he urged.

  I said nothing, followed him out the front door not knowing what to expect. He led me to the wagon where Alice lay bloody, filthy, and barely alive.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. “Help her!” demanded Rufus.

  I looked at him, remembering why Alice needed help. I didn’t say any- thing, and I don’t know what expression I was wearing, but he took a step back from me.

  “Just help her!” he said. “Blame me if you want to, but help her!”

  I turned to her, straightened her body gently, feeling for broken bones. Miraculously, there didn’t seem to be any. Alice moaned and cried out weakly. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to see me.

  “Where will you put her?” I asked Rufus. “In the attic?”

  He lifted her gently, carefully, and carried her up to his bedroom. Nigel and I followed him up, saw him place the girl on his bed. Then

  he looked up at me questioningly.

  “Tell Sarah to boil some water,” I told Nigel. “And tell her to send some clean cloth for bandages. Clean cloth.” How clean would it be? Not sterile, of course, but I had just spent the day cooking clothes in lye soap and water. That surely got them clean.

  “Rufe, get me something to cut these rags off her.”

  Rufus hurried out, came back with a pair of his mother’s scissors. Most of Alice’s wounds were new, and the cloth came away from them

  easily. Those that had dried and stuck to the cloth, I left alone. Warm water would soften them.

  “Rufe, have you got any kind of antiseptic?” “Anti-what?”

  I looked at him. “You’ve never heard of it?” “No. What is it?”

  “Never mind. I could use a salt solution, I guess.” “Brine? You want to use that on her back?”

  “I want to use it wherever she’s hurt.”

  “Don’t you have anyt
hing in your bag better than that?”

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  “Just soap, which I intend to use. Find it for me, will you? Then …

  hell, I shouldn’t be doing this. Why didn’t you take her to the doctor?” He shook his head. “The judge wanted her sold South—for spite, I

  guess. I had to pay near twice what she’s worth to get her. That’s all the money I had, and Daddy won’t pay for a doctor to fix niggers. Doc knows that.”

  “You mean your father just lets people die when maybe they could be helped?”

  “Die or get well. Aunt Mary—you know, the one who watches the kids?”

  “Yes.” Aunt Mary didn’t watch the kids. Old and crippled, she sat in the shade with a switch and threatened them with gory murder if they happened to misbehave right in front of her. Otherwise, she ignored them and spent her time sewing and mumbling to herself, contentedly senile. The children cared for each other.