Kindred

by Butler, Octavia

His green eyes glittered. “She’ll never get away from me again. Never!” He drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. “You know, Daddy wants me to send her to the fields and take you.”

  “Does he?”

  “He thinks all I want is a woman. Any woman. So you, then. He says you’d be less likely to give me trouble.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  He hesitated, managed to smile a little. “No.” I nodded. “Good.”

  “I know you, Dana. You want Kevin the way I want Alice. And you had more luck than I did because no matter what happens now, for a while he wanted you too. Maybe I can’t ever have that—both wanting, both loving. But I’m not going to give up what I can have.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no matter what happens now?’ ”

  “What in hell do you think I mean? It’s been five years! You want to write another letter. Did you ever think maybe he threw the first letter out? Maybe he got like Alice—wanted to be with one of his own kind.” I said nothing. I knew what he was doing—trying to share his pain, hurt me as he was hurting. And of course, he knew just where I was vul-

  nerable. I tried to keep a neutral expression, but he went on.

  “He told me once that you two had been married for four years. That means he’s been here away from you even longer than you’ve been together. I doubt if he’d have waited as long as he did if you weren’t the only one who could get him back to his home time. But now … who knows. The right woman could make this time mighty sweet to him.”

  “Rufe, nothing you say to me is going to ease your way with Alice.” “No? How about this: You talk to her—talk some sense into her—or

  you’re going to watch while Jake Edwards beats some sense into her!” I stared at him in revulsion. “Is that what you call love?”

  He was on his feet and across the room to me before I could take another breath. I sat where I was, watching him, feeling frightened, and

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  suddenly very much aware of my knife, of how quickly I could reach it. He wasn’t going to beat me. Not him, not ever.

  “Get up!” he ordered. He didn’t order me around much, and he’d never done it in that tone. “Get up, I said!”

  I didn’t move.

  “I’ve been too easy on you,” he said. His voice was suddenly low and ugly. “I treated you like you were better than the ordinary niggers. I see I made a mistake!”

  “That’s possible,” I said. “I’m waiting for you to show me I made a mistake.”

  For several seconds, he stood frozen, towering over me, glaring down as though he meant to hit me. Finally, though, he relaxed, leaned against his desk. “You think you’re white!” he muttered. “You don’t know your place any better than a wild animal.”

  I said nothing.

  “You think you own me because you saved my life!”

  And I relaxed, glad not to have to take the life I had saved—glad not to have to risk other lives, including my own.

  “If I ever caught myself wanting you like I want her, I’d cut my throat,” he said.

  I hoped that problem would never arise. If it did, one of us would do some cutting all right.

  “Help me, Dana.” “I can’t.”

  “You can! You and nobody else. Go to her. Send her to me. I’ll have her whether you help or not. All I want you to do is fix it so I don’t have to beat her. You’re no friend of hers if you won’t do that much!”

  Of hers! He had all the low cunning of his class. No, I couldn’t refuse to help the girl—help her avoid at least some pain. But she wouldn’t think much of me for helping her this way. I didn’t think much of myself.

  “Do it!” hissed Rufus.

  I got up and went out to find her.

  She was strange now, erratic, sometimes needing my friendship, trust- ing me with her dangerous longings for freedom, her wild plans to run away again; and sometimes hating me, blaming me for her trouble.

  One night in the attic, she was crying softly and telling me something about Isaac. She stopped suddenly and asked, “Have you heard from your husband yet, Dana?”

  “Not yet.”

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  “Write another letter. Even if you have to do it in secret.” “I’m working on it.”

  “No sense in you losing your man too.”

  Yet moments later for no reason that I could see, she attacked me, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, whining and crying after some poor white trash of a man, black as you are. You always try to act so white. White nigger, turning against your own people!”

  I never really got used to her sudden switches, her attacks, but I put up with them. I had taken her through all the other stages of healing, and somehow, I couldn’t abandon her now. Most of the time, I couldn’t even get angry. She was like Rufus. When she hurt, she struck out to hurt oth- ers. But she had been hurting less as the days passed, and striking out less. She was healing emotionally as well as physically. I had helped her to heal. Now I had to help Rufus tear her wounds open again.

  She was at Carrie’s cabin watching Jude and two other older babies someone had left with her. She had no regular duties yet, but like me, she had found her own work. She liked children, and she liked sewing. She would take the coarse blue cloth Weylin bought for the slaves and make neat sturdy clothing of it while small children played around her feet. Weylin complained that she was like old Mary with the children and the sewing, but he brought her his clothing to be mended. She worked better and faster than the slave woman who had taken over much of old Mary’s sewing—and if she had an enemy on the plantation, it was that woman, Liza, who was now in danger of being sent to more onerous work.

  I went into the cabin and sat down with Alice before the cold fireplace. Jude slept beside her in the crib Nigel had made for him. The other two babies were awake lying naked on blankets on the floor quietly playing with their feet.

  Alice looked up at me, then held up a long blue dress. “This is for you,” she said. “I’m sick of seeing you in them pants.”

  I looked down at my jeans. “I’m so used to dressing like this, I forget sometimes. At least it keeps me from having to serve at the table.”

  “Serving ain’t bad.” She’d done it a few times. “And if Mister Tom wasn’t so stingy, you’d have had a dress a long time ago. Man loves a dollar more than he loves Jesus.”

  That, I believed literally. Weylin had dealings with banks. I knew because he complained about them. But I had never known him to have

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  any dealings with churches or hold any kind of prayer meeting in his home. The slaves had to sneak away in the night and take their chances with the patrollers if they wanted to have any kind of religious meeting. “Least you can look like a woman when your man comes for you,”

  Alice said.

  I drew a deep breath. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah. Now tell me what you come here to say … that you don’t want to say.”

  I looked at her, startled.

  “You think I don’t know you after all this time? You got a look that says you don’t want to be here.”

  “Yes. Rufus sent me to talk to you.” I hesitated. “He wants you tonight.” Her expression hardened. “He sent you to tell me that?”

  “No.”

  She waited, glaring at me, silently demanding that I tell her more. I said nothing.

  “Well! What did he send you for then?”

  “To talk you into going to him quietly, and to tell you you’d be whipped this time if you resist.”

  “Shit! Well, all right, you told me. Now get out of here before I throw this dress in the fireplace and light it.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you do with that dress.”

  Now it was her turn to be startled. I didn’t usually talk to her that way, even when she deserved it.

  I leaned back comfortably in Nigel’s homemade chair. “Message delivered,” I said. “Do what you want.”
r />   “I mean to.”

  “You might look ahead a little though. Ahead and in all three direc- tions.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, it looks as though you have three choices. You can go to him as he orders; you can refuse, be whipped, and then have him take you by force; or you can run away again.”

  She said nothing, bent to her sewing and drew the needle in quick neat tiny stitches even though her hands were shaking. I bent down to play with one of the babies—one who had forgotten his own feet and crawled over to investigate my shoe. He was a fat curious little boy of several months who began trying to pull the buttons off my blouse as soon as I

  picked him up.

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  “He go’ pee all over you in a minute,” said Alice. “He likes to let go just when somebody’s holding him.”

  I put the baby down quickly—just in time, as it turned out. “Dana?”

  I looked at her.

  “What am I going to do?”

  I hesitated, shook my head. “I can’t advise you. It’s your body.”

  “Not mine.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “Not mine, his. He paid for it, didn’t he?”

  “Paid who? You?”

  “You know he didn’t pay me! Oh, what’s the difference? Whether it’s right or wrong, the law says he owns me now. I don’t know why he hasn’t already whipped the skin off me. The things I’ve said to him …”

  “You know why.”

  She began to cry. “I ought to take a knife in there with me and cut his damn throat.” She glared at me. “Now go tell him that! Tell him I’m talk- ing ’bout killing him!”

  “Tell him yourself.”

  “Do your job! Go tell him! That’s what you for—to help white folks keep niggers down. That’s why he sent you to me. They be calling you mammy in a few years. You be running the whole house when the old man dies.”

  I shrugged and stopped the curious baby from sucking on my shoe string.

  “Go tell on me, Dana. Show him you the kind of woman he needs, not me.”

  I said nothing.

  “One white man, two white men, what difference do it make?” “One black man, two black men, what difference does that make?” “I could have ten black men without turning against my own.”

  I shrugged again, refusing to argue with her. What could I win?

  She made a wordless sound and covered her face with her hands. “What’s the matter with you?” she said wearily. “Why you let me run you down like that? You done everything you could for me, maybe even saved my life. I seen people get lockjaw and die from way less than I had wrong with me. Why you let me talk about you so bad?”

  “Why do you do it?”

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  She sighed, bent her body into a “c” as she crouched in the chair. “Because I get so mad … I get so mad I can taste it in my mouth. And you’re the only one I can take it out on—the only one I can hurt and not be hurt back.”

  “Don’t keep doing it,” I said. “I have feelings just like you do.” “Do you want me to go to him?”

  “I can’t tell you that. You have to decide.” “Would you go to him?”

  I glanced at the floor. “We’re in different situations. What I’d do doesn’t matter.”

  “Would you go to him?”

  “No.”

  “Even though he’s just like your husband?” “He isn’t.”

  “But … All right, even though you don’t … don’t hate him like I do?” “Even so.”

  “Then I won’t go either.” “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know. Run away?” I got up to leave.

  “Where you going?” she asked quickly.

  “To stall Rufus. If I really work at it, I think I can get him to let you off tonight. That will give you a start.”

  She dropped the dress to the floor and came out of her chair to grab me. “No, Dana! Don’t go.” She drew a deep breath, then seemed to sag. “I’m lying. I can’t run again. I can’t. You be hungry and cold and sick out there, and so tired you can’t walk. Then they find you and set dogs on you … My Lord, the dogs …” She was silent for a moment. “I’m going to him. He knew I would sooner or later. But he don’t know how I wish I had the nerve to just kill him!”

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  She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn’t kill, but she seemed to die a little.

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  Kevin didn’t come to me, didn’t write. Rufus finally let me write another letter—payment for services rendered, I supposed—and he mailed it for me. Yet another month went by, and Kevin didn’t reply.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rufus told me. “He probably did move again. We’ll be getting a letter from him in Maine any day now.”

  I didn’t say anything. Rufus had become talkative and happy, openly affectionate to a quietly tolerant Alice. He drank more than he should have sometimes, and one morning after he’d really overdone it, Alice came downstairs with her whole face swollen and bruised.

  That was the morning I stopped wondering whether I should ask him to help me go North to find Kevin. I wouldn’t have expected him to give me money, but he could have gotten me some damned official-looking free papers. He could even have gone with me, at least to the Pennsyl- vania State Line. Or he could have stopped me cold.

  He had already found the way to control me—by threatening others. That was safer than threatening me directly, and it worked. It was a lesson he had no doubt learned from his father. Weylin, for instance, had known just how far to push Sarah. He had sold only three of her children—left her one to live for and protect. I didn’t doubt now that he could have found a buyer for Carrie, afflicted as she was. But Carrie was a useful young woman. Not only did she work hard and well herself, not only had she produced a healthy new slave, but she had kept first her mother, and now her husband in line with no effort at all on Weylin’s part. I didn’t want to find out how much Rufus had learned from his father’s handling of her.

  I longed for my map now. It contained names of towns I could write myself passes to. No doubt some of the towns on it didn’t exist yet, but at least it would have given me a better idea of what was ahead. I would have to take my chances without it.

  Well, at least I knew that Easton was a few miles to the north, and that the road that ran past the Weylin house would take me to it. Unfortu- nately, it would also take me through a lot of open fields—places where it would be nearly impossible to hide. And pass or no pass, I would hide from whites if I could.

  I would have to carry food—johnnycake, smoked meat, dried fruit, a bottle of water. I had access to what I needed. I had heard of runaway slaves starving before they reached freedom, or poisoning themselves because they were as ignorant as I was about which wild plants were

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  In fact, I had read and heard enough scare stories about the fate of run- aways to keep me with the Weylins for several days longer than I meant to stay. I might not have believed them, but I had the example of Isaac and Alice before me. Fittingly, then, it was Alice who gave me the push I needed.

  I was helping Tess with the wash—sweating and stirring dirty clothes as they boiled in their big iron pot—when Alice came to me, crept to me, looking back over her shoulder, her eyes wide with what I read as fear.

  “You look at this,” she said to me, not even glancing at Tess who had stopped pounding a pair of Weylin’s pants to watch us. She trusted Tess. “See,” she said. “I been looking where I wasn’t s’pose to look—in Mis- ter Rufe’s bed chest. But what I found don’t look like it ought to be there.”

  She took two letters from her apron pocket. Two letters, their seals broken, their faces covered with my handwriting.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. “Yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so. I can read some words. Got to take these bac
k now.” “Yes.”

  She turned to go. “Alice.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks. Be careful when you put them back.”

  “You be careful too,” she said. Our eyes met and we both knew what she was talking about.

  I left that night.

  I collected the food and “borrowed” one of Nigel’s old hats, to pull down over my hair—which wasn’t very long, luckily. When I asked Nigel for the hat, he just looked at me for a long moment, then got it for me. No questions. I didn’t think he expected to see it again.

  I stole a pair of Rufus’s old trousers and a worn shirt. My jeans and shirts were too well known to Rufus’s neighbors, and the dress Alice had made me looked too much like the dresses every other slave woman on the place wore. Besides, I had decided to become a boy. In the loose, shabby, but definitely male clothing I had chosen, my height and my con- tralto voice would get me by. I hoped.