7
Margaret Weylin wanted me. She was thin and pale and weak and older than her years. Her beauty had gone to a kind of fragile gaunt- ness. As I was reintroduced to her, she sipped at her little bottle of dark brownish-red liquid and smiled beneficently.
218
KINDRED
Nigel carried her up to her room. She could walk a little, but she could- n’t manage the stairs. Sometime later, she wanted to see Nigel’s children. She was sugary sweet with them. I couldn’t remember her being that way with anyone but Rufus before. Slave children hadn’t interested her unless her husband had fathered them. Then her interest had been negative. But she gave Nigel’s sons candy and they loved her.
She asked to see another slave—one I didn’t know—and then wept a little when she heard that one had been sold. She was full of sweetness and charity. It scared me a little. I couldn’t quite believe she’d changed that much.
“Dana, can you still read the way you used to?” she asked me. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I wanted you because I remembered how well you read.”
I kept my expression neutral. If she didn’t remember what she had thought of my reading, I did.
“Read the Bible to me,” she said.
“Now?” She had just had her breakfast. I hadn’t had anything yet, and
I was hungry.
“Now, yes. Read the Sermon on the Mount.”
That was the beginning of my first full day with her. When she was tired of hearing me read, she thought of other things for me to do. Her laundry, for instance. She wouldn’t trust anyone else to do it. I wondered whether she had already found out that Alice generally did the laundry. And there was cleaning. She didn’t believe her room had been swept and dusted until she saw me do it. She didn’t believe Sarah understood how she wanted dinner prepared until I went down, got Sarah, and brought her back with me to receive instructions. She had to talk to Carrie and Nigel about the cleaning. She had to inspect the boy and girl who served at the table. In short, she had to prove that she was running her own house again. It had gone along without her for years, but she was back now.
She decided to teach me to sew. I had an old Singer at home and I could sew well enough with it to take care of my needs and Kevin’s. But I thought sewing by hand, especially sewing for “pleasure” was slow tor- ture. Margaret Weylin never asked me whether I wanted to learn though. She had time to fill, and it was my job to help her fill it. So I spent long tedious hours trying to imitate her tiny, straight, even stitches, and she spent minutes ripping out my work and lecturing me none too gently on how bad it was.
THE ST ORM 219
As the days passed, I learned to take longer than necessary when she sent me on errands. I learned to tell lies to get away from her when I thought I was about to explode. I learned to listen silently while she talked and talked and talked … mostly about how much better things were in Baltimore than here. I never learned to like sleeping on the floor of her room, but she wouldn’t permit the trundle bed to be brought in. She honestly didn’t see that it was any hardship for me to sleep on the floor. Niggers always slept on the floor.
Troublesome as she was, though, Margaret Weylin had mellowed. She didn’t have the old bursts of temper any more. Maybe it was the laudanum.
“You’re a good girl,” she said to me once as I sat near her bed stitch- ing at a slip cover. “Much better than you used to be. Someone must have taught you to behave.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I didn’t even look up.
“Good. You were impudent before. There’s nothing worse than an impudent nigger.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She depressed me, bored me, angered me, drove me crazy. But my back healed completely while I was with her. The work wasn’t hard and she never complained about anything but my sewing. She never threat- ened me or tried to have me whipped. Rufus said she was pleased with me. That seemed to surprise even him. So I endured her quietly. By now, I knew enough to realize when I was well off. Or I thought I did.
“You ought to see yourself,” Alice told me one day as I was hiding out in her cabin—the cabin Rufus had had Nigel build her just before the birth of her first child.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Marse Rufe really put the fear of God in you, didn’t he?” “Fear of … What are you talking about?”
“You run around fetching and carrying for that woman like you love her. And half a day in the fields was all it took.”
“Hell, Alice, leave me alone. I’ve been listening to nonsense all morn- ing. I don’t need yours.”
“You don’t want to hear me, get out of here. The way you always suck- in’ up to that woman is enough to make anybody sick.”
I got up and went to the cookhouse. There were times when it was stu- pid to expect reason from Alice, times when it did no good to point out
220
the obvious.
KINDRED
There were two field hands in the cookhouse. One young man who had a broken leg splinted and obviously healing crooked, and one old man who didn’t do much work any more. I could hear them before I went in. “I know Marse Rufe’ll get rid of me if he can,” said the young man. “I
ain’t no good to him. His daddy would have got rid of me.”
“Won’t nobody buy me,” said the old man. “I was burnt out long time ago. It’s you young ones got to worry.”
I went into the cookhouse and the young man who had his mouth open to speak closed it quickly, looking at me with open hostility. The old man simply turned his back. I’d seen slaves do that to Alice. I hadn’t noticed them doing it to me before. Suddenly, the cookhouse was no more com- fortable than Alice’s cabin had been. It might have been different if Sarah or Carrie had been there, but they weren’t. I left the cookhouse and went back toward the main house, feeling lonely.
Once I was inside, though, I wondered why I had crept away like that. Why hadn’t I fought back? Alice accusing me was ridiculous, and she knew it. But the field hands … They just didn’t know me, didn’t know how loyal I might be to Rufus or Margaret, didn’t know what I might report.
And if I told them, how likely would they be to believe me? But still …
I went down the hall and toward the stairs slowly, wondering why I hadn’t tried to defend myself—at least tried. Was I getting so used to being submissive?
Upstairs, I could hear Margaret Weylin thumping on the floor with her cane. She didn’t use the cane much for walking because she hardly ever walked. She used it to call me.
I turned and went back out of the house, out toward the woods. I had to think. I wasn’t getting enough time to myself. Once—God knows how long ago—I had worried that I was keeping too much distance between myself and this alien time. Now, there was no distance at all. When had I stopped acting? Why had I stopped?
There were people coming toward me through the woods. Several peo- ple. They were on the road, and I was several feet off it. I crouched in the trees to wait for them to pass. I was in no mood to answer some white man’s stupid inevitable questions: “What are you doing here? Who’s your master?”
THE ST ORM 221
I could have answered without trouble. I was nowhere near the edge of Weylin land. But just for a while, I wanted to be my own master. Before I forgot what it felt like.
A white man went by on horseback leading two dozen black men chained two by two. Chained. They wore handcuffs and iron collars with chains connecting the collars to a central chain that ran between the two lines. Behind the men walked several women roped together neck to neck. A coffle—slaves for sale.
At the end of the procession rode a second white man with a gun in his belt. They were all headed for the Weylin house.
I realized suddenly that the slaves in the cookhouse had not been spec- ulating idly about the possibility of being sold. They had known that there was a sale coming. Field hands who never set foot in the main house, and they had known. I hadn�
�t heard a thing.
Lately, Rufus spent his time either straightening out his father’s affairs, or sleeping. The weakness left over from his illness was still with him, and he had no time for me. He barely had time for his mother. But he had time to sell slaves. He had time to make himself that much more like his father.
I let the coffle reach the house far ahead of me. By the time I got there, three slaves were already being added to the line. Two men, one grim- faced, one openly weeping; and one woman who moved as though she were sleepwalking. As I got closer, the woman began to look familiar to me. I stopped, almost not wanting to know who it was. A tall, strongly built, handsome woman.
Tess.
I’d seen her only two or three times this trip. She was still working in the fields, still serving the overseer at night. She’d had no children, and that may have been why she was being sold. Or maybe this was some- thing Margaret Weylin had arranged. She might be that vindictive if she knew of her husband’s temporary interest in Tess.
I started toward Tess and the white man who had just tied a rope around her neck, fastening her into the line, saw me. He turned to face me, gun drawn.
I stopped, alarmed, confused … I had made no threatening move. “I just wanted to say good-bye to my friend,” I told him. I was whispering for some reason.
“Say it from there. She can hear you.”
222
“Tess?”
KINDRED
She stood, head down, shoulders rounded, a little red bundle hanging from one hand. She should have heard me, but I didn’t think she had.
“Tess, it’s Dana.”
She never looked up.
“Dana!” Rufus’s voice from near the steps where he was talking with the other white man. “You get away from here. Go inside.”
“Tess?” I called once more, willing her to answer. She knew my voice, surely. Why wouldn’t she look up? Why wouldn’t she speak? Why wouldn’t she even move? It was as though I didn’t exist for her, as though I wasn’t real.
I stepped toward her. I think I would have gone to her, taken the rope from her neck or gotten shot trying. But at that moment, Rufus reached me. He grabbed me, hustled me into the house, into the library.
“Stay here!” he ordered. “Just stay …” He stopped, suddenly stumbled against me, clutching at me now, not to hold me where I was, but to keep himself upright. “Damn!”
“How could you do it!” I hissed as he straightened. “Tess … those others …”
“They’re my property!”
I stared at him in disbelief. “Oh my God …!”
He passed a hand over his face, turned away. “Look, this sale is some- thing my father arranged before he died. You can’t do anything about it, so just stay out of the way!”
“Or what? You going to sell me too? You might as well!”
He went back outside without answering. After a while, I sat down in
Tom Weylin’s worn arm chair and put my head down on his desk.
8
Carrie covered for me with Margaret Weylin. She wanted me to know that when she caught me heading back upstairs. Actually, I don’t know why I was heading upstairs, except that I didn’t want to see Rufus again for a while, and there was nowhere else to go.
Carrie stopped me on the stairs, looked at me critically, then took my
THE ST ORM 223
arm and led me back down and out to her cabin. I didn’t know or care what she had in mind, but I did understand when she told me through gestures that she had told Margaret Weylin I was sick. Then she circled her neck with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands and looked at me. “I saw,” I said. “Tess and two others.” I drew a ragged breath. “I thought that was over on this plantation. I thought it died with Tom
Weylin.”
Carrie shrugged.
“I wish I had left Rufus lying in the mud,” I said. “To think I saved him so he could do something like this …!”
Carrie caught my wrist and shook her head vigorously.
“What do you mean, no? He’s no good. He’s all grown up now, and part of the system. He could feel for us a little when his father was run- ning things—when he wasn’t entirely free himself. But now, he’s in charge. And I guess he had to do something right away, to prove it.”
Carrie clasped her hands around her neck again. Then she drew closer to me and clasped them around my neck. Finally, she went over to the crib that her youngest child had recently outgrown and there, symboli- cally, clasped her hands again, leaving enough of an open circle for a small neck.
She straightened and looked at me. “Everybody?” I asked.
She nodded, gestured widely with her arms as though gathering a group around her. Then, once again, her hands around her neck.
I nodded. She was almost surely right. Margaret Weylin could not run the plantation. Both the land and the people would be sold. And if Tom Weylin was any example, the people would be sold without regard for family ties.
Carrie stood looking down at the crib as though she had read my thought.
“I was beginning to feel like a traitor,” I said. “Guilty for saving him. Now … I don’t know what to feel. Somehow, I always seem to forgive him for what he does to me. I can’t hate him the way I should until I see him doing things to other people.” I shook my head. “I guess I can see why there are those here who think I’m more white than black.”
Carrie made quick waving-aside gestures, her expression annoyed. She came over to me and wiped one side of my face with her fingers— wiped hard. I drew back, and she held her fingers in front of me, showed
224
KINDRED
me both sides. But for once, I didn’t understand.
Frustrated, she took me by the hand and led me out to where Nigel was chopping firewood. There, before him, she repeated the face-rubbing gesture, and he nodded.
“She means it doesn’t come off, Dana,” he said quietly. “The black. She means the devil with people who say you’re anything but what you are.”
I hugged her and got away from her quickly so that she wouldn’t see that I was close to tears. I went up to Margaret Weylin and she’d just had her laudanum. Being with her at such times was like being alone. And being alone was just what I needed.
9
I avoided Rufus for three days after the sale. He made it easy for me. He avoided me too. Then on the fourth day he came looking for me. He found me in his mother’s room yes-ma’aming her and changing her bed while she sat looking thin and frail beside the window. She barely ate. I had actually caught myself coaxing her to eat. Then I realized that she enjoyed being coaxed. She could forget to be superior sometimes, and just be someone’s old mother. Rufus’s mother. Unfortunately.
He came in and said, “Let Carrie finish that, Dana. I have something else for you to do.”
“Oh, do you have to take her now?” said Margaret. “She was just …” “I’ll send her back later, Mama. And Carrie’ll be up to finish your bed
in a minute.”
I left the room silently, not looking forward to whatever he had in mind.
“Down to the library,” he said right behind me.
I glanced back at him, trying to gauge his mood, but he only looked tired. He ate well and got twice the rest he should have needed, but he always looked tired.
“Wait a minute,” he said. I stopped.
“Did you bring another of those pens with the ink inside?”
“Yes.” “Get it.”
THE ST ORM 225
I went up to the attic where I still kept most of my things. I’d brought a packet of three pens this time, but I only took one back down with me—in case he still took as much pleasure as he had last trip in wasting ink.
“You ever hear of dengue fever?” he asked as he went down the stairs. “No.”
“Well, according to the doc in town, that’s what I had. I told him about it.” He had been going back and forth to town often since his father’s d
eath. “Doc said he didn’t see how I’d made it without bleeding and a good emetic. Says I’m still weak because I didn’t get all the poisons out of my body.”
“Put yourself in his hands,” I said quietly. “And with a little luck, that will solve both our problems.”
He frowned uncertainly. “What do you mean by that?” “Not a thing.”
He turned and caught me by the shoulders in a grip that he probably meant to be painful. It wasn’t. “Are you trying to say you want me to die?”
I sighed. “If I did, you would, wouldn’t you?”
Silence. He let go of me and we went into the library. He sat down in his father’s old arm chair and motioned me into a hard Windsor chair nearby. Which was one step up from his father who had always made me stand before him like a school kid sent to the principal’s office.
Kindred Page 28