Kindred

by Octavia Butler

  “What’s the use of saying all that? And how can you be married to him?”

  “Rufe, how’d you like people to call you white trash when they talk to you?”

  “What?” He started up angrily, forgetting his leg, then fell back. “I am not trash!” he whispered. “You damn black …”

  “Hush, Rufe.” I put my hand on his shoulder to quiet him. Apparently I’d hit the nerve I’d aimed at. “I didn’t say you were trash. I said how’d you like to be called trash. I see you don’t like it. I don’t like being called nigger either.”

  He lay silent, frowning at me as though I were speaking a foreign language. Maybe I was.

  “Where we come from,” I said, “it’s vulgar and insulting for whites to call blacks niggers. Also, where we come from, whites and blacks can marry.”

  “But it’s against the law.”

  “It is here. But it isn’t where we come from.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  I looked at Kevin.

  “You asked for it,” he said.

  “You want to try telling him?”

  He shook his head. “No point.”

  “Not for you, maybe. But for me …” I thought for a moment trying to find the right words. “This boy and I are liable to have a long association whether we like it or not. I want him to know.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Where do you come from?” repeated Rufus. “You sure don’t talk like anybody I ever heard.”

  I frowned, thought, and finally shook my head. “Rufe, I want to tell you, but you probably won’t understand. We don’t understand ourselves, really.”

  “I already don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t know how I can see you when you’re not here, or how you get here, or anything. My leg hurts so much I can’t even think about it.”

  “Let’s wait then. When you feel better …”

  “When I feel better, maybe you’ll be gone. Dana, tell me!”

  “All right, I’ll try. Have you ever heard of a place called California?”

  “Yeah. Mama’s cousin went there on a ship.”

  Luck. “Well, that’s where we’re from. California. But … it’s not the California your cousin went to. We’re from a California that doesn’t exist yet, Rufus. California of nineteen seventy-six.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I mean we come from a different time as well as a different place. I told you it was hard to understand.”

  “But what’s nineteen seventy-six?”

  “That’s the year. That’s what year it is for us when we’re at home.”

  “But it’s eighteen nineteen. It’s eighteen nineteen everywhere. You’re talking crazy.”

  “No doubt. This is a crazy thing that’s happened to us. But I’m telling you the truth. We come from a future time and place. I don’t know how we get here. We don’t want to come. We don’t belong here. But when you’re in trouble, somehow you reach me, call me, and I come—although as you can see now, I can’t always help you.” I could have told him about our blood relationship. Maybe I would if I saw him again when he was older. For now, though, I had confused him enough.

  “This is crazy stuff,” he repeated. He looked at Kevin. “You tell me. Are you from California?”

  Kevin nodded. “Yes.”

  “Then are you Spanish? California is Spanish.”

  “It is now, but it will be part of the United States eventually, just like Maryland or Pennsylvania.”

  “When?”

  “It will become a state in eighteen fifty.”

  “But it’s only eighteen nineteen. How could you know …?” He broke off, looked from Kevin to me in confusion. “This isn’t real,” he said. “You’re making it all up.”

  “It’s real,” said Kevin quietly.

  “But how could it be?”

  “We don’t know. But it is.”

  He thought for a while looking from one to the other of us. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  Kevin made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I don’t blame you.”

  I shrugged. “All right, Rufe. I wanted you to know the truth, but I can’t blame you for not being able to accept it either.”

  “Nineteen seventy-six,” said the boy slowly. He shook his head and closed his eyes. I wondered why I had bothered to try to convince him. After all, how accepting would I be if I met a man who claimed to be from eighteen nineteen—or two thousand nineteen, for that matter. Time travel was science fiction in nineteen seventy-six. In eighteen nineteen—Rufus was right—it was sheer insanity. No one but a child would even have listened to Kevin and me talk about it.

  “If you know California’s going to be a state,” said Rufus, “you must know some other things that are going to happen.”

  “We do,” I admitted. “Some things. Not very much. We’re not historians.”

  “But you ought to know everything if it already happened in your time.”

  “How much do you know about seventeen nineteen, Rufe?”

  He stared at me blankly.

  “People don’t learn everything about the times that came before them,” I said. “Why should they?”

  He sighed. “Tell me something, Dana. I’m trying to believe you.”

  I dug back into the American history that I had learned both in and out of school. “Well, if this is eighteen nineteen, the President is James Monroe, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The next President will be John Quincy Adams.”

  “When?”

  I frowned, calling back more of the list of Presidents I had memorized for no particular reason when I was in school. “In eighteen twenty-four. Monroe had—will have—two terms.”

  “What else?”

  I looked at Kevin.

  He shrugged. “All I can think of is something I got from those books we looked through last night. In eighteen twenty, the Missouri Compromise opened the way for Missouri to come into the Union as a slave state and Maine to come in as a free state. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about, Rufus?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I didn’t think so. Have you got any money?”

  “Money? Me? No.”

  “Well, you’ve seen money, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Coins should have the year they were made stamped on them, even now.”

  “They do.”

  Kevin reached into his pocket and brought out a handful of change. He held it out to Rufus and Rufus picked out a few coins. “Nineteen sixty-five,” he read, “nineteen sixty-seven, nineteen seventy-one, nineteen seventy. None of them say nineteen seventy-six.”

  “None of them say eighteen-anything either,” said Kevin. “But here.” He picked out a bicentennial quarter and handed it to Rufus.

  “Seventeen seventy-six, nineteen seventy-six,” the boy read. “Two dates.”

  “The country’s two hundred years old in nineteen seventy-six,” said Kevin. “Some of the money was changed to commemorate the anniversary. Are you convinced?”

  “Well, I guess you could have made these yourself.”

  Kevin took back his money. “You might not know about Missouri, kid,” he said wearily. “But you’d have made a good Missourian.”

  “What?”

  “Just a joke. Hasn’t come into fashion yet.”

  Rufus looked troubled. “I believe you. I don’t understand, like Dana said, but I guess I believe.”

  Kevin sighed. “Thank God.”

  Rufus looked up at Kevin and managed to grin. “You aren’t as bad as I thought you’d be.”

  “Bad?” Kevin looked at me accusingly.

  “I didn’t tell him anything about you,” I said.

  “I saw you,” said Rufus. “You were fighting with Dana just before you came here, or … it looked like fighting. Did you make all those marks on her face?”

  “No, he didn’t,” I said quickly. “And he and I weren’t fighting.”

  �
�Wait a minute,” said Kevin. “How could he know about that?”

  “Like he said.” I shrugged. “He saw us before we got here. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s done it before.” I looked down at Rufus. “Have you told anyone else about seeing me?”

  “Just Nigel. Nobody else would believe me.”

  “Good. Best not to tell anyone else about us now either. Nothing about California or nineteen seventy-six.” I took Kevin’s hand and held it. “We’re going to have to fit in as best we can with the people here for as long as we have to stay. That means we’re going to have to play the roles you gave us.”

  “You’ll say you belong to him?”

  “Yes. I want you to say it too if anyone asks you.”

  “That’s better than saying you’re his wife. Nobody would believe that.”

  Kevin made a sound of disgust. “I wonder how long we’ll be stuck here,” he muttered. “I think I’m getting homesick already.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But stay close to me. You got here because you were holding me. I’m afraid that may be the only way you can get home.”

  3

  Rufus’s father arrived on a flat-bed wagon, carrying his familiar long rifle—an old muzzleloader, I realized. With him in the wagon was Nigel and a tall stocky black man. Tom Weylin was tall himself, but too lean to be as impressive as his massive slave. Weylin didn’t look especially vicious or depraved. Right now, he only looked annoyed. We stood up as he climbed down from the wagon and came to face us.

  “What happened here?” he asked suspiciously.

  “The boy has broken his leg,” said Kevin. “Are you his father?”

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  “My name’s Kevin Franklin.” He glanced at me, but caught himself and didn’t introduce me. “We came across the two boys right after the accident happened, and I thought we should stay with your son until you came for him.”

  Weylin grunted and knelt to look at Rufus’s leg. “Guess it’s broken all right. Wonder how much that’ll cost me.”

  The black man gave him a look of disgust that would surely have angered him if he had seen it.

  “What were you doing climbing a damn tree?” Weylin demanded of Rufus.

  Rufus stared at him silently.

  Weylin muttered something I didn’t quite catch. He stood up and gestured sharply to the black man. The man came forward, lifted Rufus gently, and placed him on the wagon. Rufus’s face twisted in pain as he was lifted, and he cried out as he was lowered into the wagon. Kevin and I should have made a splint for that leg, I thought belatedly. I followed the black man to the wagon.

  Rufus grabbed my arm and held it, obviously trying not to cry. His voice was a husky whisper.

  “Don’t go, Dana.”

  I didn’t want to go. I liked the boy, and from what I’d heard of early nineteenth-century medicine, they were going to pour some whiskey down him and play tug of war with his leg. And he was going to learn brand new things about pain. If I could give him any comfort by staying with him, I wanted to stay.

  But I couldn’t.

  His father had spoken a few private words with Kevin and was now climbing back up onto the seat of the wagon. He was ready to leave and Kevin and I weren’t invited. That didn’t say much for Weylin’s hospitality. People in his time of widely scattered plantations and even more widely scattered hotels had a reputation for taking in strangers. But then, a man who could look at his injured son and think of nothing but how much the doctor bill would be wasn’t likely to be concerned about strangers.

  “Come with us,” pleaded Rufus. “Daddy, let them come.”

  Weylin glanced back, annoyed, and I tried gently to loosen Rufus’s grip on me. After a moment, I realized that Weylin was looking at me—staring hard at me. Perhaps he was seeing my resemblance to Alice’s mother. He couldn’t have seen me clearly enough or long enough at the river to recognize me now as the woman he had once come so near shooting. At first, I stared back. Then I looked away, remembering that I was supposed to be a slave. Slaves lowered their eyes respectfully. To stare back was insolent. Or at least, that was what my books said.

  “Come along and have dinner with us,” Weylin told Kevin. “You may as well. Where were you going to stay the night, anyway?”

  “Under the trees if necessary,” said Kevin. He and I climbed onto the wagon beside the silent Nigel. “Not much choice, as I told you.”

  I looked at him, wondering what he had told Weylin. Then I had to catch myself as the black man prodded the horses forward.

  “You, girl,” Weylin said to me. “What’s your name?”

  “Dana, sir.”

  He turned to stare at me again, this time as though I’d said something wrong. “Where do you come from?”

  I glanced at Kevin, not wanting to contradict anything he had said. He gave me a slight nod, and I assumed I was free to make up my own lies. “I’m from New York.”

  Now the look he was giving me was really ugly, and I wondered whether he’d heard a New York accent recently and found mine a poor match. Or was I saying something wrong? I hadn’t said ten words to him. What could be wrong?

  Weylin looked sharply at Kevin, then turned around and ignored us for the rest of the trip.

  We went through the woods to a road, and along the road past a field of tall golden wheat. In the field, slaves, mostly men, worked steadily swinging scythes with attached wooden racks that caught the cut wheat in neat piles. Other slaves, mostly women, followed them tying the wheat into bundles. None of them seemed to pay any attention to us. I looked around for a white overseer and was surprised not to see one. The Weylin house surprised me too when I saw it in daylight. It wasn’t white. It had no columns, no porch to speak of. I was almost disappointed. It was a red-brick Georgian Colonial, boxy but handsome in a quiet kind of way, two and a half stories high with dormered windows and a chimney on each end. It wasn’t big or imposing enough to be called a mansion. In Los Angeles, in our own time, Kevin and I could have afforded it.

  As the wagon took us up to the front steps, I could see the river off to one side and some of the land I had run through a few hours—a few years—before. Scattered trees, unevenly cut grass, the row of cabins far off to one side almost hidden by the trees, the fields, the woods. There were other buildings lined up beside and behind the house opposite the slave cabins. As we stopped, I was almost sent off to one of these.

  “Luke,” said Weylin to the black man, “take Dana around back and get her something to eat.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the black man softly. “Want me to take Marse Rufe upstairs first?”

  “Do what I told you. I’ll take him up.”

  I saw Rufus set his teeth. “I’ll see you later,” I whispered, but he wouldn’t let go of my hand until I spoke to his father.

  “Mr. Weylin, I don’t mind staying with him. He seems to want me to.”

  Weylin looked exasperated. “Well, come on then. You can wait with him until the doctor comes.” He lifted Rufus with no particular care, and strode up the steps to the house. Kevin followed him.

  “You watch out,” said the black man softly as I started after them.

  I looked at him, surprised, not sure he was talking to me. He was.

  “Marse Tom can turn mean mighty quick,” he said. “So can the boy, now that he’s growing up. Your face looks like maybe you had enough white folks’ meanness for a while.”

  I nodded. “I have, all right. Thanks for the warning.”

  Nigel had come to stand next to the man, and I realized as I spoke that the two looked much alike, the boy a smaller replica of the man. Father and son, probably. They resembled each other more than Rufus and Tom Weylin did. As I hurried up the steps and into the house, I thought of Rufus and his father, of Rufus becoming his father. It would happen some day in at least one way. Someday Rufus would own the plantation. Someday, he would be the slaveholder, responsible in his own right for what happened to the people who lived in th
ose half-hidden cabins. The boy was literally growing up as I watched—growing up because I watched and because I helped to keep him safe. I was the worst possible guardian for him—a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children. I would have all I could do to look after myself. But I would help him as best I could. And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come. I might even be making things easier for Alice.

  Now, I followed Weylin up the stairs to a bedroom—not the same one Rufus had occupied on my last trip. The bed was bigger, its full canopy and draperies blue instead of green. The room itself was bigger. Weylin dumped Rufus onto the bed, ignoring the boy’s cries of pain. It did not look as though Weylin was trying to hurt Rufus. He just didn’t seem to pay any attention to how he handled the boy—as though he didn’t care.

  Then, as Weylin was leading Kevin out of the room, a red-haired woman hurried in.

  “Where is he?” she demanded breathlessly. “What happened?”

  Rufus’s mother. I remembered her. She pushed her way into the room just as I was putting Rufus’s pillow under his head.

  “What are you doing to him?” she cried. “Leave him alone!” She tried to pull me away from her son. She had only one reaction when Rufus was in trouble. One wrong reaction.

  Fortunately for both of us, Weylin reached her before I forgot myself and pushed her away from me. He caught her, held her, spoke to her quietly.

  “Margaret, now listen. The boy has a broken leg, that’s all. There’s nothing you can do for a broken leg. I’ve already sent for the doctor.”

  Margaret Weylin seemed to calm down a little. She stared at me. “What’s she doing here?”

  “She belongs to Mr. Kevin Franklin here.” Weylin waved a hand presenting Kevin who, to my surprise, bowed slightly to the woman. “Mr. Franklin is the one who found Rufus hurt,” Weylin continued. He shrugged. “Rufus wanted the girl to stay with him. Can’t do any harm.” He turned and walked away. Kevin followed him reluctantly.

  The woman may have been listening as her husband spoke, but she didn’t look as though she was. She was still staring at me, frowning at me as though she was trying to remember where she’d seen me before. The years hadn’t changed her much, and, of course, they hadn’t changed me at all. But I didn’t expect her to remember. Her glimpse of me had been too brief, and her mind had been on other things.