I went up to Kevin’s room, but he wasn’t there. I heard him when I passed Rufus’s room and I would have gone in, but a moment later, I heard Margaret’s voice. Repelled, I went back downstairs and out to the cookhouse.
Sarah and Carrie were alone when I went in, and I was glad of that. Sometimes old people and children lounged there, or house servants or even field hands stealing a few moments of leisure. I liked to listen to them talk sometimes and fight my way through their accents to find out more about how they survived lives of slavery. Without knowing it, they prepared me to survive. But now I wanted only Sarah and Carrie. I could say what I felt around them, and it wouldn’t get back to either of the Weylins.
“Dana,” Sarah greeted me, “you be careful. I spoke for you today. I don’t want you making me out to be a liar!”
I frowned. “Spoke for me? To Miss Margaret?”
Sarah gave a short harsh laugh. “No! You know I don’t say no more to her than I can help. She’s got her house, and I got my kitchen.”
I smiled and my own trouble receded a little. Sarah was right. Margaret Weylin kept out of her way. Talk between them was brief and confined usually to meal planning.
“Why do you dislike her so if she doesn’t bother you?” I asked.
Sarah gave me the look of silent rage that I had not seen since my first day on the plantation. “Whose idea you think it was to sell my babies?”
“Oh.” She had not mentioned her lost children since that first day either.
“She wanted new furniture, new china dishes, fancy things you see in that house now. What she had was good enough for Miss Hannah, and Miss Hannah was a real lady. Quality. But it wasn’t good enough for white-trash Margaret. So she made Marse Tom sell my three boys to get money to buy things she didn’t even need!”
“Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. My trouble seemed to shrink and become not worth mentioning. Sarah was silent for a while, her hands kneading bread dough automatically, maybe with a little more vigor than necessary. Finally she spoke again.
“It was Marse Tom I spoke to for you.”
I jumped. “Am I in trouble?”
“Not by anything I said. He just wanted to know how you work and are you lazy. I told him you wasn’t lazy. Told him you didn’t know how to do some things—and, girl, you come here not knowing how to do nothing, but I didn’t tell him that. I said if you don’t know how to do something, you find out. And you work. I tell you to do something, I know it’s going to be done. Marse Tom say he might buy you.”
“Mr. Franklin won’t sell me.”
She lifted her head a little and literally looked down her nose at me. “No. Guess he won’t. Anyway, Miss Margaret don’t want you here.”
I shrugged.
“Bitch,” muttered Sarah monotonously. Then, “Well, greedy and mean as she is, at least she don’t bother Carrie much.”
I looked at the mute girl eating stew and corn bread left over from the table of the whites. “Doesn’t she, Carrie?”
Carrie shook her head and kept eating.
“Course,” said Sarah, turning away from the bread dough, “Carrie don’t have nothing Miss Margaret wants.”
I just looked at her.
“You’re caught between,” she said. “You know that don’t you?”
“One man ought to be enough for her.”
“Don’t matter what ought to be. Matters what is. Make him let you sleep in the attic again.”
“Make him!”
“Girl …” She smiled a little. “I see you and him together sometimes when you think nobody’s looking. You can make him do just about anything you want him to do.”
Her smile surprised me. I would have expected her to be disgusted with me—or with Kevin.
“Fact,” she continued, “if you got any sense, you’ll try to get him to free you now while you still young and pretty enough for him to listen.”
I looked at her appraisingly—large dark eyes set in a full unlined face several shades lighter than my own. She had been pretty herself not long ago. She was still an attractive woman. I spoke to her softly. “Were you sensible, Sarah? Did you try when you were younger?”
She stared hard at me, her large eyes suddenly narrowed. Finally, she walked away without answering.
7
I didn’t move to the quarter. I took some cookhouse advice that I’d once heard Luke give to Nigel. “Don’t argue with white folks,” he had said. “Don’t tell them ‘no.’ Don’t let them see you mad. Just say ‘yes, sir.’ Then go ’head and do what you want to do. Might have to take a whippin’ for it later on, but if you want it bad enough, the whippin’ won’t matter much.”
There were a few whip marks on Luke’s back, and I’d twice heard Tom Weylin swear to give them company. But he hadn’t. And Luke went about his business, doing pretty much as he pleased. His business was keeping the field hands in line. Called the driver, he was a kind of black overseer. And he kept this relatively high position in spite of his attitude. I decided to develop a similar attitude—though with less risk to myself, I thought. I had no intention of taking a whipping if I could avoid it, and I was sure Kevin could protect me if he was nearby when I needed him.
Anyway, I ignored Margaret’s ravings and continued to disgrace her Christian house.
And nothing happened.
Tom Weylin was up early one morning and he caught me stumbling, still half-asleep, out of Kevin’s room. I froze, then made myself relax.
“Morning, Mr. Weylin.”
He almost smiled—came as near to smiling as I’d ever seen. And he winked.
That was all. I knew then that if Margaret got me kicked out, it wouldn’t be for doing a thing as normal as sleeping with my master. And somehow, that disturbed me. I felt almost as though I really was doing something shameful, happily playing whore for my supposed owner. I went away feeling uncomfortable, vaguely ashamed.
Time passed. Kevin and I became more a part of the household, familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize. Not that I wanted us to have trouble, but it seemed as though we should have had a harder time adjusting to this particular segment of history—adjusting to our places in the household of a slaveholder. For me, the work could be hard, but was usually more boring than physically wearing. And Kevin complained of boredom, and of having to be sociable with a steady stream of ignorant pretentious guests who visited the Weylin house. But for drop-ins from another century, I thought we had had a remarkably easy time. And I was perverse enough to be bothered by the ease.
“This could be a great time to live in,” Kevin said once. “I keep thinking what an experience it would be to stay in it—go West and watch the building of the country, see how much of the Old West mythology is true.”
“West,” I said bitterly. “That’s where they’re doing it to the Indians instead of the blacks!”
He looked at me strangely. He had been doing that a lot lately.
Tom Weylin caught me reading in his library one day. I was supposed to be sweeping and dusting. I looked up, found him watching me, closed the book, put it away, and picked up my dust cloth. My hand was shaking.
“You read to my boy,” he said. “I let you do that. But that’s enough reading for you.”
There was a long silence and I said tardily, “Yes, sir.”
“In fact, you don’t even have to be in here. Tell Carrie to do this room.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And stay away from the books!”
“Yes, sir.”
Hours later in the cookhouse, Nigel asked me to teach him to read.
The request surprised me, then I was ashamed of my surprise. It seemed such a natural request. Years before, Nigel had been chosen to be Rufus’s companion. If Rufus had been a better student, Nigel might already know how to read. As it was, Nigel had learned to do other things. At a husky thirteen, he could shoe a horse, build a cabinet, and plot to
escape to Pennsylvania someday. I should have offered to teach him to read long before he asked me.
“You know what’s going to happen to both of us if we get caught?” I asked him.
“You scared?” he asked.
“Yes. But that doesn’t matter. I’ll teach you. I just wanted to be sure you knew what you were getting into.”
He turned away from me, lifted his shirt in the back so that I could see his scars. Then he faced me again. “I know,” he said.
That same day, I stole a book and began to teach him.
And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted so easily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting.
This was something I tried to explain to Kevin on the day the children broke through my act. It suddenly became very important that he understand.
The day was miserably hot and muggy, full of flies, mosquitoes, and the bad smells of soapmaking, the outhouses, fish someone had caught, unwashed bodies. Everybody smelled, black and white. Nobody washed enough or changed clothes often enough. The slaves worked up a sweat and the whites sweated without working. Kevin and I didn’t have enough clothes or any deodorant at all, so often, we smelled too. Surprisingly, we were beginning to get used to it.
Now we were walking together away from the house and the quarter. We weren’t heading for our oak tree because by then, if Margaret Weylin saw us there, she sent someone with a job for me. Her husband may have stopped her from throwing me out of the house, but he hadn’t stopped her from becoming a worse nuisance than ever. Sometimes Kevin countermanded her orders, claiming that he had work for me. That was how I got a little rest and gave Nigel some extra tutoring. Now, though, we were headed for the woods to spend some time together.
But before we got away from the buildings, we saw a group of slave children gathered around a tree stump. These were the children of the field hands, children too young to be of much use in the fields themselves. Two of them were standing on the wide flat stump while others stood around watching.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Playing some game, probably.” Kevin shrugged.
“It looks as though …”
“What?”
“Let’s get closer. I want to hear what they’re saying.”
We approached them from one side so that neither the children on the tree stump nor those on the ground were facing us. They went on with their play as we watched and listened.
“Now here a likely wench,” called the boy on the stump. He gestured toward the girl who stood slightly behind him. “She cook and wash and iron. Come here, gal. Let the folks see you.” He drew the girl up beside him. “She young and strong,” he continued. “She worth plenty money. Two hundred dollars. Who bid two hundred dollars?”
The little girl turned to frown at him. “I’m worth more than two hundred dollars, Sammy!” she protested. “You sold Martha for five hundred dollars!”
“You shut your mouth,” said the boy. “You ain’t supposed to say nothing. When Marse Tom bought Mama and me, we didn’t say nothing.”
I turned and walked away from the arguing children, feeling tired and disgusted. I wasn’t even aware that Kevin was following me until he spoke.
“That’s the game I thought they were playing,” he said. “I’ve seen them at it before. They play at field work too.”
I shook my head. “My God, why can’t we go home? This place is diseased.”
He took my hand. “The kids are just imitating what they’ve seen adults doing,” he said. “They don’t understand …”
“They don’t have to understand. Even the games they play are preparing them for their future—and that future will come whether they understand it or not.”
“No doubt.”
I turned to glare at him and he looked back calmly. It was a what-do-you-want-me-to-do-about-it kind of look. I didn’t say anything because, of course, there was nothing he could do about it.
I shook my head, rubbed my hand across my brow. “Even knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t help,” I said. “I know some of those kids will live to see freedom—after they’ve slaved away their best years. But by the time freedom comes to them, it will be too late. Maybe it’s already too late.”
“Dana, you’re reading too much into a kids’ game.”
“And you’re reading too little into it. Anyway … anyway, it’s not their game.”
“No.” He glanced at me. “Look, I won’t say I understand how you feel about this because maybe that’s something I can’t understand. But as you said, you know what’s going to happen. It already has happened. We’re in the middle of history. We surely can’t change it. If anything goes wrong, we might have all we can do just to survive it. We’ve been lucky so far.”
“Maybe.” I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But I can’t close my eyes.”
Kevin frowned thoughtfully. “It’s surprising to me that there’s so little to see. Weylin doesn’t seem to pay much attention to what his people do, but the work gets done.”
“You think he doesn’t pay attention. Nobody calls you out to see the whippings.”
“How many whippings?”
“One that I’ve seen. One too goddamn many!”
“One is too many, yes, but still, this place isn’t what I would have imagined. No overseer. No more work than the people can manage …”
“… no decent housing,” I cut in. “Dirt floors to sleep on, food so inadequate they’d all be sick if they didn’t keep gardens in what’s supposed to be their leisure time and steal from the cookhouse when Sarah lets them. And no rights and the possibility of being mistreated or sold away from their families for any reason—or no reason. Kevin, you don’t have to beat people to treat them brutally.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m not minimizing the wrong that’s being done here. I just …”
“Yes you are. You don’t mean to be, but you are.” I sat down against a tall pine tree, pulling him down beside me. We were in the woods now. Not far to one side of us was a group of Weylin’s slaves who were cutting down trees. We could hear them, but we couldn’t see them. I assumed that meant they couldn’t see us either—or hear us over the distance and their own noise. I spoke to Kevin again.
“You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer,” I said. “I can understand that because most of the time, I’m still an observer. It’s protection. It’s nineteen seventy-six shielding and cushioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then, like with the kids’ game, I can’t maintain the distance. I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do. I ought to be doing something though. I know that.”
“There’s nothing you could do that wouldn’t eventually get you whipped or killed!”
I shrugged.
“You … you haven’t already done anything, have you?”
“Just started to teach Nigel to read and write,” I said. “Nothing more subversive than that.”
“If Weylin catches you and I’m not around …”
“I know. So stay close. The boy wants to learn, and I’m going to teach him.”
He raised one leg against his chest and leaned forward looking at me. “You think someday he’ll write his own pass and head North, don’t you?”
“At least he’ll be able to.”
“I see Weylin was right about educated slaves.”
I turned to look at him.
“Do a good job with Nigel,” he said quietly. “Maybe when you’re gone, he’ll be able to teach others.”
I nodded solemnly.
“I’d bring him in to learn with Rufus if people weren’t so good at listening at doors in that house. And Margaret is always wandering in and
out.”
“I know. That’s why I didn’t ask you.” I closed my eyes and saw the children playing their game again. “The ease seemed so frightening,” I said. “Now I see why.”
“What?”
“The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”
8
I said good-bye to Rufus the day my teaching finally did get me into trouble. I didn’t know I was saying good-bye, of course—didn’t know what trouble was waiting for me in the cookhouse where I was to meet Nigel. I thought there was trouble enough in Rufus’s room.
I was there reading to him. I had been reading to him regularly since his father caught me that first time. Tom Weylin didn’t want me reading on my own, but he had ordered me to read to his son. Once he had told Rufus in my presence, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! A nigger can read better than you!”
“She can read better than you too,” Rufus had answered.
His father had stared at him coldly, then ordered me out of the room. For a second I was afraid for Rufus, but Tom Weylin left the room with me.
“Don’t go to him again until I say you can,” he told me.
Four days passed before he said I could. And again he chastised Rufus before me.
“I’m no schoolmaster,” he said, “but I’ll teach you if you can be taught. I’ll teach you respect.”
Rufus said nothing.
“You want her to read to you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you got something to say to me.”
“I … I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“Read,” said Weylin to me. He turned and left the room.
“What exactly are you supposed to be sorry for?” I asked when Weylin was gone. I spoke very softly.
“Talking back,” said Rufus. “He thinks everything I say is talking back. So I don’t say very much to him.”
“I see.” I opened the book and began to read.
We had finished Robinson Crusoe long ago, and Kevin had chosen a couple of other familiar books from the library. We had already gone through the first, Pilgrim’s Progress. Now we were working on Gulliver’s Travels. Rufus’s own reading was improving slowly under Kevin’s tutoring, but he still enjoyed being read to.
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