On my last day with him, though, as on a few others, Margaret came in to listen—and to fidget and to fiddle with Rufus’s hair and to pet him while I was reading. As usual, Rufus put his head on her lap and accepted her caresses silently. But today, apparently, that was not enough.
“Are you comfortable?” she asked Rufus when I had been reading for a few moments. “Does your leg hurt?” His leg was not healing as I thought it should have. After nearly two months, he still couldn’t walk.
“I feel all right, Mama,” he said.
Suddenly, Margaret twisted around to face me. “Well?” she demanded.
I had paused in my reading to give her a chance to finish. I lowered my head and began to read again.
About sixty seconds later, she said, “Baby, you hot? You want me to call Virgie up here to fan you?” Virgie was about ten—one of the small house servants often called to fan the whites, run errands for them, carry covered dishes of food between the cookhouse and the main house, and serve the whites at their table.
“I’m all right, Mama,” said Rufus.
“Why don’t you go on?” snapped Margaret at me. “You’re supposed to be here to read, so read!”
I began to read again, biting off the words a little.
“Are you hungry, baby?” asked Margaret a moment later. “Aunt Sarah’s just made a cake. Wouldn’t you like a piece?”
I didn’t stop this time. I just lowered my voice a little and read automatically, tonelessly.
“I don’t know why you want to listen to her,” Margaret said to Rufus. “She’s got a voice like a fly buzzing.”
“I don’t want no cake, Mama.”
“You sure? You ought to see the fine white icing Sarah put on it.”
“I want to hear Dana read, that’s all.”
“Well, there she is, reading. If you can call it that.”
I let my voice grow progressively softer as they talked.
“I can’t hear her with you talking,” Rufus said.
“Baby, all I said was …”
“Don’t say nothing!” Rufus took his head off her lap. “Go away and stop bothering me!”
“Rufus!” She sounded hurt rather than angry. And in spite of the situation, this sounded like real disrespect to me. I stopped reading and waited for the explosion. It came from Rufus.
“Go away, Mama!” he shouted. “Just leave me alone!”
“Be still,” she whispered. “Baby, you’ll make yourself sick.”
Rufus turned his head and looked at her. The expression on his face startled me. For once, the boy looked like a smaller replica of his father. His mouth was drawn into a thin straight line and his eyes were coldly hostile. He spoke quietly now as Weylin sometimes did when he was angry. “You’re making me sick, Mama. Get away from me!”
Margaret got up and dabbed at her eyes. “I don’t see how you can talk to me that way,” she said. “Just because of some nigger …”
Rufus just looked at her, and finally she left the room.
He relaxed against his pillows and closed his eyes. “I get so tired of her sometimes,” he said.
“Rufe …?”
He opened weary, friendly eyes and looked at me. The anger was gone.
“You’d better be careful,” I said. “What if your mother told your father you talked to her that way?”
“She never tells.” He grinned. “She’ll be back after ’while to bring me a piece of cake with fine white icing.”
“She was crying.”
“She always cries. Read, Dana.”
“Do you talk to her that way often?”
“I have to, or she won’t leave me alone. Daddy does it too.”
I took a deep breath, shook my head, and plunged back into Gulliver’s Travels.
Later, as I left Rufus, I passed Margaret on her way back to his room. Sure enough, she was carrying a large slice of cake on a plate.
I went downstairs and out to the cookhouse to give Nigel his reading lesson.
Nigel was waiting. He already had our book out of its hiding place and was spelling out words to Carrie. That surprised me because I had offered Carrie a chance to learn with him, and she had refused. Now though, the two of them, alone in the cookhouse, were so involved in what they were doing that they didn’t even notice me until I shut the door. They looked up then, wide-eyed with fear. But they relaxed when they saw it was only me. I went over to them.
“Do you want to learn?” I asked Carrie.
The girl’s fear seemed to return and she glanced at the door.
“Aunt Sarah’s afraid for her to learn,” said Nigel. “Afraid if she learns, she might get caught at it, and then be whipped or sold.”
I lowered my head, sighed. The girl couldn’t talk, couldn’t communicate at all except in the inadequate sign language she had invented—a language even her mother only half-understood. In a more rational society, an ability to write would be of great help to her. But here, the only people who could read her writing would be those who might punish her for being able to write. And Nigel. And Nigel.
I looked from the boy to the girl. “Shall I teach you, Carrie?” If I did and her mother caught me, I might be in more trouble than if Tom Weylin caught me. I was afraid to teach her both for her sake and for mine. Her mother wasn’t a woman I wanted to offend or to hurt, but my conscience wouldn’t let me refuse her if she wanted to learn.
Carrie nodded. She wanted to learn all right. She turned away from us for a moment, did something to her dress, then turned back with a small book in her hand. She too had stolen from the library. Her book was a volume of English history illustrated with a few drawings which she pointed out to me.
I shook my head. “Either hide it or put it back,” I told her. “It’s too hard for you to begin with. The one Nigel and I are using was written for people just starting to learn.” It was an old speller—probably the one Weylin’s first wife had been taught from.
Carrie’s fingers caressed one of the drawings for a moment. Then she put the book back into her dress.
“Now,” I said, “find something to do in case your mother comes in. I can’t teach you in here. We’ll have to find someplace else to meet.”
She nodded, looking relieved, and went over to sweep the other side of the room.
“Nigel,” I said softly when she was gone, “I surprised you when I came in here, didn’t I?”
“Didn’t know it was you.”
“Yes. It could have been Sarah, couldn’t it?”
He said nothing.
“I teach you in here because Sarah said I could, and because the Weylins never seem to come out here.”
“They don’t. They send us out here to tell Sarah what they want. Or to tell her to come to them.”
“So you can learn here, but Carrie can’t. We might have trouble no matter how careful we are, but we don’t have to ask for it.”
He nodded.
“By the way, what does your father think of my teaching you?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t tell him you was.”
Oh God. I took a shaky breath. “But he does know, doesn’t he?”
“Aunt Sarah probably told him. He never said nothing to me though.”
If anything went wrong, there would be blacks to take their revenge on me when the whites finished. When would I ever go home? Would I ever go home? Or if I had to stay here, why couldn’t I just turn these two kids away, turn off my conscience, and be a coward, safe and comfortable?
I took the book from Nigel and handed him my own pencil and a piece of paper from my tablet. “Spelling test,” I said quietly.
He passed the test. Every word right. To my surprise as well as his, I hugged him. He grinned, half-embarrassed, half-pleased. Then I got up and put his test paper into the hot coals of the hearth. It burst into flames and burned completely. I was always careful about that, and I always hated being careful. I couldn’t help contrasting Nigel’s lessons with Rufus’s. And the contrast made me
bitter.
I turned to go back to the table where Nigel was waiting. In that moment, Tom Weylin opened the door and stepped in.
It wasn’t supposed to happen. For as long as I had been on the plantation, it had not happened—no white had come into the cookhouse. Not even Kevin. Nigel had just agreed with me that it didn’t happen.
But there stood Tom Weylin staring at me. He lowered his gaze a little and frowned. I realized that I was still holding the old speller. I’d gotten up with it in my hand and I hadn’t put it down. I even had one finger in it holding my place.
I withdrew my finger and let the book close. I was in for a beating now. Where was Kevin? Somewhere inside the house, probably. He might hear me if I screamed—and I would be screaming shortly, anyway. But it would be better if I could just get past Weylin and run into the house.
Weylin stood squarely in front of the door. “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want you reading!”
I said nothing. Clearly, nothing I could say would help. I felt myself trembling, and I tried to be still. I hoped Weylin couldn’t see. And I hoped Nigel had had the sense to get the pencil off the table. So far, I was the only one in trouble. If it could just stay that way …
“I treated you good,” said Weylin quietly, “and you pay me back by stealing from me! Stealing my books! Reading!”
He snatched the book from me and threw it on the floor. Then he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me toward the door. I managed to twist around to face Nigel and mouth the words, “Get Kevin.” I saw Nigel stand up.
Then I was out of the cookhouse. Weylin dragged me a few feet, then pushed me hard. I fell, knocked myself breathless. I never saw where the whip came from, never even saw the first blow coming. But it came—like a hot iron across my back, burning into me through my light shirt, searing my skin …
I screamed, convulsed. Weylin struck again and again, until I couldn’t have gotten up at gunpoint.
I kept trying to crawl away from the blows, but I didn’t have the strength or the coordination to get far. I may have been still screaming or just whimpering, I couldn’t tell. All I was really aware of was the pain. I thought Weylin meant to kill me. I thought I would die on the ground there with a mouth full of dirt and blood and a white man cursing and lecturing as he beat me. By then, I almost wanted to die. Anything to stop the pain.
I vomited. And I vomited again because I couldn’t move my face away.
I saw Kevin, blurred, but somehow still recognizable. I saw him running toward me in slow motion, running. Legs churning, arms pumping, yet he hardly seemed to be getting closer.
Suddenly, I realized what was happening and I screamed—I think I screamed. He had to reach me. He had to!
And I passed out.
The Fight
1
We never really moved in together, Kevin and I. I had a sardine-can sized apartment on Crenshaw Boulevard and he had a bigger one on Olympic not too far away. We both had books shelved and stacked and boxed and crowding out the furniture. Together, we would never have fitted into either of our apartments. Kevin did suggest once that I get rid of some of my books so that I’d fit into his place.
“You’re out of your mind!” I told him.
“Just some of that book-club stuff that you don’t read.”
We were at my apartment then, so I said, “Let’s go to your place and I’ll help you decide which of your books you don’t read. I’ll even help you throw them out.”
He looked at me and sighed, but he didn’t say anything else. We just sort of drifted back and forth between our two apartments and I got less sleep than ever. But it didn’t seem to bother me as much as it had before. Nothing seemed to bother me much. I didn’t love the agency now, but, on the other hand, I didn’t kick the furniture in the morning anymore, either.
“Quit,” Kevin told me. “I’ll help you out until you find a better job.”
If I hadn’t already loved him by then, that would have done it. But I didn’t quit. The independence the agency gave me was shaky, but it was real. It would hold me together until my novel was finished and I was ready to look for something more demanding. When that time came, I could walk away from the agency not owing anybody. My memory of my aunt and uncle told me that even people who loved me could demand more of me than I could give—and expect their demands to be met simply because I owed them.
I knew Kevin wasn’t that way. The situation was completely different. But I kept my job.
Then about four months after we’d met, Kevin said, “How would you feel about getting married?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. “You want to marry me?”
“Yeah, don’t you want to marry me?” He grinned. “I’d let you type all my manuscripts.”
I was drying our dinner dishes just then, and I threw the dish towel at him. He really had asked me to do some typing for him three times. I’d done it the first time, grudgingly, not telling him how much I hated typing, how I did all but the final drafts of my stories in longhand. That was why I was with a blue-collar agency instead of a white-collar agency. The second time he asked, though, I told him, and I refused. He was annoyed. The third time when I refused again, he was angry. He said if I couldn’t do him a little favor when he asked, I could leave. So I went home.
When I rang his doorbell the next day after work, he looked surprised. “You came back.”
“Didn’t you want me to?”
“Well … sure. Will you type those pages for me now?”
“No.”
“Damnit, Dana …!”
I stood waiting for him to either shut the door or let me in. He let me in.
And now he wanted to marry me.
I looked at him. Just looked, for a long moment. Then I looked away because I couldn’t think while I was watching him. “You, uh … don’t have any relatives or anything who’ll give you a hard time about me, do you?” As I spoke, it occurred to me that one of the reasons his proposal surprised me was that we had never talked much about our families, about how his would react to me and mine to him. I hadn’t been aware of us avoiding the subject, but somehow, we’d never gotten around to it. Even now, he looked surprised.
“The only close relative I’ve got left is my sister,” he said. “She’s been trying to marry me off and get me ‘settled down’ for years. She’ll love you, believe me.”
I didn’t, quite. “I hope she does,” I said. “But I’m afraid my aunt and uncle won’t love you.”
He turned to face me. “No?”
I shrugged. “They’re old. Sometimes their ideas don’t have very much to do with what’s going on now. I think they’re still waiting for me to come to my senses, move back home, and go to secretarial school.”
“Are we going to get married?”
I went to him. “You know damn well we are.”
“You want me to go with you when you talk to your aunt and uncle?”
“No. Go talk to your sister if you want to. Brace yourself though. She might surprise you.”
She did. And braced or not, he wasn’t ready for his sister’s reaction.
“I thought I knew her,” he told me afterward. “I mean, I did know her. But I guess we’ve lost touch more than I thought.”
“What did she say?”
“That she didn’t want to meet you, wouldn’t have you in her house—or me either if I married you.” He leaned back on the shabby purple sofa that had come with my apartment and looked up at me. “And she said a lot of other things. You don’t want to hear them.”
“I believe you.”
He shook his head. “The thing is, there’s no reason for her to react this way. She didn’t even believe the garbage she was handing me—or didn’t used to. It’s as though she was quoting someone else. Her husband, probably. Pompous little bastard. I used to try to like him for her sake.”
“Her husband is prejudiced?”
“Her husband would have made a good Nazi. She used to joke about it
—though never when he could hear.”
“But she married him.”
“Desperation. She would have married almost anybody.” He smiled a little. “In high school, she and this friend of hers spent all their time together because neither of them could get a boyfriend. The other girl was black and fat and homely, and Carol was white and fat and homely. Half the time, we couldn’t figure out whether she lived at the girl’s house or the girl lived with us. My friends knew them both, but they were too young for them—Carol’s three years older than I am. Anyway, she and this girl sort of comforted each other and fell off their diets together and planned to go to the same college so they wouldn’t have to break up the partnership. The other girl really went, but Carol changed her mind and trained to become a dental assistant. She wound up marrying the first dentist she ever worked for—a smug little reactionary twenty years older than she was. Now she lives in a big house in La Canada and quotes clichéd bigotry at me for wanting to marry you.”
I shrugged, not knowing what to say. I-told-you-so? Hardly. “My mother’s car broke down in La Canada once,” I told him. “Three people called the police on her while she was waiting for my uncle to come and get her. Suspicious character. Five-three, she was. About a hundred pounds. Real dangerous.”
“Sounds like the reactionary moved to the right town.”
“I don’t know, that was back in nineteen sixty just before my mother died. Things may have improved by now.”
“What did your aunt and uncle say about me, Dana?”
I looked at my hands, thinking about all they had said, paring it down wearily. “I think my aunt accepts the idea of my marrying you because any children we have will be light. Lighter than I am, anyway. She always said I was a little too ‘highly visible.’”
He stared at me.
“You see? I told you they were old. She doesn’t care much for white people, but she prefers light-skinned blacks. Figure that out. Anyway, she ‘forgives’ me for you. But my uncle doesn’t. He’s sort of taken this personally.”
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