“Personally, how?”
“He … well, he’s my mother’s oldest brother, and he was like a father to me even before my mother died because my father died when I was a baby. Now … it’s as though I’ve rejected him. Or at least that’s the way he feels. It bothered me, really. He was more hurt than mad. Honestly hurt. I had to get away from him.”
“But, he knew you’d marry some day. How could a thing as natural as that be a rejection?”
“I’m marrying you.” I reached up and twisted a few strands of his straight gray hair between my fingers. “He wants me to marry someone like him—someone who looks like him. A black man.”
“Oh.”
“I was always close to him. He and my aunt wanted kids, and they couldn’t have any. I was their kid.”
“And now?”
“Now … well, they have a couple of apartment houses over in Pasadena—small places, but nice. The last thing my uncle said to me was that he’d rather will them to his church than leave them to me and see them fall into white hands. I think that was the worst thing he could think of to do to me. Or he thought it was the worst thing.”
“Oh hell,” muttered Kevin. “Look, are you sure you still want to marry me?”
“Yes. I wish … never mind, just yes. Definitely, yes.”
“Then let’s go to Vegas and pretend we haven’t got relatives.”
So we drove to Las Vegas, got married, and gambled away a few dollars. When we came home to our bigger new apartment, we found a gift—a blender—from my best friend, and a check from The Atlantic waiting for us. One of my stories had finally made it.
2
I awoke.
I was lying flat on my stomach, my face pressed uncomfortably against something cold and hard. My body below the neck rested on something slightly softer. Slowly, I became aware of sunlight and shadow, of shapes.
I lifted my head, started to sit up, and my back suddenly caught fire. I fell forward, hit my head hard on the bare floor of the bathroom. My bathroom. I was home.
“Kevin?”
I listened. I could have looked around, but I didn’t want to.
“Kevin?”
I got up, aware that my eyes were streaming muddy tears, aware of the pain. God, the pain! For several seconds, all I could do was lean against the wall and bear it.
Slowly, I discovered that I wasn’t as weak as I had thought. In fact, by the time I was fully conscious, I wasn’t weak at all. It was only the pain that made me move slowly, carefully, like a woman three times my age.
I could see now that I had been lying with my head in the bathroom and my body in the bedroom. Now I went into the bathroom and turned on the water to fill the tub. Warm water. I don’t think I could have stood hot. Or cold.
My blouse was stuck to my back. It was cut to pieces, really, but the pieces were stuck to me. My back was cut up pretty badly too from what I could feel. I had seen old photographs of the backs of people who had been slaves. I could remember the scars, thick and ugly. Kevin had always told me how smooth my skin was …
I took off my pants and shoes and got into the tub still wearing my blouse. I would let the water soften it until I could ease it from my back.
In the tub, I sat for a long while without moving, without thinking, listening for what I knew I would not hear elsewhere in the house. The pain was a friend. Pain had never been a friend to me before, but now it kept me still. It forced reality on me and kept me sane.
But Kevin …
I leaned forward and cried into the dirty pink water. The skin of my back stretched agonizingly, and the water got pinker.
And it was all pointless. There was nothing I could do. I had no control at all over anything. Kevin might as well be dead. Abandoned in 1819, Kevin was dead. Decades dead, perhaps a century dead.
Maybe I would be called back again, and maybe he would still be there waiting for me and maybe only a few years would have passed for him, and maybe he would be all right … But what had he said once about going West watching history happen?
By the time my wounds had softened and my rag of a blouse had come unstuck from them, I was exhausted. I felt the weakness now that I hadn’t felt before. I got out of the tub and dried myself as best I could, then stumbled into the bedroom and fell across the bed. In spite of the pain, I fell asleep at once.
The house was dark when I awoke, and the bed was empty except for me. I had to remember why all over again. I got up stiffly, painfully, and went to find something that would make me sleep again quickly. I didn’t want to be awake. I barely wanted to be alive. Kevin had gotten a prescription for some pills once when he was having trouble sleeping.
I found what was left of them. I was about to take two of them when I got a look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. My face had swollen and was puffy and old-looking. My hair was in tangled patches, brown with dirt and matted with blood. In my semihysterical state earlier, I had not thought to wash it.
I put the pills down and climbed back into the tub. This time I turned on the shower and somehow managed to wash my hair. Raising my arms hurt. Bending forward hurt. The shampoo that got into my cuts hurt. I started slowly, wincing, grimacing. Finally I got angry and moved vigorously in spite of the pain.
When I looked passably human again, I took some aspirins. They didn’t help much, but I was sane enough now to know that I had something to do before I could afford to sleep again.
I needed a replacement for my lost canvas bag. Something that didn’t look too good for a “nigger” to be carrying. I finally settled on an old denim gym bag that I’d made and used back in high school. It was tough and roomy like the canvas bag, and faded enough to look properly shabby.
I would have put in a long dress this time if I’d had one. All I had, though, were a couple of bright filmy evening dresses that would have drawn attention to me, and, under the circumstances, made me look ridiculous. Best to go on being the woman who dressed like a man.
I rolled up a couple of pairs of jeans and stuffed them into the bag. Then shoes, shirts, a wool sweater, comb, brush, tooth paste and tooth brush—Kevin and I had really missed those—two large cakes of soap, my washcloth, the bottle of aspirins—if Rufus called me while my back was sore, I would need them—my knife. The knife had come back with me because I happened to be wearing it in a makeshift leather sheath at my ankle. I didn’t know whether to be glad or not that I hadn’t had a chance to use it against Weylin. I might have killed him. I had been angry enough, frightened enough, humiliated enough to try. Then if Rufus called me again, I would have to answer for the killing. Or maybe Kevin would have to answer for it. I was suddenly very glad that I had left Weylin alive. Kevin was in for enough trouble. And, too, when I saw Rufus again—if I saw him again—I would need his help. I wouldn’t be likely to get it if I had killed his father—even a father he didn’t like.
I stuffed another pencil, pen, and scratch pad into the bag. I was slowly emptying Kevin’s desk. All my things were still packed. And I found a compact paperback history of slavery in America that might be useful. It listed dates and events that I should be aware of, and it contained a map of Maryland.
The bag was too full to close completely by the time everything was in, but I tied it shut with its own rope drawstring, and tied the drawstring around my arm. I couldn’t have stood anything tied around my waist.
Then, incongruously, I was hungry. I went to the kitchen and found half-a-box of raisins and a full can of mixed nuts. To my surprise, I finished both, then slept again easily.
It was morning when I awoke, and I was still at home. My back hurt whenever I moved. I managed to spray it with an ointment Kevin had used for sunburn. The whip lacerations hurt like burns. The ointment cooled them and seemed to help. I had the feeling I should have used something stronger, though. Heaven knew what kind of infection you could get from a whip kept limber with oil and blood. Tom Weylin had ordered brine thrown onto the back of the field hand he had whipped. I could
remember the man screaming as the solution hit him. But his wounds had healed without infection.
As I thought of the field hand, I felt strangely disoriented. For a moment, I thought Rufus was calling me again. Then I realized that I wasn’t really dizzy—only confused. My memory of a field hand being whipped suddenly seemed to have no place here with me at home.
I came out of the bathroom into the bedroom and looked around. Home. Bed—without canopy—dresser, closet, electric light, television, radio, electric clock, books. Home. It didn’t have anything to do with where I had been. It was real. It was where I belonged.
I put on a loose dress and went out to the front yard. The tiny blue-haired woman who lived next door noticed me and wished me a good morning. She was on her hands and knees digging in her flower garden and obviously enjoying herself. She reminded me of Margaret Weylin who also had flowers. I had heard Margaret’s guests compliment her on her flowers. But, of course, she didn’t take care of them herself …
Today and yesterday didn’t mesh. I felt almost as strange as I had after my first trip back to Rufus—caught between his home and mine.
There was a Volvo parked across the street and there were powerlines overhead. There were palm trees and paved streets. There was the bathroom I had just left. Not a hole-in-the-ground privy toilet that you had to hold your breath to go into, but a bathroom.
I went back into the house and turned the radio on to an all-news station. There, eventually, I learned that it was Friday, June 11, 1976. I’d gone away for nearly two months and come back yesterday—the same day I left home. Nothing was real.
Kevin could be gone for years even if I went after him today and brought him back tonight.
I found a music station and turned the radio up loud to drown out my thinking.
The time passed and I did more unpacking, stopping often, taking too many aspirins. I began to bring some order to my own office. Once I sat down at my typewriter and tried to write about what had happened, made about six attempts before I gave up and threw them all away. Someday when this was over, if it was ever over, maybe I would be able to write about it.
I called my favorite cousin in Pasadena—my father’s sister’s daughter — and had her buy groceries for me. I told her I was sick and Kevin wasn’t around. Something about my tone must have reached her. She didn’t ask any questions.
I was still afraid to leave the house, walking or driving. Driving, I could easily kill myself, and the car could kill other people if Rufus called me from it at the wrong time. Walking, I could get dizzy and fall while crossing the street. Or I could fall on the sidewalk and attract attention. Someone could come to help me—a cop, anyone. Then I could be guilty of taking someone else back with me and stranding them.
My cousin was a good friend. She took one look at me and recommended a doctor she knew. She also advised me to send the police after Kevin. She assumed that my bruises were his work. But when I swore her to silence, I knew she would be silent. She and I had grown up keeping each other’s secrets.
“I never thought you’d be fool enough to let a man beat you,” she said as she left. She was disappointed in me, I think.
“I never thought I would either,” I whispered when she was gone.
I waited inside the house with my denim bag always nearby. The days passed slowly, and sometimes I thought I was waiting for something that just wasn’t going to happen. But I went on waiting.
I read books about slavery, fiction and nonfiction. I read everything I had in the house that was even distantly related to the subject—even Gone With the Wind, or part of it. But its version of happy darkies in tender loving bondage was more than I could stand.
Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin’s World War II books—a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.
The books depressed me, scared me, made me stuff Kevin’s sleeping pills into my bag. Like the Nazis, ante bellum whites had known quite a bit about torture—quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.
3
I had been at home for eight days when the dizziness finally came again. I didn’t know whether to curse it for my own sake or welcome it for Kevin’s—not that it mattered what I did.
I went to Rufus’s time fully clothed, carrying my denim bag, wearing my knife. I arrived on my knees because of the dizziness, but I was immediately alert and wary.
I was in the woods either late in the day or early in the morning. The sun was low in the sky and surrounded as I was by trees, I had no reference point to tell me whether it was rising or setting. I could see a stream not far from me, running between tall trees. Off to my opposite side was a woman, black, young—just a girl, really—with her dress torn down the front. She was holding it together as she watched a black man and a white man fighting.
The white man’s red hair told me who he must be. His face was already too much of a mess to tell me. He was losing his fight—had already lost it. The man he was fighting was his size with the same slender build, but in spite of the black man’s slenderness, he looked wiry and strong. He had probably been conditioned by years of hard work. He didn’t seem much affected when Rufus hit him, but he was killing Rufus.
Then it occurred to me that he might really be doing just that—killing the only person who might be able to help me find Kevin. Killing my ancestor. What had happened here seemed obvious. The girl, her torn dress. If everything was as it seemed, Rufus had earned his beating and more. Maybe he had grown up to be even worse than I had feared. But no matter what he was, I needed him alive—for Kevin’s sake and for my own.
I saw him fall, get up, and be knocked down again. This time, he got up more slowly, but he got up. I had a feeling he’d done a lot of getting up. He wouldn’t be doing much more.
I went closer, and the woman saw me. She called out something I didn’t quite understand, and the man turned his head to look at her. Then he followed her gaze to me. Just then, Rufus hit him on the jaw.
Surprisingly, the black man stumbled backward, almost fell. But Rufus was too tired and hurt to follow up his advantage. The black man hit him one more solid blow, and Rufus collapsed. There was no question of his getting up this time. He was out cold.
As I approached, the black man reached down and caught Rufus by the hair as though to hit him again. I stepped up to the man quickly. “What will they do to you if you kill him?” I said.
The man twisted around to glare at me.
“What will they do to the woman if you kill him?” I asked.
That seemed to reach him. He released Rufus and stood straight to face me. “Who’s going to say I did anything to him?” His voice was low and threatening, and I began to wonder whether I might wind up joining Rufus unconscious on the ground.
I made myself shrug. “You’ll say yourself what you did if they ask you right. So will the woman.”
“What are you going to say?”
“Not a word if I can help it. But … I’m asking you not to kill him.”
“You belong to him?”
“No. It’s just that he might know where my husband is. And I might be able to get him to tell me.”
“Your husband …?” He looked me over from head to foot. “Why you go ’round dressed like a man?”
I said nothing. I was so tired of answering that question that I wished I had risked going out to buy a long dress. I looked down at Rufus’s bloody face and said, “If you leave him here now, it will be a long while before he can send anyone after you. You’ll have time to get away.”
“You think you’d want him alive if you was her?” He gestured toward the woman.
“Is she your wife?”
“Yeah.”
He was like Sarah, holding himself back, not killing in spite of anger I could only imagine
. A lifetime of conditioning could be overcome, but not easily. I looked at the woman. “Do you want your husband to kill this man?”
She shook her head and I saw that her face was swollen on one side. “’While ago, I could have killed him myself,” she said. “Now … Isaac, let’s just get away!”
“Get away and leave her here?” He stared at me, suspicious and hostile. “She sure don’t talk like no nigger I ever heard. Talks like she been mighty close with the white folks—for a long time.”
“She talks like that ’cause she comes from a long way off,” said the girl.
I looked at her in surprise. Tall and slender and dark, she was. A little like me. Maybe a lot like me.
“You’re Dana, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes … how did you know?”
“He told me about you.” She nudged Rufus with her foot. “He used to talk about you all the time. And I saw you once, when I was little.”
I nodded. “You’re Alice, then. I thought so.”
She nodded and rubbed her swollen face. “I’m Alice.” And she looked at the black man with pride. “Alice Jackson now.”
I tried to see her again as the thin, frightened child I remembered—the child I had seen only two months before. It was impossible. But I should have been used to the impossible by now—just as I should have been used to white men preying on black women. I had Weylin as my example, after all. But somehow, I had hoped for better from Rufus. I wondered whether the girl was pregnant with Hagar already.
“My name was Greenwood when you saw me last,” Alice continued. “I married Isaac last year … just before Mama died.”
“She died then?” I caught myself visualizing a woman my age dying, even though I knew that was wrong. But still, the woman must have died fairly young. “I’m sorry,” I said. “She tried to help me.”
“She helped lot of folks,” said Isaac. “She used to treat this little nogood bastard better than his own people treated him.” He kicked Rufus hard in the side.
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