Kindred

THE FIGHT 129

Weylin went out the front door without another word to me and I fol- lowed, trying to remember how important it was to bandage broken ribs—that is, whether it was worth “talking back” to Weylin about. I didn’t want Rufus badly injured, even though he deserved to be. Any injury could be dangerous. But from what I could remember, bandaging the ribs was done mostly to relieve pain. I wasn’t sure whether I remem- bered that because it was true or because I wanted to avoid any kind of confrontation with Weylin. I didn’t have to touch the scabs on my back to be conscious of them.

A tall stocky slave drove a wagon around to us and I got on the back while Weylin took the seat beside the driver. The driver glanced back at me and said softly, “How are you, Dana?”

“Nigel?”

“It’s me,” he said grinning. “Grown some since you seen me last, I

guess.”

He had grown into another Luke—a big handsome man bearing little resemblance to the boy I remembered.

“You keep your mouth shut and watch the road,” said Weylin. Then to me, “You’ve got to tell us where to go.”

It would have been a pleasure to tell him where to go, but I spoke civilly. “It’s a long way from here,” I said. “I had to pass someone else’s house and fields on my way to you.”

“The judge’s place. You could have got help there.”

“I didn’t know.” And wouldn’t have tried if I had known. I wondered, though, whether this was the Judge Holman who would soon be sending men out to chase Isaac. It seemed likely.

“Did you leave Rufus by the side of the road?” Weylin asked. “No, sir. He’s in the woods.”

“You sure you know where in the woods?” “Yes, sir.”

“You’d better.”

He said nothing else.

I found Rufus with no particular difficulty and Nigel lifted him as gen- tly and as easily as Luke once had. On the wagon, he held his side, then he held my hand. Once, he said, “I’ll keep my word.”

I nodded and touched his forehead in case he couldn’t see me nodding. His forehead was hot and dry.

“He’ll keep his word about what?” asked Weylin.

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He was looking back at me, so I frowned and looked perplexed and said, “I think he has a fever as well as broken ribs, sir.”

Weylin made a sound of disgust. “He was sick yesterday, puking all over. But he would get up and go out today. Damn fool!”

And he fell silent again until we reached his house. Then, as Nigel car- ried Rufus inside and up the stairs, Weylin steered me into his forbidden library. He pushed me close to a whale-oil lamp, and there, in the bright yellow light, he stared at me silently, critically until I looked toward the door.

“You’re the same one, all right,” he said finally. “I didn’t want to believe it.”

I said nothing.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “What are you?”

I hesitated not knowing what to answer because I didn’t know how much he knew. The truth might make him decide I was out of my mind, but I didn’t want to be caught in a lie.

“Well!”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I told him. “I’m Dana. You know me.”

“Don’t tell me what I know!”

I stood silent, confused, frightened. Kevin wasn’t here now. There was no one for me to call if I needed help.

“I’m someone who may have just saved your son’s life,” I said softly. “He might have died out there sick and injured and alone.”

“And you think I ought to be grateful?”

Why did he sound angry? And why shouldn’t he be grateful? “I can’t tell you how you ought to feel, Mr. Weylin.”

“That’s right. You can’t.”

There was a moment of silence that he seemed to expect me to fill. Eagerly, I changed the subject. “Mr. Weylin, do you know where Mr. Franklin went?”

Oddly, that seemed to reach him. His expression softened a little. “Him,” he said. “Damn fool.”

“Where did he go?”

“Somewhere North. I don’t know. Rufus has some letters from him.” He gave me another long stare. “I guess you want to stay here.”

He sounded as though he was giving me a choice, which was surpris- ing because he didn’t have to. Maybe gratitude meant something to him

after all.

THE FIGHT 131

“I’d like to stay for a while,” I said. Better to try to reach Kevin from here than go wandering around some Northern city trying to find him. Especially since I had no money, and since I was still so ignorant of this time.

“You got to work for your keep,” said Weylin. “Like you did before.” “Yes, sir.”

“That Franklin comes back, he’ll stop here. He came back once—

hoping to find you, I think.” “When?”

“Last year sometime. You go up and stay with Rufus until the doctor comes. Take care of him.”

“Yes, sir.” I turned to go.

“That seems to be what you’re for, anyway,” he muttered.

I kept going, glad to get away from him. He had known more about me than he wanted to talk about. That was clear from the questions he hadn’t asked. He had seen me vanish twice now. And Kevin and Rufus had probably told him at least something about me. I wondered how much. And I wondered what Kevin had said or done that made him a “damn fool.”

Whatever it was, I’d learn about it from Rufus. Weylin was too dan- gerous to question.

6

I sponged Rufus off as best I could and bandaged his ribs with pieces of cloth that Nigel brought me. The ribs were very tender on the left side. Rufus said the bandage made breathing a little less painful, though, and I was glad of that. But he was still sick. His fever was still with him. And the doctor didn’t come. Rufus had fits of coughing now and then, and that seemed to be agonizing to him because of his ribs. Sarah came in to see him—and to hug me—and she was more alarmed at the marks of his beating than at his ribs or his fever. His face was black and blue and deformed-looking with its lumpy swellings.

“He will fight,” she said angrily. Rufus opened his puffy slits of eyes

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and looked at her, but she went on anyway. “I’ve seen him pick a fight just out of meanness,” she said. “He’s out to get himself killed!”

She could have been his mother, caught between anger and concern and not knowing which to express. She took away the basin Nigel had brought me and returned it full of clean cool water.

“Where’s his mother?” I asked her softly as she was leaving. She drew back from me a little. “Gone.”

“Dead?”

“Not yet.” She glanced at Rufus to see whether he was listening. His face was turned away from us. “Gone to Baltimore,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you ’bout it tomorrow.”

I let her go without questioning her further. It was enough to know that I would not be suddenly attacked. For once, there would be no Margaret to protect Rufus from me.

He was thrashing about weakly when I went back to him. He cursed the pain, cursed me, then remembered himself enough to say he didn’t mean it. He was burning up.

“Rufe?”

He moved his head from side to side and did not seem to hear me. I dug into my denim bag and found the plastic bottle of aspirin—a big bot- tle nearly full. There was enough to share.

“Rufe!”

He squinted at me.

“Listen, I have medicine from my own time.” I poured him a glass of water from the pitcher beside his bed, and shook out two aspirin tablets. “These could lower your fever,” I said. “They might ease your pain too. Will you take them?”

“What are they?”

“They’re called aspirin. In my time, people use them against headache, fever, other kinds of pain.”

He looked at the two tablets in my hand, then at me. “Give them to me.”

He had trouble swallowing them and had to chew them up a little. “My Lord,” he muttered. “Anything tastes that bad must be good for

you.”

I laughed and wet a cloth in the basin to bathe his face. Nigel came in with a blanket and told me the doctor was held up at a difficult childbirth. I was to stay the night with Rufus.

THE FIGHT 133

I didn’t mind. Rufus was in no condition to take an interest in me. I would have thought it would be more natural, though, for Nigel to stay. I asked him about it.

“Marse Tom knows about you,” said Nigel softly. “Marse Rufe and Mister Kevin both told him. He figures you know enough to do some doctoring. More than doctoring, maybe. He saw you go home.”

“I know.”

“I saw it too.”

I looked up at him—he was a head taller than me now—and saw noth- ing but curiosity in his eyes. If my vanishing had frightened him, the fear was long dead. I was glad of that. I wanted his friendship.

“Marse Tom says you s’pose to take care of him and you better do a good job. Aunt Sarah says you call her if you need help.”

“Thanks. Thank her for me.”

He nodded, smiled a little. “Good thing for me you showed up. I want to be with Carrie now. It’s so close to her time.”

I grinned. “Your baby, Nigel? I thought it might be.” “Better be mine. She’s my wife.”

“Congratulations.”

“Marse Rufe paid a free preacher from town to come and say the same words they say for white folks and free niggers. Didn’t have to jump no broomstick.”

I nodded, remembering what I’d read about the slaves’ marriage cere- monies. They jumped broomsticks, sometimes backward, sometimes for- ward, depending on local custom; or they stood before their master and were pronounced husband and wife; or they followed any number of other practices even to hiring a minister and having things done as Nigel had. None of it made any difference legally, though. No slave marriage was legally binding. Even Alice’s marriage to Isaac was merely an infor- mal agreement since Isaac was a slave, or had been a slave. I hoped now that he was a free man well on his way to Pennsylvania.

“Dana?”

I looked up at Nigel. He had whispered my name so softly I had hardly heard him.

“Dana, was it white men?”

Startled, I put a finger to my lips, cautioning, and waved him away. “Tomorrow,” I promised.

But he wasn’t as co-operative as I had been with Sarah. “Was it

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Isaac?”

KINDRED

I nodded, hoping he would be satisfied and let the subject drop. “Did he get away?”

Another nod.

He left me, looking relieved.

I stayed up with Rufus until he managed to fall asleep. The aspirins did seem to help. Then I wrapped myself in the blanket, pulled the room’s two chairs together in front of the fireplace, and settled in as comfortably as I could. It wasn’t bad.

The doctor arrived late the next morning to find Rufus’s fever gone. The rest of his body was still bruised and sore, and his ribs still kept him breathing shallowly and struggling not to cough, but even with that, he was much less miserable. I had gotten him a breakfast tray from Sarah, and he had invited me to share the large meal she had prepared. I ate hot biscuits with butter and peach preserve, drank some of his coffee, and had a little cold ham. It was good and filling. He had the eggs, the rest of the ham, the corn cakes. There was too much of everything, and he didn’t feel like eating very much. Instead, he sat back and watched me with amusement.

“Daddy’d do some cussin’ if he came in here and found us eating together,” he said.

I put down my biscuit and reined in whatever part of my mind I’d left in 1976. He was right.

“What are you doing then? Trying to make trouble?” “No. He won’t bother us. Eat.”

“The last time someone told me he wouldn’t bother me, he walked in and beat the skin off my back.”

“Yeah. I know about that. But I’m not Nigel. If I tell you to do some- thing, and he doesn’t like it, he’ll come to me about it. He won’t whip you for following my orders. He’s a fair man.”

I looked at him, startled.

“I said fair,” he repeated. “Not likable.”

I kept quiet. His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordi- nary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper. But I had seen no particular fairness in him. He did as he pleased. If you told him he wasn’t being fair, he would whip you for talking back. At least the Tom Weylin I had known would have. Maybe

he had mellowed.

THE FIGHT 135

“Stay,” said Rufus. “No matter what you think of him, I won’t let him hurt you. And it’s good to eat with someone I can talk to for a change.” That was nice. I began to eat again, wondering why he was in such a good mood this morning. He had come a long way from his anger the

night before—from threatening not to tell me where Kevin was.

“You know,” said Rufus thoughtfully, “you still look mighty young. You pulled me out of that river thirteen or fourteen years ago, but you look like you would have been just a kid back then.”

Uh-oh. “Kevin didn’t explain that part, I guess.” “Explain what?”

I shook my head. “Just … let me tell you how it’s been for me. I can’t tell you why things are happening as they are, but I can tell you the order of their happening.” I hesitated, gathering my thoughts. “When I came to you at the river, it was June ninth, nineteen seventy-six for me. When I got home, it was still the same day. Kevin told me I had only been gone a few seconds.”

“Seconds …?”

“Wait. Let me tell it all to you at once. Then you can have all the time you need to digest it and ask questions. Later, on that same day, I came to you again. You were three or four years older and busy trying to set the house afire. When I went home, Kevin told me only a few minutes had passed. The next morning, June tenth, I came to you because you’d fallen out of a tree…. Kevin and I came to you. I was here nearly two months. But when I went home, I found that I had lost only a few min- utes or hours of June tenth.”

“You mean after two months, you …”

“I arrived home on the same day I had left. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know. After eight days at home, I came back here.” I faced him silently for a moment. “And, Rufe, now that I’m here, now that you’re safe, I want to find my husband.”

He absorbed this slowly, frowning as though he was translating it from another language. Then he waved vaguely toward his desk—a new larger desk than he had had on my last visit. The old one had been nothing more than a little table. This one had a roll-top and plenty of drawer space both above and below the work surface.

“His letters are in the middle drawer there. You can have them if you want them. They have his addresses … But Dana, you’re saying while

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I’ve been growing up, somehow, time has been almost standing still for you.”

I was at the desk hunting through the cluttered drawer for the letters. “It hasn’t stood still,” I said. “I’m sure my last two visits here have aged me quite a bit, no matter what my calendar at home says.” I found the let- ters. Three of them—short notes on large pieces of paper that had been folded, sealed with sealing wax, and mailed without an envelope. “Here’s my Philadelphia address,” Kevin said in one. “If I can get a decent job, I’ll be here for a while.” That was all, except for the address. Kevin wrote books, but he’d never cared much for writing letters. At home he tried to catch me in a good mood and get me to take care of his correspondence for him.

“I’ll be an old man,” said Rufus, “and you’ll still come to me looking just like you do now.”

I shook my head. “Rufe, if you don’t start being more careful, you’ll never live to be an old man. Now that you’re grown up, I might not be able to help you much. The kind of trouble you get into as a man might be as overwhelming to me as it is to you.”

“Yes. But this time thing …” I shrugged.

“Damnit, there must be something mighty crazy about both of us, Dana. I never heard of anything like this happening to anybody else.”

“Neither have I.” I looked at the other two letters. One from New York, and one from Boston. In the Boston one, he was talking about going to Maine. I wondered what was driving him farther and farther north. He had been interested in the West, but Maine …?

“I’ll write to him,” said Rufus. “I’ll tell him you’re here. He’ll come running back.”

“I’ll write him, Rufe.”

“I’ll have to mail the letter.” “All right.”

“I just hope he hasn’t already taken off for Maine.”

Weylin opened the door before I could answer. He brought in another man who turned out to be the doctor, and my leisure time was over. I put Kevin’s letters back into Rufus’s desk—that seemed the best place to keep them—took away the breakfast tray, brought the doctor the empty basin he asked for, stood by while the doctor asked Weylin whether I had any sense or not and whether I could be trusted to answer simple ques-

tions accurately.

THE FIGHT 137

Weylin said yes twice without looking at me, and the doctor asked his questions. Was I sure Rufus had had a fever? How did I know? Had he been delirious? Did I know what delirious meant? Smart nigger, wasn’t I?

I hated the man. He was short and slight, black-haired and black-eyed, pompous, condescending, and almost as ignorant medically as I was. He guessed he wouldn’t bleed Rufus since the fever seemed to be gone— bleed him! He guessed a couple of ribs were broken, yes. He rebandaged them sloppily. He guessed I could go now; he had no more use for me.

I escaped to the cookhouse.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Sarah when she saw me.

I shook my head. “Nothing important. Just a stupid little man who may be one step up from spells and good luck charms.”

“What?”

“Don’t pay any attention to me, Sarah. Do you have anything for me to do out here? I’d like to stay out of the house for a while.”

“Always something to do out here. You have anything to eat?” I nodded.

She lifted her head and gave me one of her down-the-nose looks. “Well, I put enough on his tray. Here. Knead this dough.”

She gave me a bowl of bread dough that had risen and was ready to be kneaded down. “He all right?” she asked.

“He’s healing.”

“Was Isaac all right?”

I glanced at her. “Yes.”

“Nigel said he didn’t think Marse Rufe told what happened.” “He didn’t. I managed to talk him out of it.”

She laid a hand on my shoulder for a moment. “I hope you stay around for a while, girl. Even his daddy can’t talk him out of much these days.” “Well, I’m glad I was able to. But look, you promised to tell me about

his mother.”

“Not much to tell. She had two more babies—twins. Sickly little things. They lingered awhile, then died one after the other. She almost died too. She went kind of crazy. The birth had left her pretty bad off any- how—sick, hurt inside. She fought with Marse Tom, got so she’d scream at him every time she saw him—cussin’ and goin’ on. She was hurtin’ most of the time, couldn’t get out of bed. Finally, her sister came and got

138

her, took her to Baltimore.” “And she’s still there?”

KINDRED

“Still there, still sick. Still crazy, for all I know. I just hope she stays there. That overseer, Jake Edwards, he’s a cousin of hers, and he’s all the mean low white trash we need around here.”

Jake Edwards was the overseer then. Weylin had begun hiring over- seers. I wondered why. But before I could ask, two house servants came in and Sarah deliberately turned her back to me, ending the conversation. I began to understand what had happened later, though, when I asked Nigel where Luke was.

“Sold,” said Nigel quietly. And he wouldn’t say anything more. Rufus told me the rest.

“You shouldn’t have asked Nigel about that,” he told me when I men- tioned the incident.

“I wouldn’t have, if I’d known.” Rufus was still in bed. The doctor had given him a purgative and left. Rufus had poured the purgative into his chamber pot and ordered me to tell his father he’d taken it. He had had his father send me back to him so that I could write my letter to Kevin. “Luke did his work,” I said. “How could your father sell him?”

“He worked all right. And the hands would work hard for him— mostly without the cowhide. But sometimes he didn’t show much sense.” Rufus stopped, began a deep breath, caught himself and grimaced in pain. “You’re like Luke in some ways,” he continued. “So you’d better show some sense yourself, Dana. You’re on your own this time.”

“But what did he do wrong? What am I doing wrong?”

“Luke … he would just go ahead and do what he wanted to no matter what Daddy said. Daddy always said he thought he was white. One day maybe two years after you left, Daddy got tired of it. New Orleans trader came through and Daddy said it would be better to sell Luke than to whip him until he ran away.”

I closed my eyes remembering the big man, hearing again his advice to Nigel on how to defy the whites. It had caught up with him. “Do you think the trader took him all the way to New Orleans?” I asked.

“Yeah. He was getting a load together to ship them down there.”

I shook my head. “Poor Luke. Are there cane fields in Louisiana now?”

“Cane, cotton, rice, they grow plenty down there.”

“My father’s parents worked in the cane fields there before they went

THE FIGHT 139

to California. Luke could be a relative of mine.” “Just make sure you don’t wind up like him.” “I haven’t done anything.”

“Don’t go teaching nobody else to read.” “Oh.”

“Yes, oh. I might not be able to stop Daddy if he decided to sell you.” “Sell me! He doesn’t own me. Not even by the law here. He doesn’t

have any papers saying he owns me.” “Dana, don’t talk stupid!”

“But …”

“In town, once, I heard a man brag how he and his friends had caught a free black, tore up his papers, and sold him to a trader.”

I said nothing. He was right, of course. I had no rights—not even any papers to be torn up.

“Just be careful,” he said quietly.

I nodded. I thought I could escape from Maryland if I had to. I didn’t think it would be easy, but I thought I could do it. On the other hand, I didn’t see how even someone much wiser than I was in the ways of the time could escape from Louisiana, surrounded as they would be by water and slave states. I would have to be careful, all right, and be ready to run if I seemed to be in any danger of being sold.

“I’m surprised Nigel is still here,” I said. Then I realized that might not be a very bright thing to say even to Rufus. I would have to learn to keep more of my thoughts to myself.

“Oh, Nigel ran away,” said Rufus. “Patrollers brought him back, though, hungry and sick. They had whipped him, and Daddy whipped him some more. Then Aunt Sarah doctored him and I talked Daddy into letting me keep him. I think my job was harder. I don’t think Daddy relaxed until Nigel married Carrie. Man marries, has children, he’s more likely to stay where he is.”

“You sound like a slaveholder already.” He shrugged.

“Would you have sold Luke?” “No! I liked him.”

“Would you sell anyone?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“I hope not,” I said watching him. “You don’t have to do that kind of thing. Not all slaveholders do it.”

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I took my denim bag from where I had hidden it under his bed, and sat down at his desk to write the letter, using one of his large sheets of paper with my pen. I didn’t want to bother dipping the quill and steel pen on his desk into ink.

“Dear Kevin, I’m back. And I want to go North too …” “Let me see your pen when you’re finished,” said Rufus. “All right.”

I went on writing, feeling myself strangely near tears. It was as though

I was really talking to Kevin. I began to believe I would see him again. “Let me see the other things you brought with you,” said Rufus.

I swung the bag onto his bed. “You can look,” I said, and continued writing. Not until I was finished with the letter did I look up to see what he was doing.

He was reading my book.

“Here’s the pen,” I said casually, and I waited to grab the book the moment he put it down. But instead of putting it down, he ignored the pen and looked up at me.

“This is the biggest lot of abolitionist trash I ever saw.”

“No it isn’t,” I said. “That book wasn’t even written until a century after slavery was abolished.”

“Then why the hell are they still complaining about it?”

I pulled the book down so that I could see the page he had been read- ing. A photograph of Sojourner Truth stared back at me solemn-eyed. Beneath the picture was part of the text of one of her speeches.

“You’re reading history, Rufe. Turn a few pages and you’ll find a white man named J. D. B. DeBow claiming that slavery is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites someone to look down on. That’s history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” And there was other history that he must not read. Too much of it hadn’t happened yet. Sojourner Truth, for instance, was still a slave. If someone bought her from her New York owners and brought her South before the Northern laws could free her, she might spend the rest of her life picking cotton. And there were two important slave children right here in Maryland. The older one, living here in Talbot County, would be called Frederick Douglass after a name change or two. The second, growing up a few miles south in Dorchester County was Harriet Ross, eventually to be Harriet Tubman. Someday, she was going to cost Eastern Shore planta-

THE FIGHT 141

tion owners a huge amount of money by guiding three hundred of their runaway slaves to freedom. And farther down in Southampton, Virginia, a man named Nat Turner was biding his time. There were more. I had said I couldn’t do anything to change history. Yet, if history could be changed, this book in the hands of a white man—even a sympathetic white man—might be the thing to change it.

“History like this could send you down to join Luke,” said Rufus. “Didn’t I tell you to be careful!”

“I wouldn’t have let anyone else see it.” I took it from his hand, spoke more softly. “Or are you telling me I shouldn’t trust you either?”

He looked startled. “Hell, Dana, we have to trust each other. You said that yourself. But what if my daddy went through that bag of yours. He could if he wanted to. You couldn’t stop him.”

I said nothing.

“You’ve never had a whipping like he’d give you if he found that book. Some of that reading … He’d take you to be another Denmark Vesey. You know who Vesey was?”

“Yes.” A freedman who had plotted to free others violently. “You know what they did to him?”

“Yes.”

“Then put that book in the fire.”

I held the book for a moment, then opened it to the map of Maryland. I tore the map out.

“Let me see,” said Rufus.

I handed him the map. He looked at it and turned it over. Since there was nothing on the back but a map of Virginia, he handed it back to me. “That will be easier to hide,” he said. “But you know if a white man sees it, he’ll figure you mean to use it to escape.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

He shook his head in disgust.

I tore the book into several pieces and threw it onto the hot coals in his fireplace. The fire flared up and swallowed the dry paper, and I found my thoughts shifting to Nazi book burnings. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of “wrong” ideas.

“Seal your letter,” said Rufus. “There’s wax and a candle on the desk there. I’ll send the letter as soon as I can get to town.”

I obeyed inexpertly, dripping hot wax on my fingers. “Dana …?”

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I glanced at him, caught him watching me with unexpected intensity. “Yes?”

His eyes seemed to slide away from mine. “That map is still bothering me. Listen, if you want me to get that letter to town soon, you put the map in the fire too.”

I turned to face him, dismayed. More blackmail. I had thought that was over between us. I had hoped it was over; I needed so much to trust him. I didn’t dare stay with him if I couldn’t trust him.

“I wish you hadn’t said that, Rufe,” I told him quietly. I went over to him, fighting down anger and disappointment and began putting the things that he had scattered back into my bag.

“Wait a minute.” He caught my hand. “You get so damned cold when you’re mad. Wait!”

“For what?”

“Tell me what you’re mad about.”

What, indeed? Could I make him see why I thought his blackmail was worse than my own? It was. He threatened to keep me from my husband if I did not submit to his whim and destroy a paper that might help me get free. I acted out of desperation. He acted out of whimsy or anger. Or so it seemed.

“Rufe, there are things we just can’t bargain on. This is one of them.” “You’re going to tell me what we can’t bargain on?” He sounded more

surprised than indignant.

“You’re damn right I am.” I spoke very softly. “I won’t bargain away my husband or my freedom!”

“You don’t have either to bargain.” “Neither do you.”

He stared at me with at least as much confusion as anger, and that was encouraging. He could have let his temper flare, could have driven me from the plantation very quickly. “Look,” he said through his teeth, “I’m trying to help you!”

“Are you?”

“What do you think I’m doing? Listen, I know Kevin tried to help you. He made things easier for you by keeping you with him. But he couldn’t really protect you. He didn’t know how. He couldn’t even protect him- self. Daddy almost had to shoot him when you disappeared. He was fighting and cursing … at first Daddy didn’t even know why. I’m the one who helped Kevin get back on the place.”

“You?”

THE FIGHT 143

“I talked Daddy into seeing him again—and it wasn’t easy. I may not be able to talk him into anything for you if he sees that map.”

“I see.”

He waited, watching me. I wanted to ask him what he would do with my letter if I didn’t burn the map. I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to hear an answer that might send me out to face another patrol or earn another whipping. I wanted to do things the easy way if I could. I wanted to stay here and let a letter go to Boston and bring Kevin back to me.

So I told myself the map was more a symbol than a necessity anyway. If I had to go, I knew how to follow the North Star at night. I had made a point of learning. And by day, I knew how to keep the rising sun to my right and the setting sun to my left.

I took the map from Rufus’s desk and dropped it into the fireplace. It darkened, then burst into flame.

“I can manage without it, you know,” I said quietly.

“No need for you to,” said Rufus. “You’ll be all right here. You’re home.”

7

Isaac and Alice had four days of freedom together. On the fifth day, they were caught. On the seventh day, I found out about it. That was the day Rufus and Nigel took the wagon into town to mail my letter and take care of some business of their own. I had heard nothing of the runaways and Rufus seemed to have forgotten about them. He was feeling better, looking better. That seemed to be enough for him. He came to me just before he left and said, “Let me have some of your aspirins. I might need them the way Nigel drives.”

Nigel heard and called out, “Marse Rufe, you can drive. I’ll just sit back and relax while you show me how to go smooth over a bumpy road.”

Rufus threw a clod of dirt at him, and he caught it, laughing, and threw it back just missing Rufus. “See there?” Rufus told me. “Here I am all crippled up and he’s taking advantage.”

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I laughed and got the aspirins. Rufus never took anything from my bag without asking—though he could have easily done so.

“You sure you feel well enough to go to town?” I asked as I gave them to him.

“No,” he said, “but I’m going.” I didn’t find out until later that a visi- tor had brought him word of Alice and Isaac’s capture. He was going to get Alice.

And I went to the laundry yard to help a young slave named Tess to beat and boil the dirt out of a lot of heavy smelly clothes. She had been sick, and I had promised her I would help. My work was still pretty much whatever I wanted it to be. I felt a little guilty about that. No other slave—house or field—had that much freedom. I worked where I pleased, or where I saw that others needed help. Sarah sent me to do one job or another sometimes, but I didn’t mind that. In Margaret’s absence, Sarah ran the house—and the house servants. She spread the work fairly and managed the house as efficiently as Margaret had, but without much of the tension and strife Margaret generated. She was resented, of course, by slaves who made every effort to avoid jobs they didn’t like. But she was also obeyed.

“Lazy niggers!” she would mutter when she had to get after someone. I stared at her in surprise when I first heard her say it. “Why should

they work hard?” I asked. “What’s it going to get them?”

“It’ll get them the cowhide if they don’t,” she snapped. “I ain’t goin’

to take the blame for what they don’t do. Are you?” “Well, no, but …”

“I work. You work. Don’t need somebody behind us all the time to make us work.”

“When the time comes for me to stop working and get out of here, I’ll do it.”

She jumped, looked around quickly. “You got no sense sometimes! Just talk all over your mouth!”

“We’re alone.”

“Might not be alone as we look. People listen around here. And they talk too.”

I said nothing.

“You do what you want to do—or think you want to do. But you keep it to yourself.”

I nodded. “I hear.”

THE FIGHT 145

She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You need to look at some of the niggers they catch and bring back,” she said. “You need to see them— starving, ’bout naked, whipped, dragged, bit by dogs … You need to see them.”

“I’d rather see the others.” “What others?”

“The ones who make it. The ones living in freedom now.” “If any do.”

“They do.”

“Some say they do. It’s like dying, though, and going to heaven. Nobody ever comes back to tell you about it.”

“Come back and be enslaved again?”

“Yeah. But still … This is dangerous talk! No point to it anyway.” “Sarah, I’ve seen books written by slaves who’ve run away and lived

in the North.”

“Books!” She tried to sound contemptuous but sounded uncertain instead. She couldn’t read. Books could be awesome mysteries to her, or they could be dangerous time-wasting nonsense. It depended on her mood. Now her mood seemed to flicker between curiosity and fear. Fear won. “Foolishness!” she said. “Niggers writing books!”

“But it’s true. I’ve seen …”

“Don’t want to hear no more ’bout it!” She had raised her voice sharply. That was unusual, and it seemed to surprise her as much as it surprised me. “Don’t want to hear no more,” she repeated softly. “Things ain’t bad here. I can get along.”

She had done the safe thing—had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman who might have been called “mammy” in some other household. She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties. The house-nigger, the handkerchief-head, the female Uncle Tom—the fright- ened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose, and who knew as little about the freedom of the North as she knew about the hereafter.

I looked down on her myself for a while. Moral superiority. Here was someone even less courageous than I was. That comforted me somehow. Or it did until Rufus and Nigel drove into town and came back with what was left of Alice.

It was late when they got home—almost dark. Rufus ran into the house

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shouting for me before I realized he was back. “Dana! Dana, get down here!”

I came out of his room—my new refuge when he wasn’t in it—and hurried down the stairs.

“Come on, come on!” he urged.

I said nothing, followed him out the front door not knowing what to expect. He led me to the wagon where Alice lay bloody, filthy, and barely alive.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “Help her!” demanded Rufus.

I looked at him, remembering why Alice needed help. I didn’t say any- thing, and I don’t know what expression I was wearing, but he took a step back from me.

“Just help her!” he said. “Blame me if you want to, but help her!”

I turned to her, straightened her body gently, feeling for broken bones. Miraculously, there didn’t seem to be any. Alice moaned and cried out weakly. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to see me.

“Where will you put her?” I asked Rufus. “In the attic?”

He lifted her gently, carefully, and carried her up to his bedroom. Nigel and I followed him up, saw him place the girl on his bed. Then

he looked up at me questioningly.

“Tell Sarah to boil some water,” I told Nigel. “And tell her to send some clean cloth for bandages. Clean cloth.” How clean would it be? Not sterile, of course, but I had just spent the day cooking clothes in lye soap and water. That surely got them clean.

“Rufe, get me something to cut these rags off her.”

Rufus hurried out, came back with a pair of his mother’s scissors. Most of Alice’s wounds were new, and the cloth came away from them

easily. Those that had dried and stuck to the cloth, I left alone. Warm water would soften them.

“Rufe, have you got any kind of antiseptic?” “Anti-what?”

I looked at him. “You’ve never heard of it?” “No. What is it?”

“Never mind. I could use a salt solution, I guess.” “Brine? You want to use that on her back?”

“I want to use it wherever she’s hurt.”

“Don’t you have anything in your bag better than that?”

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“Just soap, which I intend to use. Find it for me, will you? Then …

hell, I shouldn’t be doing this. Why didn’t you take her to the doctor?” He shook his head. “The judge wanted her sold South—for spite, I

guess. I had to pay near twice what she’s worth to get her. That’s all the money I had, and Daddy won’t pay for a doctor to fix niggers. Doc knows that.”

“You mean your father just lets people die when maybe they could be helped?”

“Die or get well. Aunt Mary—you know, the one who watches the kids?”

“Yes.” Aunt Mary didn’t watch the kids. Old and crippled, she sat in the shade with a switch and threatened them with gory murder if they happened to misbehave right in front of her. Otherwise, she ignored them and spent her time sewing and mumbling to herself, contentedly senile. The children cared for each other.

“Aunt Mary does some doctoring,” said Rufus. “She knows herbs. But

I thought you’d know more.”

I turned to look at him in disbelief. Sometimes the poor woman barely knew her name. Finally I shrugged. “Get me some brine.”

“But … that’s what Daddy uses on field hands,” he said. “It hurts them worse than the beating sometimes.”

“It won’t hurt her as badly as an infection would later.”

He frowned, came to stand protectively close to the girl. “Who fixed up your back?”

“I did. No one else was around.” “What did you do?”

“I washed it with plenty of soap and water, and I put medicine on it. Here, brine will have to be my medicine. It should be just as good.” Please, heaven, let it be as good. I only half knew what I was doing. Maybe old Mary and her herbs weren’t such a bad idea after all—if I could be sure of catching her in one of her saner moments. But no. Igno- rant as I knew I was, I trusted myself more than I trusted her. Even if I couldn’t do any more good than she could, I was at least less likely to do harm.

“Let me see your back,” said Rufus.

I hesitated, swallowed a few indignant words. He spoke out of love for the girl—a destructive love, but a love, nevertheless. He needed to know that it was necessary to hurt her more and that I had some idea what I was

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doing. I turned my back to him and raised my shirt a little. My cuts were healed or nearly healed.

He didn’t speak or touch me. After a moment, I put my shirt down. “You didn’t get the big thick scars some of the hands get,” he

observed.

“Keloids. No, thank God, I’m not subject to them. What I’ve got is bad enough.”

“Not as bad as she’ll have.” “Get the salt, Rufe.”

He nodded and went away.

8

I did my best for Alice, hurt her as little as possible, got her clean and bandaged the worst of her injuries—the dog bites.

“Looks like they just let the dogs chew on her,” said Rufus angrily. He had to hold her for me while I cleaned the bites, gave them special atten- tion. She struggled and wept and called for Isaac, until I was almost sick at having to cause her more pain. I swallowed and clenched my teeth against threatening nausea. When I spoke to Rufus, it was more to calm myself than to get information.

“What did they do with Isaac, Rufe? Give him back to the judge?” “Sold him to a trader—fellow taking slaves overland to Mississippi.” “Oh God.”

“He’d be dead if I’d spoken up.”

I shook my head, located another bite. I wanted Kevin. I wanted des- perately to go home and be out of this. “Did you mail my letter, Rufe?”

“Yeah.”

Good. Now if only Kevin would come quickly.

I finished with Alice and gave her, not aspirins, but sleeping pills. She needed rest after days of running, after the dogs and the whipping. After Isaac.

Rufus left her in his bed. He simply climbed in beside her. “Rufe, for Godsake!”

He looked at me, then at her. “Don’t talk foolishness. I’m not going to

put her on the floor.” “But …”

THE FIGHT 149

“And I’m sure not going to bother her while she’s hurt like this.” “Good,” I said relieved, believing him. “Don’t even touch her if you

can help it.” “All right.”

I cleaned up the mess I had made and left them. Finally, I made my way to my pallet in the attic, and lay down wearily.

But tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I thought of Alice, and then of Rufus, and I realized that Rufus had done exactly what I had said he would do: Gotten possession of the woman without having to bother with her husband. Now, somehow, Alice would have to accept not only the loss of her husband, but her own enslavement. Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense. No mat- ter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense.

I lay turning, twisting, holding my eyes closed and trying first to think, then not to think. I was tempted to squander two more of my sleeping pills to buy myself relief.

Then Sarah came in. I could see her vaguely outlined in the moonlight that came through the window. I whispered her name, trying not to awaken anyone.

She stepped over the two children who slept nearest to me and made her way over to my corner. “How’s Alice?” she asked softly.

“I don’t know. She’ll probably be all right. Her body will anyway.” Sarah sat down on the end of my pallet. “I’d have come in to see her,”

she said, “but then I’d have to see Marse Rufe too. Don’t want to see him for a while.”

“Yeah.”

“They cut off the boy’s ears.” I jumped. “Isaac?”

“Yeah. Cut them both off. He fought. Strong boy, even if he didn’t show much sense. The judge’s son hit him, and he struck back. And he said some things he shouldn’t have said.”

“Rufus said they sold him to a Mississippi trader.”

“Did. After they got through with him. Nigel told me ’bout it—how they cut him, beat him. He’ll have to do some healing ’fore he can go to Mississippi or anywhere else.”

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