Kindred

THE ST ORM 215

bing his throat. There was a long silence, then another command. “Say something! Talk to me!”

“Or what?” I asked. “Are you going to have me beaten for not talking to you?”

He muttered something I didn’t quite hear. “What?”

Silence. Then a rush of bitterness from me.

“I saved your life, Rufus! Over and over again.” I stopped for a moment, caught my breath. “And I tried to save your father’s life. You know I did. You know I didn’t kill him or let him die.”

He moved uncomfortably, wincing a little. “Give me some of your medicine,” he said.

Somehow, I didn’t throw the bottle at him. I got up and handed it to him.

“Open it,” he said. “I don’t want to be bothered with that damn top.”

I opened it, shook one tablet into his hand, and snapped the top back on.

He looked at the tablet. “Only one?”

“These are stronger than the others,” I said. And also, I wanted to hang on to them for as long as I could. Who knew how many more times he would make me need them. The ones I had taken were beginning to help me already.

“You took three,” he said petulantly.

“I needed three. No one has been beating you.”

He looked away from me, put the one into his mouth. He still had to chew tablets before he could swallow them. “This tastes worse than the others,” he complained.

I ignored him, put the bottle away in the desk. “Dana?”

“What?”

“I know you tried to help Daddy. I know.”

“Then why did you send me to the field? Why did I have to go through all that, Rufe?”

He shrugged, winced, rubbed his shoulders. He still had plenty of sore muscles, apparently. “I guess I just had to make somebody pay. And it seemed that … well, people don’t die when you’re taking care of them.”

“I’m not a miracle worker.”

“No. Daddy thought you were, though. He didn’t like you, but he

216

KINDRED

thought you could heal better than a doctor.”

“Well I can’t. Sometimes I’m less likely to kill than the doctor, that’s all.”

“Kill?”

“I don’t bleed or purge away people’s strength when they need it most. And I know enough to try to keep a wound clean.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s enough to save a few lives around here, but no, it’s not all. I

know a little about some diseases. Only a little.”

“What do you know about … about a woman who’s been hurt in child- bearing?”

“Been hurt how?” I wondered whether he meant Alice.

“I don’t know. The doctor said she wasn’t to have any more and she did. The babies died and she almost died. She hasn’t been well since.”

Now I knew who he was talking about. “Your mother?” “Yes. She’s coming home. I want you to take care of her.”

“My God! Rufe, I don’t know anything about problems like that! Believe me, nothing at all.” What if the woman died in my care. He’d have me beaten to death!

“She wants to come home, now that … She wants to come home.”

“I can’t care for her. I don’t know how.” I hesitated. “Your mother doesn’t like me anyway, Rufe. You know that as well as I do.” She hated me. She’d make my life hell out of pure spite.

“There’s no one else I’d trust,” he said. “Carrie’s got her own family now. I’d have to take her out of her cabin away from Nigel and the boys …”

“Why?”

“Mama has to have someone with her through the night. What if she needed something?”

“You mean I’d have to sleep in her room?”

“Yes. She’d never have a servant sleep in her room before. Now, though, she’s gotten used to it.”

“She won’t get used to me. I’m telling you, she won’t have me.” Please heaven!

“I think she will. She’s older now, not so full of fire. You give her her laudanum when she needs it and she won’t give you much trouble.”

“Laudanum?”

“Her medicine. She doesn’t need it so much for pain anymore, Aunt

THE ST ORM 217

May says. But she still needs it.”

Since laudanum was an opium extract, I didn’t doubt that she still needed it. I was going to have a drug addict on my hands. A drug addict who hated me. “Rufe, couldn’t Alice …”

“No!” A very sharp no. It occurred to me that Margaret Weylin had more reason to hate Alice than she did to hate me.

“Alice will be having another baby in a few months anyway,” said

Rufus.

“She will? Then maybe …” I shut my mouth, but the thought went on. Maybe this one would be Hagar. Maybe for once, I had something to gain by staying here. If only …

“Maybe what?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Rufe, I’m asking you not to put your mother in my care, for her sake and for mine.”

He rubbed his forehead. “I’ll think about it, Dana, and talk to her. Maybe she remembers someone she’d like. Let me sleep now. I’m still so damn weak.”

I started out of the room. “Dana.”

“Yes?” What now?

“Go read a book or something. Don’t do any more work today.” “Read a book?”

“Do whatever you want to.”

In other words, he was sorry. He was always sorry. He would have been amazed, uncomprehending if I refused to forgive him. I remem- bered suddenly the way he used to talk to his mother. If he couldn’t get what he wanted from her gently, he stopped being gentle. Why not? She always forgave him.

7

Margaret Weylin wanted me. She was thin and pale and weak and older than her years. Her beauty had gone to a kind of fragile gaunt- ness. As I was reintroduced to her, she sipped at her little bottle of dark brownish-red liquid and smiled beneficently.

218

KINDRED

Nigel carried her up to her room. She could walk a little, but she could- n’t manage the stairs. Sometime later, she wanted to see Nigel’s children. She was sugary sweet with them. I couldn’t remember her being that way with anyone but Rufus before. Slave children hadn’t interested her unless her husband had fathered them. Then her interest had been negative. But she gave Nigel’s sons candy and they loved her.

She asked to see another slave—one I didn’t know—and then wept a little when she heard that one had been sold. She was full of sweetness and charity. It scared me a little. I couldn’t quite believe she’d changed that much.

“Dana, can you still read the way you used to?” she asked me. “Yes, ma’am.”

“I wanted you because I remembered how well you read.”

I kept my expression neutral. If she didn’t remember what she had thought of my reading, I did.

“Read the Bible to me,” she said.

“Now?” She had just had her breakfast. I hadn’t had anything yet, and

I was hungry.

“Now, yes. Read the Sermon on the Mount.”

That was the beginning of my first full day with her. When she was tired of hearing me read, she thought of other things for me to do. Her laundry, for instance. She wouldn’t trust anyone else to do it. I wondered whether she had already found out that Alice generally did the laundry. And there was cleaning. She didn’t believe her room had been swept and dusted until she saw me do it. She didn’t believe Sarah understood how she wanted dinner prepared until I went down, got Sarah, and brought her back with me to receive instructions. She had to talk to Carrie and Nigel about the cleaning. She had to inspect the boy and girl who served at the table. In short, she had to prove that she was running her own house again. It had gone along without her for years, but she was back now.

She decided to teach me to sew. I had an old Singer at home and I could sew well enough with it to take care of my needs and Kevin’s. But I thought sewing by hand, especially sewing for “pleasure” was slow tor- ture. Margaret Weylin never asked me whether I wanted to learn though. She had time to fill, and it was my job to help her fill it. So I spent long tedious hours trying to imitate her tiny, straight, even stitches, and she spent minutes ripping out my work and lecturing me none too gently on how bad it was.

THE ST ORM 219

As the days passed, I learned to take longer than necessary when she sent me on errands. I learned to tell lies to get away from her when I thought I was about to explode. I learned to listen silently while she talked and talked and talked … mostly about how much better things were in Baltimore than here. I never learned to like sleeping on the floor of her room, but she wouldn’t permit the trundle bed to be brought in. She honestly didn’t see that it was any hardship for me to sleep on the floor. Niggers always slept on the floor.

Troublesome as she was, though, Margaret Weylin had mellowed. She didn’t have the old bursts of temper any more. Maybe it was the laudanum.

“You’re a good girl,” she said to me once as I sat near her bed stitch- ing at a slip cover. “Much better than you used to be. Someone must have taught you to behave.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I didn’t even look up.

“Good. You were impudent before. There’s nothing worse than an impudent nigger.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She depressed me, bored me, angered me, drove me crazy. But my back healed completely while I was with her. The work wasn’t hard and she never complained about anything but my sewing. She never threat- ened me or tried to have me whipped. Rufus said she was pleased with me. That seemed to surprise even him. So I endured her quietly. By now, I knew enough to realize when I was well off. Or I thought I did.

“You ought to see yourself,” Alice told me one day as I was hiding out in her cabin—the cabin Rufus had had Nigel build her just before the birth of her first child.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Marse Rufe really put the fear of God in you, didn’t he?” “Fear of … What are you talking about?”

“You run around fetching and carrying for that woman like you love her. And half a day in the fields was all it took.”

“Hell, Alice, leave me alone. I’ve been listening to nonsense all morn- ing. I don’t need yours.”

“You don’t want to hear me, get out of here. The way you always suck- in’ up to that woman is enough to make anybody sick.”

I got up and went to the cookhouse. There were times when it was stu- pid to expect reason from Alice, times when it did no good to point out

220

the obvious.

KINDRED

There were two field hands in the cookhouse. One young man who had a broken leg splinted and obviously healing crooked, and one old man who didn’t do much work any more. I could hear them before I went in. “I know Marse Rufe’ll get rid of me if he can,” said the young man. “I

ain’t no good to him. His daddy would have got rid of me.”

“Won’t nobody buy me,” said the old man. “I was burnt out long time ago. It’s you young ones got to worry.”

I went into the cookhouse and the young man who had his mouth open to speak closed it quickly, looking at me with open hostility. The old man simply turned his back. I’d seen slaves do that to Alice. I hadn’t noticed them doing it to me before. Suddenly, the cookhouse was no more com- fortable than Alice’s cabin had been. It might have been different if Sarah or Carrie had been there, but they weren’t. I left the cookhouse and went back toward the main house, feeling lonely.

Once I was inside, though, I wondered why I had crept away like that. Why hadn’t I fought back? Alice accusing me was ridiculous, and she knew it. But the field hands … They just didn’t know me, didn’t know how loyal I might be to Rufus or Margaret, didn’t know what I might report.

And if I told them, how likely would they be to believe me? But still …

I went down the hall and toward the stairs slowly, wondering why I hadn’t tried to defend myself—at least tried. Was I getting so used to being submissive?

Upstairs, I could hear Margaret Weylin thumping on the floor with her cane. She didn’t use the cane much for walking because she hardly ever walked. She used it to call me.

I turned and went back out of the house, out toward the woods. I had to think. I wasn’t getting enough time to myself. Once—God knows how long ago—I had worried that I was keeping too much distance between myself and this alien time. Now, there was no distance at all. When had I stopped acting? Why had I stopped?

There were people coming toward me through the woods. Several peo- ple. They were on the road, and I was several feet off it. I crouched in the trees to wait for them to pass. I was in no mood to answer some white man’s stupid inevitable questions: “What are you doing here? Who’s your master?”

THE ST ORM 221

I could have answered without trouble. I was nowhere near the edge of Weylin land. But just for a while, I wanted to be my own master. Before I forgot what it felt like.

A white man went by on horseback leading two dozen black men chained two by two. Chained. They wore handcuffs and iron collars with chains connecting the collars to a central chain that ran between the two lines. Behind the men walked several women roped together neck to neck. A coffle—slaves for sale.

At the end of the procession rode a second white man with a gun in his belt. They were all headed for the Weylin house.

I realized suddenly that the slaves in the cookhouse had not been spec- ulating idly about the possibility of being sold. They had known that there was a sale coming. Field hands who never set foot in the main house, and they had known. I hadn’t heard a thing.

Lately, Rufus spent his time either straightening out his father’s affairs, or sleeping. The weakness left over from his illness was still with him, and he had no time for me. He barely had time for his mother. But he had time to sell slaves. He had time to make himself that much more like his father.

I let the coffle reach the house far ahead of me. By the time I got there, three slaves were already being added to the line. Two men, one grim- faced, one openly weeping; and one woman who moved as though she were sleepwalking. As I got closer, the woman began to look familiar to me. I stopped, almost not wanting to know who it was. A tall, strongly built, handsome woman.

Tess.

I’d seen her only two or three times this trip. She was still working in the fields, still serving the overseer at night. She’d had no children, and that may have been why she was being sold. Or maybe this was some- thing Margaret Weylin had arranged. She might be that vindictive if she knew of her husband’s temporary interest in Tess.

I started toward Tess and the white man who had just tied a rope around her neck, fastening her into the line, saw me. He turned to face me, gun drawn.

I stopped, alarmed, confused … I had made no threatening move. “I just wanted to say good-bye to my friend,” I told him. I was whispering for some reason.

“Say it from there. She can hear you.”

222

“Tess?”

KINDRED

She stood, head down, shoulders rounded, a little red bundle hanging from one hand. She should have heard me, but I didn’t think she had.

“Tess, it’s Dana.”

She never looked up.

“Dana!” Rufus’s voice from near the steps where he was talking with the other white man. “You get away from here. Go inside.”

“Tess?” I called once more, willing her to answer. She knew my voice, surely. Why wouldn’t she look up? Why wouldn’t she speak? Why wouldn’t she even move? It was as though I didn’t exist for her, as though I wasn’t real.

I stepped toward her. I think I would have gone to her, taken the rope from her neck or gotten shot trying. But at that moment, Rufus reached me. He grabbed me, hustled me into the house, into the library.

“Stay here!” he ordered. “Just stay …” He stopped, suddenly stumbled against me, clutching at me now, not to hold me where I was, but to keep himself upright. “Damn!”

“How could you do it!” I hissed as he straightened. “Tess … those others …”

“They’re my property!”

I stared at him in disbelief. “Oh my God …!”

He passed a hand over his face, turned away. “Look, this sale is some- thing my father arranged before he died. You can’t do anything about it, so just stay out of the way!”

“Or what? You going to sell me too? You might as well!”

He went back outside without answering. After a while, I sat down in

Tom Weylin’s worn arm chair and put my head down on his desk.

8

Carrie covered for me with Margaret Weylin. She wanted me to know that when she caught me heading back upstairs. Actually, I don’t know why I was heading upstairs, except that I didn’t want to see Rufus again for a while, and there was nowhere else to go.

Carrie stopped me on the stairs, looked at me critically, then took my

THE ST ORM 223

arm and led me back down and out to her cabin. I didn’t know or care what she had in mind, but I did understand when she told me through gestures that she had told Margaret Weylin I was sick. Then she circled her neck with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands and looked at me. “I saw,” I said. “Tess and two others.” I drew a ragged breath. “I thought that was over on this plantation. I thought it died with Tom

Weylin.”

Carrie shrugged.

“I wish I had left Rufus lying in the mud,” I said. “To think I saved him so he could do something like this …!”

Carrie caught my wrist and shook her head vigorously.

“What do you mean, no? He’s no good. He’s all grown up now, and part of the system. He could feel for us a little when his father was run- ning things—when he wasn’t entirely free himself. But now, he’s in charge. And I guess he had to do something right away, to prove it.”

Carrie clasped her hands around her neck again. Then she drew closer to me and clasped them around my neck. Finally, she went over to the crib that her youngest child had recently outgrown and there, symboli- cally, clasped her hands again, leaving enough of an open circle for a small neck.

She straightened and looked at me. “Everybody?” I asked.

She nodded, gestured widely with her arms as though gathering a group around her. Then, once again, her hands around her neck.

I nodded. She was almost surely right. Margaret Weylin could not run the plantation. Both the land and the people would be sold. And if Tom Weylin was any example, the people would be sold without regard for family ties.

Carrie stood looking down at the crib as though she had read my thought.

“I was beginning to feel like a traitor,” I said. “Guilty for saving him. Now … I don’t know what to feel. Somehow, I always seem to forgive him for what he does to me. I can’t hate him the way I should until I see him doing things to other people.” I shook my head. “I guess I can see why there are those here who think I’m more white than black.”

Carrie made quick waving-aside gestures, her expression annoyed. She came over to me and wiped one side of my face with her fingers— wiped hard. I drew back, and she held her fingers in front of me, showed

224

KINDRED

me both sides. But for once, I didn’t understand.

Frustrated, she took me by the hand and led me out to where Nigel was chopping firewood. There, before him, she repeated the face-rubbing gesture, and he nodded.

“She means it doesn’t come off, Dana,” he said quietly. “The black. She means the devil with people who say you’re anything but what you are.”

I hugged her and got away from her quickly so that she wouldn’t see that I was close to tears. I went up to Margaret Weylin and she’d just had her laudanum. Being with her at such times was like being alone. And being alone was just what I needed.

9

I avoided Rufus for three days after the sale. He made it easy for me. He avoided me too. Then on the fourth day he came looking for me. He found me in his mother’s room yes-ma’aming her and changing her bed while she sat looking thin and frail beside the window. She barely ate. I had actually caught myself coaxing her to eat. Then I realized that she enjoyed being coaxed. She could forget to be superior sometimes, and just be someone’s old mother. Rufus’s mother. Unfortunately.

He came in and said, “Let Carrie finish that, Dana. I have something else for you to do.”

“Oh, do you have to take her now?” said Margaret. “She was just …” “I’ll send her back later, Mama. And Carrie’ll be up to finish your bed

in a minute.”

I left the room silently, not looking forward to whatever he had in mind.

“Down to the library,” he said right behind me.

I glanced back at him, trying to gauge his mood, but he only looked tired. He ate well and got twice the rest he should have needed, but he always looked tired.

“Wait a minute,” he said. I stopped.

“Did you bring another of those pens with the ink inside?”

“Yes.” “Get it.”

THE ST ORM 225

I went up to the attic where I still kept most of my things. I’d brought a packet of three pens this time, but I only took one back down with me—in case he still took as much pleasure as he had last trip in wasting ink.

“You ever hear of dengue fever?” he asked as he went down the stairs. “No.”

“Well, according to the doc in town, that’s what I had. I told him about it.” He had been going back and forth to town often since his father’s death. “Doc said he didn’t see how I’d made it without bleeding and a good emetic. Says I’m still weak because I didn’t get all the poisons out of my body.”

“Put yourself in his hands,” I said quietly. “And with a little luck, that will solve both our problems.”

He frowned uncertainly. “What do you mean by that?” “Not a thing.”

He turned and caught me by the shoulders in a grip that he probably meant to be painful. It wasn’t. “Are you trying to say you want me to die?”

I sighed. “If I did, you would, wouldn’t you?”

Silence. He let go of me and we went into the library. He sat down in his father’s old arm chair and motioned me into a hard Windsor chair nearby. Which was one step up from his father who had always made me stand before him like a school kid sent to the principal’s office.

“If you think that little sale was bad—and Daddy really had already arranged it—you better make sure nothing happens to me.” Rufus leaned back and looked at me wearily. “Do you know what would happen to the people here if I died?”

I nodded. “What bothers me,” I said, “is what’s going to happen to them if you live.”

“You don’t think I’m going to do anything to them, do you?”

“Of course you are. And I’ll have to watch and remember and decide when you’ve gone too far. Believe me, I’m not looking forward to the job.”

“You take a lot on yourself.” “None of it was my idea.”

He muttered something inaudible, and probably obscene. “You ought

226

KINDRED

to be in the fields,” he added. “God knows why I didn’t leave you out there. You would have learned a few things.”

“I would have been killed. You would have had to start taking very good care of yourself.” I shrugged. “I don’t think you have the knack.”

“Damnit, Dana … What’s the good of sitting here trading threats? I

don’t believe you want to hurt me any more than I want to hurt you.” I said nothing.

“I brought you down here to write a few letters for me, not fight with me.”

“Letters?”

He nodded. “I’ll tell you, I hate to write. Don’t mind reading so much, but I hate to write.”

“You didn’t hate it six years ago.”

“I didn’t have to do it then. I didn’t have eight or nine people all want- ing answers, and wanting them now.”

I twisted the pen in my hands. “You’ll never know how hard I worked in my own time to avoid doing jobs like this.”

He grinned suddenly. “Yes I do. Kevin told me. He told me about the books you wrote too. Your own books.”

“That’s how he and I earn our living.”

“Yeah. Well, I thought you might miss it—writing your own things, I

mean. So I got enough paper for you to write for both of us.”

I looked at him, not quite sure I’d heard right. I had read that paper in this time was expensive, and I had seen that Weylin had never had very much of it. But here was Rufus offering … Offering what? A bribe? Another apology?

“What’s the matter?” he said. “Seems to me, this is better than any offer I’ve made you so far.”

“No doubt.”

He got paper, made room for me at the desk. “Rufe, are you going to sell anyone else?” He hesitated. “I hope not. I don’t like it.”

“What’s to hope? Why can’t you just not do it?”

Another hesitation. “Daddy left debts, Dana. He was the most careful man I know with money, but he still left debts.”

“But won’t your crops pay them?” “Some of them.”

“Oh. What are you going to do?”

THE ST ORM 227

“Get somebody who makes her living by writing to write some very persuasive letters.”

10

I wrote his letters. I had to read several of the letters he’d received first to pick up the stilted formal style of the day. I didn’t want Rufus having to face some creditor that I had angered with my twentieth-century brevity—which could come across as nineteenth-century abruptness, even discourtesy. Rufus gave me a general idea of what he wanted me to say and then approved or disapproved of the way I said it. Usually, he approved. Then we started to go over his father’s books together. I never did get back to Margaret Weylin.

And I wasn’t ever to get back to her full time. Rufus brought a young girl named Beth in from the fields to help with the housework. That even- tually freed Carrie to spend more time with Margaret. I continued to sleep in Margaret’s room because I agreed with Rufus that Carrie belonged with her family, at least at night. That meant I had to put up with Margaret waking me up when she couldn’t sleep and complaining bitterly that Rufus had taken me away just when she and I were begin- ning to get on so well …

“What does he have you doing?” she asked me several times—

suspiciously.

I told her.

“Seems as though he could do that himself. Tom always did it himself.”

Rufus could have done it himself too, I thought, though I never said it aloud. He just didn’t like working alone. Actually, he didn’t like working at all. But if he had to do it, he wanted company. I didn’t realize how much he preferred my company in particular until he came in one night a little drunk and found Alice and I eating together in her cabin. He had been away eating with a family in town—“Some people with daughters they want to get rid of,” Alice had told me. She had said it with no con- cern at all even though she knew her life could become much harder if Rufus married. Rufus had property and slaves and was apparently quite

228

eligible.

KINDRED

He came home, and not finding either of us in the house, came out to Alice’s cabin. He opened the door and saw us both looking up at him from the table, and he smiled happily.

“Behold the woman,” he said. And he looked from one to the other of us. “You really are only one woman. Did you know that?”

He tottered away.

Alice and I looked at each other. I thought she would laugh because she took any opportunity she could find to laugh at him—though not to his face because he would beat her when he decided she needed it.

She didn’t laugh. She shuddered, then got up, not too gracefully—her pregnancy was showing now—and looked out the door after him.

After a while, she asked, “Does he ever take you to bed, Dana?”

I jumped. Her bluntness could still startle me. “No. He doesn’t want me and I don’t want him.”

She glanced back at me over one shoulder. “What you think your wants got to do with it?”

I said nothing because I liked her. And no answer I could give could help sounding like criticism of her.

“You know,” she said, “you gentle him for me. He hardly hits me at all when you’re here. And he never hits you.”

“He arranges for other people to hit me.”

“But still … I know what he means. He likes me in bed, and you out of bed, and you and I look alike if you can believe what people say.”

“We look alike if we can believe our own eyes!”

“I guess so. Anyway, all that means we’re two halves of the same woman—at least in his crazy head.”

11

The time passed slowly, uneventfully, as I waited for the birth of the child I hoped would be Hagar. I went on helping Rufus and his mother. I kept a journal in shorthand. (“What the devil are these chicken marks?” Rufus asked me when he looked over my shoulder one day.) It was such a relief to be able to say what I felt, even in writing, without worrying

THE ST ORM 229

that I might get myself or someone else into trouble. One of my secre- tarial classes had finally come in handy.

I tried husking corn and blistered my slow clumsy hands while expe- rienced field hands sped through the work effortlessly, enjoying them- selves. There was no reason for me to join them, but they seemed to be making a party of the husking—Rufus gave them a little whiskey to help them along—and I needed a party, needed anything that would relieve my boredom, take my mind off myself.

It was a party, all right. A wild rough kind of party that nobody mod- ified because “the master’s women”—Alice and I—were there. People working near me around the small mountain of corn laughed at my blis- ters and told me I was being initiated. A jug went around and I tasted it, choked, and drew more laughter. Surprisingly companionable laughter. A man with huge muscles told me it was too bad I was already spoken for, and that earned me hostile looks from three women. After the work, there were great quantities of food—chicken, pork, vegetables, corn bread, fruit—better food than the herring and corn meal field hands usually saw so much of. Rufus came out to play hero for providing such a good meal, and the people gave him the praise he wanted. Then they made gross jokes about him behind his back. Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.

Young people began disappearing in pairs after a while, and some of the older ones stopped their eating or drinking or singing or talking long enough to give them looks of disapproval—or more understanding wist- ful looks. I thought about Kevin and missed him and knew I wasn’t going to sleep well that night.

At Christmas, there was another party—dancing, singing, three marriages.

“Daddy used to make them wait until corn shucking or Christmas to marry,” Rufus told me. “They like parties when they marry, and he made a few parties do.”

230

KINDRED

“Anything to pinch a few pennies,” I said tactlessly.

He glanced at me. “You’d better be glad he didn’t waste money. You’re the one who gets upset when some quick money has to be raised.”

My mind had caught up with my mouth by then, and I kept quiet. He hadn’t sold anyone else. The harvest had been good and the creditors patient.

“Found anybody you want to jump the broom with?” he asked me.

I looked at him startled and saw that he wasn’t serious. He was smil- ing and watching the slaves do a bowing, partner-changing dance to the music of a banjo.

“What would you do if I had found someone?” I asked.

“Sell him,” he said. His smile was still in place, but there was no longer any humor in it. I noticed, now, that he was watching the big mus- cular man who had tried to get me to dance—the same man who had spo- ken to me at the corn husking. I would have to ask Sarah to tell him not to speak to me again. He didn’t mean anything, but that wouldn’t save him if Rufus got angry.

“One husband is enough for me,” I said. “Kevin?”

“Of course, Kevin.” “He’s a long way off.”

There was something in his tone that shouldn’t have been there. I

turned to face him. “Don’t talk stupid.”

He jumped and looked around quickly to see whether anyone had heard.

“You watch your mouth,” he said. “Watch yours.”

He stalked away angrily. We’d been working together too much lately, especially now that Alice was so advanced in her pregnancy. I was grate- ful when Alice herself created another job for me—a job that got me away from him regularly. Sometime during the week-long Christmas holiday, Alice persuaded him to let me teach their son Joe to read and write.

“It was my Christmas present,” she told me. “He asked me what I wanted, and I told him I wanted my son not to be ignorant. You know, I had to fight with him all week to get him to say yes!”

But he had said it, finally, and the boy came to me every day to learn to draw big clumsy letters on the slate Rufus bought him and read sim-

THE ST ORM 231

ple words and rhymes from the books Rufus himself had used. But unlike Rufus, Joe wasn’t bored with what he was learning. He fastened onto the lessons as though they were puzzles arranged for his entertainment— puzzles he loved solving. He could get so intense—throw screaming kicking tantrums when something seemed to be eluding him. But not all that much eluded him.

“You’ve got a damn bright little kid there,” I told Rufus. “You ought to be proud.”

Rufus looked surprised—as though it had never occurred to him that there might be anything special about the undersized runny-nosed child. He had spent his life watching his father ignore, even sell the children he had had with black women. Apparently, it had never occurred to Rufus to break that tradition. Until now.

Now, he began to take an interest in his son. Perhaps he was only curi- ous at first, but the boy captured him. I caught them together once in the library, the boy sitting on one of Rufus’s knees and studying a map that Rufus had just brought home. The map was spread on Rufus’s desk.

“Is this our river?” the boy was asking.

“No, that’s the Miles River, northeast of here. This map doesn’t show our river.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too small.”

“What is?” The boy peered up at him. “Our river or this map?” “Both, I suspect.”

“Let’s draw it in, then. Where does it go?”

Rufus hesitated. “Just about here. But we don’t have to draw it in.” “Why? Don’t you want the map to be right?”

I made a noise and Rufus looked up at me. I thought he looked almost ashamed for a moment. He put the boy down quickly and shooed him away.

“Nothing but questions,” Rufus complained to me.

“Enjoy it, Rufe. At least he’s not out setting fire to the stable or trying to drown himself.”

He couldn’t quite keep from laughing. “Alice said something like that.” He frowned a little. “She wants me to free him.”

I nodded. Alice had already told me she meant to ask for the boy’s freedom.

“You put her up to it, I guess.”

232

KINDRED

I stared at him. “Rufe, if there’s a woman on the place who makes up her own mind, it’s Alice. I didn’t put her up to a thing.”

“Well … now she’s got something else to make up her mind about.” “What?”

“Nothing. Nothing to you. I just mean to make her earn what she wants for a change,” he said.

I couldn’t get any more out of him than that. Eventually, though, Alice told me what he wanted.

“He wants me to like him,” she said with heavy contempt. “Or maybe even love him. I think he wants me to be more like you!”

“I guarantee you he doesn’t.”

She closed her eyes. “I don’t care what he wants. If I thought it would make him free my children, I’d try to do it. But he lies! And he won’t put it down on no paper.”

“He likes Joe,” I said. “He ought to. Joe looks like a slightly darker version of him at that age. Anyway, he might decide on his own to free the boy.”

“And this one?” She patted her stomach. “And the others? He’ll make sure there’re others.”

“I don’t know. I’ll push him whenever I can.”

“I should have took Joe and tried to run before I got pregnant again.” “You’re still thinking about running?”

“Wouldn’t you be if you didn’t have another way to get free?” I nodded.

“I don’t mean to spend my life here watching my children grow up as slaves and maybe get sold.”

“He wouldn’t …”

“You don’t know what he would do! He don’t treat you the way he treats me. When I’m strong again after I have this baby, I’m going.”

“With the baby?”

“You don’t think I’m going to leave it here, do you?” “But … I don’t see how you can make it.”

“I know more now than I did when Isaac and me left. I can make it.”

I drew a deep breath. “When the time comes, if I can help you, I will.” “Get me a bottle of laudanum,” she said.

“Laudanum!”

“I’ll have the baby to keep quiet. Old Mama won’t let me near her, but she likes you. Get it.”

THE ST ORM 233

“All right.” I didn’t like it. Didn’t like the idea of her trying to run with a baby and a small child, didn’t like the idea of her trying to run at all. But she was right. In her place, I would have tried. I would have tried sooner and gotten killed sooner, but I would have done it alone.

“You think about this awhile longer,” I said. “You’ll get the laudanum and anything else I can supply, but you think.”

“I’ve already thought.”

“Not enough. I shouldn’t say this, but think what’s going to happen if the dogs catch Joe, or if they pull you down and get the baby.”

12

The baby was a girl, born in the second month of the new year. She was her mother’s daughter, born darker skinned than Joe would probably ever be.

“ ’Bout time I had a baby to look like me,” said Alice when she saw her. “You could have at least tried for red hair,” said Rufus. He was there too, peering at the baby’s wrinkled little face, peering with even more

concern at Alice’s face, sweat-streaked and weary.

For the first and only time, I saw her smile at him—a real smile. No sarcasm, no ridicule. It silenced him for several seconds.

Carrie and I had helped with the birth. Now, we left quietly, both of us probably thinking the same thing. That if Alice and Rufus were going to make peace, finally, neither of us wanted to break their mood.

They called the baby Hagar. Rufus said that was the ugliest name he had ever heard, but it was Alice’s choice, and he let it stand. I thought it was the most beautiful name I had ever heard. I felt almost free, half-free if such a thing was possible, half-way home. I was gleeful at first— secretly elated. I even kidded Alice about the names she chose for her children. Joseph and Hagar. And the two others whose names I thought silently—Miriam and Aaron. I said, “Someday Rufus is going to get reli- gion and read enough of the Bible to wonder about those children’s names.”

Alice shrugged. “If Hagar had been a boy, I would have called her Ish- mael. In the Bible, people might be slaves for a while, but they didn’t

234

have to stay slaves.”

KINDRED

My mood was so good, I almost laughed. But she wouldn’t have understood that, and I couldn’t have explained. I kept it all in somehow, and congratulated myself that the Bible wasn’t the only place where slaves broke free. Her names were only symbolic, but I had more than symbols to remind me that freedom was possible—probable—and for me, very near.

Or was it?

Slowly, I began to calm down. The danger to my family was past, yes. Hagar had been born. But the danger to me personally … the danger to me personally still walked and talked and sometimes sat with Alice in her cabin in the evening as she nursed Hagar. I was there with them a couple of times, and I felt like an intruder.

I was not free. Not any more than Alice was, or her children with their names. In fact, it looked as though Alice might get free before I did. She caught me alone one evening and pulled me into her cabin. It was empty except for the sleeping Hagar. Joe was out collecting cuts and bruises from sturdier children.

“Did you get the laudanum?” she demanded.

I peered at her through the semidarkness. Rufus kept her well supplied with candles, but at the moment, the only light in the room came from the window and from a low fire over which two pots simmered. “Alice, are you sure you still want it?”

I saw her frown. “Sure I want it! ’Course I want it! What’s the matter with you?”

I hedged a little. “It’s so soon … The baby’s only a few weeks old.” “You get me that stuff so I can leave when I want to!”

“I’ve got it.” “Give it to me!”

“Goddamnit, Alice, will you slow down! Look, you keep working on him the way you have been, and you can get whatever you want and live to enjoy it.”

To my surprise, her stony expression crumbled, and she began to cry. “He’ll never let any of us go,” she said. “The more you give him, the more he wants.” She paused, wiped her eyes, then added softly, “I got to go while I still can—before I turn into just what people call me.” She looked at me and did the thing that made her so much like Rufus, though

THE ST ORM 235

neither of them recognized it. “I got to go before I turn into what you are!” she said bitterly.

Sarah had cornered me once and said, “What you let her talk to you like that for? She can’t get away with it with nobody else.”

I didn’t know. Guilt, maybe. In spite of everything, my life was easier than hers. Maybe I tried to make up for that by taking her abuse. Every- thing had its limits, though.

“You want my help, Alice, you watch your mouth!” “Watch yours,” she mocked.

I stared at her in astonishment, remembering, knowing exactly what she had overheard.

“If I talked to him the way you do, he’d have me hangin’ in the barn,”

she said.

“If you go on talking to me the way you do, I won’t care what he does to you.”

She looked at me for a long time without saying anything. Finally, she smiled. “You’ll care. And you’ll help me. Else, you’d have to see your- self for the white nigger you are, and you couldn’t stand that.”

Rufus never called my bluff. Alice did it automatically—and because I was bluffing, she got away with it. I got up and walked away from her. Behind me, I thought I heard her laugh.

Some days later, I gave her the laudanum. Later that same day, Rufus began talking about sending Joe to school up North when he was a little older.

“Do you mean to free the boy, Rufe?” He nodded.

“Good. Tell Alice.”

“When I get around to it.”

I didn’t argue with him; I told her myself.

“It don’t matter what he says,” she told me. “Did he show you any free papers?”

“No.”

“When he does, and you read them to me, maybe I’ll believe him. I’m tellin’ you, he uses those children just the way you use a bit on a horse. I’m tired of havin’ a bit in my mouth.”

I didn’t blame her. But still, I didn’t want her to go, didn’t want her to risk Joe and Hagar. Hell, I didn’t even want her to risk herself. Else-

236

KINDRED

where, under other circumstances, I would probably have disliked her. But here, we had a common enemy to unite us.

13

I planned to stay on the Weylin plantation long enough to see Alice leave, to find out whether she would be able to keep her freedom this time. I managed to talk her into waiting until early summer to go. And I was prepared to wait that long myself before I tried some dangerous trick that might get me home. I was homesick and Kevinsick and damned sick of Margaret Weylin’s floor and Alice’s mouth, but I could wait a few more months. I thought.

I talked Rufus into letting me teach Nigel’s two older sons and the two children who served at the table along with Joe. Surprisingly, the chil- dren liked it. I couldn’t recall having liked school much when I was their ages. Rufus liked it because Joe was as bright as I had said—bright and competitive. He had a head start on the others, and he didn’t intend to lose it.

“Why weren’t you like that about learning?” I asked Rufus. “Don’t bother me,” he muttered.

Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Educa- tion made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have. Another man said educating slaves was illegal. When Rufus replied that he had checked and that it wasn’t illegal in Maryland, the man said it should have been. Talk. Rufus shrugged it off without ever saying how much of it he believed. It was enough that he sided with me, and my school continued. I got the feeling that Alice was keeping him happy—and maybe finally enjoying herself a little in the process. I guessed from what she had told me that this was what was frightening her so, driving her away from the plantation, caus- ing her to lash out at me. She was trying to deal with guilt of her own.

But she was waiting and using some discretion. I relaxed, spent my spare moments trying to think of a way to get home. I didn’t want to

THE ST ORM 237

depend on someone else’s chance violence again—violence that, if it came, could be more effective than I wanted.

Then Sam James stopped me out by the cookhouse and my compla- cency was brought to an end.

I saw him waiting for me beside the cookhouse door—a big young man. I mistook him for Nigel at first. Then I recognized him. Sarah had told me his name. He had spoken to me at the corn husking, and again at Christmas. Then Sarah had spoken to him for me and he had said noth- ing else. Until now.

“I’m Sam,” he said. “Remember at Christmas?” “Yes. But I thought Sarah told you …”

“She did. Look, it ain’t that. I just wanted to see if maybe you’d teach my brother and sister to read.”

“Your … Oh. How old are they?”

“Sister was born the year you came here last … brother, the year before that.”

“I’ll have to get permission. Ask Sarah about it in a few days but don’t come to me again.” I thought of the expression I had seen on Rufus’s face as he looked at this man. “Maybe I’m too cautious, but I don’t want you getting in trouble because of me.”

He gave me a long searching look. “You want to be with that white man, girl?”

“If I were anywhere else, no black child on the place would be learn- ing anything.”

“That ain’t what I mean.”

“Yes it is. It’s all part of the same thing.” “Some folks say …”

“Hold on.” I was suddenly angry. “I don’t want to hear what ‘some folks’ say. ‘Some folks’ let Fowler drive them into the fields every day and work them like mules.”

“Let him …?”

“Let him! They do it to keep the skin on their backs and breath in their bodies. Well, they’re not the only ones who have to do things they don’t like to stay alive and whole. Now you tell me why that should be so hard for ‘some folks’ to understand?”

He sighed. “That’s what I told them. But you better off than they are, so they get jealous.” He gave me another of his long searching looks. “I still say it’s too bad you already spoke for.”

238

KINDRED

I grinned. “Get out of here, Sam. Field hands aren’t the only ones who can be jealous.”

He went. That was all. Innocent—completely innocent. But three days later, a trader led Sam away in chains.

Rufus never said a word to me. He didn’t accuse me of anything. I wouldn’t have known Sam had been sold if I hadn’t glanced out the win- dow of Margaret Weylin’s room and seen the coffle.

I told Margaret some hasty lie, then ran out of her room, down the stairs, and out the door. I ran headlong into Rufus, and felt him steady me, hold me. The weakness that his dengue fever had left was finally gone. His grip was formidable.

“Get back in the house!” he hissed.

I saw Sam beyond him being chained into line. There were people a few feet away from him crying loudly. Two women, a boy and a girl. His family.

“Rufe,” I pleaded desperately, “don’t do this. There’s no need!” He pushed me back toward the door and I struggled against him. “Rufe, please! Listen, he came to ask me to teach his brother and sis-

ter to read. That’s all!”

It was like talking to the wall of the house. I managed to break away from him for a moment just as the younger of the two weeping women spotted me.

“You whore!” she screamed. She had not been permitted to approach the coffle, but she approached me. “You no-’count nigger whore, why couldn’t you leave my brother alone!”

She would have attacked me. And field hand that she was, strength- ened by hard work, she would probably have given me the beating she thought I deserved. But Rufus stepped between us.

“Get back to work, Sally!”

She didn’t move, stood glaring at him until the older woman, probably her mother, reached her and pulled her away.

I caught Rufus by the hand and spoke low to him. “Please, Rufe. If you do this, you’ll destroy what you mean to preserve. Please don’t …”

He hit me.

It was a first, and so unexpected that I stumbled backward and fell. And it was a mistake. It was the breaking of an unspoken agreement

between us—a very basic agreement—and he knew it.

I got up slowly, watching him with anger and betrayal.

THE ST ORM 239

“Get in the house and stay there,” he said.

I turned my back and went to the cookhouse, deliberately disobeying. I could hear one of the traders say, “You ought to sell that one too. Trou- blemaker!”

At the cookhouse, I heated water, got it warm, not hot. Then I took a basin of it up to the attic. It was hot there, and empty except for the pal- lets and my bag in its corner. I went over to it, washed my knife in anti- septic, and hooked the drawstring of my bag over my shoulder.

And in the warm water I cut my wrists.