Kindred

you around. But he wouldn’t have had the right to stop you from betray- ing me. I’m your private property. He’d respect that.”

“You call that human? I’m going to do all I can to see that you never come here alone again.”

I leaned back against the tree, watching him. “Just in case I do, Kevin, let’s take out some insurance.”

“What?”

“Let me help you with Rufus as much as I can. Let’s see what we can do to keep him from growing up into a red-haired version of his father.”

5

But for three days I didn’t see Rufus. Nor did anything happen to bring on the dizziness that would tell me I was going home at last. I helped Sarah as well as I could. She seemed to warm up to me a little and she was patient with my ignorance of cooking. She taught me and saw to it that I ate better. No more corn meal mush once she realized I didn’t like it. (“Why didn’t you say something?” she asked me.) Under her direc- tion, I spent God knows how long beating biscuit dough with a hatchet on a well-worn tree stump. (“Not so hard! You ain’t driving nails. Regu- lar, like this …” ) I cleaned and plucked a chicken, prepared vegetables, kneaded bread dough, and when Sarah was weary of me, helped Carrie and the other house servants with their work. I kept Kevin’s room clean. I brought him hot water to wash and shave with, and I washed in his room. It was the only place I could go for privacy. I kept my canvas bag there and went there to avoid Margaret Weylin when she came rubbing her fingers over dustless furniture and looking under rugs on well-swept floors. Differences be damned, I did know how to sweep and dust no matter what century it was. Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about. That, she made painfully clear to me the day she threw scalding hot coffee at me, screaming that I had brought it to her cold.

So I hid from her in Kevin’s room. It was my refuge. But it was not my sleeping place.

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I had been given sleeping space in the attic where most of the house

servants slept. It apparently never occurred to anyone that I should sleep in Kevin’s room. Weylin knew what kind of relationship Kevin was sup- posed to have with me, and he made it clear that he didn’t care. But our sleeping arrangement told us that he expected discretion—or we assumed it did. We co-operated for three days. On the fourth day, Kevin caught me on my way out to the cookhouse and took me to the oak tree again.

“Are you having trouble with Margaret Weylin?” he asked. “Nothing I can’t handle,” I said, surprised. “Why?”

“I heard a couple of the house servants talking, just saying vaguely that there was trouble. I thought I should find out for sure.”

I shrugged, said, “I think she resents me because Rufus likes me. She probably doesn’t want to share her son with anyone. Heaven help him when he gets a little older and tries to break away. Also, I don’t think Margaret likes educated slaves any better than her husband does.”

“I see. I was right about him, by the way. He can barely read and write. And she’s not much better.” He turned to face me squarely. “Did she throw a pot of hot coffee on you?”

I looked away. “It doesn’t matter. Most of it missed anyway.” “Why didn’t you tell me? She could have hurt you.”

“She didn’t.”

“I don’t think we should give her another chance.” I looked at him. “What do you want to do?”

“Get out of here. We don’t need money badly enough for you to put up with whatever she plans to do next.”

“No, Kevin. I had a reason for not telling you about the coffee.” “I’m wondering what else you haven’t told me.”

“Nothing important.” My mind went back over some of Margaret’s petty insults. “Nothing important enough to make me leave.”

“But why? There’s no reason for …”

“Yes there is. I’ve thought about it, Kevin. It isn’t the money that I care about, or even having a roof over my head. I think we can survive here together no matter what. But I don’t think I have much chance of sur- viving here alone. I’ve told you that.”

“You won’t be alone. I’ll see to it.”

“You’ll try. Maybe that will be enough. I hope so. But if it isn’t, if I do have to come here alone, I’ll have a better chance of surviving if I stay

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here now and work on the insurance we talked about. Rufus. He’ll prob- ably be old enough to have some authority when I come again. Old enough to help me. I want him to have as many good memories of me as I can give him now.”

“He might not remember you past the day you leave here.” “He’ll remember.”

“It still might not work. After all, his environment will be influencing him every day you’re gone. And from what I’ve heard, it’s common in this time for the master’s children to be on nearly equal terms with the slaves. But maturity is supposed to put both in their ‘places.’”

“Sometimes it doesn’t. Even here, not all children let themselves be molded into what their parents want them to be.”

“You’re gambling. Hell, you’re gambling against history.”

“What else can I do? I’ve got to try, Kevin, and if trying means taking small risks and putting up with small humiliations now so that I can sur- vive later, I’ll do it.”

He drew a deep breath and let it out in a near whistle. “Yeah. I guess I

don’t blame you. I don’t like it, but I don’t blame you.”

I put my head on his shoulder. “I don’t like it either. God, I hate it! That woman is priming herself for a nervous breakdown. I just hope she doesn’t have it while I’m here.”

Kevin shifted his position a little and I sat up. “Let’s forget about Mar- garet for a moment,” he said. “I also wanted to talk to you about that … that place where you sleep.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh. I finally got up to see it. A rag pallet on the floor, Dana!” “Did you see anything else up there?”

“What? What else should I have seen?”

“A lot of rag pallets on the floor. And a couple of corn-shuck mat- tresses. I’m not being treated any worse than any other house servant, Kevin, and I’m doing better than the field hands. Their pallets are on the ground. Their cabins don’t even have floors, and most of them are full of fleas.”

There was a long silence. Finally, he sighed. “I can’t do anything for the others,” he said, “but I want you out of that attic. I want you with me.”

I sat up and stared down at my hands. “You don’t know how I’ve wanted to be with you. I keep imagining myself waking up at home some

84

morning—alone.”

KINDRED

“Not likely. Not unless something threatens you or endangers you dur- ing the night.”

“You don’t know that for sure. Your theory could be wrong. Maybe there’s some kind of limit on how long I can stay here. Maybe a bad dream would be enough to send me home. Maybe anything.”

“Maybe I should test my theory.”

That stopped me. I realized he was talking about endangering me him- self, or at least making me believe my life was in danger—scaring the hell out of me. Scaring me home. Maybe.

I swallowed. “That might be a good idea, but I don’t think you should have mentioned it to me—warned me. Besides … I’m not sure you could scare me enough. I trust you.”

He covered one of my hands with his own. “You can go on trusting me. I won’t hurt you.”

“But …”

“I don’t have to hurt you. I can arrange something that will scare you before you have time to think about it. I can handle it.”

I accepted that, began to think maybe he really could get us home. “Kevin, wait until Rufus’s leg is healed.”

“So long?” he protested. “Six weeks, maybe more. Hell, in a society as backward as this, who knows whether the leg will heal at all?”

“Whatever happens, the boy will live. He still has to father a child. And that means he’ll probably have time to call me here again, with or without you. Give me the chance I need, Kevin, to reach him and make a haven for myself here.”

“All right,” he said sighing. “We’ll wait awhile. But you won’t do your waiting in that attic. You’re moving into my room tonight.”

I thought about that. “All right. Getting you home with me when I go is the one thing more important to me than staying with Rufus. It’s worth getting kicked off the plantation for.”

“Don’t worry about that. Weylin doesn’t care what we do.”

“But Margaret will care. I’ve seen her using that limited reading abil- ity of hers on her Bible. I suspect that in her own way, she’s a fairly moral woman.”

“You want to know how moral she is?”

His tone made me frown. “What do you mean?”

“If she chases me any harder, she and I will wind up playing a scene

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from that Bible she reads. The scene between Potiphar’s wife and

Joseph.”

I swallowed. That woman! But I could see her in my mind’s eye. Long thick red hair piled high on her head, fine smooth skin. Whatever her emotional problems, she wasn’t ugly.

“I’m moving in tonight, all right,” I said.

He smiled. “If we’re quiet about it, they might not even bother to notice. Hell, I saw three little kids playing in the dirt back there who look more like Weylin than Rufus does. Margaret’s had a lot of practice at not noticing.”

I knew which children he meant. They had different mothers, but there was a definite family resemblance between them. I’d seen Margaret Weylin slap one of them hard across the face. The child had done noth- ing more than toddle into her path. If she was willing to punish a child for her husband’s sins, would she be any less willing to punish me if she knew that I was where she wanted to be with Kevin? I tried not to think about it.

“We still might have to leave,” I said. “No matter what these people have to accept from each other, they might not be willing to tolerate

‘immorality’ from us.”

He shrugged. “If we have to leave, we leave. There’s a limit to what you should put up with even to get your chance with the boy. We’ll work our way to Baltimore. I should be able to get some kind of job there.”

“If we go to a city, how about Philadelphia?” “Philadelphia?”

“Because it’s in Pennsylvania. If we leave here, let it be for a free state.”

“Oh. Yes, I should have thought of that myself. Look … Dana, we might have to go to one of the free states, anyway.” He hesitated. “I mean if it turns out we can’t get home the way we think we can. I’ll probably become an unnecessary expense to Weylin when Rufus’s leg heals. Then we’d have to make a home for ourselves somewhere. That probably won’t happen, but it’s a possibility.”

I nodded.

“Now let’s go get whatever belongs to you out of that attic.” He stood up. “And, Dana, Rufus says his mother is going out visiting today. He’d like to see you while she’s gone.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner? A start finally!”

86 KINDRED

Later that day, as I was mixing some corn-bread batter for Sarah,

Carrie came to get me. She made a sign to Sarah that I had already learned to understand. She wiped the side of her face with one hand as though rubbing something off. Then she pointed to me.

“Dana,” said Sarah over her shoulder, “one of the white folks wants you. Go with Carrie.”

I went. Carrie led me up to Rufus’s room, knocked, and left me there. I went in and found Rufus in bed with his leg sandwiched between the two boards of a wooden splint and held straight by a device of rope and cast iron. The iron weight looked like something borrowed from Sarah’s kitchen—a heavy little hooked thing I’d once seen her hang meat on to roast. But it apparently served just as well to keep Rufus’s leg in traction. “How are you feeling?” I asked as I sat down in the chair beside his

bed.

“It doesn’t hurt as much as it did,” he said. “I guess it’s getting well. Kevin said … Do you care if I call him Kevin?”

“No, I think he wants you to.”

“I have to call him Mr. Franklin when Mama is here. Anyway, he said you’re working with Aunt Sarah.”

Aunt Sarah? Well, that was better than Mammy Sarah, I supposed. “I’m learning her way of cooking.”

“She’s a good cook, but … does she hit you?” “Of course not.” I laughed.

“She had a girl in there a while back, and she used to hit her. The girl finally asked Daddy to let her go back to the fields. That was right after Daddy sold Aunt Sarah’s boys, though. Aunt Sarah was mad at every- body then.”

“I don’t blame her,” I said.

Rufus glanced at the door, then said low-voiced, “Neither do I. Her boy Jim was my friend. He taught me how to ride when I was little. But Daddy sold him anyway.” He glanced at the door again and changed the subject. “Dana, can you read?”

“Yes.”

“Kevin said you could. I told Mama, and she said you couldn’t.” I shrugged. “What do you think?”

He took a leather-bound book from under his pillow. “Kevin brought me this from downstairs. Would you read it to me?”

I fell in love with Kevin all over again. Here was the perfect excuse

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for me to spend a lot of time with the boy. The book was Robinson Crusoe. I had read it when I was little, and I could remember not really liking it, but not quite being able to put it down. Crusoe had, after all, been on a slave-trading voyage when he was shipwrecked.

I opened the book with some apprehension, wondering what archaic spelling and punctuation I would face. I found the expected f’s for s’s and a few other things that didn’t turn up as often, but I got used to them very quickly. And I began to get into Robinson Crusoe. As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else’s trouble.

I read and read and drank some of the water Rufus’s mother had left for him, and read some more. Rufus seemed to enjoy it. I didn’t stop until I thought he was falling asleep. But even then, as I put the book down, he opened his eyes and smiled.

“Nigel said your mother was a school teacher.” “She was.”

“I like the way you read. It’s almost like being there watching every- thing happen.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s a lot more books downstairs.”

“I’ve seen them.” I had also wondered about them. The Weylins didn’t seem to be the kind of people who would have a library.

“They belonged to Miss Hannah,” explained Rufus obligingly. “Daddy was married to her before he married Mama, but she died. This place used to be hers. He said she read so much that before he married Mama, he made sure she didn’t like to read.”

“What about you?”

He moved uncomfortably. “Reading’s too much trouble. Mr. Jennings said I was too stupid to learn anyway.”

“Who’s Mr. Jennings?” “He’s the schoolmaster.”

“Is he?” I shook my head in disgust. “He shouldn’t be. Listen, do you think you’re stupid?”

“No.” A small hesitant no. “But I read as good as Daddy does already. Why should I have to do more than that?”

“You don’t have to. You can stay just the way you are. Of course, that would give Mr. Jennings the satisfaction of thinking he was right about you. Do you like him?”

88

“Nobody likes him.”

KINDRED

“Don’t be so eager to satisfy him then. And what about the boys you go to school with? It is just boys, isn’t it—no girls?”

“Yeah.”

“Well look at the advantage they’re going to have over you when you grow up. They’ll know more than you. They’ll be able to cheat you if they want to. Besides,” I held up Robinson Crusoe, “look at the pleasure you’ll miss.”

He grinned. “Not with you here. Read some more.”

“I don’t think I’d better. It’s getting late. Your mother will be home soon.”

“No she won’t. Read.”

I sighed. “Rufe, your mother doesn’t like me. I think you know that.” He looked away. “We have a little more time,” he said. “Maybe you’d

better not read though. I forget to listen for her when you read.” I handed him the book. “You read me a few lines.”

He accepted the book, looked at it as though it were his enemy. After a moment, he began to read haltingly. Some words stopped him entirely and I had to help. After two painful paragraphs, he stopped and shut the book in disgust. “You can’t even tell it’s the same book when I read it,” he said.

“Let Kevin teach you,” I said. “He doesn’t believe you’re stupid, and neither do I. You’ll learn all right.” Unless he really did have some kind of problem—poor vision or some learning disability that people in this time would see as stubbornness or stupidity. Unless. What did I know about teaching children? All I could do was hope the boy had as much potential as I thought he did.

I got up to go—then sat down again, remembering another unanswered question. “Rufe, what ever happened to Alice?”

“Nothing.” He looked surprised.

“I mean … the last time I saw her, her father had just been beaten because he went to see her and her mother.”

“Oh. Well, Daddy was afraid he’d run off, so he sold him to a trader.” “Sold him … does he still live around here?”

“No, the trader was headed south. To Georgia, I think.” “Oh God.” I sighed. “Are Alice and her mother still here?” “Sure. I still see them—when I can walk.”

“Did they have any trouble because I was with them that night?” That

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was as near as I dared to come to asking what had happened to my would-be enslaver.

“I don’t think so. Alice said you came and went away quick.”

“I went home. I can’t tell when I’m going to do that. It just happens.” “Back to California?”

“Yes.”

“Alice didn’t see you go. She said you just went into the woods and didn’t come back.”

“That’s good. Seeing me vanish would have frightened her.” Alice was keeping her mouth closed too then—or her mother was. Alice might not know what happened. Clearly there were things that even a friendly young white could not be told. On the other hand, if the patroller himself hadn’t spread the word about me or taken revenge on Alice and her mother, maybe he was dead. My blow could have killed him, or someone could have finished him after I went home. If they had, I didn’t want to know about it.

I got up again. “I have to go, Rufe. I’ll see you again whenever I can.” “Dana?”

I looked down at him.

“I told Mama who you were. I mean that you were the one who saved me from the river. She said it wasn’t true, but I think she really believed me. I told her because I thought it might make her like you better.”

“It hasn’t that I’ve noticed.”

“I know.” He frowned. “Why doesn’t she like you? Did you do some- thing to her?”

“Not likely! After all, what would happen to me if I did something to her?”

“Yeah. But why doesn’t she like you?” “You’ll have to ask her.”

“She won’t tell me.” He looked up solemnly. “I keep thinking you’re going to go home—that somebody will come and tell me you and Kevin are gone. I don’t want you to go. But I don’t want you to get hurt here either.”

I said nothing.

“You be careful,” he said softly.

I nodded and left the room. Just as I reached the stairs, Tom Weylin came out of his bedroom.

“What are you doing up here?” he demanded.

90 KINDRED

“Visiting Mister Rufus,” I said. “He asked to see me.” “You were reading to him!”

Now I knew how he happened to come out just in time to catch me. He

had been eavesdropping, for Godsake. What had he expected to hear? Or rather, what had he heard that he shouldn’t have? About Alice, perhaps. What would he make of that? For a moment my mind raced, searching for excuses, explanations. Then I realized I wouldn’t need them. I would have met him outside Rufus’s door if he had stayed long enough to hear about Alice. He had probably heard me addressing Rufus a little too familiarly. Nothing worse. I had deliberately not said anything damaging about Margaret because I thought her own attitude would damage her more in her son’s eyes than anything I could say. I made myself face Weylin calmly.

“Yes, I was reading to him,” I admitted. “He asked me to do that too. I think he was bored lying in there with nothing to do.”

“I didn’t ask you what you thought,” he said. I said nothing.

He walked me farther from Rufus’s door, then stopped and turned to look hard at me. His eyes went over me like a man sizing up a woman for sex, but I got no message of lust from him. His eyes, I noticed, not for the first time, were almost as pale as Kevin’s. Rufus and his mother had bright green eyes. I liked the green better, somehow.

“How old are you?” he asked. “Twenty-six, sir.”

“You say that like you’re sure.” “Yes, sir. I am.”

“What year were you born?”

“Seventeen ninety-three.” I had figured that out days ago thinking that it wasn’t a part of my personal history I should hesitate over if someone asked. At home, a person who hesitated over his birthdate was probably about to lie. As I spoke though, I realized that here, a person might hes- itate over his birthdate simply because he didn’t know it. Sarah didn’t know hers.

“Twenty-six then,” said Weylin. “How many children have you had?” “None.” I kept my face impassive, but I couldn’t keep myself from

wondering where these questions were leading.

“No children by now?” He frowned. “You must be barren then.”

I said nothing. I wasn’t about to explain anything to him. My fertility

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was none of his business, anyway.

He stared at me a little longer, making me angry and uncomfortable, but I concealed my feelings as well as I could.

“You like children though, don’t you?” he asked. “You like my boy.” “Yes, sir, I do.”

“Can you cipher too—along with your reading and writing?” “Yes, sir.”

“How’d you like to be the one to do the teaching?”

“Me?” I managed to frown … managed not to laugh aloud with relief. Tom Weylin wanted to buy me. In spite of all his warnings to Kevin of the dangers of owning educated, Northern-born slaves, he wanted to buy me. I pretended not to understand. “But that’s Mr. Franklin’s job.”

“Could be your job.” “Could it?”

“I could buy you. Then you’d live here instead of traveling around the country without enough to eat or a place to sleep.”

I lowered my eyes. “That’s for Mr. Franklin to say.” “I know it is, but how do you feel about it?”

“Well … no offense, Mr. Weylin, I’m glad we stopped here, and as I

said, I like your son. But I’d rather stay with Mr. Franklin.”

He gave me an unmistakable look of pity. “If you do, girl, you’ll live to regret it.” He turned and walked away.

I stared after him believing in spite of myself that he really felt sorry for me.

That night I told Kevin what had happened, and he wondered too.

“Be careful, Dana,” he said, unwittingly echoing Rufus. “Be as care- ful as you can.”

6

I was careful. As the days passed, I got into the habit of being careful. I played the slave, minded my manners probably more than I had to because I wasn’t sure what I could get away with. Not much, as it turned out.

Once I was called over to the slave cabins—the quarter—to watch

92 KINDRED

Weylin punish a field hand for the crime of answering back. Weylin ordered the man stripped naked and tied to the trunk of a dead tree. As this was being done—by other slaves—Weylin stood whirling his whip and biting his thin lips. Suddenly, he brought the whip down across the slave’s back. The slave’s body jerked and strained against its ropes. I watched the whip for a moment wondering whether it was like the one Weylin had used on Rufus years before. If it was, I understood com- pletely why Margaret Weylin had taken the boy and fled. The whip was heavy and at least six feet long, and I wouldn’t have used it on anything living. It drew blood and screams at every blow. I watched and listened and longed to be away. But Weylin was making an example of the man. He had ordered all of us to watch the beating—all the slaves. Kevin was in the main house somewhere, probably not even aware of what was happening.

The whipping served its purpose as far as I was concerned. It scared me, made me wonder how long it would be before I made a mistake that would give someone reason to whip me. Or had I already made that mistake?

I had moved into Kevin’s room, after all. And though that would be perceived as Kevin’s doing, I could be made to suffer for it. The fact that the Weylins didn’t seem to notice my move gave me no real comfort. Their lives and mine were so separate that it might take them several days to realize that I had abandoned my place in the attic. I always got up before they did to get water and live coals from the cookhouse to start Kevin’s fire. Matches had apparently not been invented yet. Neither Sarah nor Rufus had ever heard of them.

By now, the manservant Weylin had assigned to Kevin ignored him completely, and Kevin and his room were left to me. It took us twice as long to get a fire started, and it took me longer to carry water up and down the stairs, but I didn’t care. The jobs I had assigned myself gave me legitimate reason for going in and out of Kevin’s room at all hours, and they kept me from being assigned more disagreeable work. Most impor- tant to me, though, they gave me a chance to preserve a little of 1976 amid the slaves and slaveholders.

After washing and watching Kevin bloody his face with the straight razor he had borrowed from Weylin, I would go down to help Sarah with breakfast. Whole mornings went by without my seeing either of the Weylins. At night, I helped clean up after supper and prepare for the next

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day. So, like Sarah and Carrie, I rose before the Weylins and went to bed after them. That gave me several days of peace before Margaret Weylin discovered that she had another reason to dislike me.

She cornered me one day as I swept the library. If she had walked in two minutes earlier, she would have caught me reading a book. “Where did you sleep last night?” she demanded in the strident, accusing voice she reserved for slaves.

I straightened to face her, rested my hands on the broom. How lovely it would have been to say, None of your business, bitch! Instead, I spoke softly, respectfully. “In Mr. Franklin’s room, ma’am.” I didn’t bother to lie because all the house servants knew. It might even have been one of them who alerted Margaret. So now what would happen?

Margaret slapped me across the face.

I stood very still, gazed down at her with frozen calm. She was three or four inches shorter than I was and proportionately smaller. Her slap hadn’t hurt me much. It had simply made me want to hurt her. Only my memory of the whip kept me still.

“You filthy black whore!” she shouted. “This is a Christian house!” I said nothing.

“I’ll see you sent to the quarter where you belong!” Still I said nothing. I looked at her.

“I won’t have you in my house!” She took a step back from me. “You stop looking at me that way!” She took another step back.

It occurred to me that she was a little afraid of me. I was an unknown, after all—an unpredictable new slave. And maybe I was a little too silent. Slowly, deliberately, I turned my back and went on sweeping.

I kept an eye on her, though, without seeming to. After all, she was as unpredictable as I was. She could pick up a candlestick or a vase and hit me with it. And whip or no whip, I wasn’t going to stand passively and let her really hurt me.

But she made no move toward me. Instead, she turned and rushed away. It was a hot day, muggy and uncomfortable. No one else was mov- ing very fast except to wave away flies. But Margaret Weylin still rushed everywhere. She had little or nothing to do. Slaves kept her house clean, did much of her sewing, all her cooking and washing. Carrie even helped her put her clothes on and take them off. So Margaret supervised— ordered people to do work they were already doing, criticized their slow- ness and laziness even when they were quick and industrious, and in

94 KINDRED

general, made trouble. Weylin had married a poor, uneducated, nervous, startlingly pretty young woman who was determined to be the kind of person she thought of as a lady. That meant she didn’t do “menial” work, or any work at all, apparently. I had no one to compare her to except her guests who seemed, at least, to be calmer. But I suspected that most women of her time found enough to do to keep themselves comfortably busy whether they thought of themselves as “ladies” or not. Margaret, in her boredom, simply rushed around and made a nuisance of herself.

I finished my work in the library, wondering all the while whether Margaret had gone to her husband about me. Her husband, I feared. I remembered the expression on his face when he had beaten the field hand. It hadn’t been gleeful or angry or even particularly interested. He could have been chopping wood. He wasn’t sadistic, but he didn’t shrink from his “duties” as master of the plantation. He would beat me bloody if he thought I had given him reason, and Kevin might not even find out until too late.

I went up to Kevin’s room, but he wasn’t there. I heard him when I passed Rufus’s room and I would have gone in, but a moment later, I heard Margaret’s voice. Repelled, I went back downstairs and out to the cookhouse.

Sarah and Carrie were alone when I went in, and I was glad of that. Sometimes old people and children lounged there, or house servants or even field hands stealing a few moments of leisure. I liked to listen to them talk sometimes and fight my way through their accents to find out more about how they survived lives of slavery. Without knowing it, they prepared me to survive. But now I wanted only Sarah and Carrie. I could say what I felt around them, and it wouldn’t get back to either of the Weylins.

“Dana,” Sarah greeted me, “you be careful. I spoke for you today. I

don’t want you making me out to be a liar!”

I frowned. “Spoke for me? To Miss Margaret?”

Sarah gave a short harsh laugh. “No! You know I don’t say no more to her than I can help. She’s got her house, and I got my kitchen.”

I smiled and my own trouble receded a little. Sarah was right. Mar- garet Weylin kept out of her way. Talk between them was brief and confined usually to meal planning.

“Why do you dislike her so if she doesn’t bother you?” I asked.

Sarah gave me the look of silent rage that I had not seen since my first

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day on the plantation. “Whose idea you think it was to sell my babies?” “Oh.” She had not mentioned her lost children since that first day

either.

“She wanted new furniture, new china dishes, fancy things you see in that house now. What she had was good enough for Miss Hannah, and Miss Hannah was a real lady. Quality. But it wasn’t good enough for white-trash Margaret. So she made Marse Tom sell my three boys to get money to buy things she didn’t even need!”

“Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. My trouble seemed to shrink and become not worth mentioning. Sarah was silent for a while, her hands kneading bread dough automatically, maybe with a little more vigor than necessary. Finally she spoke again.

“It was Marse Tom I spoke to for you.” I jumped. “Am I in trouble?”

“Not by anything I said. He just wanted to know how you work and are you lazy. I told him you wasn’t lazy. Told him you didn’t know how to do some things—and, girl, you come here not knowing how to do nothing, but I didn’t tell him that. I said if you don’t know how to do something, you find out. And you work. I tell you to do something, I know it’s going to be done. Marse Tom say he might buy you.”

“Mr. Franklin won’t sell me.”

She lifted her head a little and literally looked down her nose at me. “No. Guess he won’t. Anyway, Miss Margaret don’t want you here.”

I shrugged.

“Bitch,” muttered Sarah monotonously. Then, “Well, greedy and mean as she is, at least she don’t bother Carrie much.”

I looked at the mute girl eating stew and corn bread left over from the table of the whites. “Doesn’t she, Carrie?”

Carrie shook her head and kept eating.

“Course,” said Sarah, turning away from the bread dough, “Carrie don’t have nothing Miss Margaret wants.”

I just looked at her.

“You’re caught between,” she said. “You know that don’t you?” “One man ought to be enough for her.”

“Don’t matter what ought to be. Matters what is. Make him let you sleep in the attic again.”

“Make him!”

“Girl …” She smiled a little. “I see you and him together sometimes

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when you think nobody’s looking. You can make him do just about any- thing you want him to do.”

Her smile surprised me. I would have expected her to be disgusted with me—or with Kevin.

“Fact,” she continued, “if you got any sense, you’ll try to get him to free you now while you still young and pretty enough for him to listen.” I looked at her appraisingly—large dark eyes set in a full unlined face several shades lighter than my own. She had been pretty herself not long ago. She was still an attractive woman. I spoke to her softly. “Were you

sensible, Sarah? Did you try when you were younger?”

She stared hard at me, her large eyes suddenly narrowed. Finally, she walked away without answering.

7

I didn’t move to the quarter. I took some cookhouse advice that I’d once heard Luke give to Nigel. “Don’t argue with white folks,” he had said. “Don’t tell them ‘no.’ Don’t let them see you mad. Just say ‘yes, sir.’ Then go ’head and do what you want to do. Might have to take a whippin’ for it later on, but if you want it bad enough, the whippin’ won’t matter much.”

There were a few whip marks on Luke’s back, and I’d twice heard Tom Weylin swear to give them company. But he hadn’t. And Luke went about his business, doing pretty much as he pleased. His business was keeping the field hands in line. Called the driver, he was a kind of black overseer. And he kept this relatively high position in spite of his attitude. I decided to develop a similar attitude—though with less risk to myself, I thought. I had no intention of taking a whipping if I could avoid it, and I was sure Kevin could protect me if he was nearby when I needed him.

Anyway, I ignored Margaret’s ravings and continued to disgrace her

Christian house.

And nothing happened.

Tom Weylin was up early one morning and he caught me stumbling, still half-asleep, out of Kevin’s room. I froze, then made myself relax.

“Morning, Mr. Weylin.”

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He almost smiled—came as near to smiling as I’d ever seen. And he winked.

That was all. I knew then that if Margaret got me kicked out, it wouldn’t be for doing a thing as normal as sleeping with my master. And somehow, that disturbed me. I felt almost as though I really was doing something shameful, happily playing whore for my supposed owner. I went away feeling uncomfortable, vaguely ashamed.

Time passed. Kevin and I became more a part of the household, famil- iar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize. Not that I wanted us to have trou- ble, but it seemed as though we should have had a harder time adjusting to this particular segment of history—adjusting to our places in the household of a slaveholder. For me, the work could be hard, but was usu- ally more boring than physically wearing. And Kevin complained of boredom, and of having to be sociable with a steady stream of ignorant pretentious guests who visited the Weylin house. But for drop-ins from another century, I thought we had had a remarkably easy time. And I was perverse enough to be bothered by the ease.

“This could be a great time to live in,” Kevin said once. “I keep think- ing what an experience it would be to stay in it—go West and watch the building of the country, see how much of the Old West mythology is true.”

“West,” I said bitterly. “That’s where they’re doing it to the Indians instead of the blacks!”

He looked at me strangely. He had been doing that a lot lately.

Tom Weylin caught me reading in his library one day. I was supposed to be sweeping and dusting. I looked up, found him watching me, closed the book, put it away, and picked up my dust cloth. My hand was shaking.

“You read to my boy,” he said. “I let you do that. But that’s enough reading for you.”

There was a long silence and I said tardily, “Yes, sir.”

“In fact, you don’t even have to be in here. Tell Carrie to do this room.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And stay away from the books!” “Yes, sir.”

Hours later in the cookhouse, Nigel asked me to teach him to read.

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The request surprised me, then I was ashamed of my surprise. It

seemed such a natural request. Years before, Nigel had been chosen to be Rufus’s companion. If Rufus had been a better student, Nigel might already know how to read. As it was, Nigel had learned to do other things. At a husky thirteen, he could shoe a horse, build a cabinet, and plot to escape to Pennsylvania someday. I should have offered to teach him to read long before he asked me.

“You know what’s going to happen to both of us if we get caught?” I

asked him.

“You scared?” he asked.

“Yes. But that doesn’t matter. I’ll teach you. I just wanted to be sure you knew what you were getting into.”

He turned away from me, lifted his shirt in the back so that I could see his scars. Then he faced me again. “I know,” he said.

That same day, I stole a book and began to teach him.

And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted so easily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting.

This was something I tried to explain to Kevin on the day the chil- dren broke through my act. It suddenly became very important that he understand.

The day was miserably hot and muggy, full of flies, mosquitoes, and the bad smells of soapmaking, the outhouses, fish someone had caught, unwashed bodies. Everybody smelled, black and white. Nobody washed enough or changed clothes often enough. The slaves worked up a sweat and the whites sweated without working. Kevin and I didn’t have enough clothes or any deodorant at all, so often, we smelled too. Surprisingly, we were beginning to get used to it.

Now we were walking together away from the house and the quarter. We weren’t heading for our oak tree because by then, if Margaret Weylin saw us there, she sent someone with a job for me. Her husband may have stopped her from throwing me out of the house, but he hadn’t stopped her from becoming a worse nuisance than ever. Sometimes Kevin counter- manded her orders, claiming that he had work for me. That was how I got a little rest and gave Nigel some extra tutoring. Now, though, we were

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headed for the woods to spend some time together.

But before we got away from the buildings, we saw a group of slave children gathered around a tree stump. These were the children of the field hands, children too young to be of much use in the fields them- selves. Two of them were standing on the wide flat stump while others stood around watching.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“Playing some game, probably.” Kevin shrugged. “It looks as though …”

“What?”

“Let’s get closer. I want to hear what they’re saying.”

We approached them from one side so that neither the children on the tree stump nor those on the ground were facing us. They went on with their play as we watched and listened.

“Now here a likely wench,” called the boy on the stump. He gestured toward the girl who stood slightly behind him. “She cook and wash and iron. Come here, gal. Let the folks see you.” He drew the girl up beside him. “She young and strong,” he continued. “She worth plenty money. Two hundred dollars. Who bid two hundred dollars?”

The little girl turned to frown at him. “I’m worth more than two hun- dred dollars, Sammy!” she protested. “You sold Martha for five hundred dollars!”

“You shut your mouth,” said the boy. “You ain’t supposed to say noth- ing. When Marse Tom bought Mama and me, we didn’t say nothing.”

I turned and walked away from the arguing children, feeling tired and disgusted. I wasn’t even aware that Kevin was following me until he spoke.

“That’s the game I thought they were playing,” he said. “I’ve seen them at it before. They play at field work too.”

I shook my head. “My God, why can’t we go home? This place is diseased.”

He took my hand. “The kids are just imitating what they’ve seen adults doing,” he said. “They don’t understand …”

“They don’t have to understand. Even the games they play are prepar- ing them for their future—and that future will come whether they under- stand it or not.”

“No doubt.”

I turned to glare at him and he looked back calmly. It was a what-do-

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you-want-me-to-do-about-it kind of look. I didn’t say anything because, of course, there was nothing he could do about it.

I shook my head, rubbed my hand across my brow. “Even knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t help,” I said. “I know some of those kids will live to see freedom—after they’ve slaved away their best years. But by the time freedom comes to them, it will be too late. Maybe it’s already too late.”

“Dana, you’re reading too much into a kids’ game.”

“And you’re reading too little into it. Anyway … anyway, it’s not their game.”

“No.” He glanced at me. “Look, I won’t say I understand how you feel about this because maybe that’s something I can’t understand. But as you said, you know what’s going to happen. It already has happened. We’re in the middle of history. We surely can’t change it. If anything goes wrong, we might have all we can do just to survive it. We’ve been lucky so far.”

“Maybe.” I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But I can’t close my eyes.”

Kevin frowned thoughtfully. “It’s surprising to me that there’s so little to see. Weylin doesn’t seem to pay much attention to what his people do, but the work gets done.”

“You think he doesn’t pay attention. Nobody calls you out to see the whippings.”

“How many whippings?”

“One that I’ve seen. One too goddamn many!”

“One is too many, yes, but still, this place isn’t what I would have imagined. No overseer. No more work than the people can manage …”

“… no decent housing,” I cut in. “Dirt floors to sleep on, food so inad- equate they’d all be sick if they didn’t keep gardens in what’s supposed to be their leisure time and steal from the cookhouse when Sarah lets them. And no rights and the possibility of being mistreated or sold away from their families for any reason—or no reason. Kevin, you don’t have to beat people to treat them brutally.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m not minimizing the wrong that’s being done here. I just …”

“Yes you are. You don’t mean to be, but you are.” I sat down against a tall pine tree, pulling him down beside me. We were in the woods now. Not far to one side of us was a group of Weylin’s slaves who were cut-

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ting down trees. We could hear them, but we couldn’t see them. I assumed that meant they couldn’t see us either—or hear us over the dis- tance and their own noise. I spoke to Kevin again.

“You might be able to go through this whole experience as an ob- server,” I said. “I can understand that because most of the time, I’m still an observer. It’s protection. It’s nineteen seventy-six shielding and cush- ioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then, like with the kids’ game, I can’t maintain the distance. I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do. I ought to be doing something though. I know that.”

“There’s nothing you could do that wouldn’t eventually get you whipped or killed!”

I shrugged.

“You … you haven’t already done anything, have you?”

“Just started to teach Nigel to read and write,” I said. “Nothing more subversive than that.”

“If Weylin catches you and I’m not around …”

“I know. So stay close. The boy wants to learn, and I’m going to teach him.”

He raised one leg against his chest and leaned forward looking at me. “You think someday he’ll write his own pass and head North, don’t you?”

“At least he’ll be able to.”

“I see Weylin was right about educated slaves.” I turned to look at him.

“Do a good job with Nigel,” he said quietly. “Maybe when you’re gone, he’ll be able to teach others.”

I nodded solemnly.

“I’d bring him in to learn with Rufus if people weren’t so good at lis- tening at doors in that house. And Margaret is always wandering in and out.”

“I know. That’s why I didn’t ask you.” I closed my eyes and saw the children playing their game again. “The ease seemed so frightening,” I said. “Now I see why.”

“What?”

“The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”

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8

I said good-bye to Rufus the day my teaching finally did get me into trouble. I didn’t know I was saying good-bye, of course—didn’t know what trouble was waiting for me in the cookhouse where I was to meet Nigel. I thought there was trouble enough in Rufus’s room.

I was there reading to him. I had been reading to him regularly since his father caught me that first time. Tom Weylin didn’t want me reading on my own, but he had ordered me to read to his son. Once he had told Rufus in my presence, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! A nigger can read better than you!”

“She can read better than you too,” Rufus had answered.

His father had stared at him coldly, then ordered me out of the room. For a second I was afraid for Rufus, but Tom Weylin left the room with me.

“Don’t go to him again until I say you can,” he told me.

Four days passed before he said I could. And again he chastised Rufus before me.

“I’m no schoolmaster,” he said, “but I’ll teach you if you can be taught. I’ll teach you respect.”

Rufus said nothing.

“You want her to read to you?” “Yes, sir.”

“Then you got something to say to me.” “I … I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“Read,” said Weylin to me. He turned and left the room.

“What exactly are you supposed to be sorry for?” I asked when Weylin was gone. I spoke very softly.

“Talking back,” said Rufus. “He thinks everything I say is talking back. So I don’t say very much to him.”

“I see.” I opened the book and began to read.

We had finished Robinson Crusoe long ago, and Kevin had chosen a couple of other familiar books from the library. We had already gone through the first, Pilgrim’s Progress. Now we were working on Gulliver’s Travels. Rufus’s own reading was improving slowly under Kevin’s tutor-

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ing, but he still enjoyed being read to.

On my last day with him, though, as on a few others, Margaret came in to listen—and to fidget and to fiddle with Rufus’s hair and to pet him while I was reading. As usual, Rufus put his head on her lap and accepted her caresses silently. But today, apparently, that was not enough.

“Are you comfortable?” she asked Rufus when I had been reading for a few moments. “Does your leg hurt?” His leg was not healing as I thought it should have. After nearly two months, he still couldn’t walk.

“I feel all right, Mama,” he said.

Suddenly, Margaret twisted around to face me. “Well?” she demanded. I had paused in my reading to give her a chance to finish. I lowered my

head and began to read again.

About sixty seconds later, she said, “Baby, you hot? You want me to call Virgie up here to fan you?” Virgie was about ten—one of the small house servants often called to fan the whites, run errands for them, carry covered dishes of food between the cookhouse and the main house, and serve the whites at their table.

“I’m all right, Mama,” said Rufus.

“Why don’t you go on?” snapped Margaret at me. “You’re supposed to be here to read, so read!”

I began to read again, biting off the words a little.

“Are you hungry, baby?” asked Margaret a moment later. “Aunt

Sarah’s just made a cake. Wouldn’t you like a piece?”

I didn’t stop this time. I just lowered my voice a little and read auto- matically, tonelessly.

“I don’t know why you want to listen to her,” Margaret said to Rufus. “She’s got a voice like a fly buzzing.”

“I don’t want no cake, Mama.”

“You sure? You ought to see the fine white icing Sarah put on it.” “I want to hear Dana read, that’s all.”

“Well, there she is, reading. If you can call it that.”

I let my voice grow progressively softer as they talked. “I can’t hear her with you talking,” Rufus said.

“Baby, all I said was …”

“Don’t say nothing!” Rufus took his head off her lap. “Go away and stop bothering me!”

“Rufus!” She sounded hurt rather than angry. And in spite of the situ- ation, this sounded like real disrespect to me. I stopped reading and waited for the explosion. It came from Rufus.

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“Go away, Mama!” he shouted. “Just leave me alone!”

“Be still,” she whispered. “Baby, you’ll make yourself sick.”

Rufus turned his head and looked at her. The expression on his face startled me. For once, the boy looked like a smaller replica of his father. His mouth was drawn into a thin straight line and his eyes were coldly hostile. He spoke quietly now as Weylin sometimes did when he was angry. “You’re making me sick, Mama. Get away from me!”

Margaret got up and dabbed at her eyes. “I don’t see how you can talk to me that way,” she said. “Just because of some nigger …”

Rufus just looked at her, and finally she left the room.

He relaxed against his pillows and closed his eyes. “I get so tired of her sometimes,” he said.

“Rufe …?”

He opened weary, friendly eyes and looked at me. The anger was gone. “You’d better be careful,” I said. “What if your mother told your father

you talked to her that way?”

“She never tells.” He grinned. “She’ll be back after ’while to bring me a piece of cake with fine white icing.”

“She was crying.”

“She always cries. Read, Dana.”

“Do you talk to her that way often?”

“I have to, or she won’t leave me alone. Daddy does it too.”

I took a deep breath, shook my head, and plunged back into Gulliver’s

Travels.

Later, as I left Rufus, I passed Margaret on her way back to his room. Sure enough, she was carrying a large slice of cake on a plate.

I went downstairs and out to the cookhouse to give Nigel his reading lesson.

Nigel was waiting. He already had our book out of its hiding place and was spelling out words to Carrie. That surprised me because I had offered Carrie a chance to learn with him, and she had refused. Now though, the two of them, alone in the cookhouse, were so involved in what they were doing that they didn’t even notice me until I shut the door. They looked up then, wide-eyed with fear. But they relaxed when they saw it was only me. I went over to them.

“Do you want to learn?” I asked Carrie.

The girl’s fear seemed to return and she glanced at the door.

“Aunt Sarah’s afraid for her to learn,” said Nigel. “Afraid if she learns, she might get caught at it, and then be whipped or sold.”

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I lowered my head, sighed. The girl couldn’t talk, couldn’t communi- cate at all except in the inadequate sign language she had invented—a language even her mother only half-understood. In a more rational soci- ety, an ability to write would be of great help to her. But here, the only people who could read her writing would be those who might punish her for being able to write. And Nigel. And Nigel.

I looked from the boy to the girl. “Shall I teach you, Carrie?” If I did and her mother caught me, I might be in more trouble than if Tom Weylin caught me. I was afraid to teach her both for her sake and for mine. Her mother wasn’t a woman I wanted to offend or to hurt, but my conscience wouldn’t let me refuse her if she wanted to learn.

Carrie nodded. She wanted to learn all right. She turned away from us for a moment, did something to her dress, then turned back with a small book in her hand. She too had stolen from the library. Her book was a volume of English history illustrated with a few drawings which she pointed out to me.

I shook my head. “Either hide it or put it back,” I told her. “It’s too hard for you to begin with. The one Nigel and I are using was written for people just starting to learn.” It was an old speller—probably the one Weylin’s first wife had been taught from.

Carrie’s fingers caressed one of the drawings for a moment. Then she put the book back into her dress.

“Now,” I said, “find something to do in case your mother comes in. I

can’t teach you in here. We’ll have to find someplace else to meet.”

She nodded, looking relieved, and went over to sweep the other side of the room.

“Nigel,” I said softly when she was gone, “I surprised you when I

came in here, didn’t I?” “Didn’t know it was you.”

“Yes. It could have been Sarah, couldn’t it?” He said nothing.

“I teach you in here because Sarah said I could, and because the

Weylins never seem to come out here.”

“They don’t. They send us out here to tell Sarah what they want. Or to tell her to come to them.”

“So you can learn here, but Carrie can’t. We might have trouble no matter how careful we are, but we don’t have to ask for it.”

He nodded.

“By the way, what does your father think of my teaching you?”

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“I don’t know. I didn’t tell him you was.”

Oh God. I took a shaky breath. “But he does know, doesn’t he?” “Aunt Sarah probably told him. He never said nothing to me though.” If anything went wrong, there would be blacks to take their revenge on

me when the whites finished. When would I ever go home? Would I ever go home? Or if I had to stay here, why couldn’t I just turn these two kids away, turn off my conscience, and be a coward, safe and comfortable?

I took the book from Nigel and handed him my own pencil and a piece of paper from my tablet. “Spelling test,” I said quietly.

He passed the test. Every word right. To my surprise as well as his, I hugged him. He grinned, half-embarrassed, half-pleased. Then I got up and put his test paper into the hot coals of the hearth. It burst into flames and burned completely. I was always careful about that, and I always hated being careful. I couldn’t help contrasting Nigel’s lessons with Rufus’s. And the contrast made me bitter.

I turned to go back to the table where Nigel was waiting. In that moment, Tom Weylin opened the door and stepped in.

It wasn’t supposed to happen. For as long as I had been on the planta- tion, it had not happened—no white had come into the cookhouse. Not even Kevin. Nigel had just agreed with me that it didn’t happen.

But there stood Tom Weylin staring at me. He lowered his gaze a lit- tle and frowned. I realized that I was still holding the old speller. I’d got- ten up with it in my hand and I hadn’t put it down. I even had one finger in it holding my place.

I withdrew my finger and let the book close. I was in for a beating now. Where was Kevin? Somewhere inside the house, probably. He might hear me if I screamed—and I would be screaming shortly, anyway. But it would be better if I could just get past Weylin and run into the house.

Weylin stood squarely in front of the door. “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want you reading!”

I said nothing. Clearly, nothing I could say would help. I felt myself trembling, and I tried to be still. I hoped Weylin couldn’t see. And I hoped Nigel had had the sense to get the pencil off the table. So far, I was the only one in trouble. If it could just stay that way …

“I treated you good,” said Weylin quietly, “and you pay me back by stealing from me! Stealing my books! Reading!”

He snatched the book from me and threw it on the floor. Then he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me toward the door. I managed to

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twist around to face Nigel and mouth the words, “Get Kevin.” I saw

Nigel stand up.

Then I was out of the cookhouse. Weylin dragged me a few feet, then pushed me hard. I fell, knocked myself breathless. I never saw where the whip came from, never even saw the first blow coming. But it came— like a hot iron across my back, burning into me through my light shirt, searing my skin …

I screamed, convulsed. Weylin struck again and again, until I couldn’t have gotten up at gunpoint.

I kept trying to crawl away from the blows, but I didn’t have the strength or the coordination to get far. I may have been still screaming or just whimpering, I couldn’t tell. All I was really aware of was the pain. I thought Weylin meant to kill me. I thought I would die on the ground there with a mouth full of dirt and blood and a white man cursing and lec- turing as he beat me. By then, I almost wanted to die. Anything to stop the pain.

I vomited. And I vomited again because I couldn’t move my face away.

I saw Kevin, blurred, but somehow still recognizable. I saw him run- ning toward me in slow motion, running. Legs churning, arms pumping, yet he hardly seemed to be getting closer.

Suddenly, I realized what was happening and I screamed—I think I

screamed. He had to reach me. He had to!

And I passed out.