Kindred (34 page)

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 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 complacency 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 nothing 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 learning 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.”

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 window 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 sister 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, strengthened 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.

“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. Troublemaker!”

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 pallets and my bag in its corner. I went over to it, washed my knife in antiseptic, and hooked the drawstring of my bag over my shoulder.

And in the warm water I cut my wrists.

The Rope

1

I awoke in darkness and lay still for several seconds trying to think where I was and when I had gone to sleep.

I was lying on something unbelievably soft and comfortable …

My bed. Home. Kevin?

I could hear regular breathing beside me now. I sat up and reached out to turn on the lamp—or I tried to. Sitting up made me faint and dizzy. For a moment, I thought Rufus was pulling me back to him before I could even see home. Then I became aware that my wrists were bandaged and throbbing—and I remembered what I had done.

The lamp on Kevin’s side of the bed went on and I could see him beardless now, but with his thatch of gray hair uncut.

I lay flat and looked up at him happily. “You’re beautiful,” I said. “You look a little like a heroic portrait I saw once of Andrew Jackson.”

“No way,” he said. “Man was skinny as hell. I’ve seen him.”

“But you haven’t seen my heroic portrait.”

“Why the hell did you cut your wrists? You could have bled to death! Or did you cut them yourself?”

“Yes. It got me home.”

“There must be a safer way.”

I rubbed my wrists gingerly. “There isn’t any safe way to almost kill yourself. I was afraid of the sleeping pills. I took them with me because I wanted to be able to die if … if I wanted to die. But I was afraid that if I used them to get home, I might die before you or some doctor figured out what was wrong with me. Or that if I didn’t die, I’d have some grisly side-effect—like gangrene.”

“I see,” he said after a while.

“Did you bandage me?”

“Me? No, I thought this was too serious for me to handle alone. I stopped the bleeding as best I could and called Lou George. He bandaged you.” Louis George was a doctor friend Kevin had met through his writing. Kevin had interviewed George for an article once, and the two had taken a liking to each other. They wound up doing a nonfiction book together.

“Lou said you managed to miss the main arteries in both arms,” Kevin told me. “Said you didn’t do much more than scratch yourself.”

“With all that blood!”

“It wasn’t that much. You were probably too frightened to cut as deeply as you could have.”

I sighed. “Well … I guess I’m glad I didn’t do much damage—as long as I got home.”

“How would you feel about seeing a psychiatrist?”

“Seeing a … Are you kidding?”

“I am, but Lou wasn’t. He says if you’re doing things like this, you need help.”

“Oh God. Do I have to? The lies I’d have to invent!”

“No, this time you probably won’t have to. Lou is a friend. You do it again, though, and … well, you could be locked up for psychiatric treatment whether you like it or not. The law tries to protect people like you from themselves.”

I found myself laughing, almost crying. I put my head on his shoulder and wondered whether a little time in some sort of mental institution would be worse than several months of slavery. I doubted it.

“How long was I gone this time?” I asked.

“About three hours. How long was it for you?”

“Eight months.”

“Eight …” He put his arm over me, holding me. “No wonder you cut your wrists.”

“Hagar has been born.”

“Has she?” There was silence for a moment, then, “What’s that going to mean?”

I twisted uncomfortably and, by accident, put pressure on one of my wrists. The sudden pain made me gasp.

“Be careful,” he said. “Treat yourself gently for a change.”

“Where’s my bag?”

“Here.” He pulled the blanket aside and let me see that I was securely tied to my denim bag. “What are you going to do, Dana?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s he like now?”

He. Rufus. He had become such a fixture in my life that it wasn’t even necessary to say his name. “His father died,” I said. “He’s running things now.”

“Well?”

“I don’t know. How do you do well at owning and trading in slaves?”

“Not well,” Kevin decided. He got up and went to the kitchen, came back with a glass of water. “Did you want anything to eat? I can get you something.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“What did he do to you, finally, to make you cut your wrists?”

“Nothing to me. Nothing important. He sold a man away from his family when there was no need for him to. He hit me when I objected. Maybe he’ll never be as hard as his father was, but he’s a man of his time.”

“Then … it doesn’t seem to me that you have such a difficult decision ahead of you.”

“But I do. I talked to Carrie about it once, and she said …”

“Carrie?” He looked at me strangely.

“Yes. She said … Oh. She gets her meaning across, Kevin. Weren’t you around the place long enough to find that out?”

“She never tried to get much across to me. I used to wonder whether she was a little retarded.”

“God, no! Far from it. If you had gotten to know her, you wouldn’t even suspect.”

He managed to shrug. “Well, anyway, what did she tell you?”

“That if I had let Rufus die, everyone would have been sold. More families would have been separated. She has three children now.”

He was silent for several seconds. Then, “She might be sold with her children if they’re young. But I doubt that anyone would bother to keep her and her husband together. Someone would buy her and breed her to a new man. It is breeding, you know.”

“Yes. So you see, my decision isn’t as easy as you thought.”

“But … they’re being sold anyway.”

“Not all of them. Good Lord, Kevin, their lives are hard enough.”

“What about your life?”

“It’s better than anything most of them will ever know.”

“It may not be as he gets older.”

I sat up, trying to ignore my own weakness. “Kevin, tell me what you want me to do.”

He looked away, said nothing. I gave him several seconds, but he kept silent.

“It’s real now, isn’t it,” I said softly. “We talked about it before—God knows how long ago—but somehow, it was abstract then. Now … Kevin, if you can’t even say it, how can you expect me to do it?”

2

We had fifteen full days together this time. I marked them off on the calendar—June 19, through July 3. With some kind of reverse symbolism, Rufus called me back on July 4. But at least Kevin and I had a chance to grow back into the twentieth century. We didn’t seem to have to grow back into each other. The separations hadn’t been good for us, but they hadn’t hurt us that much either. It was easy for us to be together, knowing we shared experiences no one else would believe. It wasn’t as easy, though, for us to be with other people.

My cousin came over, and when Kevin answered the door, she didn’t recognize him.

“What’s the matter with him?” she whispered later when she and I were alone.

“He’s been sick,” I lied.

“With what?”

“The doctor isn’t sure what it was. Kevin is much better now, though.”

“He looks just like my girl friend’s father did, and he had cancer.”

“Julie, for Godsake!”

“I’m sorry, but … never mind. He hasn’t hit you again, has he?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s something. You’d better take care of yourself. You don’t look so good either.”

Kevin tried driving—his first time after five years of horses and buggies. He said the traffic confused him, made him more nervous than he could see any reason for. He said he’d almost killed a couple of people. Then he put the car in the garage and left it there.

Of course, I wouldn’t drive, wouldn’t even ride with someone else while there was still a chance of Rufus snatching me away. After the first week, though, Kevin began to doubt that I would be called again.

I didn’t doubt it. For the sake of the people whose lives Rufus controlled, I didn’t wish him dead, but I wouldn’t rest easy until I knew he was. As things stood now, sooner or later, he would get himself into trouble again and call me. I kept my denim bag nearby.

“You know, someday, you’re going to have to stop dragging that thing around with you and come back to life,” Kevin said after two weeks. He had just tried driving again, and when he came in, his hands were shaking. “Hell, half the time I wonder if you’re not eager to go back to Maryland anyway.”

I had been watching television—or at least, the television was on. Actually, I was looking over some journal pages I had managed to bring home in my bag, wondering whether I could weave them into a story. Now, I looked up at Kevin. “Me?”

“Why not? Eight months, after all.”

I put my journal pages down and got up to turn off the television.

“Leave it on,” said Kevin.

I turned it off. “I think you’ve got something to say to me,” I said. “And I think I should hear it clearly.”

“You don’t want to hear anything.”

“No, I don’t. But I’m going to, aren’t I?”

“My God, Dana, after two weeks …”

“It was eight days, time before last. And about three hours last time. The intervals between trips don’t mean anything.”

“How old was he last time?”

“He turned twenty-five when I was there last. And, though I’ll never be able to prove it, I turned twenty-seven.”

“He’s grown up.”

I shrugged.

“Do you remember what he said just before he tried to shoot you?”

“No. I had other things on my mind.”

“I had forgotten it myself, but it’s come back to me. He said, ‘You’re not going to leave me!’”