Kindred

by Butler, Octavia

  He took his candle and went to the door of his room. The room’s shad- ows moved eerily as he moved. I realized suddenly how easy it would be for him to betray me—to open the door and run away or shout an alarm.

  Instead, he opened the door a crack and looked out. Then he turned and beckoned to me. He seemed excited and pleased, and only frightened enough to make him cautious. I relaxed, followed him quickly. He was enjoying himself—having an adventure. And, incidentally, he was play- ing with fire again, helping an intruder to escape undetected from his father’s house. His father would probably take the whip to both of us if he knew.

  Downstairs, the large heavy door opened noiselessly and we stepped into the darkness outside—the near darkness. There was a half-moon and several million stars lighting the night as they never did at home. Rufus immediately began to give me directions to his friend’s house, but I stopped him. There was something else to be done first.

  “Where would the draperies have fallen, Rufe? Take me to them.”

  He obeyed, taking me around a corner of the house to the side. There, what was left of the draperies lay smoking on the ground.

  “If we can get rid of this,” I said, “can you get your mother to give you new draperies without telling your father?”

  “I think so,” he said. “They hardly talk to each other anyway.”

  Most of the remnants of the drapes were cold. I stamped out the few

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  that were still edged in red and threatening to flame up again. Then I found a fairly large piece of unburned cloth. I spread it out flat and filled it with smaller pieces and bits of ash and whatever dirt I scooped up along with them. Rufus helped me silently. When we were finished, I rolled the cloth into a tight bundle and gave it to him.

  “Put it in your fireplace,” I told him. “Watch to see that it all burns before you go to sleep. But, Rufe … don’t burn anything else.”

  He glanced downward, embarrassed. “I won’t.”

  “Good. There must be safer ways of annoying your father. Now which way is it to Alice’s house?”

  3

  He pointed the way, then left me alone in the silent chilly night. I stood beside the house for a moment feeling frightened and lonely. I hadn’t realized how comforting the boy’s presence had been. Finally, I began walking across the wide grassy land that separated the house from the fields. I could see scattered trees and shadowy buildings around me. There was a row of small buildings off to one side almost out of sight of the house. Slave cabins, I supposed. I thought I saw someone moving around one of them, and for a moment, I froze behind a huge spreading tree. The figure vanished silently between two cabins—some slave, prob- ably as eager as I was to avoid being caught out at night.

  I skirted around a field of some grassy waist-high crop I didn’t even try to identify in the dim light. Rufus had told me his short cut, and that there was another longer way by road. I was glad to avoid the road, though. The possibility of meeting a white adult here frightened me, more than the possibility of street violence ever had at home.

  Finally, there was a stand of woods that looked like a solid wall of darkness after the moonlit fields. I stood before it for several seconds wondering whether the road wouldn’t be a better idea after all.

  Then I heard dogs barking—not too far away by their sound—and in sudden fear, I plunged through a tangle of new young growth and into the trees. I wondered about thorns, poison ivy, snakes … I wondered, but I didn’t stop. A pack of half-wild dogs seemed worse. Or perhaps a pack

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  of tame hunting dogs used to tracking runaway slaves.

  The woods were not as totally dark as they had seemed. I could see a little after my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness. I could see trees, tall and shadowy—trees everywhere. As I walked on, I began to wonder how I could be sure I was still going in the right direction. That was enough. I turned around—hoping that I still knew what “around” meant, and headed back toward the field. I was too much of a city woman.

  I got back to the field all right, then veered left to where Rufus had said there was a road. I found the road and followed it, listening for the dogs. But now, only a few night birds and insects broke the silence—crickets, an owl, some other bird I had no name for. I hugged the side of the road, trying to suppress my nervousness and praying to go home.

  Something dashed across the road so close to me that it almost brushed my leg. I froze, too terrified even to scream, then realized that it was just some small animal that I had frightened—a fox, perhaps, or a rabbit. I found myself swaying a little, swaying dizzily. I collapsed to my knees, desperately willing the dizziness to intensify, the transferal to come …

  I had closed my eyes. When I opened them, the dirt path and the trees were still there. I got up wearily and began walking again.

  When I had been walking for a while, I began to wonder whether I had passed the cabin without seeing it. And I began to hear noises—not birds or animals this time, not anything I could identify at first. But whatever it was, it seemed to be coming closer. It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that it was the sound of horses moving slowly down the road toward me.

  Just in time, I dove into the bushes.

  I lay still, listening, shaking a little, wondering whether the approach- ing horsemen had seen me. I could see them now, dark, slowly moving shapes going in a direction that would eventually take them past me on toward the Weylin house. And if they saw me, they might take me along with them as their prisoner. Blacks here were assumed to be slaves unless they could prove they were free—unless they had their free papers. Paperless blacks were fair game for any white.

  And these riders were white. I could see that in the moonlight as they came near. Then they turned and headed into the woods just a few feet from me. I watched and waited, keeping absolutely still until they had all gone past. Eight white men out for a leisurely ride in the middle of the night. Eight white men going into the woods in the area where the Green-

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  wood cabin was supposed to be.

  After a moment of indecision, I got up and followed them, moving carefully from tree to tree. I was both afraid of them and glad of their human presence. Dangerous as they could be to me, somehow, they did not seem as threatening as the dark shadowy woods with its strange sounds, its unknowns.

  As I had expected, the men led me to a small log cabin in a moonlit clearing in the woods. Rufus had told me I could reach the Greenwood cabin by way of the road, but he hadn’t told me the cabin sat back out of sight of the road. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe this was someone else’s cabin. I half hoped it was because if the people inside this cabin were black, they were almost certainly in for trouble.

  Four of the riders dismounted and went to hit and kick the door. When no one answered their pounding, two of them began trying to break it down. It looked like a heavy door—one more likely to break the men’s shoulders than it was to give. But apparently the latch used to keep it shut wasn’t heavy. There was a sound of splintering wood, and the door swung inward. The four men rushed in with it, and a moment later, three people were shoved, almost thrown out of the cabin. Two of them—a man and woman—were caught by the riders outside who had dis- mounted, apparently expecting them. The third, a little girl dressed in something long and light colored, was allowed to fall to the ground and scramble away, ignored by the men. She moved to within a few yards of where I lay in the bushes near the edge of the clearing.

  There was talk in the clearing now, and I began to distinguish words over the distance and through the unfamiliar accents.

  “No pass,” said one of the riders. “He sneaked off.”

  “No, Master,” pleaded one of those from the cabin—clearly a black man speaking to whites. “I had a pass. I had …”

  One of the whites hit him in the face. Two others held him, and he sagged between them. More talk.

  “If you had a pass, where is it?”
/>
  “Don’t know. Must have dropped it coming here.”

  They hustled the man to a tree so close to me that I lay flat on the ground, stiff with fear. With just a little bad luck, one of the whites would spot me, or, in the darkness, fail to spot me and step on me.

  The man was forced to hug the tree, and his hands were tied to prevent him from letting go. The man was naked, apparently dragged from bed.

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  I looked at the woman who still stood back beside the cabin and saw that she had managed to wrap herself in something. A blanket, perhaps. As I noticed it, one of the whites tore it from her. She said something in a voice so soft that all I caught was her tone of protest.

  “Shut your mouth!” said the man who had taken her blanket. He threw it on the ground. “Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?”

  One of the other men joined in. “What do you think you’ve got that we haven’t seen before?”

  There was raucous laughter.

  “Seen more and better,” someone else added. There were obscenities, more laughter.

  By now, the man had been securely tied to the tree. One of the whites went to his horse to get what proved to be a whip. He cracked it once in the air, apparently for his own amusement, then brought it down across the back of the black man. The man’s body convulsed, but the only sound he made was a gasp. He took several more blows with no outcry, but I could hear his breathing, hard and quick.

  Behind him, his child wept noisily against her mother’s leg, but the woman, like her husband, was silent. She clutched the child to her and stood, head down, refusing to watch the beating.

  Then the man’s resolve broke. He began to moan—low gut-wrenching sounds torn from him against his will. Finally, he began to scream.

  I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining against the rope as his screaming went on and on. My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet. Why didn’t they stop!

  “Please, Master,” the man begged. “For Godsake, Master, please …” I shut my eyes and tensed my muscles against an urge to vomit.

  I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me. In fact, she and I were reacting very much alike. My face too was wet with tears. And my mind was darting from one thought to another, trying to tune out the whipping. At one point, this last cowardice even brought me something useful. A name for whites who

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  rode through the night in the ante bellum South, breaking in doors and beating and otherwise torturing black people.

  Patrols. Groups of young whites who ostensibly maintained order among the slaves. Patrols. Forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan.

  The man’s screaming stopped.

  After a moment, I looked up and saw that the patrollers were untying him. He continued to lean against the tree even when the rope was off him until one of the patrollers pulled him around and tied his hands in front of him. Then, still holding the other end of the rope, the patroller mounted his horse and rode away half-dragging his captive bebind him. The rest of the patrol mounted and followed except for one who was hav- ing some kind of low-voiced discussion with the woman. Evidently, the discussion didn’t go the way the man wanted because before he rode after the others, he punched the woman in the face exactly as her husband had been punched earlier. The woman collapsed to the ground. The patroller rode away and left her there.

  The patrol and its stumbling captive headed back to the road, slanting off toward the Weylin house. If they had gone back exactly the way they came, they would have either gone over me or driven me from my cover. I was lucky—and stupid for having gotten so close. I wondered whether the captive black man belonged to Tom Weylin. That might explain Rufus’s friendship with the child, Alice. That is, if this child was Alice. If this was the right cabin. Whether it was or not, though, the woman, unconscious and abandoned, was in need of help. I got up and went over to her.

  The child, who had been kneeling beside her, jumped up to run away. “Alice!” I called softly.

  She stopped, peered at me through the darkness. She was Alice, then. These people were my relatives, my ancestors. And this place could be my refuge.

  4

  “I’m a friend, Alice,” I said as I knelt and turned the unconscious woman’s head to a more comfortable-looking position. Alice watched me

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  uncertainly, then spoke in a small whispery voice. “She dead?”

  I looked up. The child was younger than Rufus—dark and slender and small. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and sniffed.

  “No, she’s not dead. Is there water in the house?” “Yeah.”

  “Go get me some.”

  She ran into the cabin and returned a few seconds later with a gourd dipper of water. I wet the mother’s face a little, washed blood from around her nose and mouth. From what I could see of her, she seemed to be about my age, slender like her child, like me, in fact. And like me, she was fine-boned, probably not as strong as she needed to be to survive in this era. But she was surviving, however painfully. Maybe she would help me learn how.

  She regained consciousness slowly, first moaning, then crying out, “Alice! Alice!”

  “Mama?” said the child tentatively.

  The woman’s eyes opened wider, and she stared at me. “Who are you?”

  “A friend. I came here to ask for help, but right now, I’d rather give it. When you feel able to get up, I’ll help you inside.”

  “I said who are you!” Her voice had hardened. “My name is Dana. I’m a freewoman.”

  I was on my knees beside her now, and I saw her look at my blouse, my pants, my shoes—which for unpacking and working around the house happened to be an old pair of desert boots. She took a good look at me, then judged me.

  “A runaway, you mean.”

  “That’s what the patrollers would say because I have no papers. But

  I’m free, born free, intending to stay free.” “You’ll get me in trouble!”

  “Not tonight. You’ve already had your trouble for tonight.” I hesitated, bit my lip, then said softly, “Please don’t turn me away.”

  The woman said nothing for several seconds. I saw her glance over at her daughter, then touch her own face and wipe away blood from the cor- ner of her mouth. “Wasn’t going to turn you ’way,” she said softly.

  “Thank you.”

  I helped her up and into the cabin. Refuge then. A few hours of peace.

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  Perhaps tomorrow night, I could go on behaving like the runaway this woman thought I was. Perhaps from her, I could learn the quickest, safest way North.

  The cabin was dark except for a dying fire in the fireplace, but the woman made her way to her bed without trouble.

  “Alice!” she called out. “Here I am, Mama.” “Put a log on the fire.”

  I watched the child obey, her long gown hanging dangerously near hot coals. Rufus’s friend was at least as careless with fire as he was.

  Rufus. His name brought back all my fear and confusion and longing to go home. Would I really have to go all the way to some northern state to find peace? And if I did, what kind of peace would it be? The restricted North was better for blacks than the slave South, but not much better.

  “Why did you come here?” the woman asked. “Who sent you?”

  I stared into the fire frowning. I could hear her moving around behind me, probably putting on clothing. “The boy,” I said softly. “Rufus Weylin.”

  The small noises stopped. There was silence for a moment. I knew I had taken a risk telling her about Rufus.
Probably a foolish risk. I won- dered why I had done it. “No one knows about me but him,” I continued.

  The fire began to flare up around Alice’s small log. The log cracked and sputtered and filled the silence until Alice said, “Mister Rufe won’t tell.” She shrugged. “He never tells nothing.”

  And there in her words was a reason for the risk I had taken. I hadn’t thought of it until now, but if Rufus was one to tell what he shouldn’t, Alice’s mother should know so that she could either hide me or send me away. I waited to see what she would say.

  “You sure the father didn’t see you?” she asked. And that had to mean that she agreed with Alice, that Rufus was all right. Tom Weylin had probably marked his son more than he knew with that whip.

  “Would I be here if the father had seen me?” I asked. “Guess not.”

  I turned to look at her. She wore a gown now, long and white like her daughter’s. She sat on the edge of her bed watching me. There was a table near me made of thick smooth planks, and a bench made from a section of split log. I sat down on the bench. “Does Tom Weylin own your husband?” I asked.