Kindred

by Octavia Butler

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

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

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

  I escaped to the cookhouse.

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

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

  “What?”

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

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

  I nodded.

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

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

  “He’s healing.”

  “Was Isaac all right?”

  I glanced at her. “Yes.”

  “Nigel said he didn’t think Marse Rufe told what happened.”

  “He didn’t. I managed to talk him out of it.”

  She laid a hand on my shoulder for a moment. “I hope you stay around for a while, girl. Even his daddy can’t talk him out of much these days.”

  “Well, I’m glad I was able to. But look, you promised to tell me about his mother.”

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

  “And she’s still there?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “My father’s parents worked in the cane fields there before they went to California. Luke could be a relative of mine.”

  “Just make sure you don’t wind up like him.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

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

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, oh. I might not be able to stop Daddy if he decided to sell you.”

  “Sell me! He doesn’t own me. Not even by the law here. He doesn’t have any papers saying he owns me.”

  “Dana, don’t talk stupid!”

  “But …”

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

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

  “Just be careful,” he said quietly.

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

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

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

  “You sound like a slaveholder already.”

  He shrugged.

  “Would you have sold Luke?”

  “No! I liked him.”

  “Would you sell anyone?”

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

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

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

  “Dear Kevin, I’m back. And I want to go North too …”

  “Let me see your pen when you’re finished,” said Rufus.

  “All right.”

  I went on writing, feeling myself strangely near tears. It was as though I was really talking to Kevin. I began to believe I would see him again.

  “Let me see the other things you brought with you,” said Rufus.

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

  He was reading my book.

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

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

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

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

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

  “You’re reading history, Rufe. Turn a few pages and you’ll find a white man named J. D. B. DeBow claiming that slavery is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites someone to look down on. That’s history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” And there was other history that he must not read. Too much of it hadn’t happened yet. Sojourner Truth, for instance, was still a slave. If someone bought her from her New York owners and brought her South before the Northern laws could free her, she might spend the rest of her life picking cotton. And there were two important slave children right here in Maryland. The older one, living here in Talbot County, would be called Frederick Douglass after a name change or two. The second, growing up a few miles south in Dorchester County was Harriet Ross, eventually to be Harriet Tubman. Someday, she was going to cost Eastern Shore plantation owners a huge amount of money by guiding three hundred of their runaway slaves to freedom. And farther down in Southampton, Virginia, a man named Nat Turner was biding his time. There were more. I had said I couldn’t do anything to change history. Yet, if history could be changed, this book in the hands of a white man—even a sympathetic white man—might be the thing to change it.

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

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

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

  I said nothing.

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

  “Yes.” A freedman who had plotted to free others violently.

  “You know what they did to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then put that book in the fire.”

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

  “Let me see,” said Rufus.

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

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  He shook his head in disgust.

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

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

  I obeyed inexpertly, dripping hot wax on my fingers.

  “Dana …?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “For what?”

  “Tell me what you’re mad about.”

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

  “Rufe, there are things we just can’t bargain on. This is one of them.”

  “You’re going to tell me what we can’t bargain on?” He sounded more surprised than indignant.

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

  “You don’t have either to bargain.”

  “Neither do you.”

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

  “Are you?”

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

  “You?”

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

  “I see.”

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

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

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

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

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

  7

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

  “Lazy niggers!” she would mutter when she had to get after someone.

  I stared at her in surprise when I first heard her say it. “Why should they work hard?” I asked. “What’s it going to get them?”

  “It’ll get them the cowhide if they don’t,” she snapped. “I ain’t goin’ to take the blame for what they don’t do. Are you?”

  “Well, no, but …”

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

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

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

  “We’re alone.”

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

  I said nothing.

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

  I nodded. “I hear.”

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

  “I’d rather see the others.”

  “What others?”

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

  “If any do.”

  “They do.”

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