Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

  “Dana.”

  I looked at him.

  “Don’t worry. We arrived together and we’ll leave together.”

  I didn’t stop worrying, but I smiled and changed the subject. “How’s Rufus? I heard him screaming.”

  “Poor kid. I was glad when he passed out. The doctor gave him some opium, but the pain seemed to reach him right through it. I had to help hold him.”

  “Opium … will he be all right?”

  “The doctor thought so. Although I don’t know how much a doctor’s opinion is worth in this time.”

  “I hope he’s right. I hope Rufus has used up all his bad luck just in getting the set of parents he’s stuck with.”

  Kevin lifted one arm and turned it to show me a set of long bloody scratches.

  “Margaret Weylin,” I said softly.

  “She shouldn’t have been there,” he said. “When she finished with me, she started on the doctor. ‘Stop hurting my baby!’”

  I shook my head. “What are we going to do, Kevin? Even if these people were sane, we couldn’t stay here among them.”

  “Yes we can.”

  I turned to stare at him.

  “I made up a story for Weylin to explain why we were here—and why we were broke. He offered me a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Tutoring your little friend. Seems he doesn’t read or write any better than he climbs trees.”

  “But … doesn’t he go to school?”

  “Not while that leg is healing. And his father doesn’t want him to fall any farther behind than he already is.”

  “Is he behind others his age?”

  “Weylin seemed to think so. He didn’t come right out and say it, but I think he’s afraid the kid isn’t very bright.”

  “I’m surprised he cares one way or the other, and I think he’s wrong. But for once Rufus’s bad luck is our good luck. I doubt that we’ll be here long enough for you to collect any of your salary, but at least while we’re here, we’ll have food and shelter.”

  “That’s what I thought when I accepted.”

  “And what about me?”

  “You?”

  “Weylin didn’t say anything about me?”

  “No. Why should he? If I stay here, he knows you stay too.”

  “Yes.” I smiled. “You’re right. If you didn’t remember me in your bargaining, why should he? I’ll bet he won’t forget me though when he has work that needs to be done.”

  “Wait a minute, you don’t have to work for him. You’re not supposed to belong to him.”

  “No, but I’m here. And I’m supposed to be a slave. What’s a slave for, but to work? Believe me, he’ll find something for me to do—or he would if I didn’t plan to find my own work before he gets around to me.”

  He frowned. “You want to work?”

  “I want to … I have to make a place for myself here. That means work. I think everyone here, black and white, will resent me if I don’t work. And I need friends. I need all the friends I can make here, Kevin. You might not be with me when I come here again. If I come here again.”

  “And unless that kid gets a lot more careful, you will come here again.”

  I sighed. “It looks that way.”

  “I hate to think of your working for these people.” He shook his head. “I hate to think of you playing the part of a slave at all.”

  “We knew I’d have to do it.”

  He said nothing.

  “Call me away from them now and then, Kevin. Just to remind them that whatever I am, they don’t own me … yet.”

  He shook his head again angrily in what looked like a refusal, but I knew he’d do it.

  “What lies did you tell Weylin about us?” I asked him. “The way people ask questions around here, we’d better make sure we’re both telling the same story.”

  For several seconds, he said nothing.

  “Kevin?”

  He took a deep breath. “I’m supposed to be a writer from New York,” he said finally. “God help us if we meet any New Yorkers. I’m traveling through the South doing research for a book. I have no money because I drank with the wrong people a few days ago and was robbed. All I have left is you. I bought you before I was robbed because you could read and write. I thought you could help me in my work as well as be of use otherwise.”

  “Did he believe that?”

  “It’s possible that he did. He was already pretty sure you could read and write. That’s one reason he seemed so suspicious and mistrustful. Educated slaves aren’t popular around here.”

  I shrugged. “So Nigel has been telling me.”

  “Weylin doesn’t like the way you talk. I don’t think he’s had much education himself, and he resents you. I don’t think he’ll bother you—I wouldn’t stay here if I did. But keep out of his way as much as you can.”

  “Gladly. I plan to fit myself into the cookhouse if I can. I’m going to tell Sarah you want me to learn how to cook for you.”

  He gave a short laugh. “I’d better tell you the rest of the story I told Weylin. If Sarah hears it all, she might teach you how to put a little poison in my food.”

  I think I jumped.

  “Weylin was warning me that it was dangerous to keep a slave like you—educated, maybe kidnapped from a free state—as far north as this. He said I ought to sell you to some trader heading for Georgia or Louisiana before you ran away and I lost my investment. That gave me the idea to tell him I planned to sell you in Louisiana because that was where my journey ended—and I’d heard I could make a nice profit on you down there.

  “That seemed to please him and he told me I was right—prices were better in Louisiana if I could hold on to you until I got you there. So I said educated or not, you weren’t likely to run away from me because I’d promised to take you back to New York with me and set you free. I told him you didn’t really want to leave me right now anyway. He got the idea.”

  “You make yourself sound disgusting.”

  “I know. I think I was trying to at the end—trying to see whether anything I did to you could make me someone he wouldn’t want anywhere near his kid. I think he did cool a little toward me when I said I’d promised you freedom, but he didn’t say anything.”

  “What were you trying to do? Lose the job you’d just gotten?”

  “No, but while I was talking to him, all I could think was that you might be coming back here alone someday. I kept trying to find the humanity in him to reassure myself that you would be all right.”

  “Oh, he’s human enough. If he were of a little higher social class, he might even have been disgusted enough with your bragging not to want you around. But he wouldn’t have had the right to stop you from betraying 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 direction, 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. Regular, 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 w
as 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.

  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 supposed 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 surviving 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 here now and work on the insurance we talked about. Rufus. He’ll probably 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 survive 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 Margaret 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 mattresses. 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 morning—alone.”

  “Not likely. Not unless something threatens you or endangers you during 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 himself, 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 ability 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 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 practic
e 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 nothing 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!”

  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.