Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

  “You already said that. But no matter what you do to me, your son will still be dead. Is that what you want?”

  “You do your job,” he said stubbornly, “and he’ll live. You’re something different. I don’t know what—witch, devil, I don’t care. Whatever you are, you just about brought a girl back to life when you came here last, and she wasn’t even the one you came to help. You come out of nowhere and go back into nowhere. Years ago, I would have sworn there couldn’t even be anybody like you. You’re not natural! But you can feel pain—and you can die. Remember that and do your job. Take care of your master.”

  “But, I tell you …”

  He walked out of the room and shut the door behind him.

  4

  We got the mosquito netting and used it, just in case. Nigel said Weylin didn’t really mind letting us have it. He just didn’t want to hear any more damned nonsense about mosquitoes. He didn’t like to be taken for a fool.

  “He’s as close to being scared of you as he’s ever been of anything,” said Nigel. “I think he’d rather try to kill you than admit it though.”

  “I don’t see any sign of fear in him.”

  “You don’t know him the way I do.” Nigel paused. “Could he kill you, Dana?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

  “We better get Marse Rufe well then. Sarah has a kind of tea she makes that kind of helps the ague. Maybe it will help whatever Marse Rufe has now.”

  “Would you ask her to brew up a pot?”

  He nodded and went out.

  Sarah came upstairs with Nigel to bring Rufus the tea and to see me. She looked old now. Her hair was streaked with gray and her face lined. She walked with a limp.

  “Dropped a kettle on my foot,” she said. “Couldn’t walk at all for a while.” She gave me the feeling that everyone was getting older, passing me by. She brought me roast beef and bread to eat.

  Rufus had a fever now. He didn’t want the tea, but I coaxed and bullied until he swallowed it. Then we all waited, but all that happened was that Rufus’s other leg began to hurt. His eyes bothered him most because moving them hurt him, and he couldn’t help following my movements or Nigel’s around the room. Finally, I put a cool damp cloth over them. That seemed to help. He still had a lot of pain in his joints—his arms, his legs, everywhere. I thought I could ease that, so I took his candle and went up to the attic for my bag. I was just in time to catch a little girl trying to get the top off my Excedrin bottle. It scared me. She could just as easily have chosen the sleeping pills. The attic wasn’t as safe a place as I had thought.

  “No, honey, give those to me.”

  “They yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “They candy?”

  Good Lord. “No, they’re medicine. Nasty medicine.”

  “Ugh!” she said, and handed them back to me. She went back to her pallet next to another child. They were new children. I wondered whether the two little boys who had preceded them had been sold or sent to the fields.

  I took the Excedrin, what was left of the aspirin, and the sleeping pills back down with me. I would have to keep them somewhere in Rufus’s room or eventually one of the kids would figure out how to get the safety caps off.

  Rufus had thrown off the damp cloth and was knotted on his side in pain when I got back to him. Nigel had lain down on the floor before the fireplace and gone to sleep. He could have gone back to his cabin, but he had asked me if I wanted him to stay since this was my first night back, and I’d said yes.

  I dissolved three aspirins in water and tried to get Rufus to drink it. He wouldn’t even open his mouth. So I woke Nigel, and Nigel held him down while I held his nose and poured the bad-tasting solution into his mouth as he gasped for air. He cursed us both, but after a while he began to feel a little better. Temporarily.

  It was a bad night. I didn’t get much sleep. Nor was I to get much for six days and nights following. Whatever Rufus had, it was terrible. He was in constant pain, he had fever—once I had to call Nigel to hold him while I tied him down to keep him from hurting himself. I gave him aspirins—too many, but not as many as he wanted. I made him take broth and soup and fruit and vegetable juices. He didn’t want them. He never wanted to eat, but he didn’t want Nigel holding him down either. He ate.

  Alice came in now and then to relieve me. Like Sarah, she looked older. She also looked harder. She was a cool, bitter older sister to the girl I had known.

  “Folks treat her bad because of Marse Rufe,” Nigel told me. “They figure if she’s been with him this long, she must like it.”

  And Alice said contemptuously, “Who cares what a bunch of niggers think!”

  “She lost two babies,” Nigel told me. “And the one she’s got left is sickly.”

  “White babies,” Alice said. “Look more like him than me. Joe is even red-headed.” Joe was the single survivor. I almost cried when I heard that. No Hagar yet. I was so tired of this going back and forth; I wanted so much for it to be over. I couldn’t even feel sorry for the friend who had fought for me and taken care of me when I was hurt. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself.

  On the third day of his illness, Rufus’s fever left him. He was weak and several pounds lighter, but so relieved to be rid of the fever and the pain that nothing else mattered. He thought he was getting well. He wasn’t.

  The fever and the pain returned for three more days and he got a rash that itched and eventually peeled …

  At last, he got well and stayed well. I prayed that whatever his disease had been, I wouldn’t get it, wouldn’t ever have to care for anyone else who had it. A few days after the worst of his symptoms had disappeared, I was allowed to sleep in the attic. I collapsed gratefully onto the pallet Sarah had made me there, and it felt like the world’s softest bed. I didn’t awaken until late the next morning after long hours of deep, unbroken sleep. I was still a little groggy when Alice came running up the steps and into the attic to get me.

  “Marse Tom is sick,” she said. “Marse Rufe wants you to come.”

  “Oh no,” I muttered. “Tell him to send for the doctor.”

  “Already sent for. But Marse Tom is having bad pains in his chest.”

  The significance of that filtered through to me slowly. “Pains in his chest?”

  “Yeah. Come on. They in the parlor.”

  “God, that sounds like a heart attack. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Just come. They want you.”

  I pulled on a pair of pants and threw on a shirt as I ran. What did these people want from me? Magic? If Weylin was having a heart attack, he was going to either recover or die without my help.

  I ran down the stairs and into the parlor where Weylin lay on a sofa, ominously still and silent.

  “Do something!” Rufus pleaded. “Help him!” His voice sounded as thin and weak as he looked. His sickness had left its marks on him. I wondered how he had gotten downstairs.

  Weylin wasn’t breathing, and I couldn’t find a pulse. For a moment, I stared at him, undecided, repelled, not wanting to touch him again, let alone breathe into him. Then quelling disgust, I began mouth to mouth resuscitation and external heart massage—what did they call it? Cardiopulmonary resuscitation. I knew the name, and I’d seen someone doing it on television. Beyond that, I was completely ignorant. I didn’t even know why I was trying to save Weylin. He wasn’t worth it. And I didn’t know if CPR could do any good in an era when there was no ambulance to call, no one to take over for me even if I somehow got Weylin’s heart going—which I didn’t expect to do.

  Which I didn’t do.

  Finally, I gave up. I looked around to see Rufus on the floor near me. I didn’t know whether he had sat down or fallen, but I was glad he was sitting now.

  “I’m sorry, Rufe. He’s dead.”

  “You let him die?”

  “He was dead when I got here. I tried to bring him back the way I brought you back when you were drowning. I failed.”


  “You let him die.”

  He sounded like a child about to cry. His illness had weakened him so, I thought he might cry. Even healthy people cried and said irrational things when their parents died.

  “I did what I could, Rufe. I’m sorry.”

  “Damn you to hell, you let him die!” He tried to lunge at me, succeeded only in falling over. I moved to help him up, but stopped when he tried to push me away.

  “Send Nigel to me,” he whispered. “Get Nigel.”

  I got up and went to find Nigel. Behind me, I heard Rufus say once more, “You just let him die.”

  5

  Things were happening too fast for me. I was almost glad to find myself put back to work with Sarah and Carrie, ignored by Rufus. I needed time to catch up with myself—and catch up with life on the plantation. Carrie and Nigel had three sons now, and Nigel had never mentioned it to me because the youngest was two years old. He had forgotten that I didn’t know. I was with him once, as he watched them playing. “It’s good to have children,” he said softly. “Good to have sons. But it’s so hard to see them be slaves.”

  I met Alice’s thin pale little boy and saw with relief that in spite of the way she talked, she obviously loved the child.

  “I keep thinking I might wake up and find him cold like the others,” she said one day in the cookhouse.

  “What did they die of?” I asked.

  “Fevers. The doctor came and bled them and purged them, but they still died.”

  “He bled and purged babies?”

  “They were two and three. He said it would break the fever. And it did. But they … they died anyway.”

  “Alice, if I were you, I wouldn’t ever let that man near Joe.”

  She looked at her son sitting on the floor of the cookhouse eating mush and milk. He was five years old and he looked almost white in spite of Alice’s dark skin. “I never wanted no doctor near the other two,” said Alice. “Marse Rufe sent for him—sent for him and made me let him kill my babies.”

  Rufus’s intentions had been good. Even the doctor’s intentions had probably been good. But all Alice knew was that her children were dead and she blamed Rufus. Rufus himself was to teach me about that attitude.

  On the day after Weylin was buried, Rufus decided to punish me for letting the old man die. I didn’t know whether he honestly believed I had done such a thing. Maybe he just needed to hurt someone. He did lash out at others when he was hurt; I had already seen that.

  So on the morning after the funeral, he sent the current overseer, a burly man named Evan Fowler, to get me from the cookhouse. Jake Edwards had either quit or been fired sometime during my six-year absence. Fowler came to tell me I was to work in the fields.

  I didn’t believe it, even when the man pushed me out of the cookhouse. I thought he was just another Jake Edwards throwing his weight around. But outside, Rufus stood waiting, watching. I looked at him, then back at Fowler.

  “This the one?” Fowler asked Rufus.

  “That’s her,” said Rufus. And he turned and went back into the main house.

  Stunned, I took the sicklelike corn knife Fowler thrust into my hands and let myself be herded out toward the cornfield. Herded. Fowler got his horse and rode a little behind me as I walked. It was a long walk. The cornfield wasn’t where I’d left it. Apparently, even in this time, planters practiced some form of crop rotation. Not that that mattered to me. What in the world could I do in a cornfield?

  I glanced back at Fowler. “I’ve never done field work before,” I told him. “I don’t know how.”

  “You’ll learn,” he said. He used the handle of his whip to scratch his shoulder.

  I began to realize that I should have resisted, should have refused to let Fowler bring me out here where only other slaves could see what happened to me. Now it was too late. It was going to be a grim day.

  Slaves were walking down rows of corn, chopping the stalks down with golf-swing strokes of their knives. Two slaves worked a row, moving toward each other. Then they gathered the stalks they had cut and stood them in bunches at opposite ends of the row. It looked easy, but I suspected that a day of it could be backbreaking.

  Fowler dismounted and pointed toward a row.

  “You chop like the others,” he said. “Just do what they do. Now get to work.” He shoved me toward the row. There was already someone at the other end of it working toward me. Someone quick and strong, I hoped, because I doubted that I would be quick or strong for a while. I hoped that the washing and the scrubbing at the house and the factory and warehouse work back in my own time had made me strong enough just to survive.

  I raised the knife and chopped at the first stalk. It bent over, partially cut.

  At almost the same moment, Fowler lashed me hard across the back.

  I screamed, stumbled, and spun around to face him, still holding my knife. Unimpressed, he hit me across the breasts.

  I fell to my knees and doubled over in a blaze of pain. Tears ran down my face. Even Tom Weylin hadn’t hit slave women that way—any more than he’d kicked slave men in the groin. Fowler was an animal. I glared up at him in pain and hatred.

  “Get up!” he said.

  I couldn’t. I didn’t think anything could make me get up just then—until I saw Fowler raising his whip again.

  Somehow, I got up.

  “Now do what the others do,” he said. “Chop close to the ground. Chop hard!”

  I gripped the knife, felt myself much more eager to chop him.

  “All right,” he said. “Try it and get it over with. I thought you was supposed to be smart.”

  He was a big man. He hadn’t impressed me as being very quick, but he was strong. I was afraid that even if I managed to hurt him, I wouldn’t hurt him enough to keep him from killing me. Maybe I should make him try to kill me. Maybe it would get me out of this Godawful place where people punished you for helping them. Maybe it would get me home. But in how many pieces? Fowler would take the knife away from me and give it back edge first.

  I turned and slashed furiously at the corn stalk, then at the next. Behind me, Fowler laughed.

  “Maybe you got some sense after all,” he said.

  He watched me for a while, urging me on, literally cracking the whip. By the time he left, I was sweating, shaking, humiliated. I met the woman who had been working toward me and she whispered, “Slow down! Take a lick or two if you have to. You kill yourself today, he’ll push you to kill yourself every day.”

  There was sense in that. Hell, if I went on the way I had been, I wouldn’t even last through today. My shoulders were already beginning to ache.

  Fowler came back as I was gathering the cut stalks. “What the devil do you think you’re doing!” he demanded. “You ought to be halfway down the next row by now.” He hit me across the back as I bent down. “Move! You’re not in the cookhouse getting fat and lazy now. Move!”

  He did that all day. Coming up suddenly, shouting at me, ordering me to go faster no matter how fast I went, cursing me, threatening me. He didn’t hit me that often, but he kept me on edge because I never knew when a blow would fall. It got so just the sound of his coming terrified me. I caught myself cringing, jumping at the sound of his voice.

  The woman in my row explained, “He’s always hard on a new nigger. Make ’em go fast so he can see how fast they can work. Then later on if they slow down, he whip ’em for gettin’ lazy.”

  I made myself slow down. It wasn’t hard. I didn’t think my shoulders could have hurt much worse if they’d been broken. Sweat ran down into my eyes and my hands were beginning to blister. My back hurt from the blows I’d taken as well as from sore muscles. After a while, it was more painful for me to push myself than it was for me to let Fowler hit me. After a while, I was so tired, I didn’t care either way. Pain was pain. After a while, I just wanted to lie down between the rows and not get up again.

  I stumbled and fell, got up and fell again. Finally, I lay face-down in the dirt, unable
to get up. Then came a welcome blackness. I could have been going home or dying or passing out; it made no difference to me. I was going away from the pain. That was all.

  6

  I was on my back when I came to and there was a white face floating just above me. For a wild moment, I thought it was Kevin, thought I was home. I said his name eagerly.

  “It’s me, Dana.”

  Rufus’s voice. I was still in hell. I closed my eyes, not caring what would happen next.

  “Dana, get up. You’ll be hurt more if I carry you than if you walk.”

  The words echoed strangely in my head. Kevin had said something like that to me once. I opened my eyes again to be sure it was Rufus.

  It was. I was still in the cornfield, still lying in the dirt.

  “I came to get you,” said Rufus. “Not soon enough, I guess.”

  I struggled to my feet. He offered a hand to help me, but I ignored it. I brushed myself off a little and followed him down the row toward his horse. From there, we rode together back to the house without a word passing between us. At the house, I went straight to the well, got a bucket of water, carried it up the stairs somehow, then washed, spread antiseptic on my new cuts, and put on clean clothes. I had a headache that eventually drove me down to Rufus’s room for some Excedrin. Rufus had used all the aspirins.

  Unfortunately, he was in his room.

  “Well, you’re no good in the fields,” he said when he saw me. “That’s clear.”

  I stopped, turned, and stared at him. Just stared. He had been sitting on his bed, leaning back against the headboard, but now he straightened, faced me.

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Dana.”

  “Right,” I said softly. “I’ve done enough stupid things. How many times have I saved your life so far?” My aching head sent me to his desk where I had left the Excedrin. I shook three of them into my hand. I had never taken so many before. I had never needed so many before. My hands were trembling.

  “Fowler would have given you a good whipping if I hadn’t stopped him,” said Rufus. “That’s not the first beating I’ve saved you from.”