Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

  “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!’”

&
nbsp; I thought for a moment. “Yes, that sounds about right.”

  “It doesn’t sound right to me.”

  “I mean it sounds like what he said! I don’t have any control over what he says.”

  “But still …” He paused, looked at me as though he expected me to say something. I didn’t. “It sounded more like what I might say to you if you were leaving.”

  “Would you?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Say what you mean. I can’t answer you unless you say it.”

  He drew a deep breath. “All right. You’ve said he was a man of his time, and you’ve told me what he’s done to Alice. What’s he done to you?”

  “Sent me to the field, had me beaten, made me spend nearly eight months sleeping on the floor of his mother’s room, sold people … He’s done plenty, but the worst of it was to other people. He hasn’t raped me, Kevin. He understands, though you don’t seem to, that for him that would be a form of suicide.”

  “You mean there’s something he could do to make you kill him, after all?”

  I sighed, went over to him, and sat down on the arm of his chair. I looked down at him. “Tell me you believe I’m lying to you.”

  He looked at me uncertainly. “Look, if anything did happen, I could understand it. I know how it was back then.”

  “You mean you could forgive me for having been raped?”

  “Dana, I lived there. I know what those people were like. And Rufus’s attitude toward you …”

  “Was sensible most of the time. He knew I could kill him just by turning my back at the right moment. And he believed that I wouldn’t have him because I loved you. He said something like that once. He was wrong, but I never told him so.”

  “Wrong?”

  “At least partly. Of course I love you, and I don’t want anyone else. But there’s another reason, and when I’m back there it’s the most important reason. I don’t think Rufus would have understood it. Maybe you won’t either.”

  “Tell me.”

  I thought for a moment, tried to find the right words. If I could make him understand, then surely he would believe me. He had to believe. He was my anchor here in my own time. The only person who had any idea what I was going through.

  “You know what I thought,” I said, “when I saw Tess tied into that coffle?” I had told him about Tess and about Sam—that I had known them, that Rufus had sold them. I hadn’t told him the details though—especially not the details of Sam’s sale. I had been trying for two weeks to avoid sending his thoughts in the direction they had taken now.

  “What does Tess have to do with …?”

  “I thought, that could be me—standing there with a rope around my neck waiting to be led away like someone’s dog!” I stopped, looked down at him, then went on softly. “I’m not property, Kevin. I’m not a horse or a sack of wheat. If I have to seem to be property, if I have to accept limits on my freedom for Rufus’s sake, then he also has to accept limits—on his behavior toward me. He has to leave me enough control of my own life to make living look better to me than killing and dying.”

  “If your black ancestors had felt that way, you wouldn’t be here,” said Kevin.

  “I told you when all this started that I didn’t have their endurance. I still don’t. Some of them will go on struggling to survive, no matter what. I’m not like that.”

  He smiled a little. “I suspect that you are.”

  I shook my head. He thought I was being modest or something. He didn’t understand.

  Then I realized that he had smiled. I looked down at him questioningly.

  He sobered. “I had to know.”

  “And do you, now?”

  “Yes.”

  That felt like truth. It felt enough like truth for me not to mind that he had only half understood me.

  “Have you decided what you’re going to do about Rufus?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “You know, it’s not only what will happen to the slaves that worries me … if I turn my back on him. It’s what might happen to me.”

  “You’ll be finished with him.”

  “I might be finished period. I might not be able to get home.”

  “Your coming home has never had anything to do with him. You come home when your life is in danger.”

  “But how do I come home? Is the power mine, or do I tap some power in him? All this started with him, after all. I don’t know whether I need him or not. And I won’t know until he’s not around.”

  3

  A couple of Kevin’s friends came over on the Fourth of July and tried to get us to go to the Rose Bowl with them for the fireworks. Kevin wanted to go—more to get out of the house than for any other reason, I suspected. I told him to go ahead, but he wouldn’t go without me. As it turned out, there was no chance for me to go, anyway. As Kevin’s friends left the house, I began to feel dizzy.

  I stumbled toward my bag, fell before I reached it, crawled toward it, grabbed it just as Kevin came in from saying good-bye to his friends.

  “Dana,” he was saying, “we can’t stay cooped up in this house any longer waiting for something that isn’t …”

  He was gone.

  Instead of lying on the floor of my living room, I was lying on the ground in the sun, almost directly over a hill of large black ants.

  Before I could get up, someone kicked me, fell on me heavily. I had the breath knocked out of me for a moment.

  “Dana!” said Rufus’s voice. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  I looked up, saw him sprawled across me where he had fallen. We got up just as something began to bite me—the ants, probably. I brushed myself off quickly.

  “I said what are you doing here!” He sounded angry. He looked no older than he had been when I’d last seen him, but something was wrong with him. He looked haggard and weary—looked as though it had been too long since he’d slept last, looked as though it would be even longer before he was able to sleep again.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here, Rufe. I never do until I find out what’s wrong with you.”

  He stared at me for a long moment. His eyes were red and under them were dark smudges. Finally, he grabbed me by the arm and led me back the way he had come. We were on the plantation not far from the house. Nothing looked changed. I saw two of Nigel’s sons wrestling, rolling around on the ground. They were the two I had been teaching, and they were no bigger than they had been when I saw them last.

  “Rufe, how long have I been gone?”

  He didn’t answer. He was leading me toward the barn, I saw, and apparently I wasn’t going to learn anything until I got there.

  He stopped at the barn door and pushed me through it. He didn’t follow me in.

  I looked around, seeing very little at first as my eyes became accustomed to the dimmer light. I turned to the place where I had been strung up and whipped—and jumped back in surprise when I saw that someone was hanging there. Hanging by the neck. A woman.

  Alice.

  I stared at her not believing, not wanting to believe … I touched her and her flesh was cold and hard. The dead gray face was ugly in death as it had never been in life. The mouth was open. The eyes were open and staring. Her head was bare and her hair loose and short like mine. She had never liked to tie it up the way other women did. It was one of the things that had made us look even more alike—the only two consistently bareheaded women on the place. Her dress was dark red and her apron clean and white. She wore shoes that Rufus had had made specifically for her, not the rough heavy shoes or boots other slaves wore. It was as though she had dressed up and combed her hair and then …

  I wanted her down.

  I looked around, saw that the rope had been tied to a wall peg, thrown over a beam. I broke my fingernails, trying to untie it until I remembered my knife. I got it from my bag and cut Alice down.

  She fell stiffly like something that would break when it hit the floor. But she landed without breaking and I took th
e rope from her neck and closed her eyes. For a time, I just sat with her, holding her head and crying silently.

  Eventually, Rufus came in. I looked up at him and he looked away.

  “Did she do this to herself?” I asked.

  “Yes. To herself.”

  “Why?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Rufe?”

  He shook his head slowly from side to side.

  “Where are her children?”

  He turned and walked out of the barn.

  I straightened Alice’s body and her dress and looked around for something to cover her with. There was nothing.

  I left the barn and went across an expanse of grass to the cookhouse. Sarah was there chopping meat with that frightening speed and coordination of hers. I had told her once that it always looked as though she was about to cut off a finger or two, and she had laughed. She still had all ten.

  “Sarah?” There was such a difference in our ages now that everyone else my age called her “Aunt Sarah.” I knew it was a title of respect in this culture, and I respected her. But I couldn’t quite manage “Aunt” any more than I could have managed “Mammy.” She didn’t seem to mind.

  She looked up. “Dana! Girl, what are you doing back here? What Marse Rufe done now?”

  “I’m not sure. But, Sarah, Alice is dead.”

  Sarah put down her cleaver and sat on the bench next to the table. “Oh Lord. Poor child. He finally killed her.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I went over and sat beside her. “I think she did it to herself. Hung herself. I just took her down.”

  “He did it!” she hissed. “Even if he didn’t put the rope on her, he drove her to it. He sold her babies!”

  I frowned. Sarah had spoken clearly enough, loudly enough, but for a moment, I didn’t understand. “Joe and Hagar? His children?”

  “What he care ’bout that?”

  “But … he did care. He was going to … Why would he do such a thing?”

  “She run off.” Sarah faced me. “You must have known she was goin’. You and her was like sisters.”