Kindred (23 page)

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked bitterly. “You could have said something, got me out of his room, his bed … Oh Lord, his bed! And he may as well have cut my Isaac’s ears off with his own hand.”

“He never told anyone Isaac beat him.”

“Shit!”

“It’s true. He never did because he didn’t want you to get hurt. I know because I was with him until he got back on his feet. I took care of him.”

“If you had any sense, you would have let him die!”

“If I had, it wouldn’t have kept you and Isaac from being caught. It might have gotten you both killed though if anyone guessed what Isaac had done.”

“Doctor-nigger,” she said with contempt. “Think you know so much. Reading-nigger.
White-nigger!
Why didn’t you know enough to let me die?”

I said nothing. She was getting angrier and angrier, shouting at me. I turned away from her sadly, telling myself it was better, safer for her to vent her feelings on me than on anyone else.

Along with her shouting now, I could hear the thin faint cries of a baby.

11

Carrie and Nigel named their thin, wrinkled, brown son, Jude. Nigel did a lot of strutting and happy babbling until Weylin told him to shut up and get back to work on the covered passageway he was supposed to be building to connect the house and the cookhouse. A few days after the baby’s birth, though, Weylin called him into the library and gave him a new dress for Carrie, a new blanket, and a new suit of clothes for himself.

“See,” Nigel told me later with some bitterness. “’Cause of Carrie and me, he’s one nigger richer.” But before the Weylins, he was properly grateful.

“Thank you, Marse Tom. Yes, sir. Sure do thank you. Fine clothes, yes, sir …”

Finally he escaped back to the covered passageway.

Meanwhile, in the library, I heard Weylin tell Rufus, “You should have been the one to give him something—instead of wasting all your money on that worthless girl.”

“She’s well!” Rufus answered. “Dana got her well. Why do you say she’s worthless?”

“Because you’re going to have to whip her sick again to get what you want from her!”

Silence.

“Dana should have been enough for you. She’s got some sense.” He paused. “Too much sense for her own good, I’d say, but at least she wouldn’t give you trouble. She’s had that Franklin fellow to teach her a few things.”

Rufus walked away from him without answering. I had to get away from the library door where I had been eavesdropping very quickly as I heard him approach. I ducked into the dining room and came out again just as he was passing by.

“Rufe.”

He gave me a look that said he didn’t want to be bothered, but he stopped anyway.

“I want to write another letter.”

He frowned. “You’ve got to be patient, Dana. It hasn’t been that long.”

“It’s been over a month.”

“Well … I don’t know. Kevin could have moved again, could have done anything. I think you should give him a little more time to answer.”

“Answer what?” asked Weylin. He’d done what Rufus had predicted—come up behind us so silently that I hadn’t noticed him.

Rufus glanced at his father sourly. “Letter to Kevin Franklin telling him she’s here.”

“She wrote a letter?”

“I told her to write it. Why should I do it when she can?”

“Boy, you don’t have the sense you—” He cut off abruptly. “Dana, go do your work!”

I left wondering whether Rufus had shown lack of sense by letting me write the letter—instead of writing it himself—or by sending it. After all, if Kevin never came back for me, Weylin’s property was increased by one more slave. Even if I proved not to be very useful, he could always sell me.

I shuddered. I had to talk Rufus into letting me write another letter. The first one could have been lost or destroyed or sent to the wrong place. Things like that were still happening in 1976. How much worse might they be in this horse-and-buggy era? And surely Kevin would give up on me if I went home without him again—left him here for more long years. If he hadn’t already given up on me.

I tried to put that thought out of my mind. It came to me now and then even though everything people told me seemed to indicate that he was waiting. Still waiting.

I went out to the laundry yard to help Tess. I had come to almost welcome the hard work. It kept me from thinking. White people thought I was industrious. Most blacks thought I was either stupid or too intent on pleasing the whites. I thought I was keeping my fears and doubts at bay as best I could, and managing to stay relatively sane.

I caught Rufus alone again the next day—in his room this time where we weren’t likely to be interrupted. But he wouldn’t listen when I brought up the letter. His mind was on Alice. She was stronger now, and his patience with her was gone. I had thought that eventually, he would just rape her again—and again. In fact, I was surprised that he hadn’t already done it. I didn’t realize that he was planning to involve me in that rape. He was, and he did.

“Talk to her, Dana,” he said once he’d brushed aside the matter of my letter. “You’re older than she is. She thinks you know a lot. Talk to her!”

He was sitting on his bed staring into the cold fireplace. I sat at his desk looking at the clear plastic pen I had loaned him. He’d used half its ink already. “What the hell have you been writing with this?” I asked.

“Dana, listen to me!”

I turned to face him. “I heard you.”

“Well?”

“I can’t stop you from raping the woman, Rufe, but I’m not going to help you do it either.”

“You want her to get hurt?”

“Of course not. But you’ve already decided to hurt her, haven’t you?”

He didn’t answer.

“Let her go, Rufe. Hasn’t she suffered enough because of you?” He wouldn’t. I knew he wouldn’t.

His green eyes glittered. “She’ll never get away from me again. Never!” He drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. “You know, Daddy wants me to send her to the fields and take you.”

“Does he?”

“He thinks all I want is a woman. Any woman. So you, then. He says you’d be less likely to give me trouble.”

“Do you believe him?”

He hesitated, managed to smile a little. “No.”

I nodded. “Good.”

“I know you, Dana. You want Kevin the way I want Alice. And you had more luck than I did because no matter what happens now, for a while he wanted you too. Maybe I can’t ever have that—both wanting, both loving. But I’m not going to give up what I can have.”

“What do you mean, ‘no matter what happens now?’”

“What in hell do you think I mean? It’s been five years! You want to write another letter. Did you ever think maybe he threw the first letter out? Maybe he got like Alice—wanted to be with one of his own kind.”

I said nothing. I knew what he was doing—trying to share his pain, hurt me as he was hurting. And of course, he knew just where I was vulnerable. I tried to keep a neutral expression, but he went on.

“He told me once that you two had been married for four years. That means he’s been here away from you even longer than you’ve been together. I doubt if he’d have waited as long as he did if you weren’t the only one who could get him back to his home time. But now … who knows. The right woman could make this time mighty sweet to him.”

“Rufe, nothing you say to me is going to ease your way with Alice.”

“No? How about this: You talk to her—talk some sense into her—or you’re going to watch while Jake Edwards beats some sense into her!”

I stared at him in revulsion. “Is that what you call love?”

He was on his feet and across the room to me before I could take another breath. I sat where I was, watching him, feeling frightened, and suddenly very much aware of my knife, of how quickly I could reach it. He wasn’t going to beat me. Not him, not ever.

“Get up!” he ordered. He didn’t order me around much, and he’d never done it in that tone. “Get up, I said!”

I didn’t move.

“I’ve been too easy on you,” he said. His voice was suddenly low and ugly. “I treated you like you were better than the ordinary niggers. I see I made a mistake!”

“That’s possible,” I said. “I’m waiting for you to show me I made a mistake.”

For several seconds, he stood frozen, towering over me, glaring down as though he meant to hit me. Finally, though, he relaxed, leaned against his desk. “You think you’re white!” he muttered. “You don’t know your place any better than a wild animal.”

I said nothing.

“You think you own me because you saved my life!”

And I relaxed, glad not to have to take the life I had saved—glad not to have to risk other lives, including my own.

“If I ever caught myself wanting you like I want her, I’d cut my throat,” he said.

I hoped that problem would never arise. If it did, one of us would do some cutting all right.

“Help me, Dana.”

“I can’t.”

“You can! You and nobody else. Go to her. Send her to me. I’ll have her whether you help or not. All I want you to do is fix it so I don’t have to beat her. You’re no friend of hers if you won’t do that much!”

Of hers! He had all the low cunning of his class. No, I couldn’t refuse to help the girl—help her avoid at least some pain. But she wouldn’t think much of me for helping her this way. I didn’t think much of myself.

“Do it!” hissed Rufus.

I got up and went out to find her.

She was strange now, erratic, sometimes needing my friendship, trusting me with her dangerous longings for freedom, her wild plans to run away again; and sometimes hating me, blaming me for her trouble.

One night in the attic, she was crying softly and telling me something about Isaac. She stopped suddenly and asked, “Have you heard from your husband yet, Dana?”

“Not yet.”

“Write another letter. Even if you have to do it in secret.”

“I’m working on it.”

“No sense in you losing your man too.”

Yet moments later for no reason that I could see, she attacked me, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, whining and crying after some poor white trash of a man, black as you are. You always try to act so white. White nigger, turning against your own people!”

I never really got used to her sudden switches, her attacks, but I put up with them. I had taken her through all the other stages of healing, and somehow, I couldn’t abandon her now. Most of the time, I couldn’t even get angry. She was like Rufus. When she hurt, she struck out to hurt others. But she had been hurting less as the days passed, and striking out less. She was healing emotionally as well as physically. I had helped her to heal. Now I had to help Rufus tear her wounds open again.

She was at Carrie’s cabin watching Jude and two other older babies someone had left with her. She had no regular duties yet, but like me, she had found her own work. She liked children, and she liked sewing. She would take the coarse blue cloth Weylin bought for the slaves and make neat sturdy clothing of it while small children played around her feet. Weylin complained that she was like old Mary with the children and the sewing, but he brought her his clothing to be mended. She worked better and faster than the slave woman who had taken over much of old Mary’s sewing—and if she had an enemy on the plantation, it was that woman, Liza, who was now in danger of being sent to more onerous work.

I went into the cabin and sat down with Alice before the cold fireplace. Jude slept beside her in the crib Nigel had made for him. The other two babies were awake lying naked on blankets on the floor quietly playing with their feet.

Alice looked up at me, then held up a long blue dress. “This is for you,” she said. “I’m sick of seeing you in them pants.”

I looked down at my jeans. “I’m so used to dressing like this, I forget sometimes. At least it keeps me from having to serve at the table.”

“Serving ain’t bad.” She’d done it a few times. “And if Mister Tom wasn’t so stingy, you’d have had a dress a long time ago. Man loves a dollar more than he loves Jesus.”

That, I believed literally. Weylin had dealings with banks. I knew because he complained about them. But I had never known him to have any dealings with churches or hold any kind of prayer meeting in his home. The slaves had to sneak away in the night and take their chances with the patrollers if they wanted to have any kind of religious meeting.

“Least you can look like a woman when your man comes for you,” Alice said.

I drew a deep breath. “Thanks.”

“Yeah. Now tell me what you come here to say … that you don’t want to say.”

I looked at her, startled.

“You think I don’t know you after all this time? You got a look that says you don’t want to be here.”

“Yes. Rufus sent me to talk to you.” I hesitated. “He wants you tonight.”

Her expression hardened. “He sent
you
to tell me that?”

“No.”

She waited, glaring at me, silently demanding that I tell her more.

I said nothing.

“Well! What did he send you for then?”

“To talk you into going to him quietly, and to tell you you’d be whipped this time if you resist.”

“Shit! Well, all right, you told me. Now get out of here before I throw this dress in the fireplace and light it.”

“I don’t give a damn what you do with that dress.”

Now it was her turn to be startled. I didn’t usually talk to her that way, even when she deserved it.

I leaned back comfortably in Nigel’s homemade chair. “Message delivered,” I said. “Do what you want.”

“I mean to.”

“You might look ahead a little though. Ahead and in all three directions.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, it looks as though you have three choices. You can go to him as he orders; you can refuse, be whipped, and then have him take you by force; or you can run away again.”

She said nothing, bent to her sewing and drew the needle in quick neat tiny stitches even though her hands were shaking. I bent down to play with one of the babies—one who had forgotten his own feet and crawled over to investigate my shoe. He was a fat curious little boy of several months who began trying to pull the buttons off my blouse as soon as I picked him up.