Kindred (24 page)

“He go’ pee all over you in a minute,” said Alice. “He likes to let go just when somebody’s holding him.”

I put the baby down quickly—just in time, as it turned out.

“Dana?”

I looked at her.

“What am I going to do?”

I hesitated, shook my head. “I can’t advise you. It’s your body.”

“Not mine.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “Not mine, his. He paid for it, didn’t he?”

“Paid who? You?”

“You know he didn’t pay me! Oh, what’s the difference? Whether it’s right or wrong, the law says he owns me now. I don’t know why he hasn’t already whipped the skin off me. The things I’ve said to him …”

“You know why.”

She began to cry. “I ought to take a knife in there with me and cut his damn throat.” She glared at me. “Now go tell him that! Tell him I’m talking ’bout killing him!”

“Tell him yourself.”

“Do your job! Go tell him! That’s what you for—to help white folks keep niggers down. That’s why he sent you to me. They be calling you mammy in a few years. You be running the whole house when the old man dies.”

I shrugged and stopped the curious baby from sucking on my shoe string.

“Go tell on me, Dana. Show him you the kind of woman he needs, not me.”

I said nothing.

“One white man, two white men, what difference do it make?”

“One black man, two black men, what difference does that make?”

“I could have ten black men without turning against my own.”

I shrugged again, refusing to argue with her. What could I win?

She made a wordless sound and covered her face with her hands. “What’s the matter with you?” she said wearily. “Why you let me run you down like that? You done everything you could for me, maybe even saved my life. I seen people get lockjaw and die from way less than I had wrong with me. Why you let me talk about you so bad?”

“Why do you do it?”

She sighed, bent her body into a “c” as she crouched in the chair. “Because I get so mad … I get so mad I can taste it in my mouth. And you’re the only one I can take it out on—the only one I can hurt and not be hurt back.”

“Don’t keep doing it,” I said. “I have feelings just like you do.”

“Do you want me to go to him?”

“I can’t tell you that. You have to decide.”

“Would you go to him?”

I glanced at the floor. “We’re in different situations. What I’d do doesn’t matter.”

“Would you go to him?”

“No.”

“Even though he’s just like your husband?”

“He isn’t.”

“But … All right, even though you don’t … don’t hate him like I do?”

“Even so.”

“Then I won’t go either.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know. Run away?”

I got up to leave.

“Where you going?” she asked quickly.

“To stall Rufus. If I really work at it, I think I can get him to let you off tonight. That will give you a start.”

She dropped the dress to the floor and came out of her chair to grab me. “No, Dana! Don’t go.” She drew a deep breath, then seemed to sag. “I’m lying. I can’t run again. I can’t. You be hungry and cold and sick out there, and so tired you can’t walk. Then they find you and set dogs on you … My Lord, the dogs …” She was silent for a moment. “I’m going to him. He knew I would sooner or later. But he don’t know how I wish I had the nerve to just kill him!”

12

She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn’t kill, but she seemed to die a little.

Kevin didn’t come to me, didn’t write. Rufus finally let me write another letter—payment for services rendered, I supposed—and he mailed it for me. Yet another month went by, and Kevin didn’t reply.

“Don’t worry about it,” Rufus told me. “He probably did move again. We’ll be getting a letter from him in Maine any day now.”

I didn’t say anything. Rufus had become talkative and happy, openly affectionate to a quietly tolerant Alice. He drank more than he should have sometimes, and one morning after he’d really overdone it, Alice came downstairs with her whole face swollen and bruised.

That was the morning I stopped wondering whether I should ask him to help me go North to find Kevin. I wouldn’t have expected him to give me money, but he could have gotten me some damned official-looking free papers. He could even have gone with me, at least to the Pennsylvania State Line. Or he could have stopped me cold.

He had already found the way to control me—by threatening others. That was safer than threatening me directly, and it worked. It was a lesson he had no doubt learned from his father. Weylin, for instance, had known just how far to push Sarah. He had sold only three of her children—left her one to live for and protect. I didn’t doubt now that he could have found a buyer for Carrie, afflicted as she was. But Carrie was a useful young woman. Not only did she work hard and well herself, not only had she produced a healthy new slave, but she had kept first her mother, and now her husband in line with no effort at all on Weylin’s part. I didn’t want to find out how much Rufus had learned from his father’s handling of her.

I longed for my map now. It contained names of towns I could write myself passes to. No doubt some of the towns on it didn’t exist yet, but at least it would have given me a better idea of what was ahead. I would have to take my chances without it.

Well, at least I knew that Easton was a few miles to the north, and that the road that ran past the Weylin house would take me to it. Unfortunately, it would also take me through a lot of open fields—places where it would be nearly impossible to hide. And pass or no pass, I would hide from whites if I could.

I would have to carry food—johnnycake, smoked meat, dried fruit, a bottle of water. I had access to what I needed. I had heard of runaway slaves starving before they reached freedom, or poisoning themselves because they were as ignorant as I was about which wild plants were edible.

In fact, I had read and heard enough scare stories about the fate of runaways to keep me with the Weylins for several days longer than I meant to stay. I might not have believed them, but I had the example of Isaac and Alice before me. Fittingly, then, it was Alice who gave me the push I needed.

I was helping Tess with the wash—sweating and stirring dirty clothes as they boiled in their big iron pot—when Alice came to me, crept to me, looking back over her shoulder, her eyes wide with what I read as fear.

“You look at this,” she said to me, not even glancing at Tess who had stopped pounding a pair of Weylin’s pants to watch us. She trusted Tess. “See,” she said. “I been looking where I wasn’t s’pose to look—in Mister Rufe’s bed chest. But what I found don’t look like it ought to be there.”

She took two letters from her apron pocket. Two letters, their seals broken, their faces covered with my handwriting.

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“Yours?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. I can read some words. Got to take these back now.”

“Yes.”

She turned to go.

“Alice.”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks. Be careful when you put them back.”

“You be careful too,” she said. Our eyes met and we both knew what she was talking about.

I left that night.

I collected the food and “borrowed” one of Nigel’s old hats, to pull down over my hair—which wasn’t very long, luckily. When I asked Nigel for the hat, he just looked at me for a long moment, then got it for me. No questions. I didn’t think he expected to see it again.

I stole a pair of Rufus’s old trousers and a worn shirt. My jeans and shirts were too well known to Rufus’s neighbors, and the dress Alice had made me looked too much like the dresses every other slave woman on the place wore. Besides, I had decided to become a boy. In the loose, shabby, but definitely male clothing I had chosen, my height and my contralto voice would get me by. I hoped.

I packed everything I could into my denim bag and left it in its place on my pallet where I normally used it as a pillow. My freedom of movement was more useful to me now than it had ever been. I could go where I wanted to and no one said, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you working?” Everyone assumed I was working. Wasn’t I the industrious stupid one who always worked?

So I was left alone, allowed to make my preparations. I even got a chance to prowl through Weylin’s library. Finally, at day’s end, I went to the attic with the other house servants and lay down to wait until they were asleep. That was my mistake.

I wanted the others to be able to say they saw me go to bed. I wanted Rufus and Tom Weylin to waste time looking around the plantation for me tomorrow when they realized they hadn’t seen me for a while. They wouldn’t do that if some house servant—one of the children, perhaps—said, “She never went to bed last night.”

Overplanning.

I got up when the others had been quiet for some time. It was about midnight, and I knew I could be past Easton before morning. I had talked to others who had walked the distance. Before the sun rose, though, I’d have to find a place to hide and sleep. Then I could write myself a pass to one of the other places whose names and general locations I had learned in Weylin’s library. There was a place near the county line called Wye Mills. Beyond that, I would veer northeast, slanting toward the plantation of a cousin of Weylin’s and toward Delaware to travel up the highest part of the peninsula. In that way, I hoped to avoid many of the rivers. I had a feeling they were what would make my trip long and difficult.

I crept away from the Weylin house, moving through the darkness with even less confidence than I had felt when I fled to Alice’s house months before. Years before. I hadn’t known quite as well then what there was to fear. I had never seen a captured runaway like Alice. I had never felt the whip across my own back. I had never felt a man’s fists.

I felt almost sick to my stomach with fear, but I kept walking. I stumbled over a stick that lay in the road and first cursed it, then picked it up. It felt good in my hand, solid. A stick like this had saved me once. Now, it quenched a little of my fear, gave me confidence. I walked faster, moving into the woods alongside the road as soon as I passed Weylin’s fields.

The way was north toward Alice’s old cabin, toward the Holman plantation, toward Easton which I would have to skirt. The walking was easy, at least. This was flat country with only a few barely noticeable rolling hills to break the monotony. The road ran through thick dark woods that were probably full of good places to hide. And the only water I saw flowed in streams so tiny they barely wet my feet. That wouldn’t last, though. There would be rivers.

I hid from an old black man who drove a wagon pulled by a mule. He went by humming tunelessly, apparently fearing neither patrollers nor any other dangers of the night. I envied his calmness.

I hid from three white men who rode by on horseback. They had a dog with them, and I was afraid it would smell me and give me away. Luckily, the wind was in my favor, and it went on its way. Another dog found me later, though. It came racing toward me through a field and over a rail fence, barking and growling. I turned to meet it almost without thinking, and clubbed it down as it lunged at me.

I wasn’t really afraid. Dogs with white men frightened me, or dogs in packs—Sarah had told me of runaways who had been torn to pieces by the packs of dogs used to hunt them. But one lone dog didn’t seem to be much of a threat.

As it turned out, the dog was no threat at all. I hit it, it fell, then got up and limped away yelping. I let it go, glad I hadn’t had to hurt it worse. I liked dogs normally.

I hurried on, wanting to be out of sight if the dog’s noise brought people out to investigate. The experience did make me a little more confident of my ability to defend myself, though, and the natural night noises disturbed me less.

I reached the town and avoided what I could see of it—a few shadowy buildings. I walked on, beginning to tire, beginning to worry that dawn was not far away. I couldn’t tell whether my worrying was legitimate or came from my desire to rest. Not for the first time, I wished I had been wearing a watch when Rufus called me.

I pushed myself on until I could see that the sky really was growing light. Then, as I looked around wondering where I could find shelter for the day, I heard horses. I moved farther from the road and crouched in a thick growth of bushes, grasses, and young trees. I was used to hiding now, and no more afraid than I had been when I’d hidden before. No one had spotted me yet.

There were two horsemen moving slowly up the road toward me. Very slowly. They were looking around, peering through the dimness into the trees. I could see that one of them was riding a light colored horse. A gray horse, I saw as it drew closer, a …

I jumped. I managed not to gasp, but I did make that one small involuntary movement. And a twig that I hadn’t noticed snapped under me.

The horsemen stopped almost in front of me, Rufus on the gray he usually rode, and Tom Weylin on a darker animal. I could see them clearly now. They were looking for me—already! They shouldn’t even have known yet that I was gone. They couldn’t have known—unless someone told them. Someone must have seen me leaving, someone other than Rufus or Tom Weylin. They would simply have stopped me. It must have been one of the slaves. Someone had betrayed me. And now, I had betrayed myself.

“I heard something,” said Tom Weylin.

And Rufus, “So did I. She’s around here somewhere.”

I shrank down, tried to make myself smaller without moving enough to make more noise.

“Damn that Franklin,” I heard Rufus say.

“You’re damning the wrong man,” said Weylin.

Rufus let that go unanswered.

“Look over there!” Weylin was pointing away from me, pointing into the woods ahead of me. He headed his horse over to investigate what he had seen—and frightened out a large bird.

Rufus’s eyes were better. He ignored his father and headed straight for me. He couldn’t have seen me, couldn’t have seen anything other than a possible hiding place. He plunged his horse into the bushes that hid me, plunged it in to either trample me or drive me out.