Butler, Octavia - Kindred

Margaret slapped me across the face.

I stood very still, gazed down at her with frozen calm. She was three or four inches shorter than I was and proportionately smaller. Her slap hadn’t hurt me much. It had simply made me want to hurt her. Only my memory of the whip kept me still.

“You filthy black whore!” she shouted. “This is a Christian house!” I said nothing.

“I’ll see you sent to the quarter where you belong!” Still I said nothing. I looked at her.

“I won’t have you in my house!” She took a step back from me. “You stop looking at me that way!” She took another step back.

It occurred to me that she was a little afraid of me. I was an unknown, after all—an unpredictable new slave. And maybe I was a little too silent. Slowly, deliberately, I turned my back and went on sweeping.

I kept an eye on her, though, without seeming to. After all, she was as unpredictable as I was. She could pick up a candlestick or a vase and hit me with it. And whip or no whip, I wasn’t going to stand passively and let her really hurt me.

But she made no move toward me. Instead, she turned and rushed away. It was a hot day, muggy and uncomfortable. No one else was mov- ing very fast except to wave away flies. But Margaret Weylin still rushed everywhere. She had little or nothing to do. Slaves kept her house clean, did much of her sewing, all her cooking and washing. Carrie even helped her put her clothes on and take them off. So Margaret supervised— ordered people to do work they were already doing, criticized their slow- ness and laziness even when they were quick and industrious, and in

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general, made trouble. Weylin had married a poor, uneducated, nervous, startlingly pretty young woman who was determined to be the kind of person she thought of as a lady. That meant she didn’t do “menial” work, or any work at all, apparently. I had no one to compare her to except her guests who seemed, at least, to be calmer. But I suspected that most women of her time found enough to do to keep themselves comfortably busy whether they thought of themselves as “ladies” or not. Margaret, in her boredom, simply rushed around and made a nuisance of herself.

I finished my work in the library, wondering all the while whether Margaret had gone to her husband about me. Her husband, I feared. I remembered the expression on his face when he had beaten the field hand. It hadn’t been gleeful or angry or even particularly interested. He could have been chopping wood. He wasn’t sadistic, but he didn’t shrink from his “duties” as master of the plantation. He would beat me bloody if he thought I had given him reason, and Kevin might not even find out until too late.

I went up to Kevin’s room, but he wasn’t there. I heard him when I passed Rufus’s room and I would have gone in, but a moment later, I heard Margaret’s voice. Repelled, I went back downstairs and out to the cookhouse.

Sarah and Carrie were alone when I went in, and I was glad of that. Sometimes old people and children lounged there, or house servants or even field hands stealing a few moments of leisure. I liked to listen to them talk sometimes and fight my way through their accents to find out more about how they survived lives of slavery. Without knowing it, they prepared me to survive. But now I wanted only Sarah and Carrie. I could say what I felt around them, and it wouldn’t get back to either of the Weylins.

“Dana,” Sarah greeted me, “you be careful. I spoke for you today. I

don’t want you making me out to be a liar!”

I frowned. “Spoke for me? To Miss Margaret?”

Sarah gave a short harsh laugh. “No! You know I don’t say no more to her than I can help. She’s got her house, and I got my kitchen.”

I smiled and my own trouble receded a little. Sarah was right. Mar- garet Weylin kept out of her way. Talk between them was brief and confined usually to meal planning.

“Why do you dislike her so if she doesn’t bother you?” I asked.

Sarah gave me the look of silent rage that I had not seen since my first

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day on the plantation. “Whose idea you think it was to sell my babies?” “Oh.” She had not mentioned her lost children since that first day

either.

“She wanted new furniture, new china dishes, fancy things you see in that house now. What she had was good enough for Miss Hannah, and Miss Hannah was a real lady. Quality. But it wasn’t good enough for white-trash Margaret. So she made Marse Tom sell my three boys to get money to buy things she didn’t even need!”

“Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. My trouble seemed to shrink and become not worth mentioning. Sarah was silent for a while, her hands kneading bread dough automatically, maybe with a little more vigor than necessary. Finally she spoke again.

“It was Marse Tom I spoke to for you.” I jumped. “Am I in trouble?”

“Not by anything I said. He just wanted to know how you work and are you lazy. I told him you wasn’t lazy. Told him you didn’t know how to do some things—and, girl, you come here not knowing how to do nothing , but I didn’t tell him that. I said if you don’t know how to do something, you find out. And you work. I tell you to do something, I know it’s going to be done. Marse Tom say he might buy you.”

“Mr. Franklin won’t sell me.”

She lifted her head a little and literally looked down her nose at me. “No. Guess he won’t. Anyway, Miss Margaret don’t want you here.”

I shrugged.

“Bitch,” muttered Sarah monotonously. Then, “Well, greedy and mean as she is, at least she don’t bother Carrie much.”

I looked at the mute girl eating stew and corn bread left over from the table of the whites. “Doesn’t she, Carrie?”

Carrie shook her head and kept eating.

“Course,” said Sarah, turning away from the bread dough, “Carrie don’t have nothing Miss Margaret wants.”

I just looked at her.

“You’re caught between,” she said. “You know that don’t you?” “One man ought to be enough for her.”

“Don’t matter what ought to be. Matters what is. Make him let you sleep in the attic again.”

“Make him!”

“Girl …” She smiled a little. “I see you and him together sometimes

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when you think nobody’s looking. You can make him do just about any- thing you want him to do.”

Her smile surprised me. I would have expected her to be disgusted with me—or with Kevin.

“Fact,” she continued, “if you got any sense, you’ll try to get him to free you now while you still young and pretty enough for him to listen.” I looked at her appraisingly—large dark eyes set in a full unlined face several shades lighter than my own. She had been pretty herself not long ago. She was still an attractive woman. I spoke to her softly. “Were you

sensible, Sarah? Did you try when you were younger?”

She stared hard at me, her large eyes suddenly narrowed. Finally, she walked away without answering.

7

I didn’t move to the quarter. I took some cookhouse advice that I’d once heard Luke give to Nigel. “Don’t argue with white folks,” he had said. “Don’t tell them ‘no.’ Don’t let them see you mad. Just say ‘yes, sir.’ Then go ’head and do what you want to do. Might have to take a whippin’ for it later on, but if you want it bad enough, the whippin’ won’t matter much.”

There were a few whip marks on Luke’s back, and I’d twice heard Tom Weylin swear to give them company. But he hadn’t. And Luke went about his business, doing pretty much as he pleased. His business was keeping the field hands in line. Called the driver, he was a kind of black overseer. And he kept this relatively high position in spite of his attitude. I decided to develop a similar attitude—though with less risk to myself, I thought. I had no intention of taking a whipping if I could avoid it, and I was sure Kevin could protect me if he was nearby when I needed him.