Butler, Octavia - Kindred

It was morning when I awoke, and I was still at home. My back hurt whenever I moved. I managed to spray it with an ointment Kevin had used for sunburn. The whip lacerations hurt like burns. The ointment cooled them and seemed to help. I had the feeling I should have used something stronger, though. Heaven knew what kind of infection you could get from a whip kept limber with oil and blood. Tom Weylin had ordered brine thrown onto the back of the field hand he had whipped. I could remember the man screaming as the solution hit him. But his wounds had healed without infection.

As I thought of the field hand, I felt strangely disoriented. For a moment, I thought Rufus was calling me again. Then I realized that I wasn’t really dizzy—only confused. My memory of a field hand being whipped suddenly seemed to have no place here with me at home.

I came out of the bathroom into the bedroom and looked around. Home. Bed—without canopy—dresser, closet, electric light, television, radio, electric clock, books. Home. It didn’t have anything to do with where I had been. It was real. It was where I belonged.

I put on a loose dress and went out to the front yard. The tiny blue- haired woman who lived next door noticed me and wished me a good morning. She was on her hands and knees digging in her flower garden and obviously enjoying herself. She reminded me of Margaret Weylin who also had flowers. I had heard Margaret’s guests compliment her on her flowers. But, of course, she didn’t take care of them herself …

Today and yesterday didn’t mesh. I felt almost as strange as I had after my first trip back to Rufus—caught between his home and mine.

There was a Volvo parked across the street and there were powerlines overhead. There were palm trees and paved streets. There was the bath- room I had just left. Not a hole-in-the-ground privy toilet that you had to hold your breath to go into, but a bathroom.

I went back into the house and turned the radio on to an all-news sta- tion. There, eventually, I learned that it was Friday, June 11, 1976. I’d gone away for nearly two months and come back yesterday—the same day I left home. Nothing was real.

Kevin could be gone for years even if I went after him today and

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brought him back tonight.

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I found a music station and turned the radio up loud to drown out my thinking.

The time passed and I did more unpacking, stopping often, taking too many aspirins. I began to bring some order to my own office. Once I sat down at my typewriter and tried to write about what had happened, made about six attempts before I gave up and threw them all away. Someday when this was over, if it was ever over, maybe I would be able to write about it.

I called my favorite cousin in Pasadena—my father’s sister’s daughter

—and had her buy groceries for me. I told her I was sick and Kevin wasn’t around. Something about my tone must have reached her. She didn’t ask any questions.

I was still afraid to leave the house, walking or driving. Driving, I could easily kill myself, and the car could kill other people if Rufus called me from it at the wrong time. Walking, I could get dizzy and fall while crossing the street. Or I could fall on the sidewalk and attract atten- tion. Someone could come to help me—a cop, anyone. Then I could be guilty of taking someone else back with me and stranding them.

My cousin was a good friend. She took one look at me and recom- mended a doctor she knew. She also advised me to send the police after Kevin. She assumed that my bruises were his work. But when I swore her to silence, I knew she would be silent. She and I had grown up keeping each other’s secrets.

“I never thought you’d be fool enough to let a man beat you,” she said as she left. She was disappointed in me, I think.

“I never thought I would either,” I whispered when she was gone.

I waited inside the house with my denim bag always nearby. The days passed slowly, and sometimes I thought I was waiting for something that just wasn’t going to happen. But I went on waiting.

I read books about slavery, fiction and nonfiction. I read everything I had in the house that was even distantly related to the subject—even Gone With the Wind , or part of it. But its version of happy darkies in ten- der loving bondage was more than I could stand.

Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin’s World War II books—a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in

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only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.

The books depressed me, scared me, made me stuff Kevin’s sleeping pills into my bag. Like the Nazis, ante bellum whites had known quite a bit about torture—quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.

3

I had been at home for eight days when the dizziness finally came again. I didn’t know whether to curse it for my own sake or welcome it for Kevin’s—not that it mattered what I did.

I went to Rufus’s time fully clothed, carrying my denim bag, wearing my knife. I arrived on my knees because of the dizziness, but I was immediately alert and wary.

I was in the woods either late in the day or early in the morning. The sun was low in the sky and surrounded as I was by trees, I had no refer- ence point to tell me whether it was rising or setting. I could see a stream not far from me, running between tall trees. Off to my opposite side was a woman, black, young—just a girl, really—with her dress torn down the front. She was holding it together as she watched a black man and a white man fighting.

The white man’s red hair told me who he must be. His face was already too much of a mess to tell me. He was losing his fight—had already lost it. The man he was fighting was his size with the same slen- der build, but in spite of the black man’s slenderness, he looked wiry and strong. He had probably been conditioned by years of hard work. He didn’t seem much affected when Rufus hit him, but he was killing Rufus.

Then it occurred to me that he might really be doing just that—killing the only person who might be able to help me find Kevin. Killing my ancestor. What had happened here seemed obvious. The girl, her torn dress. If everything was as it seemed, Rufus had earned his beating and more. Maybe he had grown up to be even worse than I had feared. But no matter what he was, I needed him alive—for Kevin’s sake and for my own.

I saw him fall, get up, and be knocked down again. This time, he got

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up more slowly, but he got up. I had a feeling he’d done a lot of getting up. He wouldn’t be doing much more.

I went closer, and the woman saw me. She called out something I didn’t quite understand, and the man turned his head to look at her. Then he followed her gaze to me. Just then, Rufus hit him on the jaw.

Surprisingly, the black man stumbled backward, almost fell. But Rufus was too tired and hurt to follow up his advantage. The black man hit him one more solid blow, and Rufus collapsed. There was no question of his getting up this time. He was out cold.

As I approached, the black man reached down and caught Rufus by the hair as though to hit him again. I stepped up to the man quickly. “What will they do to you if you kill him?” I said.

The man twisted around to glare at me.

“What will they do to the woman if you kill him?” I asked.

That seemed to reach him. He released Rufus and stood straight to face me. “Who’s going to say I did anything to him?” His voice was low and threatening, and I began to wonder whether I might wind up joining Rufus unconscious on the ground.