Butler, Octavia - Kindred

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I laughed and got the aspirins. Rufus never took anything from my bag without asking—though he could have easily done so.

“You sure you feel well enough to go to town?” I asked as I gave them to him.

“No,” he said, “but I’m going.” I didn’t find out until later that a visi- tor had brought him word of Alice and Isaac’s capture. He was going to get Alice.

And I went to the laundry yard to help a young slave named Tess to beat and boil the dirt out of a lot of heavy smelly clothes. She had been sick, and I had promised her I would help. My work was still pretty much whatever I wanted it to be. I felt a little guilty about that. No other slave—house or field—had that much freedom. I worked where I pleased, or where I saw that others needed help. Sarah sent me to do one job or another sometimes, but I didn’t mind that. In Margaret’s absence, Sarah ran the house—and the house servants. She spread the work fairly and managed the house as efficiently as Margaret had, but without much of the tension and strife Margaret generated. She was resented, of course, by slaves who made every effort to avoid jobs they didn’t like. But she was also obeyed.

“Lazy niggers!” she would mutter when she had to get after someone. I stared at her in surprise when I first heard her say it. “Why should

they work hard?” I asked. “What’s it going to get them?”

“It’ll get them the cowhide if they don’t,” she snapped. “I ain’t goin’

to take the blame for what they don’t do. Are you?” “Well, no, but …”

“I work. You work. Don’t need somebody behind us all the time to make us work.”

“When the time comes for me to stop working and get out of here, I’ll do it.”

She jumped, looked around quickly. “You got no sense sometimes! Just talk all over your mouth!”

“We’re alone.”

“Might not be alone as we look. People listen around here. And they talk too.”

I said nothing.

“You do what you want to do—or think you want to do. But you keep it to yourself.”

I nodded. “I hear.”

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She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You need to look at some of the niggers they catch and bring back,” she said. “You need to see them— starving, ’bout naked, whipped, dragged, bit by dogs … You need to see them.”

“I’d rather see the others.” “What others?”

“The ones who make it. The ones living in freedom now.” “If any do.”

“They do.”

“Some say they do. It’s like dying, though, and going to heaven. Nobody ever comes back to tell you about it.”

“Come back and be enslaved again?”

“Yeah. But still … This is dangerous talk! No point to it anyway.” “Sarah, I’ve seen books written by slaves who’ve run away and lived

in the North.”

“Books!” She tried to sound contemptuous but sounded uncertain instead. She couldn’t read. Books could be awesome mysteries to her, or they could be dangerous time-wasting nonsense. It depended on her mood. Now her mood seemed to flicker between curiosity and fear. Fear won. “Foolishness!” she said. “Niggers writing books!”

“But it’s true. I’ve seen …”

“Don’t want to hear no more ’bout it!” She had raised her voice sharply. That was unusual, and it seemed to surprise her as much as it surprised me. “Don’t want to hear no more,” she repeated softly. “Things ain’t bad here. I can get along.”

She had done the safe thing—had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman who might have been called “mammy” in some other household. She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties. The house-nigger, the handkerchief-head, the female Uncle Tom—the fright- ened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose, and who knew as little about the freedom of the North as she knew about the hereafter.

I looked down on her myself for a while. Moral superiority. Here was someone even less courageous than I was. That comforted me somehow. Or it did until Rufus and Nigel drove into town and came back with what was left of Alice.

It was late when they got home—almost dark. Rufus ran into the house

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shouting for me before I realized he was back. “Dana! Dana, get down here!”

I came out of his room—my new refuge when he wasn’t in it—and hurried down the stairs.

“Come on, come on!” he urged.

I said nothing, followed him out the front door not knowing what to expect. He led me to the wagon where Alice lay bloody, filthy, and barely alive.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “Help her!” demanded Rufus.

I looked at him, remembering why Alice needed help. I didn’t say any- thing, and I don’t know what expression I was wearing, but he took a step back from me.

“Just help her!” he said. “Blame me if you want to, but help her!”

I turned to her, straightened her body gently, feeling for broken bones. Miraculously, there didn’t seem to be any. Alice moaned and cried out weakly. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to see me.

“Where will you put her?” I asked Rufus. “In the attic?”

He lifted her gently, carefully, and carried her up to his bedroom. Nigel and I followed him up, saw him place the girl on his bed. Then

he looked up at me questioningly.

“Tell Sarah to boil some water,” I told Nigel. “And tell her to send some clean cloth for bandages. Clean cloth.” How clean would it be? Not sterile, of course, but I had just spent the day cooking clothes in lye soap and water. That surely got them clean.

“Rufe, get me something to cut these rags off her.”

Rufus hurried out, came back with a pair of his mother’s scissors. Most of Alice’s wounds were new, and the cloth came away from them

easily. Those that had dried and stuck to the cloth, I left alone. Warm water would soften them.

“Rufe, have you got any kind of antiseptic?” “Anti-what?”

I looked at him. “You’ve never heard of it?” “No. What is it?”

“Never mind. I could use a salt solution, I guess.” “Brine? You want to use that on her back?”

“I want to use it wherever she’s hurt.”

“Don’t you have anything in your bag better than that?”

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“Just soap, which I intend to use. Find it for me, will you? Then …

hell, I shouldn’t be doing this. Why didn’t you take her to the doctor?” He shook his head. “The judge wanted her sold South—for spite, I

guess. I had to pay near twice what she’s worth to get her. That’s all the money I had, and Daddy won’t pay for a doctor to fix niggers. Doc knows that.”

“You mean your father just lets people die when maybe they could be helped?”

“Die or get well. Aunt Mary—you know, the one who watches the kids?”

“Yes.” Aunt Mary didn’t watch the kids. Old and crippled, she sat in the shade with a switch and threatened them with gory murder if they happened to misbehave right in front of her. Otherwise, she ignored them and spent her time sewing and mumbling to herself, contentedly senile. The children cared for each other.

“Aunt Mary does some doctoring,” said Rufus. “She knows herbs. But

I thought you’d know more.”

I turned to look at him in disbelief. Sometimes the poor woman barely knew her name. Finally I shrugged. “Get me some brine.”

“But … that’s what Daddy uses on field hands,” he said. “It hurts them worse than the beating sometimes.”

“It won’t hurt her as badly as an infection would later.”

He frowned, came to stand protectively close to the girl. “Who fixed up your back?”