Butler, Octavia - Kindred

“You needed help,” I told him. “I came to help you. Twice. Does that make me someone to be afraid of?”

“I guess not.” He gave me a long look, then came over to me, reached out hesitantly, and touched me with a sooty hand.

“You see,” I said, “I’m as real as you are.”

He nodded. “I thought you were. All the things you did … you had to be. And Mama said she touched you too.”

“She sure did.” I rubbed my shoulder where the woman had bruised it with her desperate blows. For a moment, the soreness confused me, forced me to recall that for me, the woman’s attack had come only hours ago. Yet the boy was years older. Fact then: Somehow, my travels crossed time as well as distance. Another fact: The boy was the focus of my travels

—perhaps the cause of them. He had seen me in my living room before I was drawn to him; he couldn’t have made that up. But I had seen nothing at all, felt nothing but sickness and disorientation.

“Mama said what you did after you got me out of the water was like the Second Book of Kings,” said the boy.

“The what?”

“Where Elisha breathed into the dead boy’s mouth, and the boy came back to life. Mama said she tried to stop you when she saw you doing that to me because you were just some nigger she had never seen before. Then she remembered Second Kings.”

I sat down on the bed and looked over at him, but I could read noth- ing other than interest and remembered excitement in his eyes. “She said I was what?” I asked.

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“Just a strange nigger. She and Daddy both knew they hadn’t seen you before.”

“That was a hell of a thing for her to say right after she saw me save her son’s life.”

Rufus frowned. “Why?” I stared at him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why are you mad?”

“Your mother always call black people niggers, Rufe?” “Sure, except when she has company. Why not?”

His air of innocent questioning confused me. Either he really didn’t know what he was saying, or he had a career waiting in Hollywood. Whichever it was, he wasn’t going to go on saying it to me.

“I’m a black woman, Rufe. If you have to call me something other than my name, that’s it.”

“But …”

“Look, I helped you. I put the fire out, didn’t I?” “Yeah.”

“All right then, you do me the courtesy of calling me what I want to be called.”

He just stared at me.

“Now,” I spoke more gently, “tell me, did you see me again when the draperies started to burn? I mean, did you see me the way you did when you were drowning?”

It took him a moment to shift gears. Then he said, “I didn’t see any- thing but fire.” He sat down in the old ladder-back chair near the fireplace and looked at me. “I didn’t see you until you got here. But I was so scared … it was kind of like when I was drowning … but not like any- thing else I can remember. I thought the house would burn down and it would be my fault. I thought I would die.”

I nodded. “You probably wouldn’t have died because you would have been able to get out in time. But if your parents are asleep here, the fire might have reached them before they woke up.”

The boy stared into the fireplace. “I burned the stable once,” he said. “I wanted Daddy to give me Nero—a horse I liked. But he sold him to Reverend Wyndham just because Reverend Wyndham offered a lot of money. Daddy already has a lot of money. Anyway, I got mad and burned down the stable.”

I shook my head wonderingly. The boy already knew more about

26 KINDRED

revenge than I did. What kind of man was he going to grow up into? “Why did you set this fire?” I asked. “To get even with your father for something else?”

“For hitting me. See?” He turned and pulled up his shirt so that I could see the crisscross of long red welts. And I could see old marks, ugly scars of at least one much worse beating.

“For Godsake …!”

“He said I took money from his desk, and I said I didn’t.” Rufus shrugged. “He said I was calling him a liar, and he hit me.”

“Several times.”

“All I took was a dollar.” He put his shirt down and faced me.

I didn’t know what to say to that. The boy would be lucky to stay out of prison when he grew up—if he grew up. He went on.

“I started thinking that if I burned the house, he would lose all his money. He ought to lose it. It’s all he ever thinks about.” Rufus shud- dered. “But then I remembered the stable, and the whip he hit me with after I set that fire. Mama said if she hadn’t stopped him, he would have killed me. I was afraid this time he would kill me, so I wanted to put the fire out. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to do.”

So he had called me. I was certain now. The boy drew me to him some- how when he got himself into more trouble than he could handle. How he did it, I didn’t know. He apparently didn’t even know he was doing it. If he had, and if he had been able to call me voluntarily, I might have found myself standing between father and son during one of Rufus’s beatings. What would have happened then, I couldn’t imagine. One meeting with Rufus’s father had been enough for me. Not that the boy sounded like that much of a bargain either. But, “Did you say he used a whip on you, Rufe?”

“Yeah. The kind he whips niggers and horses with.”

That stopped me for a moment. “The kind he whips … who?” He looked at me warily. “I wasn’t talking about you.”

I brushed that aside. “Say blacks anyway. But … your father whips black people?”

“When they need it. But Mama said it was cruel and disgraceful for him to hit me like that no matter what I did. She took me to Baltimore City to Aunt May’s house after that, but he came and got me and brought me home. After a while, she came home too.”

For a moment, I forgot about the whip and the “niggers.” Baltimore

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City. Baltimore, Maryland? “Are we far from Baltimore now, Rufe?” “Across the bay.”

“But … we’re still in Maryland, aren’t we?” I had relatives in Maryland

—people who would help me if I needed them, and if I could reach them. I was beginning to wonder, though, whether I would be able to reach any- one I knew. I had a new, slowly growing fear.

“Sure we’re in Maryland,” said Rufus. “How could you not know that.”

“What’s the date?” “I don’t know.”

“The year! Just tell me the year!”

He glanced across the room toward the door, then quickly back at me. I realized I was making him nervous with my ignorance and my sudden intensity. I forced myself to speak calmly. “Come on, Rufe, you know what year it is, don’t you?”

“It’s … eighteen fifteen.” “When?”

“Eighteen fifteen.”

I sat still, breathed deeply, calming myself, believing him. I did believe him. I wasn’t even as surprised as I should have been. I had already accepted the fact that I had moved through time. Now I knew I was farther from home than I had thought. And now I knew why Rufus’s father used his whip on “niggers” as well as horses.

I looked up and saw that the boy had left his chair and come closer to me.

“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “You keep acting sick.” “It’s nothing, Rufe. I’m all right.” No, I was sick. What was I going to do? Why hadn’t I gone home? This could turn out to be such a deadly place for me if I had to stay in it much longer. “Is this a plantation?” I

asked.

“The Weylin plantation. My daddy’s Tom Weylin.”

“Weylin …” The name triggered a memory, something I hadn’t thought of for years. “Rufus, do you spell your last name, W-e-y-l-i-n?”