Butler, Octavia - Kindred

I started toward Tess and the white man who had just tied a rope around her neck, fastening her into the line, saw me. He turned to face me, gun drawn.

I stopped, alarmed, confused … I had made no threatening move. “I just wanted to say good-bye to my friend,” I told him. I was whispering for some reason.

“Say it from there. She can hear you.”

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“Tess?”

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She stood, head down, shoulders rounded, a little red bundle hanging from one hand. She should have heard me, but I didn’t think she had.

“Tess, it’s Dana.”

She never looked up.

“Dana!” Rufus’s voice from near the steps where he was talking with the other white man. “You get away from here. Go inside.”

“Tess?” I called once more, willing her to answer. She knew my voice, surely. Why wouldn’t she look up? Why wouldn’t she speak? Why wouldn’t she even move? It was as though I didn’t exist for her, as though I wasn’t real.

I stepped toward her. I think I would have gone to her, taken the rope from her neck or gotten shot trying. But at that moment, Rufus reached me. He grabbed me, hustled me into the house, into the library.

“Stay here!” he ordered. “Just stay …” He stopped, suddenly stumbled against me, clutching at me now, not to hold me where I was, but to keep himself upright. “Damn!”

“How could you do it!” I hissed as he straightened. “Tess … those others …”

“They’re my property!”

I stared at him in disbelief. “Oh my God …!”

He passed a hand over his face, turned away. “Look, this sale is some- thing my father arranged before he died. You can’t do anything about it, so just stay out of the way!”

“Or what? You going to sell me too? You might as well!”

He went back outside without answering. After a while, I sat down in

Tom Weylin’s worn arm chair and put my head down on his desk.

8

Carrie covered for me with Margaret Weylin. She wanted me to know that when she caught me heading back upstairs. Actually, I don’t know why I was heading upstairs, except that I didn’t want to see Rufus again for a while, and there was nowhere else to go.

Carrie stopped me on the stairs, looked at me critically, then took my

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arm and led me back down and out to her cabin. I didn’t know or care what she had in mind, but I did understand when she told me through gestures that she had told Margaret Weylin I was sick. Then she circled her neck with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands and looked at me. “I saw,” I said. “Tess and two others.” I drew a ragged breath. “I thought that was over on this plantation. I thought it died with Tom

Weylin.”

Carrie shrugged.

“I wish I had left Rufus lying in the mud,” I said. “To think I saved him so he could do something like this …!”

Carrie caught my wrist and shook her head vigorously.

“What do you mean, no? He’s no good. He’s all grown up now, and part of the system. He could feel for us a little when his father was run- ning things—when he wasn’t entirely free himself. But now, he’s in charge. And I guess he had to do something right away, to prove it.”

Carrie clasped her hands around her neck again. Then she drew closer to me and clasped them around my neck. Finally, she went over to the crib that her youngest child had recently outgrown and there, symboli- cally, clasped her hands again, leaving enough of an open circle for a small neck.

She straightened and looked at me. “Everybody?” I asked.

She nodded, gestured widely with her arms as though gathering a group around her. Then, once again, her hands around her neck.

I nodded. She was almost surely right. Margaret Weylin could not run the plantation. Both the land and the people would be sold. And if Tom Weylin was any example, the people would be sold without regard for family ties.

Carrie stood looking down at the crib as though she had read my thought.

“I was beginning to feel like a traitor,” I said. “Guilty for saving him. Now … I don’t know what to feel. Somehow, I always seem to forgive him for what he does to me. I can’t hate him the way I should until I see him doing things to other people.” I shook my head. “I guess I can see why there are those here who think I’m more white than black.”

Carrie made quick waving-aside gestures, her expression annoyed. She came over to me and wiped one side of my face with her fingers— wiped hard. I drew back, and she held her fingers in front of me, showed

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me both sides. But for once, I didn’t understand.

Frustrated, she took me by the hand and led me out to where Nigel was chopping firewood. There, before him, she repeated the face-rubbing gesture, and he nodded.

“She means it doesn’t come off, Dana,” he said quietly. “The black. She means the devil with people who say you’re anything but what you are.”

I hugged her and got away from her quickly so that she wouldn’t see that I was close to tears. I went up to Margaret Weylin and she’d just had her laudanum. Being with her at such times was like being alone. And being alone was just what I needed.

9

I avoided Rufus for three days after the sale. He made it easy for me. He avoided me too. Then on the fourth day he came looking for me. He found me in his mother’s room yes-ma’aming her and changing her bed while she sat looking thin and frail beside the window. She barely ate. I had actually caught myself coaxing her to eat. Then I realized that she enjoyed being coaxed. She could forget to be superior sometimes, and just be someone’s old mother. Rufus’s mother. Unfortunately.

He came in and said, “Let Carrie finish that, Dana. I have something else for you to do.”

“Oh, do you have to take her now?” said Margaret. “She was just …” “I’ll send her back later, Mama. And Carrie’ll be up to finish your bed

in a minute.”

I left the room silently, not looking forward to whatever he had in mind.

“Down to the library,” he said right behind me.

I glanced back at him, trying to gauge his mood, but he only looked tired. He ate well and got twice the rest he should have needed, but he always looked tired.

“Wait a minute,” he said. I stopped.

“Did you bring another of those pens with the ink inside?”

“Yes.” “Get it.”

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I went up to the attic where I still kept most of my things. I’d brought a packet of three pens this time, but I only took one back down with me—in case he still took as much pleasure as he had last trip in wasting ink.

“You ever hear of dengue fever?” he asked as he went down the stairs. “No.”

“Well, according to the doc in town, that’s what I had. I told him about it.” He had been going back and forth to town often since his father’s death. “Doc said he didn’t see how I’d made it without bleeding and a good emetic. Says I’m still weak because I didn’t get all the poisons out of my body.”

“Put yourself in his hands,” I said quietly. “And with a little luck, that will solve both our problems.”

He frowned uncertainly. “What do you mean by that?” “Not a thing.”

He turned and caught me by the shoulders in a grip that he probably meant to be painful. It wasn’t. “Are you trying to say you want me to die?”

I sighed. “If I did, you would, wouldn’t you?”

Silence. He let go of me and we went into the library. He sat down in his father’s old arm chair and motioned me into a hard Windsor chair nearby. Which was one step up from his father who had always made me stand before him like a school kid sent to the principal’s office.

“If you think that little sale was bad—and Daddy really had already arranged it—you better make sure nothing happens to me.” Rufus leaned back and looked at me wearily. “Do you know what would happen to the people here if I died?”