Butler, Octavia - Kindred

“Wrong?”

“At least partly. Of course I love you, and I don’t want anyone else. But there’s another reason, and when I’m back there it’s the most impor- tant reason. I don’t think Rufus would have understood it. Maybe you

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won’t either.” “Tell me.”

KINDRED

I thought for a moment, tried to find the right words. If I could make him understand, then surely he would believe me. He had to believe. He was my anchor here in my own time. The only person who had any idea what I was going through.

“You know what I thought,” I said, “when I saw Tess tied into that coffle?” I had told him about Tess and about Sam—that I had known them, that Rufus had sold them. I hadn’t told him the details though— especially not the details of Sam’s sale. I had been trying for two weeks to avoid sending his thoughts in the direction they had taken now.

“What does Tess have to do with …?”

“I thought, that could be me—standing there with a rope around my neck waiting to be led away like someone’s dog!” I stopped, looked down at him, then went on softly. “I’m not property, Kevin. I’m not a horse or a sack of wheat. If I have to seem to be property, if I have to accept limits on my freedom for Rufus’s sake, then he also has to accept limits—on his behavior toward me. He has to leave me enough control of my own life to make living look better to me than killing and dying.” “If your black ancestors had felt that way, you wouldn’t be here,” said

Kevin.

“I told you when all this started that I didn’t have their endurance. I still don’t. Some of them will go on struggling to survive, no matter what. I’m not like that.”

He smiled a little. “I suspect that you are.”

I shook my head. He thought I was being modest or something. He didn’t understand.

Then I realized that he had smiled. I looked down at him question- ingly.

He sobered. “I had to know.” “And do you, now?”

“Yes.”

That felt like truth. It felt enough like truth for me not to mind that he had only half understood me.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do about Rufus?” he asked.

I shook my head. “You know, it’s not only what will happen to the slaves that worries me … if I turn my back on him. It’s what might hap- pen to me.”

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“You’ll be finished with him.”

“I might be finished period. I might not be able to get home.”

“Your coming home has never had anything to do with him. You come home when your life is in danger.”

“But how do I come home? Is the power mine, or do I tap some power in him? All this started with him, after all. I don’t know whether I need him or not. And I won’t know until he’s not around.”

3

A couple of Kevin’s friends came over on the Fourth of July and tried to get us to go to the Rose Bowl with them for the fireworks. Kevin wanted to go—more to get out of the house than for any other reason, I suspected. I told him to go ahead, but he wouldn’t go without me. As it turned out, there was no chance for me to go, anyway. As Kevin’s friends left the house, I began to feel dizzy.

I stumbled toward my bag, fell before I reached it, crawled toward it, grabbed it just as Kevin came in from saying good-bye to his friends.

“Dana,” he was saying, “we can’t stay cooped up in this house any longer waiting for something that isn’t …”

He was gone.

Instead of lying on the floor of my living room, I was lying on the ground in the sun, almost directly over a hill of large black ants.

Before I could get up, someone kicked me, fell on me heavily. I had the breath knocked out of me for a moment.

“Dana!” said Rufus’s voice. “What the hell are you doing here?”

I looked up, saw him sprawled across me where he had fallen. We got up just as something began to bite me—the ants, probably. I brushed myself off quickly.

“I said what are you doing here!” He sounded angry. He looked no older than he had been when I’d last seen him, but something was wrong with him. He looked haggard and weary—looked as though it had been too long since he’d slept last, looked as though it would be even longer before he was able to sleep again.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here, Rufe. I never do until I find out

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what’s wrong with you.”

KINDRED

He stared at me for a long moment. His eyes were red and under them were dark smudges. Finally, he grabbed me by the arm and led me back the way he had come. We were on the plantation not far from the house. Nothing looked changed. I saw two of Nigel’s sons wrestling, rolling around on the ground. They were the two I had been teaching, and they were no bigger than they had been when I saw them last.

“Rufe, how long have I been gone?”

He didn’t answer. He was leading me toward the barn, I saw, and apparently I wasn’t going to learn anything until I got there.

He stopped at the barn door and pushed me through it. He didn’t fol- low me in.

I looked around, seeing very little at first as my eyes became accus- tomed to the dimmer light. I turned to the place where I had been strung up and whipped—and jumped back in surprise when I saw that someone was hanging there. Hanging by the neck. A woman.

Alice.

I stared at her not believing, not wanting to believe … I touched her and her flesh was cold and hard. The dead gray face was ugly in death as it had never been in life. The mouth was open. The eyes were open and staring. Her head was bare and her hair loose and short like mine. She had never liked to tie it up the way other women did. It was one of the things that had made us look even more alike—the only two consistently bareheaded women on the place. Her dress was dark red and her apron clean and white. She wore shoes that Rufus had had made specifically for her, not the rough heavy shoes or boots other slaves wore. It was as though she had dressed up and combed her hair and then …

I wanted her down.

I looked around, saw that the rope had been tied to a wall peg, thrown over a beam. I broke my fingernails, trying to untie it until I remembered my knife. I got it from my bag and cut Alice down.

She fell stiffly like something that would break when it hit the floor. But she landed without breaking and I took the rope from her neck and closed her eyes. For a time, I just sat with her, holding her head and cry- ing silently.

Eventually, Rufus came in. I looked up at him and he looked away. “Did she do this to herself ?” I asked.

“Yes. To herself.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer. “Rufe?”

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He shook his head slowly from side to side. “Where are her children?”

He turned and walked out of the barn.

I straightened Alice’s body and her dress and looked around for some- thing to cover her with. There was nothing.

I left the barn and went across an expanse of grass to the cookhouse. Sarah was there chopping meat with that frightening speed and co- ordination of hers. I had told her once that it always looked as though she was about to cut off a finger or two, and she had laughed. She still had all ten.

“Sarah?” There was such a difference in our ages now that everyone else my age called her “Aunt Sarah.” I knew it was a title of respect in this culture, and I respected her. But I couldn’t quite manage “Aunt” any more than I could have managed “Mammy.” She didn’t seem to mind.

She looked up. “Dana! Girl, what are you doing back here? What

Marse Rufe done now?”

“I’m not sure. But, Sarah, Alice is dead.”

Sarah put down her cleaver and sat on the bench next to the table. “Oh

Lord. Poor child. He finally killed her.”