Butler, Octavia - Kindred

“Dana?”

A voice. A man’s voice.

I managed to turn my head and see Nigel standing in the doorway. “Dana, what …? Oh no. God, no!”

“Nigel …” moaned Rufus, and he gave a long shuddering sigh. His body went limp and leaden across me. I pushed him away somehow— everything but his hand still on my arm. Then I convulsed with terrible, wrenching sickness.

Something harder and stronger than Rufus’s hand clamped down on my arm, squeezing it, stiffening it, pressing into it—painlessly, at first—

THE ROPE 261

melting into it, meshing with it as though somehow my arm were being absorbed into something. Something cold and nonliving.

Something … paint, plaster, wood—a wall. The wall of my living room. I was back at home—in my own house, in my own time. But I was still caught somehow, joined to the wall as though my arm were growing out of it—or growing into it. From the elbow to the ends of the fingers, my left arm had become a part of the wall. I looked at the spot where flesh joined with plaster, stared at it uncomprehending. It was the exact spot Rufus’s fingers had grasped.

I pulled my arm toward me, pulled hard.

And suddenly, there was an avalanche of pain, red impossible agony! And I screamed and screamed.

Epilogue

We flew to Maryland as soon as my arm was well enough. There, we rented a car—Kevin was driving again, finally—and wandered around Baltimore and over to Easton. There was a bridge now, not the steamship Rufus had used. And at last I got a good look at the town I had lived so near and seen so little of. We found the courthouse and an old church, a few other buildings time had not worn away. And we found Burger King and Holiday Inn and Texaco and schools with black kids and white kids together and older people who looked at Kevin and me, then looked again.

We went into the countryside, into what was still woods and farmland, and found a few of the old houses. A couple of them could have been the Weylin house. They were well-kept and handsomer, but basically, they were the same red-brick Georgian Colonials.

But Rufus’s house was gone. As nearly as we could tell, its site was now covered by a broad field of corn. The house was dust, like Rufus.

I was the one who insisted on trying to find his grave, questioning the farmer about it because Rufus, like his father, like old Mary and Alice, had probably been buried on the plantation.

But the farmer knew nothing—or at least, said nothing. The only clue we found—more than a clue, really—was an old newspaper article—a notice that Mr. Rufus Weylin had been killed when his house caught fire and was partially destroyed. And in later papers, notice of the sale of the slaves from Mr. Rufus Weylin’s estate. These slaves were listed by their first names with their approximate ages and their skills given. All three

EPILOGUE 263

of Nigel’s sons were listed, but Nigel and Carrie were not. Sarah was listed, but Joe and Hagar were not. Everyone else was listed. Everyone.

I thought about that, put together as many pieces as I could. The fire, for instance. Nigel had probably set it to cover what I had done—and he had covered. Rufus was assumed to have burned to death. I could find nothing in the incomplete newspaper records to suggest that he had been murdered, or even that the fire had been arson. Nigel must have done a good job. He must also have managed to get Margaret Weylin out of the house alive. There was no mention of her dying. And Margaret had rela- tives in Baltimore. Also, Hagar’s home had been in Baltimore.

Kevin and I went back to Baltimore to skim newspapers, legal records, anything we could find that might tie Margaret and Hagar together or mention them at all. Margaret might have taken both children. Perhaps with Alice dead she had accepted them. They were her grandchildren, after all, the son and daughter of her only child. She might have cared for them. She might also have held them as slaves. But even if she had, Hagar, at least, lived long enough for the Fourteenth Amendment to free her.

“He could have left a will,” Kevin told me outside one of our haunts, the Maryland Historical Society. “He could have freed those people at least when he had no more use for them.”

“But there was his mother to consider,” I said. “And he was only twenty-five. He probably thought he had plenty of time to make a will.”

“Stop defending him,” muttered Kevin.

I hesitated, then shook my head. “I wasn’t. I guess in a way, I was defending myself. You see, I know why he wouldn’t make that kind of will. I asked him, and he told me.”

“Why?”

“Because of me. He was afraid I’d kill him afterwards.” “You wouldn’t even have had to know about it!”

“Yes, but I guess he wasn’t taking any chances.” “Was he right … to be afraid?”

“I don’t know.”

“I doubt it, considering what you took from him. I don’t think you were really capable of killing him until he attacked you.”

And barely then, I thought. Kevin would never know what those last moments had been like. I had outlined them for him, and he’d asked few questions. For that I was grateful. Now I said simply, “Self-defense.”

264

“Yes,” he said.

EPILOGUE

“But the cost … Nigel’s children, Sarah, all the others …”

“It’s over,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do to change any of it now.”

“I know.” I drew a deep breath. “I wonder whether the children were allowed to stay together—maybe stay with Sarah.”

“You’ve looked,” he said. “And you’ve found no records. You’ll prob- ably never know.”

I touched the scar Tom Weylin’s boot had left on my face, touched my empty left sleeve. “I know,” I repeated. “Why did I even want to come here. You’d think I would have had enough of the past.”

“You probably needed to come for the same reason I did.” He shrugged. “To try to understand. To touch solid evidence that those peo- ple existed. To reassure yourself that you’re sane.”

I looked back at the brick building of the Historical Society, itself a converted early mansion. “If we told anyone else about this, anyone at all, they wouldn’t think we were so sane.”

“We are,” he said. “And now that the boy is dead, we have some chance of staying that way.”

Reader’s Guide

Critical Essay

ROBERT CROSSLEY

University of Massachusetts at Boston

“What tangled skeins are the genealogies of slavery!” Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

I

First-person American slave narratives should have ceased being written when the last American citizen born into institutionalized slavery died. But the literary form has persisted, just as the legacy of slavery has per- sisted, into the present. The second half of the twentieth century saw the rise of what has been christened the “neo-slave narrative,” a fictional mutation of the autobiographies of nineteenth-century Americans who lived as slaves. Among the many historical novels, often with first-person narrators, that have recreated the era of slavery, some of the best known are Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Mor- rison’s Beloved (1987), and Charles R. Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990). Octavia Butler’s hybrid of memoir and fantasy is a distinctive contribu- tion to the genre of neo-slave narrative. Although Kindred is not itself a work of science fiction, Butler has brought to the creation of this narrative the sensibilities of an author who works largely outside the tradition of realism. When Kindred first appeared in 1979, no one had thought of using the fictional conventions of time travel to transport a modern African American to an antebellum plantation. Time-traveling narratives