Kindred (14 page)

“You know what’s going to happen to both of us if we get caught?” I asked him.

“You scared?” he asked.

“Yes. But that doesn’t matter. I’ll teach you. I just wanted to be sure you knew what you were getting into.”

He turned away from me, lifted his shirt in the back so that I could see his scars. Then he faced me again. “I know,” he said.

That same day, I stole a book and began to teach him.

And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted so easily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting.

This was something I tried to explain to Kevin on the day the children broke through my act. It suddenly became very important that he understand.

The day was miserably hot and muggy, full of flies, mosquitoes, and the bad smells of soapmaking, the outhouses, fish someone had caught, unwashed bodies. Everybody smelled, black and white. Nobody washed enough or changed clothes often enough. The slaves worked up a sweat and the whites sweated without working. Kevin and I didn’t have enough clothes or any deodorant at all, so often, we smelled too. Surprisingly, we were beginning to get used to it.

Now we were walking together away from the house and the quarter. We weren’t heading for our oak tree because by then, if Margaret Weylin saw us there, she sent someone with a job for me. Her husband may have stopped her from throwing me out of the house, but he hadn’t stopped her from becoming a worse nuisance than ever. Sometimes Kevin countermanded her orders, claiming that he had work for me. That was how I got a little rest and gave Nigel some extra tutoring. Now, though, we were headed for the woods to spend some time together.

But before we got away from the buildings, we saw a group of slave children gathered around a tree stump. These were the children of the field hands, children too young to be of much use in the fields themselves. Two of them were standing on the wide flat stump while others stood around watching.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“Playing some game, probably.” Kevin shrugged.

“It looks as though …”

“What?”

“Let’s get closer. I want to hear what they’re saying.”

We approached them from one side so that neither the children on the tree stump nor those on the ground were facing us. They went on with their play as we watched and listened.

“Now here a likely wench,” called the boy on the stump. He gestured toward the girl who stood slightly behind him. “She cook and wash and iron. Come here, gal. Let the folks see you.” He drew the girl up beside him. “She young and strong,” he continued. “She worth plenty money. Two hundred dollars. Who bid two hundred dollars?”

The little girl turned to frown at him. “I’m worth more than two hundred dollars, Sammy!” she protested. “You sold Martha for five hundred dollars!”

“You shut your mouth,” said the boy. “You ain’t supposed to say nothing. When Marse Tom bought Mama and me, we didn’t say nothing.”

I turned and walked away from the arguing children, feeling tired and disgusted. I wasn’t even aware that Kevin was following me until he spoke.

“That’s the game I thought they were playing,” he said. “I’ve seen them at it before. They play at field work too.”

I shook my head. “My God, why can’t we go home? This place is diseased.”

He took my hand. “The kids are just imitating what they’ve seen adults doing,” he said. “They don’t understand …”

“They don’t have to understand. Even the games they play are preparing them for their future—and that future will come whether they understand it or not.”

“No doubt.”

I turned to glare at him and he looked back calmly. It was a what-do-you-want-me-to-do-about-it kind of look. I didn’t say anything because, of course, there was nothing he could do about it.

I shook my head, rubbed my hand across my brow. “Even knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t help,” I said. “I know some of those kids will live to see freedom—after they’ve slaved away their best years. But by the time freedom comes to them, it will be too late. Maybe it’s already too late.”

“Dana, you’re reading too much into a kids’ game.”

“And you’re reading too little into it. Anyway … anyway, it’s not their game.”

“No.” He glanced at me. “Look, I won’t say I understand how you feel about this because maybe that’s something I can’t understand. But as you said, you know what’s going to happen. It already has happened. We’re in the middle of history. We surely can’t change it. If anything goes wrong, we might have all we can do just to survive it. We’ve been lucky so far.”

“Maybe.” I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But I can’t close my eyes.”

Kevin frowned thoughtfully. “It’s surprising to me that there’s so little to see. Weylin doesn’t seem to pay much attention to what his people do, but the work gets done.”

“You think he doesn’t pay attention. Nobody calls you out to see the whippings.”

“How many whippings?”

“One that I’ve seen. One too goddamn many!”

“One is too many, yes, but still, this place isn’t what I would have imagined. No overseer. No more work than the people can manage …”

“… no decent housing,” I cut in. “Dirt floors to sleep on, food so inadequate they’d all be sick if they didn’t keep gardens in what’s supposed to be their leisure time and steal from the cookhouse when Sarah lets them. And no rights and the possibility of being mistreated or sold away from their families for any reason—or no reason. Kevin, you don’t have to beat people to treat them brutally.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m not minimizing the wrong that’s being done here. I just …”

“Yes you are. You don’t mean to be, but you are.” I sat down against a tall pine tree, pulling him down beside me. We were in the woods now. Not far to one side of us was a group of Weylin’s slaves who were cutting down trees. We could hear them, but we couldn’t see them. I assumed that meant they couldn’t see us either—or hear us over the distance and their own noise. I spoke to Kevin again.

“You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer,” I said. “I can understand that because most of the time, I’m still an observer. It’s protection. It’s nineteen seventy-six shielding and cushioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then, like with the kids’ game, I can’t maintain the distance. I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do. I ought to be doing something though. I know that.”

“There’s nothing you could do that wouldn’t eventually get you whipped or killed!”

I shrugged.

“You … you haven’t already done anything, have you?”

“Just started to teach Nigel to read and write,” I said. “Nothing more subversive than that.”

“If Weylin catches you and I’m not around …”

“I know. So stay close. The boy wants to learn, and I’m going to teach him.”

He raised one leg against his chest and leaned forward looking at me. “You think someday he’ll write his own pass and head North, don’t you?”

“At least he’ll be able to.”

“I see Weylin was right about educated slaves.”

I turned to look at him.

“Do a good job with Nigel,” he said quietly. “Maybe when you’re gone, he’ll be able to teach others.”

I nodded solemnly.

“I’d bring him in to learn with Rufus if people weren’t so good at listening at doors in that house. And Margaret is always wandering in and out.”

“I know. That’s why I didn’t ask you.” I closed my eyes and saw the children playing their game again. “The ease seemed so frightening,” I said. “Now I see why.”

“What?”

“The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”

8

I said good-bye to Rufus the day my teaching finally did get me into trouble. I didn’t know I was saying good-bye, of course—didn’t know what trouble was waiting for me in the cookhouse where I was to meet Nigel. I thought there was trouble enough in Rufus’s room.

I was there reading to him. I had been reading to him regularly since his father caught me that first time. Tom Weylin didn’t want me reading on my own, but he had ordered me to read to his son. Once he had told Rufus in my presence, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! A nigger can read better than you!”

“She can read better than you too,” Rufus had answered.

His father had stared at him coldly, then ordered me out of the room. For a second I was afraid for Rufus, but Tom Weylin left the room with me.

“Don’t go to him again until I say you can,” he told me.

Four days passed before he said I could. And again he chastised Rufus before me.

“I’m no schoolmaster,” he said, “but I’ll teach you if you can be taught. I’ll teach you respect.”

Rufus said nothing.

“You want her to read to you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you got something to say to me.”

“I … I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“Read,” said Weylin to me. He turned and left the room.

“What exactly are you supposed to be sorry for?” I asked when Weylin was gone. I spoke very softly.

“Talking back,” said Rufus. “He thinks everything I say is talking back. So I don’t say very much to him.”

“I see.” I opened the book and began to read.

We had finished
Robinson Crusoe
long ago, and Kevin had chosen a couple of other familiar books from the library. We had already gone through the first,
Pilgrim’s Progress
. Now we were working on
Gulliver’s Travels
. Rufus’s own reading was improving slowly under Kevin’s tutoring, but he still enjoyed being read to.

On my last day with him, though, as on a few others, Margaret came in to listen—and to fidget and to fiddle with Rufus’s hair and to pet him while I was reading. As usual, Rufus put his head on her lap and accepted her caresses silently. But today, apparently, that was not enough.

“Are you comfortable?” she asked Rufus when I had been reading for a few moments. “Does your leg hurt?” His leg was not healing as I thought it should have. After nearly two months, he still couldn’t walk.

“I feel all right, Mama,” he said.

Suddenly, Margaret twisted around to face me. “Well?” she demanded.

I had paused in my reading to give her a chance to finish. I lowered my head and began to read again.

About sixty seconds later, she said, “Baby, you hot? You want me to call Virgie up here to fan you?” Virgie was about ten—one of the small house servants often called to fan the whites, run errands for them, carry covered dishes of food between the cookhouse and the main house, and serve the whites at their table.

“I’m all right, Mama,” said Rufus.

“Why don’t you go on?” snapped Margaret at me. “You’re supposed to be here to read, so read!”

I began to read again, biting off the words a little.

“Are you hungry, baby?” asked Margaret a moment later. “Aunt Sarah’s just made a cake. Wouldn’t you like a piece?”

I didn’t stop this time. I just lowered my voice a little and read automatically, tonelessly.

“I don’t know why you want to listen to her,” Margaret said to Rufus. “She’s got a voice like a fly buzzing.”

“I don’t want no cake, Mama.”

“You sure? You ought to see the fine white icing Sarah put on it.”

“I want to hear Dana read, that’s all.”

“Well, there she is, reading. If you can call it that.”

I let my voice grow progressively softer as they talked.

“I can’t hear her with you talking,” Rufus said.

“Baby, all I said was …”

“Don’t say nothing!” Rufus took his head off her lap. “Go away and stop bothering me!”

“Rufus!” She sounded hurt rather than angry. And in spite of the situation, this sounded like real disrespect to me. I stopped reading and waited for the explosion. It came from Rufus.

“Go away, Mama!” he shouted. “Just leave me alone!”

“Be still,” she whispered. “Baby, you’ll make yourself sick.”

Rufus turned his head and looked at her. The expression on his face startled me. For once, the boy looked like a smaller replica of his father. His mouth was drawn into a thin straight line and his eyes were coldly hostile. He spoke quietly now as Weylin sometimes did when he was angry. “You’re making me sick, Mama. Get away from me!”

Margaret got up and dabbed at her eyes. “I don’t see how you can talk to me that way,” she said. “Just because of some nigger …”

Rufus just looked at her, and finally she left the room.

He relaxed against his pillows and closed his eyes. “I get so tired of her sometimes,” he said.

“Rufe …?”

He opened weary, friendly eyes and looked at me. The anger was gone.

“You’d better be careful,” I said. “What if your mother told your father you talked to her that way?”

“She never tells.” He grinned. “She’ll be back after ’while to bring me a piece of cake with fine white icing.”

“She was crying.”

“She always cries. Read, Dana.”

“Do you talk to her that way often?”

“I have to, or she won’t leave me alone. Daddy does it too.”

I took a deep breath, shook my head, and plunged back into
Gulliver’s Travels
.

Later, as I left Rufus, I passed Margaret on her way back to his room. Sure enough, she was carrying a large slice of cake on a plate.

I went downstairs and out to the cookhouse to give Nigel his reading lesson.

Nigel was waiting. He already had our book out of its hiding place and was spelling out words to Carrie. That surprised me because I had offered Carrie a chance to learn with him, and she had refused. Now though, the two of them, alone in the cookhouse, were so involved in what they were doing that they didn’t even notice me until I shut the door. They looked up then, wide-eyed with fear. But they relaxed when they saw it was only me. I went over to them.

“Do you want to learn?” I asked Carrie.

The girl’s fear seemed to return and she glanced at the door.