“Is this our river?” the boy was asking.
“No, that’s the Miles River, northeast of here. This map doesn’t show our river.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too small.”
“What is?” The boy peered up at him. “Our river or this map?”
“Both, I suspect.”
“Let’s draw it in, then. Where does it go?”
Rufus hesitated. “Just about here. But we don’t have to draw it in.”
“Why? Don’t you want the map to be right?”
I made a noise and Rufus looked up at me. I thought he looked almost ashamed for a moment. He put the boy down quickly and shooed him away.
“Nothing but questions,” Rufus complained to me.
“Enjoy it, Rufe. At least he’s not out setting fire to the stable or trying to drown himself.”
He couldn’t quite keep from laughing. “Alice said something like that.” He frowned a little. “She wants me to free him.”
I nodded. Alice had already told me she meant to ask for the boy’s freedom.
“You put her up to it, I guess.”
I stared at him. “Rufe, if there’s a woman on the place who makes up her own mind, it’s Alice. I didn’t put her up to a thing.”
“Well … now she’s got something else to make up her mind about.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Nothing to you. I just mean to make her earn what she wants for a change,” he said.
I couldn’t get any more out of him than that. Eventually, though, Alice told me what he wanted.
“He wants me to like him,” she said with heavy contempt. “Or maybe even love him. I think he wants me to be more like you!”
“I guarantee you he doesn’t.”
She closed her eyes. “I don’t care what he wants. If I thought it would make him free my children, I’d try to do it. But he lies! And he won’t put it down on no paper.”
“He likes Joe,” I said. “He ought to. Joe looks like a slightly darker version of him at that age. Anyway, he might decide on his own to free the boy.”
“And this one?” She patted her stomach. “And the others? He’ll make sure there’re others.”
“I don’t know. I’ll push him whenever I can.”
“I should have took Joe and tried to run before I got pregnant again.”
“You’re still thinking about running?”
“Wouldn’t you be if you didn’t have another way to get free?”
I nodded.
“I don’t mean to spend my life here watching my children grow up as slaves and maybe get sold.”
“He wouldn’t …”
“You don’t know what he would do! He don’t treat you the way he treats me. When I’m strong again after I have this baby, I’m going.”
“With the baby?”
“You don’t think I’m going to leave it here, do you?”
“But … I don’t see how you can make it.”
“I know more now than I did when Isaac and me left. I can make it.”
I drew a deep breath. “When the time comes, if I can help you, I will.”
“Get me a bottle of laudanum,” she said.
“Laudanum!”
“I’ll have the baby to keep quiet. Old Mama won’t let me near her, but she likes you. Get it.”
“All right.” I didn’t like it. Didn’t like the idea of her trying to run with a baby and a small child, didn’t like the idea of her trying to run at all. But she was right. In her place, I would have tried. I would have tried sooner and gotten killed sooner, but I would have done it alone.
“You think about this awhile longer,” I said. “You’ll get the laudanum and anything else I can supply, but you think.”
“I’ve already thought.”
“Not enough. I shouldn’t say this, but think what’s going to happen if the dogs catch Joe, or if they pull you down and get the baby.”
12
The baby was a girl, born in the second month of the new year. She was her mother’s daughter, born darker skinned than Joe would probably ever be.
“’Bout time I had a baby to look like me,” said Alice when she saw her.
“You could have at least tried for red hair,” said Rufus. He was there too, peering at the baby’s wrinkled little face, peering with even more concern at Alice’s face, sweat-streaked and weary.
For the first and only time, I saw her smile at him—a real smile. No sarcasm, no ridicule. It silenced him for several seconds.
Carrie and I had helped with the birth. Now, we left quietly, both of us probably thinking the same thing. That if Alice and Rufus were going to make peace, finally, neither of us wanted to break their mood.
They called the baby Hagar. Rufus said that was the ugliest name he had ever heard, but it was Alice’s choice, and he let it stand. I thought it was the most beautiful name I had ever heard. I felt almost free, half-free if such a thing was possible, half-way home. I was gleeful at first—secretly elated. I even kidded Alice about the names she chose for her children. Joseph and Hagar. And the two others whose names I thought silently—Miriam and Aaron. I said, “Someday Rufus is going to get religion and read enough of the Bible to wonder about those children’s names.”
Alice shrugged. “If Hagar had been a boy, I would have called her Ishmael. In the Bible, people might be slaves for a while, but they didn’t have to stay slaves.”
My mood was so good, I almost laughed. But she wouldn’t have understood that, and I couldn’t have explained. I kept it all in somehow, and congratulated myself that the Bible wasn’t the only place where slaves broke free. Her names were only symbolic, but I had more than symbols to remind me that freedom was possible—probable—and for me, very near.
Or was it?
Slowly, I began to calm down. The danger to my family was past, yes. Hagar had been born. But the danger to me personally … the danger to me personally still walked and talked and sometimes sat with Alice in her cabin in the evening as she nursed Hagar. I was there with them a couple of times, and I felt like an intruder.
I was not free. Not any more than Alice was, or her children with their names. In fact, it looked as though Alice might get free before I did. She caught me alone one evening and pulled me into her cabin. It was empty except for the sleeping Hagar. Joe was out collecting cuts and bruises from sturdier children.
“Did you get the laudanum?” she demanded.
I peered at her through the semidarkness. Rufus kept her well supplied with candles, but at the moment, the only light in the room came from the window and from a low fire over which two pots simmered. “Alice, are you sure you still want it?”
I saw her frown. “Sure I want it! ’Course I want it! What’s the matter with you?”
I hedged a little. “It’s so soon … The baby’s only a few weeks old.”
“You get me that stuff so I can leave when I want to!”
“I’ve got it.”
“Give it to me!”
“Goddamnit, Alice, will you slow down! Look, you keep working on him the way you have been, and you can get whatever you want and live to enjoy it.”
To my surprise, her stony expression crumbled, and she began to cry. “He’ll never let any of us go,” she said. “The more you give him, the more he wants.” She paused, wiped her eyes, then added softly, “I got to go while I still can—before I turn into just what people call me.” She looked at me and did the thing that made her so much like Rufus, though neither of them recognized it. “I got to go before I turn into what you are!” she said bitterly.
Sarah had cornered me once and said, “What you let her talk to you like that for? She can’t get away with it with nobody else.”
I didn’t know. Guilt, maybe. In spite of everything, my life was easier than hers. Maybe I tried to make up for that by taking her abuse. Everything had its limits, though.
“You want my help, Alice, you watch your mouth!”
?
??Watch yours,” she mocked.
I stared at her in astonishment, remembering, knowing exactly what she had overheard.
“If I talked to him the way you do, he’d have me hangin’ in the barn,” she said.
“If you go on talking to me the way you do, I won’t care what he does to you.”
She looked at me for a long time without saying anything. Finally, she smiled. “You’ll care. And you’ll help me. Else, you’d have to see yourself for the white nigger you are, and you couldn’t stand that.”
Rufus never called my bluff. Alice did it automatically—and because I was bluffing, she got away with it. I got up and walked away from her. Behind me, I thought I heard her laugh.
Some days later, I gave her the laudanum. Later that same day, Rufus began talking about sending Joe to school up North when he was a little older.
“Do you mean to free the boy, Rufe?”
He nodded.
“Good. Tell Alice.”
“When I get around to it.”
I didn’t argue with him; I told her myself.
“It don’t matter what he says,” she told me. “Did he show you any free papers?”
“No.”
“When he does, and you read them to me, maybe I’ll believe him. I’m tellin’ you, he uses those children just the way you use a bit on a horse. I’m tired of havin’ a bit in my mouth.”
I didn’t blame her. But still, I didn’t want her to go, didn’t want her to risk Joe and Hagar. Hell, I didn’t even want her to risk herself. Elsewhere, under other circumstances, I would probably have disliked her. But here, we had a common enemy to unite us.
13
I planned to stay on the Weylin plantation long enough to see Alice leave, to find out whether she would be able to keep her freedom this time. I managed to talk her into waiting until early summer to go. And I was prepared to wait that long myself before I tried some dangerous trick that might get me home. I was homesick and Kevinsick and damned sick of Margaret Weylin’s floor and Alice’s mouth, but I could wait a few more months. I thought.
I talked Rufus into letting me teach Nigel’s two older sons and the two children who served at the table along with Joe. Surprisingly, the children liked it. I couldn’t recall having liked school much when I was their ages. Rufus liked it because Joe was as bright as I had said—bright and competitive. He had a head start on the others, and he didn’t intend to lose it.
“Why weren’t you like that about learning?” I asked Rufus.
“Don’t bother me,” he muttered.
Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have. Another man said educating slaves was illegal. When Rufus replied that he had checked and that it wasn’t illegal in Maryland, the man said it should have been. Talk. Rufus shrugged it off without ever saying how much of it he believed. It was enough that he sided with me, and my school continued. I got the feeling that Alice was keeping him happy—and maybe finally enjoying herself a little in the process. I guessed from what she had told me that this was what was frightening her so, driving her away from the plantation, causing her to lash out at me. She was trying to deal with guilt of her own.
But she was waiting and using some discretion. I relaxed, spent my spare moments trying to think of a way to get home. I didn’t want to depend on someone else’s chance violence again—violence that, if it came, could be more effective than I wanted.
Then Sam James stopped me out by the cookhouse and my complacency was brought to an end.
I saw him waiting for me beside the cookhouse door—a big young man. I mistook him for Nigel at first. Then I recognized him. Sarah had told me his name. He had spoken to me at the corn husking, and again at Christmas. Then Sarah had spoken to him for me and he had said nothing else. Until now.
“I’m Sam,” he said. “Remember at Christmas?”
“Yes. But I thought Sarah told you …”
“She did. Look, it ain’t that. I just wanted to see if maybe you’d teach my brother and sister to read.”
“Your … Oh. How old are they?”
“Sister was born the year you came here last … brother, the year before that.”
“I’ll have to get permission. Ask Sarah about it in a few days but don’t come to me again.” I thought of the expression I had seen on Rufus’s face as he looked at this man. “Maybe I’m too cautious, but I don’t want you getting in trouble because of me.”
He gave me a long searching look. “You want to be with that white man, girl?”
“If I were anywhere else, no black child on the place would be learning anything.”
“That ain’t what I mean.”
“Yes it is. It’s all part of the same thing.”
“Some folks say …”
“Hold on.” I was suddenly angry. “I don’t want to hear what ‘some folks’ say. ‘Some folks’ let Fowler drive them into the fields every day and work them like mules.”
“Let him …?”
“Let him! They do it to keep the skin on their backs and breath in their bodies. Well, they’re not the only ones who have to do things they don’t like to stay alive and whole. Now you tell me why that should be so hard for ‘some folks’ to understand?”
He sighed. “That’s what I told them. But you better off than they are, so they get jealous.” He gave me another of his long searching looks. “I still say it’s too bad you already spoke for.”
I grinned. “Get out of here, Sam. Field hands aren’t the only ones who can be jealous.”
He went. That was all. Innocent—completely innocent. But three days later, a trader led Sam away in chains.
Rufus never said a word to me. He didn’t accuse me of anything. I wouldn’t have known Sam had been sold if I hadn’t glanced out the window of Margaret Weylin’s room and seen the coffle.
I told Margaret some hasty lie, then ran out of her room, down the stairs, and out the door. I ran headlong into Rufus, and felt him steady me, hold me. The weakness that his dengue fever had left was finally gone. His grip was formidable.
“Get back in the house!” he hissed.
I saw Sam beyond him being chained into line. There were people a few feet away from him crying loudly. Two women, a boy and a girl. His family.
“Rufe,” I pleaded desperately, “don’t do this. There’s no need!”
He pushed me back toward the door and I struggled against him.
“Rufe, please! Listen, he came to ask me to teach his brother and sister to read. That’s all!”
It was like talking to the wall of the house. I managed to break away from him for a moment just as the younger of the two weeping women spotted me.
“You whore!” she screamed. She had not been permitted to approach the coffle, but she approached me. “You no-’count nigger whore, why couldn’t you leave my brother alone!”
She would have attacked me. And field hand that she was, strengthened by hard work, she would probably have given me the beating she thought I deserved. But Rufus stepped between us.
“Get back to work, Sally!”
She didn’t move, stood glaring at him until the older woman, probably her mother, reached her and pulled her away.
I caught Rufus by the hand and spoke low to him. “Please, Rufe. If you do this, you’ll destroy what you mean to preserve. Please don’t …”
He hit me.
It was a first, and so unexpected that I stumbled backward and fell.
And it was a mistake. It was the breaking of an unspoken agreement between us—a very basic agreement—and he knew it.
I got up slowly, watching him with anger and betrayal.
“Get in the house and stay there,” he said.
I turned my back and went to the cookhouse, deliberately disob
eying. I could hear one of the traders say, “You ought to sell that one too. Troublemaker!”
At the cookhouse, I heated water, got it warm, not hot. Then I took a basin of it up to the attic. It was hot there, and empty except for the pallets and my bag in its corner. I went over to it, washed my knife in antiseptic, and hooked the drawstring of my bag over my shoulder.
And in the warm water I cut my wrists.
The Rope
1
I awoke in darkness and lay still for several seconds trying to think where I was and when I had gone to sleep.
I was lying on something unbelievably soft and comfortable …
My bed. Home. Kevin?
I could hear regular breathing beside me now. I sat up and reached out to turn on the lamp—or I tried to. Sitting up made me faint and dizzy. For a moment, I thought Rufus was pulling me back to him before I could even see home. Then I became aware that my wrists were bandaged and throbbing—and I remembered what I had done.
The lamp on Kevin’s side of the bed went on and I could see him beardless now, but with his thatch of gray hair uncut.
I lay flat and looked up at him happily. “You’re beautiful,” I said. “You look a little like a heroic portrait I saw once of Andrew Jackson.”
“No way,” he said. “Man was skinny as hell. I’ve seen him.”
“But you haven’t seen my heroic portrait.”
“Why the hell did you cut your wrists? You could have bled to death! Or did you cut them yourself?”
“Yes. It got me home.”
“There must be a safer way.”
I rubbed my wrists gingerly. “There isn’t any safe way to almost kill yourself. I was afraid of the sleeping pills. I took them with me because I wanted to be able to die if … if I wanted to die. But I was afraid that if I used them to get home, I might die before you or some doctor figured out what was wrong with me. Or that if I didn’t die, I’d have some grisly side-effect—like gangrene.”
“I see,” he said after a while.
“Did you bandage me?”
“Me? No, I thought this was too serious for me to handle alone. I stopped the bleeding as best I could and called Lou George. He bandaged you.” Louis George was a doctor friend Kevin had met through his writing. Kevin had interviewed George for an article once, and the two had taken a liking to each other. They wound up doing a nonfiction book together.