when I finished, he just shook his head.
“This is getting crazier and crazier,” he muttered. “Not to me.”
He glanced at me sidelong.
“To me, it’s getting more and more believable. I don’t like it. I don’t want to be in the middle of it. I don’t understand how it can be happen- ing, but it’s real. It hurts too much not to be. And … and my ancestors, for Godsake!”
“Maybe.”
“Kevin, I can show you the old Bible.”
“But the fact is, you had already seen the Bible. You knew about those people—knew their names, knew they were Marylanders, knew …”
“What the hell is that supposed to prove! That I was hallucinating and weaving in the names of my ancestors? I’d like to give you some of this pain that I must still be hallucinating.”
He put an arm over my chest, resting it on unbruised flesh. After a while, he said, “Do you honestly believe you traveled back over a cen- tury in time and crossed three thousand miles of space to see your dead ancestors?”
I moved uncomfortably. “Yes,” I whispered. “No matter how it sounds, no matter what you think, it happened. And you’re not helping me deal with it by laughing.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“They were my ancestors. Even that damn parasite, the patroller, saw the resemblance between me and Alice’s mother.”
He said nothing.
THE FIRE 47
“I’ll tell you … I wouldn’t dare act as though they weren’t my ances- tors. I wouldn’t let anything happen to them, the boy or girl, if I could possibly prevent it.”
“You wouldn’t anyway.”
“Kevin, take this seriously, please!”
“I am. Anything I can do to help you, I’ll do.” “Believe me!”
He sighed. “It’s like you just said.” “What?”
“I wouldn’t dare act as though I didn’t believe. After all, when you vanish from here, you must go someplace. If that place is where you think it is—back to the ante bellum South—then we’ve got to find a way to protect you while you’re there.”
I moved closer to him, relieved, content with even such grudging acceptance. He had become my anchor, suddenly, my tie to my own world. He couldn’t have known how much I needed him firmly on my side.
“I’m not sure it’s possible for a lone black woman—or even a black man—to be protected in that place,” I said. “But if you have an idea, I’ll be glad to hear it.”
He said nothing for several seconds. Then he reached over me into the canvas bag and brought out the switchblade. “This might improve your chances—if you can bring yourself to use it.”
“I’ve seen it.” “Can you use it?”
“You mean,
“Yes. Before last night, I might not have been sure, but now, yes.”
He got up, left the room for a moment, and came back with two wooden rulers. “Show me,” he said.
I untied the cord of the canvas bag and got up, discovering sore mus- cles as I moved. I limped over to him, took one of the rulers, looked at it, rubbed my face groggily, and in a sudden slashing motion, drew the ruler across his abdomen just as he was opening his mouth to speak.
“That’s it,” I said. He frowned.
“Kevin, I’m not going to be in any fair fights.”
48
He said nothing.
KINDRED
“You understand? I’m a poor dumb scared nigger until I get my chance. They won’t even see the knife if I have my way. Not until it’s too late.”
He shook his head. “What else don’t I know about you?”
I shrugged and got back into bed. “I’ve been watching the violence of this time go by on the screen long enough to have picked up a few things.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“It doesn’t matter much.”
He sat down next to where I lay. “What do you mean?”
“That most of the people around Rufus know more about real violence than the screenwriters of today will ever know.”
“That’s … debatable.”
“I just can’t make myself believe I can survive in that place. Not with a knife, not even with a gun.”
He took a deep breath. “Look, if you’re drawn back there again, what can you do but try to survive? You’re not going to just let them kill you.” “Oh, they won’t kill me. Not unless I’m silly enough to resist the other things they’d rather do—like raping me, throwing me into jail as a run- away, and then selling me to the highest bidder when they see that my owner isn’t coming to claim me.” I rubbed my forehead. “I almost wish
I hadn’t read about it.”
“But it doesn’t have to happen that way. There were free blacks. You could pose as one of them.”
“Free blacks had papers to prove they were free.”
“You could have papers too. We could forge something …”
“If we knew what to forge. I mean, a certificate of freedom is what we need, but I don’t know what they looked like. I’ve read about them, but I’ve never seen one.”
He got up and went to the living room. Moments later, he came back and dumped an armload of books on the bed. “I brought everything we had on black history,” he said. “Start hunting.”
There were ten books. We checked indexes and even leafed through some of the books page by page to be sure. Nothing. I hadn’t really thought there would be anything in these books. I hadn’t read them all, but I’d at least glanced through them before.
“We’ll have to go to the library then,” said Kevin. “We’ll go today as soon as it’s open.”
THE FIRE 49
“If I’m still here when it opens.”
He put the books on the floor and got back under the cover. Then he lay there frowning at me. “What about the pass Alice’s father was sup- posed to have?”
“A pass … that was just written permission for a slave to be some- where other than at home at a certain time.”
“Sounds like just a note.”
“It is,” I said. “You’ve got it! One of the reasons it was against the law in some states to teach slaves to read and write was that they might escape by writing themselves passes. Some did escape that way.” I got up, went to Kevin’s office and took a small scratch pad and a new pen from his desk and the large atlas from his bookcase.
“I’m going to tear Maryland out,” I told him as I returned.
“Go ahead. I wish I had a road atlas for you. The roads in it wouldn’t exist in those days but it might show you the easiest way through the country.”
“This one shows main highways. Shows a lot of rivers too, and in eighteen fifteen there were probably not many bridges.” I looked closely at it, then got up again.
“What now?” asked Kevin.
“Encyclopedia. I want to see when the Pennsylvania Railroad built this nice long track through the peninsula. I’d have to go into Delaware to pick it up, but it would take me right into Pennsylvania.”
“Forget it,” he said. “Eighteen fifteen is too early for railroads.”
I looked anyway and found that the Pennsylvania Railroad hadn’t even been begun until 1846. I went back to bed and stuffed the pen, the map, and the scratch pad into my canvas bag.
“Tie that cord around you again,” said Kevin. I obeyed silently.
“I think we may have missed something,” he said. “Getting home may be simpler for you than you realize.”
“Getting home? Here?”
“Here. You may have more control over your returning than you think.”
“I don’t have any control at all.”
“You might. Listen, remember the rabbit or whatever it was that you said ran across the road in front of you?”
“Yes.”
50
“It scared you.”
KINDRED
“Terrified me. For a second, I thought it was … I don’t know, some- thing dangerous.”
“And your fear made you dizzy, and you thought you were coming home. Does fear usually make you
