… he would just go ahead and do what he wanted to no matter what Daddy said. Daddy always said he thought he was white. One day maybe two years after you left, Daddy got tired of it. New Orleans trader came through and Daddy said it would be better to sell Luke than to whip him until he ran away.”
I closed my eyes remembering the big man, hearing again his advice to Nigel on how to defy the whites. It had caught up with him. “Do you think the trader took him all the way to New Orleans?” I asked.
“Yeah. He was getting a load together to ship them down there.”
I shook my head. “Poor Luke. Are there cane fields in Louisiana now?”
“Cane, cotton, rice, they grow plenty down there.”
“My father’s parents worked in the cane fields there before they went
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to California. Luke could be a relative of mine.” “Just make sure you don’t wind up like him.” “I haven’t done anything.”
“Don’t go teaching nobody else to read.” “Oh.”
“Yes, oh. I might not be able to stop Daddy if he decided to sell you.” “Sell me! He doesn’t own me. Not even by the law here. He doesn’t
have any papers saying he owns me.” “Dana, don’t talk stupid!”
“But …”
“In town, once, I heard a man brag how he and his friends had caught a free black, tore up his papers, and sold him to a trader.”
I said nothing. He was right, of course. I had no rights—not even any papers to be torn up.
“Just be careful,” he said quietly.
I nodded. I thought I could escape from Maryland if I had to. I didn’t think it would be easy, but I thought I could do it. On the other hand, I didn’t see how even someone much wiser than I was in the ways of the time could escape from Louisiana, surrounded as they would be by water and slave states. I would have to be careful, all right, and be ready to run if I seemed to be in any danger of being sold.
“I’m surprised Nigel is still here,” I said. Then I realized that might not be a very bright thing to say even to Rufus. I would have to learn to keep more of my thoughts to myself.
“Oh, Nigel ran away,” said Rufus. “Patrollers brought him back, though, hungry and sick. They had whipped him, and Daddy whipped him some more. Then Aunt Sarah doctored him and I talked Daddy into letting me keep him. I think my job was harder. I don’t think Daddy relaxed until Nigel married Carrie. Man marries, has children, he’s more likely to stay where he is.”
“You sound like a slaveholder already.” He shrugged.
“Would you have sold Luke?” “No! I liked him.”
“Would you sell anyone?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“I hope not,” I said watching him. “You don’t have to do that kind of thing. Not all slaveholders do it.”
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I took my denim bag from where I had hidden it under his bed, and sat down at his desk to write the letter, using one of his large sheets of paper with my pen. I didn’t want to bother dipping the quill and steel pen on his desk into ink.
“Dear Kevin, I’m back. And I want to go North too …” “Let me see your pen when you’re finished,” said Rufus. “All right.”
I went on writing, feeling myself strangely near tears. It was as though
I was really talking to Kevin. I began to believe I would see him again. “Let me see the other things you brought with you,” said Rufus.
I swung the bag onto his bed. “You can look,” I said, and continued writing. Not until I was finished with the letter did I look up to see what he was doing.
He was reading my book.
“Here’s the pen,” I said casually, and I waited to grab the book the moment he put it down. But instead of putting it down, he ignored the pen and looked up at me.
“This is the biggest lot of abolitionist trash I ever saw.”
“No it isn’t,” I said. “That book wasn’t even written until a century after slavery was abolished.”
“Then why the hell are they still complaining about it?”
I pulled the book down so that I could see the page he had been read- ing. A photograph of Sojourner Truth stared back at me solemn-eyed. Beneath the picture was part of the text of one of her speeches.
“You’re reading history, Rufe. Turn a few pages and you’ll find a white man named J. D. B. DeBow claiming that slavery is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites someone to look down on. That’s history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” And there was other history that he must not read. Too much of it hadn’t happened yet. Sojourner Truth, for instance, was still a slave. If someone bought her from her New York owners and brought her South before the Northern laws could free her, she might spend the rest of her life picking cotton. And there were two important slave children right here in Maryland. The older one, living here in Talbot County, would be called Frederick Douglass after a name change or two. The second, growing up a few miles south in Dorchester County was Harriet Ross, eventually to be Harriet Tubman. Someday, she was going to cost Eastern Shore planta-
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tion owners a huge amount of money by guiding three hundred of their runaway slaves to freedom. And farther down in Southampton, Virginia, a man named Nat Turner was biding his time. There were more. I had said I couldn’t do anything to change history. Yet, if history could be changed, this book in the hands of a white man— even a sympathetic white man—might be the thing to change it.
“History like this could send you down to join Luke,” said Rufus. “Didn’t I tell you to be careful!”
“I wouldn’t have let anyone else see it.” I took it from his hand, spoke more softly. “Or are you telling me I shouldn’t trust you either?”
He looked startled. “Hell, Dana, we have to trust each other. You said that yourself. But what if my daddy went through that bag of yours. He could if he wanted to. You couldn’t stop him.”
I said nothing.
“You’ve never had a whipping like he’d give you if he found that book. Some of that reading … He’d take you to be another Denmark Vesey. You know who Vesey was?”
“Yes.” A freedman who had plotted to free others violently. “You know what they did to him?”
“Yes.”
“Then put that book in the fire.”
I held the book for a moment, then opened it to the map of Maryland. I tore the map out.
“Let me see,” said Rufus.
I handed him the map. He looked at it and turned it over. Since there was nothing on the back but a map of Virginia, he handed it back to me. “That will be easier to hide,” he said. “But you know if a white man sees it, he’ll figure you mean to use it to escape.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
He shook his head in disgust.
I tore the book into several pieces and threw it onto the hot coals in his fireplace. The fire flared up and swallowed the dry paper, and I found my thoughts shifting to Nazi book burnings. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of “wrong” ideas.
“Seal your letter,” said Rufus. “There’s wax and a candle on the desk there. I’ll send the letter as soon as I can get to town.”
I obeyed inexpertly, dripping hot wax on my fingers. “Dana …?”
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I glanced at him, caught him watching me with unexpected intensity. “Yes?”
His eyes seemed to slide away from mine. “That map is still bothering me. Listen, if you want me to get that letter to town soon, you put the map in the fire too.”
I turned to face him, dismayed. More blackmail. I had thought that was over between us. I had hoped it was over; I needed so much to trust him. I didn’t dare stay with him if I couldn’t trust him.
“I wish you hadn’t said that, Rufe,” I told him quietly. I went over to him, fighting down anger and disappointment and began putting the things that he had scattered back into my bag.
“Wait a minute.” He caught my hand. “You get so damned cold when you’re mad. Wait!”
“For what?”
“Tell me what you’re mad about.”
What, indeed? Could I make him see why I thought his blackmail was worse than my own? It was. He threatened to keep me from my husband if I did not submit to his whim and destroy a paper
