that might help me get free. I acted out of desperation. He acted out of whimsy or anger. Or so it seemed.
“Rufe, there are things we just can’t bargain on. This is one of them.” “You’re going to tell me what we can’t bargain on?” He sounded more
surprised than indignant.
“You’re damn right I am.” I spoke very softly. “I won’t bargain away my husband or my freedom!”
“You don’t have either to bargain.” “Neither do you.”
He stared at me with at least as much confusion as anger, and that was encouraging. He could have let his temper flare, could have driven me from the plantation very quickly. “Look,” he said through his teeth, “I’m trying to help you!”
“Are you?”
“What do you think I’m doing? Listen, I know Kevin tried to help you. He made things easier for you by keeping you with him. But he couldn’t really protect you. He didn’t know how. He couldn’t even protect him- self. Daddy almost had to shoot him when you disappeared. He was fighting and cursing … at first Daddy didn’t even know why. I’m the one who helped Kevin get back on the place.”
“You?”
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“I talked Daddy into seeing him again—and it wasn’t easy. I may not be able to talk him into anything for you if he sees that map.”
“I see.”
He waited, watching me. I wanted to ask him what he would do with my letter if I didn’t burn the map. I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to hear an answer that might send me out to face another patrol or earn another whipping. I wanted to do things the easy way if I could. I wanted to stay here and let a letter go to Boston and bring Kevin back to me.
So I told myself the map was more a symbol than a necessity anyway. If I had to go, I knew how to follow the North Star at night. I had made a point of learning. And by day, I knew how to keep the rising sun to my right and the setting sun to my left.
I took the map from Rufus’s desk and dropped it into the fireplace. It darkened, then burst into flame.
“I can manage without it, you know,” I said quietly.
“No need for you to,” said Rufus. “You’ll be all right here. You’re home.”
7
Isaac and Alice had four days of freedom together. On the fifth day, they were caught. On the seventh day, I found out about it. That was the day Rufus and Nigel took the wagon into town to mail my letter and take care of some business of their own. I had heard nothing of the runaways and Rufus seemed to have forgotten about them. He was feeling better, looking better. That seemed to be enough for him. He came to me just before he left and said, “Let me have some of your aspirins. I might need them the way Nigel drives.”
Nigel heard and called out, “Marse Rufe, you can drive. I’ll just sit back and relax while you show me how to go smooth over a bumpy road.”
Rufus threw a clod of dirt at him, and he caught it, laughing, and threw it back just missing Rufus. “See there?” Rufus told me. “Here I am all crippled up and he’s taking advantage.”
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I laughed and got the aspirins. Rufus never took anything from my bag without asking—though he could have easily done so.
“You sure you feel well enough to go to town?” I asked as I gave them to him.
“No,” he said, “but I’m going.” I didn’t find out until later that a visi- tor had brought him word of Alice and Isaac’s capture. He was going to get Alice.
And I went to the laundry yard to help a young slave named Tess to beat and boil the dirt out of a lot of heavy smelly clothes. She had been sick, and I had promised her I would help. My work was still pretty much whatever I wanted it to be. I felt a little guilty about that. No other slave—house or field—had that much freedom. I worked where I pleased, or where I saw that others needed help. Sarah sent me to do one job or another sometimes, but I didn’t mind that. In Margaret’s absence, Sarah ran the house—and the house servants. She spread the work fairly and managed the house as efficiently as Margaret had, but without much of the tension and strife Margaret generated. She was resented, of course, by slaves who made every effort to avoid jobs they didn’t like. But she was also obeyed.
“Lazy niggers!” she would mutter when she had to get after someone. I stared at her in surprise when I first heard her say it. “Why should
they work hard?” I asked. “What’s it going to get them?”
“It’ll get them the cowhide if they don’t,” she snapped. “I ain’t goin’
to take the blame for what they don’t do. Are you?” “Well, no, but …”
“I work. You work. Don’t need somebody behind us all the time to make us work.”
“When the time comes for me to stop working and get out of here, I’ll do it.”
She jumped, looked around quickly. “You got no sense sometimes! Just talk all over your mouth!”
“We’re alone.”
“Might not be alone as we look. People listen around here. And they talk too.”
I said nothing.
“You do what you want to do—or think you want to do. But you keep it to yourself.”
I nodded. “I hear.”
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She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You need to look at some of the niggers they catch and bring back,” she said. “You need to see them— starving, ’bout naked, whipped, dragged, bit by dogs … You need to see them.”
“I’d rather see the others.” “What others?”
“The ones who make it. The ones living in freedom now.” “If any do.”
“They do.”
“Some say they do. It’s like dying, though, and going to heaven. Nobody ever comes back to tell you about it.”
“Come back and be enslaved again?”
“Yeah. But still … This is dangerous talk! No point to it anyway.” “Sarah, I’ve seen books written by slaves who’ve run away and lived
in the North.”
“Books!” She tried to sound contemptuous but sounded uncertain instead. She couldn’t read. Books could be awesome mysteries to her, or they could be dangerous time-wasting nonsense. It depended on her mood. Now her mood seemed to flicker between curiosity and fear. Fear won. “Foolishness!” she said. “Niggers writing books!”
“But it’s true. I’ve seen …”
“Don’t want to hear no more ’bout it!” She had raised her voice sharply. That was unusual, and it seemed to surprise her as much as it surprised me. “Don’t want to hear no more,” she repeated softly. “Things ain’t bad here. I can get along.”
She had done the safe thing—had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman who might have been called “mammy” in some other household. She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties. The house-nigger, the handkerchief-head, the female Uncle Tom—the fright- ened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose, and who knew as little about the freedom of the North as she knew about the hereafter.
I looked down on her myself for a while. Moral superiority. Here was someone even less courageous than I was. That comforted me somehow. Or it did until Rufus and Nigel drove into town and came back with what was left of Alice.
It was late when they got home—almost dark. Rufus ran into the house
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shouting for me before I realized he was back. “Dana! Dana, get down here!”
I came out of his room—my new refuge when he wasn’t in it—and hurried down the stairs.
“Come on, come on!” he urged.
I said nothing, followed him out the front door not knowing what to expect. He led me to the wagon where Alice lay bloody, filthy, and barely alive.
“Oh my God,” I whispered. “Help her!” demanded Rufus.
I looked at him, remembering why Alice needed help. I didn’t say any- thing, and I don’t know what expression I was wearing, but he took a step back from me.
“Just help her!” he said. “Blame me if you want to, but help her!”
I turned to her, straightened her body gently, feeling for broken bones. Miraculously, there didn’t seem to be any. Alice moaned and cried out weakly. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to see me.
