work wasn’t hard and she never complained about anything but my sewing. She never threat- ened me or tried to have me whipped. Rufus said she was pleased with me. That seemed to surprise even him. So I endured her quietly. By now, I knew enough to realize when I was well off. Or I thought I did.
“You ought to see yourself,” Alice told me one day as I was hiding out in her cabin—the cabin Rufus had had Nigel build her just before the birth of her first child.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Marse Rufe really put the fear of God in you, didn’t he?” “Fear of … What are you talking about?”
“You run around fetching and carrying for that woman like you love her. And half a day in the fields was all it took.”
“Hell, Alice, leave me alone. I’ve been listening to nonsense all morn- ing. I don’t need yours.”
“You don’t want to hear me, get out of here. The way you always suck- in’ up to that woman is enough to make anybody sick.”
I got up and went to the cookhouse. There were times when it was stu- pid to expect reason from Alice, times when it did no good to point out
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the obvious.
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There were two field hands in the cookhouse. One young man who had a broken leg splinted and obviously healing crooked, and one old man who didn’t do much work any more. I could hear them before I went in. “I know Marse Rufe’ll get rid of me if he can,” said the young man. “I
ain’t no good to him. His daddy would have got rid of me.”
“Won’t nobody buy me,” said the old man. “I was burnt out long time ago. It’s you young ones got to worry.”
I went into the cookhouse and the young man who had his mouth open to speak closed it quickly, looking at me with open hostility. The old man simply turned his back. I’d seen slaves do that to Alice. I hadn’t noticed them doing it to me before. Suddenly, the cookhouse was no more com- fortable than Alice’s cabin had been. It might have been different if Sarah or Carrie had been there, but they weren’t. I left the cookhouse and went back toward the main house, feeling lonely.
Once I was inside, though, I wondered why I had crept away like that. Why hadn’t I fought back? Alice accusing me was ridiculous, and she knew it. But the field hands … They just didn’t know me, didn’t know how loyal I might be to Rufus or Margaret, didn’t know what I might report.
And if I told them, how likely would they be to believe me? But still …
I went down the hall and toward the stairs slowly, wondering why I hadn’t tried to defend myself—at least tried. Was I getting so used to being submissive?
Upstairs, I could hear Margaret Weylin thumping on the floor with her cane. She didn’t use the cane much for walking because she hardly ever walked. She used it to call me.
I turned and went back out of the house, out toward the woods. I had to think. I wasn’t getting enough time to myself. Once—God knows how long ago—I had worried that I was keeping too much distance between myself and this alien time. Now, there was no distance at all. When had I stopped acting? Why had I stopped?
There were people coming toward me through the woods. Several peo- ple. They were on the road, and I was several feet off it. I crouched in the trees to wait for them to pass. I was in no mood to answer some white man’s stupid inevitable questions: “What are you doing here? Who’s your master?”
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I could have answered without trouble. I was nowhere near the edge of Weylin land. But just for a while, I wanted to be my own master. Before I forgot what it felt like.
A white man went by on horseback leading two dozen black men chained two by two. Chained. They wore handcuffs and iron collars with chains connecting the collars to a central chain that ran between the two lines. Behind the men walked several women roped together neck to neck. A coffle—slaves for sale.
At the end of the procession rode a second white man with a gun in his belt. They were all headed for the Weylin house.
I realized suddenly that the slaves in the cookhouse had not been spec- ulating idly about the possibility of being sold. They had known that there was a sale coming. Field hands who never set foot in the main house, and they had known. I hadn’t heard a thing.
Lately, Rufus spent his time either straightening out his father’s affairs, or sleeping. The weakness left over from his illness was still with him, and he had no time for me. He barely had time for his mother. But he had time to sell slaves. He had time to make himself that much more like his father.
I let the coffle reach the house far ahead of me. By the time I got there, three slaves were already being added to the line. Two men, one grim- faced, one openly weeping; and one woman who moved as though she were sleepwalking. As I got closer, the woman began to look familiar to me. I stopped, almost not wanting to know who it was. A tall, strongly built, handsome woman.
Tess.
I’d seen her only two or three times this trip. She was still working in the fields, still serving the overseer at night. She’d had no children, and that may have been why she was being sold. Or maybe this was some- thing Margaret Weylin had arranged. She might be that vindictive if she knew of her husband’s temporary interest in Tess.
I started toward Tess and the white man who had just tied a rope around her neck, fastening her into the line, saw me. He turned to face me, gun drawn.
I stopped, alarmed, confused … I had made no threatening move. “I just wanted to say good-bye to my friend,” I told him. I was whispering for some reason.
“Say it from there. She can hear you.”
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“Tess?”
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She stood, head down, shoulders rounded, a little red bundle hanging from one hand. She should have heard me, but I didn’t think she had.
“Tess, it’s Dana.”
She never looked up.
“Dana!” Rufus’s voice from near the steps where he was talking with the other white man. “You get away from here. Go inside.”
“Tess?” I called once more, willing her to answer. She knew my voice, surely. Why wouldn’t she look up? Why wouldn’t she speak? Why wouldn’t she even move? It was as though I didn’t exist for her, as though I wasn’t real.
I stepped toward her. I think I would have gone to her, taken the rope from her neck or gotten shot trying. But at that moment, Rufus reached me. He grabbed me, hustled me into the house, into the library.
“Stay here!” he ordered. “Just stay …” He stopped, suddenly stumbled against me, clutching at me now, not to hold me where I was, but to keep himself upright. “Damn!”
“How could you do it!” I hissed as he straightened. “Tess … those others …”
“They’re my property!”
I stared at him in disbelief. “Oh my God …!”
He passed a hand over his face, turned away. “Look, this sale is some- thing my father arranged before he died. You can’t do anything about it, so just stay out of the way!”
“Or what? You going to sell me too? You might as well!”
He went back outside without answering. After a while, I sat down in
Tom Weylin’s worn arm chair and put my head down on his desk.
8
Carrie covered for me with Margaret Weylin. She wanted me to know that when she caught me heading back upstairs. Actually, I don’t know why I was heading upstairs, except that I didn’t want to see Rufus again for a while, and there was nowhere else to go.
Carrie stopped me on the stairs, looked at me critically, then took my
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arm and led me back down and out to her cabin. I didn’t know or care what she had in mind, but I did
