10
I wrote his letters. I had to read several of the letters he’d received first to pick up the stilted formal style of the day. I didn’t want Rufus having to face some creditor that I had angered with my twentieth-century brevity—which could come across as nineteenth-century abruptness, even discourtesy. Rufus gave me a general idea of what he wanted me to say and then approved or disapproved of the way I said it. Usually, he approved. Then we started to go over his father’s books together. I never did get back to Margaret Weylin.
And I wasn’t ever to get back to her full time. Rufus brought a young girl named Beth in from the fields to help with the housework. That even- tually freed Carrie to spend more time with Margaret. I continued to sleep in Margaret’s room because I agreed with Rufus that Carrie belonged with her family, at least at night. That meant I had to put up with Margaret waking me up when she couldn’t sleep and complaining bitterly that Rufus had taken me away just when she and I were begin- ning to get on so well …
“What does he have you doing?” she asked me several times—
suspiciously.
I told her.
“Seems as though he could do that himself. Tom always did it himself.”
Rufus could have done it himself too, I thought, though I never said it aloud. He just didn’t like working alone. Actually, he didn’t like working at all. But if he had to do it, he wanted company. I didn’t realize how much he preferred my company in particular until he came in one night a little drunk and found Alice and I eating together in her cabin. He had been away eating with a family in town—“Some people with daughters they want to get rid of,” Alice had told me. She had said it with no con- cern at all even though she knew her life could become much harder if Rufus married. Rufus had property and slaves and was apparently quite
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He came home, and not finding either of us in the house, came out to Alice’s cabin. He opened the door and saw us both looking up at him from the table, and he smiled happily.
“Behold the woman,” he said. And he looked from one to the other of us. “You really are only one woman. Did you know that?”
He tottered away.
Alice and I looked at each other. I thought she would laugh because she took any opportunity she could find to laugh at him—though not to his face because he would beat her when he decided she needed it.
She didn’t laugh. She shuddered, then got up, not too gracefully—her pregnancy was showing now—and looked out the door after him.
After a while, she asked, “Does he ever take you to bed, Dana?”
I jumped. Her bluntness could still startle me. “No. He doesn’t want me and I don’t want him.”
She glanced back at me over one shoulder. “What you think your wants got to do with it?”
I said nothing because I liked her. And no answer I could give could help sounding like criticism of her.
“You know,” she said, “you gentle him for me. He hardly hits me at all when you’re here. And he never hits you.”
“He arranges for other people to hit me.”
“But still … I know what he means. He likes me in bed, and you out of bed, and you and I look alike if you can believe what people say.”
“We look alike if we can believe our own eyes!”
“I guess so. Anyway, all that means we’re two halves of the same woman—at least in his crazy head.”
11
The time passed slowly, uneventfully, as I waited for the birth of the child I hoped would be Hagar. I went on helping Rufus and his mother. I kept a journal in shorthand. (“What the devil are these chicken marks?” Rufus asked me when he looked over my shoulder one day.) It was such a relief to be able to say what I felt, even in writing, without worrying
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that I might get myself or someone else into trouble. One of my secre- tarial classes had finally come in handy.
I tried husking corn and blistered my slow clumsy hands while expe- rienced field hands sped through the work effortlessly, enjoying them- selves. There was no reason for me to join them, but they seemed to be making a party of the husking—Rufus gave them a little whiskey to help them along—and I needed a party, needed anything that would relieve my boredom, take my mind off myself.
It was a party, all right. A wild rough kind of party that nobody mod- ified because “the master’s women”—Alice and I—were there. People working near me around the small mountain of corn laughed at my blis- ters and told me I was being initiated. A jug went around and I tasted it, choked, and drew more laughter. Surprisingly companionable laughter. A man with huge muscles told me it was too bad I was already spoken for, and that earned me hostile looks from three women. After the work, there were great quantities of food—chicken, pork, vegetables, corn bread, fruit— better food than the herring and corn meal field hands usually saw so much of. Rufus came out to play hero for providing such a good meal, and the people gave him the praise he wanted. Then they made gross jokes about him behind his back. Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.
Young people began disappearing in pairs after a while, and some of the older ones stopped their eating or drinking or singing or talking long enough to give them looks of disapproval—or more understanding wist- ful looks. I thought about Kevin and missed him and knew I wasn’t going to sleep well that night.
At Christmas, there was another party—dancing, singing, three marriages.
“Daddy used to make them wait until corn shucking or Christmas to marry,” Rufus told me. “They like parties when they marry, and he made a few parties do.”
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“Anything to pinch a few pennies,” I said tactlessly.
He glanced at me. “You’d better be glad he didn’t waste money. You’re the one who gets upset when some quick money has to be raised.”
My mind had caught up with my mouth by then, and I kept quiet. He hadn’t sold anyone else. The harvest had been good and the creditors patient.
“Found anybody you want to jump the broom with?” he asked me.
I looked at him startled and saw that he wasn’t serious. He was smil- ing and watching the slaves do a bowing, partner-changing dance to the music of a banjo.
“What would you do if I had found someone?” I asked.
“Sell him,” he said. His smile was still in place, but there was no longer any humor in it. I noticed, now, that he was watching the big mus- cular man who had tried to get me to dance—the same man who had spo- ken to me at the corn husking. I would have to ask Sarah to tell him not to speak to me again. He didn’t mean anything, but that wouldn’t save him if Rufus got angry.
“One husband is enough for me,” I said. “Kevin?”
“Of course, Kevin.” “He’s a long way off.”
There was something in his tone that shouldn’t have been there. I
turned to face him. “Don’t talk stupid.”
He jumped and looked around quickly to see whether anyone had heard.
“You watch your mouth,” he said. “Watch yours.”
He stalked away angrily. We’d been working together too much lately, especially now that Alice was so advanced in her pregnancy. I was grate- ful when Alice herself created another job for me—a job that got me away from him regularly. Sometime during the week-long Christmas holiday, Alice persuaded him to let me teach their son Joe to read and write.
“It was my Christmas present,” she told me. “He asked me what I wanted, and I told him I wanted my son not to be ignorant. You know, I had to fight with him all week to get him to say yes!”
But he had said it, finally, and the boy came to me every day to learn to draw big clumsy letters on the slate Rufus bought him and read sim-
