other people.
My cousin came over, and when Kevin answered the door, she didn’t recognize him.
“What’s the matter with him?” she whispered later when she and I
were alone.
“He’s been sick,” I lied. “With what?”
“The doctor isn’t sure what it was. Kevin is much better now, though.” “He looks just like my girl friend’s father did, and he had cancer.” “Julie, for Godsake!”
“I’m sorry, but … never mind. He hasn’t hit you again, has he?” “No.”
244
KINDRED
“Well, that’s something. You’d better take care of yourself. You don’t look so good either.”
Kevin tried driving—his first time after five years of horses and bug- gies. He said the traffic confused him, made him more nervous than he could see any reason for. He said he’d almost killed a couple of people. Then he put the car in the garage and left it there.
Of course, I wouldn’t drive, wouldn’t even ride with someone else while there was still a chance of Rufus snatching me away. After the first week, though, Kevin began to doubt that I would be called again.
I didn’t doubt it. For the sake of the people whose lives Rufus con- trolled, I didn’t wish him dead, but I wouldn’t rest easy until I knew he was. As things stood now, sooner or later, he would get himself into trou- ble again and call me. I kept my denim bag nearby.
“You know, someday, you’re going to have to stop dragging that thing around with you and come back to life,” Kevin said after two weeks. He had just tried driving again, and when he came in, his hands were shak- ing. “Hell, half the time I wonder if you’re not eager to go back to Mary- land anyway.”
I had been watching television—or at least, the television was on. Actually, I was looking over some journal pages I had managed to bring home in my bag, wondering whether I could weave them into a story. Now, I looked up at Kevin. “Me?”
“Why not? Eight months, after all.”
I put my journal pages down and got up to turn off the television. “Leave it on,” said Kevin.
I turned it off. “I think you’ve got something to say to me,” I said. “And I think I should hear it clearly.”
“You don’t want to hear anything.”
“No, I don’t. But I’m going to, aren’t I?” “My God, Dana, after two weeks …”
“It was eight days, time before last. And about three hours last time. The intervals between trips don’t mean anything.”
“How old was he last time?”
“He turned twenty-five when I was there last. And, though I’ll never be able to prove it, I turned twenty-seven.”
“He’s grown up.” I shrugged.
“Do you remember what he said just before he tried to shoot you?”
THE ROPE 245
“No. I had other things on my mind.”
“I had forgotten it myself, but it’s come back to me. He said, ‘You’re not going to leave me!’”
I thought for a moment. “Yes, that sounds about right.” “It doesn’t sound right to me.”
“I mean it sounds like what he said! I don’t have any control over what he says.”
“But still …” He paused, looked at me as though he expected me to say something. I didn’t. “It sounded more like what I might say to you if you were leaving.”
“Would you?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Say what you mean. I can’t answer you unless you say it.”
He drew a deep breath. “All right. You’ve said he was a man of his time, and you’ve told me what he’s done to Alice. What’s he done to you?”
“Sent me to the field, had me beaten, made me spend nearly eight months sleeping on the floor of his mother’s room, sold people … He’s done plenty, but the worst of it was to other people. He hasn’t raped me, Kevin. He understands, though you don’t seem to, that for him that would be a form of suicide.”
“You mean there’s something he could do to make you kill him, after all?”
I sighed, went over to him, and sat down on the arm of his chair. I
looked down at him. “Tell me you believe I’m lying to you.”
He looked at me uncertainly. “Look, if anything did happen, I could understand it. I know how it was back then.”
“You mean you could forgive me for having been raped?”
“Dana, I lived there. I know what those people were like. And Rufus’s attitude toward you …”
“Was sensible most of the time. He knew I could kill him just by turn- ing my back at the right moment. And he believed that I wouldn’t have him because I loved you. He said something like that once. He was wrong, but I never told him so.”
“Wrong?”
“At least partly. Of course I love you, and I don’t want anyone else. But there’s another reason, and when I’m back there it’s the most impor- tant reason. I don’t think Rufus would have understood it. Maybe you
246
won’t either.” “Tell me.”
KINDRED
I thought for a moment, tried to find the right words. If I could make him understand, then surely he would believe me. He had to believe. He was my anchor here in my own time. The only person who had any idea what I was going through.
“You know what I thought,” I said, “when I saw Tess tied into that coffle?” I had told him about Tess and about Sam—that I had known them, that Rufus had sold them. I hadn’t told him the details though— especially not the details of Sam’s sale. I had been trying for two weeks to avoid sending his thoughts in the direction they had taken now.
“What does Tess have to do with …?”
“I thought, that could be me—standing there with a rope around my neck waiting to be led away like someone’s dog!” I stopped, looked down at him, then went on softly. “I’m not property, Kevin. I’m not a horse or a sack of wheat. If I have to seem to be property, if I have to accept limits on my freedom for Rufus’s sake, then he also has to accept limits—on his behavior toward me. He has to leave me enough control of my own life to make living look better to me than killing and dying.” “If your black ancestors had felt that way, you wouldn’t be here,” said
Kevin.
“I told you when all this started that I didn’t have their endurance. I still don’t. Some of them will go on struggling to survive, no matter what. I’m not like that.”
He smiled a little. “I suspect that you are.”
I shook my head. He thought I was being modest or something. He didn’t understand.
Then I realized that he had smiled. I looked down at him question- ingly.
He sobered. “I had to know.” “And do you, now?”
“Yes.”
That felt like truth. It felt enough like truth for me not to mind that he had only half understood me.
“Have you decided what you’re going to do about Rufus?” he asked.
I shook my head. “You know, it’s not only what will happen to the slaves that worries me … if I turn my back on him. It’s what might hap- pen to me.”
THE ROPE 247
“You’ll be finished with him.”
“I might be finished period. I might not be able to get home.”
“Your coming home has never had anything to do with him. You come home when your life is in danger.”
“But how do I come home? Is the power mine, or do I tap some power in him? All this started with him, after all. I don’t know whether I need him or not. And I won’t know until he’s not around.”
3
A couple of Kevin’s friends came over on the Fourth of July and tried to get us to go to the Rose Bowl with them for the fireworks. Kevin wanted to go—more to get out of the house than for any other reason, I suspected. I told him to go ahead, but he wouldn’t go without me. As it turned out, there was no chance for me to go, anyway. As Kevin’s friends left the house, I began to feel dizzy.
I stumbled toward my bag, fell before I reached it, crawled toward it, grabbed it just as Kevin came in from saying good-bye to his friends.
“Dana,” he was saying, “we can’t stay cooped up in this house any longer waiting for something that isn’t …”
He was
