transferal to come …
I had closed my eyes. When I opened them, the dirt path and the trees were still there. I got up wearily and began walking again.
When I had been walking for a while, I began to wonder whether I had passed the cabin without seeing it. And I began to hear noises—not birds or animals this time, not anything I could identify at first. But whatever it was, it seemed to be coming closer. It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that it was the sound of horses moving slowly down the road toward me.
Just in time, I dove into the bushes.
I lay still, listening, shaking a little, wondering whether the approach- ing horsemen had seen me. I could see them now, dark, slowly moving shapes going in a direction that would eventually take them past me on toward the Weylin house. And if they saw me, they might take me along with them as their prisoner. Blacks here were assumed to be slaves unless they could prove they were free—unless they had their free papers. Paperless blacks were fair game for any white.
And these riders were white. I could see that in the moonlight as they came near. Then they turned and headed into the woods just a few feet from me. I watched and waited, keeping absolutely still until they had all gone past. Eight white men out for a leisurely ride in the middle of the night. Eight white men going into the woods in the area where the Green-
THE FIRE 35
wood cabin was supposed to be.
After a moment of indecision, I got up and followed them, moving carefully from tree to tree. I was both afraid of them and glad of their human presence. Dangerous as they could be to me, somehow, they did not seem as threatening as the dark shadowy woods with its strange sounds, its unknowns.
As I had expected, the men led me to a small log cabin in a moonlit clearing in the woods. Rufus had told me I could reach the Greenwood cabin by way of the road, but he hadn’t told me the cabin sat back out of sight of the road. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe this was someone else’s cabin. I half hoped it was because if the people inside this cabin were black, they were almost certainly in for trouble.
Four of the riders dismounted and went to hit and kick the door. When no one answered their pounding, two of them began trying to break it down. It looked like a heavy door—one more likely to break the men’s shoulders than it was to give. But apparently the latch used to keep it shut wasn’t heavy. There was a sound of splintering wood, and the door swung inward. The four men rushed in with it, and a moment later, three people were shoved, almost thrown out of the cabin. Two of them—a man and woman—were caught by the riders outside who had dis- mounted, apparently expecting them. The third, a little girl dressed in something long and light colored, was allowed to fall to the ground and scramble away, ignored by the men. She moved to within a few yards of where I lay in the bushes near the edge of the clearing.
There was talk in the clearing now, and I began to distinguish words over the distance and through the unfamiliar accents.
“No pass,” said one of the riders. “He sneaked off.”
“No, Master,” pleaded one of those from the cabin—clearly a black man speaking to whites. “I had a pass. I had …”
One of the whites hit him in the face. Two others held him, and he sagged between them. More talk.
“If you had a pass, where is it?”
“Don’t know. Must have dropped it coming here.”
They hustled the man to a tree so close to me that I lay flat on the ground, stiff with fear. With just a little bad luck, one of the whites would spot me, or, in the darkness, fail to spot me and step on me.
The man was forced to hug the tree, and his hands were tied to prevent him from letting go. The man was naked, apparently dragged from bed.
36 KINDRED
I looked at the woman who still stood back beside the cabin and saw that she had managed to wrap herself in something. A blanket, perhaps. As I noticed it, one of the whites tore it from her. She said something in a voice so soft that all I caught was her tone of protest.
“Shut your mouth!” said the man who had taken her blanket. He threw it on the ground. “Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?”
One of the other men joined in. “What do you think you’ve got that we haven’t seen before?”
There was raucous laughter.
“Seen more and better,” someone else added. There were obscenities, more laughter.
By now, the man had been securely tied to the tree. One of the whites went to his horse to get what proved to be a whip. He cracked it once in the air, apparently for his own amusement, then brought it down across the back of the black man. The man’s body convulsed, but the only sound he made was a gasp. He took several more blows with no outcry, but I could hear his breathing, hard and quick.
Behind him, his child wept noisily against her mother’s leg, but the woman, like her husband, was silent. She clutched the child to her and stood, head down, refusing to watch the beating.
Then the man’s resolve broke. He began to moan—low gut-wrenching sounds torn from him against his will. Finally, he began to scream.
I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining against the rope as his screaming went on and on. My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet. Why didn’t they stop!
“Please, Master,” the man begged. “For Godsake, Master, please …” I shut my eyes and tensed my muscles against an urge to vomit.
I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me. In fact, she and I were reacting very much alike. My face too was wet with tears. And my mind was darting from one thought to another, trying to tune out the whipping. At one point, this last cowardice even brought me something useful. A name for whites who
THE FIRE 37
rode through the night in the ante bellum South, breaking in doors and beating and otherwise torturing black people.
Patrols. Groups of young whites who ostensibly maintained order among the slaves. Patrols. Forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan.
The man’s screaming stopped.
After a moment, I looked up and saw that the patrollers were untying him. He continued to lean against the tree even when the rope was off him until one of the patrollers pulled him around and tied his hands in front of him. Then, still holding the other end of the rope, the patroller mounted his horse and rode away half-dragging his captive bebind him. The rest of the patrol mounted and followed except for one who was hav- ing some kind of low-voiced discussion with the woman. Evidently, the discussion didn’t go the way the man wanted because before he rode after the others, he punched the woman in the face exactly as her husband had been punched earlier. The woman collapsed to the ground. The patroller rode away and left her there.
The patrol and its stumbling captive headed back to the road, slanting off toward the Weylin house. If they had gone back exactly the way they came, they would have either gone over me or driven me from my cover. I was lucky—and stupid for having gotten so close. I wondered whether the captive black man belonged to Tom Weylin. That might explain Rufus’s friendship with the child, Alice. That is, if this child was Alice. If this was the right cabin. Whether it was or not, though, the woman, unconscious and abandoned, was in need of help. I got up and went over to her.
The child, who had been kneeling beside her, jumped up to run away. “Alice!” I called softly.
She stopped, peered at me through the darkness. She was Alice, then. These people were my relatives, my ancestors. And this place could be my refuge.
4
“I’m a friend, Alice,” I said as I knelt and turned the unconscious woman’s head to a more comfortable- looking position. Alice watched me
38 KINDRED
uncertainly, then spoke in a small whispery voice. “She dead?”
I looked up. The child was younger than Rufus—dark and slender and small. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and sniffed.
“No, she’s not dead. Is there water in the house?” “Yeah.”
“Go get me some.”
She ran into the cabin and returned a few seconds later with a gourd dipper of water. I wet the mother’s face a little, washed blood from around her nose and mouth. From what I could see of
