13
I planned to stay on the Weylin plantation long enough to see Alice leave, to find out whether she would be able to keep her freedom this time. I managed to talk her into waiting until early summer to go. And I was prepared to wait that long myself before I tried some dangerous trick that might get me home. I was homesick and Kevinsick and damned sick of Margaret Weylin's floor and Alice's mouth, but I could wait a few more months. I thought.
I talked Rufus into letting me teach Nigel's two older sons and the two children who served at the table along with Joe. Surprisingly, the children liked it. I couldn't recall having liked school much when I was their ages. Rufus liked it because Joe was as bright as I had said—bright and competitive. He had a head start on the others, and he didn't intend to lose it.
"Why weren't you like that about learning?" I asked Rufus.
"Don't bother me," he muttered.
Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have. Another man said educating slaves was illegal. When Rufus replied that he had checked and that it wasn't illegal in Maryland, the man said it should have been. Talk. Rufus shrugged it off without ever saying how much of it he believed. It was enough that he sided with me, and my school continued. I got the feeling that Alice was keeping him happy—and maybe finally enjoying herself a little in the process. I guessed from what she had told me that this was what was frightening her so, driving her away from the plantation, causing her to lash out at me. She was trying to deal with guilt of her own.
But she was waiting and using some discretion. I relaxed, spent my spare moments trying to think of a way to get home. I didn't want to depend on someone else's chance violence again—violence that, if it came, could be more effective than I wanted.
Then Sam James stopped me out by the cookhouse and my complacency was brought to an end.
I saw him waiting for me beside the cookhouse door—a big young man. I mistook him for Nigel at first. Then I recognized him. Sarah had told me his name. He had spoken to me at the corn husking, and again at Christmas. Then Sarah had spoken to him for me and he had said nothing else. Until now.
"I'm Sam," he said. "Remember at Christmas?"
"Yes. But I thought Sarah told you …"
"She did. Look, it ain't that. I just wanted to see if maybe you'd teach my brother and sister to read."
"Your … Oh. How old are they?"
"Sister was born the year you came here last … brother, the year before that."
"I'll have to get permission. Ask Sarah about it in a few days but don't come to me again." I thought of the expression I had seen on Rufus's face as he looked at this man. "Maybe I'm too cautious, but I don't want you getting in trouble because of me."
He gave me a long searching look. "You want to be with that white man, girl?"
"If I were anywhere else, no black child on the place would be learning anything."
"That ain't what I mean."
"Yes it is. It's all part of the same thing."
"Some folks say …"
"Hold on." I was suddenly angry. "I don't want to hear what 'some folks' say. 'Some folks' let Fowler drive them into the fields every day and work them like mules."
"Let him …?"
"Let him! They do it to keep the skin on their backs and breath in their bodies. Well, they're not the only ones who have to do things they don't like to stay alive and whole. Now you tell me why that should be so hard for 'some folks' to understand?"
He sighed. "That's what I told them. But you better off than they are, so they get jealous." He gave me another of his long searching looks. "I still say it's too bad you already spoke for."
I grinned. "Get out of here, Sam. Field hands aren't the only ones who can be jealous."
He went. That was all. Innocent—completely innocent. But three days later, a trader led Sam away in chains.
Rufus never said a word to me. He didn't accuse me of anything. I wouldn't have known Sam had been sold if I hadn't glanced out the window of Margaret Weylin's room and seen the coffle.
I told Margaret some hasty lie, then ran out of her room, down the stairs, and out the door. I ran headlong into Rufus, and felt him steady me, hold me. The weakness that his dengue fever had left was finally gone. His grip was formidable.
"Get back in the house!" he hissed.
I saw Sam beyond him being chained into line. There were people a few feet away from him crying loudly. Two women, a boy and a girl. His family.
"Rufe," I pleaded desperately, "don't do this. There's no need!"
He pushed me back toward the door and I struggled against him.
"Rufe, please! Listen, he came to ask me to teach his brother and sister to read. That's all!"
It was like talking to the wall of the house. I managed to break away from him for a moment just as the younger of the two weeping women spotted me.
"You whore!" she screamed. She had not been permitted to approach the coffle, but she approached me. "You no-'count nigger whore, why couldn't you leave my brother alone!"
She would have attacked me. And field hand that she was, strengthened by hard work, she would probably have given me the beating she thought I deserved. But Rufus stepped between us.
"Get back to work, Sally!"
She didn't move, stood glaring at him until the older woman, probably her mother, reached her and pulled her away.
I caught Rufus by the hand and spoke low to him. "Please, Rufe. If you do this, you'll destroy what you mean to preserve. Please don't …"
He hit me.
It was a first, and so unexpected that I stumbled backward and fell.
And it was a mistake. It was the breaking of an unspoken agreement between us—a very basic agreement—and he knew it.
I got up slowly, watching him with anger and betrayal.
"Get in the house and stay there," he said.
I turned my back and went to the cookhouse, deliberately disobeying. I could hear one of the traders say, "You ought to sell that one too. Troublemaker!"
At the cookhouse, I heated water, got it warm, not hot. Then I took a basin of it up to the attic. It was hot there, and empty except for the pallets and my bag in its corner. I went over to it, washed my knife in antiseptic, and hooked the drawstring of my bag over my shoulder.
And in the warm water I cut my wrists.