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most of the people around Rufus know more about real violence than the screenwriters of today will ever know.”
Rufus’s fear of death calls me to him, and my own fear of death sends me home.”
He was like me—a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.
Sometime during the early hours of the next morning when we lay together, tired and content in my bed, I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought—and much less than I would know when he went away.
“Like we so dumb we need some stranger to make us think about freedom,” muttered Luke.
away from the small slave children who chased each other and shouted and didn’t understand yet that they were slaves.
A place like this would endanger him in a way I didn’t want to talk to him about. If he was stranded here for years, some part of this place would rub off on him.
He wouldn’t have to take part in it, but he would have to keep quiet about it.
if trying means taking small risks and putting up with small humiliations now so that I can survive later, I’ll do it.”
“They don’t have to understand. Even the games they play are preparing them for their future—and that future will come whether they understand it or not.”
My memory of a field hand being whipped suddenly seemed to have no place here with me at home.
I read books about slavery, fiction and nonfiction. I read everything I had in the house that was even distantly related to the subject—even Gone With the Wind, or part of it. But its version of happy darkies in tender loving bondage was more than I could stand. Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin’s World War II books—a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly
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He was like Sarah, holding himself back, not killing in spite of anger I could only imagine. A lifetime of conditioning could be overcome, but not easily.
I was beginning to realize that he loved the woman—to her misfortune. There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one.
Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense. No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense.
She gave me the feeling that everyone was getting older, passing me by.
was two years old. He had forgotten that I didn’t know. I was with him once, as he watched them playing. “It’s good to have children,” he said softly. “Good to have sons. But it’s so hard to see them be slaves.”
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.
It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery.
“But why?” he had demanded. “You could have killed yourself.” “There’re worse things than being dead,” I had said. He had turned and walked away from me.
I didn’t want him feeling embarrassed or defensive for finally acknowledging his son.
He had asked for what he knew I could not give, and I had refused.
Rufus didn’t seem to be afraid of dying. Now, in his grief, he seemed almost to want death. But he was afraid of dying alone, afraid of being deserted by the person he had depended on for so long.
