Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

Was that why I was here? Not only to insure the survival of one accident-prone small boy, but to insure my family’s survival, my own birth.

I hadn’t had much contact with children since I’d been one myself. Somehow, I found myself liking this one, though. His environment had left its unlikable marks on him, but in the ante bellum South, I could have found myself at the mercy of someone much worse – could have been descended from someone much worse.

Downstairs, the large heavy door opened noiselessly and we stepped into the darkness outside – the near darkness. There was a half-moon and several million stars lighting the night as they never did at home.

Mister Tom said for him to choose a new wife there on the plantation. That way, Mister Tom’ll own all his children.’

Margaret Weylin rushed back into the room with water for Rufus and more hostility for me than I could see any reason for. ‘You’re to go out to the cookhouse and get some supper!’ she told me as I got out of her way. But she made it sound as though she were saying, ‘You’re to go straight to hell!’

Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about. That, she made painfully clear to me the day she threw scalding hot coffee at me, screaming that I had brought it to her cold.

‘She wanted new furniture, new china dishes, fancy things you see in that house now. What she had was good enough for Miss Hannah, and Miss Hannah was a real lady. Quality. But it wasn’t good enough for white-trash Margaret. So she made Marse Tom sell my three boys to get money to buy things she didn’t even need!’

‘. . . no decent housing,’ I cut in. ‘Dirt floors to sleep on, food so inadequate they’d all be sick if they didn’t keep gardens in what’s supposed to be their leisure time and steal from the cookhouse when Sarah lets them. And no rights and the possibility of being mistreated or sold away from their families for any reason – or no reason. Kevin, you don’t have to beat people to treat them brutally.’

And there were two important slave children right here in Maryland. The older one, living here in Talbot County, would be called Frederick Douglass after a name change or two. The second, growing up a few miles south in Dorchester County was Harriet Ross, eventually to be Harriet Tubman. Someday, she was going to cost Eastern Shore plantation owners a huge amount of money by guiding three hundred of their runaway slaves to freedom.

I tore the book into several pieces and threw it onto the hot coals in his fireplace. The fire flared up and swallowed the dry paper, and I found my thoughts shifting to Nazi book burnings. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of ‘wrong’ ideas.

She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn’t kill, but she seemed to die a little.

South African whites had always struck me as people who would have been happier living in the nineteenth century, or the eighteenth. In fact, they were living in the past as far as their race relations went. They lived in ease and comfort supported by huge numbers of blacks whom they kept in poverty and held in contempt. Tom Weylin would have felt right at home.

I said nothing. I realized then, though, that if he ever hit me again, I would break his scrawny neck. I would not endure it again.

He was silent for several seconds. Then, ‘She might be sold with her children if they’re young. But I doubt that anyone would bother to keep her and her husband together. Someone would buy her and breed her to a new man. It is breeding, you know.’