Kindred by Octavia Butler Page B

girl,” Weylin said to me. “What’s your name?”
    “Dana, sir.”
    He turned to stare at me again, this time as though I’d said something wrong. “Where do you come from?”
    I glanced at Kevin, not wanting to contradict anything he had said. He gave me a slight nod, and I assumed I was free to make up my own lies. “I’m from New York.”
    Now the look he was giving me was really ugly, and I wondered whether he’d heard a New York accent recently and found mine a poor match. Or was I saying something wrong? I hadn’t said ten words to him. What could be wrong?
    Weylin looked sharply at Kevin, then turned around and ignored us for the rest of the trip.
    We went through the woods to a road, and along the road past a field of tall golden wheat. In the field, slaves, mostly men, worked steadily swinging scythes with attached wooden racks that caught the cut wheat in neat piles. Other slaves, mostly women, followed them tying the wheat into bundles. None of them seemed to pay any attention to us. I looked around for a white overseer and was surprised not to see one. The Weylin house surprised me too when I saw it in daylight. It wasn’t white. It had no columns, no porch to speak of. I was almost disappointed. It was a red-brick Georgian Colonial, boxy but handsome in a quiet kind of way, two and a half stories high with dormered windows and a chimney on each end. It wasn’t big or imposing enough to be called a mansion. In Los Angeles, in our own time, Kevin and I could have afforded it.
    As the wagon took us up to the front steps, I could see the river off to one side and some of the land I had run through a few hours—a few years—before. Scattered trees, unevenly cut grass, the row of cabins far off to one side almost hidden by the trees, the fields, the woods. There were other buildings lined up beside and behind the house opposite the slave cabins. As we stopped, I was almost sent off to one of these.
    “Luke,” said Weylin to the black man, “take Dana around back and get her something to eat.”
    “Yes, sir,” said the black man softly. “Want me to take Marse Rufe upstairs first?”
    “Do what I told you. I’ll take him up.”
    I saw Rufus set his teeth. “I’ll see you later,” I whispered, but he wouldn’t let go of my hand until I spoke to his father.
    “Mr. Weylin, I don’t mind staying with him. He seems to want me to.”
    Weylin looked exasperated. “Well, come on then. You can wait with him until the doctor comes.” He lifted Rufus with no particular care, and strode up the steps to the house. Kevin followed him.
    “You watch out,” said the black man softly as I started after them.
    I looked at him, surprised, not sure he was talking to me. He was.
    “Marse Tom can turn mean mighty quick,” he said. “So can the boy, now that he’s growing up. Your face looks like maybe you had enough white folks’ meanness for a while.”
    I nodded. “I have, all right. Thanks for the warning.”
    Nigel had come to stand next to the man, and I realized as I spoke that the two looked much alike, the boy a smaller replica of the man. Father and son, probably. They resembled each other more than Rufus and Tom Weylin did. As I hurried up the steps and into the house, I thought of Rufus and his father, of Rufus becoming his father. It would happen some day in at least one way. Someday Rufus would own the plantation. Someday, he would be the slaveholder, responsible in his own right for what happened to the people who lived in those half-hidden cabins. The boy was literally growing up as I watched—growing up because I watched and because I helped to keep him safe. I was the worst possible guardian for him—a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children. I would have all I could do to look after myself. But I would help him as best I could. And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe