“But how did you get there? How did you get here?”
“Like that.” I snapped my fingers.
“That’s no answer.”
“It’s the only answer I’ve got. I was at home; then suddenly, I was here helping you. I don’t know how it happens—how I move that way—or when it’s going to happen. I can’t control it.”
“Who can?”
“I don’t know. No one.” I didn’t want him to get the idea that he could control it. Especially if it turned out that he really could.
“But … what’s it like? What did Mama see that she won’t tell me about?”
“Probably the same thing my husband saw. He said when I came to you, I vanished. Just disappeared. And then reappeared later.”
He thought about that. “Disappeared? You mean like smoke?” Fear crept into his expression. “Like a ghost?”
“Like smoke, maybe. But don’t go getting the idea that I’m a ghost. There are no ghosts.”
“That’s what Daddy says.”
“He’s right.”
“But Mama says she saw one once.”
I managed to hold back my opinion of that. His mother, after all … Besides, I was probably her ghost. She had had to find some explanation for my vanishing. I wondered how her more realistic husband had explained it. But that wasn’t important. What I cared about now was keeping the boy calm.
“You needed help,” I told him. “I came to help you. Twice. Does that make me someone to be afraid of?”
“I guess not.” He gave me a long look, then came over to me, reached out hesitantly, and touched me with a sooty hand.
“You see,” I said, “I’m as real as you are.”
He nodded. “I thought you were. All the things you did … you had to be. And Mama said she touched you too.”
“She sure did.” I rubbed my shoulder where the woman had bruised it with her desperate blows. For a moment, the soreness confused me, forced me to recall that for me, the woman’s attack had come only hours ago. Yet the boy was years older. Fact then: Somehow, my travels crossed time as well as distance. Another fact: The boy was the focus of my travels — perhaps the cause of them. He had seen me in my living room before I was drawn to him; he couldn’t have made that up. But I had seen nothing at all, felt nothing but sickness and disorientation.
“Mama said what you did after you got me out of the water was like the Second Book of Kings,” said the boy.
“The what?”
“Where Elisha breathed into the dead boy’s mouth, and the boy came back to life. Mama said she tried to stop you when she saw you doing that to me because you were just some nigger she had never seen before. Then she remembered Second Kings.”
I sat down on the bed and looked over at him, but I could read nothing other than interest and remembered excitement in his eyes. “She said I was what?” I asked.
“Just a strange nigger. She and Daddy both knew they hadn’t seen you before.”
“That was a hell of a thing for her to say right after she saw me save her son’s life.”
Rufus frowned. “Why?”
I stared at him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why are you mad?”
“Your mother always call black people niggers, Rufe?”
“Sure, except when she has company. Why not?”
His air of innocent questioning confused me. Either he really didn’t know what he was saying, or he had a career waiting in Hollywood. Whichever it was, he wasn’t going to go on saying it to me.
“I’m a black woman, Rufe. If you have to call me something other than my name, that’s it.”
“But …”
“Look, I helped you. I put the fire out, didn’t I?”
“Yeah.”
“All right then, you do me the courtesy of calling me what I want to be called.”
He just stared at me.
“Now,” I spoke more gently, “tell me, did you see me again when the draperies started to burn? I mean, did you see me the way you did when you were drowning?”
It took him a moment to shift gears. Then he said, “I didn’t see anything but fire.” He sat down in the old ladder-back chair near the fireplace and looked at me. “I didn’t see you until you got here. But I was so scared … it was kind of like when I was drowning … but not like anything else I can remember. I thought the house would burn down and it would be my fault. I thought I would die.”
I nodded. “You probably wouldn’t have died because you would have been able to get out in time. But if your parents are asleep here, the fire might have reached them before they woke up.”
The boy stared into the fireplace. “I burned the stable once,” he said. “I wanted Daddy to give me Nero—a horse I liked. But he sold him to Reverend Wyndham just because Reverend Wyndham offered a lot of money. Daddy already has a lot of money. Anyway, I got mad and burned down the stable.”
I shook my head wonderingly. The boy already knew more about revenge than I did. What kind of man was he going to grow up into? “Why did you set this fire?” I asked. “To get even with your father for something else?”
“For hitting me. See?” He turned and pulled up his shirt so that I could see the crisscross of long red welts. And I could see old marks, ugly scars of at least one much worse beating.
“For Godsake …!”
“He said I took money from his desk, and I said I didn’t.” Rufus shrugged. “He said I was calling him a liar, and he hit me.”
“Several times.”
“All I took was a dollar.” He put his shirt down and faced me.
I didn’t know what to say to that. The boy would be lucky to stay out of prison when he grew up—if he grew up. He went on.
“I started thinking that if I burned the house, he would lose all his money. He ought to lose it. It’s all he ever thinks about.” Rufus shuddered. “But then I remembered the stable, and the whip he hit me with after I set that fire. Mama said if she hadn’t stopped him, he would have killed me. I was afraid this time he would kill me, so I wanted to put the fire out. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to do.”
So he had called me. I was certain now. The boy drew me to him somehow when he got himself into more trouble than he could handle. How he did it, I didn’t know. He apparently didn’t even know he was doing it. If he had, and if he had been able to call me voluntarily, I might have found myself standing between father and son during one of Rufus’s beatings. What would have happened then, I couldn’t imagine. One meeting with Rufus’s father had been enough for me. Not that the boy sounded like that much of a bargain either. But, “Did you say he used a whip on you, Rufe?”
“Yeah. The kind he whips niggers and horses with.”
That stopped me for a moment. “The kind he whips … who?”
He looked at me warily. “I wasn’t talking about you.”
I brushed that aside. “Say blacks anyway. But … your father whips black people?”
“When they need it. But Mama said it was cruel and disgraceful for him to hit me like that no matter what I did. She took me to Baltimore City to Aunt May’s house after that, but he came and got me and brought me home. After a while, she came home too.”
For a moment, I forgot about the whip and the “niggers.” Baltimore City. Baltimore, Maryland? “Are we far from Baltimore now, Rufe?”
“Across the bay.”
“But … we’re still in Maryland, aren’t we?” I had relatives in Maryland—people who would help me if I needed them, and if I could reach them. I was beginning to wonder, though, whether I would be able to reach anyone I knew. I had a new, slowly growing fear.
“Sure we’re in Maryland,” said Rufus. “How could you not know that.”
“What’s the date?”
“I don’t know.”
“The year! Just tell me the year!”
He glanced across the room toward the door, then quickly back at me. I realized I was making him nervous with my ignorance and my sudden intensity. I forced myself to speak calmly. “Come on, Rufe, you know what year it is, don’t you?”
“It’s … eighteen fifteen.”
“When?”
“Eighteen fifteen.”
I sat still, breathed deeply, calming myself, believing him. I did believe him. I wasn’t even as surprised as I should have been. I had already accepted the fact that I had moved through time. Now I knew I was farther from home than I had thought. And now I knew why Rufus’s father used his whip on “niggers” as well as horses.
I looked up and saw that the boy had left his chair and come closer to me.
“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “You keep acting sick.”
“It’s nothing, Rufe. I’m all right.” No, I was sick. What was I going to do? Why hadn’t I gone home? This could turn out to be such a deadly place for me if I had to stay in it much longer. “Is this a plantation?” I asked.
“The Weylin plantation. My daddy’s Tom Weylin.”
“Weylin …” The name triggered a memory, something I hadn’t thought of for years. “Rufus, do you spell your last name, W-e-y-l-i-n?”
“Yeah, I think that’s right.”
I frowned at him impatiently. A boy his age should certainly be sure of the spelling of his own name—even a name like this with an unusual spelling.
“It’s right,” he said quickly.
“And … is there a black girl, maybe a slave girl, named Alice living around here somewhere?” I wasn’t sure of the girl’s last name. The memory was coming back to me in fragments.
“Sure. Alice is my friend.”
“Is she?” I was staring at my hands, trying to think. Every time I got used to one impossibility, I ran into another.
“She’s no slave, either,” said Rufus. “She’s free, born free like her mother.”
“Oh? Then maybe somehow …” I let my voice trail away as my thoughts raced ahead of it fitting things together. The state was right, and the time, the unusual name, the girl, Alice …
“Maybe what?” prompted Rufus.
Yes, maybe what? Well, maybe, if I wasn’t completely out of my mind, if I wasn’t in the middle of the most perfect hallucination I’d ever heard of, if the child before me was real and was telling the truth, maybe he was one of my ancestors.
Maybe he was my several times great grandfather, but still vaguely alive in the memory of my family because his daughter had bought a large Bible in an ornately carved, wooden chest and had begun keeping family records in it. My uncle still had it.
Grandmother Hagar. Hagar Weylin, born in 1831. Hers was the first name listed. And she had given her parents’ names as Rufus Weylin and Alice Green-something Weylin.
“Rufus, what’s Alice’s last name?”
“Greenwood. What were you talking about? Maybe what?”
“Nothing. I … just thought I might know someone in her family.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the person I’m thinking of.” Weak lies. But they were better than the truth. As young as the boy was, I thought he would question my sanity if I told the truth.
Alice Greenwood. How would she marry this boy? Or would it be marriage? And why hadn’t someone in my family mentioned that Rufus Weylin was white? If they knew. Probably, they didn’t. Hagar Weylin Blake had died in 1880, long before the time of any member of my family that I had known. No doubt most information about her life had died with her. At least it had died before it filtered down to me. There was only the Bible left.
Hagar had filled pages of it with her careful script. There was a record of her marriage to Oliver Blake, and a list of her seven children, their marriages, some grandchildren … Then someone else had taken up the listing. So many relatives that I had never known, would never know.
Or would I?
I looked over at the boy who would be Hagar’s father. There was nothing in him that reminded me of any of my relatives. Looking at him confused me. But he had to be the one. There had to be some kind of reason for the link he and I seemed to have. Not that I really thought a blood relationship could explain the way I had twice been drawn to him. It wouldn’t. But then, neither would anything else. What we had was something new, something that didn’t even have a name. Some matching strangeness in us that may or may not have come from our being related. Still, now I had a special reason for being glad I had been able to save him. After all … after all, what would have happened to me, to my mother’s family, if I hadn’t saved him?
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.
Again, what would have happened if the boy had drowned? Would he have drowned without me? Or would his mother have saved him somehow? Would his father have arrived in time to save him? It must be that one of them would have saved him somehow. His life could not depend on the actions of his unconceived descendant. No matter what I did, he would have to survive to father Hagar, or I could not exist. That made sense.
But somehow, it didn’t make enough sense to give me any comfort. It didn’t make enough sense for me to test it by ignoring him if I found him in trouble again—not that I could have ignored
any
child in trouble. But this child needed special care. If I was to live, if others were to live, he must live. I didn’t dare test the paradox.
“You know,” he said, peering at me, “you look a little like Alice’s mother. If you wore a dress and tied your hair up, you’d look a lot like her.” He sat down companionably beside me on the bed.
“I’m surprised your mother didn’t mistake me for her then,” I said.
“Not with you dressed like that! She thought you were a man at first, just like I did—and like Daddy did.”
“Oh.” That mistake was a little easier to understand now.
“Are you sure you aren’t related to Alice yourself?”
“Not that I know of,” I lied. And I changed the subject abruptly. “Rufe, are there slaves here?”
He nodded. “Thirty-eight slaves, Daddy said.” He drew his bare feet up and sat cross-legged on the bed facing me, still examining me with interest. “You’re not a slave, are you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. You don’t talk right or dress right or act right. You don’t even seem like a runaway.”
“I’m not.”
“And you don’t call me ‘Master’ either.”
I surprised myself by laughing. “Master?”
“You’re supposed to.” He was very serious. “You want me to call you black.”
His seriousness stopped my laughter. What was funny, anyway? He was probably right. No doubt I was supposed to give him some title of respect. But “Master”?