Kindred by Octavia Butler

back to her pot.
    “You know,” I said to her back, “I think I agree with you about Miss Margaret.”
    She said nothing. The warmth I’d felt when I came into the room was turning out to be nothing more than the heat of the fire.
    “Why you try to talk like white folks?” Nigel asked me.
    “I don’t,” I said, surprised. “I mean, this is really the way I talk.”
    “More like white folks than some white folks.”
    I shrugged, hunted through my mind for an acceptable explanation. “My mother taught school,” I said, “and …”
    “A nigger teacher?”
    I winced, nodded. “Free blacks can have schools. My mother talked the way I do. She taught me.”
    “You’ll get into trouble,” he said. “Marse Tom already don’t like you. You talk too educated and you come from a free state.”
    “Why should either of those things matter to him? I don’t belong to him.”
    The boy smiled. “He don’t want no niggers ’round here talking better than him, putting freedom ideas in our heads.”
    “Like we so dumb we need some stranger to make us think about freedom,” muttered Luke.
    I nodded, but I hoped they were wrong. I didn’t think I had said enough to Weylin for him to make that kind of judgment. I hoped he wasn’t going to make that kind of judgment. I wasn’t good at accents. I had deliberately decided not to try to assume one. But if that meant I was going to be in trouble every time I opened my mouth, my life here would be even worse than I had imagined.
    “How can Marse Rufe see you before you get here?” Nigel asked.
    I choked down a swallow of mush. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I wish to heaven he couldn’t!”
    4
    I stayed in the cookhouse when I finished eating because it was near the main house, and because I thought I could make it from the cookhouse into the hall if I started to feel dizzy—just in case. Wherever Kevin was in the house, he would hear me if I called from the hallway.
    Luke and Nigel finished their meal and went to the fireplace to say something privately to Sarah. At that moment, Carrie, the mute, slipped me bread and a chunk of ham. I looked at it, then smiled at her gratefully. When Luke and Nigel took Sarah out of the room with them, I feasted on a shapeless sandwich. In the middle of it, I caught myself wondering about the ham, wondering how well it had been cooked. I tried to think of something else, but my mind was full of vaguely remembered horror stories of the diseases that ran wild during this time. Medicine was just a little better than witchcraft. Malaria came from bad air. Surgery was performed on struggling wide-awake patients. Germs were question marks even in the minds of many doctors. And people casually, unknowingly ingested all kinds of poorly preserved ill-cooked food that could make them sick or kill them.
    Horror stories.
    Except that they were true, and I was going to have to live with them for as long as I was here. Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten the ham, but if I hadn’t, it would be the table leavings later. I would have to take some chances.
    Sarah came back with Nigel and gave him a pot of peas to shell. Life went on around me as though I wasn’t there. People came into the cookhouse—always black people—talked to Sarah, lounged around, ate whatever they could put their hands on until Sarah shouted at them and chased them away. I was in the middle of asking her whether there was anything I could do to help out when Rufus began to scream. Nineteenth-century medicine was apparently at work.
    The walls of the main house were thick and the sound seemed to come from a long way off—thin high-pitched screaming. Carrie, who had left the cookhouse, now ran back in and sat down beside me with her hands covering her ears.
    Abruptly, the screaming stopped and I moved Carrie’s hands gently. Her sensitivity surprised me. I would have thought she would be used to hearing people scream in pain. She listened for a moment, heard nothing, then