I scrambled away, kicking him, clawing the hands that reached out for me, trying to bite, lunging up toward his eyes. I could do it now. I could do anything.
“Dana!”
I froze. My name? No patroller would know that.
“Dana, look at me for God’s sake!”
Kevin! It was Kevin’s voice! I stared upward, managed to focus on him clearly at last. I was at home. I was lying on my own bed, bloody and dirty, but safe. Safe!
Kevin lay half on top of me, holding me, smearing himself with my blood and his own. I could see where I had scratched his face—so near the eye.
“Kevin, I’m sorry!”
“Are you all right now?”
“Yes. I thought … I thought you were the patroller.”
“The what?”
“The … I’ll tell you later. God, I hurt, and I’m so tired. But it doesn’t matter. I’m home.”
“You were gone two or three minutes this time. I didn’t know what to think. You don’t know how good it is to have you back again.”
“Two or three minutes?”
“Almost three minutes. I watched the clock. But it seemed to be longer.”
I closed my eyes in pain and weariness. It hadn’t just seemed longer to me. I had been gone for hours and I knew it. But at that moment, I couldn’t have argued it. I couldn’t have argued anything. The surge of strength that helped me to fight when I thought I was fighting for my life was gone.
“I’m going to take you to the hospital,” said Kevin. “I don’t know how I’m going to explain you, but you need help.”
“No.”
He got up. I felt him lift me.
“No, Kevin, please.”
“Listen, don’t be afraid. I’ll be with you.”
“No. Look, all he did was hit me a few times. I’ll be all right.” Suddenly I had strength again, now that I needed it. “Kevin, I went from here the first time, and this second time. And I came back here. What will happen if I go from the hospital and come back there?”
“Probably nothing.” But he had stopped. “No one who sees you leave or come back will believe it. And they wouldn’t dare tell anybody.”
“Please. Just let me sleep. That’s all I need really—rest. The cuts and bruises will heal. I’ll be fine.”
He took me back to the bed, probably against his better judgment, and put me down. “How long was it for you?” he asked.
“Hours. But it was only bad at the end.”
“Who did this to you?”
“A patroller. He … he thought I was a runaway.” I frowned. “I have to sleep, Kevin. I’ll make more sense in the morning, I promise.” My voice trailed away.
“Dana!”
I jumped, tried to refocus my attention on him.
“Did he rape you?”
I sighed. “No. I hit him with a stick—knocked him out. Let me sleep.”
“Wait a minute …”
I seemed to drift away from him. It became too much trouble for me to go on listening and trying to understand, too much trouble to answer.
I sighed again and closed my eyes. I heard him get up and go away, heard water running somewhere. Then I slept.
6
I was clean when I awoke before dawn the next morning. I was wearing an old flannel nightgown that I hadn’t worn since Kevin and I were married and that I’d never worn in June. On one side of me was a canvas tote bag containing a pair of pants, a blouse, underclothing, a sweater, shoes, and the biggest switchblade knife I had ever seen. The tote bag was tied to my waist with a length of cord. On the other side of me lay Kevin, still asleep. But he woke up when I kissed him.
“You’re still here,” he said with obvious relief, and he hugged me, reminding me painfully of a few bruises. Then he remembered, let me go, and switched on the light. “How do you feel?”
“Pretty well.” I sat up, got out of bed, managed to stand up for a moment. Then I got back under the cover. “I’m healing.”
“Good. You’re rested, you’re healing, now you can tell me what the hell happened to you. And what’s a patroller? All I could think of was the Highway Patrol.”
I thought back to my reading. “A patroller is … was a white man, usually young, often poor, sometimes drunk. He was a member of a group of such men organized to keep the blacks in line.”
“What?”
“Patrollers made sure the slaves were where they were supposed to be at night, and they punished those who weren’t. They chased down runaways—for a fee. And sometimes they just raised hell, had a little fun terrorizing people who weren’t allowed to fight back.”
Kevin leaned on one elbow and looked down at me. “What are you talking about? Where were you?”
“In Maryland. Somewhere on the Eastern Shore if I understood Rufus.”
“Maryland! Three thousand miles away in … in what? A few minutes?”
“More than three thousand miles. More than any number of miles.” I moved to relieve pressure on an especially tender bruise. “Let me tell you all of it.”
I remembered it for him in detail as I had the first time. Again, he listened without interrupting. This time when I finished, he just shook his head.
“This is getting crazier and crazier,” he muttered.
“Not to me.”
He glanced at me sidelong.
“To me, it’s getting more and more believable. I don’t like it. I don’t want to be in the middle of it. I don’t understand how it can be happening, but it’s real. It hurts too much not to be. And … and my ancestors, for Godsake!”
“Maybe.”
“Kevin, I can show you the old Bible.”
“But the fact is, you had already seen the Bible. You knew about those people—knew their names, knew they were Marylanders, knew …”
“What the hell is that supposed to prove! That I was hallucinating and weaving in the names of my ancestors? I’d like to give you some of this pain that I must still be hallucinating.”
He put an arm over my chest, resting it on unbruised flesh. After a while, he said, “Do you honestly believe you traveled back over a century in time and crossed three thousand miles of space to see your dead ancestors?”
I moved uncomfortably. “Yes,” I whispered. “No matter how it sounds, no matter what you think, it happened. And you’re not helping me deal with it by laughing.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“They were my ancestors. Even that damn parasite, the patroller, saw the resemblance between me and Alice’s mother.”
He said nothing.
“I’ll tell you … I wouldn’t dare act as though they weren’t my ancestors. I wouldn’t let anything happen to them, the boy or girl, if I could possibly prevent it.”
“You wouldn’t anyway.”
“Kevin, take this seriously, please!”
“I am. Anything I can do to help you, I’ll do.”
“Believe me!”
He sighed. “It’s like you just said.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t dare act as though I didn’t believe. After all, when you vanish from here, you must go someplace. If that place is where you think it is—back to the ante bellum South—then we’ve got to find a way to protect you while you’re there.”
I moved closer to him, relieved, content with even such grudging acceptance. He had become my anchor, suddenly, my tie to my own world. He couldn’t have known how much I needed him firmly on my side.
“I’m not sure it’s possible for a lone black woman—or even a black man—to be protected in that place,” I said. “But if you have an idea, I’ll be glad to hear it.”
He said nothing for several seconds. Then he reached over me into the canvas bag and brought out the switchblade. “This might improve your chances—if you can bring yourself to use it.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Can you use it?”
“You mean, will I use it.”
“That too.”
; “Yes. Before last night, I might not have been sure, but now, yes.”
He got up, left the room for a moment, and came back with two wooden rulers. “Show me,” he said.
I untied the cord of the canvas bag and got up, discovering sore muscles as I moved. I limped over to him, took one of the rulers, looked at it, rubbed my face groggily, and in a sudden slashing motion, drew the ruler across his abdomen just as he was opening his mouth to speak.
“That’s it,” I said.
He frowned.
“Kevin, I’m not going to be in any fair fights.”
He said nothing.
“You understand? I’m a poor dumb scared nigger until I get my chance. They won’t even see the knife if I have my way. Not until it’s too late.”
He shook his head. “What else don’t I know about you?”
I shrugged and got back into bed. “I’ve been watching the violence of this time go by on the screen long enough to have picked up a few things.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“It doesn’t matter much.”
He sat down next to where I lay. “What do you mean?”
“That most of the people around Rufus know more about real violence than the screenwriters of today will ever know.”
“That’s … debatable.”
“I just can’t make myself believe I can survive in that place. Not with a knife, not even with a gun.”
He took a deep breath. “Look, if you’re drawn back there again, what can you do but try to survive? You’re not going to just let them kill you.”
“Oh, they won’t kill me. Not unless I’m silly enough to resist the other things they’d rather do—like raping me, throwing me into jail as a runaway, and then selling me to the highest bidder when they see that my owner isn’t coming to claim me.” I rubbed my forehead. “I almost wish I hadn’t read about it.”
“But it doesn’t have to happen that way. There were free blacks. You could pose as one of them.”
“Free blacks had papers to prove they were free.”
“You could have papers too. We could forge something …”
“If we knew what to forge. I mean, a certificate of freedom is what we need, but I don’t know what they looked like. I’ve read about them, but I’ve never seen one.”
He got up and went to the living room. Moments later, he came back and dumped an armload of books on the bed. “I brought everything we had on black history,” he said. “Start hunting.”
There were ten books. We checked indexes and even leafed through some of the books page by page to be sure. Nothing. I hadn’t really thought there would be anything in these books. I hadn’t read them all, but I’d at least glanced through them before.
“We’ll have to go to the library then,” said Kevin. “We’ll go today as soon as it’s open.”
“If I’m still here when it opens.”
He put the books on the floor and got back under the cover. Then he lay there frowning at me. “What about the pass Alice’s father was supposed to have?”
“A pass … that was just written permission for a slave to be somewhere other than at home at a certain time.”
“Sounds like just a note.”
“It is,” I said. “You’ve got it! One of the reasons it was against the law in some states to teach slaves to read and write was that they might escape by writing themselves passes. Some did escape that way.” I got up, went to Kevin’s office and took a small scratch pad and a new pen from his desk and the large atlas from his bookcase.
“I’m going to tear Maryland out,” I told him as I returned.
“Go ahead. I wish I had a road atlas for you. The roads in it wouldn’t exist in those days but it might show you the easiest way through the country.”
“This one shows main highways. Shows a lot of rivers too, and in eighteen fifteen there were probably not many bridges.” I looked closely at it, then got up again.
“What now?” asked Kevin.
“Encyclopedia. I want to see when the Pennsylvania Railroad built this nice long track through the peninsula. I’d have to go into Delaware to pick it up, but it would take me right into Pennsylvania.”
“Forget it,” he said. “Eighteen fifteen is too early for railroads.”
I looked anyway and found that the Pennsylvania Railroad hadn’t even been begun until 1846. I went back to bed and stuffed the pen, the map, and the scratch pad into my canvas bag.
“Tie that cord around you again,” said Kevin.
I obeyed silently.
“I think we may have missed something,” he said. “Getting home may be simpler for you than you realize.”
“Getting home? Here?”
“Here. You may have more control over your returning than you think.”
“I don’t have any control at all.”
“You might. Listen, remember the rabbit or whatever it was that you said ran across the road in front of you?”
“Yes.”
“It scared you.”
“Terrified me. For a second, I thought it was … I don’t know, something dangerous.”
“And your fear made you dizzy, and you thought you were coming home. Does fear usually make you dizzy?”
“No.”
“I don’t think it did this time either—at least not in any normal way. I think you were right. You did almost come home. Your fear almost sent you home.”
“But … but I was afraid the whole time I was there. And I was scared half out of my mind while that patroller was beating me. But I didn’t come home until I’d knocked him out—saved myself.”
“Not too helpful.”
“No.”
“But look, was your fight with the patroller really over? You said you were afraid that if he found you there, passed out, he’d kill you.”
“He would have, for revenge. I fought back, actually hurt him. I can’t believe he’d let me get away with that.”
“You may be right.”
“I am right.”
“The point is, you believe you are.”
“Kevin …”
“Wait. Hear me out. You believed your life was in danger, that the patroller would kill you. And on your last trip, you believed your life was in danger when you found Rufus’s father aiming a rifle at you.”
“Yes.”
“And even with the animal—you mistook it for something dangerous.”
“But I saw it in time—just as a dark blur, but clearly enough to see that it was small and harmless. And I see what you’re saying.”
“That you might have been better off if your animal had been a snake. Your danger then—or assumed danger—might have sent you home before you ever met the patroller.”
“Then … Rufus’s fear of death calls me to him, and my own fear of death sends me home.”
“So it seems.”
“That doesn’t really help, you know.”
“It could.”
“Think about it, Kevin. If the thing I’m afraid of isn’t really dangerous — a rabbit instead of a snake—then I stay where I am. If it is dangerous, it’s liable to kill me before I get home. Going home does take a while, you know. I have to get through the dizziness, the nausea …”
“Seconds.”
“Seconds count when something is trying to kill you. I wouldn’t dare put myself in danger in the hope of getting home before the ax fell. And if I got into trouble by accident, I wouldn’t dare just wait passively to be saved. I might wind up coming home in pieces.”
“Yes … I see your point.”
I sighed. “So the more I think about it, the harder it is for me to believe I could survive even a few more trips to a place like that. There’s just too much that could go wrong.”
“Will you stop that! Look, your ancestors survived that era—survived it with fewer advantages than you have. You’re no less than they are.”
“In a way I am.”
“What way?”
“Strength. Endurance.
To survive, my ancestors had to put up with more than I ever could. Much more. You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t,” he said with annoyance. “You’re working yourself into a mood that could be suicidal if you’re not careful.”
“Oh, but I’m talking about suicide, Kevin—suicide or worse. For instance, I would have used your knife against that patroller last night if I’d had it. I would have killed him. That would have ended the immediate danger to me and I probably wouldn’t have come home. But if that patroller’s friends had caught me, they would have killed me. And if they hadn’t caught me, they would probably have gone after Alice’s mother. They … they may have anyway. So either I would have died, or I would have caused another innocent person to die.”
“But the patroller was trying to …” He stopped, looked at me. “I see.”
“Good.”
There was a long silence. He pulled me closer to him. “Do I really look like that patroller?”
“No.”
“Do I look like someone you can come home to from where you may be going?”
“I need you here to come home to. I’ve already learned that.”
He gave me a long thoughtful look. “Just keep coming home,” he said finally. “I need you here too.”
The Fall
1
I think Kevin was as lonely and out of place as I was when I met him, though he was handling it better. But then, he was about to escape.
I was working out of a casual labor agency—we regulars called it a slave market. Actually, it was just the opposite of slavery. The people who ran it couldn’t have cared less whether or not you showed up to do the work they offered. They always had more job hunters than jobs anyway. If you wanted them to think about using you, you went to their office around six in the morning, signed in, and sat down to wait. Waiting with you were winos trying to work themselves into a few more bottles, poor women with children trying to supplement their welfare checks, kids trying to get a first job, older people who’d lost one job too many, and usually a poor crazy old street lady who talked to herself constantly and who wasn’t going to be hired no matter what because she only wore one shoe.
You sat and sat until the dispatcher either sent you out on a job or sent you home. Home meant no money. Put another potato in the oven. Or in desperation, sell some blood at one of the store fronts down the street from the agency. I had only done that once.