Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Kunta began vomiting as the toubob—holding dim yellowish flames that burned within metal frames carried by a ring—shackled his wrists and ankles, then shoved him backward, close between two other moaning men. Even in his terror, he sensed that lights bobbing in other directions meant that the toubob were taking those who had come with him to be shackled elsewhere. Then he felt his thoughts slipping, he thought he must be dreaming. And then, mercifully, he was.
CHAPTER 35
Only the rasping sound of the deck hatch being opened told Kunta if it was day or night. Hearing the latch click, he would jerk his head up—the only free movement that his chains and shackles would allow—and four shadowy toubob figures would descend, two of them with bobbing lights and whips guarding the other pair as they all moved along the narrow aisleways pushing a tub of food. They would thrust tin pans of the stuff up onto the filth between each two shacklemates. So far, each time the food had come, Kunta had clamped his jaws shut, preferring to starve to death, until the aching of his empty stomach had begun to make his hunger almost as terrible as the pains from his beatings. When those on Kunta’s level had been fed, the lights showed the toubob descending farther below with the rest of the food.
Less often than the feeding times, and usually when it was night outside, the toubob would bring down into the hold some new captives, screaming and whimpering in terror as they were shoved and lashed along to wherever they were to be chained into empty spaces along the rows of hard plank shelves.
One day, shortly after a feeding time, Kunta’s ears picked up a strange, muted sound that seemed to vibrate through the ceiling over his head. Some of the other men heard it too, and their moaning ended abruptly. Kunta lay listening intently; it sounded as if many feet were dashing about overhead. Then—much nearer to them in the darkness—came a new sound, as of some very heavy object being creaked very slowly upward.
Kunta’s naked back felt an odd vibration from the hard, rough planking he lay on. He felt a tightening, a swelling within his chest, and he lay frozenly. About him he heard thudding sounds that he knew were men lunging upward, straining against their chains. It felt as if all of his blood had rushed into his pounding head. And then terror went clawing into his vitals as he sensed in some way that this place was moving, taking them away. Men started shouting all around him, screaming to Allah and His spirits, banging their heads against the planking, thrashing wildly against their rattling shackles. “Allah, I will never pray to you less than five times daily!” Kunta shrieked into the bedlam, “Hear me! Help me!”
The anguished cries, weeping, and prayers continued, subsiding only as one after another exhausted man went limp and lay gasping for breath in the stinking blackness. Kunta knew that he would never see Africa again. He could feel clearly now, through his body against the planks, a slow, rocking motion, sometimes enough that his shoulders or arms or hips would press against the brief warmth of one of the men he was chained between. He had shouted so hard that he had no voice left, so his mind screamed it instead: “Kill toubob—and their traitor black helpers!”
He was sobbing quietly when the hatch opened and the four toubob came bumping down with their tub of food. Again he clamped his jaws against his spasms of hunger, but then he thought of something the kintango had once said—that warriors and hunters must eat well to have greater strength than other men. Starving himself meant that weakness would prevent him from killing toubob. So this time, when the pan was thrust onto the boards between him and the man next to him, Kunta’s fingers also clawed into the thick mush. It tasted like ground maize boiled with palm oil. Each gulping swallow pained his throat in the spot where he had been choked for not eating before, but he swallowed until the pan was empty. He could feel the food like a lump in his belly, and soon it was rising up his throat. He couldn’t stop it, and a moment later the gruel was back on the planking. He could hear, over the sound of his own retching, that of others doing the same thing.
As the lights approached the end of the long shelf of planks on which Kunta lay, suddenly he heard chains rattling, a head bumping, and then a man screaming hysterically in a curious mixture of Mandinka and what sounded like some toubob words. An uproarious burst of laughter came from the toubob with the feeding tub, then their whips lashing down, until the man’s cries lapsed, into babbling and whimpering. Could it be? Had he heard an African speaking toubob? Was there a slatee down there among them? Kunta had heard that toubob would often betray their black traitor helpers and throw them into chains.
After the toubob had gone on down to the level below, scarcely a sound was heard on Kunta’s level until they reappeared with their emptied tub and climbed back up outside, closing the hatch behind them. At that instant, an angry buzzing began in different tongues, like bees swarming. Then, down the shelf from where Kunta lay, there was a heavy chain-rattling blow, a howl of pain and bitter cursing in the same hysterical Mandinka. Kunta heard the man shriek, “You think I am toubob?” There were more violent, rapid blows and desperate screams. Then the blows stopped, and in the blackness of the hold came a high squealing—and then an awful gurgling sound, as of a man whose breath was being choked off. Another rattling of chains, a tattoo of bare heels kicking at the planks, then quiet.
Kunta’s head was throbbing, and his heart was pounding, as voices around him began screaming, “Slatee! Slatees die!” Then Kunta was screaming along with them and joining in a wild rattling of chains—when suddenly with a rasping sound the hatch was opened, admitting its shaft of daylight and a group of toubob with lights and whips. They had obviously heard the commotion below them, and though now almost total silence had fallen in the hold, the toubob rushed among the aisles shouting and lashing, left and right with their whips. When they left without finding the dead man, the hold remained silent for a long moment. Then, very quietly, Kunta heard a mirthless laugh from the end of the shelf next to where the traitor lay dead.
The next feeding was a tense one. As if the toubob sensed something amiss, their whips fell even more often than usual. Kunta jerked and cried out as a bolt of pain cut across his legs. He had learned that when anyone didn’t cry out from a blow, he would get a severe beating until he did. Then he clawed and gulped down the tasteless mush as his eyes followed the lights moving on down along the shelf.
Every man in the hold was listening when one of the toubob exclaimed something to the others. A jostling of lights could be seen, then more exclamations and cursings, and then one of the toubob rushed down the aisle and up through the hatch, and he soon returned with two more. Kunta could hear the iron cuffs and chains being unlocked. Two of the toubob then half carried, half dragged the body of the dead man along the aisle and up the hatch, while the others continued bumping their food tub along the aisles.
The food team was on the level below when four more toubob climbed down through the hatch and went directly to where the slatee had been chained. By twisting his head, Kunta could see the lights raised high. With violent cursing, two of the toubob sent their whips whistling down against flesh. Whoever was being beaten refused at first to scream; though just listening to the force of the blows was almost paralyzing to Kunta, he could hear the beaten man flailing against his chains in the agony of his torture—and of his grim determination not to cry out.
Then the toubob were almost shrieking their curses, and the lights could be seen changing hands as one man spelled the other with the lash. Finally the beaten man began screaming—first a Foulah curse, then things that could not be understood, though they too were in the Foulah tongue. Kunta’s mind flashed a thought of quiet, gentle Foulah tribe who tended Mandinka cattle—as the lashing sounds continued until the beaten man barely whimpered. Then the four toubob left, cursing, gasping, and gagging in the stink.
The moans of the Foulah shivered through the black hold. Then, after a while, a clear voice called out in Mandinka, “Share his pain! We must be in this place as one village!” The voice belonged to an elder. He was right. The Foulah’s
pains had been as Kunta’s own. He felt himself about to burst with rage. He also felt, in some nameless way, a terror greater than he had ever known before, and it seemed to spread from the marrow of his bones. Part of him wanted to die, to escape all of this; but no, he must live to avenge it. He forced himself to lie absolutely still. It took a long while, but finally he felt his strain and confusion, even his body’s pains, begin to ebb—except for the place between his shoulders where he had been burned with the hot iron. He found that his mind could focus better now on the only choice that seemed to lie before him and the others: Either they would all die in this nightmare place, or somehow the toubob would have to be overcome and killed.
CHAPTER 36
The stinging bites, then the itching of the body lice, steadily grew worse. In the filth, the lice as well as the fleas had multiplied by the thousands until they swarmed all over the hold. They were worst wherever the body crevices held any hair. Kunta’s armpits, and around his foto, felt as if they were on fire, and his free hand scratched steadily wherever his shackled hand couldn’t reach.
He kept having thoughts of springing up and running away; then, a moment later, his eyes would fill with tears of frustration, anger would rise in him, and he would fight it all back down until he felt again some kind of calm. The worst thing was that he couldn’t move anywhere; he felt he wanted to bite through his chains. He decided that he must keep himself focused upon something, anything to occupy his mind or his hands, or else he would go mad—as some men in the hold seemed to have done already, judging from the things they cried out.
By lying very still and listening to the breathing sounds of the men on either side of him, Kunta had long since learned to tell when either of them was asleep or awake. He concentrated now upon hearing farther away from him. With more and more practice at listening intently to repeated sounds, he discovered that his ears after a while could discern their location almost exactly; it was a peculiar sensation, almost as if his ears were serving for eyes. Now and then, among the groans and curses that filled the darkness, he heard the thump of a man’s head against the planks he lay on. And there was another odd and monotonous noise. It would stop at intervals, then resume after a while; it sounded as if two pieces of metal were being rubbed hard together, and after hearing more of it Kunta figured that someone was trying to wear the links of his chains apart. Kunta often heard, too, brief exclamations and janglings of chains as two men furiously fought, jerking their shackles against each other’s ankles and wrists.
Kunta had lost track of time. The urine, vomit, and feces that reeked everywhere around him had spread into a slick paste covering the hard planking of the long shelves on which they lay. Just when he had begun to think he couldn’t stand it any more, eight toubob came down the hatchway, cursing loudly. Instead of the routine food container, they carried what seemed to be some kind of long-handled hoes and four large tubs. And Kunta noticed with astonishment that they were not wearing any clothes at all.
The naked toubob almost immediately began vomiting worse than any of the others who had come before. In the glow of their lights, they all but sprang along the aisles in teams of two, swiftly thrusting their hoes up onto the shelves and scraping some of the mess into their tubs. As each tub was filled, the toubob would drag it back along the aisle and go bumping it up the steps through the opened hatchway to empty it outside, and then they would return. The toubob were gagging horribly by now, their faces contorted grotesquely, and their hairy, colorless bodies covered with blobs of the mess they were scraping off the shelves But when they finished their job and were gone, there was no difference in the hot, awful, choking stench of the hold.
The next time that more than the usual four toubob descended with their food tubs, Kunta guessed that there must be as many as twenty of them clumping down the hatch steps. He lay frozen. Turning his head this way and that, he could see small groups of toubob posting themselves around the hold, some carrying whips and guns, guarding others with lights upraised at the ends of each shelf of chained men. A knot of fear grew in Kunta’s belly as he began hearing strange clicking sounds, then heavy rattlings. Then his shackled right ankle began jerking; with flashing terror he realized that the toubob were releasing him. Why? What terrible thing was going to happen now? He lay still, his right ankle no longer feeling the familiar weight of the chain, hearing all around the hold more clicking sounds and the rattling of chains being pulled. Then the toubob started shouting and lashing with their whips. Kunta knew that it meant for them to get down off their shelves. His cry of alarm joined a sudden bedlam of shrieks in different tongues as the men reared their bodies upward, heads thudding against the ceiling timbers.
The whips lashed down amid screams of pain as one after another pair of men went thumping down into the aisleways. Kunta and his Wolof shacklemate hugged each other on the shelf as the searing blows jerked them convulsively back and forth. Then hands clamped roughly around their ankles and hauled them across the shelf’s mushy filth and into the tangle of other men in the aisleway, all of them howling under the toubob whips. Wrenching and twisting in vain to escape the pain, he glimpsed shapes moving against the light of the opened hatchway. The toubob were snatching men onto their feet—one pair after another—then beating and shoving them along, stumbling in the darkness, toward the hatchway’s steps. Kunta’s legs felt separated from the rest of his body as he went lurching alongside the Wolof, shackled by their wrists, naked, crusted with filth, begging not to be eaten.
The first open daylight in nearly fifteen days hit Kunta with the force of a hammer between his eyes. He reeled under the bursting pain, flinging his free hand up to cover his eyes. His bare feet told him that whatever they were walking on was moving slightly from side to side. Fumbling blindly ahead, with even his cupped hand and clamped eyelids admitting some tormenting light, trying futilely to breathe through nostrils nearly plugged with snot, he gaped open his cracked lips and took a deep breath of sea air—the first of his life. His lungs convulsed from its rich cleanness, and he crumpled to the deck, vomiting alongside his shacklemate. All about him he heard more vomiting, chains clanking, lashes meeting flesh, and shrieks of pain amid toubob shouts and curses and strange flapping sounds overhead.
When another whip ripped across his back, Kunta shrank to one side, hearing his Wolof partner gasp as the lash hit him. It kept tearing at them both until somehow they stumbled to their feet. He slit his eyes to see if he could escape some of the blows; but new pains stabbed into his head as their tormentor shoved them toward where Kunta could see the blurred forms of other toubob passing a length of chain through the shackles around each man’s ankles. There had been more of them down there in the darkness than he had ever realized—and far more toubob than had ever gone below. In the bright sunlight, they looked even paler and more horrible, their faces pitted with the holes of disease, their peculiar long hair in colors of yellow or black or red, some of them even with hair around their mouths and under their chins. Some were bony, others fat, some had ugly scars from knives, or a hand, eye, or limb missing, and the backs of many were crisscrossed with deep scars. It flashed through Kunta’s mind how his teeth had been counted and inspected, for several of these toubob he saw had but few teeth.
Many of them were spaced along the rails, holding whips, long knives, or some kind of heavy metal stick with a hole in the end, and Kunta could see beyond them an amazing sight—an unbelievable endlessness of rolling blue water. He jerked his head upward toward the slapping sounds above and saw that they came from giant white cloths billowing among huge poles and many ropes. The cloths seemed to be filled up with the wind. Turning about, Kunta saw that a high barricade of bamboo taller than any man extended completely across the width of the huge canoe. Showing through the barricade’s center was the gaping black mouth of a huge, terrible-looking metal thing with a long, thick, hollow shaft, and the tips of more metal sticks like the ones the toubob had been holding at the rail. Both the huge thing and the
sticks were pointed toward where he and the other naked men were grouped.
As their ankle shackles were being linked onto the new chain, Kunta got the chance to take a good look at his Wolof shacklemate for the first time. Like himself, the man was crusted from head to foot with filth. He seemed about the rains of Kunta’s father Omoro, and the Wolof had that tribe’s classic facial features, and he was very black of color. The Wolof’s back was bleeding from where the whippings had cut into him, and pus was oozing from where an LL mark had been burned into his back. Kunta realized, as their eyes searched each other, that the Wolof was staring at him with the same astonishment. Amid the commotion, they had time to stare also at the other naked men, most of them gibbering in their terror. From the different facial features, tribal tattoos, and scarification marks, Kunta could tell that some were Foulah, Jola, Serere, and Wolof, like his partner, but most were Mandinkas—and there were some he could not be sure of. With excitement, Kunta saw the one he was sure must have killed the slatee. He was indeed a Foulah; blood from the beating he had received was crusted all over him.
They were all soon being shoved and whipped toward where another chain of ten men was being doused with buckets of seawater drawn up from over the side. Then other toubob with long-handled brushes were scrubbing the screaming men. Kunta screamed, too, as the drenching salt water hit him, stinging like fire in his own bleeding whip cuts and the burned place on his back. He cried even louder as the stiff brush bristles not only loosened and scraped off some of his body’s crusted filth but also tore open his scabbed lash cuts. He saw the water frothing and pinkish at their feet. Then they were herded back toward the center of the deck, where they flopped down in a huddle. Kunta gawked upward to see toubob springing about on the poles like monkeys, pulling at the many ropes among the great white cloths. Even in Kunta’s shock, the heat of the sun felt warm and good, and he felt an incredible sense of relief that his skin was freed of some of its filth.