Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  He spent a sleepless night worrying that a wedge discovered missing might cause all of the cabins to be searched. He felt better when there was no outcry the following day, but he still wasn’t sure just how he might employ the wedge to help himself escape, when that time came again.

  What he really wanted to get his hands on was one of those long knives that the “oberseer” would issue to a few of the men each morning. But each evening he would see the “oberseer” demanding the knives back and counting them carefully. With one of those knives, he could cut brush to move more quickly within a forest, and if he had to, he could kill a dog—or a man.

  One cold afternoon almost a moon later—the sky bleak and slaty—Kunta was on his way across one of the fields to help another man repair a fence when, to his astonishment, what looked like salt began to fall from the sky, at first lightly, then more rapidly and thickly. As the salt became a flaky whiteness, he heard the black nearby exclaiming, “Snow!” and guessed that was what they called it. When he bent down to pick some of it up, it was cold to his touch—and even colder when he licked it off a finger with his tongue. It stung, and it had no taste whatever. He tried to smell it, but not only did there seem to be no odor either, it also disappeared into watery nothingness. And wherever he looked on the ground was a whitish film.

  But by the time he reached the other side of the field, the “snow” had stopped and even begun to melt away. Hiding his amazement, Kunta composed himself and nodded silently to his black partner, who was waiting by the broken fence. They set to work—Kunta helping the other man to string a kind of metal twine that he called “wire.” After a while they reached a place almost hidden by tall grass, and as the other man hacked some of it down with the long knife he carried, Kunta’s eyes were gauging the distance between where he stood and the nearest woods. He knew that Samson was nowhere near and the “oberseer” was keeping watch in another field that day. Kunta worked busily, to give the other man no suspicion of what was in his mind. But his breath came tensely as he stood holding the wire tight and looking down on the head of the man bent over his work. The knife had been left a few steps behind them, where the chopping of the brush had stopped.

  With a silent prayer to Allah, Kunta clasped his hands together, lifted them high, and brought them down across the back of the man’s neck with all the violence of which his slight body was capable. The man crumpled without a sound, as if he had been poleaxed. Within a moment, Kunta had bound the man’s ankles and wrists with the wire. Snatching up the long knife, Kunta suppressed the impulse to stab him—this was not the hated Samson—and went running toward the woods, bent over almost double. He felt a lightness, as if he were running in a dream, as if this weren’t really happening at all.

  He came out of it a few moments later—when he heard the man he had left live yelling at the top of his lungs. He should have killed him, Kunta thought, furious with himself, as he tried to run yet faster. Instead of fighting his way deeply into the underbrush when he reached the woods, he skirted it this time. He knew that he had to achieve distance first, then concealment. If he got far enough fast enough, he would have time to find a good place to hide and rest before moving on under cover of the night.

  Kunta was prepared to live in the woods as the animals did. He had learned many things about this toubob land by now, together with what he already knew from Africa. He would capture rabbits and other rodents with snare traps and cook them over a fire that wouldn’t smoke. As he ran, he stayed in the area where the brush would conceal him but wasn’t thick enough to slow him down.

  By nightfall, Kunta knew that he had run a good distance. Yet he kept going, crossing gullies and ravines, and for quite a way down the bed of a shallow stream. Only when it was completely dark did he allow himself to stop, hiding himself in a spot where the brush was dense but from which he could easily run if he had to. As he lay there in the darkness, he listened carefully for the sound of dogs. But there was nothing but stillness all around him. Was it possible? Was he really going to make it this time?

  Just then he felt a cold fluttering on his face, and reached up with his hand. “Snow” was falling again! Soon he was covered—and surrounded—by whiteness as far as he could see. Silently it fell, deeper and deeper, until Kunta began to fear he was going to be buried in it; he was already freezing. Finally he couldn’t stop himself from leaping up and running to look for better cover.

  He had run a good way when he stumbled and fell; he wasn’t hurt, but when he looked back, he saw with horror that his feet had left a trail in the snow so deep that a blind man could follow him. He knew that there was no way he could erase the tracks, and he knew that the morning was now not far away. The only possible answer was more distance. He tried to increase his speed, but he had been running most of the night, and his breath was coming in labored gasps. The long knife had begun to feel heavy; it would cut brush, but it wouldn’t melt “snow.” The sky was beginning to lighten in the east when he heard, far ahead of him, the faint sound of conch horns. He changed course in the next stride. But he had the sinking feeling that there was nowhere he could find to rest safely amid this blanketing whiteness.

  When he heard the distant baying of the dogs, a rage flooded up in him such as he had never felt before. He ran like a hunted leopard, but the barking grew louder and louder, and finally, when he glanced back over his shoulder for the tenth time, he saw them gaining on him. The men couldn’t be far behind. Then he heard a gun fire, and somehow it propelled him forward even faster than before. But the dogs caught up with him anyway. When they were but strides away, Kunta whirled and crouched down, snarling back at them. As they came lunging forward with their fangs bared, he too lunged at them, slashing open the first dog’s belly with a single sideways swipe of the knife; with another blur of his arm, he hacked the blade between the eyes of the next one.

  Springing away, Kunta began running again. But soon he heard the men on horses crashing through the brush behind him, and he all but dove for the deeper brush where the horses couldn’t go. Then there was another shot, and another—and he felt a flashing pain in his leg. Knocked down in a heap, he had staggered upright again when the toubob shouted and fired again, and he heard the bullets thud into trees by his head. Let them kill me, thought Kunta; I will die as a man should. Then another shot hit the same leg, and it smashed him down like a giant fist. He was snarling on the ground when he saw the “oberseer” and another toubob coming toward him with their guns leveled and he was about to leap up and force them to shoot him again and be done with it, but the wounds in his leg wouldn’t let him rise.

  The other toubob held his gun at Kunta’s head as the “oberseer” jerked off Kunta’s clothing until he stood naked in the snow, the blood trickling down his leg and staining the whiteness at his feet. Cursing with each breath, the “oberseer” knocked Kunta all but senseless with his fist; then both of them tied him facing a large tree, with his wrists bound on the other side.

  The lash began cutting into the flesh across Kunta’s shoulders and back, with the “oberseer” grunting and Kunta shuddering under the force of each blow. After a while Kunta couldn’t stop himself from screaming with the pain, but the beating went on until his sagging body pressed against the tree. His shoulders and back were covered with long, half-opened bleeding welts that in some places exposed the muscles beneath. He couldn’t be sure, but the next thing Kunta knew he had the feeling he was falling. Then he felt the coldness of the snow against him and everything went black.

  He came to in his hut, and along with his senses, pain returned—excruciating and enveloping. The slightest movement made him cry out in agony; and he was back in chains. But even worse, his nose informed him that his body was wrapped from feet to chin in a large cloth soaked with grease of the swine. When the old cooking woman came in with food, he tried to spit at her, but succeeded only in throwing up. He thought he saw compassion in her eyes.

  Two days later, he was awakened early in the morn
ing by the sounds of festivities. He heard black people outside the big house shouting “Christmas gif’, Massa!,” and he wondered what they could possibly have to celebrate. He wanted to die, so that his soul could join the ancestors; he wanted to be done forever with misery unending in this toubob land, so stifling and stinking that he couldn’t draw a clean breath in it. He boiled with fury that instead of beating him like a man, the toubob had stripped him naked. When he became well, he would take revenge—and he would escape again. Or he would die.

  CHAPTER 48

  When Kunta finally emerged from his hut, again with both of his ankles shackled, most of the other blacks avoided him, rolling their eyes in fear of being near him, and moving quickly elsewhere, as if he were a wild animal of some kind. Only the old cooking woman and the old man who blew the conch horn would look at him directly.

  Samson was nowhere to be seen. Kunta had no idea where he had gone, but Kunta was glad. Then, a few days later, he saw the hated black one bearing the unhealed marks of a lash; he was gladder still. But at the slightest excuse, the lash of the toubob “oberseer” fell once again on Kunta’s back as well.

  He knew every day that he was being watched as he went through the motions of his work, like the others moving more quickly when the toubob came anywhere near, then slowing down as they left. Unspeaking, Kunta did whatever he was ordered to do. And when the day was over, he carried his melancholy—deep within himself—from the fields back to the dingy little hut where he slept.

  In his loneliness, Kunta began talking to himself, most often in imaginary conversations with his family. He would talk to them mostly in his mind, but sometimes aloud. “Fa,” he would say, “these black ones are not like us. Their bones, their blood, their sinews, their hands, their feet are not their own. They live and breathe not for themselves but for the toubob. Nor do they own anything at all, not even their own children. They are fed and nursed and bred for others.”

  “Mother,” he would say, “these women wear cloths upon their heads, but they do not know how to tie them; there is little that they cook that does not contain the meat or the greases of the filthy swine, and many of them have lain down with the toubob, for I see their children who are cursed with the sasso-borro half color.”

  And he would talk with his brothers Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi, telling them that even the wisest of the elders could never really adequately impress upon them the importance of realizing that the most vicious of the forest animals was not half as dangerous as the toubob.

  And so the moons passed in this way, and soon the spikes of “ice” had fallen and melted into water. And before long after that, green grass came peeping through the dark-reddish earth, the trees began to show their buds, and the birds were singing once again. And then came the plowing of the fields and the planting of the endless rows. Finally the sun’s rays upon the soil made it so hot that Kunta was obliged to step quickly, and if he had to stop, to keep his feet moving to prevent them from blistering.

  Kunta had bided his time and minded his own business, waiting for his keepers to grow careless and take their eyes off him once again. But he had the feeling that even the other blacks were still keeping an eye on him, even when the “oberseer” and the other toubob weren’t around. He had to find some way not to be so closely watched. Perhaps he could take advantage of the fact that the toubob didn’t look at blacks as people but as things. Since the toubob’s reactions to these black things seemed to depend on how those things acted, he decided to act as inconspicuous as possible.

  Though it made him despise himself, Kunta forced himself to start behaving the way the other blacks did whenever the toubob came anywhere near. Hard as he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to grin and shuffle, but he made an effort to appear co-operative, if not friendly, and he made a great show of looking busy. He had also learned a good many more toubob words by now, always keenly listening to everything that was said around him, either out in the fields or around the huts at night, and though he still chose not to speak himself, he began to make it clear that he could understand.

  Cotton—one of the main crops on the farm—grew quickly here in the toubob’s land. Soon its flowers had turned into hard green bolls and split open, each filled with fluffy balls, until the fields as far as Kunta could see were vast seas of whiteness, dwarfing the fields he had seen around Juffure. It was time to harvest, and the wake-up horn began blowing earlier in the morning, it seemed to Kunta, and the whip of the “oberseer” was cracking in warning even before the “slaves,” as they were called, could tumble from their beds.

  By watching others out in the field, Kunta soon learned that a hunched position made his long canvas sack seem to drag less heavily behind him as the endlessly repeated handfuls of cotton from the bolls slowly filled his sack. Then he would drag it to be emptied in the wagon that waited at the end of the rows. Kunta filled his sack twice a day, which was about average, although there were some—hated and envied by the others for bending their backs so hard to please the toubob, and succeeding at it—who could pick cotton so fast that their hands seemed a blur; by the time the horn blew at dusk, their sacks would have been filled and emptied into the wagon at least three times.

  When each cotton wagon was filled, it was taken to a storehouse on the farm, but Kunta noticed that the overflowing wagons of tobacco harvested in the larger fields adjoining his were driven away somewhere down the road. Four days passed before it returned empty—just in time to pass another loaded wagon on its way out. Kunta also began seeing other loaded tobacco wagons, doubtlessly from other farms, rolling along the main road in the distance, drawn sometimes by as many as four mules. Kunta didn’t know where the wagons were going, but he knew they went a long way, for he had seen the utter exhaustion of Samson and other drivers when they had returned from one of their trips.

  Perhaps they would go far enough to take him to freedom. Kunta found it hard to get through the next several days in his excitement with this tremendous idea. He ruled out quickly any effort to hide on one of this farm’s wagons; there would be no time without someone’s eyes too near for him to slip unnoticed into a load of tobacco. It must be a wagon moving along the big road from some other farm. Using the pretext of going to the outhouse late that night, Kunta made sure that no one was about, then went to a place where he could see the road in the moonlight. Sure enough—the tobacco wagons were traveling at night. He could see the flickering lights each wagon carried, until finally those small specks of brightness would disappear in the distance.

  He planned and schemed every minute, no details of the local tobacco wagons escaping his notice. Picking in the fields, his hands fairly flew; he even made himself grin if the “oberseer” rode anywhere near. And all the time he was thinking how he would be able to leap onto the rear end of a loaded, rolling wagon at night and burrow under the tobacco without being heard by the drivers up front because of the bumping wagon’s noise, and unseen not only because of the darkness but also because of the tall mound of leaves between the drivers and the rear of the wagon. It filled him with revulsion even to think of having to touch and smell the pagan plant he had managed to stay away from all his life, but if that was the only way to get away, he felt sure that Allah would forgive him.

  CHAPTER 49

  Waiting one evening soon afterward behind the “outhouse,” as the slaves called the hut where they went to relieve themselves, Kunta killed with a rock one of the rabbits that abounded in the woods nearby. Carefully he sliced it thinly and dried it as he had learned in manhood training, for he would need to take some nourishment along with him. Then, with a smooth rock, he honed the rusted and bent knife blade he had found and straightened, and wired it into a wooden handle that he had carved. But even more important than the food and the knife was the saphie he had made—a cock’s feather to attract the spirits, a horse’s hair for strength, a bird’s wishbone for success—all tightly wrapped and sewn within a small square of gunnysacking with a needle he had made from a
thorn. He realized the foolishness of wishing that his saphie might be blessed by a holy man, but any saphie was better than no saphie at all.

  He hadn’t slept all night, but far from being tired, it was all Kunta could do not to burst with excitement—to keep from showing any emotion at all—throughout the next day’s working in the fields. For tonight would be the night. Back in his hut after the evening meal, his hands trembled as he pushed into his pocket the knife and the dried slices of rabbit, then tied his saphie tightly around his upper right arm. He could hardly stand hearing the familiar early-night routine of the other blacks; for each moment, which seemed to be taking forever to pass, might bring some unexpected occurrence that could ruin his plan. But the bone-weary field hands’ mournful singing and praying soon ended. To let them get safely asleep, Kunta waited as much longer as he dared.

  Then, grasping his homemade knife, he eased out into the dark night. Sensing no one about, he bent low and ran as fast as he could go, plunging after a while into a small, thick growth of brush just below where the big road curved. He huddled down, breathing hard. Suppose no more wagons were coming tonight? The thought lanced through him. And then a nearly paralyzing, worse fear: Suppose the driver’s helper sits as a rear lookout? But he had to take the chance.

  He heard a wagon coming minutes before he saw its flickering light. Teeth clenched, muscles quivering, Kunta felt ready to collapse. The wagon seemed barely crawling. But finally, it was directly across from him and slowly passing. Two dim figures sat on its front seat. Feeling like screaming, he lunged from the growth of brush. Trotting low behind the squeaking, lurching wagon, Kunta awaited the road’s next rough spot; then his outstretched hand clawed over the tailboard, and he was vaulting upward, over the top, and into the mountain of tobacco. He was on board!