Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  In the backyard, she showed Kunta the first weaving house he had ever seen, and nearby were the slave quarters—which were about the same as theirs—and below them was a pond, and farther beyond was a slaves’ graveyard. “I knows you ain’t want to see dat,” she said, reading his thoughts. He wondered if she also knew how strange and sad he found it to hear her talking—as so many others did—about “usn’s,” and acting as if she owned the plantation she lived on instead of the other way around.

  CHAPTER 58

  “How come massa been seein’ so much a dat no-good brother a his las’ few months?” asked Bell one evening after Kunta trudged in after arriving home from a visit to Massa John’s plantation. “I thought they was no love los’ ’tween dem two.”

  “Look to me like massa jes’ gone crazy ’bout dat l’il ol’ gal baby dey got,” said Kunta wearily.

  “She sho is a cute l’il thin’,” said Bell. After a thoughtful pause, she added, “Reckon Missy Anne seem to massa like dat l’il gal of his own he los’.”

  That hadn’t occurred to Kunta, who still found it difficult to think of toubob as actual human beings.

  “She gon’ be a whole year ol’ dis November, ain’t she?” asked Bell.

  Kunta shrugged. All he knew was that all this running back and forth between the two plantations was wearing ruts in the road—and in his rump. Even though he had no use for Massa John’s sour-faced buggy driver Roosby, he told Bell he was grateful for the rest when the massa invited his brother to visit him for a change the week before.

  As they were leaving that day, Bell recalled, the massa had looked as happy as his little niece when he tossed her in the air and caught her, squealing and laughing, before handing her up to her mother in the buggy. Kunta hadn’t noticed and he didn’t care—and he couldn’t understand why Bell did.

  One afternoon a few days later, on their way home from a house call on one of Massa Waller’s patients at a plantation not far from Newport, the massa called out sharply to Kunta that he had just passed a turn they should have taken. Kunta had been driving without seeing, so shocked was he by what he had just seen at the patient’s big house. Even as he muttered an apology and turned the buggy hastily around, he couldn’t rid his mind of the sight of the heavy, very black, Wolof-looking woman he had seen in the backyard. She had been sitting on a stump, both of her large breasts hanging out, matter-of-factly suckling a white infant at one and a black infant at the other. It was a revolting sight to Kunta, and an astonishing one, but when he told the gardener about it later, the old man said, “Ain’t hardly a massa in Virginia ain’t sucked a black mammy, or leas’ was raised up by one.”

  Almost as repulsive to Kunta was something he’d seen all too much of—the kind of demeaning “games” that went on at the plantations he visited between white and black “young’uns” of about the same age. The white children seemed to love nothing more than playing “massa” and pretending to beat the black ones, or playing “hosses” by climbing onto their backs and making them scramble about on all fours. Playing “school,” the white children would “teach” the black to read and write, with many cuffings and shriekings about their “dumbness.” Yet after lunch—which the black children would spend fanning the massa and his family with leafy branches to keep flies away—the white and black children would lie down together and take naps on pallets.

  After seeing such things, Kunta would always tell Bell, the fiddler, and the gardener that he’d never understand the toubob if he lived to a hundred rains. And they would always laugh and tell him that they’d seen this sort of thing—and more—all of their lives.

  Sometimes, they told him, as the white and black “young’uns” grew up together, they became very attached to one another. Bell recalled two occasions when the massa had been called to attend white girls who had fallen ill when their lifelong black playmates had been sold away for some reason. Their massas and mistresses had been advised that their daughters’ hysterical grief was such that they might well grow weaker and weaker until they died, unless their little girlfriends were quickly found and bought back.

  The fiddler said that a lot of black young’uns had learned to play the violin, the harpsichord, or other instruments by listening and observing as their white playmates were taught by music masters whom their rich massas had hired from across the big water. The old gardener said that on his second plantation a white and black boy grew up together until finally the young massa took the black one off with him to William and Mary College. “Ol’ Massa ain’t like it a’tall; but Ol’ Missy say, ‘It’s his nigger if he want to!’ An’ when dis nigger git back later on, he tol’ us in slave row dat dey was heap more young massas dere wid dey niggers as valets, sleepin’ right in de room wid ’em. He say heap of times dey take dey niggers wid ’em to classes, den dey argue later on whose nigger learnt de mos’. Dat nigger from my plantation couldn’t jes’ read an’ write, he could figger, too, an’ ’cite dem poems an’ stuff dey has at colleges. I got sol’ away roun’ den. Wonder whatever become a him?”

  “Lucky if he ain’t dead,” the fiddler said. “’Cause white folks is quick to ’spicion a nigger like dat be de first to hatch a uprisin’ or a re-volt somewhere. Don’t pay to know too much, jes’ like I tol’ dis African here when he started drivin’ massa. Mouf shut an’ ears open, dat’s de way you learns de mos’—.”

  Kunta found out how true that was soon afterward, when Massa Waller offered a ride to a friend of his from one plantation to another. Talking as if he wasn’t there—and saying things that Kunta would have found extraordinary even if they hadn’t known there was a black sitting right in front of them—they spoke about the frustrating slowness of their slaves’ separation of cotton fibers from the seeds by hand when demands for cotton cloth were rapidly increasing. They discussed how more and more, only the largest planters could afford to buy slaves at the robbery prices being demanded by slave traders and slave-ship agents.

  “But even if you can afford it, bigness can create more problems than it solves,” said the massa. “The more slaves you’ve got, the likelier it is that some kind of revolt could be fomented.”

  “We should never have let them bear arms against white men during the war,” said his companion. “Now we witness the result!” He went on to tell how, at a large plantation near Fredericksburg, some former slave soldiers had been caught just before a planned revolt, but only because a housemaid had gotten some wind of it and told her mistress in tears. “They had muskets, scythe blades, pitchforks, they had even made spears,” said the massa’s friend. “It’s said their plot was to kill and burn by night and hide by day and keep moving. One of their ringleaders said they expected to die, but not before they had done what the war had showed them they could do to white people.”

  “They could have cost many innocent lives,” he heard the massa reply gravely. Massa Waller went on to say that he had read somewhere that over two hundred slave outbreaks had occurred since the first slaveships came. “I’ve been saying for years that our greatest danger is that slaves are coming to outnumber whites.”

  “You’re right!” his friend exclaimed. “You don’t know who’s shuffling and grinning and planning to cut your throat. Even the ones right in your house. You simply can’t trust any of them. It’s in their very nature.”

  His back as rigid as a board, Kunta heard the massa say, “As a doctor, more than once I’ve seen white deaths that—well, I’ll not go into details, but let’s just say I’ve thought some of them suspicious.”

  Hardly feeling the reins in his hands, Kunta was unable to comprehend that they could seem so incredibly unaware of him. His mind tumbled with things that he too had heard during the nearly two years now that he had been driving the buggy for the massa. He had heard many a whispering of cooks and maids grinning and bowing as they served food containing some of their own bodily wastes. And he had been told of white folks’ meals containing bits of ground glass, or arsenic, or other poisons. He had
even heard stories about white babies going into mysterious fatal comas without any trace of the darning needle that had been thrust by house-maids into their soft heads where the hair was thickest. And a big-house cook had pointed out to him the former hut of an old mammy nurse who had been beaten badly and then sold away after severely injuring a young massa who had hit her.

  It seemed to Kunta that black women here were even more defiant and rebellious than the men. But perhaps it only appeared that way because the women were more direct and personal about it; they would usually take revenge against white folks who had wronged them. The men tended to be more secretive and less vengeful. The fiddler had told Kunta about a white overseer who had been hanged from a tree by the father of a black girl he had been caught raping; but violence against whites by black men was most often ignited by news of white atrocities or slave rebellions and the like.

  There had never been any uprisings, or even any incidents, at the Waller place, but right there in Spotsylvania County, Kunta had heard about some blacks who had hidden muskets and other weapons and vowed to kill their massas or mistresses, or both, and put their plantations to the torch. And there were some men among those he worked with who would meet in secret to discuss anything good or bad that happened to slaves elsewhere and to consider any action they might take to help; but so far they had only talked.

  Kunta had never been invited to join them—probably, he thought, because they felt that his foot would make him useless to them in an actual revolt. Whatever their reasons for leaving him out, he felt it was just as well. Though he wished them luck in whatever they might decide to do, Kunta didn’t believe that a rebellion could ever succeed against such overwhelming odds. Perhaps, as Massa Waller had said, blacks might soon outnumber whites, but they could never overpower them—not with pitchforks, kitchen knives, and stolen muskets against the massed armies of the white nation and its cannons.

  But their worst enemy, it seemed to Kunta, was themselves. There were a few young rebels among them, but the vast majority of slaves were the kind that did exactly what was expected of them, usually without even having to be told; the kind white folks could—and did—trust with the lives of their own children, the kind that looked the other way when the white man took their women into haymows. Why, there were some right there on the plantation he was sure the massa could leave unguarded for a year and find them there—still working—when he returned. It certainly wasn’t because they were content; they complained constantly among themselves. But never did more than a handful so much as protest, let alone resist.

  Perhaps he was becoming like them, Kunta thought. Or perhaps he was simply growing up. Or was he just growing old? He didn’t know; but he knew that he had lost his taste for fighting and running, and he wanted to be left alone, he wanted to mind his own business. Those who didn’t had a way of winding up dead.

  CHAPTER 59

  Dozing off in the shade of an oak tree in the backyard of a plantation where the massa was visiting to treat an entire family that had come down with a fever, Kunta woke up with a start when the evening conch horn blew to call the slaves in from the fields. He was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes when they reached the yard. Glancing up as they passed by on their way to wash up for supper, he noticed that there were about twenty or thirty of them. He looked again. Maybe he was still sleeping, but four of them—a man, a woman, and two teen-age boys—were white.

  “Dey’s what you call indentured white folks,” his friend the cook explained when he expressed his amazement to her a few minutes later. “Been here ’bout two months now. Dey’s a fambly from someplace ’crost de big water. Massa pay dere way here on de boat, so dey gotta pay him back by workin’ seben years as slaves. Den dey free jus’ like any other white folks.”

  “Dey live in slave row?” asked Kunta.

  “Dey got dey own cabin off a ways from our’n, but it jus’ as tumbledown as de res’. And dey eats de same mess we does. An’ don’t get treated no different out in de fiel’.”

  “What dey like?” asked Kunta.

  “Dey sticks pretty much to deyselves, but dey awright. Ain’t like us’ns, but does dey job and don’t make no trouble for nobody.”

  It seemed to Kunta that these white slaves were better off than most of the free whites he’d seen on the massa’s rounds. With often as many as a dozen grown-ups and children packed on top of each other in one-room hovels on tiny patches of red clay or swampland, they scratched out a living so meager that the blacks laughingly sang a song about them: “Not po’ white, please, O Lawd, fer I’d ruther be a nigger.” Though he had never seen it for himself, Kunta had heard that some of these whites were so poor that they even had to eat dirt. They were certainly skinny enough, and few of them—even the “chilluns”—had any teeth left. And they smelled like they slept with their flea-bitten hounds, which many of them did. Trying to breathe through his mouth as he waited in the buggy outside their shacks while the massa treated one of them for scurvy or pellagra, watching the women and the children plowing and chopping while the menfolk lay under a tree with a brown jug of liquor and their dogs, all scratching, it was easy for Kunta to understand why plantation-owning massas and even their slaves scorned and sneered at them as “lazy, shiftless, no-count white trash.”

  In fact, as far as he was concerned, that was a charitable description of heathens so shameless that they managed to commit every conceivable offense against the standards of decency upheld by the most sacrilegious Moslem. On his trips with the massa to neighboring towns, there would always be packs of them idling around the courthouse or the saloon even in the morning—dressed in their sweat-stained, greasy, threadbare castoffs, reeking of the filthy tobacco weed, which they puffed incessantly, swigging “white lightning” from bottles they carried in their pockets, laughing and yelling raucously at one another as they knelt on the ground in alleys playing cards and dice for money.

  By midafternoon, they would be making complete fools of themselves: bursting drunkenly into song, cavorting wildly up and down the street, whistling and calling out indecently to women who passed by, arguing and cursing loudly among themselves, and finally starting fights that would begin with a shove or a punch—while huge crowds of others like them would gather round to cheer them on—and end with ear-biting, eye-gouging, kicking of private parts, and bloody wounds that would almost always call for the massa’s urgent attention. Even the wild animals of his homeland, it seemed to Kunta, had more dignity than these creatures.

  Bell was always telling stories about poor whites getting flogged for beating their wives and being sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for rape. Almost as often, she told about one of them stabbing or shooting another one to death; for that they might be forced to serve six months as a slave. But as much as they loved violence among themselves, Kunta knew from personal experience that they loved violence against black people even more. It was a crowd of poor whites—male and female—that had hooted and jeered and jabbed with sticks at him and his chain mates when they were taken from the big canoe. It was a poor-white overseer who had applied the lash so freely to his back at Massa John’s plantation. It was “cracker white trash” slave catchers who had taken such glee in chopping off his foot. And he had heard about runaways captured by “pattyrollers” who hadn’t given them the choice he’d gotten and sent them back to their plantations torn and broken almost beyond recognition—and divested of their manhood. He had never been able to figure out why poor whites hated blacks so much. Perhaps, as the fiddler had told him, it was because of rich whites, who had everything they didn’t: wealth, power, and property, including slaves who were fed, clothed, and housed while they struggled to stay alive. But he could feel no pity for them, only a deep loathing that had turned icy cold with the passing of the years since the swing of an ax held by one of them had ended forever something more precious to him than his own life: the hope of freedom.

  Later that summer of 1786, Kunta was returning to the plantation fr
om the county seat with news that filled him with mixed feelings. White folks had been gathering at every corner waving copies of the Gazette and talking heatedly about a story in it that told of increasing numbers of Quakers who were not only encouraging slaves to escape, as they had been doing for several years, but had now also begun aiding, hiding, and guiding them to safety in the North. Poor whites and massas alike were calling furiously for the tarring and feathering, even hanging, of any known Quakers who might be even suspected of such seditious acts. Kunta didn’t believe the Quakers or anybody else would be able to help more than a few of them escape, and sooner or later they’d get caught themselves. But it couldn’t hurt to have white allies—they’d need them—and anything that got their owners so frightened couldn’t be all bad.

  Later that night, after Kunta told everyone in slave row what he had seen and heard, the fiddler said that when he had been playing for a dance across the county the week before, he’d seen “dey moufs fallin’ open” when he cocked an ear close enough to overhear a lawyer there confiding to a group of big plantation owners that the will of a wealthy Quaker named John Pleasant had bequeathed freedom to his more than two hundred slaves. Bell, who arrived late, said that she had just overheard Massa Waller and some dinner guests bitterly discussing the fact that slavery had recently been abolished in a northern state called “Massachusetts,” and reports claimed that other states near there would do the same.

  “What ’bolished mean?” asked Kunta.

  The old gardener replied, “It mean one dese days all us niggers gon’ be free!”

  CHAPTER 60

  Even when he didn’t have anything he’d seen or heard in town to tell the others, Kunta had learned to enjoy sitting around the fire with them in front of the fiddler’s hut. But lately he’d found that he was spending less time talking with the fiddler—who had once been his only reason for being there—than with Bell and the old gardener. They hadn’t exactly cooled toward one another, but things just weren’t the same anymore, and that saddened him. It hadn’t brought them closer for the fiddler to get saddled with Kunta’s gardening duties, though he’d finally managed to get over it. But what he couldn’t seem to get used to was the fact that Kunta soon began to replace him as the plantation’s best-informed source of news and gossip from the outside.