Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Kunta thought about how “high-yaller” slave girls brought high prices at the county seat slave auctions. He had seen them being sold, and he had heard many times about the purposes for which they were bought. And he thought of the many stories he had heard about “high-yaller” man-children—about how they were likely to get mysteriously taken away as babies never to be seen again, because of the white fear that otherwise they might grow up into white-looking men and escape to where they weren’t known and mix the blackness in their blood with that of white women. Every time Kunta thought about any aspect of blood mixing, he would thank Allah that he and Bell could share the comfort of knowing that whatever otherwise might prove to be His will, their man-child was going to be black.
It was early one night in September of 1790 when the labor pains began to take hold of Bell. But she wouldn’t yet let Kunta go for the massa, who had said that he would personally attend her, with Sister Mandy to be in readiness as his assistant if he should need her. Each time the pains came, Bell lay on the bed gritting her teeth to keep from crying out, and she would tighten her grip on Kunta’s hand with the strength of a man.
It was during one of the brief intervals between the pains that Bell turned her sweating face to Kunta and said, “It’s something I oughta tol’ you ’fore now. I’s already done had two chilluns, long time ago, ’fore I ever come here, ’fore I was sixteen years ol’.” Kunta stood looking down at the anguished Bell, astounded. Had he known this—no, he would have married her anyway—but he felt betrayed that she hadn’t told him before. Making herself gasp out the words between contractions, Bell told him about the two daughters from whom she had been sold away. “Jes’ nothin’ but babies is all dey was.” She began to weep. “One was jes’ startin’ to walk good, an’ de other’n weren’t a year old hardly—.” She started to go on, but a spasm of pain clamped her mouth shut and tightened her grip on his hand. When it finally subsided, her grip didn’t loosen; she looked up at him through her tears and—reading his racing thoughts—said, “Case you wond’rin’, dere daddy weren’t no massa or no oberseer. Was a field nigger ’bout my age. We didn’t know no better.”
The pains came again, much sooner than before, and her nails dug into his palm as her mouth opened wide in a soundless scream. Kunta rushed from the cabin down to Sister Mandy’s hut, where he banged the door and called to her hoarsely, then ran on as fast as he could go to the big house. His knocking and calling finally brought Massa Waller, who needed but one glance at Kunta to say, “I’ll be right there!”
Hearing Bell’s anguished moans rise into shrieks that went ripping through the quiet of slave row pushed from Kunta’s mind any thought of what Bell had revealed to him. As much as he wanted to be by Bell’s side, he was glad Sister Mandy had ordered him outside, where he squatted at the door trying to imagine what must be going on inside. He had never learned much about childbirth in Africa, since that was considered women’s affair, but he had heard that a woman birthed a child while kneeling over cloths spread on the floor, then sat in a pan of water to clean away the blood, and he wondered if that’s what was happening now.
It occurred to Kunta that far away in Juffure, Binta and Omoro were becoming grandparents, and it saddened him to know not only that they would never see his man-child—or he them—but also that they would never know he’d had one.
Hearing the first sharp cries of another voice, Kunta sprang upright. A few minutes later, the massa emerged looking haggard. “She had a hard time. She’s forty-three years old,” he said to Kunta. “But she’ll be fine in a couple of days.” The massa gestured toward the cabin door. “Give Mandy a little while to clean up; then you go on in there and see your baby girl.”
A girlchild! Kunta was still struggling to compose himself when Sister Mandy appeared at the doorway, smiling and beckoning him inside. Cripping through the front room, he pushed aside the curtain at the bedroom door and there they were. As he moved quietly to her side, a floorboard squeaked and Bell opened her eyes, managing a weak smile. Absently, he found her hand and squeezed, but he scarcely felt it, for he couldn’t stop staring at the face of the infant who lay beside her. It was almost as black as his, and the features were unmistakably Mandinka. Though it was a girlchild—which must be the will of Allah—it was nonetheless a child, and he felt a deep pride and serenity in the knowledge that the blood of the Kintes, which had coursed down through the centuries like a mighty river, would continue to flow for still another generation.
Kunta’s next thoughts, standing there at the bedside, were of a fitting name for his child. Though he knew enough not to ask the massa for eight days off from work to spend deciding on it, as a new father would in Africa, he knew that the matter would require long and serious reflection, for he knew that what a child was called would really influence the kind of person he or she became. Then it flashed into his mind that whatever name he gave her, she would be also called by the last name of the massa; the thought was so infuriating that Kunta vowed before Allah that this girlchild would grow up knowing her own true name.
Abruptly, without a word, he turned and left. With the sky just beginning to show the traces of early dawn, he went outside and started walking down along the fence row where he and Bell had shared their courtship. He had to think. Remembering what she had told him about her life’s greatest grief—having been sold away from her two infant girlchildren—he searched his mind for a name, some Mandinka word, that would have as its meaning Bell’s deepest wish never to suffer such a loss again, a name that would protect its owner from ever losing her. Suddenly he had it! Turning the word over and over in his mind, he resisted the temptation to speak it aloud, even just for himself, for that would have been improper. Yes, that had to be it! Exhilarated with his good luck in such a short while, Kunta hurried back along the fencerow to the cabin.
But when he told Bell that he was prepared for his child to be named, she protested far more strongly than he would have thought her capable of in her condition. “What’s sich a rush to name ’er? Name ’er what? We ain’t talked ’bout no name nohow!” Kunta knew well how stubborn Bell could be once she got her back up, so there was anguish as well as anger in his voice as he searched for the right words to explain that there were certain traditions that must be honored, certain precedures that must be followed in the naming of a child; chief among them was the selection of that name by the father alone, who was permitted to tell no one what it was until he had revealed it to the child, and that this was only right. He went on to say that haste was essential lest their child hear first some name that the massa might decide upon for her.
“Now I sees!” said Bell. “Dese Africanisms you so full of ain’t gon’ do nothin’ but make trouble. An’ dey ain’t gon’ be none of dem heathen ways, an’ names, neither, for dis chile!”
In a fury, Kunta stormed out of the cabin—and nearly bumped into Aunt Sukey and Sister Mandy on their way in with armloads of towels and steaming pots of water.
“’Gratulations, Br’er Toby, we comin’ to look in on Bell.”
But Kunta scarcely grunted at them as he passed. A field hand named Cato was headed out to ring the first bell of the morning, signaling the others out of their cabins for buckets of water from the well to wash up with before breakfast. Kunta quickly turned off slave row to take the back path that led to the barn, wanting as much distance as he could get between him and those heathen blacks whom the toubob had trained to shrink away in fear from anything smacking of the Africa that had been their very source-place.
In the sanctuary of the barn, Kunta angrily fed, watered, and then rubbed down the horses. When he knew that it was time for the massa to have his breakfast, he took the long way around again on his way to the big-house kitchen door, where he asked Aunt Sukey, who was filling in for Bell, if the massa was going to need the buggy. Refusing to speak or even turn around, she shook her head and left the room without even offering him any food. Limping back to the barn, Kunta wondered what Bel
l had told Aunt Sukey and Sister Mandy for them to go gossiping through slave row; then he told himself that he couldn’t care less.
He had to do something with himself; he couldn’t just idle away more hours around the barn. Moving outside with the buggy harnesses, he set about his familiar task of killing time by oiling them unnecessarily, as he had just done only two weeks before. He wanted to go back to the cabin to see the baby—and even Bell—but anger rose every time he thought of what a disgrace it was that the wife of a Kinte could want her child to bear some toubob name, which would be nothing but the first step toward a lifetime of self-contempt.
About noontime, Kunta saw Aunt Sukey taking in to Bell a pot of some food—some kind of soup, probably. It made him hungry to think about it; a few minutes later he went out behind the barn where some recently harvested sweet potatoes had been mounded under straw for curing, picked out four of the smaller ones, and—feeling very sorry for himself—ate them raw to appease his stomach.
Dusk was descending before he could bring himself to go home. When he opened the front door and walked in, there was no sound of response from Bell in the bedroom. She could be asleep, he thought, leaning over to light a candle on the table.
“Dat you?”
He could detect no special harshness in Bell’s tone. Grunting noncommittally, he picked up the candle, pushed aside the curtain, and went into the bedroom. In the ruddy glow, he could see that the expression on her face was as adamant as his own.
“Looka here, Kunta,” she said, wasting no time getting to the point, “it’s some things I knows ’bout our massa better’n you does. You git him mad wid dat African stuff, he sell us all three at de next county seat auction jes’ sho’s we born!”
Containing the anger within him as well as he could, Kunta stumbled for the words that could make Bell understand the absoluteness of his determination that whatever the risks, his child would bear no toubob name, and that moreover she would be given her name in the proper manner.
As deeply as Bell disapproved, she was even more apprehensive of what Kunta might do if she refused. So with deep misgivings, she finally acquiesced. “What kin’ o’ voodoo you got to do?” she asked dubiously. When he said he was simply going to take the baby outdoors for a while, she insisted that he wait until the child awakened and she had nursed her so that she wouldn’t be hungry and crying, and Kunta immediately agreed. Bell reckoned that the baby wouldn’t wake up for at least another two hours, by which time it would be most unlikely that anyone in slave row would still be up to see whatever mumbo jumbo Kunta was going to perform. Though she didn’t show it, Bell was still angry that Kunta prevented her from helping him pick a name for the daughter she had just brought into the world amid such agony; and she dreaded finding out what African-sounding, forbidden name Kunta had come up with, but she was sure that she could deal with the baby’s name later in her own way.
It was near midnight when Kunta emerged from the cabin, carrying his firstborn wrapped snugly in a blanket. He walked until he felt they were far enough from slave row that it couldn’t cast a pall over what was about to take place.
Then, under the moon and the stars, Kunta raised the baby upward, turning the blanketed bundle in his hands so that the baby’s right ear touched against his lips. And then slowly and distinctly, in Mandinka, he whispered three times into the tiny ear, “Your name is Kizzy. Your name is Kizzy. Your name is Kizzy.” It was done, as it had been done with all of the Kinte ancestors, as it had been done with himself, as it would have been done with this infant had she been born in her ancestral homeland. She had become the first person to know who she was.
Kunta felt Africa pumping in his veins—and flowing from him into the child, the flesh of him and Bell—as he walked on a little farther. Then again he stopped, and lifting a small corner of the blanket he bared the infant’s small black face to the heavens, and this time he spoke aloud to her in Mandinka. “Behold, the only thing greater than yourself!”
When Kunta returned with the baby to the cabin, Bell all but snatched her away, her face tight with fear and resentment as she opened the blanket and examined her from head to toe, not knowing what she was looking for and hoping she wouldn’t find it. Satisfied that he hadn’t done anything unspeakable—at least nothing that showed—she put the baby to bed, came back into the front room, sat down in the chair across from him, folded her hands carefully in her lap, and asked,
“Awright, lemme have it.”
“Have what?”
“De name, African, what you call her?”
“Kizzy.”
“Kizzy! Ain’t nobody never heared no name like dat!”
Kunta explained that in Mandinka “Kizzy” meant “you sit down,” or “you stay put,” which, in turn, meant that unlike Bell’s previous two babies, this child would never get sold away.
She refused to be placated. “Jes’ start troubles!” she insisted. But when she felt Kunta’s anger starting to rise again she thought it would be wise to relent. She said she seemed to recall her mother speaking of a grandmother whose name was “Kibby,” which sounded very much the same; at least that’s what they could tell the massa if he got suspicious.
The next morning, Bell did her best to hide her nervousness when the massa came to look in on her—even forcing herself to laugh good-naturedly as she told him the baby’s name. He only commented that it was an odd name, but he said nothing against it, and Bell breathed a heavy sigh of relief the moment he stepped out the door. Back in the big house, before leaving for a day of visiting his patients with Kunta driving him, Massa Waller opened the large black Bible that he kept locked in a case in the drawing room, turned to a page devoted to plantation records, dipped his pen in the inkwell, and wrote in fine black script: “Kizzy Waller, born September 12, 1790.”
CHAPTER 69
“She jes’ like a l’il nigger doll!” squealed Missy Anne, hopping ecstatically up and down, clapping her hands with delight, as she saw Kizzy for the first time three days later in Bell’s kitchen. “Cain’t she be mine?”
Bell smiled widely with pleasure. “Well, she belongst to me an’ her daddy, honey, but jes’ soon’s she big enough, you sho’ can play wid her all you wants!”
And so she did. As often as not, whenever Kunta went to the kitchen now to find out if the buggy would be needed, or simply to visit Bell, he would find the massa’s flaxen-haired little niece—four years old now—bent over the edge of Kizzy’s basket cooing down at her. “Jes’ pretty as you can be. We gonna have plenty fun soon’s you get some size, you hear me? You jes’ hurry up an’ grow, now!” Kunta never said anything about it, but it galled him to think how that toubob child acted as if Kizzy had entered the world to serve as her plaything, like some extraordinary doll. Bell hadn’t even respected his manhood and fatherhood enough to ask his feelings about his daughter playing with the daughter of the man who bought him, he thought bitterly.
It seemed to him sometimes that Bell was less concerned about his feelings than she was about the massa’s. He’d lost count of the evenings she’d spent talking about what a blessing it was that little Missy Anne had come along to replace Massa Waller’s real daughter, who had died at birth along with her mother.
“Oh, Lawd, I jes’ even hates to think back on it,” she told him sniffing one night. “Po’ l’il pretty Missis Priscilla weren’t hardly no bigger’n a bird. Walkin’ roun’ here every day singin’ to herself an’ smilin’ at me an’ pattin’ herself, jes’ waitin’ for her baby’s time. An’ den dat mornin’ jes’ a-screamin’ and finally dyin’, her an’ de l’il baby gal, too! Look like I ain’t hardly seen po’ massa do no smilin’ since—leastways not ’til dis here l’il Missy Anne.”
Kunta felt no pity for the massa’s loneliness, but it seemed to him that getting married again would keep the massa too busy to spend so much time doting on his niece, and that way would almost certainly cut down on Missy Anne’s visits to the plantation—and therefore to play with Kizzy. r />
“Ever since then I been watchin’ how massa git dat l’il gal in his lap, hol’ her close, talk to her, sing her to sleep, an’ den jes’ set on dere holdin’ her ruther’n put her to bed. Jes’ act like he don’t never want his eyes to leave her all de time she be roun’ here. An’ I know it’s ’cause he’s her daddy in his heart.”
It could only dispose the massa even more kindly toward both of them, not to mention toward Kizzy, Bell would tell him, for Missy Anne to strike up a friendship that would bring her over to the massa’s house even more often than before. Nor could it hurt Massa John and his sickly wife, she reasoned slyly, that their daughter was developing a special closeness to her uncle, “’cause den de closer dey figgers dey is to massa’s money.” However important the massa’s brother acted, she said she knew for a fact that he borrowed from the massa now and then, and Kunta knew enough not to disbelieve her—not that he really cared which toubob was richer than which, since they were all alike to him.
Oftentimes now, since Kizzy’s arrival, as Kunta drove the massa around to see his patients and his friends, he would find himself sharing the wish Bell had often expressed that the massa would marry again—although Kunta’s reasons were entirely different from Bell’s. “He jes’ be’s so pitiful to me livin’ all by hisself in dis big house. Fact, I believes dat’s how come he keep y’all always out dere in de buggy on dem roads, he jes’ want to keep hisself movin’, ruther’n settin’ roun’ here by hisself Lawd, even l’il ol’ Missy Anne sees it! Las’ time she was here, I was servin’ dem lunch an’ all of a sudden she say, ‘Uncle William, how come you ain’t got no wife like everybody else?’ An’ po’ thing, he didn’t know what to say to her.”