Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  “Seem like he don’t care bout nothin’ no mo’,” said Kunta.

  “Sho’ seem dat. He keep to hisself, don’t hardly even nod to nobody no mo’, ’ceptin’ Kizzy when she bring ’im supper an set wid’im whilst he eat it. She de onliest one he want anythin’ to do wid. Don’t even spen’ no time wid you no mo’.”

  “What wid dis fever goin’ roun’ lately,” said Kunta wearily, “I ain’t hardly had no time or stren’th for visitin’ noways.”

  “Yeah, I been noticin’, an you ain’t gon’ set up here half de night, you goin’ straight to bed.”

  “Leave me ’lone, woman. I’m fine.”

  “Naw you ain’t!” Bell said decisively, taking him by the hand, helping him up, and leading him into the bedroom without his further resistance. Kunta sat on the edge of the bed while she helped him out of his clothes, then he lay down, sighing.

  “Roll over an’ I gives you a backrub.”

  He obeyed, and she began kneading his back with her stiffened fingers.

  He winced.

  “What’s de matter? I ain’t rubbin’ all dat hard.”

  “Ain’t nothin’.”

  “Do dis hurt here, too?” she asked, pressing down farther toward the small of his back.

  “Ow!”

  “Don’t like de looks o’ dis,” she said, lightening her touch to a caress.

  “I’se jes’ tired. All I need’s a night’s sleep.”

  “We’ll see,” she said, blowing out the candle and climbing in beside him.

  But when she had served the massa his breakfast the next morning, Bell had to tell him that Kunta had been unable to rise from his bed.

  “Probably fever,” said the massa, trying to conceal his irritation. “You know what to do. In the meanwhile, there’s an epidemic going on and I’ve got to have a driver.”

  “Yassa, Massa.” She thought for a moment. “You got any objection to dat fiel’-hand boy Noah? He done growed up so fast he bout man-size now. Handle de mules good, he sho’ could drive yo’ hosses, too, suh.”

  “How old is he now?”

  “Well suh, Noah roun’ two years older’n my Kizzy, so dat—” she paused to count on her fingers, “—dat make him thirteen or fo’teen, I b’lieve, suh.”

  “Too young,” said the massa. “You go tell that fiddler to take over. He’s not doing that much in the garden, or with his fiddle either, lately. Have him hitch up the horses and get around front right away.”

  On her way to the fiddler’s cabin, Bell guessed that he’d be either very indifferent or very upset about the news. He was both. He didn’t seem to care one way or the other about having to drive the massa, but when he learned that Kunta was ill, the fiddler got so concerned that she had to talk him out of stopping off at their cabin before picking up the massa.

  From that day on, the fiddler was a changed man—certainly no happier than he’d been acting for the past few months, but caring, considerate, and tireless as he drove the massa all about the county day and night, and then came home to help Bell care for Kunta and others on slave row who also had come down with the fever.

  Before long, so many people were sick—both on the plantation and off—that the massa pressed Bell into service as his assistant. While he attended the whites, the boy Noah drove her around in the mulecart taking care of the blacks. “Massa got his medicines, I got mine,” she confided to the fiddler. After administering the massa’s drugs, she gave her patients her secret brew of dried, powdered herbs mixed with water from boiled persimmon tree bark—that she swore would work better and faster than any white folks remedy. But what would really cure them, she confided to Sister Mandy and Aunt Sukey, was that always she knelt down at a patient’s bedside and prayed for them. “Whatever He bring on man, He can take away if He want to,” she said. But some of her patients died anyway—as well as Massa Waller’s.

  As Kunta’s own condition steadily worsened, despite everything Bell and the massa could do, her prayers became more and more fervent. Kunta’s strange, silent, stubborn ways had been entirely forgotten as, herself too tired to sleep, she sat by his bed each night as he lay sweating heavily, tossing, moaning, or at times babbling in spells of delirium beneath the several quilts she’d piled on him. She would hold his hot, dry hand in hers, desperately afraid that she might never be able to tell him what had taken this, after all these years, for her fully to realize: that he was a man of caliber, of strength, and of character, that she had never known the equal of, and she loved him very deeply.

  He had been in a coma for three days when Missy Anne came to visit the massa and found Kizzy in the cabin, with Bell, Sister Mandy, and Aunt Sukey, all of them weeping and praying. Tearful herself, Missy Anne returned to the big house and told the weary Massa Waller that she wanted to read something from the Bible for Kizzy’s pappy. But she said she didn’t know what would be a good place to read from, so would he please show her? The massa’s eyes drank in the wet-eyed earnestness of his beloved niece, and getting up from the couch, he unlocked his bookcase and took out his big Bible. After a thoughtful moment, he turned to a page and pointed out with his forefinger the exact spot where she should begin.

  As the word passed in slave row that Missy Anne was going to read something, everyone quickly assembled outside Bell and Kunta’s cabin, and she started to read:

  “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.” Missy Anne paused, frowning at the page, then went on. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.” She paused again, this time for a deep breath, and looked up uncertainly at the faces watching her.

  Deeply moved, Sister Mandy couldn’t stop herself from exclaiming, “Lawd, listen to dat chile! Done growed up an’ learnt to read so good!”

  Amid a hubbub of praises from others, Noah’s mother Ada marveled, “Look like jes’ yestiddy she runnin’ roun’ here in diapers! How ol’ she now?”

  “Ain’t long turnt fo’teen!” said Bell as proudly as if she were her own. “Please read us a l’il mo’, honey!”

  Flushed with their compliments, Missy Anne read the final verse of the Twenty-third Psalm.

  Between treatment and prayer, a few days later Kunta showed signs of beginning to rally. Bell knew he was going to be all right when he glared at her and snatched from around his neck the dried rabbit’s foot and the bag of asafoetida she had tied there to ward off further bad luck and sickness. And Kizzy knew it when she whispered into his ear that on the past new-moon morning she had put a pretty pebble into his gourd, and his drawn face found a broad smile. And Kunta knew that the fiddler was going to be all right when Kunta waked up one morning with a start to the sound of fiddling beside his bed.

  “I mus’ be dreamin’,” said Kunta, opening his eyes.

  “Not no mo’, you ain’t,” said the fiddler. “I’se sick an’ tired o’ drivin’ yo’ massa all over hell an’ gone. Got burn holes in my coat from his eyes at my back. Time you either git up or move over, nigger!”

  CHAPTER 81

  Kunta was sitting up in bed the next day when he heard Kizzy enter the cabin laughing and chattering with Missy Anne, who was on vacation from school, and he heard them pulling back chairs to sit at the table in the next room.

  “Kizzy, have you studied your lessons?” Missy Anne sternly demanded, playing teacher.

  “Yes, ma’am,” snickered Kizzy.

  “Very well, then—what’s that?”

  After a short silence, the intently listening Kunta heard Kizzy falter that she couldn’t remember.

  “It’s a D,” said Missy Ann “Now what’s this one?”

  Almost instantly Kizzy cried triumphantly, “Dat’s dat circle, a O!”

  Both girls laughed happily.

  “Good! You ain’t forgot it.
Now, what’s that?”

  “Ah ... uh ... um ...” Then Kizzy exulted, “Dat’s G!”

  “Right!”

  After another brief silence, Missy Anne said, “Now, see that? D-O-G. What’s that?”

  Kizzy’s silence told him that she didn’t know—as neither did he.

  “Dog!” Missy Anne exclaimed. “You hear me? Don’t forget, DO-G! You got to learn all the letters good, then we’ll do some more about how they make words.”

  After the girls left the cabin, Kunta lay thinking hard. He couldn’t help feeling some pride in Kizzy’s learning ability. On another hand, he couldn’t stomach that it was toubob things her head was being stuffed with. It maybe explained why lately she had seemed to show less interest in their conversations about Africa. It might be too late, but he wondeied if he should reconsider his decision not to teach her how to read in Arabic. But then he thought that would be as foolish as encouraging her to continue her lessons with Missy Anne. Suppose Massa Waller were to discover that Kizzy could read—in any language! That would be a good way to end the white girl’s “schoolteaching,” and yet better, it might even end their relationship. But the trouble was that Kunta couldn’t be sure the massa would let the matter stop at that. So Kizzy’s “school” continued at least two or three times weekly, until Missy Anne had to return to her own daily studies—about the time that Kunta, now adequately recovered, returned to relieve the happy fiddler of driving the massa in his buggy.

  But even after Missy Anne was gone, night after night, as Bell sewed or knitted and Kunta rocked in his chair before the fireplace, Kizzy would sit bent over the table, her pencil almost touching her cheek, carefully copying words from a book Missy Anne had given her or from a torn piece of one of the massa’s discarded newspapers. Sitting with his back to them, Kunta sometimes would hear Kizzy involve Bell, although Kizzy knew of her mother’s ability to read and write a bit herself.

  “Naw, dat’s a A, Mammy,” Kizzy might explain, “an’ dat’s a O. It ain’t nothin’ but a l’il circle.”

  In time, she began to move on to words, just as Missy Anne did with her. “Dat’s ‘dog,’ an’ dat’s ‘cat’ ... an’ dat dere’s ‘Kizzy’ ... an’ dis here’s yo’ name, B-E-L-L. How you like dat? You write it now.” And Bell would made a great pretense of struggling with the pencil as she scrawled it out, deliberately making some mistakes so that Kizzy would have a chance to correct her. “You does like I shows you, Mammy, you can write good as me,” said Kizzy, proud of having something to teach her mother for a change.

  One night a few weeks later, after Kizzy had fallen asleep at the table after hours of copying her latest writing lesson from Missy Anne, Bell sent her daughter to bed and soon after herself lay alongside Kunta and said quietly, “Ain’t no game no mo’. Dat chile awready know more’n I does. I jes’ hopes it be’s awright, Lawd have mercy!”

  Over the months that followed, Kizzy and Missy Anne continued to visit one another, mostly on weekends, but not every weekend, and after a while, Kunta began to detect—or wishfully felt that he did—if not exactly a cooling between the two of them, at least some slow, subtle ebbing in their closeness, a gradual growing apart as Missy Anne began to ripen toward young womanhood four years ahead of Kizzy.

  Finally the milestone of her long-awaited sixteenth birthday was about to arrive, but three days before the party that was being planned, the willful, hot-headed Missy Anne galloped angrily over to Massa Waller’s house—bareback on their buggy horse—and told him, amid copious tears, that her sickly mother was affecting one of her week-long headaches as an effort to call it off. And with much pouting, eyelash fluttering, and tugging his sleeve, she implored him to let her party be at his house instead. Unable to refuse her anything she’d ever asked, he said yes, of course, and as Roosby rushed all over the county informing the dozens of teenaged guests about the change of address, Bell and Kizzy helped Missy Anne with all of the frantic last-minute preparations. They were completed barely in time for Kizzy to help Missy Anne into her party gown and downstairs to greet her guests.

  But then, as Bell told Kunta later, from the moment the first carriage arrived, Missy Anne suddenly had acted as if she didn’t even know the starchly uniformed aproned Kizzy, who kept circulating among the guests bearing trays of refreshments, “till de po’ chile come bustin’ in de kitchen cryin’ her eyes out.” That night in the cabin, Kizzy was still weeping as Bell tried to comfort her. “She jes done growed up into a young missy, now, honey, an’ her mind on dem kind o’ things. Ain’t she think no less o’ you, or really meant no harm. Dis time always come, fo’ any us dat’s growed up real close wid white young’uns, when you jes’ got to go yo’ own way, an dey goes dere’s.”

  Kunta sat seething with the same emotions he had felt when he had first seen Missy Anne playing with the infant Kizzy in her basket. Across the twelve rains since then, he had asked Allah many times to end the toubob girl’s closeness to his Kizzy—and though finally his prayers had been answered, still it both hurt and angered him to see her so deeply wounded. But it had been necessary, and surely from this experience she would learn and remember. Moreover, from the tightness that Kunta had seen in Bell’s face as she had been talking to Kizzy, he felt some hope that even Bell might have gotten cured of at least some of her sickening great affection for the obviously treacherous, conniving “young missy.”

  Missy Anne still continued to visit at Massa Waller’s, although much less often than before since—as Roosby confided to Bell—young massas had begun to occupy her time. When she visited, she always saw Kizzy; and usually she’d bring along an old dress for Bell to “let out” for Kizzy, who was physically bigger, despite being years younger. But now, as if by some unspoken agreement, the two of them would spend around a half hour together, walking and talking quietly in the backyard near slave row, and then Missy Anne would leave.

  Kizzy would always stand looking after her, then very quickly she would walk back into the cabin and bury herself in study, often reading and writing until suppertime. Kunta still didn’t like the idea of her increasing abilities to do either, but he accepted that she must have something to occupy herself with now that she’d lost her lifelong friend. His Kizzy was herself now approaching adolescence, he reflected, which likely was going to present them both with a whole new area of worries.

  Just after Christmas of the next year—1803—the winds blew the snow into deep, feathery drifts until in places the roads were hidden and impassable for all but the biggest wagons. When the massa went out—in response to only the most desperate summons—he had to ride on one of the horses, and Kunta stayed behind, busily helping Cato, Noah, and the fiddler to keep the driveway clear and to chop wood to keep all of the fireplaces steadily going.

  Cut off as they were—even from Massa Waller’s Gazette, which had stopped arriving about a month before with the first big snow—the slave-row people were still talking about the last bits of news that had gotten through to them: how pleased the white massas were with the way President Jefferson was “runnin’ the gubmint,” despite the massas’ initial reservations toward his views regarding slaves. Since taking office, President Jefferson had reduced the size of the Army and Navy, lowered the public debt, even abolished the personal property tax—that last act, the fiddler said, particularly having impressed those of the massa class with his greatness.

  But Kunta said that when he had made his last trip to the county seat before they had gotten snowed in, white folks had seemed to him even more excited about President Jefferson’s purchase of the huge “Louisiana Territory” for but three cents an acre. “What I likes ’bout it,” he said, “’cordin’ to what I heared, dat Massa Napoleon had to sell it so cheap ’cause he in sich hot water in France over what it cost ’im in money, long wid fifty thousan’ Frenchmans got killed or died fo’ dey beat dat Toussaint in Haiti.”

  They were all still warming themselves in the glow of that thought a later afternoon when a black rider arrived am
id a snow-storm with an urgently ill patient’s message for the massa—and another of dismal news for the slave row. In a damp dungeon on a remote French mountain where Napoleon had sent him, Haiti’s General Toussaint had died of cold and starvation.

  Three days later, Kunta was still feeling stricken and depressed when he trudged back to the cabin one afternoon for a mug of hot soup, and stamping snow from his shoes, then entering pulling off his gloves, he found Kizzy stretched out on her pallet in the front room, her face drawn and frightened. “She feelin’ po’ly,” was the explanation that Bell offered as she strained a cup of her herb tea and ordered Kizzy to sit up and drink it. Kunta sensed that something more was being kept from him; then when he was a few more minutes there in the over-warm, tightly closed, mud-chinked cabin, his nostrils helped him to guess that Kizzy was experiencing her first time of the bloodiness.

  He had watched his Kizzy growing and maturing almost every day now for nearly thirteen rains, and he had lately come to accept within himself that her ripening into womanhood would be only a matter of time, yet somehow he felt completely unprepared for this pungent evidence. After another day abed, though, the hardy Kizzy was back up and about in the cabin, then back at work in the big house—and it was as if overnight that Kunta began actually noticing for the first time how his girlchild’s always previously narrow body had budded. With a kind of embarrassed awe, he saw that somehow she had gotten mango-sized breasts and that her buttocks had begun to swell and curve. She even seemed to be walking in a less girlish way. Now, whenever he came through the bedroom separator curtain into the front room where Kizzy slept, he began to avert his eyes, and whenever Kizzy happened not to be clothed fully, he sensed that she felt the same.