Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  In this summertime off-season, with the gamecocks moulting off their old feathers, there was only routine work to be done, and Chicken George gradually became accustomed to not having anyone around to talk with, except for the chickens—in particular the pinfeathered veteran catchcock that had been practically Uncle Mingo’s pet.

  “You could o’ tol’ us how sick he was, you ol’ wall-eyed devil!” he told the old bird one afternoon, at which it cocked its head for a second, as if aware that it was being addressed, and then went on pecking and scratching in its ever-hungry way. “You hears me talkin’ to you!” George said with amiable gruffness. “You must o’ knowed he was real bad off!” For a while he let his eyes idly follow the foraging bird. “Well, I reckon you knows he’s gone now. I wonders if you’s missin’ de ol’ man de way I is.” But the old catchcock, pecking and scratching away, seemed not to be missing anyone, and finally Chicken George sent him squawking off with a tossed pebble.

  In another year or so, George reflected, the old bird will probably join Uncle Mingo wherever it is that old gamecockers and their birds go when they die. He wondered what had ever happened to the massa’s very first bird—that twenty-five-cent raffle-ticket gamecock that had gotten him started more than forty years ago. Did it finally catch a fatal gaff? Or did it die an honored catchcock’s death of old age? Why hadn’t he ever asked Uncle Mingo about that? He must remember to ask the massa. Over forty years back! The massa had told him he was only seventeen when he had won the bird. That would make him around fifty-six or fifty-seven now—around thirty years older than Chicken George. Thinking of the massa, and of how he owned people, as well as chickens, all their lives, he found himself pondering what it must be like not to belong to someone. What would it feel like to be “free”? It must not be all that good or Massa Lea, like most whites, wouldn’t hate free blacks so much. But then he remembered what a free black woman who had sold him some white lightning in Greensboro had told him once. “Every one us free show y’all plantation niggers livin’ proof dat jes’ bein’ a nigger don’ mean you have to be no slave. Yo’ massa don’ never want you thinkin’ nothin’ ’bout dat.” During his long solitudes in the gamefowl area, Chicken George began to think about that at length. He decided he was going to strike up conversation with some of the free blacks he always saw but had always ignored when he and the massa went to the cities.

  Walking along the split-rail fence, feeding and watering the cockerels and stags, Chicken George enjoyed as always the stags’ immature clucking angrily at him, as if they were rehearsing their coming savagery in the cockpits. He found himself thinking a lot about being owned.

  One afternoon, while he was on one of his periodic inspections of the birds that were maturing out on the rangewalk, he decided to amuse himself by trying out his nearly perfect imitation of a challenging cock’s crow. Almost always in the past, it would bring instantly forth a furious defender crowing angrily in reply and jerking its head this way and that in search of the intruding rival he was sure he had just heard. Today was no exception. But the magnificent gamecock that burst from the underbrush in response to his call stood beating its wings explosively against its body for almost half a minute before its crow seemed to shatter the autumn afternoon. The bright sunlight glinted off its iridescent plumage. Its carriage was powerful and ferocious, from the glittering eyes to the stout yellow legs with their lethal spurs. Every ounce, every inch of him symbolized its boldness, spirit, and freedom so dramatically that Chicken George left vowing this bird must never be caught and trained and trimmed. It must remain there with its hens among the pines—untouched and free!

  CHAPTER 100

  The new cockfighting season was fast approaching, but Massa Lea hadn’t mentioned New Orleans. Chicken George hadn’t really expected him to; somehow he had known that trip was never going to happen. But he and the massa made a very big impression at the local “mains” when they showed up in their gleaming, custom-built, twelve-coop wagon. And their luck was running good. Massa Lea averaged almost four wins out of five, and George, using the best of the culls, did just about as well in the Caswell County hackfights. It was a busy season as well as a profitable one, but George happened to be home again when his fifth son was born late that year. Matilda said she wanted to name this one James. She said “James somehow ’nother always been my fav’rite ’mongst all de Disciples.” Chicken George agreed, with a private grimace.

  Wherever he and Massa Lea traveled for any distance now, it seemed that he would hear of increasing bitterness against white people. On their most recent trip, a free black had told George about Osceola, chief of the Seminole Indians in the state called Florida. When white men recaptured Osceola’s black wife, an escaped slave, he had organized a war party of two thousand Seminoles and escaped black slaves to track and ambush a detachment of the U. S. Army. Over a hundred soldiers were killed, according to the story, and a much larger Army force was hard after Osceola’s men, who were running, hiding, and sniping from their trails and recesses in the Florida swamps.

  And the cockfight season of 1836 hadn’t long ended when Chicken George heard that at someplace called “The Alamo,” a band of Mexicans had massacred a garrison of white Texans, including a woodsman named Davey Crockett, who was famous as a friend and defender of the Indians. Later that year, he heard of greater white losses to the Mexicans, under a General Santa Anna, who was said to boast of himself as the greatest cockfighter in the world; if that was true, George wondered why he’d never heard of him till now.

  It was during the spring of the next year when George returned from a trip to tell slave row still another extraordinary piece of news. “Done heared it from de co’thouse janitor nigger at de county seat, dat new Pres’dent Van Buren done ordered de Army to drive all de Indians wes’ de Mis’sippi River!”

  “Soun’ for sho’ now like gwine be dem Indians’ River Jordan!” said Matilda.

  “Dat’s what Indians gittin’ for lettin’ in white folks in dis country, in de firs’ place,” said Uncle Pompey. “Whole heap o’ folks,’cludin’ me till I got grown, ain’t knowed at firs’ weren’t nobody in dis country but Indians, fishin’ an’ huntin’ an’ fightin’ one ’nother, jes’ mindin’ dey own business. Den here come l’il ol’ boat o’ white folks a-wavin’ an’ grinnin’. ‘Hey, y’all red mens! How ’bout let us come catch a bite an’ a nap ’mongst y’all an’ le’s be friends!’ Huh! I betcha nowdays dem Indians wish dey’s made dat boat look like a porcupine wid dey arrows!”

  After the massa attended the next Caswell County landholders’ meeting, Chicken George came back with still more news about the Indians. “Hear tell it’s a Gen’l Winfield Scott done warned ’em dat white folks bein’ Christians ain’t wantin’ to shed no mo’ Indians’ blood, so dem wid any sense best to hurry up an’ git to movin’! Hear tell if a Indian even look like he wanted to fight, de sojers shot ’im in ’is tracks! An’ den de Army commence drivin’ jes’ thousan’s dem Indians toward somewheres called Oklahoma. Say ain’t no tellin’ how many ’long de way was kilt or took sick an’ died—”

  “Jes’ evil, evil!” exclaimed Matilda.

  But there was some good news, too—only this time it was waiting for him when he got home from one of his trips in 1837: His sixth son in a row was born. Matilda named him Lewis, but after finding out where she got the name for James, Chicken George decided not even to inquire why. Less exuberant than she’d been at the birth of each previous grandchild, Kizzy said, “Look like to me y’all ain’t gwine never have nothin’ but boys!”

  “Mammy Kizzy, bad as I’se layin’ up here hurtin’ an’ you soundin’ disappointed!” cried Matilda from the bed.

  “Ain’t neither! I loves my gran’boys an’ y’all knows it. But jes’ seem like y’all could have one gal!”

  Chicken George laughed. “We git right to work on a gal for you, Mammy!”

  “You git out’n here!” exclaimed Matilda.

  But only a few months passed be
fore a look at Matilda made it clear that George intended to be a man of his word.

  “Hmph! Sho’ can tell when dat man been spendin’ reg’lar time home!” commented Sister Sarah. “Seem like he wuss’n dem roosters!” Miss Malizy agreed.

  When her pains of labor came once again, the waiting, pacing George heard—amid his wife’s anguished moans and cries—his mother’s yelps of “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!,” and he needed no further advisement that at last he had fathered a girl.

  Even before the baby was cleaned off, Matilda told her mother-in-law that she and George had agreed years before that their first girl would be named Kizzy.

  “Ain’t done lived in vain!” Gran’mammy cried at intervals throughout the rest of the day. Nothing would do for her then but that the following afternoon Chicken George would come up from the gamefowl area and tell once again about the African great-gran’pappy Kunta Kinte for the six boys and the infant Kizzy in his lap.

  One night about two months later, with all of the children finally asleep, George asked, “’Tilda, how much money is we got saved up?”

  She looked at him, surprised. “L’il over a hunnud dollars.”

  “Dat all?”

  “Dat all! It’s a wonder it’s dat much! Ain’t I been tellin’ you all dese years de way you spends ain’t hardly no point even do no talkin’ ’bout no savin’!”

  “Awright, awright,” he said guiltily.

  But Matilda pursued the point. “Not countin’ what you winned an’ spent what I ain’t never seed, which was yo’ business, you want to guess ’bout how much you done give me to save since we been married, den you borrowin’ back?”

  “Awright, how much?”

  Matilda paused for effect. “Twixt three-fo’ thousan’ dollars.”

  “Wheeeew!” he whistled. “I is?”

  Watching his expression change, she sensed that she had never observed him grow more serious in all their twelve years together. “Off down yonder by myself so much,” he said finally, “I been thinkin’ ’bout whole heap o’ things—” He paused. She thought he seemed almost embarrassed by whatever he was about to say. “One thing I been thinkin’, if’n us could save ’nough dese nex’ comin’ years, maybe us could buy ourselves free.”

  Matilda was too astounded to speak.

  He gestured impatiently. “I wish you git yo’ pencil to figger some, an’ quit buckin’ yo’ eyes at me like you ain’t got no sense!”

  Still stunned, Matilda got her pencil and a piece of paper and sat back down at the table.

  “Trouble to start wid,” he said, “jes’ can’t do nothin’ but guess roun’ what massa’d ax for us all. Me an’ you an’ de passel o’ young’uns. Start wid you. Roun’ de county seat, I knows men fiel’ han’s is bringin’’bout a thousan’ dollars apiece. Wimmins is worth less, so le’s call you’bout eight hunnud—” Getting up, bending to inspect Matilda’s moving pencil, he sat back down. “Den let’s say massa let us have our chilluns, all eight, ’bout three hunnud apiece—”

  “Ain’t but seb’n!” said Matilda.

  “Dat new one you say started in yo’ belly ag’in make eight!”

  “Oh!” she said, smiling. She figured at length. “Dat make twenty-fo’ hunnud—”

  “Jes’ for chilluns?” His tone mingled doubt with outrage. Matilda refigured. “Eight threes is twenty-fo’. Plus de eight hunnud fo’ me, dat make ’zactly thirty hunnud—dat’s same as three thousan’.”

  “Wheeeew!”

  “Don’t carry on so yet! De big one you!” She looked at him. “How much you figger fo’ you?”

  Serious as it was, he couldn’t resist asking, “What you think I’se worth?”

  “If I’d o’ knowed, I’d o’ tried to buy you from massa myself.” They both laughed. “George, I don’ even know how come we’s talkin’ sich as dis, nohow. You know good an’ well massa ain’t gwine never sell you!”

  He didn’t answer right away. But then he said, “’Tilda, I ain’t never mentioned dis, reckon since I know you don’t hardly even like to hear massa’s name called. But I betcha twenty-five different times, one or ’nother, he done talk to me ’bout whenever he git ’nough together to buil’ de fine big house he want, wid six columns crost de front, he say him an’ missis could live off’n what de crops make, an’ he ’speck he be gittin’ out’n de chicken-fightin’ business, he say he steady gittin’ too ol’ to keep puttin’ up wid all de worries.”

  “I have to see dat to b’lieve it, George. Him or you neither ain’t gwine never give up messin’ wid chickens!”

  “I’m tellin’ you what he say! If you can listen! Looka here, Uncle Pompey say massa ’bout sixty-three years ol’ right now. Give ’im another five, six years—it ain’t easy fo’ no real ol’ man to keep runnin’ here an’ yonder fightin’ no birds! I didn’t pay ’im much ’tention neither till I kept thinkin’ dat, yeah, he really might let us buy ourselves, an ’specially if we be payin’ him ’nough would he’p ’im buil’ dat big house he want.”

  “Hmph,” Matilda grunted without conviction. “Awright, let’s talk ’bout it. What you reckon he’d want for you?”

  “Well—” His expression seemed to mingle pride in one way and pain in another at what he was about to say. “Well—nigger buggy driver o’ dat rich Massa Jewett done swo.’ up an’ down to me one time dat he overheard his massa tellin’ somebody he’d offered Massa Lea fo’ thousan’ dollars fo’ me—”

  “Whooooooee!” Matilda was flabbergasted.

  “See, you ain’t never knowed de valuable nigger you sleeps wid!” But quickly he was serious again. “I don’t really b’lieve dat nigger. I’speck he jes’ made up dat lie tryin’ to see if I’d be fool ’nough to swallow it. Anyhow, I go by what’s gittin’ paid nowdays for niggers wid de bes’ trades, like de carpenters an’ blacksmiths, sich as dem. Dey’s sellin’ twix two-three thousan’, I knows dat fo’ a fac’—” He paused, peering at her waiting pencil. “Put down three thousan’—” He paused again. “How much dat be?”

  Matilda figured. She said then that the total estimated cost to buy their family would be sixty-two hundred dollars. “But what’bout Mammy Kizzy?”

  “I git to Mammy!” he said impatiently. He thought. “Mammy gittin’ pretty ol’ now, dat he’p her cost less—”

  “Dis year she turnin’ fifty,” said Matilda.

  “Put down six hunnud dollars.” He watched the pencil move. “Now what dat?”

  Matilda’s face strained with concentration. “Now it’s sixty-eight hunnud dollars.”

  “Whew! Sho’ make you start to see niggers is money to white folks.” George spoke very slowly. “But I ’clare I b’lieves I can hackfight an’ do it. ’Cose, gon’ mean waitin’ an’ savin’ up a long time—” He noticed that Matilda seemed discomfited. “I knows right what’s on yo’ mind,” he said. “Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah, an’ Uncle Pompey.”

  Matilda looked grateful that he knew. He said, “Dey’s family to me even fo’ dey was to you—”

  “Lawd, George!” she exclaimed, “jes’ don’t see how jes’ one man s’posed to be tryin’ to buy ever’body, but I sho’ jes’ couldn’t walk off an’ leave dem!”

  “We got plenty time, ’Tilda. Let’s us jes’ cross dat bridge when we gits to it.”

  “Dat’s de truth, you right.” She looked down at the figures that she had written. “George, I jes’ can’t hardly b’lieve we’s talkin’ ’bout what we is—” She felt herself beginning to dare to believe it, that the two of them, together, were actually engaging for the first time in a monumental family discussion. She felt an intense urge to spring around the table and embrace him as tightly as she could. But she felt too much to move—or even speak for a few moments. Then she asked, “George, how come you got to thinkin’ dis?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “I got by myself, an’ seem like I jes’ got to thinkin’ mo’, like I tol’ you—”

  “Well,” she said softly, “sho’ is nice.” br />
  “We ain’t gittin’ nowhere!” he exclaimed. “All we ever doin’ is gittin’ massa somewhere!” Matilda felt like shouting “Jubilee!” but made herself keep still. “I been talkin’ wid free niggers when me an’ massa go to cities,” George went on. “Dey say de free niggers up Nawth is de bes’ off. Say dem lives ’mongst one ’nother in dey own houses, an’ gits good jobs. Well, I know I can git me a job! Plenty cockfightin’ up Nawth! Even famous cockfightin’ niggers I’se heared live right in dat New Yawk City, a Uncle Billy Roger, a Uncle Pete what got a big flock an’ own a great big gamblin’ joint, an’ another one call ‘Nigger Jackson’ dey say don’t nobody beat his birds, hardly!” He further astounded Matilda. “An’ ’nother thing—I wants to see our young’uns learnin’ to read an’ write, like you can.”

  “Lawd, better’n me, I hope!” Matilda exclaimed, her eyes shining.

  “An’ I wants ’em to learn trades.” Abruptly he grinned, pausing for effect. “How you reckon you look settin’ in yo’ own house, yo’ own stuffed furniture, an’ all dem l’il knickknacks? How ’bout Miss ’Tilda be axin’ de other free nigger womens over for tea in de mornin’s, an’ y’all jes’ settin’ roun’ talkin’ ’bout rangin’ y’all’s flowers, an’ sich as dat?”