Roots (56 page)

Alone at home with Kunta and Kizzy for the next several nights in search of the latest news, Bell spelled her way through several newspapers the massa thought he had discarded. It took her the better part of an hour on one big story before she could tell him that “some kin’ o’ Bill o’ Rights done got . . .” Bell hesitated and drew a deep breath, “well, it done got rat-ti-fied, or somethin’ ’nother.” But there were far more reports about recent events in Haiti—most of which they’d already heard through the slave grapevine. The gist of most of them, she said, was that the Haitian slave revolt could easily spread foolhardy notions among black malcontents in this
country, that extreme restrictions and harsh punishments should be imposed. As she folded up the papers and put them away, Bell said, “Look like to me ain’t much more dey can do ’gainst us, less’n it’s jes’ chain us all up, I reckon.”

Over the next month or two, however, news of further developments in Haiti slowly ebbed, and with it came a gradual easing of tensions—and a lightening of restrictions—throughout the South. The harvest season had begun, and whites were congratulating one another on the bumper cotton crop—and the record prices they were getting for it. The fiddler was being sent for to play at so many big-house balls and parties that during the daytime when he was back home, he did little more than sleep. “Look like dem massas makin’ so much cotton money dey jes’ gwine dance deyselves to death!” he told Kunta.

It wasn’t long, however until the white folks had something to be unhappy about again. On his visits to the county seat with the massa, Kunta began to hear angry talk of increasing numbers of “antislavery societies” organized by “traitors to the white race” not only in the North but also in the South. Highly dubious, he told Bell what he had heard, and she said she’d been reading the same thing in the massa’s newspapers, which attributed their recent and rapid growth to Haiti’s black revolt.

“Keeps tryin’ tell you it’s some good white folks!” she exclaimed. “Fact of de matter, I’se heared a whole heap of ’em was ’gainst de firs’ ships ever bringin’ any y’all African niggers here!” Kunta wondered where on earth Bell thought her own grandparents had come from, but she was so wound up that he let it pass. “’Cose, anytime somethin’ like dat be’s in de paper,” she went on, “de massas gits riled up, rantin’ an’ hollerin’ ’bout enemies of de country an’ sich as dat, but what’s ’portant is de mo’ white folks ’gainst slavery says what dey thinks, den de mo’ of dem massas git to wonderin’
in dey secret heart is dey right or not.” She stared at Kunta. “’Specially dem callin’ deyselves Christians.”

She looked at him again, a slyness in her eyes. “What you think me an’ Aunt Sukey an’ Sister Mandy be’s talkin’ ’bout dese Sundays massa think we jes’ singin’ an’ prayin’? I follows white folks close. Take dem Quakers. Dey was ’gainst slavin’ even fo’ dat Rebolution, I means right here in Virginia,” she went on. “An’ plenty o’ dem was massas ownin’ a heap o’ niggers. But den preachers commence to sayin’ niggers was human bein’s, wid rights to be free like anybody else, an’ you ’members some Quaker massas started to lettin’ dey niggers loose, an’ even helpin’ ’em git up Nawth. By now it done got to where de Quakers dat’s still keepin’ dey niggers is bein’ talked ’bout by de res’, an’ I’se heared if dey still don’t let dem niggers go, dey gwine git disowned by dey church. Gwine on right today, sho’ is!” Bell exclaimed.

“An’ dem Methodists is de nex’ bes’. I ’members readin’ ten, leben years back, Methodists called a great big meetin’ in Baltimore, an’ finally dey ’greed slavin’ was ’gainst Gawd’s laws an’ dat anybody callin’ hisself Christian wouldn’t have it did to deyselves. So it’s mostly de Methodists an’ Quakers makin’ church fuss to git laws to free niggers. Dem Baptist an’ Presbyterian white folks—dat’s what massa an’ all de Wallers is—well, dey seems like to me jes’ halfhearted. Dey’s mostly worried ’bout dey own freedom to worship like dey pleases, an’ den how dey can keep a clear conscience an’ dey niggers bofe.”

For all of Bell’s talk of whites who were against slavery—even though she had read some of it in the massa’s own newspaper—Kunta had never once heard a toubob opinion expressed that was not absolutely the opposite. And during that spring and summer of 1792, the massa shared his buggy with some of the biggest and richest massas, politicians, lawyers, and merchants in the state.
Unless something else was more pressing, their ever-ready topic of conversation was the problems created for them by blacks.

Whoever would successfully manage slaves, someone would always say, must first understand that their African pasts of living in jungles with animals gave them a natural inheritance of stupidity, laziness, and unclean habits, and that the Christian duty of those God had blessed with superiority was to teach these creatures some sense of discipline, morality, and respect for work—through example, of course, but also with laws and punishment as needed, although encouragement and rewards should certainly be given to those who proved deserving.

Any laxity on the part of whites, the conversation always continued, would simply invite the kind of dishonesty, tricks, and cunning that came naturally to a lower species, and the bleatings of antislavery societies and others like them could come only from those, particularly in the North, who had never owned any black ones themselves or tried to run a plantation with them; such people couldn’t be expected to realize how one’s patience, heart, spirit, and very soul could be strained to the breaking point by the trials and burdens of owning slaves.

Kunta had been listening to the same outrageous nonsense for so long that it had become like a litany to him, and he hardly paid any attention to it anymore. But sometimes, while he drove along, he couldn’t help asking himself why it was that his countrymen didn’t simply kill every toubob who set foot on African soil. He was never able to give himself an answer that he was able to accept.

I
t was about the noon hour on a sultry day late in August when Aunt Sukey came waddling as fast as she could out to the fiddler among his tomato plants and—between gasps—told him that she was worried to death about the old gardener. When he didn’t come to her cabin for breakfast, she hadn’t thought anything about it, she said breathlessly, but when he didn’t appear for lunch either, she became concerned, went to his cabin door, knocked, and called as loudly as she could, but got no answer, became alarmed, and thought she’d better come to find out if the fiddler had seen him anywhere. He hadn’t.

“Knowed it somehow or ’nother even ’fore I went in dere,” the fiddler told Kunta that night. And Kunta said that he had been unable to explain an eerie feeling he had himself as he had driven the massa homeward that afternoon. “He was jes’ lyin’ dere in bed real peaceful like,” said the fiddler, “wid a l’il smile on ’is face. Look like he sleepin’. But Aunt Sukey say he awready waked up in heab’m.” He said he had gone to take the sad news out to those working in the fields, and the boss field hand Cato returned with him to help wash the body and place it on a cooling board. Then they had hung the old gardener’s sweat-browned straw hat on the outside of his door in the traditional sign of mourning before the fieldworkers returned and gathered in front of the cabin to pay
their last respects, and then Cato and another field hand went to dig a grave.

Kunta returned to his cabin feeling doubly grieved—not only because the gardener was dead, but also because he hadn’t been visiting him as much as he could have ever since Kizzy was born. It had just seemed that there was hardly ever enough time anymore; and now it was too late. He arrived to find Bell in tears, which he expected, but he was taken aback at the reason she gave for crying. “Jes’ always seem like to me he was de daddy I ain’t never seed,” she sobbed. “Don’t know how come I didn’t never let him know, but it ain’t gon’ never seem de same widout him bein’ roun’ here.” She and Kunta ate their supper in silence before taking Kizzy with them—bundled against the cool autumn night—to join the others “settin’ wid de dead” until late into the night.

Kunta sat a little apart from the others, with the restless Kizzy on his lap during the first hour of prayers and soft singing, and then some hushed conversation was begun by Sister Mandy, asking if anyone there could recall the old man ever having mentioned any living relatives. The fiddler said, “One time ’way back I ’members he said he never knowed his mammy. Dat’s all I ever heared him say of family.” Since the fiddler had been the closest among them to the old man, and he would know if anyone did, it was decided that there was probably no one to whom word should be sent.

Another prayer was said, another song was sung, then Aunt Sukey said, “Seem like he done always belonged to some a’ de Wallers. I’se heared him talk ’bout de massa ridin’ on his shoulders as a boy, so I reckon dat’s why massa bring him here later on when he got his own big house.”

“Massa real sorry, too,” said Bell. “He say for me to tell y’all won’t be no workin’ for half a day tomorra.”

“Well, leas’ he gwine git buried right,” said Ada, the field-hand mother of the boy Noah, who sat impassively beside her.
“It’s aplenty o’ massas jes’ ’lows you to quit workin’ long enough to come look at de dead nigger ’fore he git stuck in de ground still warm.”

“Well, all dese Wallers is quality white folks, so wouldn’t none us here have to worry ’bout dat,” said Bell.

Others started talking then about how rich plantation owners sometimes staged very elaborate funerals for usually either longtime big-house cooks or for the old mammies who had suckled and helped to raise two or even three broods of the family’s children. “Dey even gits buried in de white folks’ graveyards, wid flat rocks to mark where dey is.”

What a heartwarming—if somewhat belated—reward for a lifetime of toil, thought Kunta bitterly. He remembered the gardener telling him that he had come to the massa’s big house as a strong young stablehand, which he had remained for many years until he was kicked badly by a horse. He stayed on the job, but gradually he had become more and more disabled, and finally Massa Waller had told him to spend his remaining years doing whatever he felt able to do. With Kunta as his assistant, he had tended the vegetable garden until he was too feeble to do even that, and from then on had spent most of his time weaving cornshucks into hats and straw into chairbottoms and fans, until advancing arthritis had crippled even his fingers. Kunta recalled another old man he had seen now and then at a rich big house across the county. Though he had long since been allowed to retire, he demanded every morning that some younger blacks carry him out to the garden, where he would lie on his side plucking weeds with gnarled hands among the flowerbeds of his equally old and crippled beloved lifetime missis. And these were the lucky ones, Kunta knew. Many old folks began to get beaten when they were no longer able to perform their previous quota of work, and finally they got sold away for perhaps twenty or thirty dollars to
some “po’ white trash” farmer—with aspirations of rising into the planter class—who worked them literally to death.

Kunta was snapped out of those thoughts as everyone rose from their seats all around him, said a final prayer, and headed wearily home for a few hours of sleep that were left before daybreak.

Right after breakfast, the fiddler dressed the old man in the worn dark suit the old man had been given many years before by Massa Waller’s daddy. His few other clothes had been burned, since whoever might wear a dead person’s clothes would soon die too, Bell told Kunta. Then Cato tied the body on a wide board that he had shaped to a point at both ends with an ax.

A little while later, Massa Waller came out of the big house carrying his big black Bible and fell in behind the slave-row people as they walked with a peculiar pausing, hitching step behind the body being drawn on a mule cart. They were softly chanting a song Kunta had never heard before: “In de mawnm’, when I gits dere, gwine tell my Jesus hi’dy! Hi’dy! . . . In de mawnin’, gwine to rise up, tell my Jesus hi’dy! Hi’dy! . . . ” They kept on singing all the way to the slave graveyard, which Kunta had noticed everyone avoided in a deep fear of what they called “ghoses” and “haints,” which he felt must bear some resemblance to his Africa’s evil spirits. His people also avoided the burial ground, but out of consideration for the dead whom they didn’t wish to disturb, rather than out of fear.

When Massa Waller stopped on one side of the grave, his slaves on the other, old Aunt Sukey began to pray. Then a young field-hand woman named Pearl sang a sad song, “Hurry home, my weary soul . . . I heared from heab’m today.... Hurry ’long, my weary soul . . . my sin’s forgived, an’ my soul’s set free.... ” And then Massa Waller spoke with his head bowed, “Josephus, you have been a good and faithful servant. May God rest and bless your soul. Amen.” Through his sorrow, Kunta was surprised to
hear that the old gardener had been called “Josephus.” He wondered what the gardener’s true name had been—the name of his African forefathers—and to what tribe they had belonged. He wondered if the gardener himself had known. More likely he had died as he had lived—without ever learning who he really was. Through misted eyes, Kunta and the others watched as Cato and his helper lowered the old man into the earth he had spent so many years making things grow in. When the shovelfuls of dirt began to thud down onto his face and chest, Kunta gulped and blinked back the tears as the women around him began to weep and the men to clear their throats and blow their noses.

As they trudged silently back from the graveyard, Kunta thought how the family and close friends of one who had died in Juffure would wail and roll in ashes and dust within their huts while the other villagers danced outside, for most African people believed that there could be no sorrow without happiness, no death without life, in that cycle that his own father had explained to him when his beloved Grandma Yaisa had died. He remembered that Omoro had told him, “Stop weeping now, Kunta,” and explained that Grandma had only joined another of the three peoples in every village—those who had gone to be with Allah, those who were still living, and those who were yet to be born. For a moment, Kunta thought he must try to explain that to Bell, but he knew she wouldn’t understand. His heart sank—until he decided a moment later that this would become another of the many things he would one day tell Kizzy about the homeland she would never see.