Roots (62 page)

The fiddler snorted. “Pret’ near eve’ybody know plenty dem niggers Massa Jefferson’s own chilluns by high-yaller woman he own, name o’ Sally Hemings.” He was about to say more when Bell contributed the most interesting thing she knew. “’Cordin’ to a kitchen maid he use to have dere,” she said, “ain’t nothin’ Massa Jefferson ruther eat dan a rabbit soaked all night in oil, thyme, rosemary, an’ garlic, den next day simmered down in wine till de meat fallin’ off de bones.”

“You don’ say!” exclaimed the fiddler sarcastically.

“See how soon you gits ’nother piece dat rhubarb pie you keeps axin’ me to make!” snapped Bell.

“See how soon I axes you!” he shot back.

Refusing to get caught in the middle, as he had so often been in the past—in trying to make peace when his wife and the fiddler started in on each other, then turned on him for butting in—Kunta acted as if he hadn’t heard, and simply continued where he’d left off before they interrupted.

“I heared Massa Jefferson say slavery jes’ bad for white folks as for us’ns, an’ he ’gree wid Massa Hamilton it’s jes’ too much nachel diffrence fo’ white an’ black folks ever to learn to live wid one’nother peaceful. Dey say Massa Jefferson want to see us sot free, but not stickin’ roun’ dis country takin’ po’ white folks’ jobs—he favor shippin’ us back to Africa, gradual, widout big fuss an’ mess.”

“Massa Jefferson better talk to dem slave traders,” said the fiddler, “’cause look like dey got diffrent ideas which way de ships oughta go.”

“Seem like lately when massa go to other plantations, I hears’bout lots of peoples gittin’ sol’,” said Kunta. “Whole families dat’s been all dey lives roun’ here is gittin’ sol’ off down South by dey massas.
Even passed one dem slave traders yestiddy on de road. He wave an’ grin an’ tip ’is hat, but massa ack like he ain’t even seed ’im.”

“Humph! Dem slave traders gittin’ thick as flies in de towns,” said the fiddler. “Las’ time I went to Fredericksburg, dey was buzzin’ after sump’n ol’ an’ dried-up as me, ’til I flash my pass. I seed a po’ ol’ graybeard nigger git sol’ off fo’ six hunnud dollars. Young healthy buck use to fetch dat. But dat ol’ nigger sho’ didn’t go quiet! Dey’s jerkin’ ’im off’n de auction block, an’ he bawlin’ out, ‘Y’all white folks done made Gawd’s earth a livin’ HELL fo’ my peoples! But jes’ sho’ as JEDGMENT MAWNIN’ gwie come, y’all’s hell gwine bounce BACK on y’all dat brung it! Ain’t no BEGGIN’ gwine stop it from ’STROYIN’ you! No MEDICINES y’all make ... no RUNNIN’ y’all do ... none y’all’s GUNS ... no PRAYIN’, no NOTHIN’ he’p y’all den!’ By dat time dey’d drug ’im off. Ol’ nigger soun’ like a preacher or sump’n, de way he carry on.”

Kunta saw Bell’s sudden agitation. “Dat ol’ man—” she asked, “he real black an’ skinny, kin’ o’ stooped over an’ got a white beard an’ had a big scar down his neck?”

The fiddler looked startled. “Yeah! Sho’ was! Sho’ did. All dem things—you know who he was?”

Bell looked at Kunta as if she were ready to weep. “Dat de preacher what christened Kizzy,” she said somberly.

Kunta was visiting in the fiddler’s cabin late the next day when Cato knocked at the open door. “What you doin’ out dere? Come on in!” the fiddler shouted.

Cato did. Both Kunta and the fiddler were very glad that he had come. Only recently they had expressed mutual wishing that the quiet, solid lead field hand Cato was closer to them, as the old gardener had been.

Cato seemed ill at ease. “Jes’ want to say I b’lieves it be good if y’all maybe don’ tell de scaries’ things y’all hears ’bout so many folks
gittin’ sol’ off down South—” Cato hesitated. “Reason why I’m tellin’ y’all de truth, out in de fields de folks is gittin’ so scairt dey gwine git sol’, dey jes’ can’ hardly keep dey minds on no workin’.” Again he paused briefly. “Leas’ways nobody ’ceptin’ me an’ dat boy Noah. I figgers if I gits sol’, well, I’se jes’ sol’, ain’t much I can do’bout it. An’ dat Noah—don’ seem like he scairt o’ nothin’.”

After several minutes of talk among the three of them—during which Kunta sensed Cato’s warm response to their warm welcoming of his visit—they agreed that it would probably be best if only they, not even Bell, shared the news that was the most frightening, that could only alarm the others needlessly.

But one night in the cabin a week or so later, Bell looked up abruptly from her knitting and said, “Seem like de cat got some tongues roun’ here—either dat or white folks done quit sellin’ niggers, an’ I knows I got mo’ sense dan dat!”

Grunting in embarrassment, Kunta was amazed that she—and probably all the other people on slave row—had guessed intuitively that he and the fiddler weren’t telling them all they knew anymore. So he began reporting slave sale stories again—omitting the most unpleasant details. But he stressed news about successful runaways, featuring the black grapevine tales he had heard about wily, fast-talking slaves in the act of escaping and making fools of ignorant poor cracker “paterollers.” One night he told them of a high-yaller butler and a black stablehand having stolen a buggy, horse, and fine clothing and a hat that the high yaller wore while he pretended to be a rich massa loudly cursing his black buggy driver whenever he drew within earshot of any white patrols they met along their rapid buggy ride into the North and automatic freedom. Another time Kunta told of a no less audacious slave who always galloped his mule almost into the “paterollers’” faces before halting and unrolling with a flourish a large, fine-print document that he said would explain his urgent errand for his
massa—gambling always correctly that the illiterate white crackers would wave him on rather than admit they couldn’t read. Kunta often now set the slave-row people to laughing—telling such as how other escaping blacks had so perfected an act of chronic stuttering that disgusted “paterollers” told them to get along their way rather than spend obvious hours trying to question them. He told of runaways’ affected fearful reluctance before finally apologetically confiding how much their rich, powerful massas despised poor whites and how harshly they dealt with any interference with their servants. One night Kunta set slave row to roaring about a house slave he’d been told of who reached safety up North just a jump ahead of his hotly pursuing massa, who quickly summoned a policeman. “You
know
you my nigger!” the massa screamed wildly at his slave, who simply looked blank and kept exclaiming, “He’p me Gawd, I ain’t never sot eyes on dat white man!”—convincing a gathered crowd, along with the policeman who ordered the furious white man to quiet down and move on or he’d have to arrest him for disturbing the peace.

For years now Kunta had managed to avoid going anywhere near any slave auction, ever since the one where the girl had futilely cried out to him for help. But a few months after his talk with Cato and the fiddler, one early afternoon Kunta drove the massa into the public square of the county seat just as a slave sale was beginning.

“Oyez, oyez, gentlemen of Spotsylvania, I offer the finest lot of niggers ever seen in y’all’s lives!” As the auctioneer shouted to the crowd, his beefy, younger assistant jerked an old slave woman up onto the platform. “A fine cook!” he began—but she began screaming, gesturing frantically to a white man in the crowd: “Massa Philip! Philip! you act like you done forgot I worked fo’ you an’ yo’ brudders’ daddy when y’all was jes’ young’uns! Knows I’se ol’ an’ ain’t much now, but please, Lawd, keep me! I work for
you hard, Massa Philip!
Please,
suh, don’ let ’em whup me to death somewheres down South!”

“Stop the buggy, Toby!” the massa ordered.

Kunta’s blood ran cold as he reined the horses to a halt. Why after all these years of showing no interest in slave auctions did Massa Waller want to watch one? Was he thinking of buying someone, or what? Was it the pitiful woman’s heartbreaking outburst? Whomever she had appealed to yelled back some ridicule, and the crowd was still laughing when a trader bought her for seven hundred dollars.

“He’p me, Gawd, Jesus, Lawd, he’p me!” she cried as the trader’s black helper began shoving her roughly toward the slave pen. “Git yo’ black hands off’n me, nigger!” she screamed, and the crowd rocked with laughter. Kunta bit his lip, blinking back tears.

“Prize buck o’ the lot, gentlemen!” Next on the platform was a young black man, glaring baleful hatred, his barrel chest and thickly muscled body crisscrossed with the angry, reddish welts of a very recent, severe lashing. “This one jes’ needed some remindin’! He’ll heal up quick! He can plow a mule into the ground! Pick you four hundred pounds of cotton any day!
Look
at ’im! A natural stud—if your wenches ain’t bearin’ every year like they ought! A steal at any price!” The chained young man brought fourteen hundred dollars.

Kunta’s vision blurred anew as a weeping mulatto woman great with child was led onto the platform. “Two for the price of one, or one for free, dependin’ on how you look at it!” shouted the auctioneer. “Pickaninnies today worth a hundred dollars soon’s they draw breath!” She brought a thousand dollars.

It was becoming unendurable when the next one came, being pulled along by her chain—and Kunta nearly fell from his seat. The teen-aged black girl, quaking with terror, in her build, her skin color, even her facial features, might have been an older
Kizzy! As if Kunta had been poleaxed, he heard the auctioneer start his spiel: “A fine trained housemaid—or she’s prime breedin’ stock if you want one!” he added with a leering wink. Inviting closer inspection, he abruptly loosened the neckpiece of the girl’s sack dress, which fell about her feet as she screamed, weeping, flinging her arms downward in an effort to cover her nakedness from the ogling crowd, several of whom jostled forward, reaching out to poke and fondle her.

“That’s enough! Let’s get out of here!” the massa commanded—an instant before Kunta felt he would have done it anyway.

Kunta hardly saw the road before them as they rode back toward the plantation; his mind was reeling. What if the girl had really been his Kizzy? What if the cook had been his Bell? What if they both were sold away from him? Or he from them? It was too horrible to think about—but he could think of nothing else.

Even before the buggy reached the big house, Kunta intuitively sensed that something was wrong, perhaps because it was a warm summer evening, yet he saw none of the slave-row people strolling or sitting around outside. Dropping the massa off, Kunta hurriedly unhitched and stabled the horses, then headed straight for the kitchen, where he knew Bell now would be preparing the massa’s supper. She didn’t hear him until he asked through the screen door, “You awright?”

“Oh, Kunta!” Whirling around, her eyes wide with shock, loudly she blurted, “Slave trader done been here!” Then, lowering her voice, “I heared Cato’s whippoorwill whistle from out in de fiel’ an’ run to de front window. Minute I seed dat citified-lookin’ white man gittin’ off his hoss, I jes’ smelt what he was! Lawd a mercy! I open de do’ by time he got up de steps. He ax to see my massa or missis. I say my missis in de graveyard, an my massa a doctor off tendin’ sick peoples, an’ no tellin’ what time o’ night he
git back. Den he throw me dis smirkin’ look an’ han’ me a l’il card wid printin’ on it an’ say give dat to massa an’ tell ’im he be back. Well, I’se feared not to give massa de card—finally jes’ stuck it on his desk.”

“Bell!” a call came from the living room.

She nearly dropped her spoon. She whispered, “Wait! I be back!” Kunta waited—hardly daring to breathe, expecting the worst—until he saw the returning Bell’s expression of immense relief.

“He say he want early supper! De card gone from de desk where I lef’ it, but he don’ say nothin’ ’bout it, an’ fo’ sho’ I ain’t neither!”

After supper, Bell filled in the field hands on the developments after Cato’s warning whistle, and Aunt Sukey started crying. “Lawd, y’all think massa gwine sell some us?”

“Ain’t nobody never gon’ beat me no mo’!” declared Cato’s big wife, Beulah.

A long, heavy silence fell. Kunta could think of nothing to say; but he knew he wasn’t going to tell them about the auction.

“Well,” said the fiddler finally, “massa ain’t one o’ dem wid a whole lotta spare niggers. An he
is
one dem got plenty money, so ain’t needin’ to sell no niggers to pay debts, like a whole lot doin’.”

Kunta hoped the others found the fiddler’s comforting effort more convincing than he did. Bell looked a little hopeful. “I knows massa, or
anyhow,
I thinks I does. Long as we’s all been here, he ain’t never sol’ off nobody—leas’ways nobody ’cept dat buggy driver Luther, an’ dat ’cause Luther drawed dat map to he’p a gal try to ’scape.” Bell hesitated before continuing. “Naw!” she said. “Massa wouldn’t git rid o’ none us widout no good cause—any y’all speck he would?” But nobody answered.

K
unta’s ears were riveted upon the massa’s dialogue with a favorite one of his cousins, who was being brought home for dinner, as they sat in the rear of the rolling buggy.

“At a county seat auction the other day,” the massa was saying, “I was astonished that everyday field hands are selling for twice to three times what they fetched just a few years ago. And from advertisements I read in the
Gazette,
carpenters, brickmasons, blacksmiths—in fact, slaves who are really experienced in about any trade, leatherworkers, sailmakers, musicians, whatever, are going for as much as twenty-five hundred dollars apiece.”

“It’s the same everywhere since this new cotton gin!” exclaimed the massa’s cousin. “More than a million slaves already in the country, I’ve been told, yet the ships still can’t seem to bring enough new ones to supply those Deep South bottomlands trying to meet the demands of the northern mills.”

“What’s concerning me is that too many otherwise sensible planters, in their eagerness for quick profits, may be starting to see our state of Virginia eventually losing its best quality of slaves, even the best breeding stock,” said Massa Waller, “and that’s just plain foolishness!”

“Foolishness? Hasn’t Virginia got more slaves than she needs? They cost more to maintain than most are worth in work.”