Roots (70 page)

Forcing more brightness into her tone, sensing Miss Malizy’s genuinely affectionate concern, Kizzy told her how it had been with Noah, ending finally, “I tells myself he jes’ steady gwine ’bout lookin’ fo’ me, an’ we’s gwine turn up face-to-face somewhere one dese days.” Kizzy’s expression might have been of someone praying. “If dat was to happen, Miss Malizy, I tell you de truth, I b’lieve neither one us would say nary word. I b’lieve we jes’ take one’nother’s hand an’ I slip on in here and tell y’all good-bye, an’ git
George, an’ we leave. I wouldn’t even ax or care whereabouts. Ain’t never gwine forgit de las’ thing he said to me. He say, ‘We spen’ de res’ our days togedder, baby!’” Kizzy’s voice broke and then both she and Miss Malizy were weeping, and soon afterward Kizzy went back to her cabin.

One Sunday morning, a few weeks later, George was in the big house “helping” Miss Malizy prepare the noon meal when Sister Sarah invited Kizzy into her cabin for the first time since she had come to the Lea plantation. Kizzy stared at the much-chinked walls; they were all but covered with bunches of dried roots and herbs hanging from pegs and nails, attesting to Sister Sarah’s claim that she could supply the nature cure for nearly any ailment. Pointing to her only chair, she said, “Set yo’self down, gal.” Kizzy sat, and Sister Sarah went on, “I gwine tell you sump’n ever’body don’t know. My mammy was a Louisiana Cajun woman what teached me how to tell fortunes good.” She studied Kizzy’s startled face. “You want me to tell your’n?”

Instantly Kizzy remembered times when both Uncle Pompey and Miss Malizy had mentioned that Sister Sarah had a gift for fortune-telling. Kizzy heard herself saying, “I reckon I would, Sister Sarah.”

Squatting on the floor, Sister Sarah drew a large box from under the bed. Removing from it a smaller box, she picked out two palmfuls of mysterious-looking dried objects and slowly turned toward Kizzy. Carefully arranging her objects into a symmetrical design, she produced a thin, wandlike stick from within the bosom of her dress and began vigorously stirring them around. Bending forward until her forehead actually touched the objects on the floor, she seemed to be straining to straighten back upward when she spoke in an unnaturally high tone, “I hates to tell you what de sperrits says. You ain’t never gwine see yo’ mammy an’ yo’ pappy no mo’, leas’ways not in dis worl’—”

Kizzy burst into sobs. Ignoring her entirely, Sister Sarah carefully rearranged her objects, then stirred and stirred again, much longer than before, until Kizzy regained some control and her weeping had diminished. Through misty eyes, she stared in awe as the wand trembled and quivered. Then Sister Sarah began a mumbling that was barely audible: “Look like jes’ ain’t dis chile’s good-luck time ... onlies’ man she gwine ever love ... he had a mighty hard road ... an’ he love her, too ... but de sperrits done tol’ ’im it’s de bes’ to know de truth ... an’ to give up jes’ even hopin’.... ”

Kizzy sprang upright, shrieking, this time highly agitating Sister Sarah. “
Shhhhh! Shhhhh! Shhhhh!
Don’t ’sturb de sperrits, daughter! SHHHHH! SHHHHH! SHHHHH!” But Kizzy continued to scream, bolting outside and across into her own cabin and slamming her door, as Uncle Pompey’s cabin door jerked open and the faces of Massa and Missis Lea, Miss Malizy, and George appeared abruptly at windows of the big house and its kitchen. Kizzy was thrashing and wailing on her cornshuck mattress when George came bursting in. “
Mammy! Mammy!
What de matter?” Her face tear-streaked and contorted, she screamed hysterically at him, “SHUT UP!”

B
y George’s third year, he had begun to demonstrate a determination to “help” the slave-row grown-ups. “Lawd, tryin’ to carry some water for me, an’ can’t hardly lif’ up de bucket!” Miss Malizy said laughing. And another time: “Dog if he ain’t toted a stick at a time ’til he fill up my woodbox; den he raked de ashes out’n de fireplace!” Proud as Kizzy was, she took pains not to repeat Miss Malizy’s praises to George, whom she felt was giving her headaches enough already.

“How come I ain’t black like you is, Mammy?” he asked one night when they were alone in the cabin, and gulping, Kizzy said, “Peoples jes’ born what color dey is, dat’s all.” But not many nights passed before he raised the subject again. “Mammy, who my pappy was? Why ain’t I never seed ’im? Where he at?” Kizzy affected a threatening tone: “Jes’ shut yo’ mouth up!” But hours later, she lay awake beside him, still seeing his hurt, confused expression, and the next morning delivering him to Miss Malizy, she apologized in a lame way. “I jes’ gits frazzled, you ax me so many questions.”

But she knew that something better than that had to be told to her highly alert, inquisitive son, something that he both could understand and would accept. “He tall, an’ black as de night, an’ didn’t hardly never smile,” she offered finally. “He b’longst to you same as me, ’cept you calls him Gran’pappy!” George seemed interested
and curious to hear more. Telling him that his gran’pappy had come on a ship from Africa “to a place my mammy said dey calls ’Naplis,’” she said that a brother of her Massa Waller had brought him to a plantation in Spotsylvania County, but he tried to escape. Uncertain how to soften the next part of the story, she decided to make it brief: “—an’ when he kept on runnin’ ’way, dey chopped off half his foot.”

A grimace twisted George’s small face. “How come dey done dat, Mammy?”

“He near ’bout kilt some nigger catchers.”

“Catchin’ niggers fo’ what?”

“Well, niggers dat had runned ’way.”

“What dey was runnin’ from?”

“From dey white massas.”

“What de white massas done to ’em?”

In frustration, she shrilled, “Heish yo’ mouf! Git on ’way from me, worryin’ me to death!”

But George never was silenced for long, any more than his appetite to know more of his African gran’pappy ever was fully satisfied. “Where ’bouts is dat Africa, Mammy?” ... “Any l’il boys in dat Africa?”... “What my gran’pappy’s name was again?”

Even beyond what she had hoped, George seemed to be building up his own image of his gran’pappy, and—to the limits of her endurance—Kizzy tried to help it along with tales from her own rich store of memories. “Boy, I wish you could o’ heared ’im singin’ some o’ dem African songs to me when we be ridin’ in de massa’s buggy, an’ I was a l’il gal, right roun’ de age you is now.” Kizzy would find herself smiling as she remembered with what delight she used to sit on the high, narrow buggy seat alongside her pappy as they went rolling along the hot, dusty Spotsylvania County roads; how at other times she and Kunta would walk hand-in-hand along the fencerow that led to the stream where later she
would walk hand-in-hand with Noah. She said to George, “Yo’ gran’pappy like to tell me things in de African tongue. Like he call a fiddle a
ko
, or he call a river
Kamby Bolongo,
whole lotsa different, funny-soundin’ words like dat.” She thought how much it would please her pappy, wherever he was, for his grandson also to know the African words.

“
Ko!”
she said sharply. “Can you say dat?”

“
Ko,”
said George.

“All right, you so smart: ‘
Kamby Bolongo’!”
George repeated it perfectly the first time. Sensing that she didn’t intend to continue, he demanded, “Say me some mo’, Mammy!” Overwhelmed with love for him, Kizzy promised him more—later on—and then she put him, protesting, to bed.

W
hen George’s sixth year came—meaning that he must start working in the fields—Miss Malizy was heartsick to lose his company in the kitchen, but Kizzy and Sister Sarah rejoiced to be getting him back at last. From George’s first day of fieldwork, he seemed to relish it as a new realm of adventure, and their loving eyes followed him as he ran around picking up rocks that might break the point of Uncle Pompey’s oncoming plow. He scurried about bringing to each of them a bucket of cool drinking water that he had trudged to get from the spring at the other end of the field. He even “helped” them with the corn and cotton planting, dropping at least some of the seeds more or less where they should have gone along the mounded rows. When the three grown-ups laughed at his clumsy but determined efforts to wield a hoe whose handle was longer than he was, George’s own broad smile displayed his characteristic good spirits. They had a further laugh when George insisted to Uncle Pompey that he could plow, and then discovered that he wasn’t tall enough to hold the plowhandles; but he promptly wrapped his arms around the sides and hollered to the mule, “
Git up!”

When they finally got back into their cabin in the late evenings, Kizzy immediately began the next chore of cooking them a meal, as hungry as she knew George must be. But one
night he proposed that the routine be changed. “Mammy, you done worked hard all day. How come you don’t lay down an’ res’ some fo’ you cooks?” He would even try to order her around if she felt like letting him get away with it. At times it seemed to Kizzy as if her son was trying to fill in for a man whom she felt he sensed was missing in both of their lives. George was so independent and self-sufficient for a small boy that now or then when he got a cold or some small injury, Sister Sarah would insist upon all but smothering him with her herb cures, and Kizzy would finish the job with a plentiful salving of her love. Sometimes, as they both lay before sleeping, he would set Kizzy smiling to herself with the fantasies he’d share with her there in the darkness. “I’se gwine down dis big road,” he whispered one night, “an’ I looks up, an’ I sees dis great big ol’ bear a-runnin’ ... seem like he taller’n a hoss ... an’ I hollers, ‘
Mr. Bear! Hey, Mr. Bear!
You jes’ well’s to git ready for me to turn you inside out, ’cause you sho’ ain’t gwine hurt
my
mammy!’” Or sometimes he would urge and urge and finally persuade his tired mammy to join him in singing some of the songs that he had heard Miss Malizy sing when he had spent his days with her in the big-house kitchen. And the little cabin would resound softly with their duets: “Oh, Mary, don’t ’cha weep, don’t ’cha moan! Oh, Mary, don’t ’cha weep, don’t ’cha moan! ’Cause ol’ Pharaoh’s army done got drown-ded! Oh, Mary, don’t ’cha weep!”

Sometimes when nothing else attracted George within the cabin, the restless six-year-old would stretch out before the fireplace. Whittling a finger-sized stick to a point at one end, which he then charred in the flames to make a sort of pencil, he would then draw on a piece of white pine board the simple outline figures of people or animals. Every time he did it, Kizzy all but held her breath, fearing that George would next want to learn to write or read. But apparently the idea never occurred to him, and Kizzy
took great care never to mention writing or reading, which she felt had forever scarred her life. In fact, during all of Kizzy’s years on the Lea plantation, she had not once held a pen or pencil, a book or newspaper, nor had she mentioned to anyone that she once read and wrote. When she thought about it, she would wonder if she still could, should she ever want to, for any reason. Then she would spell out in her head some words she felt she still remembered correctly, and with intense concentration she would mentally picture what those words would look like written—not that she was sure what her handwriting would look like anymore. Sometimes she’d be tempted—but still she kept her sworn pact with herself never to write again.

Far more than she missed writing or reading, Kizzy felt the absence of news about what was happening in the world beyond the plantation. She remembered how her pappy would tell what he had heard and seen when he returned from his trips with Massa Waller. But any outside news was almost a rarity here on this modest and isolated plantation, where the massa rode his own horse and drove his own buggy. This slave row found out what was going on outside only when Massa and Missis Lea had guests for dinner—sometimes months apart. During one such dinner on a Sunday afternoon in 1812, Miss Malizy ran down from the house to them, “Dey’s eatin’ now an’ I got to hurry right back, but dey’s talkin’ in dere ’bout some new war done started up wid dat England! Seem like de England is sendin’ whole shiploads of dey so’jers over here at us!”

“Ain’t sendin’ ’em over here at
me!”
said Sister Sarah. “Dem’s white folks fightin’!”

“Where dey fightin’ dis war at?” asked Uncle Pompey, and Miss Malizy said she hadn’t heard. “Well,” he replied, “long as it’s somewheres up Nawth an’ not nowhere roun’ here, don’t make me no difference.”

That night in the cabin, sharp-eared little George asked Kizzy, “What a war is, Mammy?”

She thought a moment before answering. “Well, I reckon it’s whole lots of mens fightin’ ’gainst one ’nother.”

“Fightin’ ’bout what?”

“Fightin’ ’bout anything dey feels like.”

“Well, what de white folks an’ dat England feelin’ ’gainst one’nother ’bout?”

“Boy, jes’ ain’t never no end to ’splainin’ you nothin’.”

A half hour later, Kizzy had to start smiling to herself in the darkness when George began singing one of Miss Malizy’s songs, barely audibly, as if just for himself, “Gon’ put on my long white robe! Down by de ribberside! Down by de ribberside! Ain’t gon’ stu-dy de war no mo’!”

After a very long time without further news, during another big-house dinner, Miss Malizy reported, “Dey sayin’ dem Englands done took some city up Nawth dey calls ’Detroit.’” Then again, months later, she said the massa, missis, and guests were jubilantly discussing, “some great big Newnited States ship dey’s callin’ ‘Ol’ Ironsides.’ Dey’s sayin’ it done sunk plenty dem England ships wid its fo’ty-fo’ guns!”

“
Whoowee!
” exclaimed Uncle Pompey. “Dat’s ’nough to sink de ark!”

Then one Sunday in 1814, Miss Malizy had George “helping” her in the kitchen when he came flying down to slave row, breathless with a message: “Miss Malizy say tell y’all dat England’s army done whupped five thousan’ Newnited States so’jers, an’ done burnt up both dat Capitol an’ de White House.”