Roots (84 page)

“Fo’ you tells me ag’in why you won’t stan’ fo’ it, woman, you listen to me. Nex’ time massa want me to travel wid ’im somewhere, dat’s when he sho’ gwine say, ‘Go git dat oldes’ young’un of your’n down here!’ An’ once dat happen, Virgil be wid chickens to
stay,
less’n massa say different, which might be never, an’ you or me neither can’t say a mumblin’ word—” He gestured to stop Matilda from interrupting. “Wait! Ain’t wantin’ no back talk! I’se tryin’ to git you to see de boy need to come on down dere now. If ’n
I
bring’im, den he can stay jes’ long ’nough fo’ me to teach ’im how to feed de birds when I has to leave, an’ he’p me exercise ’em durin’ trainin’ season. Den res’ de time, mos’ de year, he can be wid y’all in de fiel’.” Seeing Matilda’s tight expression, he shrugged elaborately and said with mock resignation, “Awright, I jes’ leave it up to you an’ massa, den!”

“What git me is you talk like Virgil grown awready,” said Matilda. “Don’ you realize dat chile ain’t but six years ol’? Jes’
half
de twelve you was when dey drug you off down dere.” She paused. “But I knows he got to work now he’s six. So reckon can’t do nothin’ ’cept what you says, much as I jes’ gits mad every time I thinks ’bout how dem chickens stole you!”

“Anybody listen to you an’ mammy! Y’all soun’ like chickens done snatched me up an’ off crost de ocean somewheres!”

“Jes’ well’s to, mos’ de time, much as you’s gone.”

“Gone! Who settin’ up here talkin’ to you? Who been here every day dis month?”

“Dis month maybe, but where you gwine be fo’ long?”

“If you’s talkin’ ’bout de fightin’ season, I be wherever massa tell me we’s gwine. If you talkin’ ’bout right now, soon’s I eats, I sho ain’t gwine set here ’til some varmints creeps roun’ down dere an’ eats some chickens, or den I
really
be gone!”

“Oh! You’s finally ’greein’ he’d sell you, too!”

“I b’lieves he sell missis, she let his chickens git et!”

“Look,” she said, “we done got by widout no big fallin’ out ’bout Virgil, so let’s sho’ don’t start none ’bout nothin’ else.”

“I ain’t arguin’ in de firs’ place, it’s you de one!”

“Awright, George, I’se through wid it,” Matilda said, setting steaming bowls on the table. “Jes’ eat yo’ supper an’ git on back, an’ I sen’ Virgil down dere in de mornin’. Less’n you wants to take ’im back wid you now. I can go git ’im from over at ’is gran’mammy’s.”

“Naw, tomorrow be fine.”

But within a week it became clear to Chicken George that his eldest son lacked totally what had been his own boyhood fascination with gamebirds. Six years old or not, it seemed inconceivable to George that after completing an assigned task, Virgil would either wander off and play alone, or just sit down somewhere and do nothing. Then Virgil would leap up as his father angrily exclaimed, “Git up from dere! What you think dis is? Dese ain’t no pigs down dere, dese fightin’ chickens!” Then Virgil would do acceptably well whatever new task he was set to, but then once more, as George watched from the corner of his eye, he would see his son soon either sitting down again or going off to play. Fuming, he remembered how, as a boy, he had spent what little free time he had scampering around admiring the cockerels and the stags, plucking grass and catching grasshoppers to feed them, finding it all incredibly exciting.

Though Uncle Mingo’s way of training had been cool and businesslike—an order given, a watchful silence, then another order—George decided to try another approach with Virgil in hopes that he’d snap out of it. He’d
talk
to him.

“What you been doin’ wid yo’self up yonder?”

“Nothin’, Pappy.”

“Well, is you an’ de other young’uns gittin’ ’long all right an’ mindin’ yo’ mammy an’ gran’mammy?”

“Yassuh.”

“Reckon dey feeds you pretty good, huh?”

“Yassuh.”

“What you like to eat de mos’?”

“Anythin’ Mammy cooks us, yassuh.”

The boy seemed to lack even the faintest imagination. He’d try a different tack.

“Lemme hear you tell de story ’bout yo’ great-gran’daddy like you done once.”

Virgil obediently did so, rather woodenly. George’s heart sank. But after standing there thoughtfully for a moment, the boy asked, “Pappy, is you seed my great-gran’pappy?”

“Naw, I ain’t,” he replied hopefully. “I knows ’bout ’im same as you does, from yo’ gran’mammy.”

“She used to ride in de buggy wid ’im!”

“Sho’ she did! It was her pappy. Jes’ like one dese days you tell yo’ chilluns you used to set down here ’mongst de chickens wid yo’ pappy.”

That seemed to confuse Virgil, who fell silent.

After a few more such lame efforts, George reluctantly gave up, hoping that he’d have better luck with Ashford, George, and Tom. Without communicating to anyone his disappointment in Virgil, he regretfully decided to use the boy for the simple part-time duties he
had discussed with Matilda, rather than try futilely to train him as a full-time permanent helper as he had actually intended.

So when Chicken George felt Virgil had mastered the task of feeding and watering the cockerels and stags in their pens three times daily, he sent him back up to Matilda to begin working with them in the fields—which seemed to suit the boy just fine. Chicken George would never have breathed it to Matilda, Kizzy, or the others, but George had always felt a deep disdain for field work, which he saw as nothing more than a ceaseless drudge of wielding hoes under hot sun, dragging cottonsacks, picking endless tobacco worms, and beating cornstalks down for fodder, in relentless seasonal succession. With a chuckle he remembered Uncle Mingo’s saying, “Gimmme a good corn or cotton field or a good fightin’ bird, I’ll take de bird every time!” It was exhilarating just to think of how anywhere a cockfight had been announced—if it was in a woods, an open cow pasture, or behind some massa’s barn—the very air would become charged as gamecockers began converging on it with their birds raucously crowing in their lust to win or die.

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!

T
he 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!”