Roots (30 page)

Although his pains didn’t subside, the warm sun began to make Kunta feel a little better. He glanced down and saw, in a pool around where he sat, the blood that had drained from his back—and a shuddering whine forced itself up his throat. Toubob who were also sick and weak were moving about with brushes and buckets, scrubbing up vomit and feces, and others were bringing tubs of filth up from below and dumping it over the side. In the daylight, Kunta vacantly noted their pale, hairy skins, and the smallness of their fotos.

After a while he smelled the steam of boiling vinegar and tar through the gratings as the chief toubob began to move among the shackled people applying his salve. He would put a plaster of cloth smeared with powder wherever the bones showed through, but seeping blood soon made the plasters slip and fall off. He also opened some of the men’s mouths—including Kunta’s—and forced down their throats something from a black bottle.

At sunset, those who were well enough were fed—maize boiled with red palm oil and served in a small tub they dipped into with their hands. Then each of them had a scoopful of water brought by
a toubob from a barrel that was kept at the foot of the biggest of the poles on deck. By the time the stars came out, they were back below in chains. The emptied spaces on Kunta’s level, where men had died, were filled with the sickest of the men from the level below, and their moans of suffering were even louder than before.

For three days Kunta lay among them in a twilight of pain, vomiting, and fever, his cries mingled with theirs. He was also among those racked with fits of deep, hoarse coughing. His neck was hot and swollen, and his entire body poured with sweat. He came out of his stupor only once, when he felt the whiskers of a rat brush along his hip; almost by reflex his free hand darted out and trapped the rat’s head and foreparts in its grasp. He couldn’t believe it. All the rage that had been bottled up in him for so long flooded down his arm and into his hand. Tighter and tighter he squeezed—the rat wriggling and squealing frantically—until he could feel the eyes popping out, the skull crunching under his thumb. Only then did the strength ebb from his fingers and the hand open to release the crushed remains.

A day or two later, the chief toubob began to enter the hold himself, discovering each time—and unchaining—at least one more lifeless body. Gagging in the stench, with others holding up lights for him to see by, he applied his salve and powder and forced the neck of his black bottle into the mouths of those still living. Kunta fought not to scream with pain whenever the fingers touched the grease to his back or the bottle to his lips. He also shrank from the touch of those pale hands against his skin; he would rather have felt the lash. And in the light’s orange glow, the faces of the toubob had a kind of paleness without features that he knew would never leave his mind any more than the stink in which he lay.

Lying there in filth and fever, Kunta didn’t know if they had been down in the belly of this canoe for two moons or six, or even
as long as a rain. The man who had been lying near the vent through which they had counted the days was dead now. And there was no longer any communication among those who had survived.

Once when Kunta came jerking awake from a half sleep, he felt a nameless terror and sensed that death was near him. Then, after a while, he realized that he could no longer hear the familiar wheezing of his shacklemate beside him. It was a long time before Kunta could bring himself to reach out a hand and touch the man’s arm. He recoiled in horror, for it was cold and rigid. Kunta lay shuddering. Pagan or not, he and the Wolof had talked together, they had lain together. And now he was alone.

When the toubob came down again, bringing the boiled corn, Kunta cringed as their gagging and muttering came closer and closer. Then he felt one of them shaking the body of the Wolof and cursing. Then Kunta heard food being scraped as usual into his own pan, which was thrust up between him and the still Wolof, and the toubob moved on down the shelf. However starved his belly was, Kunta couldn’t think of eating.

After a while two toubob came and unshackled the Wolof’s ankle and wrist from Kunta’s. Numb with shock, he listened as the body was dragged and bumped down the aisle and up the stairs. He wanted to shove himself away from that vacant space, but the instant he moved, the raking of his exposed muscles against the boards made him scream in agony. As he lay still, letting the pain subside, he could hear in his mind the death wailings of the women of the Wolof’s village, mourning his death.
“Toubob fa!”
he screamed into the stinking darkness, his cuffed hand jangling the chain of the Wolof’s empty cuff.

The next time he was up on deck, Kunta’s glance met the gaze of one of the toubob who had beaten him and the Wolof. For an instant they looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and though the toubob’s face and eyes tightened with hatred, this time no whip
fell upon Kunta’s back. As Kunta was recovering from his surprise, he looked across the deck and for the first time since the storm, saw the women. His heart sank. Of the original twenty, only twelve remained. But he felt a pang of relief that all four of the children had survived.

There was no scrubbing this time—the wounds on the men’s backs were too bad—and they jumped in their chains only weakly, this time to the beat of the drum alone; the toubob who had squeezed the wheezing thing was gone. As well as they could, in their pain, the women who were left sang that quite a few more toubob had been sewn into white cloths and dropped overboard.

With a great weariness in his face, the white-haired toubob was moving among the naked people with his salve and bottle when a man with the empty shackles of a dead partner dangling from his wrist and ankle bolted from where he stood and raced to the rail. He had scrambled halfway over it when one of the nearby toubob managed to catch up with him and grab the trailing chain just as he leaped. An instant later his body was banging against the side of the great canoe and the deck was ringing with his strangled howls. Suddenly, unmistakably, amid the cries, Kunta heard some toubob words. A hissing rose from the chained men; it was the other slatee, without question. As the man flailed against the hull—screeching
“Toubob fa!”
and then begging for mercy—the chief toubob went over to the rail and looked down. After listening for a moment, he abruptly jerked the chain from the other toubob and let the slatee drop screaming into the sea. Then, without a word, he went back to greasing and powdering wounds as if nothing had happened.

Though their whips fell less often, the guards seemed to act terrified of their prisoners now. Each time the prisoners were brought up on deck, the toubob ringed them closely, with firesticks and knives drawn, as if at any moment the shackled people might attack.
But as far as Kunta was concerned, though he despised the toubob with all his being, he didn’t care about killing them any more. He was so sick and weak that he didn’t even care if he lived or died himself. Up on the deck he would simply lie down on his side and close his eyes. Soon he would feel the chief toubob’s hands smearing salve on his back again. And then, for a while, he would feel nothing but the warmth of the sun and smell only the fresh ocean breeze, and the pain would dissolve into a quiet haze of waiting—almost blissfully—to die and join his ancestors.

Occasionally, down in the hold, Kunta would hear a little murmuring here and there, and he wondered what they could find to talk about. And what was the point? His Wolof shacklemate was gone, and death had taken some of those who had translated for the others. Besides, it took too much strength to talk any more. Each day Kunta felt a little worse, and it didn’t help to see what was happening to some of the other men. Their bowels had begun to drain out a mixture of clotted blood and thick, grayish-yellow, horribly foul-smelling mucus.

When they first smelled and saw the putrid discharge, the toubob became agitated. One of them went rushing back up through the hatch, and minutes later the chief toubob descended. Gagging, he gestured sharply for the other toubob to unshackle the screaming men and remove them from the hold. More toubob soon returned with lights, hoes, brushes, and buckets. Vomiting and gasping curses, they scraped, scrubbed, and scrubbed again the shelves from which sick men had been taken away. Then they poured boiling vinegar on those places and moved the men lying next to those places to other empty spaces farther away.

But nothing helped, for the bloody contagion—which Kunta heard the toubob call “the flux”—spread and spread. Soon he too began to writhe with pains in his head and back, then to roast and shiver with fever and chills, and finally to feel his insides clenching
and squeezing out the stinking blood and ooze. Feeling as if his entrails were coming out along with the discharge, Kunta nearly fainted from the pain. Between screams, he cried out things he could hardly believe he was uttering: “Omoro—Omar the Second Caliph, third after Muhammad the Prophet! Kairaba—Kairaba means peace!” Finally his voice was all but gone from shrieking and could hardly be heard amid the sobbing of the others. Within two days, the flux had afflicted nearly every man in the hold.

By now the bloody globs were dripping down off the shelves into the aisleways, and there was no way for the toubob to avoid brushing against it or stepping on it—cursing and vomiting—whenever they went into the hold. Each day now the men would be taken up on deck while the toubob took down buckets of vinegar and tar to boil into steam to clean the hold. Kunta and his mates stumbled up through the hatch and across to where they would flop down on the deck, which would soon be fouled with the blood from their backs and the discharge from their bowels. The smell of the fresh air would seem to go all through Kunta’s body, from his feet to his head and then, when they were returned to the hold, the vinegar and tar smell would do the same, although the smell of it never killed the stench of the flux.

In his delirium, Kunta saw flashing glimpses of his Grandma Yaisa lying propped up on one arm on her bed talking to him for the last time, when he was but a small boy; and he thought of old Grandmother Nyo Boto, and the stories she would tell when he was back in the first kafo, about the crocodile who was caught in a trap by the river when the boy came along to set it free. Moaning and babbling, he would claw and kick when the toubob came anywhere near him.

Soon most of the men could no longer walk at all, and toubob had to help them up onto the deck so that the white-haired one could apply his useless salve in the light of day. Every day someone
died and was thrown overboard, including a few more of the women and two of the four children—as well as several of the toubob themselves. Many of the surviving toubob were hardly able to drag themselves around any more, and one manned the big canoe’s wheel while standing in a tub that would catch his flux mess.

The nights and the days tumbled into one another until one day Kunta and the few others from below who yet could manage to drag themselves up the hatch steps stared over the rail with dull astonishment at a rolling carpet of gold-colored seaweed floating on the surface of the water as far as they could see. Kunta knew that the water couldn’t continue forever, and now it seemed that the big canoe was about to go over the edge of the world—but he didn’t really care. Deep within himself, he sensed that he was nearing the end; he was unsure only of by what means he was going to die.

Dimly he noted that the great white sheets were dropping, no longer full of wind as they had been. Up among the poles, the toubob were pulling their maze of ropes to move the sheets this way and that, trying to pick up any little breeze. From the toubob down on the deck, they drew up buckets of water and sloshed them against the great cloths. But still the great canoe remained becalmed, and gently it began to roll back and forth upon the swells.

All the toubob were on the edges of their tempers now, the white-haired one even shouting at his knife-scarred mate, who cursed and beat the lesser toubob more than before, and they in turn fought with each other even more than they had before. But there were no further beatings of the shackled people, except on rare occasions, and they began to spend almost all the daylight hours up on deck, and—to Kunta’s amazement—they were given a full pint of water every day.

When they were taken up from the hold one morning, the men saw hundreds of flying fish piled up on the deck. The women sang that the toubob had set lights out on deck the night before to lure
them, and they had flown aboard and floundered about in vain trying to escape. That night they were boiled with the maize, and the taste of fresh fish startled Kunta with pleasure. He wolfed the food down, bones and all.

When the stinging yellow powder was sprinkled next against Kunta’s back, the chief toubob applied a thick cloth bandage against his right shoulder. Kunta knew that meant his bone had begun showing through, as was the case with so many other men already, especially the thinner ones, who had the least muscle over their bones. The bandaging made Kunta’s shoulder hurt even more than before. But he hadn’t been back down in the hold for long before the seeping blood made the soaked bandage slip loose. It didn’t matter. Sometimes his mind would dwell on the horrors he had been through, or on his deep loathing of all toubob; but mostly he just lay in the stinking darkness, eyes gummy with some yellowish matter, hardly aware that he was still alive.

He heard other men crying out, or beseeching Allah to save them, but he neither knew nor cared who they were. He would drift off into fitful, moaning sleep, with jumbled dreams of working in the fields back in Juffure, of leafy green farms, of fish leaping from the glassy surface of the bolong, of fat antelope haunches roasting over glowing coals, of gourds of steaming tea sweetened with honey. Then, drifting again into wakefulness, he sometimes heard himself mouthing bitter, incoherent threats and begging aloud, against his will, for a last look at his family. Each of them—Omoro, Binta, Lamin, Suwadu, Madi—was a stone in his heart. It tortured him to think that he had caused them grief. Finally he would wrench his mind away to something else, but it wouldn’t help. His thoughts would always drift to something like the drum he had been going to make for himself. He’d think about how he would have practiced on it at night while guarding the groundnut fields, where no one could hear his mistakes. But then he would
remember the day he had gone to chop down the tree trunk for the drum, and it would all come flooding back.