Roots (42 page)

So as old as he felt, he was still a young man. Would he spend the rest of his life here, as the gardener had, watching hope and pride slip away along with the years, until there was nothing left to live for and time had finally run out? The thought filled him with dread—and determination not to end up the way the old man had, doddering around in his plot, uncertain which foot to put before the other. The poor man was worn out long before the midday meal, and through the afternoons he was only able to pretend that he was working at all, and Kunta had to shoulder almost all the load.

Every morning, as Kunta bent over his rows, Bell would come with her basket—Kunta had learned that she was the cook in the big house—to pick the vegetables she wanted to fix for the massa that day. But the whole time she was there, she never so much as looked at Kunta, even when she walked right past him. It puzzled and irritated him, remembering how she had attended him daily when he lay fighting to survive, and how she would nod at him during the evenings at the fiddler’s. He decided that he hated her, that the only reason she had acted as his nurse back then was because the massa had ordered her to do it. Kunta wished that he could hear whatever the fiddler might have to say about this matter, but he knew that his limited command of words wouldn’t allow him to express it right—apart from the fact that even asking would be too embarrassing.

One morning not long afterward, the old man didn’t come to the garden, and Kunta guessed that he must be sick. He had seemed even more feeble than usual for the past few days. Rather than going right away to the old man’s hut to check on him, Kunta went straight to work watering and weeding, for he knew that Bell was due at any moment, and he didn’t think it would be fitting for her to find no one there when she arrived.

A few minutes later she showed up and, still without looking at Kunta, went about her business, filling her basket with vegetables as Kunta stood holding his hoe and watching her. Then, as she started to leave, Bell hesitated, looked around, set the basket on the ground, and—throwing a quick, hard glance at Kunta—marched off. Her message was clear that he should bring her basket to the back door of the big house, as the old man had always done. Kunta all but exploded with rage, his mind flashing an image of dozens of Juffure women bearing their headloads in a line past the bantaba tree where Juffure’s men always rested. Slamming down his hoe, he was about to stamp away when he remembered how close she was to the massa. Gritting his teeth, he bent over, seized the basket, and followed silently after Bell. At the door, she turned around and took the basket as if she didn’t even see him. He returned to the garden seething.

From that day on, Kunta more or less became the gardener. The old man, who was very sick, came only now and then, whenever he was strong enough to walk. He would do a little something for as long as he felt able, which wasn’t very long, and then hobble back to his hut. He reminded Kunta of the old people back in Juffure who, ashamed of their weakness, continued to totter about making the motions of working until they were forced to retreat to their pallets, and finally were rarely seen out any more at all.

The only new duty Kunta really hated was having to carry that basket for Bell every day. Muttering under his breath, he would follow her to the door, thrust it into her hands as rudely as he dared, then turn on his heel and march back to work, as fast as he could go. As much as he detested her, though, his mouth would water when now and then the air would waft to the garden the tantalizing smells of the things that Bell was cooking.

He had dropped the twenty-second pebble into his calendar gourd when—without any outward sign of change—Bell beckoned
him on into the house one morning. After a moment’s hesitation, he followed her inside and set the basket on a table there. Trying not to look amazed at the strange things he saw everywhere around him in this room, which they called the “kitchen,” he was turning to leave when she touched him on the arm and handed him a biscuit with what looked like a piece of cold beef between the slices. As he stared at it in puzzlement, she said, “Ain’t you never seed a san’wich befo’? It ain’t gonna bite you. You s’posed to bite
it.
Now git on outa here.”

As time went on, Bell began to give him more than he could carry in his hand—usually a tin plate piled with something called “cornpone,” a kind of bread he had never tasted before, along with boiled fresh mustard greens in their own delicious potliquor. He had sown the mustard’s tiny seeds himself—in garden soil mixed with rich black dirt dug from the cow pasture—and the tender greens had swiftly, luxuriously sprung up. He loved no less the way she cooked the long, slender field peas that grew on the vines coiling around the sweet corn’s stalks. She never gave him any obvious meat of the pig, though he wasn’t sure how she knew that. But whatever she gave him, he would always wipe off the plate carefully with a rag before returning it. Most often he would find her at her “stove”—a thing of iron that contained fire—but sometimes she would be on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor with oak ashes and a hard-bristled brush. Though at times he wanted to say something to her, he could never muster a better expression of his appreciation than a grunt—which now she returned.

One Sunday after supper, Kunta had gotten up to stretch his legs and was walking around the fiddler’s hut idly patting himself on the belly when the brown one, who had been talking steadily all through the meal, interrupted his monologue to exclaim, “Looka here, you startin’ to fill out!” He was right. Kunta hadn’t looked—or felt—better since he left Juffure.

After months of incessant plaiting to strengthen his fingers, the fiddler, too, felt better than he had in a long time—since his hand was broken—and in the evenings he had begun to play on his instrument again. Holding the peculiar thing in his cupped hand and under his chin, the fiddler raked its strings with his wand—which seemed to be made of long, fine hairs—and the usual evening audience would shout and break into applause when each song had finished. “Dat ain’t nothin’!” he would say disgustedly. “Fingers ain’t nimble yet.”

Later, when they were alone, Kunta asked haltingly, “What is nimble?”

The fiddler flexed and wiggled his fingers. “Nimble! Nimble. Get it?” Kunta nodded.

“You a lucky nigger, what you is,” the fiddler went on. “Jes’ piddlin’’roun’ eve’yday in dat garden. Ain’t hardly nobody got a job dat sof ’ ’cept on plantations whole lot bigger’n dis.”

Kunta thought he understood, and he didn’t like it. “Work
hard,
” he said. And nodding at the fiddler on his chair, he added, “Harder dan
dat.
”

The fiddler grinned. “You awright, African!”

T
he “months,” as they called moons here, were passing more quickly now, and before long the hot season known as “summer” was over and harvest time had begun along with a great many more duties for Kunta and the others. While the rest of the blacks—even Bell—were busy with the heavy work out in the fields, he was expected to tend the chickens, the livestock, and the pigs in addition to his garden. And at the height of the cotton picking, he was called upon to drive the wagon along the rows. Except for having to feed the filthy swine, which almost made him ill, Kunta didn’t mind the extra work, for it made him feel less of a cripple. But it was seldom that he got back to his hut before dark—so tired out that he sometimes even forgot to eat his supper. Taking off nothing but his frayed straw hat and his shoes—to relieve the aching of his half foot—he would flop down on his cornshuck mattress, pulling his quilt of cotton-stuffed burlap up over him, and within moments he would be sound asleep, in clothes still wet with sweat.

Soon the wagons were piled high with cotton, then with plump ears of corn, and the golden tobacco leaves were hanging up to dry. The hogs had been killed, cut into pieces, and hung over slowly burning hickory, and the smoky air was turning cold when everyone on the plantation began preparing for the “harvest dance,” an
occasion so important that even the massa would be there. Such was their excitement that when Kunta found out that the black people’s Allah didn’t seem to be involved, he decided to attend himself—but just to watch.

By the time he got up the courage to join the party, it was well under way. The fiddler, whose fingers were finally nimble again, was sawing away at his strings, and another man was clacking two beef bones together to keep time as someone shouted, “Cakewalk!” Dancers coupled off and hurried out before the fiddler. Each woman put her foot on the man’s knee while he tied her shoestring; then the fiddler sang out, “Change partners!” and when they did, he began to play madly, and Kunta saw that the dancers’ footsteps and body motions were imitating their planting of the crops, the chopping of wood, the picking of cotton, the swinging of scythes, the pulling of corn, the pitchforking of hay into wagons. It was all so much like the harvest dancing back in Juffure that Kunta’s good foot was soon tapping away on the ground—until he realized what he was doing and looked around, embarrassed, to see if anyone had noticed.

But no one had. At that moment, in fact, almost everyone had begun to watch a slender fourth-kafo girl who was dipping and whirling around as light as a feather, her head tossing, her eyes rolling, her arms describing graceful patterns. Soon the other dancers, exhausted, were moving to the sides to catch their breaths and stare; even her partner was hard put to keep up.

When he quit, gasping, a shout went up, and when finally even she went stumbling toward the sidelines, a whooping and hollering engulfed her. The cheering got even louder when Massa Waller awarded that girl a half-dollar prize. And smiling broadly at the fiddler, who grinned and bowed in return, the massa left them amid more shouting. But the cakewalk was far from over, and the other couples, rested by now, rushed back out and went on as before, seemingly ready to dance all night.

Kunta was lying on his mattress thinking about what he had heard and seen when suddenly there came a rapping at his door.

“Who dat?” he demanded, astonished, for only twice had anyone ever come to his hut in all the time he’d lived there.

“Kick dis do’ in, nigger!”

Kunta opened the door, for it was the voice of the fiddler; instantly he smelled the liquor on his breath. Though he was repelled, Kunta said nothing, for the fiddler was bursting to talk, and it would have been unkind to turn him away just because he was drunk.

“You seen massa!” said the fiddler. “He ain’t knowed I could play dat good! Now you watch an’ see if ’n he don’t ’range for me to play for white folks to hear me, an’ den hire me out!” Beside himself with happiness, the fiddler sat on Kunta’s three-legged stool, fiddle across his lap, and went on babbling.

“Looka here, I second fiddled with the best! You ever hear of Sy Gilliat from Richmond?” He hesitated. “Naw, ’course you ain’t! Well, dat’s de fiddlin’est slave nigger in de worl’, and I fiddled wid him. Looka here, he play for nothin’ but big white folks’ balls an’ dances, I mean like the Hoss Racin’ Ball every year, and like dat. You oughta see him wid dat gold-painted fiddle of his an’ him wearin’ court dress wid his brown wig an’ Lawd, dem manners! Nigger name London Briggs behin’ us playin’ flute an’ clarinet! De minuets, de reels, de congos, hornpipes, jigs, even jes’ caperin’’bout—don’t care what it was, we’d have dem white folks dancin’ up a storm!”

The fiddler carried on like this for the next hour—until the alcohol wore off—telling Kunta of the famous singing slaves who worked in Richmond’s tobacco factories; of other widely known slave musicians who played the “harpsichord,” the “pianoforte,” and the “violin”—whatever they were—who had learned to play by listening to toubob musicians from someplace called “Europe,”
who had been hired to come to plantations to teach the massas’ children.

The following crispy cold morning saw the starting of new tasks. Kunta watched as the women mixed hot melted tallow with wood-ash lye and water, boiling and stirring, then cooling the thick brown mixture in wooden trays to let it set for four nights and three days before they cut it into oblong cakes of hard, brown soap. To his complete distaste, he saw men fermenting apples, peaches, and persimmons into something foul-smelling that they called “brandy,” which they put into bottles and barrels. Others mixed gluey red clay, water, and dried hog hair to press into cracks that had appeared in their huts. Women stuffed some mattresses with cornshucks like Kunta’s, and some others with the moss he had seen drying; and a new mattress for the massa was filled with goose feathers.

The slave who built things from wood was making new tubs in which clothes would be soaked in soapy water before being boiled and lumped onto a wooden block to be beaten with a stick. The man who made things with leather—horse collars, harnesses, and shoes—was now busily tanning cows’ hides. And women were dyeing into different colors the white cotton cloth the massa had bought to make clothes with. And just as it was in Juffure, all of the nearby vines, bushes, and fences were draped with drying cloths of red, yellow, and blue.

With each passing day, the air became colder and colder, the sky grayer and grayer, until soon the ground was covered once again with snow and ice that Kunta found as unpleasant as it was extraordinary. And before long the other blacks were beginning to talk with great excitement about “Christmas,” which he had heard of before. It seemed to have to do with singing, dancing, eating, and the giving of gifts, which sounded fine—but it also seemed to involve their Allah, so even though Kunta really enjoyed by now
the gatherings at the fiddler’s, he decided it would be best to stay to himself until the pagan festivities were safely over. He didn’t even visit the fiddler, who looked curiously at Kunta the next time he saw him, but said nothing about it.

Thence swiftly came another springtime season, and as he knelt planting among his rows, Kunta remembered how lush the fields around Juffure always looked at this time of year. And he recalled as a second-kafo boy how happily he had gone prancing out behind the hungry goats in this green season. Here in this place the black “young’uns” were helping to chase and catch the
baaaing,
bounding “sheep,” as the animals were called, and then fighting over whose turn was next to sit on the head of a desperately struggling sheep while a man snipped off the thick, dirty wool with a pair of shears. The fiddler explained to Kunta that the wool would be taken off somewhere to be cleaned and “carded into bats,” which then would be returned for the women to spin woolen thread from which they would weave cloth for the making of winter clothes.