Roots (47 page)

There had never been any uprisings, or even any incidents, at the Waller place, but right there in Spotsylvania County, Kunta had heard about some blacks who had hidden muskets and other weapons and vowed to kill their massas or mistresses, or both, and put their plantations to the torch. And there were some men among those he worked with who would meet in secret to discuss anything good or bad that happened to slaves elsewhere and to consider any action they might take to help; but so far they had only talked.

Kunta had never been invited to join them—probably, he thought, because they felt that his foot would make him useless to them in an actual revolt. Whatever their reasons for leaving him out, he felt it was just as well. Though he wished them luck in whatever they might decide to do, Kunta didn’t believe that a rebellion could ever succeed against such overwhelming odds. Perhaps, as Massa Waller had said, blacks might soon outnumber whites, but they could never overpower them—not with pitchforks, kitchen knives, and stolen muskets against the massed armies of the white nation and its cannons.

But their worst enemy, it seemed to Kunta, was themselves. There were a few young rebels among them, but the vast majority of slaves were the kind that did exactly what was expected of them, usually without even having to be told; the kind white folks could—and did—trust with the lives of their own children, the kind that looked the other way when the white man took their women into haymows. Why, there were some right there on the plantation he was sure the massa could leave unguarded for a year and find them there—still working—when he returned. It certainly wasn’t because they were content; they complained constantly among themselves. But never did more than a handful so much as protest, let alone resist.

Perhaps he was becoming like them, Kunta thought. Or perhaps he was simply growing up. Or was he just growing old? He didn’t know; but he knew that he had lost his taste for fighting and running, and he wanted to be left alone, he wanted to mind his own business. Those who didn’t had a way of winding up dead.

D
ozing off in the shade of an oak tree in the backyard of a plantation where the massa was visiting to treat an entire family that had come down with a fever, Kunta woke up with a start when the evening conch horn blew to call the slaves in from the fields. He was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes when they reached the yard. Glancing up as they passed by on their way to wash up for supper, he noticed that there were about twenty or thirty of them. He looked again. Maybe he was still sleeping, but four of them—a man, a woman, and two teen-age boys—were
white.

“Dey’s what you call indentured white folks,” his friend the cook explained when he expressed his amazement to her a few minutes later. “Been here ’bout two months now. Dey’s a fambly from someplace ’crost de big water. Massa pay dere way here on de boat, so dey gotta pay him back by workin’ seben years as slaves. Den dey free jus’ like any other white folks.”

“Dey live in slave row?” asked Kunta.

“Dey got dey own cabin off a ways from our’n, but it jus’ as tumbledown as de res’. And dey eats de same mess we does. An’ don’t get treated no different out in de fiel’.”

“What dey like?” asked Kunta.

“Dey sticks pretty much to deyselves, but dey awright. Ain’t like us’ns, but does dey job and don’t make no trouble for nobody.”

It seemed to Kunta that these white slaves were better off than most of the free whites he’d seen on the massa’s rounds. With often as many as a dozen grown-ups and children packed on top of each other in one-room hovels on tiny patches of red clay or swampland, they scratched out a living so meager that the blacks laughingly sang a song about them: “Not po’ white, please, O Lawd, fer I’d ruther be a nigger.” Though he had never seen it for himself, Kunta had heard that some of these whites were so poor that they even had to eat dirt. They were certainly skinny enough, and few of them—even the “chilluns”—had any teeth left. And they smelled like they slept with their flea-bitten hounds, which many of them did. Trying to breathe through his mouth as he waited in the buggy outside their shacks while the massa treated one of them for scurvy or pellagra, watching the women and the children plowing and chopping while the menfolk lay under a tree with a brown jug of liquor and their dogs, all scratching, it was easy for Kunta to understand why plantation-owning massas and even their slaves scorned and sneered at them as “lazy, shiftless, no-count white trash.”

In fact, as far as he was concerned, that was a charitable description of heathens so shameless that they managed to commit every conceivable offense against the standards of decency upheld by the most sacrilegious Moslem. On his trips with the massa to neighboring towns, there would always be packs of them idling around the courthouse or the saloon even in the morning—dressed in their sweat-stained, greasy, threadbare castoffs, reeking of the filthy tobacco weed, which they puffed incessantly, swigging “white lightning” from bottles they carried in their pockets, laughing and yelling raucously at one another as they knelt on the ground in alleys playing cards and dice for money.

By midafternoon, they would be making complete fools of themselves: bursting drunkenly into song, cavorting wildly up and
down the street, whistling and calling out indecently to women who passed by, arguing and cursing loudly among themselves, and finally starting fights that would begin with a shove or a punch—while huge crowds of others like them would gather round to cheer them on—and end with ear-biting, eye-gouging, kicking of private parts, and bloody wounds that would almost always call for the massa’s urgent attention. Even the wild animals of his homeland, it seemed to Kunta, had more dignity than these creatures.

Bell was always telling stories about poor whites getting flogged for beating their wives and being sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for rape. Almost as often, she told about one of them stabbing or shooting another one to death; for that they might be forced to serve six months as a slave. But as much as they loved violence among themselves, Kunta knew from personal experience that they loved violence against black people even more. It was a crowd of poor whites—male and female—that had hooted and jeered and jabbed with sticks at him and his chain mates when they were taken from the big canoe. It was a poor-white overseer who had applied the lash so freely to his back at Massa John’s plantation. It was “cracker white trash” slave catchers who had taken such glee in chopping off his foot. And he had heard about runaways captured by “pattyrollers” who hadn’t given them the choice he’d gotten and sent them back to their plantations torn and broken almost beyond recognition—and divested of their manhood. He had never been able to figure out why poor whites hated blacks so much. Perhaps, as the fiddler had told him, it was because of
rich
whites, who had everything they didn’t: wealth, power, and property, including slaves who were fed, clothed, and housed while they struggled to stay alive. But he could feel no pity for them, only a deep loathing that had turned icy cold with the passing of the years since the swing of an ax held by one of them had ended forever something more precious to him than his own life: the hope of freedom.

Later that summer of 1786, Kunta was returning to the plantation from the county seat with news that filled him with mixed feelings. White folks had been gathering at every corner waving copies of the
Gazette
and talking heatedly about a story in it that told of increasing numbers of Quakers who were not only encouraging slaves to escape, as they had been doing for several years, but had now also begun aiding, hiding, and guiding them to safety in the North. Poor whites and massas alike were calling furiously for the tarring and feathering, even hanging, of any known Quakers who might be even suspected of such seditious acts. Kunta didn’t believe the Quakers or anybody else would be able to help more than a few of them escape, and sooner or later they’d get caught themselves. But it couldn’t hurt to have white allies—they’d need them—and anything that got their owners so frightened couldn’t be all bad.

Later that night, after Kunta told everyone in slave row what he had seen and heard, the fiddler said that when he had been playing for a dance across the county the week before, he’d seen “dey moufs fallin’ open” when he cocked an ear close enough to overhear a lawyer there confiding to a group of big plantation owners that the will of a wealthy Quaker named John Pleasant had bequeathed freedom to his more than two hundred slaves. Bell, who arrived late, said that she had just overheard Massa Waller and some dinner guests bitterly discussing the fact that slavery had recently been abolished in a northern state called “Massachusetts,” and reports claimed that other states near there would do the same.

“What ’bolished mean?” asked Kunta.

The old gardener replied, “It mean one dese days all us niggers gon’ be
free!”

E
ven when he didn’t have anything he’d seen or heard in town to tell the others, Kunta had learned to enjoy sitting around the fire with them in front of the fiddler’s hut. But lately he’d found that he was spending less time talking with the fiddler—who had once been his only reason for being there—than with Bell and the old gardener. They hadn’t exactly cooled toward one another, but things just weren’t the same anymore, and that saddened him. It hadn’t brought them closer for the fiddler to get saddled with Kunta’s gardening duties, though he’d finally managed to get over it. But what he couldn’t seem to get used to was the fact that Kunta soon began to replace
him
as the plantation’s best-informed source of news and gossip from the outside.

No one could have accused the fiddler of becoming tight-lipped, but as time went on, his famous monologues became shorter and shorter and more and more infrequent; and he hardly ever played fiddle for them anymore. After he had acted unusually subdued one evening, Kunta mentioned it to Bell, wondering if he had done or said anything that might have hurt his feelings.

“Don’ flatter yourself,” she told him. “Day an’ night fo’ months now, fiddler been runnin’ back an’ fo’th ’crost de county playin’ fo’ de white folks. He jes’ too wo’ out to run his mouf like he use to, which is fine wid me. An’ he gittin’ dollar an’ a half a night now
eve’y time he play at one a dem fancy white folks’ parties he go’to. Even when de massa take his half, fiddler get to keep a sebentyfive cents fo’ hisself, so how come he bother playin’ fo’ niggers no mo’—less’n you wants to take up a c’llection an’ see if’n he play fo’ a nickel.”

She glanced up from the stove to see if Kunta was smiling. He wasn’t. But she would have fallen into her soup if he had been. She had seen him smile just once—when he heard about a slave he knew from a nearby plantation who had escaped safely to the North.

“I hears fiddler plannin’ to save up what he earn an’ buy his freedom from de massa,” she went on.

“Time he got enough to do dat,” said Kunta gravely, “he gonna be too ol’ to leave his hut.”

Bell laughed so hard she almost
did
fall into her soup.

If the fiddler never earned his freedom, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying, Kunta decided, after hearing him play at a party one night not long afterward. He had dropped off the massa and was talking with the other drivers under a tree out on the darkened lawn when the band—led by the fiddler, obviously in rare form tonight—began to play a Virginia reel so lively that even the white folks couldn’t keep their feet still.

From where he sat, Kunta could see the silhouettes of young couples whirling from the great hall out onto the veranda through one door and back in again through another. When the dancing was over, everybody lined up at a long table glowing with candles and loaded with more food than slave row got to see in a year. And when they’d had their fill—the host’s fat daughter came back three times for more—the cook sent out a trayful of leftovers and a pitcher of lemonade for the drivers. Thinking that the massa might be getting ready to leave, Kunta wolfed down a chicken leg and a delicious sticky sweet creamy something or other that one of
the other drivers called “a ay-clair.” But the massas, in their white suits, stood around talking quietly for hours, gesturing with hands that held long cigars and sipping now and then from glasses of wine that glinted in the light from the chandelier that hung above them, while their wives, in fine gowns, fluttered their handkerchiefs and simpered behind their fans.

The first time he had taken the massa to one of these “high-falutin’ to-dos,” as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion—but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn’t believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they
didn’t
live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it’s possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother’s milk made possible the life of privilege they led.

Kunta had considered sharing these thoughts with Bell or the old gardener, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to find the right words in the toubob tongue. Anyway, both of them had lived here all their lives and couldn’t be expected to see it as he did, with the eyes of an outsider—one who had been born free. So, as it had always been when he thought about such things, he kept it to himself—and found himself wishing that, even after all these years, he didn’t still feel so alone.

About three months later Massa Waller—“’long wid jes’ ’bout ev’eybody who’s anybody in de state a Virginia,” according to the fiddler—was invited to attend the Thanksgiving Ball his parents held each year at Enfield. Arriving late because the massa, as usual, had to stop off and see a patient on the way, Kunta could hear that
the party was well under way as they clip-clopped up the tree-lined driveway toward the big house, which was lit up from top to bottom. Pulling up at the front door, he leaped down to stand at attention while the doorman helped the massa out of the buggy. That’s when he heard it. Somewhere very nearby, the edges and heels of someone’s hands were beating on a drumlike gourd instrument called a qua-qua, and doing it with a sharpness and power that made Kunta know the musician was an African.