Roots (50 page)

One day after he had been talking for some time with the gardener and the fiddler and worked the conversation very slowly around to Bell, it seemed to Kunta that he had just the right tone of casualness in his voice when he asked, “Where she was fo’ she come here?” But his heart sank when they instantly sat up straighter and looked at him, sensing something in the air.

“Well,” the gardener said after a minute, “I ’members she come here ’bout two years fo’ you. But she ain’t never done much talkin’’bout herself. So ain’t much I knows more’n you does—.”

The fiddler said Bell had never spoken of her past to him either. Kunta couldn’t put his finger on what it was about their expressions that irritated him. Yes, he could: It was smugness.

The fiddler scratched his right ear. “Sho’ is funny you ax ’bout Bell,” he said, nodding in the gardener’s direction, “’cause me’n him ain’t been long back ’scussin’ y’all.” He looked carefully at Kunta.

“We was sayin’ seem like y’all both might be jes’ what de other’n needs,” said the gardener.

Outraged, Kunta sat with his mouth open, only nothing came out.

Still scratching his ear, the fiddler wore a sly look. “Yeah, her big behin’ be too much to handle for most mens.”

Kunta angrily started to speak, but the gardener cut him off, demanding sharply, “Listen here, how long you ain’t touched no woman?”

Kunta glared daggers. “Twenty years anyhow!” exclaimed the fiddler.

“Lawd, Gawd!” said the gardener. “You better git you some ’fo’ you dries up!”

“If he ain’t a-reddy!” the fiddler shot in. Unable to speak but able to contain himself a moment longer, Kunta leaped up and stamped out. “Don’ you worry!” the fiddler shouted after him. “You ain’t gon’ stay dry long wid
her!”

F
or the next few days, whenever Kunta wasn’t off driving the massa somewhere, he spent both his mornings and afternoons oiling and polishing the buggy. Since he was right outside the barn in any one’s view, it couldn’t be said that he was isolating himself again, but at the same time it said that his work was keeping him too busy to spend time talking with the fiddler and the gardener—at whom he was still furious for what they had said about him and Bell.

Being off by himself also gave him more time to sort out his feelings for her. Whenever he was thinking of something he didn’t like about her, his polishing rag would become a furious blur against the leather; and whenever he was feeling better about her, it would move slowly and sensuously across the seats, sometimes almost stopping as his mind lingered on some disarming quality of hers. Whatever her shortcomings, he had to admit that she had done a great deal in his best interests over the years. He felt certain that Bell had even played a quiet role in the massa’s having selected him as his buggy driver. There was no question that in her own subtle ways, Bell had more influence on the massa than anyone else on the plantation, or probably all of them put together. And a parade of smaller things came and went through Kunta’s mind. He remembered a time back when he was gardening and
Bell had noticed that he was often rubbing at his eyes, which had been itching him in a maddening way. Without a word, she had come out to the garden one morning with some wide leaves still wet with dewdrops, which she shook into his eyes, whereupon the itching had soon stopped.

Not that he felt any less strongly about the things he disapproved of in Bell, Kunta reminded himself as the rag picked up speed—most particularly her disgusting habit of smoking tobacco in a pipe. Even more objectionable was her way of dancing whenever there was some festivity among the blacks. He didn’t feel that women shouldn’t dance, or do so less than enthusiastically. What bothered him was that Bell seemed to go out of her way to make her behind shake in a certain manner, which he figured was the reason the fiddler and the gardener had said what they did about her. Bell’s behind, of course, wasn’t any of his business, he just wished she would show a little more respect for herself—and while she was at it, a little more toward him and other men. Her tongue, it seemed to him, was even worse than old Nyo Boto’s. He wouldn’t mind her being critical if she’d only keep it to herself, or do her criticizing in the company of other women, as it was done in Juffure.

When Kunta had finished with the buggy, he began cleaning and oiling the leather harnesses, and for some reason as he did so, his mind went back to the old men in Juffure who carved things from wood such as the knee-high slab of hickory on which he was sitting. He thought how carefully they would first select and then study some thoroughly seasoned piece of wood before they would ever touch it with their adzes and their knives.

Kunta got up and toppled the hickory block over on its side, sending the beetles that lived beneath it scurrying away. After closely examining both ends of the block, he rolled it back and
forth, tapping it with the piece of iron at different places, and always hearing the same solid, seasoned sound. It seemed to him that this excellent piece of wood was serving no real purpose just sitting here. It was there apparently only because someone had put it there long before and no one had ever bothered to move it. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, Kunta rolled the block rapidly to his hut, where he stood it upright in a corner, closed the door, and went back to work.

That night, after bringing the massa back from a trip to the county seat that seemed to take forever, Kunta couldn’t sit through supper before getting another look at the hickory block, so he took the food along with him to his cabin. Not even noticing what he was eating, Kunta sat on the floor in front of it and studied it in the light from the flickering candle on his table. In his mind, he was seeing the mortar and pestle that Omoro had carved for Binta, who had worn it slick with many grindings of her corn.

Merely to pass away some of his free time, Kunta told himself, when Massa Waller didn’t want to go anywhere, Kunta began to chop away at the block with a sharp hatchet, making a rough shape of the outside rim of a mortar for grinding corn. By the third day, with a hammer and a wood chisel, he dug out the mortar’s inside, also roughly, and then he began to carve with a knife. After a week, Kunta’s fingers surprised him at how nimbly they flew, considering that he hadn’t watched the old men in his village carving things for more than twenty rains.

When he had finished the inside and the outside of the mortar, he found a seasoned hickory limb, perfectly straight and of the thickness of his arm, from which he soon made a pestle. Then he set about smoothing the upper part of the handle, scraping it first with a file, next with a knife, and finally with a piece of glass.

Finished, they both sat in a corner of Kunta’s hut for two more weeks. He would look at them now and then, reflecting that they
wouldn’t look out of place in his mother’s kitchen. But now that he had made them, he was unsure what to do with them; at least that’s what he told himself. Then one morning, without really thinking about why he was doing it, Kunta picked them up and took them along when he went to check with Bell to see if the massa was going to need the buggy. When she gave him her brief, cold report from behind the screen door, saying that the massa had no travel plans that morning, Kunta waited until her back was turned and found himself setting the mortar and pestle down on the steps and turning to leave as fast as he could go. When Bell’s ears caught the gentle thumping sound, which made her turn around, she first saw Kunta cripping away even more hurriedly than usual, then she saw the mortar and pestle on the steps.

Walking to the door, she peered out at Kunta until he had disappeared, then eased the screen door open and looked down at them; she was flabbergasted. Picking them up and bringing them inside, she examined its painstaking carving with astonishment; and then she began to cry.

It was the first time in her twenty-two years on the Waller plantation that any man had made something for her with his own hands. She felt flooding guilt for the way she had been acting toward Kunta, and she remembered how peculiar the fiddler and the gardener had acted recently when she complained to them about him. They must have known of this—but she couldn’t be certain, knowing how close-mouthed and reserved Kunta could be in his African way.

Bell was confused about how she should feel—or how she should act the next time he came to check on the massa again after lunch. She was glad she would have at least the rest of the morning to get her mind made up about that. Kunta, meanwhile, sat in his cabin feeling as if he were two people, one of them completely humiliated by the foolish and ridiculous thing the other one had
just done—and felt almost deliriously happy and excited about it. What made him do it? What would she think? He dreaded having to return to the kitchen after lunch.

Finally the hour came, and Kunta trudged up the walk as if he were going to his execution. When he saw that the mortar and pestle were gone from the back steps, his heart leaped and sank at the same time. Reaching the screen door, he saw that she had put them on the floor just inside, as if she were uncertain why Kunta had left them there. Turning when he knocked—as if she hadn’t heard him coming—she tried to look calm as she unlatched the door and opened it for him to come on in. That was a bad sign, thought Kunta; she hadn’t opened the door to him in months. But he wanted to come in; yet he couldn’t seem to take that first step. Rooted where he stood, he asked matter-of-factly about the massa, and Bell, concealing her hurt feelings and her confusion, managed to reply just as matter-of-factly that the massa said he had no afternoon plans for the buggy either. As Kunta turned to go, she added hopefully, “He been writin’ letters all day.” All of the possible things that Bell had thought of that she might say had fled her head, and as he turned again to go, she heard herself blurting “What dat?” with a gesture toward the mortar and pestle.

Kunta wished that he were anywhere else on earth. But finally he replied, almost angrily, “For you to grin’ cawn wid.” Bell looked at him with her mingled emotions now clearly showing on her face. Seizing the silence between them as an excuse to leave, Kunta turned and hurried away without another word. Bell stood there feeling like a fool.

For the next two weeks, beyond exchanging greeetings, neither of them said anything to each other. Then one day, at the kitchen door, Bell gave Kunta a round cake of cornbread. Mumbling his thanks, he took it back to his hut and ate it still hot from the pan and soaked with butter. He was deeply moved. Almost certainly she had made
it with meal ground in the mortar he had given her. But even before this he had decided that he was going to have a talk with Bell. When he checked in with her after lunch, he forced himself to say, as he had carefully rehearsed and memorized it, “I wants a word wid you after supper.” Bell didn’t delay her response overlong. “Don’t make me no difference,” she said too quickly, regretting it.

By suppertime, Kunta had worked himself into a state. Why had she said what she did? Was she really as indifferent as she seemed? And if she was, why did she make the cornbread for him? He would have it out with her. But neither he nor Bell had remembered to say exactly when or where they would meet. She must have intended for him to meet her at her cabin, he decided finally. But he hoped desperately that some emergency medical call would come for Massa Waller. When none did, and he knew he couldn’t put it off any longer, he took a deep breath, opened his cabin door, and strolled casually over to the barn. Coming back outside swinging in his hand a set of harnesses that he figured would satisfy the curiosity of anyone who might happen to see him and wonder why he was out and around, he ambled on down to slave row to Bell’s cabin and—looking around to make sure no one was around—knocked very quietly on the door.

It opened almost before his knuckles touched the wood, and Bell stepped immediately outside. Glancing down at the harness, and then at Kunta, she said nothing—and when he didn’t either, she began to walk slowly down toward the back fencerow; he fell into step beside her. The half moon had begun to rise, and in its pale light they moved along without a word. When a groundvine entangled the shoe on his left foot, Kunta stumbled—his shoulder brushing against Bell—and he all but sprang away. Ransacking his brain for something—anything—to say, he wished wildly that he was walking with the gardener or the fiddler, or practically anyone except Bell.

Finally it was she who broke the silence. She said abruptly, “De white folks done swore in dat Gen’l Washington for de Pres’dent.” Kunta wanted to ask her what that was, but he didn’t, hoping that she’d keep on talking. “An’ it’s annuder massa name of John Adams is Vice Pres’dent,” she went on.

Floundering, he felt that he must say something to keep the talk going. He said finally, “Rode massa over to see his brother’s young’un yestiddy,” instantly feeling foolish, as he knew full well that Bell already knew that.

“Lawd, he do love dat chile!” Bell said, feeling foolish, since that’s about all she ever said about little Missy Anne whenever the subject came up. The silence had built up a little bit again when she went on. “Don’t know how much you knows ’bout massa’s brother. He de Spotsylvania County clerk, but he ain’t never had our massa’s head fo’ binness.” Bell was quiet for a few more steps. “I keeps my ears sharp on little things gits dropped. I knows whole lot more’n anybody thinks I knows.”

She glanced over at Kunta. “I ain’t never had no use for dat Massa John—an’ I’s sure you ain’t neither—but dere’s sump’n you ought to know ’bout him dat I ain’t never tol’ you. It weren’t him had your foot cut off. Fact, he pitched a fit wid dem low-down po’ white trash what done it. He’d hired ’em to track you wid dey nigger dogs, an’ dey claim how come dey done it was you tried to kill one of ’em wid a rock.” Bell paused. “I ’members it like yestiddy when Sheriff Brock come a-rushin’ you to our massa.” Under the moonlight, Bell looked at Kunta. “You near ’bout dead, massa said. He got so mad when Massa John say he ain’t got no use for you no more wid your foot gone, he swore he gon’ buy you from him, an’ he done it, too. I seen de very deed he bought you wid. He took over a good-sized farm long wid you in de place of money his brother owed him. It’s dat big farm wid de pond right where de big road curve, you passes it all de time.”