Roots
by
Alex Haley

--James Baldwin "OVERWHELMING!  ... We follow his forbears through the
mutilations, sexual assaults-nfe and the breakups of families that was their
lot under white owners ... A COMPELLING AND INTIMATELY MOVING

LITERARY

EXPERIENCE.  "

--Minneapolis Tribune

"BY TRACING HIS HERITAGE BACK TO ITS AFRICAN ROOTS HE HAS DONE

SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY .  He speaks not only for America's black people, but
for all of us everywhere.  "

--The New York Times

"THROBS WITH EMOTION, RIGHT UP TO THE END ... A GREAT AMERICAN

BOOK!  "

--San Francisco Chronicle ' / " < .  ..."  / "SUPERB .  .  .  A LASTING
ACHIEVEMENT .  .  .  ROOTS HOISTS THE

SPIRIT!  "

--Vogue "UNIQUE AND REMARKABLE ... It is the epic of the black man in America
as told, at long last, by a black man .  ..  Like any good historical novel
Roots gives us a fresh view of history itself."

--Chicago Tribune Book World

"DAZZLING .  .  .  EXTRAORDINARY

FORCE .  an honest, inspired version of the central story of the nation's
ailing heart.  "

--The New Republic pT

"AS A WORK OF RESEARCH AND IMAGINATIVE RECONSTRUCTION IT IS AN

)LUTELY STUNNING ACHIEVE', .  .  Utterly absorbing, sustained good j-jt -A
book for our time.  "

fjjSj>, --Baltimore Sun soj^e NARRATIVE SKILL .  .  .  FOR SUNG TIME WE HAVE
NEEDED A i^QOK THAT WOULD CAPTURE OUR (ij&eepest FEELINGS .  .  .  NOW WE
HAVE fc IT!  "

--Houston Chronicle "Dramatically details slave family life--birth, r,
courtship, marriage, death and the ever-pres- ent fear of being sold off and
having to leave your kin .  .  .  the story of the Amerieanization of the
Kinte clan strikes enough human chords to sustain the book's cumulative
power."

--Time "AN ASTOUNDING FEAT!  .  .  .  ROOTS is not fiction; at least it is
not advertised as such.  But Haley for the most part uses a novelist's when
and technique in telling his story.

And what a story!  .  .  .  FASCINATING .  .  .  HEARTWARMING .  .  .

DRAMATIC.  "

--Toledo Slade

"REMARKABLE TOUR-DE-FORCE!"

--Saturday Review "A fascinating and vivid story of the lifestyles of the
Mandingo tribe in Africa and slaves in the United States .  .  .

POTENT AND

PROVOCATIVE.  "

--Milwaukee Journal

"A POWERFUL DOCUMENT .  .  .  ROOTS SHOULD BE READ BY ALL LITERATE

AMERICANS.  "

--The Pittsburgh Press ALEXHALEY

A Dell Book Published by DELL PUBLISHING CO.  " INC.  1 Dag Hammarskjold
Plaza New York, N.Y.  10017 A condensed version of a portion of this work
first appeared in Reader's Digest Copyright 1974 by Reader's Digest
Association, Inc.  Copyright 1976 by Alex Haley All rights reserved.  For
information contact Doubleday & Company, Inc."  New York, N.  Y.  10017.

Dell TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co.  " Inc.  ISBN: 0440174643 Reprinted by
arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.  Printed in the United States of
America First Dell printing--November 1977 Eighth Dell printing--December
1982 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe deep gratitude to so many people for their help with Roots that pages
would be required simply to list them all.  The following are preeminent:
George Sims, my lifelong friend from our Henning, Tennessee boyhood, is a
master researcher who often traveled with me, sharing both the physical and
emotional adventures.  His dedicated combing through volumes by the hundreds,
and other kinds of documents by the thousands-- particularly in the U.  S.
Library of Congress and the U.  S.  National Archives--supplied much of the
historical and cultural material that I have woven around the lives of the
people in this book.

Murray Fisher had been my editor for years at Playboy magazine when I
solicited his clinical expertise to help me structure this book from a
seeming impassable maze of researched materials.  After we had established
Roots' pattern of chapters, next the story line was developed, which he then
shepherded throughout.  Finally, in the book's pressurized completion phase,
he even drafted some of Roots' scenes, and his brilliant editing pen steadily
tightened the book's great length.

The Africa section of this book exists in its detail only because at a
crucial time Mrs. DeWitt Wallace and the editors of the Reader's Digest
shared and supported my intense wish to explore if my maternal family's
treasured oral history might possibly be documented back into Africa where
all black Americans began.

Nor would this book exist in its fullness without the help of those scores of
dedicated librarians and archivists in some fifty-seven different
repositories of information on three continents.  I found that if a librarian
or archivist becomes excited with your own fervor of research, they can turn
into sleuths to aid your quests.

10 ALtX HA LET I owe a great debt to Paul R.  Reynolds, doyen of literary
agents--whose client I have the pleasure to be--and to Doubleday Senior
Editors Lisa Drew and Ken McCormick, all of whom have patiently shared and
salved my frustrations across the years of producing Roots.

Finally, I acknowledge immense debt to the griots of Africa--where today it
is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to
the ground.  The griots symbolize how all human ancestry goes back to some
place, and some time, where there was no writing.  Then, the memories and the
mouths of ancient elders was the only way that early histories of mankind got
passed along .  .  .  for all of us today to know who we are.

CHAPTER 1

Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver
from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a man child was born to Omoro and
Binta Kinte.  Forcing forth from Binta's strong young body, he was as black
as she was, flecked and slippery with Binta's blood, and he was bawling.  The
two wrinkled midwives, old Nyo Boto and the baby's Grandmother Yaisa, saw
that it was a boy and laughed with joy.  According to the forefathers, a boy
firstborn presaged the special blessings of Allah not only upon the parents
but also upon the parents' families; and there was the prideful knowledge
that the name of Kinte would thus be both distinguished and perpetuated.

It was the hour before the first crowing of the cocks, and along with Nyo
Boto and Grandma Yaisa's clatterings, the first sound the child heard was the
muted, rhythmic bompabompabomp of wooden pestles as the other women of the
village pounded couscous grain in their mortars, preparing the traditional
breakfast of porridge that was cooked in earthen pots over a fire built among
three rocks.

The thin blue smoke went curling up, pungent and pleasant, over the small
dusty village of round mud huts as the nasal wailing of Kajali Demba, the
village alimamo, began, calling men to the first of the five daily prayers
that had been offered up to Allah for as long as anyone living could
remember.  Hastening from their beds of bamboo cane and cured hides into
their rough cotton tunics, the men of the village filed briskly to the
praying place, where the alimamo led the worship: "Allahu Akbar!  Ashadu an
lailahailala!"  (God is great!  I bear witness that there is only one God!  )
It was after this, as the men were returning toward their home compounds for
breakfast, that Omoro rushed among them, beaming and excited, to tell them of
12 ALEX HALEY

his firstborn son.  Congratulating him, all of the men echoed the omens of
good fortune.

Each man, back in his own hut, accepted a calabash of porridge from his wife.
Returning to their kitchens in the rear of the compound, the wives fed next
their children, and finally themselves.  When they had finished eating, the
men took up their short, bent-handled hoes, whose wooden blades had been
sheathed with metal by the village blacksmith, and set off for their day's
work of preparing the land for farming of the ground nuts and the couscous
and cotton that were the primary men's crops, as rice was that of the women,
in this hot, lush savanna country of The Gambia.

By ancient custom, for the next seven days, there was bui a.  singic task
with which Omoro would seriously occupy himself: the selection of a name for
his firstborn son.  It would have to be a name rich with history and with
promise, for the people of his tribe--the Mandinkas--believed that a child
would develop seven of the characteristics of whomever or whatever he was
named for.

On behalf of himself and Binta, during this week of thinking, Omoro visited
every household in Juffure, and invited each family to the naming ceremony of
the newborn child, traditionally on the eighth day of his life.  On that day,
like his father and his father's father, this new son would become a member
of the tribe.

When the eighth day arrived, the villagers gathered in the early morning
before the hut of Omoro and Binta.  On their heads, the women of both
families brought calabash containers of ceremonial sour milk and sweet munko
cakes of pounded rice and honey.  Karamo Silla, the jaliba of the village,
was there with his tan-tang drums; and the alimamo, and the arafang, Brima
Cesay, who would some day be the child's teacher; and also Omoro's two
brothers, Janneh and Saloum, who had journeyed from far away to attend the
ceremony when the drum talk news of their nephew's birth had reached them.

As Binta proudly held her new infant, a small patch of his first hair was
shaved off, as was always done on this day, and all of the women exclaimed at
how well formed the baby was.  Then they quieted as the jaliba/began to beat
his drums.  The alimamo said a prayer over the calabashes of sour milk and
munko cakes, and as he prayed, each guest touched a calabash brim with his or
her right hand, as KUU15 13

a gesture of respect for the food.  Then the alimamo turned to pray over the
infant, entreating Allah to grant him long life, success in bringing credit
and pride and many children to his family, to his village, to his tribe--and,
finally, the strength and the spirit to deserve and to bring honor to the
name he was about to receive.

Omoro then walked out before all of the assembled people of the village.
Moving to his wife's side, he lifted up the infant and, as all watched,
whispered three times into his son's ear the name he had chosen for him.  It
was the first time the name had ever been spoken as this child's name, for
Omoro's people felt that each human being should be the first to know who he
was.

The tan-tang drum resounded again; and now Omoro whispered the name into the
ear of Binta, and Binta smiled with pride and pleasure.  Then Omoro whispered
the name to the arafang, who stood before the villagers.

"The first child of Omoro and Binta Kinte is named Kunta!"  cried Brima Cesay.

As everyone knew, it was the middle name of the child's late grandfather,
Kairaba Kunta Kinte, who had come from his native Mauretania into The Gambia,
where he had saved the people of Juffure from a famine, married Grandma
Yaisa, and then served Juffure honorably till his death as the village's holy
man.

One by one, the arafang recited the names of the Mauretanian forefathers of
whom the baby's grandfather, old Kairaba Kinte, had often told.  The names,
which were great and many, went back more than two hundred rains.  Then the
jaliba pounded on his tan-tang and all of the people exclaimed their
admiration and respect at such a distinguished lineage.

Out under the moon and the stars, alone with his son that eighth night, Omoro
completed the naming ritual.  Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he
walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the
heavens, and said softly,

"Fend kiting dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee."  (Behold--the only thing
greater than yourself.  ) CHAPTER 2

It was the planting season, and the first rains were soon to come.  On all
their farming land, the men of Juffure had piled tall stacks of dry weeds and
set them afire so that the light wind would nourish the soil by scattering
the ashes.  And the women in their rice fields were already planting green
shoots in the mud.

While she was recovering from childbirth, Binta's rice plot had been attended
by Grandma Yaisa, but now Binta was ready to resume her duties.  With Kunta
cradled across her back in a cotton sling, she walked with the other
women--some of them, including her friend Jankay Tou- ray, carrying their own
newborns, along with the bundles they all balanced on their heads--to the
dugout canoes on the bank of the village belong, one of the many tributary
canals that came twisting inland from the Gambia River, known as the Kamby
Bolongo.

The canoes went skimming down the belong with five or six women in each one,
straining against their short, broad paddles.  Each time Binta bent forward
to dip and pull, she felt Kunta's warm softness pressing against her back.

The air was heavy with the deep, musky fragrance of the mangroves, and with
the perfumes of the other plants and trees that grew thickly on both sides of
the belong.  Alarmed by the passing canoes, huge families of baboons, roused
from sleep, began bellowing, springing about and shaking palm-tree fronds.
Wild pigs grunted and snorted, running to hide themselves among the weeds and
bushes.  Covering the muddy banks, thousands of pelicans, cranes, egrets,
herons, storks, gulls, terns, and spoonbills interrupted their breakfast
feeding to watch nervously as the canoes glided by.  Some of the smaller
birds took to the air--ring- doves, skimmers, rails, darters, and
kingfishers--circling with shrill cries until the intruders had passed.

As the canoes arrowed through rippling, busy patches of water, schools of
minnows would leap up together, perform a silvery dance, and then splash
back.  Chasing the minnows, sometimes so hungrily that they flopped right
into a moving canoe, were large, fierce fish that the women would club with
their paddles and stow away for a succulent evening meal.  But this morning
the minnows swam around them undisturbed.

The twisting belong took the rowing women around a turn into a wider
tributary, and as they came into sight, a great beating of wings filled the
air and a vast living carpet of seafowl-yhundreds of thousands of them, in
every color of the rainbow--rose and filled the sky.  The surface of the
water, darkened by the storm of birds and furrowed by their napping wings,
was flecked with feathers as the women paddled on.

As they neared the marshy faros where generations of Juffure women had grown
their rice crops, the canoes passed through swarming clouds of mosquitoes and
then, one after another, nosed in against a walkway of thickly matted weeds.
The weeds bounded and identified each woman's plot, where by now the emerald
shoots of young rice stood a hand's height above the water's surface.

Since the size of each woman's plot was decided each year by Juffure's
Council of Elders, according to how many mouths each woman had to feed with
rice, Binta's plot was still a small one.  Balancing herself carefully as she
stepped from the canoe with her new baby, Binta took a few steps" and then
stopped short, looking with surprise and delight at a tiny thatch-roofed
bamboo hut on stilts.  While she was in labor, Omoro had come here and built
it as a shelter for their son.  Typical of men, he had said nothing about it.

Nursing the baby, then nestling him inside his shelter, Binta changed into
the working clothes she had brought in the bundle on her head, and waded out
to work.  Bending nearly double in the water, she pulled up by the roots the
young weeds that, left alone, would outgrow and choke the rice crop.  And
whenever Kunta cried, Binta waded out, dripping water, to nurse him again in
the shadow of his shelter.

Little Kunta basked thus every day in his mother's tenderness.  Back in her
hut each evening, after cooking and serving Omoro's dinner, Binta would
soften her baby's skin 1B ALEX HALEY

by greasing him from head to toe with shea tree butter, and then--more often
than not--she would carry him proudly across the village to the hut of
Grandma Yaisa, who would bestow upon the baby still more cluckings and
kissings.  And both of them would set little Kunta to whimpering in
irritation with their repeated pressings of his little head, nose, ears, and
lips, to shape them correctly.

Sometimes Omoro would take his son away from the women and carry the
blanketed bundle to his own hut-- husbands always resided separately from
their wives-- where he would let the child's eyes and fingers explore such
attractive objects as the sap hie charms at the head of Omoro's bed, placed
there to ward off evil spirits.  Anything colorful intrigued little
Kunta--especially his father's leather huntsman's bag, nearly covered by now
with cowrie shells, each for an animal that Omoro had personally brought in
as food for the village.  And Kunta cooed over the long, curved bow and
quiver of arrows hanging nearby.  Omoro smiled when a tiny hand reached out
and grasped the dark, slender spear whose shaft was polished from so much
use.  He let Kunta touch everything except the prayer rug, which was sacred
to its owner.  And alone together in his hut, Omoro would talk to Kunta of
the fine and brave deeds his son would do when he grew up.

Finally he would return Kunta to Binta's hut for the next nursing.

Wherever he was, Kunta was happy most of the time, and he always fell asleep
either with Binta rocking him on her lap or bending over him on her bed,
singing softly such a lullaby as, My smiling child, Named for a noble
ancestor.

Great hunter or warrior You will be one day, Which will give your papa pride.

But always I will remember you thus.

However much Binta loved her baby and her husband, she also felt a very real
anxiety, for Moslem husbands, by ancient custom, would often select and marry
a second wife during that time when their first wives had babies still
nursing.  As yet Omoro had taken no other wife; and since Binta didn't want
him tempted, she felt that the sooner little Kunta was able to walk alone,
the better, for that was when the nursing would end.

So Binta was quick to help him as soon as Kunta, at about thirteen moons,
tried his first unsteady steps.  And.  before long, he was able to toddle
about without an assisting hand.  Binta was as relieved as Omoro was proud,
and when Kunta cried for his next feeding, Binta gave her son not a breast
but a sound spanking and a gourd of cow's milk.

CHAPTER 3

Three rains had passed, and it was that lean season when the village's store
of grain and other dried foods from the last harvest was almost gone.  The
men had hunted, but they had returned with only a few small antelopes and
gazelle and some clumsy bush fowl for in this season of burning sun, so many
of the savanna's water holes had dried into mud that the bigger and better
game had moved into deep forest--at the very time when the people of Juffure
needed all their strength to plant crops for the new harvest.  Already, the
wives were stretching their staple meals of couscous and rice with the
tasteless seeds of bamboo cane and with the bad-tasting dried leaves of the
baobab tree.  The days of hunger had begun so early that five goats and two
bullocks--more than last time--were sacrificed to strengthen everyone's
prayers that Allah might spare the village from starvation.

Finally the hot skies clouded, the light breezes became brisk winds and,
abruptly as always, the little rains began, falling warmly and gently as the
farmers hoed the softened earth into long, straight rows in readiness for the
seeds.  They knew the planting must be done before the big rains came.

The next few mornings, after breakfast, instead of canoeing to their rice
fields, the farmers' wives dressed in the 18 .  ALfcA HALT traditional
fertility costumes of large fresh leaves, symbolizing the green of growing
things, and set out for the furrowed fields of the men.  Their voices would
be heard rising and falling even before they appeared as they chanted
ancestral prayers that the couscous and ground nuts and other seeds in the
earthen bowls balanced on their heads would take strong roots and grow.

With their bare feet moving in step, the line of women walked and sang three
times around every farmer's field.  Then they separated, and each woman fell
in behind a farmer as he moved along each row, punching a hole in the earth
every few inches with his big toe.  Into each hole a woman dropped a seed,
covered it over with her own big toe, and then moved on.  The women worked
even harder than the men, for they not only had to help their husbands but
also tend both the rice fields and the vegetable gardens they cultivated near
their kitchens.

While Binta planted her onions, yams, gourds, cassava, and bitter tomatoes,
little Kunta spent his days romping under the watchful eyes of the several
old grandmothers who took care of all the children of Juffure who belonged to
the first kafo, which included those under five rains in age.  The boys and
girls alike scampered about as naked as young animals--some of them just
beginning to say their first words.  All, like Kunta, were growing fast,
laughing and squealing as they ran after each other around the giant trunk of
the village baobab, played hide-and-seek, and scattered the dogs and chickens
into masses of fur and feathers.

But all the children--even those as small as Kunta-- would quickly scramble
to sit still and quiet when the telling of a story was promised by one of the
old grandmothers.  Though unable yet to understand many of the words, Kunta
would watch with wide eyes as the old women acted out their stories with such
gestures and noises that they really seemed to be happening.

As little as he was, Kunta was already familiar with some of the stories that
his own Grandma Yaisa had told to him alone when he had been visiting in her
hut.  But along with his first-kafo playmates, he felt that the best
story-teller of all was the beloved, mysterious, and peculiar old Nyo Boto.
Bald-headed, deeply wrinkled, as black as the bottom of a cooking pot, with
her long lemongrass-root chew stick sticking out like an insect's feeler
between the few teeth she had left--which were deep orange from the
countless kola nuts she had gnawed on--old Nyo Boto would settle herself with
much grunting on her low stool.  Though she acted gruff, the children knew
that she loved them as if they were her own, which she claimed they all were.

Surrounded by them, she would growl,

"Let me tell a story .  .  ."

"Please!"  the children would chorus, wriggling in anticipation.

And she would begin in the way that all Mandinka story-tellers began: "At
this certain time, in this certain village, lived this certain person."  It
was a small boy, she said, of about their rains, who walked to the riverbank
one day and found a crocodile trapped in a net.

"Help me!"  the crocodile cried out.

"You'll kill me!"  cried the boy.

"No!  Come nearer!"  said the crocodile.

So the boy went up to the crocodile--and instantly was seized by the teeth in
that long mouth.

"Is this how you repay my goodness--with badness?"  cried the boy.

"Of course," said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth.

"That is the way of the world."

The boy refused to believe that, so the crocodile agreed not to swallow him
without getting an opinion from the first three witnesses to pass by.  First
was an old donkey.

When the boy asked his opinion, the donkey said,

"Now that I'm old and can no longer work, my master has driven me out for the
leopards to get me!"

"See?"  said the crocodile.  Next to pass by was an old horse, who had the
same opinion.

"See?"  said the crocodile.  Then along came a plump rabbit who said, "Well,
I can't give a good opinion without seeing this matter as it happened from
the beginning."

Grumbling, the crocodile opened his mouth to tell him --and the boy jumped
out to safety on the riverbank.

"Do you like crocodile meat?"  asked the rabbit.  The boy said yes.

"And do your parents?"  He said yes again.

"Then here is a crocodile ready for the pot."

The boy ran off and returned with the men of the village, who helped him to
kill the crocodile.  But they brought with them a wuolo dog, which chased and
caught and killed the rabbit, too.

^20 ALEX HALEY

"So the crocodile was right," said Nyo Boto.

"It is the way of the world that goodness is often repaid with badness.  This
is what I have told you as a story."

"May you be blessed, have strength and pros peri said the children gratefully.

Then the other grandmothers would pass among the children with bowls of
freshly toasted beetles and grasshoppers.  These would have been only tasty
tidbits at another time of year, but now, on the eve of the big rains, with
the hungry season already beginning, the toasted insects had to serve as a
noon meal, for only a few handfuls of couscous and rice remained in most
families' storehouses.

CHAPTER 4

Fresh, brief showers fell almost every morning now, and between the showers
Kunta and his playmates would dash about excitedly outside.

"Mine!  Mine!"  they would shout at the pretty rainbows that would arc down
to the earth, seeming never very far away.  But the showers also brought
swarms of flying insects whose vicious stinging and biting soon drove the
children back indoors.

Then, suddenly, late one night, the big rains began, and the people huddled
inside their cold huts listening to the water pound on their thatch roofs,
watching the lightning flash and comforting their children as the frightening
thunder rumbled through the night.  Between cloudbursts, they heard only the
barking of the jackals, the howling of the hyenas, and the croaking of the
frogs.

The rains came again the next night, and the next, and the next--and only at
night--flooding the lowlands near the river, turning their fields into a
swamp and their village into a mud hole Yet each morning before breakfast,
all the farmers struggled through the mud to Juffure's little mosque and
implored Allah to send still more rain, for life itself depended upon enough
water to soak deeply into the earth before the hot suns arrived, which would
wither those crops whose roots could not find enough water to survive.

In the damp nursery hut, dimly lighted and poorly heated by the burning dry
sticks and cattle-dung patties in the earthen floor's shallow fire hole old
Nyo Boto told Kunta and the other children of the terrible time she
remembered when there were not enough big rains.  No matter how bad anything
was, Nyo Boto would always remember a time when it was worse.  After two days
of big rain, she told them, the burning suns had come.  Although the people
prayed very hard to Allah, and danced the ancestral rain dance, and
sacrificed two goats and a bullock every day, still everything growing in the
ground began to parch and die.  Even the forest's water holes dried up, said
Nyo Boto, and first wild fowl, and then the forest's animals, sick from
thirst, began to appear at the village well.  In crystal-clear skies each
night, thousands of bright stars shone, and a cold wind blew, and more and
more people grew ill.  Clearly, evil spirits were abroad in Juffure.

Those who were able continued their prayers and their dances, and finally the
last goat and bullock had been sacrificed.  It was as if Allah had turned His
back on Juffure.  Some--the old and the weak and the sick--began to die.
Others left town, seeking another village to beg someone who had food to
accept them as slaves, just to get something into their bellies, and those
who stayed behind lost their spirit and lay down in their huts.  It was then,
said Nyo Boto, that Allah had guided the steps of mar about Kairaba Kunta
Kinte into the starving village of Juffure.  Seeing the people's plight, he
kneeled down and prayed to Allah-- almost without sleep and taking only a few
sips of water as nourishment--for the next five days.  And on the evening of
the fifth day came a great rain, which fell like a flood, and saved Juffure.

When she finished her story, the other children looked with new respect at
Kunta, who bore the name of that distinguished grandfather, husband of
Kunta's Grandma Yaisa.  Even before now, Kunta had seen how the parents of
the other children acted toward Yaisa, and he had sensed that she was an
important woman, just as old Nyo Boto surely was.

The big rains continued to fall every night until Kunta 22 ALEX HALEY

and the other children began to see grownups wading across the village in mud
up to their ankles and even to their knees, and even using canoes to paddle
from place to place.  Kunta had heard Binta tell Omoro that the rice fields
were flooded in the bolong's high waters.  Cold and hungry, the children's
fathers sacrificed precious goats and bullocks to Allah almost every day,
patched leaking roofs, shored up sagging huts--and prayed that their
disappearing stock of rice and couscous would last until the harvest.

But Kunta and the others, being yet little children, paid less attention to
the hunger pangs in their bellies than to playing in the mud, wrestling each
other and sliding on their naked bottoms.  Yet in their longing to see the
sun again, they would wave up at the slate-colored sky and shout--as they had
seen their parents do"--Shine, sun, and I will kill you a goat!"

The life-giving rain had made every growing thing fresh and luxuriant.  Birds
sang everywhere.  The trees and plants were explosions of fragrant blossoms.
The reddish-brown, clinging mud underfoot was newly carpeted each morning,
with the bright-colored petals and green leaves beaten loose by the rain of
the night before.

But amid all the lushness of nature, sickness spread steadily among the
people of Juffure, for none of the richly growing crops was ripe enough to
eat.  The adults and children alike would stare hungrily at the thousands of
plump mangoes and monkey apples hanging heavy on the trees, but the green
fruits were as hard as rocks, and those who bit into them fell ill and
vomited.

"Nothing but skin and bones!"  Grandma Yaisa would exclaim, making a loud
clicking noise with her tongue every time she saw Kunta.  But in fact his
grandma was almost as thin as he; for every storehouse in Juffure was now
completely empty.  What few of the village's cattle and goats and chickens
had not been eaten or sacrificed had to be kept alive--and fed--if there was
to be a next year's crop of kids and calves and baby chicks.  So the people
began to eat rodents, roots, and leaves foraged from in and around the
village on searchings that began when the sun rose and ended when it set.

If the men had gone to the forests to hunt wild game, as they frequently did
at other times of the year, they wouldn't have had the strength to drag it
back to the village.  Tribal taboos forbade the Mandinkas to eat the
abounding monkeys and baboons; nor would they touch the many hens' eggs that
lay about, or the millions of big green bullfrogs that Mandinkas regarded as
poisonous.

And as devout Moslems, they would rather have died than eat the flesh of the
wild pigs that often came rooting in herds right through the village.

For ages, families of cranes had nested in the topmost branches of the
village's silk-cotton tree, and when the young hatched, the big cranes
shuttled back and forth bringing fish, which they had just caught in the
belong, to feed their babies.  Watching for the right moment, the
grandmothers and the children would rush beneath the tree, whooping and
hurling small sticks and stones upward at the nest.  And often, in the noise
and confusion, a young crane's gaping mouth would miss the fish, and the fish
would miss the nest and come slapping down-among the tall tree's thick
foliage to the ground.  The children would struggle over the prize, and
someone's family would have a feast for dinner.  If one of the stones thrown
up by the children happened to hit a gawky, pin-feathered young crane, it
would sometimes fall from the high nest along with the fish, killing or
injuring itself in the crash against the ground; and that night a few
families would have crane soup.  But such meals were rare.

By the late evening, each family would meet back at their hut, bringing
whatever each individual had found--perhaps even a mole or a handful of large
grub worms if they were lucky--for that night's pot of soup, heavily peppered
and spiced to improve the taste.  But such fare filled their bellies without
bringing nourishment.  And so it was that the people of Juffure began to die.

CHAPTER 5

More and more often now, the high-pitched howling of a woman would be heard
throughout the village.  The fortunate were those babies and toddlers yet too
young to understand, for even Kunta was old enough to know that the howling
meant a loved one had just died.  In the afternoons, usually, some sick
farmer who had been out cutting weeds in his field would be carried back to
the village on a bullock's hide, lying very still.

And disease had begun to swell the legs of some adults.  Yet others developed
fevers with heavy perspiration and trembling chills.  And among all the
children, small areas on their arms or tegs would puff up, rapidly grow
larger and painfully sore; then the puffed areas would split, leaking a
pinkish fluid that soon became a full, yellow, stinking pus that drew buzzing
flies.

The hurting of the big open sore on Kunta's leg made him stumble while trying
to run one day.  Falling hard, he was picked up by his playmates, stunned and
yelling, with his forehead bleeding.  Since Binta and Omoro were away
farming, they rushed him to the hut of Grandma Yaisa, who for a number of
days now had not appeared in the nursery hut.

She looked very weak, her black face gaunt and drawn, and she was sweating
under her bullock hide on her bamboo pallet.  But when she saw Kunta, she
sprang up to wipe his bleeding forehead.  Embracing him tightly, she ordered
the other children to run and bring her some kelelalu ants.  When they
returned.  Grandma Yaisa tightly pressed together the skin's split edges,
then pressed one struggling driver ant after another against the wound.  As
each ant angrily clamped its strong pincers into the flesh on each side of
the cut, she deftly snapped off its body, leaving the head in place, until
the wound was stitched together.

Dismissing the other children, she told Kunta to lie down and rest alongside
her on the bed.  He lay and listened to her labored breathing as she remained
silent for some time.  Then Grandma Yaisa's hand gestured toward a pile of
books on the shelf beside her bed.

Speaking slowly, and softly, she told Kunta more about his grandfather, whose
books she said those were.

In his native country of Mauretania, Kairaba Kunta Kinte had thirty-five
rains of age v/hen his teacher, a master mar about gave him the blessing that
made him a holy man, said Grandma Yaisa.

Kunta's grandfather had followed a family tradition of holy men that dated
back many hundreds of rains into Old Mali.  As a man of the fourth kafo, he
had begged the old mar about to accept him as a student, and for the next
fifteen rains had traveled with his party of wives, slaves, students, cattle
and goats as he pilgrim aged from village to village in the service of Allah
and his subjects.  Over dusty foot trails and muddy creeks, under hot suns
and cold rains, through green valleys and windy wastelands, said Grandma
Yaisa, they had trekked southward from Mauretania.

Upon receiving his ordination as a holy man, Kairaba Kunta Kinte had himself
wandered for many moons alone, among places in Old Mali such as Keyla,
Djeela, Kangaba, and Timbuktu, humbly prostrating himself before very great
old holy men and imploring their blessings for his success, which they all
freely gave.  And Allah then guided the young holy man's footsteps in a
southerly direction, finally to The Gambia, where he stopped first in the
village of Pakali N'Ding.

In a short while, the people of this village knew, by the quick results from
his prayers, that this young holy man had upon him Allah's special favor.
Talking drums spread the news, and soon other villages tried to lure him
away, sending messengers with offers of prime maidens for wives, and slaves
and cattle and goats.  And before long he did move, this time to the village
of Jiffarong, but only because Allah had called him there, for the people of
Jiffarong had little to offer him but their gratitude for his prayers.  It
was here that he heard of the village of Juffure, where people were sick and
dying for lack of a big rain.  And so at last he came to Juffure, said
Grandma Yaisa, where for five 26 ALEX HALEY

days, ceaselessly, he had prayed until Allah sent down the big rain that
saved the village.

Learning of Kunta's grandfather's great deed, the King of Barra himself, who
ruled this part of The Gambia, personally presented a choice virgin for the
young holy man's first wife, and her name was Sireng.  By Sireng, Kairaba
Kunta Kinte begot two sons--and he named them Janneh and Saloum.

By now, Grandma Yaisa had sat up on her bamboo pallet.

"It was then,"

she said with shining eyes, "that he saw Yaisa, dancing the seoruba!

My age was fifteen rains!  " She smiled widely, showing her toothless gums.

"He needed no king to choose his next wife!"  She looked at Kunta.

"It was from my belly that he begot your papa Omoro."

That night, back in his mother's hut, Kunta lay awake for a long time,
thinking of the things Grandma Yaisa had told him.  Many times, Kunta had
heard about the grandfather holy man whose prayers had saved the village, and
whom later Allah had taken back.  But Kunta had never truly understood until
now that this man was his father's father, that Omoro had known him as he
knew Omoro, that Grandma Yaisa was Omoro's mother as Binta was his own.  Some
day, he too would find a woman such as Binta to bear him a son of his own.
And that son, in turn .  .  .

Turning over and closing his eyes, Kunta followed these deep thoughts slowly
into sleep.

CHAPTER 6

Just before sundown for the next few days, after returning from the rice
field, Binta would send Kunta to the village well for a calabash of fresh
water, which she would use to boil a soup from whatever scraps she could
find.  Then she and Kunta would take some of the soup across the village to
Grandma Yaisa.  Binta moved more slowly than usual, it seemed to Kunta, and
he noticed that her belly was very big and heavy.

While Grandma Yaisa protested weakly that she would soon feel well again,
Binta would clean up the hut and arrange things.  And they would leave
Grandma Yaisa propped up on her bed, eating a bowl of soup along with some of
Binta's hungry-season bread, made from the yellow powder that covered the dry
black beans of the wild locust tree.

Then one night, Kunta awakened to find himself being shaken roughly by his
father.  Binta was making low, moaning sounds on her bed, and also within the
hut, moving quickly about, were Nyo Boto and Binta's friend Jankay Touray.
Omoro hurried across the village with Kunta, who, wondering what all of this
was about, soon drifted back to sleep on his father's bed.

In the morning, Omoro again awakened Kunta and said, "You have a new
brother."  Scrambling sleepily onto his knees and rubbing his eyes, Kunta
thought it must be something very special to so please his usually stern
father.  In the afternoon, Kunta was with his kafo mates, looking for things
to eat, when Nyo Boto called him and took him to see Binta.  Looking very
tired, she sat on the edge of her bed gently caressing the baby in her lap.
Kunta stood a moment studying the little wrinkly black thing; then he looked
at the two women smiling at it, and he noticed that the familiar bigness of
Binta's stomach was suddenly gone.  Going back outside without a word, Kunta
stood for a long moment and then, instead of rejoining his friends, went off
to sit by himself behind his father's hut and think about what he had seen.

Kunta continued sleeping in Omoro's but for the next seven nights--not that
anyone seemed to notice or care, in their concern for the new baby.  He was
beginning to think that his mother didn't want him any more--or his father,
either--until, on the evening of the eighth day, Omoro called him before his
mother's hut, along with everyone else in Juffure who was physically able, to
hear the new baby given his chosen name, which was Lamin.

That night Kunta slept peacefully and well--back in his own bed beside his
mother and his new brother.  But within a few days, as soon as her strength
had returned, Binta be28 ALEX HALEY gan to take the baby, after cooking and
serving something for Omoro's and Kunta's breakfast, and spent most of each
day in the hut of Grandma Yaisa.  From the worried expressions that both
Binta and Omoro wore, Kunta knew that Grandma Yaisa was very sick.

Late one afternoon, a few days later, he and his kafo mates were out picking
mangoes, which had finally ripened.  Bruising the tough, orange-yellow skin
against the nearest rock, they would bite open one plump end to squeeze and
suck out the soft sweet flesh within.  They were collecting basketfuls of
monkey apples and wild cashew nuts when Kunta suddenly heard the howling of a
familiar voice from the direction of his grandma's hut.  A chill shot.
through him, for it was the voice of his mother, raised in the death wail
that he had heard so often in recent weeks.  Other women immediately joined
in a keening cry that soon spread all the way across the village.  Kunta ran
blindly toward his grandmother's hut.

Amid the milling confusion, Kunta saw an anguished Omoro and a bitterly
weeping old Nyo Boto.  Within moments, the tobalo drum was being beaten and
the jaliba was loudly crying out the good deeds of Grandma Yaisa's long life
in Juffure.  Numb with shock, Kunta stood watching blankly as the young
unmarried women of the village beat up dust from the ground with wide fans of
plaited grass, as was the custom on the occasion of a death.  No one seemed
to notice Kunta.

As Binta and Nyo Boto and two other shrieking women entered the hut, the
crowd outside fell to their knees and bowed their heads.  Kunta burst
suddenly into tears, as much in fear as in grief.  Soon men came with a
large, freshly split log and set it down in front of the hut.

Kunta watched as the women brought out and laid on the log's flat surface the
body of his grandmother, enclosed from her neck to her feet in a white cotton
winding cloth.

Through his tears, Kunta saw the mourners walk seven circles around Yaisa,
praying and chanting as the alimamo wailed that she was journeying to spend
eternity with Allah and her ancestors.  To give her strength for that
journey, young unmarried men tenderly placed cattle horns filled with fresh
ashes all around her body.

After most of the mourners had filed away, Nyo Boto and other old women took
up posts nearby, huddling and weeping and squeezing their heads with their
hands.  Soon, young women brought the biggest ciboa leaves that could be
found, to protect the old women's heads from rain through their vigil.  And
as the old women sat, the village drums talked about Grandma Yaisa far into
the night.

In the misty morning, according to the custom of the forefathers, only the
men of Juffure those who were able to walk joined the procession to the
burying place, not far past the village, where otherwise none would go, out
of the Mandinkas' fearful respect for the spirits of their ancestors.  Behind
the men who bore Grandma Yuisa on the log came Omoro, carrying the infant
Lamin and holding the hand of little Kunta, who was too frightened to cry.
And behind them came the other men of the village.  The stiff, white-wrapped
body was lowered into the freshly dug hole, and over her went a thick woven
cane mat.  Next were thorn bushes, to keep out the digging hyenas, and the
rest of the hole was packed tight with stones and a mound of fresh earth.

Afterward, for many days, Kunta hardly ate or slept, and he would not go
anywhere with his kafo mates.  So grieved was he that Omoro, one evening,
took him to his own hut, and there beside his bed, speaking to his son more
softly and gently than he ever had before, told him something that helped to
ease his grief.

He said that three groups of people lived in every village.  First were those
you could see walking around, eating, sleeping, and working.  Second were the
ancestors, whom Grandma Yaisa had now joined.

"And the third people who are they?"  asked Kunta.

"The third people," said Omoro, "are those waiting to be born."

CHAPTER 7

The rains had ended, and between the bright blue sky and the damp earth, the
air was heavy with the fragrance of lush wild blooms and fruits.  The early
mornings echoed with the sound of the women's mortars pounding millet and
couscous and ground nuts--not from the main harvest, but from those
early-growing seeds that the past year's harvest had left living in the soil.
The men hunted, bringing back fine, plump antelope, and after passing out
the meat, they scraped and cured the hides.  And the women busily collected
the ripened reddish mangkano berries, shaking the bushes over cloths spread
beneath, then drying the berries in the sun before pounding them to separate
the delicious futo flour from the seeds.  Nothing was wasted.

Soaked and boiled with pounded millet, the seeds were cooked into a sweetish
breakfast gruel that Kunta and everyone else welcomed as a seasonal change of
diet from their usual morning meal of couscous porridge.

As food became more plentiful each day, new life flowed 1} into Juffure in
ways that could be seen and heard.  The men began to walk more briskly to and
from their farms, pride- fully inspecting their bountiful crops, which would
soon be ready for harvesting.  With the flooded river now subsiding rapidly,
the women were rowing daily to the faro and pulling out the last of the weeds
from among the tall, green rows of rice.

And the village rang again with the yelling and laughing of the children back
at play after the long hungry season.  Bellies now filled with nourishing
food, sores dried into scabs and falling away, they dashed and frolicked
about as if possessed.  One day they would capture some big scarab dung
beetles, line them up for a race, and cheer the fastest to run outside a
circle drawn in the dirt with a stick.  Another day, Kunta and Sitafa Silla,
his special friend, who lived in the hut next to Binta's, would raid a tall
earth mound to dig up the blind, wingless termites that lived inside, and
watch them pour out by the thousands and scurry frantically to get away.

Sometimes the boys would rout out little ground squirrels and chase them into
the bush.  And they loved nothing better than to hurl stones arid shouts at
passing schools of small, brown, long-tailed monkeys, some of which would
throw a stone back before swinging up to join their screeching brothers in
the topmost branches of a tree.  And every day the boys would wrestle,
grabbing each other, sprawling down, grunting, scrambling, and springing up
to start all over again, each one dreaming of the day when he might become
one of Juffure's champion wrestlers and be chosen to wage mighty battles with
the champions of other villages during the harvest festivals.

Adults passing anywhere near the children would solemnly pretend not to see
nor hear as Sitafa, Kunta, and the rest of their kafo growled and roared like
lions, trumpeted like elephants, and grunted like wild pigs, or as the
girls--cooking and tending their dolls and beating their couscous--played
mothers and wives among themselves.  But however hard they were playing, the
children never failed to pay every adult the respect their mothers had taught
them to show always toward their elders.  Politely looking the adults in the
eyes, the children would ask,

"Kerabe?"  (Do you have peace?  ) And the adults would reply,

"Kera dorong."  (Peace only.  ) And if an adult offered his hand, each child
in turn would clasp it with both hands, then stand with palms folded over his
chest until that adult passed by.

Kunta's home-training had been so strict that, it seemed to him, his every
move drew Binta's irritated finger-snapping--if, indeed, he wasn't grabbed
and soundly whipped.  When he was eating, he would get a cuff on the head if
Binta caught his eyes on anything except his own food.  And unless he washed
off every bit of dirt when he came into the hut from a hard day's play, Binta
would snatch up her scratchy sponge of dried plant stems and her bar of
homemade soap and make Kunta think she was going to scrape off his very hide.

For him ever to stare at her, or at his father, or at any other adult, would
earn him a slap as quickly as when he 32 ALEX HALEY

committed the equally serious offense of interrupting the conversation of any
grown-up.  And for him ever to speak anything but truth would have been
unthinkable.  Since there never seemed any reason for him to lie, he never
did.

Though Binta didn't seem to think so, Kunta tried his best to be a good boy,
and soon began to practice his home-training lessons with the other children.
When disagreements occurred among them, as they often did--some- times
fanning into exchanges of harsh words and fingersnapping--Kunta would always
turn and walk away, thus displaying the dignity and self-command that his
mother had taught him were the proudest traits of the Mandinka tribe.

But almost every night, Kunta got spanked for doing something bad to his baby
brother--usually for frightening him by snarling fiercely, or by dropping on
all fours like a baboon, rolling his eyes, and stomping his fists like
forepaws upon the ground.

"I will bring the toubob!"  Binta would yell at Kunta when he had tried her
patience to the breaking point, scaring Kunta most thoroughly, for the old
grandmothers spoke often of the hairy, red-faced, strangelooking white men
whose big canoes stole people away from their homes.

CHAPTER 8

Though Kunta and his mates were tired and hungry from play by the time of
each day's setting sun, they would still race one another to climb small
trees and point at the sinking crimson ball.

"He will be even lovelier tomorrow!"  they would shout.  And even Juffure's
adults ate dinner quickly so that they might congregate outside in the
deepening dusk to shout and clap and pound on drums at the rising of the
crescent moon, symbolic of Allah.

But when clouds shrouded that new moon, as they did this night, the people
dispersed, alarmed, and the men entered the mosque to pray for forgiveness,
since a shrouded new moon meant that the heavenly spirits were displeased
with the people of Juffure.  After praying, the men led their frightened
families to the baobab, where already on this night the jaliba squatted by a
small fire, heating to its utmost tautness the goatskin head of his talking
drum.

Rubbing at his eyes, which smarted from the smoke of the fire, Kunta
remembered the times that drums talking at night from different villages had
troubled his sleep.  Awakening, he would lie there, listening hard; the
sounds and rhythms were so like those of speech that he would finally
understand some of the words, telling of a famine' or a plague, or of the
raiding and burning of some village, with its people killed or stolen away.

Hanging on a branch of the baobab, beside the jaliba, was a goatskin
inscribed with the marks that talk, written there in Arabic by the arafang.
In the flickering firelight, Kunta watched as the jaliba began to beat the
knobby elbows of his crooked sticks very rapidly and sharply against
different spots on the drumhead.  It was an urgent message for the nearest
magic man to come to Juffure and drive out evil spirits.

Not daring to look up at the moon, the people hurried home and fearfully went
to bed.  But at intervals through the night, the talk of distant drums echoed
the appeal of Juffure for a magic man in other villages as well.  Shivering
beneath his cows king Kunta guessed that their new moon was shrouded, too.

The next day, the men of Omoro's age had to help the younger men of the
village to guard their nearly ripened fields against the seasonal plague of
hungry baboons and birds.  The second-kafo boys were told to be especially
vigilant as they grazed the goats, and the mothers and grandmothers hovered
closer than they normally would over the toddlers and the babies.  The first
kafo's biggest children, those the size of Kunta and Sitafa, were instructed
to play a little way out past the village's tall fence, where they could keep
a sharp lookout for any stranger approaching the travelers' tree, not far
distant.

They did, but none came that day.

He appeared on the second morning--a very old man, walking with the help of a
wooden staff and bearing a large bundle on his bald head.

Spotting him, the children raced 34 ALEX HALEY

shouting back through the village gate.  Leaping up, old Nyo Boto hobbled
over and began to beat on the big tobalo drum that brought the men rushing
back to the village from their fields a moment before the magic man reached
the gate and entered Juffure.

As the villagers gathered around him, he walked over to the baobab and set
down his bundle carefully on the ground.  Abruptly squatting, he then shook
from a wrinkled goatskin bag a heap of dried objects--a small snake, a
hyena's jawbone, a monkey's teeth, a pelican's wing bone various fowls' feet,
and strange roots.  Glancing about, he gestured impatiently for the hushed
crowd to give him more room; and the people moved back as he began to quiver
all over--clearly being attacked by Juffure's evil spirits.

The magic man's body writhed, his face contorted, his eyes rolled wildly, as
his trembling hands struggled to force his resisting wand into contact with
the heap of mysterious objects.  When the wand's tip, with a supreme effort,
finally touched, he fell over backward and lay as if struck by lightning.
The people gasped.  But then he slowly began to revive.  The evil spirits had
been driven out.  As he struggled weakly to his knees, Juffure's
adults--exhausted but relieved--went running off to their huts and soon
returned with gifts to press upon him.  The magic man added these to his
bundle, which was already large and heavy with gifts from previous villages,
and soon he was on his way to answer the next call.  In his mercy, Allah had
seen fit to spare Juffure once again.

CHAPTER 9

Twelve moons had passed, and with the big rains ended once again.  The
Gambia's season for travelers had begun.  Along the network of walking paths
between its villages came enough-visitors--passing by or stopping off in
Juffure --to keep Kunta and his playmates on the lookout almost every day.

After alerting the village when a stranger appeared, they would rush back out
to meet each visitor as he approached the travelers' tree.

Trooping boldly alongside him, they would chatter away inquisitively as their
sharp eyes hunted for any signs of his mission or profession.  If they found
any, they would abruptly abandon the visitor and race back ahead to tell the
grownups in that day's hospitality hut.  In accordance with ancient
tradition, a different family in each village would be chosen every day to
offer food and shelter to arriving visitors at no cost for as long as they
wished to stay before continuing their journey.

Having been entrusted with the responsibility of serving as the village
lookouts, Kunta, Sitafa, and their kafo mates began to feel and act older
than their rains.  Now after breakfast each morning, they would gather by the
arafang's schoolyard and kneel quietly to listen as he taught the older
boys--those of the second kafo, just beyond Kunta's age, five to nine rains
old--how to read their Koranic verses and to write with grass-quill pens
dipped in the black ink of bitter-orange juice mixed with powdered crust from
the bottom of cooking pots.

When the schoolboys finished their lessons and ran on--- with the tails of
their cotton dundikos flapping behind them --to herd the village's goats out
into the brush lands for the day's grazing, Kunta and his mates tried to act
very unconcerned, but the truth was that they envied the older boys' long
shirts as much as they did their important jobs.  Though he said nothing,
Kunta was not alone in feeling that he was too grown up to be treated like a
child and made to go naked any longer.  They avoided suckling babies like
Lamin as if they were diseased, and the toddlers they regarded as even more
unworthy of notice, unless it was to give them a good whack when no adults
were watching.  Shunning even the attentions of the old grandmothers who had
taken care of them for as long as they could remember, Kunta, Sitafa, and the
others began to hang around grownups of their parents' age in hopes of being
seen underfoot and perhaps sent off on an errand.

It was just before the harvest came that Omoro told Kunta very casually, one
night after dinner, that he wanted him up early the next day to help guard
the crops.  Kunta 3tj ALtX HALfcT was so excited he could hardly sleep.
After gulping down his breakfast in the morning, he almost burst with joy
when Omoro, handed him the hoe to carry when they set out for the fields.
Kunta and his mates fairly flew up and down the ripe rows, yelling and waving
sticks at the wild pigs and baboons that came grunting from the brush to root
or snatch up ground nuts With dirt clods and shouts, they routed whistling
flocks of blackbirds as they wheeled low over the couscous, for the
grandmothers' stories had told of ripened fields ruined as quickly by hungry
birds as by any animal.  Collecting the handfuls of couscous and ground nuts
that their fathers had cut or pulled up to test for ripeness, and carrying
gourds of cool water for the men to drink, they worked all through the day
with a swiftness equaled only by their pride.

Six days later, Allah decreed that the harvest should begin.  After the
dawn's suba prayer, the farmers and their sons--some chosen few carrying
small tan-tang and sour- aba drums--went out to the fields and waited with
heads cocked, listening.  Finally, the village's great tobalo drum boomed and
the farmers leaped to the harvesting.  As the jaliba and the other drummers
walked among them, beating out a rhythm to match their movements, everyone
began to sing.  In exhilaration now and then, a farmer would fling his hoe,
whirling up on one drumbeat and catching it on the next.

Kunta's kafo sweated alongside their fathers, shaking the groundnut bushes
free of dirt.  Halfway through the morning came the first rest--and then, at
midday, happy shouts of relief as the women and girls arrived with lunch.
Walking in single file, also singing harvest songs, they took the pots from
their heads, ladled the contents into calabashes, and served them to the
drummers and harvesters, who ate and then napped until the tobalo sounded
once again.

Piles of the harvest dotted the fields at the end of that first day.

Streaming sweat and mud, the farmers trudged wearily to the nearest stream,
where they took off their clothes and leaped into the water, laughing and
splashing to cool and clean themselves.  Then they headed home, swatting at
the biting flies that buzzed around their glistening bodies.  The closer they
came to the smoke that drifted toward them from the women's kitchens, the
more tantalizing were the smells of the roasted meats that would be served
three times daily for however long it took to finish the harvest.

After stuffing himself that night, Kunta noticed--as he had for several
nights--that his mother was sewing something.  She said nothing about it, nor
did Kunta ask.  But the next morning, as he picked up his hoe and began to
walk out the door, she looked at him and said gruffly,

"Why don't you put on your clothes?"

Kunta jerked around.  There, hanging from a peg, was a brand-new dundiko.
Struggling to conceal his excitement, he matter-of-factly put it on and
sauntered out the door-- where he burst into a run.

Others of his kafo were already outside--all of them, like him, dressed for
the first time in their lives, all of them leaping, shouting, and laughing
because their nakedness was covered at last.

They were now officially of the second kafo.  They were becoming men.

CHAPTER 10

By the time Kunta sauntered back into his mother's hut that night, he had
made sure that everyone in Juffure had seen him in his dundiko.

Though he hadn't stopped working all day, he wasn't a bit tired, and he knew
he'd never be able to go to sleep at his regular bedtime.

Perhaps now that he was a grown-up, Binta would let him stay up later.  But
soon after Lamin was asleep, the same as always, she sent him to bed--with a
reminder to hang up his dundiko.

As he turned to go, sulking as conspicuously as he thought he could get away
with, Binta called him back-- probably to reprimand him for sulking, Kunta
thought, or maybe she'd taken pity on him and changed her mind.  "Your Pa
wants to see you in the morning," she said casually.  Kunta knew better than
to ask why, so he just said, "Yes, Mama," and wished her good night.  It was
just as 38 ALEX HALEY

well he wasn't tired, because he couldn't sleep now anyway, lying under his
cowhide coverlet wondering what he had done now that was wrong, as it seemed
he did so often.  But racking his brain, he couldn't think of a single thing,
especially nothing so bad that Binta herself wouldn't have whacked him for
it, since a father would involve himself only with something pretty terrible.
Finally he gave up worrying and drifted off to sleep.

At breakfast the next morning, Kunta was so subdued that he almost forgot the
joy of his dundiko, until naked little Lamin happened to brush up against it.
Kunta's hand jerked up to shove him away, but a flashing look from Binta
prevented that.  After eating, Kunta hung around for a while hoping that
something more might be said by Binta, but when she acted as if she hadn't
even told him anything, he reluctantly left the hut and made his way with
slow steps to Omoro's hut, where he stood outside with folded hands.

When Omoro emerged and silently handed his son a small new slingshot, Kunta's
breath all but stopped.  He stood looking down at it, then up at his father,
not knowing what to say.

"This is yours as one of the second kafo.  Be sure you don't shoot the wrong
thing, and that you hit what you shoot at."

Kunta just said,

"Yes, Fa," still tongue-tied beyond that.

"Also, as you are now second kafo," Omoro went on, "it means you will begin
tending goats and going to school.  You go goat-herding today with Toumani
Touray.  He and the other older boys will teach you.  Heed them well.  And
tomorrow morning you will go to the schoolyard."  Omoro went back into his
hut, and Kunta dashed away to the goat pens, where he found his friend Sitafa
and the rest of his kafo, all in their new dundikos and clutching their new
slingshots--uncles or older brothers having made them for boys whose fathers
were dead.

The older boys were opening the pens and the bleating goats were bounding
forth, hungry for the day's grazing.  Seeing Toumani, who was the first son
of the couple who were Omoro's and Binta's best friends, Kunta tried to get
near him, but Toumani and his mates were all herding the goats to bump into
the smaller boys, who were trying to scramble out of the way.  But soon the
laughing older boys and the wuolo dogs had the goats hurrying down the dusty
path with Kunta's kafo running uncertainly behind, clutching their
slingshots and trying to brush the dirtied spots off their dundikos.

As familiar with goats as Kunta was, he had never realized how fast they ran.
Except for a few walks with his father, he had never been so far beyond the
village as the goats were leading them--to a wide grazing area of low brush
and grass with the forest on one side and the fields of village farmers on
the other.  The older boys each nonchalantly set their own herds to grazing
in separate grassy spots, while the wuolo dogs walked about or lay down near
the goats.

Toumani finally decided to take notice of Kunta tagging along behind him, but
he acted as if the smaller boy was some kind of insect.

"Do you know the value of a goat?"  he asked, and before Kunta could admit he
wasn't sure, he said,

"Well, if you lose one, your father will let you knowl" And Toumani launched
into a lecture of warnings about goat herding Foremost was that if any boy's
attention or laziness let any goat stray away from its herd, no end of
horrible things could happen.  Pointing toward the forest, Toumani said that,
for one thing, living just over there, and often creeping on their bellies
through the high grass, were lions and panthers, which, with but a single
spring from the grass, could tear a goat apart.

"But if a boy is close enough," said Toumani, "he is tastier than a goat!"

Noting Kunta's wide eyes with satisfaction, Toumani went on: Even a worse
danger than lions and panthers were toubob and their black slatee helpers,
who would crawl through the tall grass to grab people and take them off to a
distant place where they were eaten.  In his own five rains of goat herding
he said, nine boys from Juffure had been taken, and many more from
neighboring villages.  Kunta hadn't known any of the boys who had been lost
from Juffure, but he remembered being so scared when he heard about them that
for a few days he wouldn't venture more than a stone's throw from his
mother's hut.

"But you're not safe even inside the village gates," said Toumani, seeming to
read his thoughts.  A man he knew from Juffure, he told Kunta, deprived of
everything he owned when a pride of lions killed his entire herd of goats,
had been caught with toubob money soon after the disappearance of two
third-kafo boys from their own huts one 40 ALEX HALEY

night.  He claimed that he had found the money in the forest, but the day
before his trial by the Council of Elders, he himself had disappeared.

"You would have been too young to remember this," said Toumani.

"But such things still happen.  So never get out of sight of somebody you
trust.  And when you're out here with your goats, never let them go where you
might have to chase them into deep bush, or your family may never see you
again."

As Kunta stood quaking with fear, Toumani added that even if a big cat or a
toubob didn't get him, he could still get into serious trouble if a goat got
away from the herd, because a boy could never catch a dodging goat once it
got onto someone's nearby farm of couscous and ground nuts And once the boy
and his dog were both gone after it, the remaining flock might start running
after the strayed one, and hungry goats could ruin a farmer's field quicker
even than baboons, antelopes, or wild pigs.

By noontime, when Toumani shared the lunch his mother had packed for him and
Kunta, the entire new second kafo had gained a far greater respect for the
goats they had been around all of their lives.  After eating, some of
Toumani's kafo lounged under small trees nearby, and the rest walked around
shooting birds with their students' untried slingshots.  While Kunta and his
mates struggled to look after the goats, the older boys yelled out cautions
and insults and held their sides with laughter at the younger boys' frantic
shoutings and dashings toward any goat that as much as raised its head to
look around.  When Kunta wasn't running after the goats, he was casting
nervous glances toward the forest in case anything was lurking there to eat
him.

In the midafternoon, with the goats nearing their fill of grass, Toumani
called Kunta over to him and said sternly, "Do you intend me to collect your
wood for you?"  Only then did Kunta remember how many times he had seen the
goatherds returning in the evening, each of them bearing a head load of light
wood for the night fires of the village.  With the goats and the forest to
keep an eye on, it was all Kunta and his mates could do to run around looking
for and picking up light brush and small fallen limbs that had become dry
enough to burn well.  Kunta piled his wood up into a bundle as large as he
thought his head could carry, but Toumani scoffed and threw on a few more
sticks.  Then Kunta tied a slender green liana vine about the wood, doubtful
that he could get it onto his head, let alone all the distance to the village.

With the older boys observing, he and his mates somehow managed to hoist
their head loads and to begin more or less following the wuolo dogs and the
goats, who knew the homeward trail better than their new herdsmen did.  Amid
the older boys' scornful laughter, Kunta and the others kept grabbing at
their head loads to keep them from falling off.  The sight of the village had
never been prettier to Kunta, who was bone-weary by now; but no sooner had
they stepped inside the village gates when the older boys set up a terrific
racket, yelling out warnings and instructions and jumping around so that all
of the adults within view and hearing would know that they were doing their
job and that their day of training these clumsy younger boys had been a -most
trying experience for them.  Kunta's head load somehow safely reached the
yard of Brima Cesay, the arafang, whose education of Kunta and his new kafo
would begin the next morning.

Just after breakfast, the new herdsmen--each, with pride, carrying a
cottonwood writing slate, a quill, and a section of bamboo cane containing
soot to mix with water for ink --trooped anxiously into the schoolyard.
Treating them as if they were even more stupid than their goats, the arafang
ordered the boys to sit down.  Hardly had he uttered the words when he began
laying about among them with his limber stick, sending them scrambling--their
first obedience to his command not having come as quickly as he wanted.
Scowling, he further warned them that for as long as they would attend his
classes, anyone who made so much as a sound, unless asked to speak, would get
more of the rod--he brandished it fiercely at them--and be sent home to his
parents.  And the same would be dealt out to any boy who was ever late for
his classes, which would be held after breakfast and again just after their
return with the goats.

"You are no longer children, and you have responsibilities now," said the
arafang.

"See to it that you fulfill them."  With these disciplines established, he
announced that they would begin that evening's class with his reading certain
verses of the Koran, which they would be expected to memorize and recite
before proceeding to other things.  Then he excused them, as his older
students, the former 4Z ALLA nALE.  1 goatherds, began arriving.  They
looked even more nervous than Kunta's kafo, for this was the day for their
final examinations in Koranic recitations and in the writing of Arabic, the
results of which would bear heavily upon their being formally advanced into
the status of third kafo.

That day, all on their own for the first time in their lives, Kunta's kafo
managed to get the goats un penned and trotting in a ragged line along the
trail out to the grazing area.  For a good while to come, the goats probably
got less to eat than usual, as Kunta and his mates chased and yelled at them
every time they took a few steps to a new clump of grass.  But Kunta felt
even more hounded than his herd.  Every time he sat down to sort out the
meaning of these changes in his life, there seemed to be something he had to
do, someplace he had to go.  What with the goats all day, the arafang after
breakfast and after herding, and then whatever slingshot practice he could
fit in before darkness, he could never seem to find the time for any serious
thinking any more.

CHAPTER 11

The harvesting of ground nuts and couscous was complete, and the women's rice
came next.  No men helped their wives; even boys like Sitafa and Kunta didn't
help their mothers, for rice was women's work alone.  The first light of dawn
found Binta with Jankay Touray and the other women bending in their ripe
fields and chopping off the long golden stalks, which were left to dry for a
few days on the walkway before being loaded into canoes and taken to the
village, where the women and their daughters would stack their neat bundles
in each family's storehouse.  But there was no rest for the women even when
the rice harvesting was done, for then they had to help the men to pick the
cotton, which had been left until last so that it would dry as long as
possible under the hot sun and thus make better thread for the women's sewing.

With everyone looking forward to Juffure's annual seven- day harvest
festival, the women hurried now to make new clothes for their families.
Though Kunta knew better than to show his irritation, he was forced for
several evenings to tend his talky, pesty little brother Lamin while Binta
spun her cotton.  But Kunta was happy again when she took him with her to the
village weaver, Dembo Dibba, whom Kunta watched in fascination as her rickety
hand- and-foot loom wove the spindles of thread into strips of cotton cloth.
Back at home, Binta let Kunta trickle water through wood ashes to make the
strong lye into which she mixed finely pounded indigo leaves to dye her cloth
deep blue.  All of "tuffure's women were doing the same, and soon their cloth
was spread across low bushes to dry, festooning the village with splashes of
rich color--red, green, and yellow as well as blue.

While the women spun and sewed, the men worked equally hard to finish their
own appointed tasks before the harvest festival--and before the hot season
made heavy work impossible.  The village's tall bamboo fence was patched
where it was sagging or broken from the back scratching of the goats and
bullocks.  Repairs were made on mud huts that had been damaged by the big
rains, and new thatching replaced the old and worn.  Some couples, soon to
marry, required new homes, and Kunta got the chance to join the other
children in stomping water-soaked dirt into the thick, smooth mud that the
men used to mold walls for the new huts.

Since some muddy water had begun to appear in the buckets that were pulled up
from the well, one of the men climbed down and found that the small fish that
was kept in the well to eat insects had died in the murky water.  So it was
decided that a new well must be dug.  Kunta was watching as the men reached
shoulder depth in the new hole, and passed upward several egg-sized lumps of
a greenish-white clay.  They were taken immediately to those women of the
village whose bellies were big, and eaten eagerly.  That clay, Binta told
him, would give a baby stronger bones.

Left to themselves, Kunta, Sitafa, and their mates spent 44 ALEX HALEY

most of their free hours racing about the village playing hunter with their
new slingshots.  Shooting at nearly every- thing--and fortunately hitting
almost nothing--the boys made enough noise to scare off a forest of animals.
Even the smaller children of Lamin's kafo romped almost unattended, for no
one in Juffure was busier than the old grandmothers, who worked often now
until late at night to supply the demands of the village's unmarried girls
for hairpieces to wear at the harvest festival.  Buns, plaits, and full wigs
were woven of long fibers picked carefully from rotting sisal leaves or from
the soaked bark of the baobab tree.  The coarser sisal hairpieces cost much
less than those made from the softer, silkier fiber of the baobab whose
weaving took so much longer that a full wig might cost as much as three
goats.  But the customers always haggled long and loudly, knowing that the
grandmothers charged less if they enjoyed an hour or so of good,
tongue-clacking bargaining before each sale.

Along with her wigs, which were especially well made, old Nyo Boto pleased
every woman in the village with her noisy defiance of the ancient tradition
that decreed women should always show men the utmost of respect.  Every
morning found her squatted comfortably before her hut, stripped to the waist,
enjoying the sun's heat upon her tough old hide and busily weaving
hairpieces--but never so busily that she failed to notice every passing man.
"Hah!"  she would call out,

"Look at that!  They call themselves men!  Now, in my day, men were men!"
And the men who passed--expecting what always came--would all but run to
escape her tongue, until finally Nyo Boto fell asleep in the afternoon, with
her weaving in her lap and the toddlers in her care laughing at her loud
snoring.

The second-kafo girls, meanwhile, were helping their mothers and big sisters
to collect bamboo baskets full of ripe medicinal roots and cooking spices,
which they spread under the sun to dry.  When grains were being pounded, the
girls brushed away the husks and chaff.  They helped also with the family
washing, beating against rocks the soiled clothing that had been lathered
with the rough, reddish soap the mothers had made from lye and palm oil.

The men's main work done--only a few days before the new moon that would open
the harvest festival in all of The Gambia's villages--the sounds of musical
instruments began to be heard here and there in Juffure.  As the village
musicians practiced on their twenty-four-stringed koras, their drums, and
their balafons--melodious instruments made of gourds tied beneath wooden
blocks of various lengths that were struck with mallets--little crowds would
gather around them to clap and listen.  While they played, Kunta and Sitafa
and their mates, back from their goat herding would troop about blowing
bamboo flutes, ringing bells, and rattling dried gourds.

Most men relaxed now, talking and squatting about in the shade of the baobab.
Those of Omoro's age and younger kept respectfully apart from the Council of
Elders, who were making their annual pre festival decisions on important
village business.  Occasionally two or three of the younger men would rise,
stretch themselves, and go ambling about the village with their small fingers
linked loosely in the age-old yayo manner of African men.

But a few of the men spent long hours alone, patiently carving on pieces of
wood of different sizes and shapes.  Kunta and his friends would sometimes
even put aside their slings just to stand watching as the carvers created
terrifying and mysterious expressions on masks soon to be worn by festival
dancers.  Others carved human or animal figures with the arms and legs very
close to the body, the feet flat, and the heads erect.

Binta and the other women snatched what little relaxation they could around
the village's new well, where they came every day for a cool drink and a few
minutes of gossip.  But with the festival now upon them, they still had much
to do.  Clothing had to be finished, huts to be cleaned, dried foods to be
soaked, goats to be slaughtered for roasting.  And above all, the women had
to make themselves look their very best for the festival.

Kunta thought that the big tomboyish girls he had so often seen scampering up
trees looked foolish now, the way they went about acting coy and fluttery.
They couldn't even walk right.  And he couldn't see why the men would turn
around to watch them--clumsy creatures who couldn't even shoot a bow and
arrow if they tried.

Some of these girls' mouths, he noticed, were swelled up to the size of a
fist.  where the inner lips had been pricked with thorns and rubbed black
with soot.  Even Binta, along with every other female in the village over
twelve rains 46 ALEX HALEY

old, was nightly boiling and then cooling a broth of freshly pounded fudano
leaves in which she soaked her feet--and the pale palms of her hands--to an
inky blackness.  When Kunta asked his mother why, she told him to run along.
So he asked his father, who told him,

"The more blackness a woman has, the more beautiful she is."

"But why?"  asked Kunta.

"Someday," said Omoro, "you will understand."

CHAPTER 12

Kunta leaped up when the tobalo sounded at dawn.  Then he, Sitafa, and their
mates were running among grownups to the silk-cotton tree, where the village
drummers were already pounding on the drums, barking and shouting at them as
if they were live things, their hands a blur against the taut goatskins.  The
gathering crowd of costumed villagers, one by one, soon began to respond with
slow movements of their arms, legs, and bodies, then faster and faster, until
almost everyone had joined the dancing.

Kunta had seen such ceremonies for many plantings and harvests, for men
leaving to hunt, for weddings, births, and deaths, but the dancing had never
moved him--in a way he neither understood nor was able to resist--as it did
now.  Every adult in the village seemed to be saying with his body something
that was in his or her mind alone.

Among the whirling, leaping, writhing people, some of them wearing masks,
Kunta could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw tough old Nyo Boto suddenly
shrieking wildly, jerking both of her hands before her face, then lurching
backward in fear at some unseen terror.

Snatching up an imaginary burden, she thrashed and kicked the air until she
crumpled down.

Kunta turned this way and that, staring at different people he knew among the
dancers.  Under one of the horrifying masks, Kunta recognized the alimamo,
flinging and winding himself again and again like some serpent around a tree
trunk.  He saw that some of those he had heard were even older than Nyo Boto
had left their huts, stumbling out on spindly legs, their wrinkled arms
flapping, their rheumy eyes squinting in the sun, to dance a few unsteady
steps.  Then Kunta's eyes widened as be caught sight of his own father.
Omoro's knees were churning high, his feet stomping up dust.  With ripping
cries, he reared backward, muscles trembling, then lunged forward, hammering
at his chest, and went leaping and twisting in the air, landing with heavy
grunts; The pounding heartbeat of the drums seemed to throb not only in
Kunta's ears but also in his limbs.  Almost without his knowing it, as if it
were a dream, he felt his body begin to quiver and his arms to flail, and
soon he was springing and shouting along with the others, whom he had ceased
to notice.  Finally he stumbled and fell, exhausted.

He picked himself up and walked with weak knees to the sidelines--feeling a
deep strangeness that he had never known before.

Dazed, frightened, and excited, he saw not only Sitafa but also others of
their kafo out there dancing among the grownups, and Kunta danced again.
From the very young to the very old, the villagers danced on through the
entire day, they and the drummers stopping for neither food nor drink but
only to catch fresh breath.  But the drums were still beating when Kunta
collapsed into sleep that night.

The festival's second day began with a parade for the people of honor just
after the noon sun.  At the head of the parade were the arafang, the alimamo,
the senior elders, the hunters, the wrestlers, and those others whom the
Council of Elders had named for their important deeds in Juffure since the
last harvest festival.  Everyone else came trailing behind, singing and
applauding, as the musicians led them out in a snaking line beyond the
village.  And when they made a turn around the travelers' tree, Kunta and his
kafo dashed ahead, formed their own pa- fade, and then trooped back and forth
past the marching adults, exchanging bows and smiles as they went, stepping
briskly in time with their flutes, bells, and rattles.  The parading boys
took turns at being the honored person; when it.  was Kunta's turn, he
pranced about, lifting his knees 48 ALEX HALEY

high, feeling very important indeed.  In passing the grownups, he caught both
Omoro's and Binta's eyes and knew they were proud of their son.

The kitchen of every woman in the village offered a variety of food in open
invitation to anyone who passed by and wished to stop a moment and enjoy a
plateful.  Kunta and his kafo gorged themselves from many calabashes of
delicious stews and rice.  Even roasted meats--goats and game from the
forest--were in abundance; and it was the young girls' special duty to keep
bamboo baskets filled with every available fruit.

When they weren't stuffing their bellies, the boys darted out to the
travelers' tree to meet the exciting strangers who now entered the village.
Some stayed overnight, but most tarried only a few hours before moving on to
the next village's festival.  The visiting Senegalese set up colorful
displays with bolts of decorated cloth.

Others arrived with heavy sacks of the very best quality Nigerian kola nuts,
the grade and size of each determining the price.  Traders came up the belong
in boats laden with salt bars to exchange for indigo, hides, beeswax, and
honey.  Nyo Boto was herself now busily selling--for a cowrie shell
apiece--small bundles of cleaned and trimmed lemongrass roots, whose regular
rubbing against the teeth kept the breath sweet and the mouth fresh.

Pagan traders hurried on past Juffure, not even stopping, for their wares of
tobacco and snuff and mead beer were for infidels only, since the Moslem
Mandinkas never drank nor smoked.  Others who seldom stopped, bound as they
were for bigger villages, were numerous footloose young men from other
villages--as some young men had also left Juffure during the harvest season.
Spotting them as they passed on the path beyond the village, Kunta and his
mates would run alongside them for a while trying to see what they carried in
their small bamboo head baskets Usually it was clothing and small gifts for
new friends whom they expected to meet in their wanderings, before returning
to their home villages by the next planting season.

Every morning the village slept and awakened to the sound of drums.

And every day brought different 'traveling musicians--experts on the Koran,
the balafon, and the drums.  And if they were flattered enough by the gifts
that were pressed upon them, along with the dancing and the cheers and
clapping of the crowds, they would stop and play for a while before moving on
to the next village.

When the story-telling griots came, a quick hush would fall among the
villagers as they sat around the baobab to hear of ancient kings and family
clans, of warriors, of great battles, and of legends of the past.  Or a
religious griot would shout prophecies and warnings that Almighty Allah must
be appeased, and then offer to conduct the necessary --and by now, to Kunta,
familiar--ceremonies in return for a small gift.  In his high voice, a
singing griot sang endless verses about the past splendors of the kingdoms of
Ghana, Songhai, and Old Mali, and when he finished, some people of the
village would often privately pay him to sing the praises of their own aged
parents at their huts.  And the people would applaud when the old ones came
to their doorways and stood blinking in the bright sunshine with wide,
toothless grins.  His good deeds done, the singing griot reminded everyone
that a drum talk message--and a modest offering--would quickly bring him to
Juffure any time to sing anyone's praises at funerals, weddings, or other
special occasions.  And then he hurried on to the' next village.

It was during the harvest festival's sixth afternoon when suddenly the sound
of a strange drum cut through Juffure.  Hearing the insulting words spoken by
the drum, Kunta hurried outside and joined the other villagers as they
gathered angrily beside the baobab.  The drum, obviously quite nearby, had
warned of oncoming wrestlers so mighty that any so-called wrestlers in
Juffure should hide.  Within minutes, the people of Juffure cheered as their
own drum sharply replied that such foolhardy strangers were asking to get
crippled, if not worse.

The villagers rushed now to the wrestling place.  As Juffure's wrestlers
slipped into their brief dalas with the rolled- cloth handholds on the sides
and buttocks, and smeared themselves with a slippery paste of pounded baobab
leaves and wood ashes, they heard the shouts that meant that then"
challengers had arrived.  These powerfully built strangers never glanced at
the jeering crowd.

Trotting behind their drummer, they went directly to the wrestling area, clad
already in their dalas, and began rubbing one another with their own slippery
paste.  When Juffure's wrestlers appeared 50 ALEX HALEY

behind the village drummers, the crowd's shouting and jostling became so
unruly that both drummers had to implore them to remain calm.

Then both drums spoke: "Ready!"  The rival teams paired off, each two
wrestlers crouching and glaring face to face.

"Take hold!  Take hold!"

the drums ordered, and each pair of wrestlers began a catlike circling.  Both
of the drummers now went darting here and there among the stalking men; each
drummer was pounding out the names of that village's ancestral champion
wrestlers, whose spirits were looking on.

With lightning feints, one after another pair finally seized hold and began
to grapple.  Soon both teams struggled amid the dust clouds their feet kicked
up, nearly hiding them from the wildly yelling spectators.  Dogfalls or slips
didn't count; a victory came only when one wrestler pulled another off
balance, thrust him bodily upward, and hurled him to the ground.  Each time
there came a fall--first one of Juffure's champions, then one of the
challengers--the crowd jumped and screamed, and a drummer pounded out that
winner's name.  Just beyond the excited crowd, of course, Kunta and his mates
were wrestling among themselves.

At last it was over, and Juffure's team had won by a single fall.

They were awarded the horns and hooves of a freshly slaughtered bullock.  Big
chunks of the meat were put to roast over a fire, and the brave challengers
were invited warmly to join the feasting.  The people congratulated the
visitors on their strength, and unmarried maidens tied small bells around all
of the wrestlers' ankles and upper arms.  And during the feasting that
followed, Juffure's third-kafo boys swept and brushed to smoothness the
wrestling area's reddish dust to prepare it for a seoruba.

The hot sun had just begun to sink when the people again assembled around the
wrestling area, now all dressed in their best.  Against a low background of
drums, both wrestling teams leaped into the ring and began to crouch and
spring about, their muscles rippling and their little bells tinkling as the
onlookers admired their might and grace.  The drums suddenly pounded hard;
now the maidens ran out into the ring, weaving coyly among the wrestlers as
the people clapped.

Then the drummers began to beat ROOTS 51

their hardest and fastest rhythm--and the maidens' feet kept pace.

One girl after another, sweating and exhausted, finally stumbled from the
ring, flinging to the dust her colorfully dyed tiko head wrap All eyes
watched eagerly to see if the marriageable man would pick up that tiko, thus
showing his special appreciation of that maiden's dance--for it could mean he
meant soon to consult her father about her bridal price in goats and cows.
Kunta and his mates, who were too young to understand such things, thought
the excitement was over and ran off to play with their slingshots.  But it
had just begun, for a moment later, everyone gasped as a tiko was picked up
by one of the visiting wrestlers.  This was a major event--and a happy
one--but the lucky maiden would not be the first who was lost through
marriage to another village.

CHAPTER 13

On the final morning of the festival, Kunta was awakened by the sound of
screams.  Pulling on his dundiko, he went dashing out, and his stomach
knotted with fright.  Before several of the nearby huts, springing up and
down, shrieking wildly and brandishing spears, were halfa dozen men in fierce
masks, tall headdresses, and costumes of leaf and bark.  Kunta watched in
terror as one man entered each hut with a roar and emerged jerking roughly by
the arm a trembling boy of the third kafo.

Joined by a cluster of his own equally terrified second- kafo mates, Kunta
peered with wide eyes around the corner of a hut.  A heavy white cotton hood
was over the head of each third-kafo boy.  Spying Kunta, Sitafa, and their
group of little boys, one of the masked men dashed toward them waving his
spear and shouting fearfully.  Though he stopped short and turned back to his
hooded FR1;nLbA linLbl charge, the boys scattered, squealing in horror.  And
when all of the village's third-kafo boys had been collected, they were
turned over to slaves, who took them by the hand and led them, one by one,
out the village gate.

Kunta had heard that these older boys were going to be taken away from
Juffure for their manhood training, but he had no idea that it would happen
like this.  The departure of the third-kafo boys, along with the men who
would conduct their manhood training, cast a shadow of sadness upon the
entire village.  In the days that followed, Kunta and his mates could talk of
nothing but the terrifying things they had seen, and of the even more
terrifying things they had overheard about the mysterious manhood training.
In the mornings, the arafang rapped their heads for their lack of interest in
memorizing the Koranic verses.  And after school, trooping along behind their
goats out into the bush Kunta and his mates each tried not to think about
what each could not forget--that he would be among Juflfure's next group of
hooded boys jerked and kicked out through the village gate.

They all had heard that a full twelve moons would pass before those
third-kafo boys would return to the village-- but then as men.  Kunta said
that someone had told him that the boys in manhood training got heatings
daily.  A boy named Karamo said they were made to hunt wild animals for food;
and Sitafa said they were sent out alone at night into the deep forest, to
find their own way back.  But the worst thing, which none of them mentioned,
although it made Kunta nervous each time he had to relieve himself, was that
during the manhood training a part of his foto would be cut off.  After a
while, the more they talked, the idea of manhood training became so
frightening that the boys slopped talking about it, and each of them tried to
conceal his fears within himself, not wanting to show that he wasn't brave.

Kunta and his mates had gotten much better at goat- herding since their first
anxious days out in the bush.  But they still had much to learn.  Their job,
they were beginning to discover, was hardest in the mornings, when swarms of
biting flies kept the goats bolting this way and that, quivering their skins
and switching their stubby tails as the boys and the dogs nrshed about trying
to herd them together again.  But before noon, when the sun grew so hot
ROOTS 53

that even the flies sought cooler places, the tired goats settled down to
serious grazing, and the boys could finally enjoy themselves.

By now they were crack shots with their slingshots--and also with the new
bows and arrows their fathers had given them on graduating to the second
kafo--and they spent an hour or so killing every small creature they could
find: hares, ground squirrels, bush rats, lizards, and one day a tricky spur
fowl that tried to decoy Kunta away from her nest by dragging a wing as if it
had been injured.  In the early afternoon, the boys skinned and cleaned the
day's game, rubbing the insides with the salt they always carried, and then,
building a fire, roasted themselves a feast.

Each day out in the bush seemed to be hotter than the day before.

Earlier and earlier, the insects stopped biting the goats to look for shade,
and the goats bent down on their knees to get at the short grass that
remained green beneath the parched taller grass.  But Kunta and his mates
hardly noticed the heat.  Glistening with sweat, they played as if each day
were the most exciting one in their lives.

With their bellies tight after the afternoon meal, they wrestled or raced or
sometimes just yelled and made faces at one another, taking turns at keeping
a wary eye on the grazing goats.  Playing at war, the boys clubbed and
speared each other with thick-rooted weeds until someone held up a handful of
grass as a sign of peace.  Then they cooled off their warrior spirits by
rubbing their feet with the contents of the stomach of a slaughtered rabbit;
they had heard in the grandmothers' stories that real warriors used the
stomach of a lamb.

Sometimes Kunta and his mates romped with their faithful wuolo dogs, which
Mandinkas had kept for centuries, for they were known as one of the very
finest breeds of hunting and guard dogs in all of Africa.  No man could count
the goats and cattle that had been saved on dark nights from killer hyenas by
the howling of the wuolos.  But hyenas weren't the game stalked by Kunta and
his mates when they played at being huntsmen.  In their imaginations, as they
crept about in the tall, sun-baked grass of the savanna, their quarry were
rhinoceros, elephant, leopard, and the mighty lion.

Sometimes, as a boy followed his goats around in their search for grass and
shade, he would find himself separated 54 ALEX HALEY

from his mates.  The first few times it happened to him, Kunta herded up his
goats as quickly as he could and headed back to be near Sitafa.  But soon he
began to like these moments of solitude, for they gave him the chance to
stalk some great beast by himself.  It was no ordinary antelope, leopard, or
even lion that he sought in his daydreaming; it was that most feared and
dangerous of a)l beasts--a maddened buffalo.

The one he tracked had spread" so much terror throughout the land that many
hunters had been sent to kill the savage animal, but they had managed only
'to wound it, and one after another, it had gored them with its wicked horns.
Even more bloodthirsty than before with its painful wound, the buffalo had
then charged and killed several farmers from Juffure who had been working on
their fields outside the village.  The famed simbon Kunta Kinte had been deep
in the forest, smoking out a bee's nest to sustain his energy with rich
honey, when he heard the distant drum talk begging him to save the people of
the village of his birth.  He could not refuse.

Not even a blade of the dry grass crackled under his feet, so silently did he
stalk for signs of the buffalo's trail, using the sixth sense that told
master simbons which way animals would travel.  And soon he found the tracks
he sought; they were larger than any he had ever seen.  Now trotting
silently, he drew deeply into his nostrils the foul smell that led him to
giant, fresh buffalo dung.  And maneuvering now with all the craft and skill
at his command, simbon Kinte finally spotted the huge bulk of the beast
himself-- it would have been concealed from ordinary eyes--hiding in the
dense, high grass.

Straining back his bow, Kinte took careful aim--and sent the arrow thudding
home.  The buffalo was badly wounded now, but more dangerous than ever.
Springing suddenly from side to side, Kinte evaded the beast's desperate,
stricken charge and braced himself as it wheeled to charge again.  He fired
his second arrow only when he had to leap aside at the last instant--and the
huge buffalo crashed down dead.

Kinte's piercing whistle brought from hiding, awed and trembling, those
previous hunters who had failed where he had gloriously succeeded.  He
ordered them to remove the huge hide and horns and to summon still more men
to help drag the carcass all the way back to Juffure.  The joyously shouting
people had laid down a pathway of hides within the village gate so that Kinte
would not get dust upon his feet.

"Simbon Kinte!"

the talking drum beat out.  "Simbon Kinte!"  the children shouted, waving
leafy branches above their heads.  Everyone was pushing and shoving and
trying to touch the mighty hunter so that some of his prowess might rub off
on them.  Small boys danced around the huge carcass, re-enacting the kill
with wild cries and long sticks.

And now, walking toward him from amid the crowd, came the strongest, most
graceful, and most beautifully black of all the maidens in Juffure--indeed,
in all of The Gambia--and kneeling before him, she offered a calabash of cool
water; but Kinte, not thirsty, merely wet his fingers, to favor her,
whereupon she drank that water with happy tears, thus showing to everyone the
fullness of her love.

The clamoring crowd was spreading--making way for aged, wrinkled, gray-headed
Omoro and Binta, who came tottering against their canes.

The simbon permitted his old mother to embrace him while Omoro looked on,
eyes filled with pride.  And the people of Juffure chanted

"Kintel Kinte!"  Even the dogs were barking their acclaim.

Was that his own wuolo dog barking?

"Kinte!  Kinte!"  Was that Sitafa yelling frantically?  Kunta snapped out of
it just in time to see his forgotten goats bounding toward someone's farm.
Sitafa and his other mates and their dogs helped to herd them up again before
any damage was done, but Kunta was so ashamed that a whole moon went by
before he drifted off into any more such daydreams.

CHAPTER 14

As hot as the sun already was, the five long moons of the dry season had only
begun.  The heat devils shimmered, making objects larger in the distance, and
the people 56 ALEX HALEY

sweated in their huts almost as much as they did in the fields.

Before Kunta left home each morning for his goat- herding, Binta saw that he
protected his feet well with red palm oil, but each afternoon, when he
returned to the village from the open bush, his lips were parched and the
soles of his feet were dry and cracked by the baking earth beneath them.
Some of the boys came home with bleeding feet, but out they would go again
each morning--uncomplaining, like their fathers--into the fierce heat of the
dry grazing land, which was even worse than in the village.

By the time the sun reached its zenith, the boys and their dogs and the goats
all lay panting in the shade of scrub trees, the boys too tired to hunt and
roast the small game that had been their daily sport.  Mostly, they just sat
and chatted as cheerfully as they could, but somehow by this time the
adventure of goat herding had lost some of its excitement.

It didn't seem possible that the sticks they gathered every day would be
needed to keep them warm at night, but once the sun set, the air turned as
cold as it had been hot.  And after their evening meat, the people of Juffure
huddled around their crackling fires.  Men of Omoro's age sat talking around
one fire, and a little distance away was the fire of the elders.  Around
still another sat the women and the unmarried girls, apart from the old
grandmothers, who told their nightly stories to the little first-kafo
children around a fourth fire.

Kunta and the other second-kafo boys were too proud to sit with the naked
first kafo of Lamin and his mates, so they squatted far enough away not to
seem part of that noisy, giggling group--yet near enough to hear the old
grandmothers' stories, which still thrilled them as much as ever.  Sometimes
Kunta and his mates eavesdropped on those at other fires; but the
conversations were mostly about the heat.  Kunta heard the old men recalling
times when the sun had killed plants and burned crops; how it had made the
well go stale, or dry, of times when the heat had dried the people out like
husks.  This hot season was bad, they said, but not as bad as many they could
remember.  It seemed to Kunta that older people always could remember
something worse.

Then, abruptly one day, breathing the air was like breathing flames, and
that night the people shivered beneath their blankets with the cold creeping
into their bones.  Again the next morning, they were mopping their faces and
trying to draw a full breath.  That afternoon the harmattan wind began.  It
wasn't a hard wind, nor even a gusty wind, either of which would have helped.

Instead it blew softly and steadily, dusty and dry, day and night, for nearly
halfa moon.  As it did each time it came, the constant blowing of the
harmattan wore away slowly at the nerves of the people of Juffure.  And soon
parents were yelling more often than usual at their children, and whipping
them for no good reason.  And though bickering was unusual among the
Mandinkas, hardly a daytime hour passed without loud shoutings between some
adults, especially between younger husbands and wives like Omoro and Binta.
Suddenly then nearby doorways would fill with people watching as the couple's
mothers went rushing into that hut.  A moment later the shouting would grow
louder, and next a rain of sewing baskets, cooking pots, calabashes, stools,
and clothes would be hurled out the door.  Then, bursting out themselves, the
wife and her mother would snatch up the possessions and go storming off to
the mother's hut.

After about two moons, just as it had begun, the harmattan suddenly stopped.
In less than a day, the air became still, the -sky clear.

Within one night, a parade of wives slipped back in with their husbands, and
their mothers-in- law were exchanging small gifts and patching up arguments
all over the village.  But the five long moons of the dry season were only
half over.  Though food was still plentiful in the storehouses, the mothers
only cooked small quantities, for no one, not even the usually greedy
children, felt like eating much.

Everyone was sapped of strength by the sun's heat, and the people talked less
and went about doing only the things they had to do.

The hides of the gaunt cattle in the village were broken by lumpy sores where
biting flies had laid their eggs.  A quietness had come upon the scrawny
chickens that normally ran squawking around the village, and they lay in the
dust on their sides, with their wings fanned out and their beaks open.  Even
the monkeys now were seldom seen or heard, for most of them had gone into the
forest for more shade.  And the goats, Kunta noticed, grazing less and less
in the heat, had grown nervous and thin.

For some reason--perhaps it was the heat, or perhaps simply because they
were growing older--Kunta and his goat herding mates, who had spent every day
together out in the bush for almost six moons, now began to drift off alone
with their own small herds.

It had happened for several days before Kunta realized that he had never
before been completely away from other people for any real length of time.
He looked across at other boys and their goats in the distance, scattered
across the silence of the sunbaked bush.

Beyond them lay the fields where the farmers were chopping the weeds that had
grown in the moons since the last harvest.  The tall piles of weeds they
raked to dry under the sun seemed to wave and shimmer in the beat.

Wiping the sweat from his brow, it seemed to Kunta that his people were
always enduring one hardship or an- other--something uncomfortable or
difficult, or frightening, or threatening to life itself.  He thought about
the burning, hot days and the cold nights that followed them.  And he thought
about the rains that would come next, turning the village into a mud hole and
finally submerging the walking paths until the people had to travel in their
canoes from place to place where usually they walked.  They needed the rain
as they needed the sun, but there always seemed to be too much or too little.

Even when the goats were fat and the trees were heavy with fruit and
blossoms, he knew that would be the time when the last rain's harvest would
run out in the family storehouses and that this would bring the hungry
season, with people starving and some even dying, like his own dearly
remembered Grandma Yaisa.

"The harvest season was a happy one--and after that, the harvest
festival--but it was over so soon, and then the long, hot, dry season would
come again, with its awful harmattan, when Binta kept shouting at him and
beating on Lamin--until he almost felt sorry for his pest of a small brother.
As he herded his goats back toward the village, Kunta remembered the stories
he had heard so many times when he was as young as Lamin, about how the
forefathers bad always lived through great fears and dangers.  As far back as
time went, Kunta guessed, the lives of the people had been hard.  Perhaps
they always would be.

Each evening in the village now, the alimamo led the prayers for Allah to
send the rains.  And then one day, excitement filled Juffure when some gentle
winds stirred up the dust--for those winds meant that the rains were soon to
come.  And the next morning, the people of the village gathered out in the
fields, where the farmers set afire the tall piles of weeds they had raked
up, and thick smoke coiled up over the fields.  The heat was nearly
unbearable, but the sweating people danced and cheered, and the firstkafo
children went racing and whooping about, each trying to catch good-luck
pieces of drifting, feathery flakes of ashes.

The next day's light winds began to sift the loose ashes over the fields,
enriching the soil to grow yet another crop.  The farmers now began chopping
busily with their hoes, preparing the long rows to receive the seeds--in this
seventh planting time through which Kunta had lived in the endless cycle of
the seasons.

CHAPTER 15

Two rains had passed, and Binta's belly was big again, and her temper was
even shorter than usual.  So quick was she to whack both her sons, in fact,
that Kunta was grateful each morning when goat herding let him escape her for
a few hours, and when he returned in the afternoon, he couldn't help feeling
sorry for Lamin, who was only old enough to get into mischief and get beaten
but not old enough to get out of the house alone.  So one day when he came
home and found his little brother in tears, he asked Binta--not without some
misgivings--if Lamin could join him on an errand, and she snapped "Yes!"
Naked little Lamin could hardly contain his happiness over this amazing act
of kindness, but Kunta was so disgusted with his own impulsiveness that he
gave him a good kick and a cuffing as soon as they got beyond Binta's
earshot.  Lamia hollered--and then followed his brother like a puppy.

Every afternoon after that, Kunta found Lamin waiting anxiously at the door
in hopes that his big brother would 60 ALEX HALEY

take him out again.  Kunta did, nearly every day--but not because he wanted
to.  Binta would profess such great relief at getting some rest from both of
them that Kunta now feared a beating if he didn't take Lamin along.  It
seemed as if a bad dream had attached his naked little brother to Kunta's
back like some giant leech from the belong.

But soon Kunta began to notice that some of the kafo mates also had small
brothers tagging along behind them.  Though they would play off to one side
or dart about nearby, they always kept a sharp eye on their big brothers, who
did their best to ignore them.  Sometimes the big boys would dash off
suddenly, jeering back at the young ones as they scrambled to catch up with
them.  When Kunta and his mates climbed trees, their little brothers, trying
to follow, usually tumbled back to the ground, and the older boys would laugh
loudly at their clumsiness.  It began to be fun having them around.

Alone with Lamin, as he sometimes was, Kunta might pay his brother a bit more
attention.  Pinching a tiny seed between his fingers, he would explain that
Juffure's giant silk-cotton tree grew from a thing that small.  Catching a
honeybee, Kunta would hold it carefully for Lamin to see the stinger; then,
turning the bee around, he would explain how bees sucked the sweetness from
flowers and used it to make honey in their nests in the tallest trees.  And
Lamin began to ask Kunta a lot of questions, most of which he would patiently
answer.  There was something nice about Lamin's feeling that Kunta knew
everything.  It made Kunta feel older than his eight rains.  In spite of
himself, he began to regard his little brother as something more than a pest.

Kunta took great pains not to show it, of course, but returning homeward now
each afternoon with his goats, he really looked forward to Lamin's eager
reception.  Once Kunta thought that he even saw Binta smile as he and Lamin
left the hut.  In fact, Binta would often snap at her younger son,

"Have your brother's manners!"  The next moment, she might whack Kunta for
something, but not as often as she used to.

Binta would also tell Lamin that if he didn't act properly, he couldn't go
with Kunta, and Lamin would be very good for the rest of the day.

He and Lamin would always leave the hut now walking very politely, hand in
hand, but once outside, Kunta went ROOTS 61

dashing and whooping--with Lamin racing behind him-- to join the other
second- and first-kafo boys.  During one afternoon's romping, when a fellow
goatherd of Kunta's happened to run into Lamin, knocking him on his back,
Kunta was instantly there, shoving that boy roughly aside and exclaiming
hotly,

"That's my brother!"  The boy protested and they were ready to exchange blows
when the others grabbed their arms.  Kunta snatched the crying Lamin by the
hand and jerked him away from their staring playmates.  Kunta was both deeply
embarrassed and astonished at himself for acting as he had toward his own
kafo mate--and especially over such a thing as a sniffling little brother.
But after that day, Lamin began openly trying to imitate whatever he saw
Kunta do, sometimes even with Binta or Omoro looking on.  Though he pretended
not to like it, Kunta couldn't help feeling just a little proud.

When Lamin fell from a low tree he was trying to climb one afternoon, Kuota
showed him how to do it right.  At one time or another, he taught his little
brother how to wrestle (so that Lamin could win the respect of a boy who had
humiliated him in front of his kafo mates); how to whistle through his
fingers (though Lamin's best whistle was nowhere near as piercing as
Kunta's); and he showed him the kind of berry leaves from which their mother
liked to make tea.  And he cautioned Lamin to take the big, shiny dung
beetles they always saw crawling in the hut and set them gently outside on
the ground, for it was very bad luck to harm them.  To touch a rooster's
spur, he told him, was even worse luck.  But however hard he tried, Kunta
couldn't make Lamin understand how to tell the time of day by the position of
the sun.

"You're just too little, but you'll learn."  Kunta would still shout at him
sometimes, if Lamin seemed too slow in learning something simple; or he would
give him a slap if he was too much of a pest.  But he would always feel so
badly about it that he might even let the naked Lamin wear his dundiko for a
while.

As he grew closer to his brother, Kunta began to feel less deeply something
that had often bothered him before --the gulf between his eight rains and the
older boys and men of Juffure.  Indeed, scarcely a day of his life that he
could remember had ever passed without something to remind him that he was
still of the second kafo--one who yet slept in the hut of his mother.  The
older boys who 62 ALEX HALEY

were away now at manhood training had always had nothing but sneers and
cuffings for those of Kunta's age.  And the grown men, such as Omoro and the
other fathers, acted as if a second-kafo boy were something merely to be
tolerated.  As for the mothers, well, often when Kunta was out in the bush,
he would think angrily that whenever he got to be a man, he certainly
intended to put Binta in her place as a woman--although he did intend to show
her kindness and forgiveness, since after all, she was his mother.

Most irritating of all to Kunta and his mates, though, was how the
second-kafo girls with whom they had grown up were now so quick to remind
them that they were thinking already of becoming wives.  It rankled Kunta
that girls married at fourteen rains or even younger, while boys didn't get
married until they were men of thirty rains or more.  In general, being of
the second kafo had always been an embarrassment to Kunta and his mates,
except for their afternoons off by themselves in the bush, and in Kunta's
case, his new relationship with Lamin.

Every time he and his brother would be walking somewhere by themselves, Kunta
would imagine that he was taking Lamin on some journey, as men sometimes did
with their sons.  Now, somehow, Kunta felt a special responsibility to act
older, with Lamin looking up to him as a source of knowledge.  Walking
alongside, Lamin would ply Kunta with a steady stream of questions.

"What's the world like?"

"Well," said Kunta, "no man or canoes ever journeyed so far.  And no one
knows all there is to know about it."

"What do you learn from the arafang?"

Kunta recited the first verses of the Koran in Arabic and then said, "Now you
try."  But when Lamin tried, he got badly confused--as Kunta had known he
would--and Kunta said paternally,

"It takes time."

"Why does no one harm owls?"

"Because all our dead ancestors' spirits are in owls."  Then he told Lamin
something of their late Grandma Yaisa.

"You were just a baby, and cannot remember her."

"What's that bird in the tree?"

"A hawk."

"What does he eat?"

"Mice and other birds and things."

"Oh."

Kunta had never realized how much he knew--but now and then Lamin asked
something of which Kunta knew nothing at all.

"Is the sun on fire?"  Or: "Why doesn't our father sleep with us?"

At such times, Kunta would usually grunt, then stop talking--as Omoro did
when he tired of so many of Kunta's questions.  Then Lamin would say no more,
since Mandinka home training taught that one never talked to another who did
not want to talk.  Sometimes Kunta would act as if he had gone into deep
private thought.  Lamin would sit silently nearby, and when Kunta rose, so
would he.  And sometimes, when Kunta didn't know the answer to a question, he
would quickly do something to change the subject.

Always, at his next chance, Kunta would wait until Lamin was out of the hut
and then ask Binta or Omoro the answer he needed for Lamin.

He never told them why he asked them both so many questions, but it seemed as
if they knew.  In fact, they seemed to act as if they had begun to
regard,Kunta as an older person, since he had taken on more responsibility
with his little brother.  Before long, Kunta was speaking sharply to Lamin in
Binta's presence about things done wrongly.

"You must talk clearly!"  he might say with a snap of his fingers.  Or he
might whack Lamin for not jumping swiftly enough to do anything his mother
had ordered him to do.  Binta acted as if she neither saw nor heard.

So Lamin made few moves now without either his mother's or his brother's
sharp eyes upon him.  And Kunta now had only to ask Binta or Omoro any
questions of Lamin's and they immediately told him the answer.

"Why is father's bullock's hide mat of that red color?  A bullock isn't red."

"I dyed the hide of the bullock with lye and crushed millet."  replied Binta.

"Where does Allah live?"

"Allah lives where the sun comes from," said Omoro.

CHAPTER 16

"What are slaves?"  Lamin asked Kunta one afternoon.  Kunta grunted and fell
silent.  Walking on, seemingly lost in thought, he was wondering what Lamin
had overheard to prompt that question.  Kunta knew that those who were taken
by toubob became slaves, and he had overheard grownups talking about slaves
who were owned by people in Juffure.

But the fact was that he really didn't know what slaves were.  As had
happened so many other times, Lam- in's question embarrassed him into finding
out more.

The next day, when Omoro was getting ready to go out after some palm wood to
build Binta a new food storehouse, Kunta asked to join his father; he loved
to go off anywhere with Omoro.  But neither spoke this day until they had
almost reached the dark, cool palm grove.

Then Kunta asked abruptly,

"Fa, what are slaves?"

Omoro just grunted at first, saying nothing, and for several minutes moved
about in the grove, inspecting the trunks of different palms.

"Slaves aren't always easy to tell from those who aren't slaves," he said
finally.  Between blows of his bush ax against the palm he had selected, he
told Kunta that slaves' huts were roofed with nyantang jon go and free
people's huts with nyantang foro, which Kunta knew was the best quality of
thatching grass.

"But one should never speak of slaves in the presence of slaves,"

said Omoro, looking very stern.  Kunta didn't understand why, but he nodded
as if he did.

When the palm tree fell, Omoro began chopping away its thick, tough fronds.
As Kunta plucked off for himself some of the ripened fruits, he sensed his
father's mood of willingness to talk today.  He thought happily how now he
would be able to explain to Lamin all about slaves.

"Why are some people slaves and others not?"  he asked.

Omoro said that people became slaves in different ways.  Some were born of
slave mothers--and he named a few of those who lived in Juffure, people whom
Kunta knew well.  Some of them were the parents of some of his own kafo
mates.  Others, said Omoro, had once faced starvation during their home
villages' hungry season, and they had come to Juffure and begged to become
the slaves of someone who agreed to feed and provide for them.  Still
others--and he named some of Juffure's older people--had once been enemies
and been captured as prisoners.

"They become slaves, being not brave enough to die rather than be taken,"
said Omoro.

He had begun chopping the trunk of the palm into sections of a size that a
strong man could carry.  Though all he had named were slaves, he said, they
were all respected people, as Kunta well knew.

"Their rights are guaranteed by the laws of our forefathers," said Omoro, and
he explained that all masters had to provide their slaves with food,
clothing, a house, a farm plot to work on half shares, and also a wife or
husband.

"Only those who permit themselves to be are despised," he told Kunta--those
who had been made slaves because they were convicted murderers, thieves, or
other criminals.  These were the only slaves whom a master could beat or
otherwise punish, as he felt they deserved.

"Do slaves have to remain slaves always?"  asked Kunta.

"No, many slaves buy their freedom with what they save from farming on half
share with their masters."  Omoro named some in Juffure who had done this.
He named others who had won their freedom by marrying into the family that
owned them.

To help him carry the heavy sections of palm, Omoro made a stout sling out of
green vines, and as he worked, he said that some slaves, in fact, prospered
beyond their masters.  Some had even taken slaves for themselves, and some
had become very famous persons.

"Sundiata was one!"  exclaimed Kunta.  Many times, he had heard the
grandmothers and the griots speaking of the great forefather slave general
whose army had conquered so many enemies.

Omoro grunted and nodded, clearly pleased that Kunta 66 ALEX HALEY

knew this, for Omoro also had learned much of Sundiata when he was Kunta's
age.  Testing his son, Omoro asked,

"And who was Sundiata's mother?"

"Sogolon, the Buffalo Woman!"  said Kunta proudly.

Omoro smiled, and hoisting onto his strong shoulders two heavy sections of
the palm pole within the vine sling, he began walking.

Eating his palm fruits, Kunta followed, and nearly all the way back to the
village, Omoro told him how the great Mandinka Empire had been won by the
crippled, brilliant slave general whose army had begun with runaway slaves
found in swamps and other hiding places.

"You will learn much more of him when you are in manhood training,"

said Omoro--and the very thought of that time sent a fear through Kunta, but
also a thrill of anticipation.

Omoro said that Sundiata had run away from his hated master, as most slaves
did who didn't like their masters.  He said that except for convicted
criminals, no slaves could be sold unless the slaves approved of the intended
master.

"Grandmother Nyo Boto also is a slave," said Omoro, and Kunta almost
swallowed a mouthful of palm fruit.  He couldn't comprehend this.

Pictures flashed across his mind of beloved old Nyo Boto squatting before the
door of her hut, tending the village's twelve or fifteen naked babies while
weaving baskets of twigs, and giving the sharp side of her tongue to any
passing adult--even the elders, if she felt like it.

"That one is nobody's slave," he thought.

The next afternoon, after he had delivered his goats to their pens, Kunta
took Lamin home by a way that avoided their usual playmates, and soon they
squatted silently before the hut of Nyo Boto.  Within a few moments the old
lady appeared in her doorway, having sensed that she had visitors.  And'with
but a glance at Kunta, who had always been one of her very favorite children,
she knew that something special was on his mind.  Inviting the boys inside
her hut, she set about the brewing of some hot herb tea for them.

"How are your papa and mama?"  she asked.

"Fine.  Thank you for asking," said Kunta politely.

"And you are well.

Grandmother?  "

"I'm quite fine, indeed," she replied.

ROOTS 67

Kunta's next words didn't come until the tea had been set before him.

Then he blurted,

"Why are you a slave, Grandmother?"

Nyo Boto looked sharply at Kunta and Lamin.  Now it was she who didn't speak
for a few moments.

"I will tell you," she said finally.

"In my home village one night, very far from here and many rains ago, when I
was a young woman and wife," Nyo Boto said, she had awakened in terror as
naming grass roofs came crashing down among her screaming neighbors.
Snatching up her own two babies, a boy and a girl, whose father had recently
died in a tribal war, she rushed out among the others--and awaiting them were
armed white slave raiders with their black slatee helpers.  In a furious
battle, all who didn't escape were roughly herded together, and those who
were too badly injured or too old or too young to travel were murdered before
the others' eyes, Nyo Boto began to sob, "--including my own two babies and
my aged mother."

As Lamin and Kunta clutched each other's hands, she told them how the
terrified prisoners, bound neck-to-neck with thongs, were beaten and driven
across the hot, hard inland country for many days.  And every day, more and
more of the prisoners fell beneath the whips that lashed their backs to make
them walk faster.  After a few days, yet more began to fall of hunger and
exhaustion.  Some struggled on, but those who couldn't were left for the wild
animals to get.  The long line of prisoners passed other villages that had
been burned and ruined, where the skulls and bones of people and animals lay
among the burned-out shells of thatch and mud that had once been family huts.
Fewer than half of those who had begun the trip reached the village of
Juffure, four days from the nearest place on the Kamby Bolongo where slaves
were sold.

"It was here that one young prisoner was sold for a bag of corn,"

said the old woman.

"That Was me.  And this was how I came to be called Nyo Boto," which Kunta
knew meant "bag of corn."  The man who bought her for his own slave died
before very long, she said, "and I have lived here ever since."

Lamin was wriggling in excitement at the story, and Kunta felt somehow even
greater love and appreciation 68 ALEX HALEY

than he had felt before for old Nyo Boto, who now sat smiling tenderly at the
two boys, whose father and mother, like them, she had once dandled on her
knee.

"Omoro, your papa, was of the first kafo when I came to Juffure,"

said Nyo Boto, looking directly at Kunta.  "Yaisa, his mother, who was your
grandmother, was my very good friend.  Do you remember her?"

Kunta said that he did and added proudly that he had told his little brother
about their grandma.

"That is good!"  said Nyo Boto.

"Now I must get back to work.  Run along, now."

Thanking her for the tea, Kunta and Lamin left and walked slowly back to
Binta's hut, each deep in his own private thoughts.

The next afternoon, when Kunta returned from his goat- herding, he found
Lamin filled with questions about Nyo Boto's story.  Had any such fire ever
burned in Juffure?  he wanted to know.  Well, he had never heard of any, said
Kunta, and the village showed no signs of it.  Had Kunta ever seen one of
those white people?

"Of course not!"

he exclaimed.  But he said that their father had spoken of a time when he and
his brothers had sees the-toubob and their ships at a point along the river.

Kunta quickly changed the subject, for he knew very little about toubob, and
he wanted to think about them for himself.  He wished that he could see one
of them--from a safe distance, of course, since everything he'd ever heard
about them made it plain that people were better off who never got too close
to them.

Only recently a girl out gathering herbs--and before her two grown men out
hunting--had disappeared, and every- 1 one was certain that toubob had stolen
them away.  He remembered of course, how when drums of other villages |
warned that toubob had either taken somebody or was 1 known to be near, the
men would arm themselves and | mount a double guard while the frightened
women quickly gathered all of the children and hid in the bush far from the
village--sometimes for several days--until the toubob was felt to be gone.

Kunta recalled once when he was out with his goats in the quiet of the bush,
sitting under his favorite shade tree.  He had happened to look upward and
there, to his astonishment, in the tree overhead, were twenty or thirty
monROOTS 69

keys huddled along the thickly leaved branches as still as statues, with
their long tails hanging down.  Kunta had always thought of monkeys rushing
noisily about, and he couldn't forget how quietly they had been watching his
every move.  He wished that now he might sit in a tree and watch some toubob
on the ground below him.

The goats were being driven homeward the afternoon after Lamin had asked him
about toubob when Kunta raised the subject among his fellow goatherds--and in
no time they were telling about the things they had heard.  One boy, Demba
Conteh, said that a very brave uncle had once gone close enough to smell some
toubob, and they had a peculiar stink.  All of the boys had heard that toubob
took people away to eat them.  But some had heard that the toubob claimed the
stolen people were not eaten, only put to work on huge farms.  Sitafa.  Silla
spat out his grandfather's answer to that: "White man's lie!"

The next chance he had, Kunta asked Omoro,

"Papa, will you tell me how you and your brothers saw the tou- bob at the
river?"  Quickly, he added,

"The matter needs to be told correctly to Lamin."  It seemed to Kunta that
his father nearly smiled, but Omoro only grunted, evidently not feeling like
talking at that moment.  But a few days later, Omoro casually invited both
Kunta and Lamin to go with him out beyond the village to collect some roots
he needed.  It was the naked Lamin's first walk anywhere with his father, and
he was overjoyed.

Knowing that Kunta's influence had brought this about, he held tightly onto
the tail of his big brother's dundiko.

Omoro told his sons that after their manhood training, his two older brothers
Janneh and Saloum had left Juffure, and the passing of time brought news of
them as well- known travelers in strange and distant places.  Their first
return home came when drum talk all the way from Juffure told them of the
birth of Omoro's first son.  They spent sleepless days and nights on the
trail to attend the naming ceremony.

And gone from home so long, the brothers joyously embraced some of their kafo
mates of boyhood.  But those few sadly told of others gone and lost---some in
burned villages, some killed by fearsome fire sticks some kidnaped, some
missing while farming, hunting, or traveling--and all because of toubob.

Omoro said that his brothers had then angrily asked him 70 ALEX HALEY

to join them on a trip to see what the toubob were doing, to see what might
be done.  So the three brothers trekked for three days along the banks of the
Kamby Bolongo, keeping carefully concealed in the bush, until they found what
they were looking for.  About twenty great toubob canoes were moored in the
river, each big enough that its insides might hold all the people of Juffure,
each with a huge white cloth tied by ropes to a tree like pole as tall as ten
men.  Nearby was an island, and on the island was a fortress.

Many toubob were moving about, and black helpers were with them, both on the
fortress and in small canoes.  The small canoes were taking such things as
dried indigo, cotton, beeswax, and hides to the big canoes.  More terrible
than he could describe, however, said Omoro, were the heatings and other
cruelties they saw being dealt out to those who had been captured for the
toubob to take away.

For several moments, Omoro was quiet, and Kunta sensed that he was pondering
something else to tell him.  Finally he spoke: "Not as many of our people are
being taken away now as then."  When Kunta was a baby, he said, the King of
Barra, who ruled this part of The Gambia, had ordered that there would be no
more burning of villages with the capturing or killing of all their people.
And soon it did stop, after the soldiers of some angry kings had burned the
big canoes down to the wate i killing all the toubob on board.

"Now," said Omoro, "nineteen guns are fired in salute to the King of Barra by
every toubob canoe entering the Kamby Bolongo."  He said that the King's
personal agents now supplied most of the people whom the toubob took
away--usually criminals or debtors, or anyone convicted for suspicion of
plotting against the king--often for little more than whispering.  More
people seemed to get convicted of crimes, said Omoro, whenever toubob ships
sailed in the Kamby Bolongo looking for slaves to buy.

"But even a king cannot stop the stealings of some people from their
villages," Omoro continued.

"You have known some of those lost from our village, three from among us just
within the past few moons, as you know, and you have heard the drum talk from
other villages."  He looked hard at his sons, and spoke slowly.

"The things I'm going to tell you now, you must hear with more than your
ears for not to do what I say can mean your being stolen away forever!"
Kunta and Lamin listened with rising fright.  "Never be alone when you can
help it," said Omoro; "Never be out at night when you can help it.  And day
or night, when you're alone, keep away from any high weeds or bush if you can
avoid it."

For the rest of their lives, "even when you have come to be men,"

said their father, they must be on guard for toubob.

"He often shoots his fire sticks which can be heard far off.  And wherever
you see much smoke away from any villages, it is probably his cooking fires,
which are too big.  You should closely inspect his signs to learn which way
the toubob went.  Having much heavier footsteps than we do, he leaves signs
you will recognize as not ours: He breaks twigs and grasses.

And when you get close where he has been, you will find that his scent
remains there.  It's like a wet chicken smells.  And many say a toubob sends
forth a nervousness that we can feel.  If you feel that, become quiet, for
often he can be detected at some distance.  "

But it's not enough to know the toubob, said Omoro.  "Many of our own people
work for him.  They are slatee traitors.  But without knowing them, there is
no way to recognize them.  In the bush, therefore, trust no one you don't
know."

Kunta and Lamin sat frozen with fear.

"You cannot be told these things strongly enough," said their father.

"You must know what your uncles and I saw happening tp those who had been
stolen.  It is the difference between slaves among ourselves and those whom
toubob takes away to be slaves for him."  He said that they saw stolen people
chained inside long, stout, heavily guarded bamboo pens along the shore of
the river.  When small canoes brought important- acting toubob from the big
canoes, the stolen people were dragged outside their pens onto the sand.

"Their heads had been shaved, and they had been greased until they shined all
over.  First they were made to squat and jump up and down,"

said Omoro.

"And then, when the toubob had seen enough of that, they ordered the stolen
people's mouths forced open for their teeth and their throats to be looked
at."

Swiftly, Omoro's finger touched Kunta's crotch, and as Kunta jumped, Omoro
said,

"Then the men's foto was pulled and looked at.  Even the women's private
parts were 72 ALEX HALEY

inspected.  " And the toubob finally made the people squat again and stuck
burning hot irons against their backs and shoulders.  Then, screaming and
struggling, the people were shipped toward the water, where small canoes
waited to take them out to the big canoes.

"My brothers and I watched many fall onto their bellies, clawing and eating
the sand, as if to get one last hold and bite of their own home," said Omoro.

"But they were dragged and beaten on."  Even in the small canoes out in the
water, he told Kunta and Lamin, some kept fighting against the whips and the
clubs until they jumped into the water among terrible long fish with gray
backs and white bellies and curved mouths full of thrashing teeth that
reddened the water with their blood.

Kunta and Lamin had huddled close to each other, each gripping the other's
hands.

"It's better that you know these things than that your mother and I kill the
white cock one day for you."  Omoro looked at his sons.

"Do you know what that means?"

Kunta managed to nod, and found his voice.

"When someone is missing, Fa?"  He had seen families frantically chanting to
Allah as they squatted around a white cock bleeding and flapping with its
throat slit.

"Yes," said Omoro.

"If the white cock dies on its breast, hope remains.  But when a white cock
flaps to death on its back, then no hope remains, and the whole village joins
the family in crying to Allah."

"Fa" -- Lamin's voice, squeaky with fear, startled Kunta, "where do the big
canoes take the stolen people?"

"The elders say to Jong Sang Doo," said Omoro, "a land where slaves are sold
to huge cannibals called toubabo koomi, who eat us.  No man knows any more
about it."

CHAPTER 17

So frightened was Lamin by his father's talk of slave-taking and white
cannibals that he awakened Kunta several times that night with his bad
dreams.  And the next day, when Kunta returned from goat herding he decided
to turn his little brother's mind--and his own--from such thoughts by telling
him about their distinguished uncles.

"Our father's brothers are also the sons of Kairaba Kunta Kinte, for whom I
am named," said Kunta proudly.

"But our uncles Janneh and Saloum were born of Sireng," he said.  Lamin
looked puzzled, but Kunta kept on explaining.  "Sireng was our grandfather's
first wife, who died before he married our Grandma YaisaJ' Kunta arranged
twigs on the ground to show the Kinte family's different individuals.  But he
could see that Lamin still didn't understand.  With a sigh, he began to talk
instead of their uncles' adventures, which Kunta himself had thrilled to so
often when his father had told of them.

"Our uncles have never taken wives for themselves because their love of
traveling is so great," said Kunta.

"For moons on end, they travel under the sun and sleep under the stars.  Our
father says they have been where the sun burns upon endless sand, a land
where there is never any rain."  In another place their uncles had visited,
said Kunta, the trees were so thick that the forests were dark as night even
in the daytime.  The people of this place were no taller than Lamin, and like
Lamin, always went naked--even after they grew up.

And they killed huge elephants with tiny, poisoned darts.  In still another
place, a land of giants, Janneh and Saloum had seen warriors who could throw
their hunting spears twice as far as the mightiest Mandinka, and dancers who
could leap higher than their own heads, which were six hands higher than the
tallest man in Juffure.

74 ALEX HALEY

Before bedtime, as Lamin watched with wide eyes, Kunta acted out his favorite
of all the stories--springing suddenly about with an imaginary sword slashing
up and down, as if Lamin were one of the bandits whom their uncles and others
had fought off every day on a journey of many moons, heavily laden with
elephants' teeth, precious stones, and gold, to the great black city of
Zimbabwe.

Lamin begged for more stories, but Kunta told him to go to sleep.

Whenever Kunta had been made to go to bed after his father told him such
tales, he would lie on his mat--as his little brother now would--with his
mind making the uncles' stories into pictures.  And sometimes Kunta would
even dream that he was traveling with his uncles to all the strange places,
that he was talking with the people who looked and acted and lived so
differently from the Mandinkas.  He had only to hear the names of his uncles
and his heart would quicken.

A few days later, it happened that their names reached Juffure in a manner so
exciting that Kunta could hardly contain himself.  It was a hot, quiet
afternoon, and just about everyone in the village was sitting outside his
hut's doorway or in the shade of the baobab--when suddenly there came a sharp
burst of drum talk from the next village.

Like the grownups, Kunta and Lamin cocked their heads' intently to read what
the drum was saying.  Lamin gasped aloud when he heard his own father's name.
He wasn't old enough to understand the rest, so Kunta whispered the news it
brought: Five days of walking in the way the sun rose, Janneh and Saloum
Kinte were building a new village.

And their brother Omoro was expected for the ceremonial blessing of the
village on the second next new moon.

The drum talk stopped; Lamin was full of questions.

"Those are our uncles?  Where is that place?  Will our fa go there?"  Kunta
didn't reply.  Indeed, as Kunta dashed off across the village toward the hut
of the jaliba, he barely heard his brother.  Other people were already
gathering there--and then came Omoro, with the big-bellied Binta behind him.
Everyone watched as Omoro and the jaliba spoke briefly, and Omoro gave him a
gift.  The talking drum lay near a small fire, where its goatskin head was
heating to extreme tautness.  Soon the crowd looked on as the jaliba's hands
pounded out Omoro's reply that, Allah willing, he would be in his brothers'
new village before the second next new moon.  Omoro went nowhere during the
next days without other villagers pressing upon him their congratulations and
their blessings for the new village, which history would record as founded by
the Kinte clan.

It wasn't many days before Omoro was to depart when an idea that was almost
too big to think about seized upon Kunta.  Was it remotely possible that his
papa might let him share the journey?  Kunta could think of nothing else.
Noticing his unusual quietness, Kunta's fellow goatherds, even Sitafa, left
him alone.  And toward his adoring little brother, he became so
short-tempered that even Lamin drew away, hurt and puzzled.  Kunta knew how
he was acting and felt badly, but he couldn't help himself.

He knew that now and then some lucky boy was allowed to share a journey with
his father, uncle, or grownup brother.  But he also knew that such boys had
never been so young as his eight rains, except for some fatherless boys, who
got special privileges under the forefathers' laws.  Such a boy could start
following closely behind any man, and the man would never object to sharing
whatever he had--even if he was on a journey lasting for moons--so long as
the boy followed him at exactly two paces, did everything he was told, never
complained, and never spoke unless spoken to.

Kunta knew not to let anyone, especially his mother, even suspect what he
dreamed of.  He felt certain that not only would Binta disapprove, but she
would also probably forbid his ever mentioning it again, and that would mean
Omoro would never know how desperately Kunta hoped he could go.  So Kunta
knew that his only hope lay in asking Pa himself--if he could ever catch him
alone.

There were soon but three days before Omoro was to leave, and the watchful,
almost despairing Kunta was herding his goats after breakfast when he saw his
father leaving Binta's hut.  Instantly he began maneuvering his goats into
milling back and forth, going nowhere, until Omoro had gone on in a direction
and to a distance that Binta surely wouldn't see.  Then, leaving his goats
alone, because he had to take the chance, Kunta ran like a hare and came to a
breathless stop and looked up pleadingly at his father's startled face.
Gulping, Kunta couldn't remember a single thing he had meant to say.

76 ALEX HALEY

Omoro looked down at his son for a long moment, and then he spoke.

"I

have just told your mother," he said-- and walked on.

It took Kunta a few seconds to realize what his father meant.

"Aieee!"  Kunta shouted, not even aware that he had shouted.  Dropping onto
his belly, he sprang froglike into the air--and bolting back to his goats,
sent them racing toward the bush.

When he collected himself enough to tell his fellow goat- herds what had
happened, they were so jealous that they went off by themselves.

But by midday they could no longer resist the chance to share with him the
excitement of such wonderful luck.  By that time he had fallen silent with
the realization that ever since the drum talk message had come, his father
had been thinking about his son.

Late that afternoon, when Kunta raced happily home and into his mother's hut,
Binta grabbed him without a word and began to cuff him so hard that Kunta
fled, not daring to ask what he had done.  And her manner changed suddenly
toward Omoro in a way that shocked Kunta almost as much.  Even Lamin knew
that a woman was absolutely never allowed to disrespect a man, but with Omoro
standing where he could plainly hear her, Binta loudly muttered her
disapproval of his and Kunta's traveling in the bush when the drums of
different villages were reporting regularly of new people missing.  Fixing
the breakfast couscous, she pounded the pestle into the mortar so furiously
that the sound was like drums.

As Kunta was hurrying out of the hut the next day--to avoid another
whacking--Binta commanded Lamin to stay behind and began to kiss and pat and
hug him as she hadn't done since he was a baby.  Lamin's eyes told Kunta his
embarrassment, but there was nothing either of them could do about it.

When Kunta was outside the hut away from his mother, practically every adult
who saw him offered congratulations upon his being Juffure's youngest boy
ever given the honor of sharing an elder's long journey.  Modestly, Kunta
said,

"Thank you," reflecting his proper home-training-- but once out in the bush
beyond the sight of grownups, he pranced under an extra-large head bundle he
had brought along to show his mates how well he balanced it--and would
balance it the next morning when he strutted past he travelers' tree behind
his father.  It fell to the ground hree times before he took as many steps.

On his way homeward, with many things he wanted to lo around the village
before leaving, Kunta felt a strange )ull to visit old Nyo Boto before doing
anything else.  \after delivering his goats, he escaped from Binta's hut as
Illicitly as he could and went to squat before Nyo Boto's.  Shortly she
appeared in her doorway.

"I have expected tou," she said, inviting him inside.  As usual, whenever
(until visited her alone, the two of them just sat quietly 'or a while.  He
had always liked and looked forward to hat feeling.

Although he was very young and she was very rid, they still felt very close
to each other, just sitting there n the dim hut, each of them thinking
private thoughts.

"I have something for you," said Nyo Boto finally.  Mov- ng to the dark pouch
of cured bullock's hide that hung Torn the wall by her bed, she withdrew a
dark sap hie charm of the kind that encircled one's upper arm.

"Your grandfather blessed this charm when your father went to man- iood
training," said Nyo Boto.

"It was blessed for the man- lood training of Omoro's first son--yourself.
Your Grand- na Yaisa left it with me for when your manhood training would
start.  And that is really this journey with your fa."  Cunta looked with
love at the dear old grandmother, but ie couldn't think of a right way to say
how the sap hie harm would make him feel that she was with him no mater how
far away he went.

The next morning, returning from prayers at the mosque, Dmoro stood waiting
impatiently as Binta took her time :ompleting the adjustment of Kunta's head
load When Cunta had laid awake too filled with excitement to sleep hrough the
night, he had heard her sobbing.  Then suddenly he was hugging Kunta so hard
that he could feel her body rembling, and he knew, more than ever before in
his life, low much his mother really loved him.

With his friend Sitafa, Kunta had carefully reviewed md practiced what he and
his father now did: First Omoro nd then Kunta made two steps out into the
dust beyond he doorway of his hut.  Then, stopping and turning and lending
down, they scraped up the dust of their first footprints and put it into
their hunters' bags, thus insuring that heir footprints would return to that
place.

Binta watched, weeping, from her hut's doorway, pressing 78 ALEX HALEY

Lamin against her big belly, as Omoro and Kunta walked away.  Kunta started
to turn for a last look--but seeing that his father didn't, kept his eyes
front and marched on, remembering that it wasn't proper for a man to show his
emotions.  As they walked through the village, the people they passed spoke
to them and smiled, and Kunta waved at his kafo mates, who had delayed their
rounding up of the goats in order to see him off.  He knew they understood
that he didn't return their spoken greetings because any talking now was
taboo for him.

Reaching the travelers' tree, they stopped, and Omoro added two more narrow
cloth strips to the weather-tattered hundreds already hanging from the lower
limbs, each strip representing the prayer of a traveler that his journey
would be safe and blessed.

Kunta couldn't believe it was really happening.  It was the first time in his
life he would spend a night away from his mother's hut, the first time he
would ever go farther from the gates of Juffure than one of his goats had
strayed, the first time--for so many things.

While Kunta was thus preoccupied, Omoro had turned and without a word or a
backward glance, started walking very fast down the path into the forest.
Almost dropping his head load Kunta raced to catch up with him.

CHAPTER 18

Kunta found himself nearly trotting to keep the proper two paces behind
Omoro.  He saw that almost two of his quick, short steps were necessary for
each long, smooth stride of his father.  After about an hour of this, Kunta's
excitement had waned almost as much as his pace.  His head bundle began to
feel heavier and heavier, and he had a terrible thought: Suppose he grew so
tired he couldn't keep up?

Fiercely, he told himself he would drop in his tracks before that would
happen.

Here and there, as they passed, snuffling wild pigs would ROOTS 79

go rushing into the underbrush, and partridges would whir up, and rabbits
would bound for cover.  But Kunta wouldn't have paid an elephant much
attention in his determination to keep up with Omoro.

The muscles below Kunta's knees were beginning to ache a little.  His face
was sweating, and so was his head; he could tell by the way his bundle began
sliding off balance, a little bit one way or the other, and he kept having to
put both his hands up there to readjust it.

Ahead, after a while, Kunta saw that they were approaching the travelers'
tree of some small village.  He wondered what village it was; he was sure he
would know its name if his father said it, but Omoro had neither spoken nor
looked back ever since they left Juffure.  A few minutes later, Kunta saw
dashing out to meet them--as he himself had once done--some naked children of
the first kafo.

They were waving and hallooing, and when they got closer, he could see their
eyes widen at the sight of one so young traveling with his father.

"Where are you going?"  they chattered, scampering on either side of Kunta.

"Is he your fa7"

"Are you Mandinka?"   "What's your village?"

Weary as he was, Kunta felt very mature and important, ignoring them just as
his father was doing.

Near every travelers' tree, the trail would fork, one leading on into the
village and the other past it, so that a person with no business there could
pass on by without being considered rude.  As Omoro and Kunta took the fork
that passed by this village, the little children exclaimed unhappily, but the
grownups seated under the village baobab only threw glances at the travelers,
for.  holding every- one's attention was a griot whom Kunta could hear loudly
orating about the greatness of Mandinkas.  There would be many griots, praise
singers, and musicians at the blessing of his uncles' new village, Kunta
thought.

The sweat began to run into Kunta's eyes, making him blink to stop the
stinging.  Since they had begun walking, the sun had crossed only half the
sky, but his legs already hurt so badly, and his head load had become so
heavy, that he began to think he wasn't going to make it.  A feeling of panic
was rising in him when Omoro suddenly stopped and swung his head load to the
ground alongside a clear pool at the side of the trail.  Kunta stood for a
moment trying to control his unsteady legs.  He clutched his head bundle to
80 ALEX HALEY

take it down, but it slipped from his fingers and fell with a bump.

Mortified, he knew his father had heard--but Omoro was on his knees drinking
from the spring, without a sign that his son was even there.

Kunta hadn't realized how thirsty he was.  Hobbling over to the water's edge,
he kneeled down to drink--but his legs refused the position.  After trying
again in vain, he finally lay down on his stomach, braced himself on his
elbows, and managed to lower his mouth to the water.

"Just a little."  It was the first time his father had spoken since they left
Juffure, and it shocked Kunta.

"Swallow a little, wait, then a little more."  For some reason, he felt angry
toward his father.

"Yes, Fa," he intended to say, but no sound came.  He sipped some cool water
and swallowed it.  Making himself wait, he wanted to collapse.  After sipping
a little more, he sat up and rested beside the pool.  The thought passed
through his mind that manhood training must be something like this.  And
then, sitting upright, he drifted off to sleep.

When he awakened with a start--how long had it been?  --Omoro was nowhere to
be seen.  Jumping up, Kunta saw the big head load under a nearby tree; so his
father wouldn't be far away.  As he began to look around, he realized how
sore he was.  He shook himself and stretched.

The muscles hurt, but he felt much better than he had.  Kneeling for a few
more gulps of water from the spring, Kunta noticed his reflection m the still
surface of the pool--a narrow black face with wide eyes and mouth.  Kunta
smiled at himself, then grinned with all his teeth showing.  He couldn't help
laughing, and as he looked up--there was Omoro standing at his side.  Kunta
sprang up, embarrassed, but his father's attention seemed to be on other
things.

In the shade of some trees, neither of them speaking a word, as the monkeys
chattered and the parrots screeched above their heads, they ate some of the
bread from their head loads along with the four plump wood pigeons Omoro had
shot with his bow and roasted while Kunta slept.  As they ate, Kunta told
himself that the first time there was any chance, he was going to show his
father how well he too could kill and cook food, the way he and his kafo
mates did out in the bush.

When they finished eating, the sun was three fourths across the sky, so it
wasn't as hot when the head loads were rctied and readjusted on their heads
and they set out on the trail once again.

"Toubob brings his canoes one day of walking from here," said Omoro when they
had gone a good distance.  "Now is daytime when we can see, but we must avoid
high bush and grass, which can hide surprises."

Omoro's fingers touched his knife sheath and his bow and arrows.

"Tonight we must sleep in a village."

With his father, he need not fear, of course, but Kunta felt a flash of
fright after a lifetime of hearing people and drums tell of disappearances
and stealings.  As they walked on--a little faster now--Kunta noticed hyena
dung on the trail, its color lily-white because hyenas with their strong jaws
cracked and ate so many bones.

And beside the path, their approach caused a herd of antelope to stop eating
and stand like statues, watching until the humans had passed by.

"Elephants!"  said Omoro a little later, and Kunta saw the surrounding
trampled bush, the young saplings stripped to bare bark and limbs, and some
half-uprooted trees the elephants had leaned on to push the topmost tender
leaves downward where they could reach them with their trunks.  Since
elephants never grazed near villages and people, Kunta had seen only a few of
them in his life, and then only from a great distance.  They had been among
the thousands of forest animals that ran together, sounding like thunder,
ahead of frightening black smoke clouds when a great fire had swept across
the brush land once when Kunta was very young; but Allah's rain had put it
out before it harmed Juffure or any other nearby villages.

As they trudged along the seemingly endless trail, it occurred to Kunta that
just as people's walking feet made trails, so did spiders spin the long, thin
threads they traveled on.  Kunta wondered if Allah willed matters for the
insects and the animals as He did for people; it surprised him to realize he
never had thought about that before.

He wished he could ask Omoro about it right now.  He was even more surprised
that Lamin hadn't asked him about it, for Lamin had asked him about even
smaller matters than insects.  Well, he would have much to tell his little
brother when he returned to Juffure--enough to fill days out in the bush with
his fellow goatherds for moons to come.

It seemed to Kunta that he and Omoro were entering a 82 ALEX HALEY

different kind of country than the one where they lived.  The sinking sun
shone down on heavier grasses than he had ever seen before, and among the
familiar trees were large growths of palm and cactus.  Apart from the biting
flies, the only flying things he saw here were not pretty parrots and birds
such as those that squawked and sang around Juffure, but circling hawks in
search of prey and vultures hunting for food already dead.

The orange ball of the sun was nearing the earth when Omoro and Kunta sighted
a thick trail of smoke from a village up ahead.  As they reached the
travelers' tree, even .  Kunta could tell that something wasn't right.  Very
few prayer strips hung from the limbs, showing that few of those who lived
here ever left their village and that most travelers from other villages had
taken the trail that passed it by.  Alas, no children came running out to
meet them.

As they passed by the village baobab, Kunta saw that it was partly burned.
Over half of the mud huts he could see were empty; trash was in the yards;
rabbits were hopping about; and birds were bathing in the dust.  The people
of the village--most of them leaning or lying about in the doorways of their
huts--were almost all old or sick, and a few crying babies seemed to be the
only children.  Kunta saw not a person of his age--or even as young as Omoro.

Several wrinkled old men weakly received the travelers.  The eldest among
them, rapping his walking stick, ordered a toothless old woman to bring the
travelers water and couscous; maybe she's a slave, thought Kunta.  Then the
old men began interrupting each other in their haste to explain what had
happened to the village.  Slave takers one night had stolen or killed all of
their younger people, "from your rains to his!"  One old man pointed at
Omoro, then at Kunta.

"We old they spared.  We ran away into the forest."

Their abandoned.  village had begun going to pieces before they could bring
themselves to return.  They had no crops yet, and not much food or strength.

"We will die out without our young people," said one of the old men.  Omoro,
had listened closely as they talked, and his words were slow as he spoke: "My
brothers' village, which is four days, distant, will welcome you,
grandfathers."

But all of them began shaking their heads as the eldest said: "This is our
village.  No other well has such sweet water.  No other trees' shade is as
pleasant.  No other kitchens smell of the cooking of our women."

The old men apologized that they had no hospitality hut to offer.

Omoro assured them that he and his son enjoyed sleeping under the stars.  And
that night, after a simple meal of bread from their head loads which they
shared with the villagers, Kunta lay on his pallet of green, springy boughs,
and thought about all he had heard.

Suppose it had been Juffure, with everybody he knew dead or taken
away--Omoro, Binta, Lamin, and himself too, and the baobab burned, and the
yards filled with trash.  Kunta made himself think about something else.

Then, suddenly, in the darkness, he heard the shrieks of some forest creature
caught by some ferocious animal, and he thought about people catching other
people.  In the distance he could also hear the howling of hyenas--but rainy
season or dry, hungry or harvest, every night of his life, he had heard
hyenas howling somewhere.  Tonight he found their familiar cry almost
comforting as he finally drifted off to sleep.

CHAPTER 19

In the first light of dawn, Kunta came awake, springing onto his feet.
Standing beside his pallet was a queer old woman demanding in a high, cracked
voice to know what had happened to the food she had sent him for two moons
ago.  Behind Kunta, Omoro spoke softly: "We wish we could tell you.
Grandmother."

As they hurried on beyond the village after washing and eating, Kunta
remembered an old woman in Juffure who would totter about, peering closely
into anyone's face and telling him happily,

"My daughter arrives tomorrow!"  Her daughter had disappeared many rains
before, everyone knew, and the white cock had died on its back, but all 84
ALEX HALEY

those she stopped would gently agree,

"Yes, Grandmother tomorrow."

Before the sun was very high, they saw ahead a lone figure walking toward
them on the trail.  They had passed two or three other travelers the day
before exchanging smiles and greetings but this old man, drawing near, made
it clear that he wanted to talk.  Pointing from the direction he had come, he
said,

"You may see a toubob."

Behind Omoro, Kunta nearly stopped breathing.

"He has many people carrying his head loads The old man said the toubob had
seen him and stopped him, but only sought help in finding out where the river
began.

"I told him the river begins farthest from where it ends."

"He meant you no harm?"  asked Omoro.

"He acted very friendly," said the old man, "but the cat always eats the
mouse it plays with."

"That's the truth!"  said Omoro, Kunta wanted to ask his father about this
strange toubob who came looking for rivers rather than for people; but Omoro
had bade farewell to the old man and was walking off down the footpath as
usual, without a glance to see if Kunta was behind him.  This time Kunta was
glad, for Omoro would have seen his son holding onto his head load with both
hands while he ran painfully to catch up.  Kunta's feet had begun to bleed,
but he knew it would be unmanly to take notice of it, let alone mention it to
his father.

For the same reason, Kunta swallowed his terror when, later that day, they
rounded a turn and came upon a family of lions a big male, a beautiful
female, and two half- grown cubs lounging in a meadow very near the path.  To
Kunta, lions were fearsome, slinking animals that would tear apart a goat
that a boy permitted to stray too far in its grazing.

Omoro slowed his pace, and without taking his eyes from the lions, said
quietly, as if sensing his son's fear, "They don't hunt or eat at this time
of the day unless they're hungry.  These are-fat."  But he kept one hand on
his bow and the other by his quiver of arrows as they passed by.  Kunta held
his breath but kept walking, and he and the lions watched each other until
they were out of sight.

He would have continued to think about them, and about the toubob, also
somewhere in the area, but his aching legs ROOTS 85

wouldn't let him.  By that night, he would have ignored twenty lions if they
had been feeding at the place Omoro chose for them to spend the night.  Kunta
had barely lain down on his bed of soft branches before he was into a deep
sleep--and it seemed only minutes before his father was shaking him awake in
the early dawn.  Though he felt as if he hadn't slept at all, Kunta watched
with unconcealed admiration how swiftly Omoro skinned, cleaned, and roasted
their morning meal of two hares, which he had caught in night snares.  As
Kunta squatted and ate the tasty meat, he thought how he and his goat herding
mates used up hours of catching and cooking game, and he wondered how his
father and other men ever found time to ever learn so much--about everything
there was to know, it seemed.

His blistered feet, and his legs, and his back, and his neck all began to
hurt again this third day on the trail--in fact, his whole body seemed to be
one dull ache--but he pretended that manhood training had already begun and
that he would be the last boy in his kafo to betray his pain.  When he
stepped on a sharp thorn just before midday, Kunta bravely bit his lip to
avoid crying out, but he began to limp and fall so far behind that Omoro
decided to let him rest for a few minutes beside the path while they ate
their afternoon meal.  The soothing paste his father rubbed into the wound
made it feel better, but soon after they began walking again, it began to
hurt--and bleed--in earnest.  Before long, however, the wound was filled with
dirt, so the bleeding stopped, and the constant walking numbed the pain
enough to let him keep up with his father.  Kunta couldn't be sure, but it
seemed to him that Omoro had slowed down a tiny bit.  The area around the
wound was ugly and swollen by the time they stopped that night, but his
father applied another poultice, and in the morning it looked and felt good
enough to bear his weight without too much pain.

Kunta noticed with relief, as they set out the next day, that they had left
behind the thorn and cactus land they had been traveling through and were
moving into bush country more like Juffure's, with even more trees and
thickly flowering plants, and more chattering monkeys and multicolored land
birds than he had ever seen before.

Breathing in the fragrant air made Kunta remember times when he had taken his
little brother to catch crabs down along the 86 ALEX HALEY

banks of the bolong, where he and Lamin would wait to wave at their mother
and the other women rowing homeward after work in their rice fields.

Omoro took the bypass fork at every travelers' tree, but each village's
first-kafo children always raced out to meet them and to tell the strangers
whatever happened to be the most exciting of the local news.  In one such
village, the little couriers rushed out yelling,

"Mumbo jumbo!  Mumbo jumbo!," and considering their job done, fled back
inside the village gate.  The bypassing trail went near enough for Omoro and
Kunta to see the townspeople watching a masked and costumed figure
brandishing a rod over the bare back of a screaming woman whom several other
women held.  All of the women spectators were shrieking with each blow of the
rod.  From discussions with his fellow goatherds, Kunta knew how a husband,
if enough annoyed by a quarrelsome, trouble making wife, could go quietly to
another village and hire a mumbo jumbo to come to his village and shout
fearsomely at intervals from concealment, then appear and publicly discipline
that wife, after which all of the village's women were apt to act better for
a time.

At one travelers' tree, no children came out to meet the Kintes.  In fact,
there was no one to be seen at all, and not a sound was to be heard in the
silent village, except for the birds and monkeys.  Kunta wondered if slave
takers had come here, too.  He waited in vain for Omoro to explain the
mystery, but it was the chattering children of the next village who did so.
Pointing back down the trail, they said that village's chief had kept on
doing things his people disliked until one night not long ago, as he slept,
everyone had quietly gone away with all their possessions to the homes of
friends and families in other places--leaving behind an "empty chief," the
children said, who was now going about promising to act better if only his
people would return.

Since nighttime was near, Omoro decided to enter this village, and the crowd
under the baobab was abuzz with this exciting gossip.  Most felt certain that
their new neighbors would return home after they had taught their chief his
lesson for a few more days.  While Kunta stuffed his stomach with groundnut
stew over steamed rice, Omoro went to the village jaliba and arranged for a
talking-drum message to his brothers.  He told them to expect him by the
lext sundown and that traveling with him was his first son.

Kunta had sometimes daydreamed about bearing his lame drum-sounding across
the land, and now it had hap- 'ened.  It wouldn't leave his ears.  Later, on
the hospitality [Ut's bamboo bed, bone-weary as he was, Kunta thought if the
other jalibas hunched over their drums pounding out us name in every village
along their route to the village of anneh and Saloum.

At every travelers' tree now, since the drums had sposen, were not only the
usual naked children but also some ilders and musicians.  And Omoro couldn't
refuse a senior ilder's request to grant his village the honor of at least a
brief visit.  As the Kintes freshened themselves in each hospitality hut and
then sat down to share food and drink in 'he shade of the baobab and
silk-cotton trees, the adults gathered eagerly to hear Omoro's answers to
their questions, and the first, second, and third kafos clustered about Kunta.

While the first kafo stared at him in silent awe, those of Junta's rains and
older, painfully jealous, asked him re- ipectful questions about his home
village and his des tina- ion.  He answered them gravely with, he hoped, the
same iignity as his father did their fathers' questions.  By the ime they
left, he was sure the villagers felt they had seen young man who had spent
most of his life traveling with us father along The Gambia's long trails.

CHAPTER 20

hey had tarried so long at the last village that they would have to walk
faster and harder to reach their destination by sundown, as Omoro had
promised his brothers.  Though he sweated and ached, Kunta found it easier
than before to keep his head load balanced, and he felt a new spurt of
strength with each of the drum talk messages that now filled the air with
word of the arrival of griots, jalibas, senior 88 ALEX HALEY

elders, and other important people in the town ahead, each representing such
distant home villages as Karantaba, Kootacunda, Pisania, and Jonkakonda, most
of which Kunta had never heard of.  A griot from the Kingdom of Wooli was
there, said the drums, and even a prince sent by his father, the King of
Barra.  As Kunta's cracked feet padded quickly along the hot, dusty trail, he
was amazed at how famous and popular his uncles were.  Soon he was all but
running, not only to keep close behind the ever more rapidly striding Omoro,
but also because these past few hours seemed to be taking forever.

Finally, just as the sun began to turn crimson on the western horizon, Kunta
spotted smoke rising from a village not far ahead.  The wide, circular
pattern of the smoke told Kunta that dried baobab hulls were being burned to
drive away mosquitoes.  That meant the village was entertaining important
visitors.  He felt like cheering.

They had arrived!  Soon he began to hear the thunder of a big ceremonial
tobalo drum--being pounded, he guessed, as each new personage entered between
the village gates.  Intermingling was the throb of smaller tan-tang drums and
the shriekings of dancers.  Then the trail made a turn, and there under the
rising smoke was the village.  And alongside a bushy growth they saw a man
who caught sight of them at the same instant and began to point and wave as
if he had been posted there to await an oncoming man with a boy.  Omoro waved
back at the man, who immediately squatted over his drum and announced on it:
"Omoro Kinte and first son" -- Kunta's-feet scarcely felt the ground.  The
travelers' tree, soon in sight, was festooned with cloth strips, and the
original single-file trail had already been widened by many feet --evidence
of an already popular and busy village.  The pounding of the tan-tangs grew
louder and louder, and suddenly the dancers appeared, grunting and shouting
in their leaf-and-bark costumes, leaping and whirling and stamping out
through the village gate ahead of everyone else, all of them rushing to meet
the distinguished visitors.  The village's deep-voiced tobalo began to boom
as two figures came running through the crowd.

Ahead of Kunta, Omoro's head bundle dropped suddenly to the ground, and Omoro
was running toward them.  Before he knew it, Kunta's own head bundle had
dropped and he was running too.

The two men and his father were hugging and pounding each other.

"And this is our nephew?"  Both men yanked Kunta off his feet and embraced
him amid exclamations of joy.  Sweeping them on to the village, the huge
welcoming party cried out their greetings all around them, but Kunta saw and
beard no one but his uncles.  They certainly resembled Omoro, but he noticed
that they were both somewhat shorter, stockier, and more muscular than his
father.  The older uncle Janneh's eyes had a squinting way of seeming to look
a long distance, and both men moved with an almost animal quickness.  They
also talked much more rapidly than his father as they plied him with
questions about Juffure and about Binta.

Finally, Saloum thumped his fist on Kunta's head.

"Not since he got his name have we been together.  And now look at him!  How
many rains have you, Kunta?"

"Eight, sir," he answered politely.

"Nearly ready for manhood training!"  exclaimed his uncle.

All around the village's tall bamboo fence, dry thorn- bushes were piled up,
and concealed among them were sharp-pointed stakes to cripple any marauding
animal or human.  But Kunta wasn't noticing such things, and the few others
of around his age who were there he saw only out of the corners of his eyes.
He scarcely heard the racket of the parrots and monkeys above their heads, or
the barking of the wuolo dogs underfoot, as the uncles took them on a tour of
their beautiful new village.  Every hut had its own private yard, said
Saloum, and every woman's dry- foods storehouse was mounted directly over her
cooking fire, so the smoke would keep her rice, couscous, and millet free of
bugs.

Kunta almost got dizzy jerking his head toward this or that exciting sight,
smell, or sound.  It was both fascinating and confusing to overhear people
speaking in Mandinka dialects that he couldn't understand beyond an
occasional word.  Like the rest of the Mandinkas--except for those as learned
as the arafang--Kunta knew next to nothing of the languages of other tribes,
even of those who lived nearby.  But he had spent enough time around the
travelers' tree to know which tribes were which.  The Fulas had oval faces,
longer hair, thinner lips, and sharper features, and vertical scars on their
temples.  The Wolof were extremely black 90 ALEX HALEY

and very reserved, the Serahuli lighter-skinned and small in stature.

And the Jolas--there was no mistaking them-- scarred their entire bodies, and
their faces always seemed to wear a ferocious expression.

Kunta recognized people from all of these tribes here in the new village, but
there were even more he didn't recognize.  Some were haggling loudly with
traders as they hawked their wares.  Older women clamored over tanned hides,
and younger women bargained for hairpieces made from sisal and baobab.  The
cry

"Kola!  Fine purple kola!"  drew a cluster of those whose few remaining teeth
were already orange-stained from chewing the nuts.

Amid friendly elbowing and pushing, Omoro was introduced to an endless stream
of villagers and important persons from exciting places.  Kunta marveled at
his uncles' fluent talking in the strange tongues they spoke.  Letting
himself drift into the shifting throng, knowing that he could find his father
and uncles whenever he wanted to, Kunta soon found himself among the
musicians who were playing for all who felt like dancing.  Next he sampled
the roast antelope and beef and the groundnut stew that the village women
kept bountifully supplied on tables in the baobabs' shade for anyone who
wanted it.  It was all right as food went, Kunta thought, but not as tasty as
the succulent harvest-festival dishes prepared by the mothers of Juffure.

Seeing some women over by the well talking excitedly about something, Kunta
sidled over, his ears as wide as his eyes, and heard that a very great mar
about was reported to be only about halfa day's travel away on the trail,
journeying with his party to honor the new village, since it had been founded
by sons of the late holy man Kairaba Kunta Kinte.  Kunta was thrilled anew to
hear his own grandfather spoken of so reverently.  Unrecognized by any of the
women, he heard them chatter next about his uncles.  It was time they
traveled less and settled down to have wives and sons, one woman said.

"The only trouble they will have," said another, "is so many maidens eager to
be their wives."

It was almost dark when Kunta, feeling very awkward, finally approached some
boys of around his own age.  But they didn't seem to mind that he had hung
around the grownups until now.  Mostly, they seemed anxious to tell Kunta how
their new village had come to be.

"All of our ROOTS 91

families became your uncles' friends somewhere during their travels,"

said one boy.  All of them had been dissatisfied with their lives where they
were, for one reason or another.

"My grandfather didn't have enough space for all his family and his
children's families to be close to him," a boy said.

"Our belong wouldn't grow good rice," said another.

His uncles, Kunta heard, began telling friends they knew an ideal place where
they were thinking of building a village.  And the families of Janneh and
Saloum's friends were soon on the trail with their goats, chickens, pets,
prayer rugs, and other possessions.

Soon it was dark and Kunta watched as the fires of the new village were lit
with the sticks and branches that his new friends had collected earlier in
the day.  Because it was a time of celebration, they told him, all the
villagers and visitors would sit together around several fires, instead of
the usual custom, which dictated that the men and the women and children
would sit at separate fires.

The alimamo would bless the gathering, they said, and then Janneh and Saloum
would walk inside the circle to tell stories about their travels and
adventures.  In the circle with them would be the oldest visitor to the
village, a senior elder from the distant upper-river of Fulladu.  It was
whispered that he had over a hundred rains, and would share his wisdom with
all who had ears to hear.

Kunta ran to join his father at the fireside just in time to hear the
alimamo's prayer.  After it, no one said anything for a few minutes.

Crickets rasped loudly, and the smoky fires cast dancing shadows upon the
wide circle of faces.  Finally, the leathery old elder spoke: "Hundreds of
rains before even my earliest memories, talk reached across the big waters of
an African mountain of gold.  This is what first brought toubob to Africa!"
There was no gold mountain, he said, but gold beyond description had been
found in streams and mined from deep shafts first in northern Guinea, then
later in the forests of Ghana.

"Toubob was never told where gold came from," said the old man, "for what one
toubob knows, soon they all know."

Then Janneh spoke.  Nearly as precious as gold in many places, he said, was
salt.  He and Saloum had personally seen salt and gold exchanged in equal
weights.  Salt was found in thick slabs under certain distant sands, and
cer92 ALEX HALEY tain waters elsewhere would dry into a salty mush, which was
shaped into blocks after sitting in the sun.

"There was once a city of salt," said the old man.

"The city of Taghaza, whose people built their houses and mosques of blocks
of salt."

"Tell of the strange humpbacked animals you have spoken of before now,"
demanded an ancient-looking old woman, daring to interrupt.  She reminded
Kunta of Grandmother Nyo Boto.

A hyena howled somewhere in the night as people leaned forward in the
flickering light.  It was Saloum's turn to speak.

"Those animals that are called camels live in a place of endless sand.  They
find their way across it from the sun, the stars, and the wind.  Janneh and I
have ridden these animals for as long as three moons with few stops for
water."

"But many stops to fight off the bandits!"  said Janneh.

"Once we were part of a caravan of twelve thousand camels," Saloum continued.

"Actually, it was many smaller caravans traveling together to protect
ourselves against bandits."

Kunta saw that as Saloum spoke, Janneh was unrolling a large piece of tanned
hide.  The elder made an impatient gesture to two young men who sprang to
throw onto the fire some dry branches.  In the flaring light, Kunta and the
others could follow Janneh's finger as it moved across a strange-looking
drawing.

"This is Africa," he said.  The finger traced what he told them was "the big
water" to the west, and then "the great sand desert," a place larger by many
times than all of The Gambia--which he pointed out in the lower left of the
drawing.

"To the north coast of Africa, the toubob ships bring porcelain, spices,
cloth, horses, and countless things made by men," said Saloum.

"Then, camels and donkeys bear these goods inland to places like Sijilmasa,
Ghadames, and Manrakech."  The moving finger of Janneh showed where those
cities were.

"And as we sit here tonight," said Saloum, "there are many men with heavy
head loads crossing deep forests taking our own African goods--ivory, skins,
olives, dates, kola nuts, cotton, copper, precious stones--back to the
toubob's ships."

Kunta's mind reeled at what he heard, and he vowed silently that someday he
too would venture to such exciting places.

ROOTS 93

"The mar about From far out on the trail, the lookout drummer beat out the
news.  Quickly a formal greeting party was lined up--Janneh and Saloum as the
village's founders; then the Council of Elders, the alimamo, the arafang;
then the honored representatives of other villages, including Omoro; and
Kunta was placed with those of his height among the village's young ones.
Musicians led them all out toward the travelers' tree, timing their approach
to meet the holy man as he arrived.  Kunta stared hard at the white-bearded,
very black old man at the head of his long and tired party.  Men, women, and
children were heavily loaded with large head bundles except for a few men
herding cattle and, Kunta judged, more than a hundred goats.

With quick gestures, the holy man blessed the welcoming party and bade them
rise from their knees.  Then Janneh and Saloum were specially blessed, and
Omoro was introduced by Janneh, and Saloum beckoned to Kunta, who went
dashing up alongside them.

"This is my first son," said Omoro, "who bears his holy grandfather's name."

Kunta heard the mar about speak words in Arabic over him--which he couldn't
understand, except for his grandfather's name--and he felt the holy man's
fingers touching his head as lightly as a butterfly's wing, and then he went
dashing back among those of his own age as the mar about went to meet the
others in the welcoming party, conversing with them as if he were an ordinary
man.  The young ones in Kunta's group began to trail away and stare at the
long line of wives, children, students, and slaves who brought up the rear of
the procession.

The mar about wives and children quickly retired into guest huts.

The students, taking seats on the ground and opening their head bundles
withdrew books and manu- scripts--the property of their teacher, the holy
man--and began reading aloud to those who gathered around each of them to
listen.  The slaves, Kunta noticed, didn't enter the village with the others.
Remaining outside the fence, the slaves squatted down near where they had
tethered the cattle and penned the goats.  They were the first slaves Kunta
had ever seen who kept away from other people.

The holy man could scarcely move for all the people on their knees around
him.  Villagers and distinguished visitors alike pressed their foreheads to
the dirt and wailed for him to hear their plaints, some of the nearest
presuming to 94 ALEX HALEY

touch his garment.  Some begged him to visit their villages and conduct
long-neglected religious services.  Some asked for legal decisions, since law
and religion were companions under Islam.

Fathers asked to be given meaningful names for new babies.  People from
villages without an arafang asked if their children might be taught by one of
the holy man's students.

These students were now busily selling small squares of cured goat hide which
many hands then thrust toward the holy man for him to make his mark on.  A
holy-marked piece of goatskin, sewn into a treasured sap hie charm such as
Kunta wore around his upper arm, would insure the wearer's constant nearness
to Allah.  For the two cowrie shells he had brought with him from Juffure,
Kunta purchased a square of goat hide and joined the jostling crowd that
pressed in upon the mar about

It ran through Kunta's mind that his grandfather must have been like this
holy man, who had the power, through Allah, to bring the rain to save a
starving village, as Kairaba Kunta Kinte had once saved Juffure.  So his
beloved grandmas Yaisa and Nyo Boto had told him since he was old enough to
understand.  But only now, for the first time, did he truly understand the
greatness of his grandfather-- and of Islam.  Only one person, thought Kunta,
was going to be told why he had decided to spend his precious two cowries and
now stood holding his own small square of cured goatskin waiting his turn for
a holy mark.  He was going to take the blessed goatskin back home and turn it
over to Nyo Boto, and ask her to keep it for him until the time came to sew
it into a precious sap hie charm for the arm of his own first son.

CHAPTER 21

Kunta's kafo, galled with envy of his trip, and expecting that he would
return to Juffure all puffed up with himself, had decided--without any of
them actually saying so--to show no interest whatever in him or his travels
when he returned.  And so they did, thinking nothing of how heartsick it made
Kunta feel to arrive home and find his lifelong mates not only acting as if
he hadn't been away, but actually ending conversations if he came near, his
dearest friend Sitafa acting even colder than the others.  Kunta was so upset
that he hardly even thought about his new infant brother, Suwadu, who had
been born while he was away With Omoro.

One noon, as the goats grazed, Kunta finally decided to overlook his mates'
unkindness and try to patch things up.  Walking over to the other boys, who
were sitting apart from him eating their lunches, he sat down among them and
simply began talking.

"I wish you could have been with me," he said quietly, and without waiting
for their reaction, began to tell them about the trip.

He told how hard the days of walking had been, how his muscles had ached,
about his fright in passing the lions.  And he described the different
villages he had passed through and the people who lived there.  While he
spoke, one of the boys jumped up to regroup his goats, and when he
returned--without seeming to notice--sat down closer to Kunta.  Soon Kunta's
words were being accompanied by grunts and exclamations from the others, and
before they knew it, just at that point in his story when he reached his
uncles' new village, the time had come to drive the goats homeward.

The next morning in the schoolyard, all of the boys had to strain not to let
the arafang suspect their impatience to leave.  Finally out again with their
goats, they huddled 96 ALEX HALEY

around Kunta, and he began to tell them about the different tribes and
languages all intermingled in his uncles' village.  He was in the middle of
one of the tales of faraway places that Janneh and Saloum had told around the
camp- fire--the boys hanging raptly on every word--when the stillness of the
fields was broken by the ferocious barking of a wuolo dog and the shrill,
terrified bleating of a goat.

Springing upright, they saw over the edge of the tall grass a great, tawny
panther dropping a goat from his jaws and lunging at two of their wuolo dogs.
The boys were still standing there, too shocked and scared to move, when one
of the dogs was flung aside by the panther's sweeping paw --as the other dog
leaped wildly back and forth, the panther crouched to spring, their horrible
snarlings drowning out the frantic barking of the other dogs and the cries of
the other goats, which were bounding off in all directions.

Then the boys fanned out, shouting and running, most trying^ to head off the
goats.  But Kunta bolted blindly toward his father's fallen goat.

"Stop, Kunta!  No!"  screamed Sitafa as he tried to stop him from running
between the dogs and the panther.  He couldn't catch him; but when the
panther saw the two yelling boys rushing at him, he backed off a few feet,
then turned and raced back toward the forest with the enraged dogs at his
heels.

The panther stink and the mangled nanny goat made Kunta sick--blood was
running darkly down her twisted neck; her tongue lolled out; her eyes were
rolled back up in her head and--most horribly--her belly was ripped wide open
and Kunta could see her unborn kid inside, still slowly pulsing.  Nearby was
the first wuolo dog, whining in pain from its gashed side and trying to crawl
toward Kunta.  Vomiting where he stood, Kunta turned, ashen, and looked at
Sitafa's anguished face.

Dimly, through his tears, Kunta sensed some of the other boys around him,
staring at the hurt dog and the dead goat.  Then slowly they all drew
back--all but Sitafa, who put his arms around Kunta.  None of them spoke, but
the question hung in the air: How is he going to tell his father?  Somehow
Kunta found his voice.

"Can you care for my goats?"  he asked Sitafa.

"I must take this hide to my father."

Sitafa went over and talked with the other boys, and two of them quickly
picked up and carried off the whimpering dog.  Kunta then motioned Sitafa to
go away with the others.

Kneeling by the dead nanny goat with his knife, Kunta cut and pulled, and cut
again, as he had seen his father do it, until finally he rose with the wet
hide in his hands.  Pulling weeds, he covered over the nanny's carcass and
the unborn kid, and started back toward the village.  Once before he had
forgotten his goats while herding, and he had vowed never to let it happen
again.  But it had happened again, and this time a nanny goat had been killed.

Desperately, he hoped it was a nightmare and that he'd awaken now, but the
wet hide was in his hands.  He wished death upon himself, but he knew his
disgrace would be taken among the ancestors.  Allah must be punishing him for
boasting, Kunta thought with shame.  He stopped to kneel toward the way the
sun rose and prayed for forgiveness.

Rising, he saw that his kafo had all the goats herded back together and were
getting ready to leave the grazing area, lifting their head loads of
firewood.  One boy was carrying the injured dog, and two of the other dogs
were limping badly.  Sitafa, seeing Kunta looking toward them, put his head
load down and started toward Kunta, but quickly Kunta waved him away again to
go on with the rest.

Each footstep along the worn goat trail seemed to take Kunta closer to the
end--the end of everything.  Guilt and terror and numbness washed over him in
waves.  He would be sent away.  He would miss Binta, Lamin, and old Nyo Boto.
He would even miss the arafang's class.  He thought of his late Grandma
Yaisa, of his holy man grandfather whose name he bore, now disgraced; of his
famous traveling uncles, who had built a village.  He remembered that he had
no head load of firewood.

He thought of the nanny goat, whom he remembered well, always skittish and
given to trotting off from the rest.  And he thought of the kid not yet born.
And while he thought of all these things, he could think of nothing but what
he most feared to think of: his father.

His mind lurched, and he stopped, rooted, not breathing, staring ahead of him
down the path.  It was Omoro, running toward him.  No boy would have dared
tell him; how had he known?

"Are you all right?"  his father asked.

98 ALEX HALEY

Kunta's tongue seemed cleaved to the roof of his mouth.  "Yes, Pa," he said
finally.  But by then Omoro's hand was exploring Kunta's belly, discovering
that the blood soaking his dundiko wasn't Kunta's.

Straightening, Omoro took the hide and laid it on the grass.

"Sit down!"  he ordered, and Kunta did, trembling as Omoro sat across from
him.

"There is something you need to know," said Omoro.  "All men make mistakes.
I lost a goat to a lion when I was of your rains."

Pulling at his tunic, Omoro bared his left hip.  The pale, deeply scarred
place there shocked Kunta.

"I learned, and you must learn.

Never run toward any dangerous animal!  " His eyes searched Kunta's face.

"Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Fa."

Omoro got up, took the goafs hide, and flung it far off into the brush.

"Then that is all that needs to be said."

Kunta's head reeled as he walked back to the village behind Omoro.

Greater even than his guilt, and his relief, was the love he felt for his
father at this moment

CHAPTER 22

Kunta had reached his tenth rain, and the second-kafo boys his age were about
to complete the schooling they had received twice daily since they were five
rains old.  When the day of graduation came, the parents of Kunta and his
mates seated themselves in the arafang's schoolyard beaming with pride in the
very front rows, even ahead of the village elders.  While Kunta and the
others squatted before the ara- fang, the village alimamo prayed.  Then the
arafang stood and began looking around at his pupils as they waved their
hands to be asked a question.  Kunta was the first boy he chose.

"What was the profession of your forefathers, Kunta Kinte?"  he asked.

"Hundreds of rains ago in the land of Man," Kunta confidently replied, "the
Kinte men were blacksmiths, and their women were makers of pots and weavers
of cloth."  With each pupil's correct answer, all those assembled made loud
sounds of pleasure.

Then the arafang asked a mathematical question: "If a baboon has seven wives,
each wife has seven children, and each child eats seven ground nuts for seven
days, how many nuts did the baboon steal from some man's farm?"  After much
frantic figuring with grass-quill pens on their cottonwood slates, the first
to yelp out the right answer was Sitafa Silla, and the crowd's shouting of
praise drowned out the groans of the other boys.

Next the boys wrote their names in Arabic, as they had been taught.

And one by one, the arafang held up the slates for all the parents and other
spectators to see for themselves what education had achieved.  Like the other
boys, Kunta had found the marks that talk even harder to read than they were
to write.  Many mornings and evenings, with the arafang rapping their
knuckles, they had all wished that writing was as easy to understand as the
talking drum, which even those of Lamin's age could read as if someone
standing beyond sight were calling out the words.

One by one now, the arafang asked each graduate to stand.  Finally came
Kunta's turn.

"Kunta Kintel" With all eyes upon him, Kunta felt the great pride of his
family in the front row, even of his ancestors in the burying ground beyond
the village--most especially of his beloved Grandma Yaisa.  Standing up, he
read aloud a verse from the Koran's last page; finishing, he pressed it to
his forehead and said, "Amen!"  When the readings were done, the teacher
shook each boy's hand and announced loudly that as their education was
complete, these boys were now of the third kafo, and everyone broke out into
a loud cheering.  Binta and the other mothers quickly removed the covers from
the bowls and calabashes they had brought, heaped with delicious foods, and
the graduation ceremony ended in a feast that soon emptied both.

Omoro was waiting the next morning when Kunta came to take the family's goats
out for the day's grazing.  Pointing to a fine young male and female, Omoro
said,

"These two are your school-finishing present."  Almost before Kunta 100 ALEX
HALEY

could stammer out his thanks, Omoro walked away without another word--as if
he gave away a pair of goats every day--and Kunta tried very hard not to seem
excited.  But the moment his father was out of sight, Kunta whooped so loud
that his new charges jumped and started running-- with all the others in hot
pursuit.  By the time he caught up with them and herded them out to the
fields, the rest of his mates were already there--showing off their own new
goats.  Treating them like sacred animals, the boys steered their charges to
only the most tender grasses, already picturing the strong young kids they
would soon produce, and the kids would have soon after, until each boy had a
herd as large and valuable as his father's.

Before the next new moon appeared, Omoro and Binta were among the parents who
gave away a third goat--this one to the arafang as an expression of gratitude
for their son's education.  If they had been more prosperous, they would have
been glad to give even a cow, but they knew he understood that this was
beyond their means, as it was beyond the means of everyone in Juffure, which
was a humble village.

Indeed, some parents--new slaves with nothing saved--had little to offer but
their own backs, and their grateful gift of a moon's farm work for the
arafang was graciously accepted.

The passing moons soon flowed into seasons until yet another rain had passed
and Kunta's kafo had taught Lamin's kafo how to be goatherds.

A time long awaited now drew steadily nearer.  Not a day passed that Kunta
and his mates didn't feel both anxiety and joy at the approach of the next
harvest festival, which would end with the taking away of the third
kafo--those boys between ten and fifteen rains in age--to a place far away
from Juffure, to which they would return, after four moons, as men.

Kunta and the others tried to act as if none of them were really giving the
matter any particular thought or concern.  But they thought of little else,
and they watched and listened for the slightest sign or word from a grownup
that had anything at all to do with manhood training.  And early in the dry
season, after several of their fathers quietly left Juffure for two or three
days and just as quietly returned, the boys whispered tensely among
themselves, especially after Kalilu Conteh overheard his uncle say that
much-needed repairs had been made on the jujuo, the manhood-training village
that had gone unused and exposed to weather and animals for almost five rains
since the last training had been completed there.  Even more excited
whispering followed talk among their^ fathers about which elder might be
selected by the Council of Elders to be the kin tango the man in charge of
manhood training.

Kunta and all of his mates had many times heard their fathers, uncles, and
older brothers speaking reverently of the kin- tangos who had supervised
their own manhood training many rains before.

It was just before the harvest season when all of the third-kafo boys
reported to one another in a fever of excitement how their mothers had
silently measured each of them with a sewing tape around his head and down to
his shoulders.  Kunta did his best to hide the vivid memory of that morning
five rains before when, as brand-new little goatherds, he and his mates had
been scared nearly out of their wits as they watched screaming boys under
white hoods being kicked and jeered from the village by a band of temfyingly
masked, shrieking, spear-carrying kanku- rang dancers.

The tobalo soon boomed out the beginning of the new harvest, and Kunta joined
the rest of the villagers in the fields.  He welcomed the long days of hard
work, for they kept him too busy and too tired to give much thought to what
lay ahead.  But when the harvesting was done and the festival began, he found
himself unable to enjoy the music and the dancing and the feasting as the
others did-- as he himself had done for as long as he could remember.  The
louder the merriment, in fact, the unhappier he became until finally he spent
most of the last two days of the festival sitting by himself on the banks of
the belong skipping stones across the water.

On the night before the last day of the festival, Kunta was in Binta's hut
silently finishing his evening meal of groundnut stew with rice when Omoro
walked in behind him.  From the corner of his eye, Kunta glimpsed his father
raising something white, and before he had a chance to turn around, Omoro had
pulled a long hood down firmly over his head.  The terror that shot through
Kunta all but numbed him.

He-felt his father's hand gripping his upper arm and urging him to stand up,
then to move backward until he was pushed down onto a low stool.  Kunta was
102 ALEX HALEY

grateful to sit, for his legs felt like water and his head felt light.  He
listened to himself breathing in short gasps, knowing that if he tried to
move, he would fall off the stool.  So he sat very still, trying to accustom
himself to the darkness.  Terrified as he was, it seemed almost a double
darkness.  As his upper lip felt the moist warmth of his breath inside the
hood, it flashed through Kunta's mind that surely once such a hood had been
thrust in the same way over his father's head.  Could Omoro have been so
frightened?  Kunta couldn't even imagine that, and he felt ashamed to be such
a disgrace to the Kinte clan.

It was very quiet in the hut.  Wrestling the fear that knotted the pit of his
stomach, Kunta closed his eyes and focused his very pores on trying to hear
something, anything at all.  He thought he heard Binta moving about, but he
couldn't be sure.  He wondered where Lamin was, and Suwadu, who surely would
be making noise.  He knew only one thing for sure: Neither Binta nor anyone
else was going to speak to him, let alone lift that hood off his head.  And
then Kunta thought how awful it would be if his hood did get lifted, for
everyone would see how scared he really was, and perhaps therefore a boy
unworthy of joining his kafo mates in manhood training.

Even boys the size of Lamin knew--since Kunta had told him--what would happen
to anyone who showed himself too weak or cowardly to endure the training that
turned boys into hunters, into warriors, into men--all within a period of
twelve moons.  Suppose he should fail?  He began gulping down his fear,
remembering how he had been told that any boy who failed the manhood training
would be treated as a child for the rest of his life, even though he might
look like a grown man.  He would be avoided, and his village would never
permit him to marry, lest he father others like himself.  These sad cases,
Kunta had heard, usually slipped away from their villages sooner or later,
never to return, and even their own fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters
would never mention them again.  Kunta saw himself slinking away from Juffure
like some mangy hyena, scorned by everyone; it was too horrible to think of.

After a time, Kunta realized that he was faintly hearing the drumbeats and
the shouting of dancers in the distance.  More time passed.  What hour was
it, he wondered.  He guessed it must be near the sutoba hour, halfway between
ROOTS 103

dusk and dawn, but after a few moments he heard the alimamo's high-pitched
wailing for the village's safo prayer, two hours before midnight.  The music
ceased and Kunta knew that the villagers had stopped their celebrating and
the men were hastening to the mosque.

Kunta sat until he knew the prayers must have been over, but the music didn't
resume.  He listened hard, but could hear only silence.

Finally he nodded off, awakening with a start only a few moments later.  It
was still quiet--and darker under the hood than a moonless night.  Finally,
faintly, he was certain that he could hear the early yippings of hyenas.  He
knew that hyenas always yipped for a while before settling down to steady
howling, which they would continue until early daybreak, sounding eerily far
away.

During the harvest festival week, at the first streaks of daybreak, Kunta
knew the tobalo would boom.  He sat waiting for that to happen--for anything
to happen.  He felt his anger building, expecting the tobalo to sound at any
moment--but nothing happened.  He grated his teeth and waited some, more.
And then, at last, after jerking awake a few times, he dozed off into a
fitful sleep.  He all but leaped from his skin when the tobalo finally did
boom.  Under the hood, his cheeks were hot with embarrassment that he had
fallen asleep.

Having become accustomed to the hood's darkness, Kunta could all but see the
morning's activities from the sounds his ears picked up--the crowing of the
cocks, the barking of the wuolo dogs, the wailing of the alimamo, the bumping
of the women's pestles as they beat the breakfast couscous.  This morning's
prayer to Allah, he knew, would be for the success of the manhood training
that was about to begin.

He heard movement in the hut, and he sensed that it was Binta.  It was
strange how he couldn't see her, but he knew it was his mother.  Kunta
wondered about Sitafa and his other mates.  It surprised him to realize that
throughout the night, he hadn't once thought about them until now.  He told
himself that they must surely have had as long a night as he had.

When the music of koras and balafons began playing outside the hut, Kunta
heard the sound of people walking and talking, louder and louder.  Then drums
joined the din, their rhythm sharp and cutting.  A moment later, his 104
ALEX HALEY

heart seemed to stop as he sensed the sudden movement of someone rushing into
the hut.  Before he could even brace himself, his wrists were grabbed, and
roughly he was snatched up from the stool and jerked out through the hut door
into the all but deafening noise of staccato drums and screeching people.

Hands knocked him and feet kicked him.  Kunta thought desperately of bolting
away somehow, but just as he was about to try, a firm yet gentle hand grasped
one of his.  Breathing hoarsely under his hood, Kunta realized that he was no
longer being hit and kicked and that the screaming of the crowd was suddenly
no longer nearby.  The people, he guessed, had moved along to some other
boy's hut, and the guiding hand that held his must belong to the slave Omoro
would have hired, as every father did, to lead his hooded son to the jujuo.

The crowd's shouting rose to a frenzied pitch every time another boy was
dragged from a hut, and Kunta was glad he couldn't see the kankurang dancers,
who were making bloodcurdling whoops as they sprang high into the air
brandishing their spears.  Big drums and small drums-- every drum in the
village, it seemed--were pounding as the slave guided Kunta faster and faster
between rows of people shouting on either side of him, crying out things like
"Four moons!"

and

"They will become meni" Kunta wanted to burst into tears.  He wished wildly
that he could reach out and touch Omoro, Binta, Lamin--even the sniveling
Suwadu--for it felt too much to bear that four long moons were going to pass
before he would see again those he loved even more than he had ever realized
until now.  Kunta's ears told him that he and his guide had joined a moving
line of marchers, all stepping to the swift rhythm of the drums.  As they
passed through the village gates--he could tell because the noise of the
crowd began to fade-- he felt hot tears well up and run down his cheeks.  He
closed his eyes tight, as if to hide the tears even from himself.

As he had felt Binta's presence in the hut, now he felt, almost as if it were
a smell, the fear of his kafo mates ahead and behind him in the line, and he
knew that theirs was as great as his.  Somehow that made him feel less
ashamed.  As he trudged on in the white blindness of his hood, he knew that
he was leaving behind more than his ROOTS 105

father and his mother and his brothers and the village of his birth, and this
filled him with sadness as much as terror.  But he knew it must be done, as
it had been done by his father before him and would some day be done by his
son.  He would return, but only as a man.

CHAPTER 23

They must be approaching--within a stone's throw, Kunta sensed--a recently
cut bamboo grove.  Through his hood, he could smell the rich fragrance of
bamboo freshly chopped.  They marched closer; the smell became stronger and
stronger; they were at the barrier, then through it; but they were still
outdoors.  Of course--it was a bamboo fence.

Suddenly the drums stopped and the marchers halted.  For several minutes,
Kunta and the others stood still and silent.  He listened for the slightest
sound that might tell him when they had stopped or where they were, but all
he could hear was the screeching of parrots and the scolding of monkeys
overhead.

Then, suddenly, Kunta's hood was lifted.  He stood blinking in the bright sun
of midafternoon, trying to adjust his eyes to the light.  He was afraid even
to turn his head enough to see his kafo mates, for directly before them stood
stem, wrinkled senior elder Silla Ba Dibba.  Like all the other boys, Kunta
knew him and his family well.

But Silla Ba Dibba acted as if he had never seen any of them before--indeed,
as if he would rather not see them now; his eyes scanned their faces as he
would have looked at crawling maggots.  Kunta knew that this surely was their
kin- tango.  Standing on either side of him were two younger men, All Sise
and Soru Tura, whom Kunta also knew well; Soru was a special friend of
Omoro's.  Kunta was grateful that neither of them wiw Omoro, to see his son
so scared.

As they had been taught, the entire kafo--all twenty- three boys--crossed
their palms over their hearts and 106 ALEX HALEY

greeted their elders in the traditional way: "Peace!"  "Peace only!"

replied the old kin tango and his assistants.  Widening his gaze for a
moment--careful not to move his head --Kunta saw that they stood in a
compound dotted with several small, mud-walled, thatch-roofed huts and
surrounded by the tall new bamboo fence.  He could see where the huts had
been patched, undoubtedly by the fathers who had disappeared from Juffure for
a few days.  All this he saw without moving a muscle.

But the next moment he nearly jumped out of his skin.

"Children left Juffure village," said the kin tango suddenly in a loud voice.

"If men are to return, your fears must be erased, for a fearful person is a
weak person, and a weak person is a danger to his family, to his village, and
to his tribe."  He glared at them as if he had never seen such a sorry lot,
and then turned away.  As he did so, his two assistants sprang forward and
began to lay about among the boys with limber sticks, pummeling their
shoulders and backsides smartly as they herded them like so many goats, a few
boys apiece, into the small mud huts.

Huddled in their bare hut, Kunta and his four mates were too terrified to
feel the lingering sting of the blows they had received, and too ashamed to
raise their heads even enough to Jook at one another.  After a few minutes,
when it seemed that they would be spared from further abuse for a little
while, Kunta began to sneak looks at his companions.  He wished that he and
Sitafa were in the same hut.  He knew these others, of course, but none as
well as his yayo brother, and his heart sank.  But perhaps that's no
accident, he reasoned.  They probably don't want us to have even that small
comfort.  Maybe they're not even going to feed us, he began to think, when
his stomach started to growl with hunger.

Just after sunset, the kin tango assistants burst into the hut.

"Move!"  A stick caught him sharply across the shoulders, and the scrambling
boys were hissed at as they rushed outside into the dusk, bumping into boys
from other huts, and under the flying sticks were herded with gruff orders
into a ragged line, each boy grasping the hand of the boy ahead.  When they
were all in place, the kin tango fixed them with a dark scowl and announced
that they were about to undertake a night journey deep into the surrounding
forest.

ROOTS 107

At the order to march, the long line of boys set out along the path in clumsy
disarray, and the sticks fell steadily among them.

"You walk like buffalo!"  Kunta heard close to his ear.  A boy cried out as
he was hit, and both assistants shouted loudly in the darkness,

"Who was that?," and their sticks rained down even harder.  After that no boy
uttered a sound.

Kunta's legs soon began to hurt--but not as soon or as badly as they would
have done if he hadn't learned the manner of loose striding taught him by his
father on their trip to the village of Janneh and Saloum.  It pleased him to
think that the other boys' legs were surely hurting worse than his, for they
wouldn't yet know how to walk.  But nothing he had learned did anything to
help Kunta's hunger and thirst.

His stomach felt tied in knots, and he was starting to feel light-headed when
at last a stop was called near a small stream.  The reflection of the bright
moon in its surface was soon set to rippling as the boys fell to their knees
and began to scoop up and gulp down handfuls of water.  A moment later the
kin tango assistants commanded them away from the stream with orders not to
drink too much at once, then opened their head packs and passed out some
chunks of dried meat.

The boys tore away at the morsels like hyenas; Kunta chewed and swallowed so
fast that he barely tasted the four bites he managed to wrest away for
himself.

Every boy's feet had big, raw blisters on them, Kunta's as bad as any of the
rest; but it felt so good to have food and water in his stomach that he
hardly noticed.  As they sat by the stream, he and his kafo mates began to
look around in the moonlight at one another, this time too tired rather than
too afraid to speak.  Kunta and Sitafa exchanged long glances, but neither
could tell in the dim light if his friend looked as miserable as he felt
himself.

Kunta hardly had a chance to cool his burning feet in the stream before the
kin tango assistants ordered them back into formation for the long walk back
to the jujuo.  His legs and head were numb when they finally came within
sight of the bamboo gates shortly before dawn.

Feeling ready to die, he trudged to his hut, bumped into another boy already
inside, lost his footing, stumbled to the dirt floor--and fell deep asleep
right where he lay.

On every night for the next six nights came another 108 ALEX HALEY

march, each one longer than the last.  The pain of his blistered feet was
terrible, but Kunta found by the fourth night that he somehow didn't mind the
pain as much, and he began to feel a welcome new emotion: pride.  By the
sixth march, he and the other boys discovered that though the night was very
dark, they no longer needed to hold the next boy's hand in order to maintain
a straight marching line.

On the seventh night came the kin tango first personal lesson for the boys:
showing them how men deep in the forest used the stars to guide them, so that
they would never be lost.  Within the first half moon, every boy of the kafo
had- learned how to lead the marching line by the stars, back toward the
jujuo.  One night when Kunta was the leader, he almost stepped on a bush rat
before it noticed him and scurried for cover.  Kunta was almost as proud as
he was startled, for this meant that the marchers had been walking too
silently to be heard even by an animal.

But animals, the kin tango told them, were the' best teachers of the art of
hunting, which was one of the most important things for any Mandinka to
learn.  When the kin tango was satisfied that they had mastered the
techniques of marching, he took the kafo, for the next half moon, deep into
the bush far from the jujuo, where they built lean-to shelters to sleep in
between countless lessons in the secrets of becoming a simbon.  Kunta's eyes
never seemed to have been closed before one of the kin tango assistants was
shouting them awake for some training session.

The kin tango assistants pointed out where lions had recently crouched in
wait, then sprung out to kill passing antelope; then where the lions had gone
after_ their meal and laid down to sleep for the rest of the night.  The
tracks of the antelope herd were followed backward until they almost painted
a picture for the boys of what those antelope had done through the day before
they met the lions.

The kafo inspected the wide cracks in rocks where wolves and hyenas hid.  And
they began to learn many tricks of hunting that they had never dreamed about.
They had never realized, for example, that the first secret of the master
simbon was never moving abruptly.  The old kin tango himself told the boys a
story about a foolish hunter who finally starved to death in an area thick
with game, because he was so clumsy and made so much noise, darting here and
ROOTS 109

there, that all about him animals of every sort swiftly and silently slipped
away without his even realizing that any had been near.

The boys felt like that clumsy hunter during their lessons in imitating the
sounds of animals and birds.  The air was rent with their grunts and
whistles, yet no birds or animals came near.  Then they would be told to lie
very quietly in hiding places while the kin tango and his assistants made
what seemed to them the same sounds, and soon animals and birds would come
into sight, cocking their heads and looking for the others who had called to
them.

When the boys were practicing bird calls one afternoon, suddenly a
large-bodied, heavy-beaked bird landed with a great squawking in a nearby
bush.

"Look!"  one boy shouted with a loud laugh--and every other boy's heart
leaped into his throat, knowing that once again that boy's big mouth was
going to get them all punished together.  No few times before had he shown
his habit of acting before thinking-but now the kin tango surprised them.  He
walked over to the boy and said to him very sternly,

"Bring that bird to me--alive!"  Kunta and his mates held their breaths as,
they watched the boy hunch down and creep toward the bush where the heavy
bird sat stupidly, turning its head this way and that.  But when the boy
sprang, the bird managed to escape his clutching hands, frantically beating
its stubby wings just enough to raise its big body over the brush tops-- and
the boy went leaping after it in hot pursuit, soon disappearing from sight.

Kunta and the others were thunderstruck.  There was clearly no limit to what
the kin tango might order them to do.  For the next three days and two
nights, as the boys went about their training sessions, they cast long
glances at each other and then the nearby bush, all of them wondering and
worrying about what had befallen their missing mate.  As much as he had
annoyed them before by getting them all beaten for things he'd done, he
seemed never more one of them now that he was gone.

The boys were just getting up on the morning of the fourth day when the jujuo
lookout' signaled that someone was approaching the village.

A moment later came the drum message: It was he.  They rushed out to meet
him, whooping as if their own brother had returned from a trek to Marrakech.
Thin and dirty and covered with cuts and 110 ALEX HALEY

bruises, he swayed slightly as they ran up and slapped him on the back.  But
he managed a weak smile--and well he should: Under his arm, its wings and
feet and beak bound with a length of vine, he held the bird.  It looked even
worse than he did, but it was still alive.

The kin tango came out, and though speaking to that boy, he made it clear
that he was really speaking to them all: "This taught you two important
things--to do as you are told, and to keep your mouth shut.

These are among the makings of men.  " Then Kunta and his mates saw that boy
receive the first clearly approving look cast upon anyone by the old kin
tango who had known that the boy would sooner or later be able to catch a
bird so heavy that it could make only short, low hops through the bush.

The big bird was quickly roasted and eaten with great relish by everyone
except his captor, who was so tired that he couldn't stay awake long enough
for it to cook.  He was permitted to sleep through the day and also through
the night, which Kunta and the others had to spend out in the bush on a
hunting lesson.  The next day, during the first rest period, the boy told his
hushed mates what a torturous chase he had led, until finally, after two days
and a night, he had laid a trap that the bird walked into.  After trussing it
up--including the snapping beak--he had somehow kept himself awake for
another day and night, and by following the stars as they had been taught,
had found his way back to the jujuo.  For a while after that, the other boys
had very little to say to him.  Kunta told himself that he wasn't really
jealous; it was just that the boy seemed to think that his exploit--and the
kin tango approval of it --had made him more important than his kafo mates.
And the very next time the kin tango assistants ordered an afternoon of
wrestling practice, Kunta seized the chance to grab that boy and throw him
roughly to the ground.

By the second moon of manhood training, Kunta's kafo had become almost as
skilled at survival in the forest as they would have been in their own
village.  They could now both detect and follow the all but invisible signs
of animals, and now they were learning the secret rituals and prayers of the
forefathers that could make a very great simbon himself invisible to animals.
Every bite of meat they ate now was either trapped by the boys or shot by
their slings and arrows.

They could skin an animal twice ROOTS 111

as fast as they could before, and cook the meat over the nearly smokeless
fires they had learned to build by striking flint close to dry moss under
light, dry sticks.  Their meals of roasted game--sometimes small bush
rats--were usually topped off with insects toasted crispy in the coals.

Some of the most valuable lessons they learned weren't even planned.

One day, during a rest period, when a boy was testing his bow and one
careless arrow happened to strike a nest of kurburungo bees high in a tree, a
cloud of angry bees swarmed down--and once again all the boys suffered for
the mistake of one.  Not even the fastest runner among them escaped the
painful stings.

"The simbon never shoots an arrow without knowing what it will hit,"

the kin tango told them later.  Ordering the boys to rub one another's puffed
and hurting places with shea tree butter, he said,

"Tonight, you will deal with those bees in the proper manner."  By nightfall,
the boys had piled dry moss beneath the tree that held the nest.

After one of the kin tango assistants set it afire, the other one threw into
the flames a quantity of leaves from a certain bush.

Thick, choking smoke rose into the tree's upper limbs, and soon dead bees
were dropping around the boys by the thousands, as harmlessly as rain.  In
the morning, Kunta and his kafo were shown how to melt down the
honeycombs--skimming off the rest of the dead bees--so that they could eat
their fill of honey.  Kunta could almost feel himself tingle with that extra
strength it was said honey would give to great hunters when they were in need
of quick nourishment deep in the forest.

But no matter what they went through, no matter how much they added to their
knowledge and abilities, the old kin tango was never satisfied.  His demands
and his discipline remained so strict that the boys were torn between fear
and anger most of the time--when they weren't too weary to feel either.  Any
command to one boy that wasn't instantly and perfectly performed still
brought a beating to the entire kafo.  And when they weren't being beaten, it
seemed to Kunta, they' were being wakened roughly in the middle of the night
for a-long march--always as a punishment for some boy's wrongdoing.  The only
thing that kept Kunta and the others from giving that boy a beating of their
own was the certain knowledge that they would be beaten for fighting; among
the first lessons they had learned 112 ALEX HALEY

in life---long before coming to the jujuo--having been that Mandinkas must
never fight among themselves.  Finally the boys began to understand that the
welfare of the group depended on each of them--just as the welfare of their
tribe would depend on each of them one day.  Violations of the rules slowly
dwindled to an occasional lapse, and with the decline in heatings, the fear
they felt for the kin tango was slowly replaced by a respect they had felt
before only for their fathers.

But still hardly a day would pass without something new to make Kunta and his
mates feel awkward and ignorant all over again.  It amazed them to learn, for
example, that a rag folded and hung in certain ways near a man's hut would
inform other Mandinka men when he planned to return, or that sandals crossed
in certain ways outside a hut told many things that only other men would
understand.  But the secret Kunta found the most remarkable of all was sira
kango, a kind of men's talk in which sounds of Mandinka words were changed in
such a way that no women or children or non-Mandinkas were permitted to
learn.  Kunta remembered times when he had heard his father say something
very rapidly to another man that Kunta had not understood nor dared to ask
explained.  Now that he had learned it himself, he and his mates soon spoke
nearly everything they said in the secret talk of men.

In every hut as each moon went by, the boys added a new rock to a bowl to
mark how long they had been gone from Juffure.  Within days after the third
rock was dropped in the bowl, the boys were wrestling in the compound-one
afternoon when suddenly they looked toward the gate of the jujuo, and there
stood a group of twenty-five or thirty men.  A loud gasp rose from the boys
as they recognized their fathers, uncles, and older brothers.  Kunta sprang
up, unable to believe his eyes, as a bolt of joy shot through him at the
first sight of Omoro for three moons.  But it was as if some unseen hand held
him back and stifled a cry of gladness--even before he saw in his father's
face no sign that he recognized his son.

Only one boy rushed forward, calling out his father's name, and without a
word that father reached for the stick of the nearest kin tango assistant and
beat his son with it, shouting at him harshly for betraying his emotions, for
showing that he was still a boy.  He added, unnecessarily, ROOTS 113

as he gave him the last licks, that his son should expect no favors from his
father.  Then the kin tango himself barked a command for the entire kafo to
lie on their bellies in a row, and all of the visiting men walked along the
row and flailed the upturned backsides with their walking sticks.  Kunta's
emotions were in a turmoil; the blows he didn't mind at all, knowing them to
be merely another of the rigors of manhood training, but it pained him not to
be able to bug his father or even hear his voice, and it shamed him to know
that it wasn't manly even to wish for such indulgences.

The beating over, the kin tango ordered the boys to race, to jump, to dance,
to wrestle, to pray as they had been taught, and the fathers, uncles, and
older brothers watched it all silently, and then departed with warm
compliments to the kin tango and his assistants, but not so much as a
backward look at the boys, who stood with downcast faces.

Within the hour, they got another beating for sulking about the preparation
of their evening meal.  It hurt all the more because the kin tango and his
assistants acted as if the visitors had never even been there.  But early
that night, while the boys were wrestling before bedtime--only halfheartedly
now--one of the kin tango assistants passed by Kunta and said brusquely to
him, under his breath,

"You have a new brother, and he is named Madi."

Four of us now, thought Kunta, lying awake later that night.  Four
brothers--four sons for his mother and father.  He thought how that would
sound in the Kinte family history when it was told by griots for hundreds of
rains in the future.  After Omoro, thought Kunta, he would be the first man
of the family when he returned to Juffure.  Not only was he learning to be a
man, but he was also learning many, many things he would be able to teach
Lamin, as already he had taught him so many of the things of boyhood.  At
least he would teach him that which was permissible for boys to know; and
then Lamin would teach Suwadu, and Suwadu would teach this new one whom Kunta
had not even seen, whose name was Madi.  And some day, Kunta thought as he
drifted off to sleep, when he was as old as Omoro, he would have sons of his
own, and it would all begin again.

CHAPTER 24

"You are ceasing to be children.  You are experiencing rebirth as men,"

the kin tango said one morning to the assembled kafo.  This was the first
time the kin tango had used the word "men" except to tell them what they
weren't.  After moons of learning together, working together, being beaten
together, he told them, each of them was finally beginning to discover that
he had two selves--one within him, and the other, larger self in all those
whose blood and lives he shared.  Not until they learned that lesson could
they undertake the next phase of manhood training: how to be warriors.

"You know already that Mandinkas fight only if others are warlike," said the
kin tango

"But we are the finest warriors if driven to fight."

For the next half moon, Kunta and his mates learned how to make war.

Famous Mandinka battle strategies were drawn in the dust by the kin tango or
his assistants, and then the boys were told to re-enact the strategies in
mock battles.

"Never completely encircle your enemy," counseled the kin tango

"Leave him some escape, for he will fight even more desperately if trapped."
The boys learned also that battles should start in late afternoon, so that
any enemy, seeing defeat, could save face by retreating in the darkness.  And
they were taught that during any wars, neither enemy should ever do harm to
any traveling mara bouts griots, or blacksmiths, for an angered mar about
could bring down the displeasure of Allah; an angered griot could use his
eloquent tongue to stir the enemy army to greater savagery; and an angered
blacksmith could make or repair weapons for the enemy.

Under the direction of the kin tango assistants, Kunta and the others carved
out barbed spears and made barbed arrows of the kind used only in battle, and
practiced with ROOTS 115

them on smaller and smaller targets.  When a boy could hit a bamboo cane
twenty-five steps away, he was cheered and praised.  Tramping into the woods,
the boys found some koona shrub, whose leaves they picked to be boiled back
at the jujuo.  Into the resulting thick, black juice they would dip a cotton
thread, and they were shown how that thread, wound around an arrow's barbs,
would seep a deadly poison into whatever wound the arrow made.

At the end of the war-training period, the kin tango told them more than they
had ever known before--and told them more excitingly than they had ever heard
it--about that greatest of all Mandinka wars and warriors--the time when the
army of the fabled ex-slave general Sundiata, son of Sogolon, the Buffalo
Woman, conquered the forces of the Boure country's King Soumaoro, a king so
cruel that he wore human-skin robes and adorned his palace walls with enemy's
bleached skulls.

Kunta and his mates held their breaths, hearing how both armies suffered
thousands of wounded or dead.  But the archers of the Mandinkas closed in on
Soumaoro's forces like a giant trap, raining down arrows from both sides and
moving in steadily until Soumaoro's terrified army finally fled in rout.  For
days and nights, said the kin tango--and it was the first time the boys ever
had seen him smile--the talking drums of every village followed the marching
progress of the victorious Mandinka forces, laden with enemy booty and
driving thousands of captives before them.  In every village, happy crowds
jeered and kicked the prisoners, whose shaved heads were bowed and whose
hands were tied behind their backs.  Finally General Sundiata called a huge
meeting of the people, and he brought before them the chiefs of all the
villages he had defeated and gave them back their spears of chief hood rank,
and then he established among those chiefs the bonds of peace, which would
last among them for the next one hundred rains.  Kunta and his mates went
dreamily to their beds, never prouder to be Mandinkas.

As the next moon of training began, drum talk reached the jujuo telling of
new visitors to be expected within the next two days.  The excitement with
which the news of any visitors would have been received, after so long since
the fathers and brothers had come to see them, was doubled 116 ALEX HALEY

when the boys learned that the sender of the message was the drummer of
Juffure's champion wrestling team, which was coming to conduct special
lessons for the trainees.

Late in the afternoon of the next day, the drums announced their arrival even
earlier than expected.  But the boys' pleasure at seeing all the familiar
faces again was forgotten when, without a word, the wrestlers grabbed them
and began to flip them onto the ground harder than they had ever been thrown
in their lives.  And every boy was bruised and hurting when the wrestlers
divided them into smaller groups to grapple one another, as the champions
supervised.  Kunta had never imagined there were so many wrestling holds, nor
how effectively they could work if used correctly.  And the champions kept
drumming into the boys' ears that it was knowledge and expertness and not
strength that made the difference between being an ordinary wrestler and a
champion.  Still, as they demonstrated the holds for their pupils, the boys
couldn't help admiring their bulging muscles as much as their skill in using
them.  Around the fire that night, the drummer from Juffure chanted the names
arid the feats of great Mandinka wrestling champions of even a hundred rains
in the past, and when it was the boys' time for bed, the wrestlers left the
jujuo to return to Juffure.

Two days later came news of another visitor.  This time the message was
brought by a runner from Juffure--a young man of the fourth kafo whom Kunta
and his mates knew well, though in his own new manhood, he acted as if he
never had seen these third-kafo children.  Without so much as a glance at
them, he ran up to the kin tango and announced, between deep breaths, that
Kujali N'jai, a griot well known throughout The Gambia, would soon spend one
full day at the jujuo.

In three days he arrived, accompanied by several young men of his family.  He
was much older than any of the griots Kunta had seen before--so old, in fact,
that he made the kin tango seem young.  After gesturing for the boys to squat
in a semicircle about him, the old man began to talk of how he became what he
was.  He told them how, over years of study from young manhood, every griot
had buried deep in his mind the records of the ancestors.

"How else could you know of the great deeds of the ancient kings, holy men,
hunters, and warriors who came hundreds of rains before us?  Have you met
them?"  asked the old man.  "No!  The history of our people is carried to the
future in here."  And he tapped his gray head.

The question in the mind of every boy was answered by the old griot: Only the
sons of griots could become griots.  Indeed, it was their solemn duty to
become griots.  Upon finishing their manhood training, these boys--like those
grandsons of his own who sat beside him here today-- would begin studying and
traveling with selected elders, hearing over and over again the historical
names and stories as they had been passed down.  And in due time, each young
man would know that special part of the forefathers' history in the finest
and fullest detail, just as it had been told to his father and his father's
father.  And the day would come when that boy would become a man and have
sons to whom he would tell those stories, so that the events of the distant
past would forever live.

When the awed boys had wolfed down their evening meal and rushed back to
gather again around the old griot, he thrilled them until late into the night
with stories his own father had passed down to him--about the great black
empires that had ruled Africa hundreds of rains before.

"Long before toubob ever put his foot in Africa," the old griot said, there
was the Empire of Benin, ruled by an all- powerful King called the Oba, whose
every wish was obeyed instantly.  But the actual governing of Benin was done
by trusted counselors of the Oba, whose full time was needed just for making
the necessary sacrifices to appease the forces of evil and for his proper
attentions to a harem of more than a hundred wives.  But even before Benin
was a yet richer kingdom called Songhai, said the griot.  Song- had's capital
city was Gao, filled with fine houses for black princes and rich merchants
who lavishly entertained traveling tradesmen who brought much gold to buy
goods.

"Nor was that the richest kingdom," said the old man.  And he told the boys
of ancestral Ghana, in which an entire town was populated with only the
King's court.  And King Kanissaai had a thousand horses, each of which had
three servants and its own urinal made of copper.  Kunta could hardly believe
his ears.

"And each evening," said the griot, "When King Kanissaai would emerge from
his palace, a thousand fires would be lit, lighting up all between the
heavens and the earth.  And the servants of the great King 118 ALEX HALEY

would bring forth food enough to serve the ten thousand people who gathered
there each evening.  "

Here he paused, and exclamations of wonder could not be restrained by the
boys, who knew well that no sound should be made as a griot talked, but
neither he nor even the kin tango himself seemed to notice their rudeness.
Putting into his mouth half of a kola nut and offering the other half- to the
kin tango who accepted it with pleasure, the griot drew the skirt of his robe
closer about his legs against the chill of the early night and resumed his
stories.

"But even Ghana was not the richest black kingdom!"  he exclaimed.

"The very richest, the very oldest of them all was the kingdom of ancient
Mali!"  Like the other empires, Mali had its cities, its farmers, its
artisans, its blacksmiths, tanners, dyers, and weavers, said the old griot.
But Mali's enormous wealth came from its far-flung trade routes in salt and
gold and copper.

"Altogether Mali was four months of travel long and four months of travel
wide," said the griot, "and the greatest of all its cities was the fabled
Timbuktu!"  The major center of learning in all Africa, it was populated by
thousands of scholars, made even more numerous by a steady parade of visiting
wise men seeking to increase their knowledge--so many that some of the
biggest merchants sold nothing but parchments and books.

"There is not a mar about not a teacher in the smallest village, whose
knowledge has not come at least in part from Timbuktu," said the griot, When
finally the kin tango stood up and thanked the griot for the generosity with
which he had shared with them the treasures of his mind, Kunta and the
others--for the first time since they came to the jujuo--actually dared to
voice their displeasure, for the time had come for them to go to bed.  The
kin tango chose to ignore this impertinence, at least for the time being, and
sternly commanded them to their huts--but not before they had a chance to beg
him to urge the griot to come back and visit them again.

They were still thinking and talking of the wondrous tales the griot bad told
them when--six days later--word came that a famous moro would soon be
visiting the camp.  The moro was the highest grade of teacher in The Gambia;
indeed, there were only a few of them, and so wise were they--after many
rains of study--that their job was to ROOTS 119

teach not schoolboys but other teachers, such as the arafang of Juffure.

Even the kin tango showed unusual concern about this visitor, ordering the
entire jujuo to be thoroughly cleaned, with the dirt raked and then brushed
with leafy branches to a smoothness that would capture the honor of the fresh
footprints of the moro when he arrived.  Then the kin tango assembled the
boys in the compound and told them,

"The advice and the blessings of this man who will be with us is sought not
only by ordinary people but also by village chiefs and even by kings."

When the moro arrived the next morning, five of his students were with him,
each carrying head bundles that Kunta knew would contain treasured Arabic
books and parchment manuscripts such as those from ancient Timbuk- to .  As
the old man passed through the gate, Kunta and his mates joined the kin tango
and his assistants on their knees, with their foreheads touching the ground.
When the moro had blessed them and their jujuo, they rose and seated
themselves respectfully around him as he opened his books and began to
read--first from the Koran, then from such unheard-of books as the Taureta La
Musa, the Zabora Dawith and the Lingeeli la Isa, which he said were known to
"Christians" as The Pentateuch of Moses, The Psalms of David and The Book of
Isaiah.  Each time the moro would open or close a book, roll or unroll a
manuscript, he would press it to his forehead and mutter, "Amen!"

When he had finished reading, the old man put his books aside and spoke to
them of great events and people from the Christian Koran, which was known as
the Holy Bible.  He spoke of Adam and Eve, of Joseph and his brethren; of
Moses, David, and Solomon; of the death of Abel.  And he spoke to them of
great men of more recent history, such as Djoulou Kara Naini, known to the
toubob as Alexander the Great, a mighty King of gold and silver whose sun had
shown over half of the world.

Before the moro finally rose to leave that night, he reviewed what they
already knew of the five daily prayers to Allah, and he instructed them
thoroughly in how to conduct themselves inside the sacred mosque of their
village, which they would enter for their first time when they returned home
as men.  Then he and his students had to hurry in or120 ALEX HALEY der to
reach the next place on his busy schedule, and the boys honored him--as the
kin tango had instructed them-- by singing one of the men's songs they had
learned from the jalli kea: "One generation passes on... .  Another
generation comes and goes.  ... But Allah abides forever."

In his hut after the moro had gone that night, Kunta lay awake thinking how
so many things--indeed, nearly everything they had learned--all tied
together.  The past seemed with the present, the present with the future; the
dead with the living and those yet to be born; he himself with his family,
his mates, his village, his tribe, his Africa; the world of man with the
world of animals and growing things--they all lived with Allah.  Kunta felt
very small, yet very large.  Perhaps, he thought, this is what it means to
become a man.

CHAPTER 25

The time had come for that which made Kunta and every other boy shudder to
think of: the kasas boyo operation, which would purify a boy and prepare him
to become a father of many sons.  They knew it was coming, but when it came
it was without warning.  One day as the sun reached the noontime position,
one of the kin tango assistants gave what seemed to be only a routine order
for a kafo to line up in the compound, which the boys did as quickly as
usual.  But Kunta felt a twinge of fear when the kin tango himself came from
his hut, as he rarely did at midday, and walked before them.

"Hold out your fotos," he commanded.  They hesitated, not believing--or
wanting to believe--what they had heard.  "Now!"  he shouted.  Slowly and
shyly, they obeyed, each keeping his eyes on the ground as he reached inside
his loincloth.

Working their way from either end of the line, the kin- tango's assistants
wrapped around the head of each boy's foto a short length of cloth spread
with a green paste made of a pounded leaf.

"Soon your fotos will have no feeling," the kin tango said, ordering them
back into their huts.

Huddled inside, ashamed and afraid of what would happen next, the boys waited
in silence until about mid after- Boon, when again they were ordered outside,
where they stood watching as a number of men from Juffure--the Earners,
brothers, and uncles who had come before, and others--filed in through the
gate.  Omoro was among them, but this time Kunta pretended that he didn't see
his father.  The men formed themselves into a line facing the boys and
chanted together: "This thing to be done .  ..  also has been done to us ...
as to the forefathers before us ... so that you also will become ... all of
us men together."  Then the kin tango ordered the boys back into their huts
once again.

Night was falling when they heard many drums suddenly begin to pound just
outside the jujuo.  Ordered out of their buts, they saw bursting through the
gate about a dozen leaping, shouting kankurang dancers.

In leafy branch costumes and bark masks, they sprang about brandishing their
spears among the terrified boys, "and then--just as abruptly as they had
appeared--were gone.  Almost numb with fear, the boys now heard and followed
dumbly the kin tango order to seat themselves close together with their backs
against the jujuo's bamboo fence.

The fathers, uncles, and older brothers stood nearby, this time chanting,

"You soon will return to home ... and to your farms ..  .

and in time you will marry .  .  .  and life everlasting will spring from
your loins.  " One of the kin- tango's assistants called out one boy's name.
As he got up, the assistant motioned him behind a long screen of woven
bamboo.  Kunta couldn't see or hear what happened after that, but a few
moments later, the boy reappeared--with a bloodstained cloth between his
legs.  Staggering slightly, he was half carried by the other assistant back
to his place along the bamboo fence.  Another boy's name was called; then
another, and another, and finally: " Kunta Kinte!  "

Kunta was petrified.  But he made himself get up and walk behind the screen.
Inside were four men, one of whom ordered him to lie down on his back.  He
did so; his shaking legs wouldn't have supported him any longer anyway.  The
men then leaned down, grasped him firmly, and lifted his 122 ALEX HAUEY

thighs upward.  Just before closing his eyes, Kunta saw the kin tango bending
over him with something in his hands.  Then he felt the cutting pain.  It was
even worse than he thought it would be, though not as bad as it would have
been without the numbing paste.  In a moment he was bandaged tightly, and an
assistant helped him back outside, where he sat, weak and dazed, alongside
the others who had already been behind the screen.  They didn't dare to look
at one another.  But the thing they had feared above all else had now been
done.

As the fotos of the kafo began healing, a general air of jubilation rose
within the jujuo, for gone forever was the indignity of being mere boys in
body as well as in mind.  Now they were very nearly men--and they
were-boundless in their gratitude and reverence for the kin tango And he, in
turn, began to see Kunta's kafo with different eyes.  The old, wrinkled,
gray-haired elder whom they had slowly come to love was sometimes seen even
to smile now.  And very casually, when talking to the kafo, he or his
assistants would say,

"You men" -- and to Kunta and his mates, it seemed as unbelievable as it was
beautiful to hear.

Soon afterward the fourth new moon arrived, and two or three members of
Kunta's kafo, at the kin tango personal order, began to leave the jujuo each
night and trot all the way to the sleeping village of Juffure, where they
would slip like shadows into their own mothers' storehouses, steal as much
couscous, dried meats, and millet as they could carry, and then race back
with it to the jujuo, where it was gleefully cooked the next day"--to prove
yourselves smarter than all women, even your mother," the kin tango had told
them.  But that next day, of course, those boys' mothers would boast to their
friends how they had heard their sons prowling and had lain awake listening
with pride.

There was a new feeling now in the evenings at the jujuo.  Nearly always,
Kunta's kafo would squat in a semicircle around the kin tango

Most of the time he remained as stem in manner as before, but now he talked
to them not as bumbling little boys but as young men of his own village.
Sometimes he spoke to them about the qualities of manhood--chief among which,
after fearlessness, was total honesty in all things.  And sometimes he spoke
to them about the forefathers.

Worshipful regard was a duty owed by the living to those who dwelled with
Allah, he told them.  He ROOTS 123

isked each boy to name the ancestor he remembered best; Cunta named his
Grandma Yaisa, and the kin tango said hat each of the ancestors the boys had
named--as was the way of ancestors--was petitioning Allah in the best inter-
ssts of the living.

Another evening, the kin tango told them how in one's village, every person
who lived there was equally important to that village; from the newest baby
to the oldest elder.  As lew men, they must therefore learn to treat everyone
with She same respect, and--as the foremost of their manhood iuties--to
protect the welfare of every man, woman, and :hild in Juffure as they would
their own.

"When you return home," said the kin tango "you will begin to serve Juffure
as its eyes and ears.  You will be ex- aected to stand guard over the
village--beyond the gates as lookouts for toubob and other savages, and in
the fields as sentries to keep the crops safe from scavengers.  You will ilso
be charged with the responsibility of inspecting the ivomen's cooking
pots--including those of your own mothsrs--to make sure they are kept clean,
and you will be expected to reprimand them most severely if any dirt or
insects are found inside."  The boys could hardly wait to be- ;in their
duties.

Though all but the oldest of them were still too young to ire am of the
responsibilities they would assume when they reached the fourth kafo, they
knew that some day, as men rf fifteen to nineteen rains, they would be
appointed to the important job of carrying messages--like the young man who
had brought them word of the moro's visit--between Fuffure and other
villages.  It would have been hard for Kunta's kafo to imagine such a thing,
but those old enough So be messengers longed for nothing more than to stop
being nessengers; when they reached the fifth kafo at twenty rains, hey would
graduate to really important work--assisting the tillage elders as emissaries
and negotiators in all dealings with other villages.  Men of Onaoro's
age--over thirty-- rose gradually in rank and responsibility with^ each
passing rain until they themselves acquired the honored status of siders.
Kunta had often proudly watched Omoro sitting on the edges of the Council of
elders, and looked forward to the day when his father would enter the inner
circle of those who would inherit the mantle of office from such revered
leaders as the kin tango when they were called to Allah.

124 ALEX HALEY

It was no longer easy for Kunta and the others to pay attention as they
should to everything the kin tango said.  It seemed impossible to them that
so much could have happened in the past four moons and that they were really
about to become men.  The past few days seemed to last longer than the moons
that preceded them, but finally-- with the fourth moon high and full in the
heavens--the kin tango assistants ordered the kafo to line up shortly after
the evening meal.

Was this the moment for which they had waited?  Kunta looked around for their
fathers and brothers, who would surely be there for the ceremony.  They were
nowhere to be seen.  And where was the kin tango

His eyes searched the compound and found him--standing at the gate of the
jujuo--just as he swung it open wide, turned to them, and called out: "Men of
Juffure, return to your village!"

For a moment they stood rooted; then they rushed up whooping and grabbed and
hugged their kin tango and his assistants, who pretended to be offended by
such impertinence.  Four moons before, as the hood was being lifted from his
head in this very compound, Kunta would have found it difficult to believe
that he would be sorry to leave this place, or that he would come to love the
stern old man who stood before them on that day; but he felt both emotions
now.  Then his thoughts turned homeward and he was racing and shouting with
the others out the gate and down the path to Juffure.  They hadn't gone very
far before, as if upon some unspoken signal, their voices were stilled and
their pace slowed by the thoughts they all shared, each in his own way--of
what they were leaving behind, and of what lay ahead of them.  This time they
didn't need the stars to find their way.

CHAPTER 26

"Aiee!  Aiee!"  The women's happy shrieks rang out, and he people were
rushing from their huts, laughing, danc- ng, and clapping their hands as
Kunta's kafo--and those who had turned fifteen and become fourth kafo while
they were away at the jujuo--strode in through the village gate it the break
of dawn.  The new men walked slowly, with what they hoped was dignity, and
they didn't speak or smile --at first.  When he saw his mother running toward
him, Cunta felt like dashing to meet her, and he couldn't stop is face from
lighting up, but he made himself continue walking at the same measured pace.

Then Binta was upon dm--arms around his neck, hands caressing his cheeks,
ears welling in her eyes, murmuring his name.  Kunta pernitted this only
briefly before he drew away, being now i man; but he made it seem as if he
did so only to get a letter look at the yowling bundle cradled snugly in the
ling across her back.  Reaching inside, he lifted the baby mt with both hands.

"So this is my brother Madi!"  he shouted happily, hold- ng him high in the
air.

Binta beamed at his side as he walked toward her hut with the baby in his
arms--making faces and cooing and queezing the plump little cheeks.  But
Kunta wasn't so aken with his little brother that he failed to notice the
herd if naked children that followed close behind them with yes as wide as
their mouths.  Two or three were at his ;nees, and others darted in and out
among Binta and the ther women, who were all exclaiming over how strong and
healthy Kunta looked, how manly he'd become.  He >re tended not to hear, but
it was music to his ears.

Kunta wondered where Omoro was, and where Lamin vas--remembering abruptly
that his little brother would >e away grazing the goats.  He had sat down
inside Binta's 12B ALEX HALEY

hut before he noticed that one of the bigger first-kafo children had followed
them inside and now stood staring at him and clinging to Binta's skirt.

"Hello, Kunta," said the little boy.  It was Suwadu!

Kunta couldn't believe it.  When he had left for manhood training, Suwadu was
just something underfoot, too small to take notice of except when he was
annoying Kunta with his eternal whining.  Now, within the space of four
moons, he seemed to have grown taller, and he was beginning to talk; he had
become a person.  Giving the baby back to Binta, he picked up Suwadu and
swung him high up to the roof of Binta's hut, until his little brother yelped
with delight.

When he finished visiting with Suwadu, who ran outside to see some of the
other new men, the hut fell silent.  Brimming over with joy and pride, Binta
felt no need to speak.  Kunta did.  He wanted to tell her how much he had
missed her and how it gladdened him to be home.  But he couldn't find the
words.  And he knew it wasn't the sort of thing a man should say to a
woman--even to his mother.

"Where is my father?"  he asked finally.

"He's cutting thatch grass for your hut," said Binta.  In his excitement,
Kunta had nearly forgotten that, as a man, he would now have his own private
hut.  He walked outside and hurried to the place where his father had always
told him one could cut the best quality of roofing thatch.

Omoro saw him coming, and Kunta's heart raced as he saw his father begin
walking to meet him.  They shook hands in the manner of men, each looking
deeply into the other's eyes, seeing the other for the first time as man to
man.  Kunta felt almost weak with emotion, and they were silent for a moment.
Then Omoro said, as if he were commenting on the weather, that he had
acquired for Kunta a hut whose previous owner had married and built a new
house.  Would he like to inspect the hut now?  Kunta said softly that he
would and they walked along together, with Omoro doing most of the talking,
since Kunta was still having trouble finding words.

The hut's mud walls needed as many repairs as the thatching.  But Kunta
hardly noticed or cared, for this was his own private hut, and it was all the
way across the village from his mother's.  He didn't allow himself to ROOTS
127

ihow his satisfaction, of course, let alone to speak of it [nstead, he told
Omoro only that he would make the epairs himself.  Kunta could fix the walls,
said Omoro, sut he would like to finish the roof repairs he had already leg
un Without another word, he turned and headed back :o the thatch-grass
field--leaving Kunta standing there, grateful for the everyday manner with
which his father iad begun their new relationship as men.

Kunta spent most of the afternoon covering every ;orner of Juffure, filling
his eyes with the sight of all the iearly remembered faces, familiar huts and
haunts--the Ullage well, the schoolyard, the baobab and silk-cotton :rees.
He hadn't realized how homesick he had been until ie began to bask in the
greetings of everyone he passed.  He wished it was time for Lamin to return
with the goats, and found himself missing one other very special person, ;ven
if she was a woman.  Finally--not caring whether it was something a man
should properly do--he headed for he small, weathered hut of old Nyo Boto.

"Grandmother!"  he called at the door.

"Who is it?"  came the reply in a high, cracked, irritable one.

"Guess, Grandmotheri" said Kunta, and he went inside the hut.

It took his eyes a few moments to see her better in the iim light.

Squatting beside a bucket and plucking long Sbers from a slab of baobab bark
that she had been soaking with water from the bucket, she peered sharply at
lim for a while before speaking.

"Kunta!"

"It's so good to see you.  Grandmother!"  he exclaimed.

Nyo Boto returned to her plucking of the fibers.

"Is four mother well?"  she asked, and Kunta assured her Shat Binta was.

He was a little taken aback, for her manner was almost is if he hadn't even
been away anywhere, as if she hadn't noticed that he had become a man.

"I thought of you often while I was away--each time [ touched the sap hie
charm you put on my arm."

She only grunted, not even looking up from her work.

He apologized for interrupting her and quickly left, ieeply hurt and terribly
confused.  He wouldn't understand until much later that her rebuff had hurt
Nyo Boto sven more than it did him; she had acted as she knew a 128 ALEX
HALEY

woman must toward one who could no longer seek comfort at her skirts.

Still troubled, Kunta was walking slowly back toward his new hut when he
heard a familiar commotion: bleating goats, barking dogs, and shouting boys.
It was the second kafo returning from their afternoon's work in the bush.
Lamin would be among them.  Kunta began to search their faces anxiously as
the boys approached.  Then Lamin saw him, shouted his name, and came dashing,
wreathed in smiles.  But he stopped short a few feet away when he saw his
brother's cool expression, and they stood looking at each other.  It was
finally Kunta who spoke.

"Hello."

"Hello, Kunta."

Then they looked at each other some more.  Pride shone in Lamin's eyes, but
Kunta saw also the same hurt he had just felt in the hut of Nyo Boto, and
uncertainty about just what to make of his new big brother.  Kunta was
thinking that the way they were both acting wasn't as he would have had it
be, but it was necessary that a man be regarded with a certain amount of
respect, even by his own brother.

Lamin was the first to speak again: "Your two goats are both big with kids."
Kunta was delighted; that meant he would soon own four, maybe even five
goats, if one of those nannies was big with twins.  But he didn't smile or
act surprised.

"That's good news," he said, with even less enthusiasm than he wanted to
show.  Not knowing what else to say, Lamin dashed away without another word,
hollering for his wuolo dogs to reassemble his goats, which had begun to
wander.

Binta's face kept a set, tight expression as she assisted Kunta in moving to
his own hut.  His old clothes were all outgrown, she said, and with her tone
properly respectful, added that whenever he had time for her to measure him
between the important things he had to do, she would sew him some new
clothes.  Since he owned not much more than his bow and arrows and his
slingshot, Binta kept murmuring,

"You'll need this" and

"You'll need that," until she had provided him with such household essentials
as a pallet, some bowls, a stool, and a prayer rug she had woven while he was
away.  With each new thing, as he had always heard his father do, Kunta
ROOTS 129

would grunt, as if he could think of no objection to have- ng it in his
house.  When she noticed him scratching his lead, she offered to inspect his
scalp for ticks, and he bluntly told her

"No!," ignoring the grumbling sounds she nade afterward.

It was nearly midnight when Kunta finally slept, for nuch was on his mind.
And it seemed to him that his syes had hardly closed before the crowing cocks
had waked him, and then came the singsong call of the ilimamo to the mosque,
for what would be the first morn- ng prayer that he and his mates would be
allowed to at- end with the other men of Juffure.  Dressing quickly, Kunta
took his new prayer rug and fell in among his safo as, with heads bowed and
rolled prayer rugs under iheir arms--as if they had done it all their
lives--they altered the sacred mosque behind the other men of the village.
Inside, Kunta and the others watched and copied svery act and utterance of
the older men, being especially ;areful to be neither too soft nor too loud
in their reciting rf the prayers.

After prayers, Binta brought breakfast to her new man's hut.  Setting the
bowl of steaming couscous before Kunta --who just grunted again, not letting
his face say any- Shing--Binta left quickly, and Kunta ate without pleasure,
Irritated by a suspicion that she had seemed to be suppressing something like
mirth.

After breakfast, he joined his mates in undertaking their duties as the eyes
and ears of the village with a iiligence their elders found equally amusing.
The women ;ould hardly turn around without finding one of the new men
demanding to inspect their cooking pots for insects.  And rummaging around
outside people's huts and all around the village fence, they found hundreds
of spots where the state of repair failed to measure up to their exacting
standards.  Fully a dozen of them drew up buckets of well water, tasting
carefully from the gourd dipper in hopes of detecting a saltiness or a
muddiness or something else unhealthy.  They were disappointed, but the fish
and turtle that were kept in the well to eat insects were removed anyway and
replaced with fresh ones.

The new men, in short, were everywhere.

"They are thick as fleas!"

old Nyo Boto snorted as Kunta approached a stream where she was pounding
laundry on a rock, and 130 ALEX HALEY

he all but sprinted off in another direction.  He also took special care to
stay clear of any known place where Binta might be, telling himself that
although she was his mother, he would show her no special favors; that,
indeed, he would deal firmly with her if she ever made it necessary.  After
all, she was a woman.

CHAPTER 27

Juffure was so small, and its kafo of diligent new men so numerous, it soon
seemed to Kunta that nearly every roof, wall, calabash, and cooking pot in
the village had been inspected, cleaned, repaired, or replaced moments before
he got to it.  But he was more pleased than disappointed, for it gave him
more time to spend farming the small plot assigned to his use by the Council
of Elders.  All new men grew their own couscous or ground nuts some to live
on and the rest to trade--with those who grew too little to feed their
families--for things they needed more than food.  A young man who tended his
crops well, made good trades, and managed his goats wisely--perhaps swapping
a dozen goats for a female calf that would grow up and have other
calves--could move ahead in the world and become a man of substance by the
time he reached twenty- five or thirty rains and began to think about taking
a wife and raising sons of his own.

Within a few moons after his return, Kunta had grown so much more than he
could eat himself, and made such shrewd trades for this or that household
possession to adorn his hut, that Binta began to grumble about it within his
hearing.  He had so many stools, wicker mats, food bowls, gourds, and sundry
other objects in his hut, she would mutter, that there was hardly any room
left inside for Kunta.

But he charitably chose to ignore her impertinence, since he slept now upon a
fine bed of woven eeds over a springy bamboo mattress that she had spent
alfa moon making for him.

In his hut, along with several sap hies he had acquired n exchange for crops
from his farm plot, he kept a num- ?  er of other potent spiritual
safeguards: the perfumed ex- iracts of certain plants and barks which, like
every other Mandinka man, Kunta rubbed onto his forehead, upper inns, and
thighs each night before going to bed.  It was relieved that this magical
essence would protect a man From possession by evil spirits while he slept.
It would ilso make him smell good a thing that, along with his ippearance,
Kunta had begun to think about.

He and the rest of his kafo were becoming increasingly exasperated about a
matter that had been rankling their manly pride for many moons.  When they
went off to man- liood training, they had left behind a group of skinny,
giggling, silly little girls who played almost as hard as the boys.  Then,
after only four moons away, they had returned as new men to find these same
girls, with whom they had grown up, flouncing about wherever one looked,
poking out their mango-sized breasts, tossing their heads and arms, showing
off their jangly new earrings, beads, and bracelets.  What irritated Kunta
and the others wasn't so much that the girls were behaving so absurdly, but
that they seemed to be doing so exclusively for the benefit of men at least
ten rains older than themselves.  For new men like Kunta, these maidens of
marriageable age fourteen and fifteen had scarcely a glance except to sneer
or laugh.  He and his mates finally grew so disgusted with these airs and
antics that they resolved to pay no further attention either to the girls or
to the all-too-willing older men they sought to entice with such fluttery
coyness.

But Kunta's foto would be as hard as his thumb some mornings when he waked.
Of course, it had been hard many times before, even when he was Lamin's age;
but now it was much different in the feeling, very deep and strong.  And
Kunta couldn't help putting his hand down under his bed cover and tightly
squeezing it.  He also couldn't help thinking about things he and his mates
had overheard about fotos being put into women.

One night dreaming for ever since he was a small boy, Kunta had dreamed a
great deal, even when he was awake, 132 ALEX HALEY

Binta liked to say--he found himself watching a harvest-festival seoruba,
when the loveliest, longest-necked, sootiest-black maiden there chose to
fling down her head- wrap for him to pick up.  When he did so, she rushed
home shouting,

"Kunta likes me!," and after careful consideration, her parents gave
permission for them to marry.

Omoro and Binta also agreed, and both fathers bargained for the bride price.

"She is beautiful," said Omoro, "but my concerns are of her true value as my
son's wife.  Is she a strong, hard worker?  Is she of pleasant disposition in
the home?  Can she cook well and care for children?  And above all, is she
guaranteed a virgin?"  The answers were all yes, so a price was decided and a
date set' for the wedding.

Kunta built a fine new mud house, and both mothers cooked bountiful
delicacies, to give guests the best impression.  And on the wedding day, the
adults, children, goats, chickens, dogs, parrots, and monkeys all but drowned
out the musicians they had hired.  When the bride's party arrived, the praise
singer shouted of the fine families being joined together.  Yet louder shouts
rose when the bride's best girlfriends roughly shoved her inside Kunta's new
house.  Grinning and waving to everyone, Kunta followed her and drew the
curtain across the door.  When she had seated herself on his bed, he sang to
her a famous ancestral song of love: "Mandumbe, your long neck is very
beautiful.  .  .."  Then they lay down on Soft cured hides and she kissed him
tenderly, and they clung together very tightly.  And then the thing happened,
as Kunta had come to imagine it from the ways it had been described to him.
It was even greater than he had been told, and the feeling grew and
grew--until finally he burst.

Jerking suddenly awake, Kunta lay very still for a long moment, trying to
figure out what had happened.  Then, moving his hand down between his legs,
he felt the warm wetness on himself--and on his bed.  Frightened and alarmed,
he leaped up, felt for a cloth, and wiped himself off, and the bed, too.
Then, sitting there in the darkness, his fear was slowly overtaken by
embarrassment, his embarrassment by shame, his shame by pleasure, and his
pleasure, finally, by a kind of pride.  Had this ever happened to any of his
mates?  he wondered.  Though he hoped it had, he also hoped it hadn't, for
perhaps this is what ROOTS 133

lap pens when one really becomes a man, he thought; and ie wanted to be the
first.  But Kunta knew that he would lever know, for this experience and even
these thoughts weren't the kind he could ever share with anyone.  Finally,
exhausted and exhilarated, he lay down again and soon ell into a mercifully
dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER 28

iCunta knew every man, woman, child, dog, and goat in fuffure, he told
himself one afternoon while he sat eating unch beside his plot of ground nuts
and in the course of us new duties, he either saw or spoke with almost all of
them nearly every day.  Why, then, did he feel so alone?  Was he an orphan?
Did he not have a father who treated dim as one man should another?  Did he
not have a mother who tended dutifully to his needs?  Did he not have
brothers to look up to him?  As a new man, was he not their idol?  Did he not
have the friendship of those with whom tie had played in the mud as children,
herded goats as boys, returned to Juffure as men?  Had he not earned the
respect of his elders--and the envy of his kafo mates-- for husbanding his
farm plot into seven goats, three chick- ins, and a splendidly furnished hut
before reaching his sixteenth birthday?  He couldn't deny it.

And yet he was lonely.  Omoro was too busy to spend even as much time with
Kunta as he had when he had only one son and fewer responsibilities in the
village.  Binta was busy too, taking care of Kunta's younger brothers, but
his mother and he had little to say to one another anyway.  Even he and Lamin
were no longer close; while he had been away at the jujuo, Suwadu had become
Lamin's adoring shadow as Lamin had once been Kunta's, and Kunta watched with
mixed emotions while Lamin's attitude toward his little brother warmed from
irritation to toleration to affection.  Soon they were inseparable, and 134
ALEX HALEY

this had left as little room for Kunta as it had for Madi, who was too young
yet to join them but old enough to whine because they wouldn't let him.  On
days when the two older boys couldn't get out of their mother's hut fast
enough, of course, Binta would often order them to take Madi along, so that
she could get him out from underfoot, and Kunta would have to smile in spite
of himself at the sight of his three brothers marching around the village,
one behind the other, in the order of their births, with the two in front
staring glumly ahead while the little one, smiling happily, brought up the
rear, almost running to keep up.

No one walked behind Kunta any longer, and not often did anyone choose to
walk beside him either, for his kafo mates were occupied almost every waking
hour with their new duties and--perhaps, like him--with their own broodings
about what had so far proved to be the dubious rewards of manhood.  True,
they had been given their own farm plots and were beginning to collect goats
and other possessions.  But the plots were small, the work hard, and their
possessions were embarrassingly few in comparison to those of older men.
They had also been made the eyes and ears of the village, but the cooking
pots were kept clean without their supervision, and nothing ever trespassed
in the fields except occasional baboon families or dense flocks of birds.
Their elders, it soon became clear, got to do all the really important jobs,
and as if to rub it in, gave the new men only what they felt was the
appearance of respect, as they had been given only the appearance of
responsibility.  Indeed, when they paid any attention at all to the younger
men, the elders seemed to have as much difficulty as the young girls of the
village in restraining themselves from laughter, even when one of them
performed the most challenging task without a mistake.  Well, someday he
would be one of those older men, Kunta told himself, and he would wear the
mantle of manhood not only with more dignity but also with more compassion
and understanding toward younger men than he and his mates received now.

Feeling restless--and a little sorry for himself--that evening, Kunta left
his hut to take a solitary walk.  Though he had no destination in mind, his
feet drew him toward the circle of rapt children's faces glowing in the light
of rie campfire around which the old grandmothers were elling their nightly
stories to the first kafo of the village.  Stopping close enough to
listen--but not close enough o be noticed listening--Kunta squatted down on
his launches and pretended to be inspecting a rock at his eet while one of
the wrinkled old women waved her kinny arms and jumped around the clearing in
front of he children as she acted out her story of the four thousand rave
warriors of the King of Kasoon who had been [riven into battle by the thunder
of five hundred great var drums and the trumpeting of five hundred elephant-
usk horns.  It was a story he had heard many times around he fires as a
child, and as he looked at the wide-eyed faces f his brothers--Madi in the
front row and Suwadu in the ck row--it somehow made him feel sad to hear it
again.

With a sigh, he rose and walked slowly away--his de- larture as unnoticed as
his arrival had been.  At the fire yhere Lamin sat with other boys his age
chanting their Koranic verses, and the fire where Binta sat with other
aothers gossiping about husbands, households, children, looking, sewing,
makeup, and hairdos, he felt equally unrelcome.  Passing them by, he found
himself finally 'eneath the spreading branches of the baobab where the Then
of Juffure sat around the fourth fire discussing village 'usiness and other
matters of gravity.  As he had felt too

"Id to be wanted around the first fire, he felt too young to be wanted around
this one.  But he had no place else to go, so Kunta seated himself among
those in the outer ;ircle--beyond those of Omoro's age who sat closer to the
fire, and those of the kin tango age, who sat closest, imong the Council of
Elders.  As he did so, he heard one ?f them ask: " Can anyone say how many of
us are getting stolen?  " They were discussing slave taking, which had been
the main subject around the men's fire for the more than one ron dred rains
that toubob had been stealing people and shipping them in chains to the
kingdom of white cannibals across the sea.

There was silence for a little while, and then the alinamo said,

"We can only thank Allah that it's less now han it was."

"There are fewer of us left to steal!"  said an angry elder.  "I listen to
the drums and count the lost," said the 136 ALEX HALEY

kin tango

"Fifty to sixty each new moon just from along our part of the belong would be
my guess."  No one said anything to that, and he added,

"There is no way, of course, to count the losses farther inland, and farther
up the river."

"Why do we count only those taken away by the tou- bob?"  asked the arafang.

"We must count also the burned baobabs where villages once stood.  He has
killed more in fires and in fighting him than he has ever taken away!"

The men stared at the fire for a long time, and then another elder broke the
silence: "Toubob could never do this without help from our own people.
Mandinkas, Fulas, Wolofs, Jolas--none of The Gambia's tribes is without its
slatee traitors.  As a child I saw these slatees beating those like
themselves to walk faster for the toubobi" "For toubob money, we turn against
our own kind," said Juffure's senior elder.

"Greed and treason--these are the things toubob has given us in exchange for
those he has stolen away."

No one talked again for a while, and the fire sputtered quietly.  Then the
kin tango spoke again: "Even worse than toubob's money is that he lies for
nothing and he cheats with method, as naturally as he breathes.  That's what
gives him the advantage over us."

A few moments passed, and then a young man of the kafo ahead of Kunta's asked,

"Will toubob never change?"

"That will be," said one of the elders, "when the river flows backwardi" Soon
the fire was a pile of smoking embers, and the men began to get up, stretch
themselves, wish one another good night, and head home to their huts.  But
five young men of the third kafo stayed behind--one to cover with dust the
warm ashes of all the fires, and the rest, including Kunta, to take the late
shift as village lookouts beyond each corner of Juffure's high bamboo fence.
After such alarming talk around the fire, Kunta knew he would have no trouble
staying awake, but he didn't look forward to spending this particular night
beyond the safety of the village.

Ambling through Juffure and out the gate with what he hoped was nonchalance,
Kunta waved to his fellow guards and made his way along the outside of the
fence--past the sharp-thomed bushes piled thickly against it, and the 
ointed stakes concealed beneath them--to a leafy hiding place that afforded
him a silvery view of the surrounding countryside on this moonlit night.
Getting as comfortable as he could, he slung his spear across his lap, drew
up his knees, clasped his arms around them for warmth, and settled in for the
night Scanning the bush with straining eyes for any sign of movement, he
listened to the shrilling of crickets, the eerie whistling of night birds the
distant howling of hyenas, and the shrieks of unwary animals taken by
surprise, and he thought about the things the men had said around the fire.
When dawn came without incident, he was almost as surprised that he hadn't
been set upon by slave stealers as he was to realize that for the Brst time
in a moon, he hadn't spent a moment worrying about his personal problems.

CHAPTER 29

Fearly every day, it seemed to Kunta, Binta would irritate lim about
something.  It wasn't anything she would do or ;ay, but in other ways--little
looks, certain tones of voice -Kunta could tell she disapproved of something
about im.  It was worst when Kunta added to his possessions ew things that
Binta hadn't obtained for him herself.

One iioming, arriving to serve his breakfast, Binta nearly 'ropped the
steaming couscous upon Kunta when she saw e was wearing his first dundiko not
sewn with her own lands.  Feeling guilty for having traded a cured hyena lide
to get it, Kunta angrily offered her no explanation, ho ugh he could feel
that his mother was deeply hurt.

From that morning on, he knew that Binta never rought his meals without her
eyes raking every item in us hut to see if there was anything else--a stool,
a mat, i bucket, a plate, or a pot--that she'd had nothing to do with .  If
something new had appeared, Binta's sharp eyes would never miss it.  Kunta
would sit there fuming while 100 HIXA nHLCl she put on that look of not
caring and not noticing that he had seen her wear so many times around Omoro,
who knew as well as Kunta did that Binta could hardly wait to get to the
village well among her women friends so that she could loudly bemoan her
troubles which was what all Mandinka women did when they disagreed with their
husbands.

One day, before his mother arrived with the morning meal, Kunta picked up a
beautifully woven basket that Jinna M'Baki, one of Juffure's several widows,
had given him as a gift, and he set it just inside the door of his hut, where
his mother would be sure to all but stumble over it.  The widow was actually
a little younger than Binta, it occurred to him.  While Kunta was still a
second-kafo goatherd, her husband had gone away to hunt and never returned.
She lived quite near Nyo Boto, whom Kunta often visited, and that was how he
and the widow had seen each other and come to speak to each other as Kunta
had grown older.  It had annoyed Kunta when the widow's gift caused some of
Kunta's friends to tease him about her reason for giving him a valuable
bamboo basket.  When Binta arrived at his hut and saw it recognizing the
widow's style of weaving she flinched as if the basket were a scorpion before
managing to compose herself.

She didn't say a word about it, of course, but Kunta knew he had made his
point.  He was no longer a boy, and it was time for her to stop acting like
his mother.  He felt it was his own responsibility to change her in that
regard.  It wasn't something to speak to Omoro about, for Kunta knew he
couldn't put himself into the ridiculous position of asking Omoro's advice on
how to make Binta respect her son the same as she did her husband.  Kunta
thought about discussing his problem with Nyo Boto, but changed his mind when
he recalled how peculiarly she had acted toward him upon his return from
manhood training.

So Kunta kept his own counsel, and before long he decided not to go any more
into Binta's hut, where he had lived most of his life.  And when Binta
brought his meals, he would sit stiffly silent while she set his food on the
mat before him and left without speaking or even looking at him.  Kunta
finally began thinking seriously of seeking out some new eating arrangement.
Most of the other new young men still ate from their mothers' kitchens, but
some ROOTS 139

were cooked for by an older sister or a sister-in-law.  If Binta got any
worse, Kunta told himself, he was going to find some other woman to cook for
him--perhaps the widow who had given him the woven basket.  He knew without
asking that she would gladly cook for him--and yet Kunta didn't want to let
her know that he was even considering such a thing.  In the meantime, he and
his mother continued to meet at mealtimes--and to act as if they didn't even
see each other.

Early one morning, returning from a night of sentry duty out in the groundnut
fields, Kunta saw hurrying along the trail some distance ahead of him three
young men whom he could tell were about his own age, and whom he knew had to
be travelers from somewhere else.

Shouting until they turned around, he went running to meet and greet them.
They told Kunta they were from the village of Barra, a day and a night of
walking from Juffure, and they were on their way to hunt for gold.  They were
of the Feloop tribe, which was a branch of Mandinka, but he bad to listen
carefully to understand them, as they did to understand him.  It made Kunta
remember his visit with his father to his uncles' new village, where he
couldn't understand what some people were saying, although they lived only
two or three days away from Juffure.

Kunta was intrigued by the trip the young men were taking.  He thought it
might also interest some of his friends, so he asked the young men to stop in
his village for a day of hospitality before they went on.

But they graciously refused the invitation, saying that they had to reach the
place where the gold could be panned by the third afternoon of travel.

"But why don't you come along with us?"  one of the young men asked Kunta.

Never having dreamed of such a thing, Kunta was so taken aback that he found
himself saying no, telling them that as much as he appreciated the offer, he
had much work to do on his farm, as well as other duties.  And the three
young men expressed their regret

"If you should change your mind, please join us," one said.  And they got
down on their knees and drew in the dust to show Kunta where the gold-hunting
place was located--about two days and nights of travel beyond Juffure.  The
father of one of the boys, a traveling musician, had told them where it was.

Kunta walked along talking with his newfound friends 140 ALEX HALEY

until they came to where the travelers' trail forked.  After the three men
took the fork that led on past Juffure--and turned to wave back to him--Kunta
walked slowly home.  He was thinking hard as he entered his hut and lay down
on his bed, and though he had been awake all night, he still couldn't seem to
fall asleep.  Perhaps he might go to hunt gold after all if he could find a
friend to tend his farm plot.

And he knew that someone of his mates would take over his sentry duties if
they were only asked--as he would gladly do if they asked him.

Kunta's next thought hit him so hard it made him leap right up out of bed: As
a man now, he could take Lamin along, as his father had once taken him.  For
the next hour Kunta paced the dirt floor of his hut, his mind wrestling with
the questions raised by this exciting thought.  First of all, would Omoro
permit such a trip for Lamin, who was yet a boy and thus required his
father's approval?  It galled Kunta enough, as a man, to have to ask
permission for anything; but suppose Omoro said no?  And how would his three
new friends feel about it if he showed up with his little brother?

Come to think of it, Kunta wondered why he was pacing the floor, and risking
serious embarrassment, just to do a favor for Lamin.  After all, ever since
he had returned from manhood training, Lamin hadn't even been that close to
him any more.  But Kunta knew that this wasn't something that either of them
wanted.  They had really enjoyed each other before Kunta went away.  But now
Lamin's time was taken up by Suwadu, who was always hanging around his bigger
brother in the same way that Lamin used to hang around Kunta, full of pride
and admiration.  But Kunta felt that Lamin had never quit feeling that way
about him.  If anything, he felt (hat Lamin admired his big brother even more
than before.  It was just that some kind of distance had come between them
because of his having become a man.  Men simply spent no great deal of time
with boys; and even if that wasn't as he and Lamin wanted it, there just
seemed no way for either of them to crack through it--until Kunta thought of
taking Lamin along on his gold-hunting trip.

"Lamin is a good boy.  He displays his home training well.  And he takes good
care of my goats," was Kunta's opening comment to Omoro, for Kunta knew that
men Umost never began conversations directly with what they neant to
discuss.  Omoro, of course, knew this, too.  He lodded slowly and replied:
"Yes, I would say that is true."  \s calmly as he could, Kunta then told his
father of meet- ng his three new friends and of their invitation to join hem
in hunting for gold.  Taking a deep breath, Kunta said finally,

"I've been thinking that Lamin might enjoy he trip."

Omoro's face showed not a flicker of expression.  A long noment passed before
he spoke.

"For a boy to travel is ;ood," he said--and Kunta knew that his father was at
east not going to say no absolutely.  In some way, Kunta ;ould feel his
father's trust in him, but also his concern, which he knew Omoro didn't want
to express any more strongly than he had to.

"It has been rains since I've had my travel in that area.  I seem not to
remember that trail's oute very well," said Omoro, as casually as if they
were nerely discussing the weather.  Kunta knew that his father --whom Kunta
had never known to forget anything--was trying to find out if he knew the
route to the gold-hunting place.

Dropping onto his knees in the dust, Kunta drew the trail with a stick as if
he had known it for years.  He drew ;ircles to show the villages that were
both near the trail and at some distance from it along the way.  Omoro got
town onto his knees as well, and when Kunta had finished ira wing the trail,
said,

"I would go so as to pass close by the most villages.  It will take a little
longer, but it will be the safest."

Kunta nodded, hoping that he appeared more confident than he suddenly felt.
The thought hit him that though the three friends he had met, traveling
together, could catch each other's mistakes--if they made any--he, traveling
with a younger brother for whom he would be responsible, would have no one to
help if something went wrong.

Then Kunta saw Omoro's finger circling the last third of the trail.

"In this area, few speak Mandinka," Omoro said.  Kunta remembered the lessons
of his manhood training and looked into his father's eyes.

"The sun and the stars will tell me the way," he said.

A long moment passed, and then Omoro spoke again.  "I think I'll go by your
mother's house."  Kunta's heart leaped.  He knew it was his father's way of
saying that his 142 ALEX HALEY

permission was given, and he felt it best that he personally make his
decision known to Binta.

Omoro wasn't long in Binta's hut.  He had hardly left' to return to his own
when she burst out her door, hands pressed tightly to her shaking head.

"Madi!  Suwadu!"  she shrieked, and they came rushing to her from among the
other children.

Now other mothers came from their huts, and unmarried girls, all rushing
behind Binta as she began hollering and pulling the two boys alongside her
toward the well.  Once there, all of the women crowded about her as she wept
and moaned that now she had only two children left, that her others certainly
would soon be lost to toubob.

A second-kafo girl, unable to contain the news of Kunta's trip with Lamin,
raced all the way out to where the boys of her kafo were grazing the goats.
A short time later, back in the village, heads jerked around with smiles on
their faces as a deliriously joyful boy came whooping into the village in a
manner fit to wake the ancestors.

Catching up with his mother just outside her hut, Lamin-- though still a
hand's span shorter than she--bear hugged Binta, planted big kisses on her
forehead and swept her whirling up off her feet as she shouted to be put
down.  Once back on the ground, she ran to pick up a nearby piece of wood and
struck Lamin with it.  She would have done it again, but he dashed
away--feeling no pain-- toward Kunta's hut.

He didn't even knock as he burst inside.  It was an unthinkable intrusion
into a man's house --but after a glimpse at his brother's face, Kunta had to
overlook it.  Lamin just stood there, looking up into the face of his big
brother.  The boy's mouth was trying to say something; indeed, his whole body
was trembling, and Kunta had to catch himself to keep from grabbing and
hugging Lamin in the rush of love he felt passing between them in that moment.

Kunta heard himself speaking, his tone almost gruff.

"I see you've already heard.  We'll leave tomorrow after first prayer."

Man or not, Kunta took care to walk nowhere near Binta as he made several
quick calls to see friends about caring for his farm and filling in for him
on sentry duty.  Kunta could tell where Binta was from the sound of her
wailing as she marched around the village holding Madi and Suwadu by the
hand.

"These two only I have left!"  she cried, as loudly as she could.  But like
everyone else in Juffure, she knew that no matter what she felt or said or
did, Omoro had spoken.

CHAPTER 30

At the travelers' tree, Kunta prayed for their journey to be a safe one.  So
that it would be a prosperous one as well, he tied the chicken he had brought
along to a lower branch by one of its legs, leaving it flapping and squawking
there as he and Lamin set forth on the trail.  Though he didn't turn back to
look, Kunta knew Lamin was trying very hard to keep pace with him, and to
keep his head- load balanced--and to keep Kunta from noticing either.

After an hour, the trail took them by a low, spreading tree strung thickly
with beads.  Kunta wanted to explain to Lamin how such a tree meant that
living nearby were some of the few Mandinkas who were kafirs, pagan
unbelievers who used snuff and smoked tobacco in pipes made of wood with
earthen bowls, and also drank a beer they made of mead.  But more important
than that knowledge was for Lamin to learn the discipline of silent marching.
By noontime, Kunta knew that Lamin's feet and legs would be hurting him
badly, and also his neck under the heavy head load But it was only by keeping
on despite pain that a boy could toughen his body and his spirit.  At the
same time, Kunta knew that Lamin must stop for rest before he collapsed,
which would hurt his pride.

Taking the bypass trail to miss the first village they passed, they soon
shook off the naked little first-kafo children who raced out to inspect them.
Kunta still didn't look back, but he knew that Lamin would have quickened
his pace and straightened his back for the children's benefit.  But as they
left the children and the village behind, Kunta's mind drifted off Lamin to
other things.  He thought 144 ALEX HALEY

again of the drum he was going to make for himself-- making it first in his
mind, as the men did who carved out masks and figures.  For the drum's head,
he had a young goat's skin already scraped and curing in his hut, and he knew
just the place--only a short trot beyond the women's rice fields--where he
could find the tough wood he needed for a strong drum frame Kunta could
almost hear how his drum was going to sound.

As the trail took them into a grove of trees close by the path, Kunta
tightened his grip on the spear he carried, as he had been taught to do.
Cautiously, he continued walking--then stopped and listened very quietly.
Lamia stood wide-eyed behind him, afraid to breathe.  A moment later,
however, his big brother relaxed and began walking again, toward what Kunta
recognized--with relief--as the sound of several men singing a working song.
Soon he and Lamia came into a clearing and saw twelve men dragging a dugout
canoe with ropes.  They had felled a tree and burned and chopped it out, and
now they were starting to move it the long way to the river.  After each haul
on the ropes, they sang the next line of the song, each one ending

"All forest rather than near the riverbank: They were from the dugout about
another arm's length.  Waving to the men, who waved back, Kunta passed them
and made a mental note to tell Lamin later who these men were and why they
had made the canoe from a tree that grew here in the forest rather than near
the riverbank: They were from the village of Kerewan, where they made the
best Mandinka dugouts; and they knew that only forest trees would float.

Kunta thought with a rush of warmth about the three young men from Barra whom
they were traveling to meet.  It was strange that though they never had seen
each other before, they seemed as brothers.

Perhaps it was because they too were Mandinkas.  They said things differently
than he did, but they weren't different inside.  Like them, he had decided to
leave his village to seek his fortune--and a little excitement--before
returning to home ahead of the next big rains.

When the time neared for the alansaro prayer in mid- afternoon , Kunta
stepped off the trail where a small stream ran among trees.  Not looking at
Lamin, he slipped off his head load flexed himself, and bent to scoop up
handfuls of water in order to splash his face.  He drank sparingly, ROOTS 145

then in the midst of his prayer, he heard Lamin's head load thud to the
earth.  Springing up at the end of the prayer intending to rebuke him, he saw
how painfully his brother was crawling toward the water.

But Kunta still made his voice hard: "Sip a little at a time!"  As Lamin
drank, Kunta decided that an hour's resting here would be long enough.  After
eating a few bites of food, he thought, Lamin should be able to keep walking
until time for the fitiro prayer, at about dusk, when a fuller meal and a
night's rest would be welcomed by them both.

But Lamin was too tired even to eat.  He lay where he had drunk from the
stream, face down with his arms flung out, palms up.  Kunta stepped over
quietly to look at the soles of his feet; they weren't bleeding yet.  Then
Kunta himself catnapped, and when he got up he took from his head load enough
dried meat for two.  Shaking Lamin awake, he gave him his meat and ate his
own.  Soon they were back on the trail, which made all the turns and passed
all the landmarks the young men from Barra had drawn for Kunta.  Near one
village, they saw two old grandmothers and two young girls with some
first-kafo children busily catching crabs, darting their bands into a little
stream and snatching out their prey.

Near dusk, as Lamin began to grab more and more often at his head load Kunta
saw ahead a flock of large bush fowl circling down to land.  Abruptly he
stopped, concealing himself, as Lamin sank onto his knees behind a bush
nearby.  Kunta pursed his lips, making the male bushfowl mating call, and
shortly several fat, fine hens came flapping and waddling over.  They were
cocking their heads and looking around when Kunta's arrow went straight
through one.  Jerking its head off, he let the blood drain out, and while the
bird roasted he built a rough bush shelter, then prayed.  He also roasted
some ears of wild corn that he had plucked along the way before awakening
Lamin, who had fallen asleep again the moment they put their head loads down.

Hardly had Lamin wolfed down his meal before he flopped back down onto the
soft moss under a slanting roof of leafy boughs and went back to sleep
without a murmur.

Kunta sat hugging his knees in the night's still air.  Not far away, hyenas
began yipping.  For some time, he diverted himself by identifying the other
sounds of the for146 ALEX HALEY 1 est.  Then three times he faintly heard a
melodious horn.  He knew it was the next village's final prayer call, blown
by their alimamo through a hollowed elephant's tooth.  He wished that Lamin
had been awake to hear its haunting cry, which was almost like a human voice,
but then he smiled, for his brother was beyond caring what anything sounded
like.  Then himself praying, Kunta also slept.

Soon after sunrise, they were passing that village and hearing the drumming
rhythm of the women's pestles pounding couscous for breakfast porridge.
Kunta could almost taste it; but they didn't stop.  Not far beyond, down the
trail, was another village, and as they went by, the men were leaving their
mosque and the women were bustling around their cooking fires.  Still farther
on, Kunta saw ahead of them an old man sitting beside the trail.  He was bent
nearly double over a number of cowrie shells, which he was shuffling and
reshuffling on a plaited bamboo mat while mumbling to himself.  Not to
interrupt him, Kunta was about to pass by when the old man looked up and
hailed them over to where he sat.

"I come from the village of Kootacunda, which is in the kingdom of Wooli,
where the sun rises over the Simbani forest," he said in a high, cracking
voice.

"And where may you be from?"  Kunta told him the village of Juffure, and the
old man nodded.

"I have heard of it."  He was consulting his cowries, he said, to learn their
next message about his journey to the city of Timbuktu, "which I want to see
before I die," and he wondered if the travelers would care to be of any help
to him.

"We are poor, but happy to share whatever we have with you.  Grandfather,"
said Kunta, easing off his head load reaching within it and withdrawing some
dried meat, which he gave the old man, who thanked him and put the food in
his lap.

Peering at them both, he asked,

"You are brothers traveling?"

"We are.  Grandfather," Kunta replied.

"That is good!"  the old man said, and picked up two of his cowries.

"Add this to those on your hunting bag, and it will bring you a fine profit,"
he said to Kunta, handing him one of the cowries.

"And you, young man," he said to Lamin, giving him the other, "keep this for
when you become a man with a bag of your own."  They both thanked him, and he
wished them Allah's blessings.

ROOTS 147

They had walked on for quite a while when Kunta iecided that the time was
ripe to break his silence with Lamin.  Without stopping or turning, he began
to speak: There is a legend, little brother, that it was traveling Mandinkas
who named the place where that old man is ?  ound.  They found there a kind
of insect they had never seen before and named the place Tumbo Kutu," which
neans 'new insect."

" When there was no response from Lamin, Kunta turned his head; Lamin was
well behind, :>ent down over his head load--which had fallen open on he
ground--and struggling to tie it back together.   As ECunta trotted back, he
realized that Lamin's grabbing at lis bead load had finally caused it to work
its bindings loose and that he had somehow eased it off his head without
making any noise, not wanting to break the rule of Hence by asking Kunta to
stop.   While Kunta was retying he head load he saw that Lamin's feet were
bleeding; but his was to be expected, so he said nothing of it.

The tears ihone in Lamin's eyes as he got the load back on his head, nd they
went on.  Kunta upbraided himself that he hadn't missed Lamin's presence and
might have left him behind.

They hadn't walked much farther when Lamin let out a ;hoked scream.

Thinking he had stepped on a thorn, Kunta turned--and saw his brother staring
upward at a lig panther flattened on the limb they would have walked inder in
another moment.  The panther went sssss, then seemed to flow almost lazily
into the branches of a tree nd was gone from sight.  Shaken, Kunta resumed
walking, ilanned and angry and embarrassed at himself.  Why had ie not seen
that panther?  The odds were that it was only wishing to remain unseen and
wouldn't have sprung down Jpon them, for unless the big cats were extremely
hungry, they rarely attacked even their animal prey during the day- ight, and
humans seldom at any time, unless they were ;ornered, provoked, or wounded.
Still, a picture flashed through Kunta's memory of the panther-mangled nanny
oat from his goat-herding days.  He could almost hear the kin tango stem
warning: "The hunter's senses must be fine.

He must hear what others cannot, smell what others cannot.  He must see
through the darkness.  " But while he had been walking along with his own
thoughts wandering, it was Lamin who had seen the panther.  Most of his bad
troubles had come from that habit, which he absolutely 148 ALEX HALEY

must correct, he thought.  Bending quickly without breaking pace, Kunta
picked up a small stone, spit on it three times, and hurled it far back down
the trail, the stone having thus carried behind them the spirits of
misfortune.

They walked on with the sun burning down upon them as the country gradually
changed from green forest to oil palms and muddy, dozing creeks, taking them
past hot, dusty villages where--just as in Juffure--first-kafo children ran
and screamed around in packs, where men lounged under the baobab and women
gossiped beside the well.  But Kunta wondered why they let their goats wander
around these villages, along with the dogs and chickens, rather than keep
them either out grazing or penned up, as in Juffure.  He decided that they
must be an odd, different kind of people.

They pushed on over grass less sandy soil sprinkled with the burst dry fruit
of weirdly shaped baobab.  When the time came to pray, they rested and ate
lightly, and Kunta would check Lamin's head bundle and his feet, whose
bleeding was not so bad any more.  And the crossroads kept unfolding like a
picture, until finally there was the huge old shell of a baobab that the
young men from Barra had described.  It must have been hundreds of rains old
to be dying at last, he thought, and he told Lamin what one of the young men
had told him: "A griot rests inside there," adding from his own knowledge
that griots were always buried not as other people were but within the shells
of ancient baobabs, since both the trees and the histories in the heads of
griots were timeless.

"We're close now," Kunta said, and he wished he had the drum he was going to
make, so that he could signal ahead to his friends.  With the sinking of the
sun, they finally reached the clay pits--and there were the three young men.

"We felt you would come!"  they shouted, happy to see him.  They merely
ignored Lamin as if he were their own second-kafo brother.  Amid brisk talk,
the three young men proudly showed the tiny grains of gold they had
collected.  By the next morning's first light, Kunta and Lamin had joined in,
chopping up chunks of sticky clay, which they dropped into.  large calabashes
of water.  After whirling the calabash, then slowly pouring off most of the
muddy water, they carefully felt with their fingers to see if any gold
grains had sunk to the bottom.  Now and then there was a grain as tiny as a
millet seed, or maybe a little larger.

They worked so feverishly that there was no time for talk.  Lamin seemed even
to forget his aching muscles in the search for gold.  And each precious grain
went carefully into the hollow of the largest quills from bush pigeons'
wings, stoppered with a bit of cotton.

Kunta and Lamin had six quills full when the three young men said they'd
collected enough.  Now, they said, they'd like to go farther up the trail,
deeper into the interior of the country, to hunt elephants' teeth.  They said
they had been told where old elephants sometimes broke off their teeth in
trying to uproot small trees and thick bush while feeding.  They had heard
also that if one could ever find the secret graveyards of the elephants, a
fortune in teeth would be there.  Would Kunta join them?  He was sorely
tempted; this sounded even more exciting than hunting for gold.  But he
couldn't go--not with Lamin.  Sadly he thanked them for the invitation and
said he must return home with his brother.  So warm farewells were exchanged,
but not before Kunta had made the young men accept his invitation to stop for
hospitality in Juffure on their way home to Barra.

The trip back seemed shorter to Kunta.  Lamin's feet bled worse, but he
walked faster when Kunta handed him the quills to carry, saying, "Your mother
should enjoy these."  Lamin's happiness was no greater than his own at having
taken his brother traveling, just as their father had done for him--just as
Lamin would one day take Suwadu, and Suwadu would take Madi.  They were
approaching Juffure's travelers' tree when Kunta heard Lamin's head- load
fall off again.

Kunta whirled angrily, but then he saw his brother's pleading expression.

"All right, get it later!"  he snapped.  Without a word, his aching muscles
and his bleeding feet forgotten, Lamin bolted past Kunta for the village, his
thin legs racing faster than they'd ever taken him.

By th& time Kunta entered the village gate, excited women and children were
clustered around Binta, who was sticking the six quills of gold into her
hair, clearly bursting with relief and happiness.  A moment later, Binta's
and Kunta's faces exchanged a look of tenderness and warmth 150 ALEX HALEY

far beyond the usual greetings that passed between mother and her grown-up
son home from traveling.  The women's clacking tongues soon let everyone in
Juffure know what the two oldest Kinte sons had brought home with them.
"There's a cow on Binta's head!"  shouted an old grand- mother--there was
enough gold in the quills to buy a cow --and the rest of the women took up
that cry.

"You did well," said Omoro simply when Kunta met him.  But the feeling they
shared without further words was even greater than with Binta.

In the days that followed, elders seeing Kunta around the village began to
speak to him and smile in a special way, and he solemnly replied with his
respects.  Even Suwadu's little second-kafo mates greeted Kunta as a
grown-up, saying

"Peace 1" and then Standing with palms folded over their chests until he
passed by.  Kunta even chanced to overhear Binta one day gossiping about "the
two men I feed," and he was filled with pride that his mother had finally
realized he was a man.

It was all right with Kunta now not only for Binta to feed him, but even to
do such things as searching on Kunta's head for ticks, as she had been
resenting not doing.  And Kunta felt it all right now also to visit her hut
again now and then.  As for Binta, she bustled about all smiles, even humming
to herself as she cooked.  In an offhand manner, Kunta would ask if she
needed him to do anything; she would say so if she did, and he did whatever
it was as soon as he could.  If he but glanced at Lamin or Suwadu, when they
were playing too loudly, for example, they were instantly still and quiet.
And Kunta liked tossing Madi into the air, catching him as he fell, and Madi
liked it even more.  As for Lamin, he clearly regarded his man-brother as
ranking second only to Allah.  He cared for Kunta's seven goats--which were
multiplying well--as if they were goats of gold, and he eagerly helped Kunta
to raise his small farm plot of couscous and ground nuts

Whenever Binta needed to get some work done around the hut, Kunta would' take
all three children off her hands, and she would stand smiling in her doorway
as he marched off with Madi on his shoulder, Lamin following--strutting like
a rooster--and Suwadu jealously tagging along behind.  It was nice, thought
Kunta--so nice that he caught himself wishing that he might have a family of
his own like this someday.  But not until the time comes, of course, he told
himself; and that's a long way off.

CHAPTER 31

As new men were permitted to do whenever there was no conflict with their
duties, Kunta and others of his kafo would sit at the outermost edges of the
formal sessions of the Council of Elders, which were held once each moon
under Juffure's ancient baobab.  Sitting beneath it on cured hides very close
together, the six senior elders seemed almost as old as the tree, Kunta
thought, and to have been carved from the same wood, except that they were as
black as ebony against the white of their long robes and round skullcaps.
Seated facing them were those with troubles or disputes to be resolved.
Behind the petitioners, in rows, according to their ages, sat junior elders
such as Omoro, and behind them sat the new men of Kunta's kafo.  And behind
them the village women could sit, though they rarely attended except when
someone in their immediate family was involved in a matter to be heard.  Once
in a long while, all the women would be present--but only if a case held the
promise of some juicy gossip.

No women at all attended when the Council met to discuss purely
administrative affairs, such as Juffure's relationship with other villages.
On the day for matters of the people, however, the audience was large and
noisy-- but all settled quickly into silence when the most senior of the
elders raised his stick, sewn with bright-colored beads, to strike out on the
talking drum before him the name of the first person to be heard.  This was
done according to their ages, to serve the needs of the oldest first.
Whoever it was would stand, stating his case, the senior 152 ALEX HALEY

elders all staring at the ground, listening until he finished and sat down.
At this point, any of the elders might ask him questions.

If the matter involved a dispute, the second person now presented his side,
followed by more questions, whereupon the elders turned around to present
their backs as they huddled to discuss the matter, which could take a long
time.  One or more might turn with further questions.  But all finally turned
back around toward the front, one motioning the person or persons being heard
to stand again, and the senior elder then spoke their decision, after which
the next name was drum talked

Even for new men like Kunta, most of these hearings were routine matters.
People with babies recently born asked for a bigger farm plot for the husband
and an additional rice plot for the wife--requests that were almost always
quickly granted, as were the first farming-land requests of unmarried men
like Kunta and his mates.

During man-training, the kin tango had directed them never to miss any
Council of Elders sessions unless they had to, as the witnessing of its
decisions would broaden a man's ^knowledge as his own rains increased until
he too would be a senior elder.  Attending his first session, Kunta had
looked at Omoro seated ahead of him, wondering how many hundreds of decisions
his father must have in his head, though he wasn't even a senior elder yet.

At his first session, Kunta witnessed a land matter involving a dispute.  Two
men both claimed the fruit of some trees originally planted by the first man
on land to which the second man now had the farming rights, since the first
man's family had decreased.  The Council of Elders awarded the fruit to the
first man, saying,

"If he hadn't planted the trees, that fruit wouldn't be there."

At later sessions, Kunta saw people frequently charged with breaking or
losing something borrowed from an irate lender who claimed that the articles
had been both valuable and brand-new.  Unless the borrower had witnesses to
disprove that, he was usually ordered to pay for or replace the article at
the value of a new one.  Kunta also saw furious people accusing others of
inflicting bad fortune on them through evil magic.  One man testified that
another had touched him with a cock's spur, making him violently ill.  A
young wife declared that her new mother-in-law had ROOTS 153

hidden some bourein shrub in the wife's kitchen, causing whatever was cooked
there to turn out badly.  And a widow claimed that an old man whose advances
she had spurned had sprinkled powdered eggshells in her path, making her walk
into a long succession of troubles, which she proceeded to describe.  If
presented, with enough impressive evidence of evil magic's motives and
results, the Council would command immediate corrective magic to be done by
the nearest traveling magic man, whom a drum talk message would summon to
Juffure at the expense of the evildoer.

Kunta saw debtors ordered to pay up, even if they had to sell their
possessions; or with nothing to sell, to work off the amount as the lender's
slave.  He saw slaves charging their masters with cruelty, or with providing
unsuitable food or lodgings, or with taking more than their half share of
what the slaves' work had produced.  Masters, in turn, accused slaves of
cheating by hiding some of their produce, or of insufficient work, or of
deliberately breaking farm tools.  Kunta saw the Council weigh carefully the
evidence in these cases, along with each person's past record in the village,
and it was not uncommon for some slaves' reputations to be better than their
masters'!

But sometimes there was no dispute between a master and his slave.

Indeed, Kunta saw them coming together asking permission for the slave to
marry into the master's family.  But any couple intending to marry first had
to obtain the Council's permission.  Couples judged by the Council to be too
close of kinship were refused out of hand, but for those not thus
disqualified, there was a waiting period of one moon between the request and
the reply, during which the villagers were expected to pay quiet visits to
any senior elder and reveal any private information, either good or bad,
about the couple in question.

Since childhood, had each of them always demonstrated a good home training?
Had either of them ever caused undue trouble to anyone, including their own
families?  Had either of them ever displayed any undesirable tendencies of
any kind, such as cheating or telling less than the full truth?  Was the girl
known for being irritable and argumentative?  Was the man known for beating
goats' unmercifully If so, the marriage was refused, for it was believed that
such a person might pass these 154 ALfcX HALbT traits along to his or her
children.  But as Kunta knew even before he began attending the Council
sessions, most couples won approval for marriage, because both sets of
parents involved had already learned the answers to these questions, and
found them satisfactory, before granting their own permission.

At the Council sessions, however, Kunta learned that sometimes parents hadn't
been told things that people did tell the senior elders.  Kunta saw one
marriage permission flatly refused when a witness came forth to testify that
the young man of the planned marriage, as a young goatherd, had once stolen a
basket from him, thinking he hadn't been seen.  The crime hadn't been
reported then, out of compassion for the fact that he was still a boy; if it
had been reported, the law would have dictated that his right hand be cut
off.  Kunta sat riveted as the young thief, exposed at last, burst into
tears, blurting out his guilt before his horrified parents and the girl he
was asking to marry, who began screaming.  Soon afterward, he disappeared
from Juffure and was never seen or heard of again.

After attending Council sessions for a number of moons, Kunta guessed that
most problems for the senior elders came from married people---especially
from men with two, three, or four wives.  Adultery was the most frequent
charge by such men, and unpleasant things happened to an offending man if a
husband's accusation was backed up with convincing outside testimony or other
strong evidence.  If a wronged husband was poor and the offending man well
off, the Council might order the offender to deliver his possessions to the
husband, one at a time, until the husband said

"I have enough," which might not be until the adulterer had only his bare hut
left.  But with both men poor, which was usually the case, the Council might
order the offender to work as the husband's slave for a period of time
considered worth the wrongful use of his wife.  And Kunta flinched for one
repeated offender when the elders set a date and time for him to receive a
public flogging of thirty-nine lashes across his bare back by his most
recently wronged husband, according to the ancient Moslem rule of "forty,
save one."

Kunta's own thoughts about getting married cooled somewhat as he watched and
listened to (he angry testimony of injured wives and husbands before the
Council.

ROOTS 155

Men charged that their wives failed to respect them, were unduly lazy, were
unwilling to make love when their turn came, or were just generally
impossible to live with.  Unless an accused wife presented a strong counter
argument with some witnesses to bear her out, the senior elders usually told
the husband to go that day and set any three possessions of his wife's
outside her hut and then utter toward those possessions, three times, with
witnesses present, the words,

"I

divorce you!  "

A wife's most serious charge--certain to bring out every woman in the village
if it was suspected in advance--was to claim that her husband was not a man,
meaning that he was inadequate with her in bed.  The elders would appoint
three old persons, one from the family of the defiant wife, another from the
family of the husband, and the third from among the elders themselves.  A
date and time would be set for them to observe the wife and husband together
in his bed.  If two of the three voted that the wife was right, she won her
divorce, and her family kept the dowry goats; but if two observers voted that
the husband performed well, he not only got the goats back but also could
beat the wife and divorce her if he wished to.

In the rains since Kunta had returned from manhood training, no case that had
been considered by the Council filled him and his mates with as much
anticipation as the one that began with gossip and whispering about two older
members of their own kafo and a pair of Juffure's most eligible widows.  On
the day the matter finally came before the Council, nearly everyone in the
village gathered early to assure themselves of the best possible seats.  A
number of routine old people's problems were settled first, and then came the
case of Dembo Dabo and Kadi Tamba, who had been granted a divorce more than a
rain before but now were back before the Council grinning widely and holding
hands and asking permission to remarry.  They stopped grinning when the
senior elder told them sternly: "You insisted on divorce; therefore you may
not remarry --until each of you has had another wife and husband in between."

The gasps from those in the rear were hushed by the drum talk announcement of
the next names to be called: "Tuda Tamba and Kalilu Conteh!  Parrta Bedeng
and Sefo Kela!"  The two members of Kunta's kafo and the two 156 ALEX HALEY

widows stood up.  The taller widow, Fanta Bedeng, spoke for all of them,
sounding as if she had carefully practiced what to say; but nervousness still
gripped her.

"Tuda Tamba with her thirty-two rains and I with my thirty-three have small
chance of catching more husbands," she said, and proceeded to ask the Council
to approve of teriya friendships for her and Tuda Tamba to cook for and sleep
with Sefo Kela and Kalilu Conteh, respectively.

Different elders asked a few questions of all four--the widows responding
confidently, Kunta's friends uncertainly, in sharp contrast to their usual
boldness of manner.  And then the elders turned around, murmuring among
themselves.  The audience was so tense and quiet that a dropped groundnut
could have been heard as the elders finally turned back around.  The senior
elder spoke: "Allah would approve!  You widows will have a man to use, and
you new men will get valuable experience for when you marry later."

The senior elder rapped his stick twice hard against the edge of the talking
drum and glared at the buzzing women in the rear.  Only when they fell silent
was the next name called: "Jankeh Jallon!"  Having but fifteen rains, she was
thus the last to be heard.  All of Juffure had danced and feasted when she
found her way home after escaping from some toubob who had kidnaped her.
Then, a few moons later, she became big with child, although unmarried, which
caused much gossip.

Young and strong, she might still have found some old man's acceptance as a
third or fourth junior wife.  But then the child was born: He was a strange
pale tan color like a cured hide, and had very odd hair--and wherever Jankeh
Jallon would appear thereafter, people would look at the ground and hurry
elsewhere.  Her eyes glistening with tears, she stood up now and asked the
Council: What was she to do?  The elders didn't turn around to confer; the
senior elder said they would have to weigh the matter--which was a most
serious and difficult one--until the next moon's Council meeting.  And with
that, he and the five other elders rose and left.

Troubled, and somehow unsatisfied, by the way the session had ended, Kunta
remained seated for a few moments after most of his mates and the rest of the
audience had gotten up--chattering among themselves--and headed ROOTS 157

back toward their huts.  His head was still full of thoughts when Binta
brought his evening meal, and he said not a word to her as he ate, nor she to
him.  Later, as he picked up his spear and his bow and arrow and ran with his
wuolo dog to his sentry post--for this was his night to stand guard outside
the village--Kunta was still thinking: about the tan baby with the strange
hair, about his no doubt even stranger father, and about whether (his toubob
would have eaten Jankeh Jallon if she had not escaped from him.

CHAPTER 32

In the moonlit expanse of ripening fields of ground nuts Kunta climbed the
notched pole and sat down cross legged on the lookout platform that was built
into its sturdy fork, high above the ground.

Placing his weapons beside him-- along with' the ax with which he planned the
next morning, at last, to chop the wood for his drum frame--he watched as his
wuolo dog went trotting and sniffing this way and that in the fields below.
During Kunta's first few moons on sentry duty, rains ago, he remembered
snatching at his spear if so much as a rat went rustling through the grass.
Every shadow seemed a monkey, every monkey a panther, and every panther a
toubob, until his eyes and ears became seasoned to his task.  In time, he
found he could tell the difference between the snarl of a lion and that of a
leopard.  It took longer, however, for him to learn how to remain vigilant
through these long nights.  When his thoughts began to turn inward, as they
always did, he often forgot where he was and what he was supposed to be
doing.  But finally he learned to keep alert with half of his mind and yet
still explore his private thoughts with the other.

Tonight, he was thinking about the teriya friendships that had been approved
for his two friends by the Council of Elders.  For several moons, they had
been telling Kunta 158 ALEX HALEY

and his mates that they were going to take their case before the Council, but
no one had really believed them.  And now it was done.

Perhaps at this very moment, he thought, they might be performing the teriya
act in bed with their two widows.  Kunta suddenly sat upright trying to
picture what it must be like.

It was chiefly from his kafo's gossip that Kunta knew what little he did
about under women's clothes.  In marriage negotiations, he knew, girls'
fathers had to guarantee them as virgins to get the best bride price.  And a
lot of bloodiness was connected with women, he knew that.  Every moon they
had blood; and whenever they had babies; and the night when they got married.
Everyone knew how the next morning, the newlyweds' two mothers went to the
hut to put into a woven basket the white pagne cloth the couple had slept on,
taking its bloodiness as proof of the girl's virginity to the alimamo, who
only then walked around the village drum talking Allah's blessings on that
marriage.  If that white cloth wasn't bloodied, Kunta knew, the new husband
would angrily leave the hut with the two mothers as his witnesses and shout
loudly,

"I divorce you!"  three times for all to hear.

But teriya involved none of that--only new men sleeping with a willing widow
and eating her cooking.  Kunta thought for a little while about how Jinna
MTtaki had looked at him, making no secret of her designs, amid the previous
day's jostling crowd as the Council session ended.

Almost without realizing, he squeezed his hard foto, but he forced back the
strong urge to stroke it because that would seem as if, he was giving in to
what that widow wanted, which was embarrassing even to think about.  He
didn't really want the stickiness with her, he told himself; but now that he
was a man, he had every right, if he pleased, to think about teriya, which
the senior elders themselves had shown was nothing for a man to be ashamed of.

Kunta's mind returned to the memory of some girls he and Lamin had passed in
one village when returning from their gold-hunting trip.

There had been about ten of them, he guessed, all beautifully black, in tight
dresses, colorful beads, and bracelets, with high breasts and little hair
plaits sticking up.  They had acted so strangely as he went by that it had
taken Kunta a moment to realize that the show they made of looking away
whenever he looked at them meant ROOTS 159

lot that they weren't interested in him but that they wanted lim to be
interested in them.

Females were so confusing, he thought.  Girls of their ige in Juffure never
paid enough attention to him even to look away.  Was it because they knew
what he was really ike?  Or was it because they knew he was far younger than
ie looked--too young to be worthy of their interest?

Probibiy the girls in that village believed no traveling man lead- ng a boy
could have less than twenty or twenty-five rains, et alone his seventeen.
They would have scoffed if they had mown.  Yet he was being sought after by a
widow who cnew very well how young he was.  Perhaps he was lucky lot to be
older, Kunta thought.  If he was, the girls of luffure would be carrying on
over him the way the girls of hat village had, and he knew they all had just
one thing on heir minds: marriage.  At least Jinna M'Baki was too old ;o be
looking for anything more than a teriya friendship.  Miy would a man want to
marry when he could get a woman to cook for him and sleep with him without
getting named?  There must be some reason.  Perhaps it was be- ;ause it was
only through marrying that a man could have long .  That was a good thing.
But what would he have to each those sons until he had lived long enough to
learn omething about the world--not just from his father, and Torn the
arafang, and from the kin tango but also by ex- iloring it for himself, as
his uncles had done?

His uncles weren't married even yet, though they were rfder than his father,
and most men of their rains had aleady taken second wives by now.  Was Omoro
considering aking a second wife?  Kunta was so startled at the thought hat he
sat up straight.

And how would his mother feel ibout it?  Well, at least Binta, as the senior
wife, would be ible to tell the second wife her duties, and make certain he
worked hard and set her sleeping turns with Omoro.  iVould there be trouble
between the two women?  No, he was sure Binta wouldn't be like the kin tango
senior wife, vhom it was commonly known shouted so much abuse at us junior
wives, keeping them in such a turmoil, that he arely got any peace.

Kunta shifted the position of his legs to let them hang 'or a while over the
edge of his small perch, to keep the nuscles from cramping.  His wuolo dog
was curled on the ground below him, its smooth brown fur shining in the 160
ALEX HALEY

moonlight, but he knew that the dog only seemed to be dozing, and that his
nose and ears were alertly twitching for the night air's slightest smell or
sound of warning to bound up racing and barking after the baboons that had
lately been raiding the groundnut fields almost every night.  During each
long lookout duty, few things pleased Kunta more than when, maybe a dozen
times in the course of a night, he would be jerked from his thoughts by
sudden distant snarlings as a baboon was sprung upon in the brush by a big
cat--especially if the baboon's growling turned into a scream quickly hushed,
which meant that it had not escaped.

But it all was quiet now as Kunta sat on the edge of his platform and looked
out across the fields.  The only sign of life, in fact, beyond the tall
grass, was the bobbing yellow light of a Fulani herdsman in the distance as
he waved his grass torch to frighten away some animal, probably a hyena, that
was roaming too close to his cows.  So good were the Fulani at tending cattle
that people claimed they could actually talk with their animals.  And Omoro
had told Kunta that each day, as part of their pay for herding, the Fulani
would siphon a little blood from the cows' necks, which they mixed with milk
and drank.  What a strange people, thought Kunta.  Yet though they were not
Man- dinka, they were from The Gambia, like him.  How much stranger must be
the people--and the customs--one would find beyond the borders of his land.

Within a moon after he returned from gold hunting with Lamin, Kunta had been
restless to get on the road once again--this time for a real trip.  Other
young men of his kafo, he knew, were planning to travel somewhere as soon as
the ground nuts and couscous got harvested, but none was going to venture
far.  Kunta, however, meant to put his eyes and feet upon that distant place
called Mali, where, some three or four hundred rains before, according to
Omoro and his uncles, the Kinte clan had begun.  These forefather Kintes, he
remembered, had won fame as blacksmiths, men who had conquered fire to make
iron weapons that won wars and iron tools that made farming less hard.  And
from this original Kinte family, all of their descendants and all of the
people who worked for them had taken the Kinte name.  And some of that clan
had moved to Mauretania, the birthplace of Kunta's holy-man grandfather.

So that no one else, even Omoro, would know about his plan until he wanted it
known, Kunta had consulted in the strictest confidence with the arafang about
the best route to Mali.  Drawing a rough map in the dust, then tracing his
finger along it, he had told Kunta that by following the banks of the Kamby
Bolongo about six days in the direction of one's prayers to Allah, a traveler
would reach Samo Island.  Beyond there, the river narrowed and curved sharply
to the left and began a serpent's twists and turns, with many confusing
belongs leading off as wide as the river, whose swampy banks couldn't be seen
in some areas for the thickness of the mangroves growing sometimes as high as
ten men.  Where one could see the riverbanks, the schoolmaster told him, they
abounded with monkeys, hippopotamus, giant crocodiles, and herds of as many
as five hundred baboons.

But two to three days of that difficult traveling should bring Kunta to a
second large island, where the low, muddy banks would rise into small cliffs
matted with shrubs and small trees.  The trail, which twisted alongside the
river, would take him past villages of Bansang, Karantaba, and Diabugu.  Soon
afterward he would cross the eastern border of The Gambia and enter the
Kingdom of Fulladu, and a half day's walking from there, he would arrive at
the village of Fatoto.

Out of his bag, Kunta took the scrap of cured hide the arafang had given him.
On it was the name of a colleague in Fatoto who he said would give Kunta
directions for the next twelve to fourteen days, which would take him across
a land called Senegal.  Beyond that, said the arafang, lay Mali and Kunta's
destination, Ka-ba, that land's main place.  To go there and return, the
arafang figured, would take about a moon--not counting whatever time Kunta
chose to spend in Mali.

So many times had Kunta drawn and studied the route on his hut's dirt
floor--erasing it before Binta brought his meals--that he could almost see it
before him as he sat on his perch in the groundnut fields.  Thinking about
the adventures that awaited him along that trail--and in Mali-- he could
hardly contain his eagerness to be off.

He was almost as eager to tell Lamin of his plans, not only because 162 ALEX
HALEY

he wanted to share his secret, but also because he had decided to take his
little brother along.  He knew how much Lamin had boasted about that earlier
trip with his brother.  Since then, Lamin had also been through manhood
training and would be a more experienced and trustworthy traveling companion.
But Kunta's deepest reason for deciding to take him, he had to admit, was
simply that he wanted company.

For a moment, Kunta sat in the dark smiling to himself, thinking of Lamin's
face when the time would come for him to know.  Kunta planned, of course, to
drop the news in a very offhand way" as if he had just happened to think of
it.  But before then he must speak about it with Omoro, whom he knew now
would feel no undue concern.  In fact, he was sure that Omoro would be deeply
pleased, and that even Binta, though she would worry, would be less upset
than before.  Kunta wondered what he might bring to Binta from Mali that she
would treasure even more than her quills of gold.  Perhaps some fine molded
pots, or a bolt of beautiful cloth; Omoro and his uncles had said that the
ancient Kinte women in Mali had been famed for the pots they made and for the
brilliant patterns of cloth they wove, so maybe the Kinte women there still
did those things.

When he returned from Mali, it occurred to Kunta, he might plan still another
trip for a later rain.  He might even journey to that distant place beyond
endless sands where his uncles had told of the long caravans of strange
animals with water stored in two humps on their backs.  Kalilu Conteh and
Sefo Kela could have their old, ugly teriya widows; he, Kunta Kinte, would
make a pilgrimage to Mecca itself.

Happening at that moment to be staring in the direction of that holy city,
Kunta became aware of a tiny, steady yellow light far across the fields.  The
Fulani herdsman over there, he realized, was cooking his breakfast.  Kunta
hadn't even noticed the first faint streaks of dawn in the east.

Reaching down to pick up his weapons and head home, he saw his ax and
remembered the wood for his drum frame.  But he was tired, he thought; maybe
he'd chop the wood tomorrow.  No, he was already halfway to the forest, and
if he didn't do it now, he knew he would probably let it go until his next
sentry duty, which was twelve days later.  Besides, it wouldn't be manly to
give in to his weariness.  Moving his legs to test for any cramps and feeling
none, ROOTS 183

e climbed down the notched pole to the ground, where us wuolo dog waited,
making happy little barks and waging his tail.  After kneeling for his suba
prayer, Kunta got ip, stretched, took a deep breath of the cool morning air,
,nd set off toward the belong at a lope.

CHAPTER 33

The familiar perfumes of wild flowers filled Kunta's nostrils is he ran,
wetting his legs, through grass glistening with lew in the first rays of
sunshine.  Hawks circled overhead booking for prey, and the ditches beside
the fields were alive with the croaking of frogs.  He veered away from a tree
to avoid disturbing a flock of blackbirds that filled its branches like shiny
black leaves.  But he might have saved ilimself the trouble, for no sooner
had he passed by than an ingry, raucous cawing made him turn his head in time
to >ee hundreds of crows bullying the blackbirds from their roost.

Breathing deeply as he ran, but still not out of breath, he began to smell
the musky aroma of the mangroves as he aeared the low, thick underbrush that
extended far back from the banks of the belong.  At the first sight of him, a
sudden snorting spread among the wild pigs, which in turn set off a barking
and snarling among the baboons, whose aig males quickly pushed their females
and babies behind 'hem.  When he was younger, he would have stopped to mitate
them, grunting and jumping up and down, since this lever failed to annoy the
baboons, who would always shake heir fists and sometimes throw rocks.  But he
was no longer i boy, and he had learned to treat all of Allah's creatures is
he himself wished to ^>e treated: with respect.

Fluttering white way0-- of egrets, cranes, storks, and pelicans rose from
th'ir sleeping places as he picked his way through the tangled mangrove down
to the belong.  Junta's wuolo dog raced ahead chasing water snakes and 164
ALEX HALEY

big brown turtles down their mud slides into the water, where they left not
even a ripple.

As he always did whenever he felt some need to come here after a night's
lookout duty, Kunta stood awhile at the edge of the belong, today watching a
gray heron trailing its long, thin legs as it flew at about a spear's height
above the pale green water, rippling the surface with each downbeat of its
wings.  Though the heron was looking for smaller game, he knew that this was
the best spot along the belong for kujalo, a big, powerful fish that Kunta
loved to catch for Binta, who would stew it for him with onions, rice, and
bitter tomatoes.  With his stomach already rumbling for breakfast, it made
him hungry just to think of it.

A little farther downstream, Kunta turned away from the water's edge along a
path he himself had made to an ancient mangrove tree that he thought must
know him, after countless visits, as well as he knew it.

Pulling himself up onto the lowest branch, he climbed all the way to his
favorite perch near the top.  From here, in the clear morning, with the sun
warm on his back, he could see all the way to the next bend in the belong,
still carpeted with sleeping waterfowl, and beyond them to the women's rice
plots, dotted with their bamboo shelters for nursing babies.  In which one of
them, he wondered, had his mother put him when he was little?  This place in
the early morning would always fill Kunta with a greater sense of calm, and
wonder, than anywhere else he knew of.  Even more than in the village mosque,
he felt here how totally were everyone and everything in the hands of Allah;
and how everything he could see and hear and smell from the top of this tree
had been here for longer than men's memories, and would be here long after he
and his sons and his sons' sons had joined their ancestors.

Trotting away from the belong toward the sun for a little while, Kunta
finally reached the head-high grass surrounding the grove where he was going
to pick out and chop a section of tree trunk just the right size for the body
of his drum.  If the green wood started drying and curing today, he figured
it would be ready to hollow out and work on in a moon and a half, about the
time he and Lamin would be returning from their trip to Mali.  As he stepped
into the grove, Kunta saw a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye.  It
was a hare, and the wuolo dog was after it in a flash as it raced for cover
in the tall grass.  He was obviously chasing it for sport rather than for
food, since he was barking furiously; Kunta knew that a hunting wuolo never
made noise if he was really hungry.  The two of them were soon out of
earshot, but Kunta knew that his dog would come back when he lost interest in
the chase.

Kunta headed forward to the center of the grove, where he would find more
trees from which to choose a trunk of the size, smoothness, and roundness
that he wanted.  The soft, mossy earth felt good under his feet as he walked
deeper into the dark grove, but the air here was damp and cold, he noticed,
the sun not being high enough or hot enough yet to penetrate the thick
foliage overhead.  Leaning his weapons and ax against a warped tree, he
wandered here and there, occasionally stooping, his eyes and fingers
examining for just the right trunk, one just a little bit larger--to allow
for drying shrinkage--than he wanted his drum to be.

He was bending over a likely prospect when he heard the sharp crack of a
twig, followed quickly by the squawk of a parrot overhead.  It was probably
the dog returning, he thought in the back of his mind.

But no grown dog ever cracked a twig, he flashed, whirling in the same
instant.  In a blur, rushing at him, he saw a white face, a club upraised;
heard heavy footfalls behind him.  Toubob!  His foot lashed up and caught the
man in the belly--it was soft and he heard a grunt--just as something hard
and heavy grazed the back of Kunta's head and landed like a tree trunk on his
shoulder.  Sagging under the pain, Kunta spun--turning his back on the man
who lay doubled over on the ground at his feet--and pounded with his fists on
the faces of two black men who were lunging at him with a big sack, and at
another toubob swinging a short, thick club, which missed him this time as he
sprang aside.

His brain screaming for any weapon, Kunta leaped into them--clawing, butting,
kneeing, gouging--hardly feeling the club that was pounding against his back.
As three of them went down with him, sinking to the ground under their
combined weight, a knee smashed into Kunta's lower back, rocking him with
such pain that he gasped.  His open mouth meeting flesh, his teeth clamped,
cut, tore.  His numb fingers finding a face, he clawed deeply into an eye,
hearing its owner howl as again the heavy club met Kunta's head.

166 ALEX HALEY

Dazed, he heard a dog's snarling, a toubob screaming, then a sudden piteous
yelp.  Scrambling to his feet, wildly twisting, dodging, ducking to escape
more clubbing, with blood streaming from his split head, he saw one black
cupping his eye, one of the toubob holding a bloody arm, standing over the
body of the dog, and the remaining pair circling him with raised clubs.
Screaming his rage, Kunta went -for the second toubob, his fists meeting and
breaking the force of the descending club.  Almost choking with the awful
toubob stink, he tried desperately to wrench away the club.  Why had he not
heard them, sensed them, smelted them?

Just then the black's club smashed into Kunta once again, staggering him to
his knees, and the toubob sprang loose.  His head ready to explode, his body
reeling, raging at his own weakness, Kunta reared up and roared, nailing
blindly at the air, everything blurred with tears and blood and sweat.  He
was fighting for more than his life now.  Omoro!  Binta!  Lamin!  Suwadu!
Madi!  The toubob's heavy club crashed against his temple.  And all went
black.

CHAPTER 34

Kunta wondered if he had gone mad.  Naked, chained, shackled, he awoke on his
back between two other men in a pitch darkness full of steamy heat and
sickening stink and a nightmarish bedlam of shrieking, weeping, praying, and
vomiting.  He could feel and smell his own vomit on his chest and belly.  His
whole body was one spasm of pain from the heatings he had received in the
four days since his capture.  But the place where the hot iron had been put
between his shoulders hurt the worst.

A rat's thick, furry body brushed his cheek, its whiskered nose sniffing at
his mouth.  Quivering with revulsion, Kunta snapped his teeth together
desperately, and the rat ran away.  In rage, Kunta snatched and kicked
against the ROOTS 167

shackles that bound his wrists and ankles.  Instantly, angry exclamations and
jerking came back from whomever he was shackled to.

The shock and pain adding to his fury, Kunta lunged upward, his head bumping
hard against wood --right on the spot where he had been clubbed by the tou-
bob back in the woods.  Gasping and snarling, he and the unseen man next to
him battered their iron cuffs at each other until both slumped back in
exhaustion.  Kunta felt himself starting to vomit again, and he tried to
force it back, but couldn't.

His already emptied belly squeezed up a thin, sour fluid that drained from
the side of his mouth as he lay wishing that he might die.

He told himself that he mustn't lose control again if he wanted to save his
strength and his sanity.  After a while, when he felt he could move again, he
very slowly and carefully explored his shackled right wrist and ankle with
his left hand.  They were bleeding.  He pulled lightly on the chain; it
seemed to be connected to the left ankle and wrist of the man he had fought
with.  On Kunta's left, chained to him by the ankles, lay some other man,
someone who kept up a steady moaning, and they were all so close that their
shoulders, arms, and legs touched if any of them moved even a little.

Remembering the wood he had bumped into with his head, Kunta drew himself
upward again, just enough for it to bump gently; there wasn't enough space
even to sit up.  And behind his head was a wooden wall.

I'm trapped like a leopard in a snare, he thought.  Then he remembered
sitting in the darkness of the manhood-training hut after being taken
blindfolded to the jujuo so many rains before, and a sob welled up in his
throat; but he fought it back.  Kunta made himself think about the cries and
groans he was hearing all around him.  There must be many men here in the
blackness, some close, some farther away, some beside him, others in front of
him, but all in one room, if that's what this was.  Straining his.  ears, he
could hear still more cries, but they were muffled and came from below,
beneath the splintery planking he lay on.

Listening more intently, he began to recognize the different tongues of those
around him.  Over and over, in Arabic, a Fulani was shouting, "Allah in
heaven, help me!"  And a man of the Serere tribe was hoarsely wailing what
must have been the names of his family.  But mostly Kunta heard 168 ALEX
HALEY

Mandinkas, the loudest of them babbling wildly in the sira kango secret talk
of men, vowing terrible deaths to all tou- bob.  The cries of the others were
so slurred with weeping that Kunta could identify neither their words nor
their languages, although he knew that some of the strange talk he heard must
come from beyond The Gambia.

As Kunta lay listening, he slowly began to realize that he was trying to push
from his mind the impulse to relieve the demands of his bowels, which he had
been forcing back for days.  But he could hold it in no longer, and finally
the feces curled out between his buttocks.

Revolted at himself, smelling his own addition to the stench, Kunta began
sobbing, and again his belly spasmed, producing this time only a little
spittle; but he kept gagging.  What sins was he being punished for in such a
manner as this?  He pleaded to Allah for an answer.  It was sin enough that
he hadn't prayed once since the morning he went for the wood to make his
drum.  Though he couldn't get onto his knees, and he knew not even which way
was east, he closed his eyes where he lay and prayed, beseeching Allah's
forgiveness.

Afterward, Kunta lay for a long time bathing dully in his pains, and slowly
became aware that one of them, in his knotted stomach, was nothing more than
hunger.  It occurred to him that he hadn't eaten anything since the night
before his capture.  He was trying to remember if he had slept in all that
time, when suddenly he saw himself walking along a trail in the forest;
behind him walked two blacks, ahead of him a pair of toubob with their
strange clothes and their long hair in strange colors.  Kunta jerked his eyes
open and shook his head; he was soaked in sweat and his heart was pounding.
He had been asleep without knowing.  It had been a nightmare; or was the
nightmare this stinking blackness?  No, it was as real as the scene in the
forest in his dream had been.  Against his will, it all came back to him.

After fighting the black slatees and the toubob so desperately in the grove
of trees, he remembered awakening-- into a wave of blinding pain--and finding
himself gagged, blindfolded, and bound with his wrists behind him and his
ankles hobbled with knotted rope.  Thrashing to break free, he was jabbed
savagely with sharp sticks until blood ran down his legs.  Yanked onto his
feet and prodded with the ROOTS 169

sticks to begin moving, he stumbled ahead of them as fast as his hobbles
would permit.

Somewhere along the banks of the belong--Kunta could tell by the sounds, and
the feel of the soft ground beneath his feet--he was shoved down into a
canoe.  Still blindfolded, he heard the slatees grunting, rowing swiftly,
with the toubob hitting him whenever he struggled.  Landing, again they
walked, until finally that night they reached a place where they threw Kunta
on the ground, tied him with his back to a bamboo fence and, without warning,
pulled off his blindfold.  It was dark, but he could see the pale face of the
toubob standing over him, and the silhouettes of others like him on the
ground nearby.  The toubob held out some meat for him to bite off a piece.
He turned his head aside and clamped his jaws.  Hissing with rage, the toubob
grabbed him by the throat and tried to force his mouth open.  When Kunta kept
it shut tight, the toubob drew back his fist and punched him hard in the face.

Kunta was let alone the rest of the night.  At dawn, he began to make
out--tied to other bamboo trunks--the figures of the other captured people,
eleven of them--six men, three girls, and two children--all guarded closely
by armed slatees and toubob.  The girls were naked; Kunta could only avert
his eyes; he never had seen a woman naked before.  The men, also naked, sat
with murderous hatred etched in their faces, grimly silent and crusted with
blood from whip cuts.  But the girls were crying out, one about dead loved
ones in a burned village; another, bitterly weeping, rocked back and forth
cooing endearments to an imaginary infant in her cradled arms; and the third
shrieked at intervals that she was going to Allah.

In wild fury, Kunta lunged back and forth trying to break his bonds.

A heavy blow with a club again knocked him senseless.  When he came to, he
found that he too was naked, that all of their heads had been shaved and
their bodies smeared with red palm oil.  At around noonday, two new toubob
entered the grove.  The slatees, now all grins, quickly untied the captives
from the bamboo trunks, shouting to them to stand in a line.  Kunta's muscles
were knotted with rage and fear.

One of the new toubob was short and stout and his hair was white.  The other
towered over him, tall and huge and scowling, with deep knife scars across
his 170 ALEX HALEY

face, but it was the white-haired one before whom the slatees and the other
toubob grinned and all but bowed.

Looking at them all, the white-haired one gestured for Kunta to step forward,
and lurching backward in terror, Kunta screamed as a whip seared across his
back.  A slatee from behind grappled him downward to his knees, jerking his
head backward.  The white-haired toubob calmly spread Kunta's trembling lips
and studied his teeth.  Kunta attempted to spring up, but after another blow
of the whip, he stood as ordered, his body quivering as the toubob's fingers
explored his eyes, his chest, his belly.  When the fingers grasped his foto,
he lunged aside with a choked cry.  Two slatees and more lashings were needed
to force Kunta to bend over almost double, and in horror he felt his buttocks
being spread wide apart.  Then the white-haired toubob roughly shoved Kunta
aside and, one by one, he similarly inspected the others, even the private
parts of the wailing girls.  Then whips and shouted commands sent the
captives all dashing around within the enclosure, and next springing up and
down on their haunches.

After observing them, the white-haired toubob and the huge one with the
knife-scarred face stepped a little distance away and spoke briefly in low
tones.  Stepping back, the white-haired one, beckoning another toubob, jabbed
his finger at four men, one of them Kunta, and two of the girls.  The toubob
looked shocked, pointing at the others in a beseeching manner.  But the
white-haired one shook his head firmly.  Kunta sat straining against his
bonds, his head threatening to burst with rage, as the toubob argued
heatedly.  After a while, the white-haired one disgustedly wrote something on
a piece of paper that the other toubob angrily accepted.

Kunta struggled and howled with fury as the slatees grabbed him again,
wrestling him to a seated position with his back arched.  Eyes wide with
terror, he watched as a toubob withdrew from the fire a long, thin iron that
the white-haired one had brought with him.  Kunta was already thrashing and
screaming as the iron exploded pain between his shoulders.  The bamboo grove
echoed with the screams of the others, one by one.  Then red palm oil was
rubbed over the peculiar LL shape Kunta saw on their backs.

Within the hour, they were hobbling in a line of clanking ROOTS 171

chains, with the slatees' ready whips flailing down on anyone who balked or
stumbled.  Kunta's back and shoulders were ribboned with bleeding cuts when
late that night they reached two canoes hidden under thick, overhanging
mangroves at the river's banks.  Split into two groups, they were rowed
through darkness by the slatees, with the toubob lashing out at any sign of
struggle.

When Kunta saw a vast dark shape looming up ahead in the night, he sensed
that this was his last chance.  Springing and lunging amid shouts and screams
around him, he almost upset the canoe in his struggle to leap overboard; but
he was bound to the others and couldn't make it over the side.  He almost
didn't feel the blows of the whips and clubs against his ribs, his back, his
face, his belly, his head --as the canoe bumped against the side of the great
dark thing.  Through the pain, he could feel the warm blood pouring down his
face, and he heard above him the exclamations of many toubob.  Then ropes
were being looped around him, and he was helpless to resist.  After being
half pushed and half pulled up some strange rope ladder, he had enough
strength left to twist his body wildly in another break for freedom; again he
was lashed with whips, and hands were grabbing him amid an overwhelming
toubob smell and the sound' of women shrieking and loud toubob cursing.

Through swollen lids, Kunta saw a thicket of legs and feet all around him,
and managing an upward glance while trying to shield his bleeding face with
his forearm, he saw the short toubob with the white hair standing calmly
making marks in a small book with a stubby pencil.  Then he felt himself
being snatched upright and shoved roughly across a flat space.  He caught a
glimpse of tall poles with thick wrappings of coarse white cloth.  Then he
was being guided, stumbling weakly down some kind of narrow steps, into a
place of pitch blackness; at the same instant, his nose was assaulted by an
unbelievable stink, and his ears by cries of anguish.

Kunta began vomiting as the toubob--holding dim yellowish flames that burned
within metal frames carried by a ring--shackled his wrists and ankles, then
shoved him backward, close between two other moaning men.  Even in his
terror, he sensed that lights bobbing in other directions 172 ALEX HALEY

meant that the toubob were taking those who had come with him to be shackled
elsewhere.  Then he felt his thoughts slipping; he thought he must be
dreaming.  And then, mercifully, he was.

CHAPTER 35

Only the rasping sound of the deck hatch being opened told Kunta if it was
day or night.  Hearing the latch click, he would jerk his head up--the only
free movement that his chains and shackles would allow--and four shadowy
toubob figures would descend, two of them with bobbing lights and whips
guarding the other pair as they all moved along the narrow aisle ways pushing
a tub of food.  They would thrust tin pans of the stuff up onto the filth
between each two shackle mates So far, each time the food had come, Kunta had
clamped his jaws shut, preferring to starve to death, until the aching of his
empty stomach had begun to make his hunger almost as terrible as the pains
from his heatings.  When those on Kunta's level had been fed, the lights
showed the toubob descending farther below with the rest of the food.

Less often than the feeding times, and usually when it was night outside, the
toubob would bring down into the hold some new captives, screaming and
whimpering in terror as they were shoved and lashed along to wherever they
were to be chained into empty spaces along the rows of hard plank shelves.

One day, shortly after a feeding time, - Kunta's ears picked up a strange,
muted sound that seemed to vibrate through the ceiling over his head.  Some
of the other men heard it too, and their moaning ended abruptly.  Kunta lay
listening intently; it sounded as if many feet were dashing about overhead.
Then--much nearer to them in the darkness--came a new sound, as of some very
heavy object being creaked very slowly upward.

ROOTS 173

Kunta's naked back felt an odd vibration from the hard, enough planking he
lay on.  He felt a tightening, a swelling yithin his chest, and he lay
frozen.  About him he heard :hudding sounds that he knew were men lunging
upward, straining against their chains.  It felt as if all of his blood lad
rushed into his pounding head.  And then terror went ;lawing into his vitals
as he sensed in some way that this place was moving, taking them away.  Men
started shouting ill around him, screaming to Allah and His spirits, banging
their heads against the planking, thrashing wildly against their rattling
shackles.

"Allah, I will never pray to you less than five times daily!"  Kunta shrieked
into the bedlam, "Hear me!  Help me!"

The anguished cries, weeping, and prayers continued, subsiding only as one
after another exhausted man went limp and lay gasping for breath in the
stinking blackness.  Kunta knew that he would never see Africa again.  He
;ould feel clearly now, through his body against the planks, 3.  slow,
rocking motion, sometimes enough that his shouliers or arms or hips would
press against the brief warmth 3f one of the men he was chained between.  He
had shouted so hard that he had no voice left, so his mind screamed it
instead: "Kill toubob--and their traitor black helpers!"

He was sobbing quietly when the hatch opened and the four toubob came bumping
down with their tub of food.  Again he clamped his jaws against his spasms of
hunger, but then he thought of something the kin tango had once said--that
warriors and hunters must eat well to have greater strength than other men.
Starving himself meant that weakness would prevent him from killing toubob.
So this time, when the pan was thrust onto the boards between him and the man
next to him, Kunta's fingers also clawed into the thick mush.  It tasted like
ground maize botled'-with palm oil.  Each gulping swallow pained his throat
in the spot where he had been choked for not eating before, but he swallowed
until the pan was empty.  He could feel the food like a lump in his belly,
and soon it was rising up his throat.  He couldn't stop it, and a moment
later the gruel was back on the planking.  He could hear, over the sound of
his own retching, that of others doing the same thing.

As the lights approached the end of the long shelf of planks on which Kunta
lay, suddenly he heard chains rattling, a head bumping, and then a man
screaming hysteri174 ALEX HALEY

cally in a curious mixture of Mandinka and what sounded like some toubob
words.  An uproarious burst of laughter came from the toubob with the feeding
tub, then their whips lashing down, until the man's cries lapsed into
babbling and whimpering.  Could it be?  Had he heard an Afri- can speaking
toubob?  Was there a slatee down there among them?  Kunta had heard that
toubob would often betray their black traitor helpers and throw them into
chains.

After the toubob had gone on down to the level below, scarcely a sound was
heard on Kunta's level until they reappeared with their emptied tub and
climbed back up outside, closing the hatch behind them.  At that instant, an
angry buzzing began in different tongues, like bees swarming.  Then, down the
shelf from where Kunta lay, there was a heavy chain-rattling blow, a howl of
pain and bkter cursing in the same hysterical Mandinka.  K-until heard the
man shriek,

"You think I am toubob?"  There were more violent, rapid blows and desperate
screams.  Then the blows stopped, and in the blackness of the hold came a
high squealing-- and then an awful gurgling sound, as of a man whose breath
was being choked off.  Another rattling of chains, a tattoo of bare heels
kicking at the planks, then quiet.

Kunta's head was throbbing, and his heart was pounding, as voices around him
began screaming,

"Slatee!  Slatees die!"  Then Kunta was screaming along with them and joining
in a wild rattling of chains--when suddenly with a rasping sound the hatch
was opened, admitting its shaft of daylight and a group of toubob with lights
and whips.  They had obviously heard the commotion below them, and though now
almost total silence had fallen in the hold, the toubob rushed among the
aisles shouting and lashing left and right with their whips.  When they left
without finding the dead man, the hold remained silent for a long moment.
Then, very quietly, Kunta heard a mirthless laugh from the end of the shelf
next to where the traitor lay dead.

The next feeding was a tense one.  As if the toubob sensed something amiss,
their whips fell even more often than usual.  Kunta jerked and cried out as a
bolt of pain cut across his legs.  He had learned that when anyone didn't cry
out from a blow, he would get a severe beating until he did.  Then he clawed
and gulped down the tasteless mush as his eyes followed the lights moving on
down along the shelf.

ROOTS 175

Every man in the hold was listening when one of the toubob exclaimed
something to the others.  A jostling of lights could be seen, then more
exclamations and cursings, and then one of the toubob rushed down the aisle
and up through the hatch, and he soon returned with two more.  Kunta could
hear the iron cuffs and chains being unlocked.

Two of the toubob then half carried, half dragged the body of the dead man
along the aisle and up the hatch, while the others continued bumping their
food tub along the aisles.

The food team was on the level below when four more toubob climbed down
through the hatch and went directly to where the slatee had been chained.  By
twisting his head, Kunta could see the lights raised high.  With violent
cursing, two of the toubob sent their whips whistling down against flesh.
Whoever was being beaten refused at first to scream; though just listening to
the force of the blows was almost paralyzing to Kunta, he could hear the
beaten man flailing against his chains in the agony of his torture--and of
his grim determination not to cry out.

Then the toubob were almost shrieking their curses, and the lights could be
seen changing hands as one man spelled the other with the lash.  Finally the
beaten man began screaming--first a Foulah curse, then things that could not
be understood, though they too were in the Foulah tongue.  Kunta's mind
flashed a thought of the quiet, gentle Foulah tribe who tended Mandinka
cattle--as the lashing sounds continued until the beaten man barely
whimpered.  Then the four toubob left, cursing, gasping, and gagging in the
stink.

The moans of the Foulah shivered through the black hold.  Then, after a
while, a clear voice called out in Man- dinka,

"Share his pain!  We must be in this place as one village!"  The voice
belonged to an elder.  He was right.  The Foulah's pains had been as Kunta's
own.  He felt himself about to burst with rage.  He also felt, in some
nameless way, a terror greater than he had ever known before, and it seemed
to spread from the marrow of his bones.  Part of him wanted to die, to escape
all of this; but no, he must live to avenge it.  He forced himself to lie
absolutely still.  It took a long while, but finally he felt his strain and
confusion, even his body's pains, begin to ebb--except for the place between
his shoulders where he had been burned with the hot iron.  He found that his
mind could focus better 176 ALEX HALEY

now on the only choice that seemed to lie before him and the others: Either
they would all die in this nightmare place, or somehow the toubob would have
to be overcome and killed.

CHAPTER 36

The stinging bites, then the itching of the body lice, steadily grew worse.
In the filth, the lice as well as the fleas had multiplied by the thousands
until they swarmed all over the hold.  They were worst wherever the body
crevices held any hair.  Kunta's armpits, and around his foto, felt as if
they were on fire, and his free hand scratched steadily wherever his shackled
hand couldn't reach.

He kept having thoughts of springing up and running away; then, a moment
later, his eyes would fill with tears of frustration, anger would rise in
him, and he would fight it all back down until he felt again some kind of
calm.  The worst thing was that he couldn't move anywhere; he felt he wanted
to bite through his chains.  He decided that he must keep himself focused
upon something, anything to occupy his mind or his hands, or else he would go
mad--as some men in the hold seemed to have done already, judging from the
things they cried out.

By lying very still and listening to the breathing sounds of the men on
either side of him, Kunta had long since learned to tell when either of them
was asleep or awake.  He concentrated now upon hearing farther away from him.
With more and more practice at listening intently to repeated sounds, he
discovered that his ears after a while could discern their location almost
exactly; it was a peculiar sensation, almost as if his ears were serving for
eyes.  Now and then, among the groans and curses that filled the darkness, he
heard the thump of a man's head against the planks he lay on.  And there was
another odd and monotonous noise.  It would stop at intervals, then resume
after ROOTS 177

a while; it sounded as if two pieces of metal were being rubbed hard
together, and after hearing more of it Kunta figured that someone was trying
to wear the links of his ;ha ins apart.  Kunta often heard, too, brief
exclamations and janglings of chains as two men furiously fought, jerking
their shackles against each other's ankles and wrists.

Kunta had lost track of time.  The urine, vomit, and feces that reeked
everywhere around him had spread into a slick paste covering the hard
planking of the long shelves on which they lay.  Just when he had begun to
think he souldn't stand it any more, eight toubob came down the hatchway,
cursing loudly.  Instead of the routine food container, they carried what
seemed to be some kind of long- handled hoes and four large tubs.  And Kunta
noticed with astonishment that they were not wearing any clothes at all.

The naked toubob almost immediately began vomiting worse than any of the
others who had come before.  In the glow of their lights, they all but sprang
along the aisles in teams of two, swiftly thrusting their hoes up onto the
shelves and scraping some of the mess into their tubs.  As ;ach tub was
filled, the toubob would drag it back along the aisle and go bumping it up
the steps through the opened hatchway to empty it outside, and then they
would return.  The toubob were gagging horribly by now, their faces contorted
grotesquely, and their hairy, colorless bodies covered with blobs of the mess
they were scraping off the shelves.  But when they finished their job and
were gone, there was no difference in the hot, awful, choking stench of the
hold.

The next time that more than the usual four toubob descended with their food
tubs, Kunta guessed that there must be as many as twenty of them clumping
down the hatch steps.  He lay frozen.  Turning his head this way and that, he
could see small groups of toubob posting themselves around the hold, some
carrying whips and guns, guarding others with lights upraised at the ends of
each shelf of chained men.

A knot of fear grew in Kunta's belly as he began hearing strange clicking
sounds, then heavy rattlings.  Then his shackled right ankle began jerking;
with Bashing terror he realized that the toubob were releasing him.  Why?
What terrible thing was going to happen now?  He lay still, his right ankle
no longer feeling the familiar weight of the chain, hearing all around the
hold more clicking sounds and the rattling of chains being pulled.  Then 178
ALEX HALEY

the toubob started shouting and lashing with their whips.  Kunta knew that it
meant for them to get down off their shelves.  His cry of alarm joined a
sudden bedlam of shrieks in different tongues as the men reared their bodies
upward, heads thudding against the ceiling timbers.

The whips lashed down amid screams of pain as one after another pair of men
went thumping down into the aisle ways Kunta and his Wolof shackle mate
hugged each other on the shelf as the searing blows jerked them convulsively
back and forth.  Then hands clamped roughly around their ankles and hauled
them across the shelf s mushy filth and into the tangle of other men in the
aisle- way, all of them howling under the toubob whips.  Wrenching and
twisting in vain to escape the pain, he glimpsed shapes moving against the
light of the opened hatchway.  The toubob were snatching men onto their
feet--one pair after another--then beating and shoving them along, stumbling
in the darkness, toward the hatchway's steps.  Kunta's legs felt separated
from the rest of his body as he went lurching alongside the Wolof, shackled
by their wrists, naked, crusted with filth, begging not to be eaten.

The first open daylight in nearly fifteen days hit Kunta with the force of a
hammer between his eyes.  He reeled under the bursting pain, flinging his
free hand up to cover his eyes.  His bare feet told him that whatever they
were walking on was moving slightly from side to side.  Fumbling blindly
ahead, with even his cupped hand and clamped eyelids admitting some
tormenting light, trying futilely to breathe through nostrils nearly plugged
with snot, he gaped open his cracked lips and took a deep breath of sea air--
the first of his life.  His lungs convulsed from its rich cleanness, and he
crumpled to the deck, vomiting alongside his shackle mate All about him he
heard more vomiting, chains clanking, lashes meeting flesh, and shrieks of
pain amid toubob shouts and curses and strange flapping sounds over bead

When another whip ripped across his back, Kunta shrank to one side, hearing
his Wolof partner gasp as the lash hit him.  It kept tearing at them both
until somehow they stumbled to their feet He slit his eyes to see if he could
escape some of the blows; but new pains stabbed into his head as their
tormentor shoved them toward where Kunta could see the blurred forms of other
toubob passing a ROOTS 179

length of chain through the shackles around each man's ankles.  There had
been more of them down there in the darkness than he had ever realized--and
far more toubob than had ever gone below.  In the bright sunlight, they
looked even paler and more horrible, their faces pitted with the holes of
disease, their peculiar long hair in colors of yellow or black or red, some
of them even with hair around their mouths and under their chins.  Some were
bony, others fat, some had ugly scars from knives, or a hand, eye, or limb
missing, and the backs of many were crisscrossed with deep scars.  It flashed
through Kunta's mind how his teeth had been counted and inspected, for
several of these tou- bob he saw had but few teeth.

Many of them were spaced along the rails, holding whips, long knives, or some
kind of heavy metal stick with a hole in the end, and Kunta could see beyond
them an amazing sight--an unbelievable endlessness of rolling blue water.  He
jerked his head upward toward the slapping sounds above and saw that they
came from giant white sloths billowing among huge poles and many ropes.  The
sloths seemed to be filled up with the wind.  Turning about, Kunta saw that a
high barricade of bamboo taller than any man extended completely across the
width of the huge ;anoe.  Showing through the barricade's center was the
gaping black mouth of a huge, terrible-looking metal thing with i long,
thick, hollow shaft, and the tips of more metal sticks like the ones the
toubob had been holding at the rail.  Both the huge thing and the sticks were
pointed toward where he and the other naked men were grouped.

As their ankle shackles were being linked onto the new ;hain, Kunta got the
chance to take a good look at his Wolof shackle mate for the first time.
Like himself, the man was crusted from head to foot with filth.  He seemed
about the rains of Kunta's father Omoro, and the Wolof had that ribe's
classic facial features, and he was very black of ;olor.  The Wolof's back
was bleeding from where the whip- aings had cut into him, and pus was oozing
from where an LL mark had been burned into his back.  Kunta realized, is
their eyes searched each other, that the Wolof was star- ng at him with the
same astonishment.

Amid the commoJon, they had time to stare also at the other naked men, nost
of them gibbering in their terror.  From the different 'acial features,
tribal tattoos, and scarification marks, Kunta 180 ALEX HALEY

could tell that some were Foulah, Jola, Serere, and Wolof, like his partner,
but most were Mandinkas--and there were some he could not be sure of.  With
excitement, Kunta saw the one he was sure must have killed the slatee.  He
was indeed a Foulah; blood from the beating he had received was crusted all
over him.

They were all soon being shoved and whipped toward where another chain of ten
men was being doused with buckets of seawater drawn up from over the side.
Then other toubob with long-handled brushes were scrubbing the screaming men.
Kunta screamed, too, as the drenching salt water hit him, stinging like fire
in his own bleeding whip cuts and the burned place on his back.  He cried
even louder as the stiff brush bristles not only loosened and scraped off
some of his body's crusted filth but also tore open his scabbed lash cuts.
He saw the water frothing and pinkish at their feet.  Then they were herded
back toward the center of the deck, where they flopped down in a huddle.

Kunta gawked upward to see toubob springing about on the poles like monkeys,
pulling at the many ropes among the great white cloths.  Even in Kunta's
shock, the heat of the sun felt warm and good, and he felt an incredible
sense of relief that his skin was freed of some of its filth.

A sudden chorus of cries brought the chained men jerking upright.

About twenty women, most of them teenaged, and four children, came running
naked and without chains from behind the barricade, ahead of two grinning
toubob with whips.  Kunta instantly recognized the girls who had been brought
on board with him--as with flooding rage he watched all of the toubob leering
at thair nakedness, some of them even rubbing their fotos.  By sheer force of
will, he fought the urge to go lunging after the nearest toubob despite their
weapons.  Hands clutched into fists, he sucked hard for air to keep
breathing, wrenching his eyes away from the terrified women.

Then a toubob near the rail began pulling out and pushing in between his
hands some peculiar folding thing that made a wheezing sound.

Another joined in, beating on a drum from Africa, as other toubob now moved
themselves into a ragged line with the naked men, women, and children staring
at them.  The toubob in the line had a length of rope, and each of them
looped one ankle within it, as if that rope was a length of chain such as
linked the naked ROOTS 181

Then.  Smiling now, they began jumping up and down to- ether in short hops,
keeping in time with the drumbeats ad the wheezing thing.  Then they and the
other armed toubob gestured for the men in chains to jump in the same manner.
But when the chained men continued to stand as if petrified, the toubobs'
grins became scowls, and they began laying about with whips.

"Jump!"  shouted the oldest woman suddenly, in Man- dinka.  She was of about
the rains of Kunta's mother Binta.  Bounding out, she began jumping herself.

"Jump!"  she ;ried shrilly again, glaring at the girls and children, and bey
jumped as she did.

"Jump to kill toubob!"  she shrieked, aer quick eyes flashing at the naked
men, her arms and hands darting in the movements of the warrior's dance.  And
then, as her meaning sank home, one after another shackled pair of men began
a weak, stumbling hopping up and down, their chains clanking against the
deck.  With his head down, Kunta saw the welter of hopping feet and legs,
Feeling his own legs rubbery under him as his breath came in gasps.  Then the
singing of the woman was joined by the girls.  It was a happy sound, but the
words they sang told how these horrible toubob had taken every woman into the
dark corners of the canoe each night and used them like dogs.

"Toubob fa!"  (Kill toubob) they shrieked with smiles and laughter.  The
naked, jumping men joined in: "Toubob fa!"  Even the toubob were grinning
now, some of them slapping their hands with pleasure.

But Kunta's knees beganoto buckle beneath him and his throat went tight when
he saw, approaching him, the short, stocky toubob with white hair, and with
him the huge, cowling one with the knife-scarred face who also had aeen at
that place where Kunta was examined and beaten and choked and burned before
he was brought here.

In an instant, as the other naked people saw these two, a sudden silence
fell, and the only sound to be heard was that of great, slapping cloths
overhead, for even the rest of the toubob had stiffened at their presence.

Barking out something hoarsely, the huge one cleared the other toubob away
from the chained people.  From his belt there dangled a large ring of the
slender, shiny things that Kunta had glimpsed others using as they had opened
he chains.  And then the white-haired one went moving imong the naked people,
peering closely at their bodies.

182 ALEX HALEY

Wherever he saw whip cuts badly festered, or pus draining from rat bites or
burned places, he smeared on some grease from a can that the huge one handed
to him.  Or the huge one himself would sprinkle a yellowish powder from a
container on wrists and ankles that became a sickly, moist, grayish color
beneath the iron cuffs.  As the two toubob moved nearer to him, Kunta shrank
in fear and fury, but then the white-haired one was smearing grease on his
festering places and the huge one was sprinkling his ankles and wrists with
the yellowish powder, neither of them seeming even to recognize who Kunta was.

Then, suddenly, amid rising shouts among the toubob, one of the girls who had
been brought with Kunta was springing wildly between frantic guards.  As
several of them went clutching and diving for her, she hurled herself
screaming over me rail and went plunging downward.  In the great shouting
commotion, the white-haired toubob and the huge one snatched up whips and
with bitter curses lashed the backs of those who had gone sprawling after,"
letting her slip from their grasp.

Then the toubob up among the cloths were yelling and pointing toward the
water.  Turning in that direction, the naked people saw the girl bobbing in
the waves--and not far away, a pair of dark fins coursing swiftly toward her.
Then came another scream--a blood-chilling one--then a frothing and
thrashing, and she was dragged from sight, leaving behind only a redness in
the Water where she had been.  For the first time, no whips fell as the
chained people, sick with horror, were herded back into the dark hold and
rechained into their places.

Kunta's head was reeling.  After the fresh air of the ocean, the stench
smelled even worse than before, and after the daylight, the hold seemed even
darker.  When soon a new disturbance arose, seeming somewhat distant, his
practiced ears told him that the tou- bob were driving up onto the deck the
terrified men from the level below.

After a while, he heard near his right ear a low mutter.

"Jula?"

Kunta's heart leaped.  He knew very little of the Wolof tongue, but he did
know that Wolof and some others used the word juta to mean travelers and
traders who were usually Mandinkas.  And twisting his head a bit closer to
the Wolofs ear, Kunta whispered,

"Jula.

Mandinka.  " For moments, as he lay tensely, the Wolof made no return ROOTS
183

sound.  It went flashing through Kunta's head that if he ;ould only speak
many languages, as his father's brothers "id--but he was ashamed to have
brought them to this ilace, even in his thoughts.

"Wolof.  Jebou Manga," the other man whispered finally, and Kunta knew that
was his name.

"Kunta Kinte," he whispered back.

Exchanging a whisper now and then in their desperation to communicate, they
picked at each other's minds to learn a new word here, another there, in
their respective tongues.  It was much as they had learned their early words
as first- kafo children.  During one of the intervals of silence between
them, Kunta remembered how when he had been a lookout against the baboons in
the groundnut fields at night, the distant fire of a Fulani herdsman had
given him a sense of comfort and he had wished that there had been some way
he could exchange words with this man he had never seen.  It was as if that
wish were being realized now, except that it was with a Wolof, unseen for the
weeks they had been lying there shackled to each other.

Every Wolof expression Kunta had ever heard he now dragged from his memory.
He knew that the Wolof was doing the same with Mandinka words, of which he
knew more than Kunta knew of Wolof words.  In another time of silence between
them, Kunta sensed that the man who lay on his other side, who never had made
any sound other than moaning in pain, was listening closely to them.  Kunta
realized from the low murmuring that spread gradually throughout the hold
that once the men had actually been able to see each other up in the
daylight, he and his own shackle mate weren't the only ones trying now to
communi- sate with one another.  The murmuring kept spreading.  The hold
would fall silent now only when the toubob came with the food tub, or with
the brushes to clean the filth from the shelves.  And there was a new quality
to the quietness that would fall at these times; for the first time since
they had been captured and thrown in chains, it was as if there was among the
men a sense of being together.

CHAPTER 37

The next time the men were taken up onto the deck, Kunta made a point of
looking at the man behind him in line, the one who lay beside him to the left
when they were below.  He was a Serere tribesman much older than Kunta, and
his body, front and back, was creased with whip cuts, some of them so deep
and festering that Kunta felt badly for having wished sometimes that he might
strike the man in the darkness for moaning so steadily in his pain.  Staring
back at Kunta, the Serere's dark eyes were full of fury and defiance.  A whip
lashed out even as they stood looking at each other--this time at Kunta,
spurring him to move ahead.  The force of the blow drove him nearly to his
knees and triggered an explosion of rage.  With his throat ripping out almost
an animal's cry, Kunta lunged off balance toward the toubob, only to fall,
sprawling, dragging his shackle mate down with him, as the tou- bob nimbly
sprang clear of them both.  Men milled around them as the toubob, his eyes
narrowing with hatred, brought the whip down over and over on both Kunta and
the Wolof, like a slashing knife.  Trying to roll away, Kunta was kicked
heavily in his ribs.  But somehow he and the gasping Wolof managed to stagger
back up among the other men from their shelf who were shambling toward their
dousing with buckets of seawater.

A moment later, the stinging saltiness of it was burning in Kunta's wounds,
and his screams joined those of others over the sound of the drum and the
wheezing thing that had again begun marking time for the chained men to jump
and dance for the toubob.  Kunta and the Wolof were so weak from their new
beating that twice they stumbled, but whip blows and kicks sent them hopping
clumsily up and down in their chains.  So great was his fury that Kunta was
barely aware of the women singing ROOTS 185

"Toubob fa!"  And when he had finally been chained back town in his place in
the dark hold, his heart throbbed with lust to murder toubob.

Every few days the eight naked toubob would again come into the stinking
darkness and scrape their tubs full of the excrement that had accumulated on
the shelves where the chained men lay.  Kunta would lie still with his syes
staring balefully in hatred, following the bobbing orange lights, listening
to the toubob cursing and sometimes ilipping and falling into the slickness
underfoot--so plentiful now, because of the increasing looseness of the men's
bowels, that the filth had begun to drop off the edges of the shelves down
into the aisle way

The last time they were on deck, Kunta had noticed a Tian limping on a badly
infected leg.  The chief toubob had ipplied grease to it, but it hadn't
helped, and the man had egun to scream horribly in the darkness of the hold.
When they next went on deck, he had to be helped up, ;nd Kunta saw that the
leg, which had been grayish be- ore, had begun to rot and stink even in the
fresh air.  this time the man was kept up on deck when the rest were taken
back below.  A few days later, the women told the other prisoners in their
singing that the man's leg had been cut off and that one of the women had
been brought to tend him, but that the man had died that night and been
thrown over the side.  Starting then, when the toubob came to clean the
shelves, they also dropped red- dot pieces of metal into pails of strong
vinegar.  The ;louds of acrid steam left the hold smelling better, but soon
it would again be overwhelmed by the choking stink.  [t was a smell that
Kunta felt would never leave his lungs and skin.

The steady murmuring that went on in the hold when- sver the toubob were gone
kept growing in volume and intensity as the men began to communicate better
and better with one another.  Words not understood were whispered from mouth
1o ear along the shelves until someone who knew more than one tongue would
send back their meanings.  In the process, all of the men along each shelf
[earned new words in tongues they had not spoken before.  Sometimes men
jerked upward, bumping their heads, in the double excitement of communicating
with each other uid the fact that it was being done without the toubob's 186
ALEX HALEY

knowledge.  Muttering among themselves for hours, the men developed a
deepening sense of intrigue and of brotherhood.  Though they were of
different villages and tribes, the feeling grew that they were not from
different peoples or places.

When the toubob next came to drive them up onto the deck, the chained men
marched as if they were on parade.  And when they descended again, several of
those men who spoke several tongues managed to change their position in line
in order to get chained at the ends of shelves, thus permitting more rapid
relaying of translations.  The toubob never seemed to notice, for they were
either unable or unconcerned to distinguish one chained man from another.

Questions, and responses to them, had begun spreading in the hold.

"Where are we being taken?"  That brought a babble of bitterness.

"Who ever returned to tell us?"

"Because they were eaten!"   The question, "How long have we been here?"
brought a rash of guesses of up to a moon, until the question was translated
to a man who had been able to keep a count of daylights through a small air
vent near where he was chained; he said that he had counted eighteen days
since the great canoe had sailed.

Because of intrusions by toubob with their food tub or their scrapers, an
entire day might be used up in relaying of responses to a single statement or
question.  Anxious inquiries were passed along for men who might know each
other.

"Is anyone here from Barrakunda village?"  someone asked one day, and after a
time there came winging back from mouth to ear the joyous response,

"I, Jabon Sallah, am here!"  One day, Kunta nearly burst with excitement when
the Wolof hastily whispered,

"Is anyone here from Juffure village?"

"Yes, Kunta Kinte!"   he sent back breathlessly.   He lay almost afraid to
breathe for the hour that it took an answer to return: "Yes, that was the
name.   I heard the drums of his grieving village."   Kunta dissolved into
sobs, his mind streaming with pictures of his family around a flapping white
cockerel that died on its back as the village wadanela went to spread that
sad news among all of the people who would then come to Omoro, Binta, Lamin,
Suwadu, and the baby Madi, all of them squatting about and weeping as the
village drums beat out the words to inform whoever might hear them ROOTS 187

far away that a son of the village named Kunta Kinte now was considered gone
forever.

Days of talking sought answers to the question: "How could the toubob of this
canoe be attacked and killed?"  Did anyone have or know of anything that
might be used as weapons?  None did.  Up on the deck, had anyone noticed any
carelessness or weaknesses on the part of the toubob that could be useful to
a surprise attack?  Again, none had.

The most useful information of any sort had some from the women's singing as
the men danced in their chains: that about thirty toubob were riding with
them on this big canoe.  There had seemed to be many more, but the women were
in a better position to count them.  The women said also that there had been
more toubob at the beginning of the voyage, but five had died.  They had been
sewn inside white cloths and thrown overboard while the white-haired chief
toubob read from some kind of book.  The women also sang that the toubob
often fought and beat each other viciously, usually as a result af arguments
over which ones would next use the women.

Thanks to their singing, not much happened up on the leek that wasn't quickly
told to the men dancing in their shains, who then lay discussing it down in
the hold.  Then ;ame the exciting new development that contact had been
sstablished with the men who were chained on the level yet below.  Silence
would fall in the hold where Kunta lay, md a question would be called out
from near the hatchway: "How many are down there?"  And after a time the
inswer would circulate on Kunta's level: "We believe about sixty of us."

The relaying of any information from whatever source seemed about the only
function that would justify their itaying alive.  When there was no news, the
men would :alk of their families, their villages, their professions, their
arms, their hunts.  And more and more frequently there irose disagreements
about how to kill the toubob, and when it should be tried.  Some of the men
felt that, what- sver the consequences, the toubob should be attacked the
aext time they were taken up on deck.  Others felt that it would be wiser to
watch and wait for the best moment Bitter disagreements began to flare up.
One debate was suddenly interrupted when the voice of an elder rang out, 188
ALEX HALEY

"Hear me!  Though we are of different tribes and tongues, remember that we
are the same people!  We must be as one village, together in this place!"

Murmurings of approval spread swiftly within the hold.  That voice had been
heard before, giving counsel in times of special stress.  It was a voice with
experience and authority as well as wisdom.  Soon the information passed from
mouth to ear that the speaker had been the alcala of his village.  After some
time, he spoke again, saying now that some leader must be found and agreed
upon, and some attack plan must be proposed and agreed upon before there
could be any hope of overcoming the toubob, who were obviously both well
organized and heavily armed.  Again, the hold soon filled with mutterings of
approval.

The new and comforting sense of closeness with the other men made Kunta feel
almost less aware of the stink and filth, and even the lice and rats.  Then
he heard the new fear that was circulating--that yet another slatee was
believed to be somewhere on the level of men below.  One of the women had
sung of having been among the group of chained people whom this slatee had
helped to bring, blindfolded, onto this canoe.  She had sung that it was
night when her blindfold was removed, but she had seen the toubob give that
slatee liquor, which he drank until he stumbled about drunkenly, and then the
toubob, all howling with laughter, had knocked him unconscious and dragged
him into the hold.  The woman sang that though she was not able to tell in
any definite way the face of that' slatee, he was almost surely somewhere
below in chains like the rest, in terror that he would be discovered and
killed, as he now knew that one slatee had been already.  In the hold, the
men discussed how probably this slatee, too, was able to speak some toubob
words, and in hopes of saving his miserable life, he might try to warn the
toubob of any attack plans he learned of.

It occurred to Kunta, as he shook his shackles at a fat rat, why he had known
little of slatees until now.  It was because none of them would dare to live
among people in villages, where even a strong suspicion of who they were
would bring about their instant death.  He remembered that back in Juffure he
often had felt that his own father Omoro and yet older men, when they sat
around the night ROOTS 189

fires, would seem to be needlessly occupied with dark worries and gloomy
speculations about dangers to which he and the other younger men privately
thought they themselves would never succumb.  But now he understood why the
older men had worried about the safety of the village; they had known better
than he how many slatees slithered about, many of them in The Gambia.  The
despised tan-colored sasso borro children of toubob fathers were easy to
identify; but not all.

Kunta thought now about the girl of his village who had been kidnaped by
toubob and then escaped, who had gone to the Council of Elders just before he
had been taken away, wanting to know what to do about her sasso borro infant,
and he wondered what the Council of Elders had decided for her to do.

Some few slatees, he learned now from the talk in the hold, only supplied
toubob canoes with such goods as indigo, gold, and elephants' teeth.  But
there were hundreds of others who helped, toubob to burn villages and capture
people.  Some of the men told how children were enticed with slices of sugar
cane; then bags were thrown over their heads.  Others said the slatees had
beaten them mercilessly during the marches after their capture.  One man's
wife, big with child, had died on the road.  The wounded son of another was
left bleeding to die from whip cuts.  The more Kunta heard, the more his rage
became as great for others as for himself.

He lay there in the darkness hearing the voice of his father sternly warning
him and Lamin never to wander off anywhere alone; Kunta desperately wished
that he had heeded his father's warnings.  His heart sank with the thought
that he would never again be able to listen to his father, that for the rest
of whatever was going to be his life, he was going to have to think for
himself.

"All things are the will of Allah!"  That statement-- which had begun with
the alcala--went from mouth to ear, and when it came to Kunta from the man
lying on his left side, he turned his head to whisper the words to his Wolof
shackle mate After a moment, Kunta realized that the Wolof hadn't whispered
the words on to the next man, and after wondering for a while why not, he
thought that perhaps he hadn't said them clearly, so he started to whisper
the message once again.  But abruptly the Wolof spat out loudly enough to be
heard across the entire hold, 190 ALEX HALEY

"If your Allah wills this, give me the devil!"  From elsewhere in the
darkness came several loud exclamations of agreement with the Wolof, and
arguments broke out here and there.

Kunta was deeply shaken.  The shocked realization that he lay with a pagan
burned into his brain, faith in Allah being as precious to him as life
itself.  Until now he had respected the friendship and the wise opinions of
his older shackle mate But now Kunta knew that there could never be any more
companionship between them.

CHAPTER 38

Up on the deck now, the women sang of having managed to steal and hide a few
knives, and some other things that could be used as weapons.  Down in the
hold, even more strongly than before, the men separated into two camps of
opinion.  The leader of the group that felt the toubob should be attacked
without delay was a fierce-looking tattooed Wolof.  On the deck, every man
had seen him dancing wildly in his chains while baring his sharply filed
teeth at the toubob, who clapped for him because they thought he was
grinning.  Those who believed in the wisdom of further watchful preparation
were led by the tawny Foulah who had been beaten for choking the slatee to
death.

There were a few followers of the Wolof who exclaimed that the toubob should
be attacked when many of them were in the hold, where the chained men could
see better than they and the element of surprise would be greatest-- but
those who urged this plan were dismissed as foolish by the others, who
pointed out that the bulk of the toubob would still be up on the deck, and
thus able to kill the chained men below like so many rats.  Sometimes when
the arguments between the Wolof and the Foulah would reach the point of
shouting, the alcala would intervene, com ROOTS 191 man ding them to be
quieter lest their discussion be overheard by the toubob.

Whichever leader's thinking finally prevailed, Kunta was ready to fight to
the death.  Dying held no fear for him any more.  Once he had decided that he
would never see his family and home again, he felt the same as dead already.
His only fear now was that he might die without at least one of the toubob
also dead by his hand.  But the leader toward whom Kunta was most
inclined--along with most of the men, he felt--was the cautious, whip-scarred
Foulah.  Kunta had found out by now that most of the men in the hold were
Mandinkas, and every Mandinka knew well that the Foulah people were known for
spending years, even their entire lives if need be, to avenge with death any
serious wrong ever done to them.  If someone killed a Foulah and escaped, the
Foulah's sons would never rest until one day they found and killed the
murderer.

"We must be as one behind the leader we agree upon," the alcala counseled.
There was angry muttering from those who followed the Wolof, but when it had
become clear that most of the men sided with the Foulah, he promptly issued
his first order.

"We must examine toubob's every action with the eyes of hawks.  And when the
time comes, we must be warriors."  He advised them to follow the counsel of
the woman who had told them to look happy when they jumped on deck in their
chains.  That would relax the toubob's guard, which would make them easier to
take by surprise.  And the Foulah also said that every man should locate with
his eyes any weapon like object that he could swiftly grab and use.  Kunta
was very pleased with himself, for during his times up on deck, he had
already spotted a spike, tied loosely beneath a space of railing, which he
intended to snatch and use as a spear to plunge into the nearest toubob
belly.  His fingers would clutch around the handle he imagined in his hands
every time he thought of it.

Whenever the toubob would jerk the hatch cover open and climb down among
them, shouting and wielding their whips, Kunta lay as still as a forest
animal.  He thought of what the kin tango had said during manhood training,
that the hunter' should learn from what Allah himself had 192 ALEX HALEY

taught the animals--how to hide and watch the hunters who sought to kill
them.  Kunta had lain for hours thinking how the toubob seemed to enjoy
causing pain.  He remembered with loathing the times when toubob would laugh
as they lashed the men--particularly those whose bodies were covered with bad
sores--and then disgustedly wipe off the ooze that splattered onto them.
Kunta lay also bitterly picturing the toubob in his mind as they forced the
women into the canoe's dark corners in the nights; he imagined that he could
hear the women screaming.  Did the toubob have no women of their own?  Was
that why they went like dogs after others' women?  The toubob seemed to
respect nothing at all; they seemed to have no gods, not even any spirits to
worship.

The only thing that could take Kunta's mind off the toubob--and how to kill
them--was the rats, which had become bolder and bolder with each passing day.
Their nose whiskers would tickle between Kunta's legs as they went to bite a
sore that was bleeding or running with pus.  But the lice preferred to bite
him on the face, and they would suck at the liquids in the corners of Kunta's
eyes, or the snot draining from his nostrils.  He would squirm his body, with
his fingers darting and pinching to crush any lice that he might trap between
his nails.  But worse even than the lice and rats was the pain in Kunta's
shoulders, elbows, and hips, stinging now like fire from the weeks of steady
rubbing against the hard, rough boards beneath him.  He had seen the raw
patches on other men when they were on deck, and his own cries joined theirs
whenever the big canoe pitched or rolled somewhat more than usual.

And Kunta had seen that when they were up on the deck, some of the men had
begun to act as if they were zombies--their faces wore a look that said that
they were no longer afraid, because they no longer cared whether they lived
or died.  Even when the whips of the toubob lashed them, Ihey would react
only slowly.  When they had been scrubbed of their filth, some were simply
unable even to try jumping in their chains, and the white-haired chief
toubob, with a look of worry, would order the others to permit those men to
sit, which they did with their foreheads between their knees and the thin,
pinkish fluid draining down their raw backs.  Then the chief toubob would
ROOTS 193

force their heads backward and into their upturned mouths pour some stuff
that they would usually choke up.  And some of them fell limply on their
sides, unable to move, and toubob would carry them back into the hold.  Even
before these men died, as most of them did, Kunta knew that in some way they
had willed themselves to die.

But in obedience to the Foulah, Kunta and most of the men tried to keep
acting happy as they danced in their chains, although the effort was like a
canker in their souls.  It was possible to see, though, that when the toubob
were thus made more relaxed, fewer whips fell on backs, and the men were
allowed to remain on the sunlit deck for longer periods than before.  After
enduring the buckets of seawater and the torture of the scrubbing brushes,
Kunta and the rest of the men sat resting on their haunches and watched the
toubobs' every move--how they generally spaced themselves along the rails;
how they usually kept their weapons too close to be grabbed away.  No chained
man's eye missed it whenever any toubob leaned his gun briefly against the
rails.  While they sat on the deck, anticipating the day when they would kill
the toubob, Kunta worried about the big metal thing that showed through the
barricade.  He knew that at whatever cost in lives, that weapon would have to
be overwhelmed and taken, for even though he didn't know exactly what it was,
he knew that it was capable of some terrible act of destruction, which was of
course why the toubob had placed it there.

He worried also about those few toubob who were always turning the wheel of
the big canoe, a little this way, a.  little that way, while staring at a
round brownish metal thing before them.  Once, when they were down in the
hold, the alcala spoke his own thought: "If those toubob are killed, who will
run this canoe?"  And the Foulah lead- sr responded that those toubob needed
to be taken alive.  "With spears at their throats," he said, "they will
return us to our land, or they will die."  The very thought that he might
actually see his land, his home, his family once again sent a shiver down
Kunta's spine.  But even if that should happen, he thought he would have to
live to be wry old if he was ever to forget, even a little bit, wha \ toubob
had done to him.  \ There was yet another fear within Kunta--th?  " bob might
have the eyes to notice how differ 194 ALEX HALEY

the other men danced in their chains on the deck, for now they were really
dancing; they couldn't help their movements from showing what was deep in
their minds: swift gestures of hurling off shackles and chains, then
clubbing, strangling, spearing, killing.  While they were dancing, Kunta and
the other men would even whoop out hoarsely their anticipation of slaughter.
But to his great relief, when the dancing ended and he could again contain
himself, he saw that the unsuspecting toubob only grinned with happiness.
Then, one day up on the deck, the chained people suddenly stood rooted in
astonishment and stared--along with the toubob--at a flight of hundreds of
flying fish that filled the air above the water like silvery birds.  Kunta
was watching, dumfounded, when suddenly he heard a scream.  Whirling, he saw
the fierce, tattooed Wolof in the act of snatching a metal stick from a
toubob.

Swinging it like a club, he sent the toubob's brains spraying onto the deck;
as other toubob snapped from their frozen positions of shock, he battered
another to the deck.  It was done so swiftly that the Wolof, bellowing in
rage, was clubbing his fifth toubob when the flash of a long knife lopped off
his head cleanly at the shoulders.

His head hit the deck before his body had crumpled down, and both spurted
blood from their stumps.  The eyes in the face were still open, and they
looked very surprised.

Amid shoutings of panic, more and more toubob scrambled to the scene, rushing
out of doors and sliding like monkeys down from among the billowing white
cloths.  As the women shrieked, the shackled men huddled together in a
circle.  The metal sticks barked flame and smoke; then the big black barrel
exploded with a thunderous roar and a gushing cloud of heat and smoke just
over their heads, and they screamed and sprawled over each other in horror.

From behind the barricade bolted the chief toubob and his scar-faced mate,
both of them screaming in rage.  The huge one struck the nearest toubob a
blow that sent blood spurting from his mouth, then all of the other toubob
were a mass of screaming and shouting as with their lashes and knives and
fire sticks they rushed to herd the shackled men back toward the opened
hatch.  Kunta moved; not feeling the lashes that struck him, still awaiting
the Foulah's signal to attack.  But almost before he realized it, they ing ^.

ROOTS 195

were below and chained back in their dark places and the hatch cover had been
slammed down.

But they were not alone.  In the commotion, a toubob had been trapped down
there with them.  He dashed this way and that in the darkness, stumbling and
bumping into the shelves, screaming in terror, scrambling up when he fell and
dashing off again.  His bowlings sounded like some primeval beast's.

"Toubob fa!"  somebody shouted, and other voices joined him: "Toubob fa!
Toubob fa!"  they shouted, louder and louder, as more and more men joined the
chorus.  It was as if the toubob knew they meant it for him, and pleading
sounds came from him as Kunta lay silent as if frozen, none of his muscles
able to move.  His head was pounding, his body poured out sweat, he was
gasping to breathe.  Suddenly the hatch cover was snatched apen and a dozen
toubob came pounding down the stairs into the dark hold.  Some of their whips
had slashed down anto the trapped toubob before he could make them realize he
was one of them.

Then, under viciously lashing whips, the men were again unchained and beaten,
kicked back up onto the deck, where they were made to watch as four toubob
with heavy whips beat and cut into a pulpy mess the headless body af the
Wolof.  The chained men's naked bodies shone with sweat and blood from their
cuts and sores, but scarcely sound came from among them.  Every one of the
toubob was heavily armed now, and murderous rage was upon their faces as they
stood in a surrounding ring, glaring and breathing heavily.  Then the whips
lashed down again as the naked men were beaten back down into the hold and
rechained in their places.

For a long while, no one dared even to whisper.  Among the torrent of
thoughts and emotions that assailed Kunta when his terror had subsided enough
for him to think at all was the feeling that he wasn't alone in admiring the
courage of the Wolof, who had died as a warrior was supposed to.  He
remembered his own tingling anticipation that the Foulah leader would at any
instant signal an at- tack--but that signal hadn't come.  Kunta was bitter,
for whatever might have happened would have been all over now; and why not
die now?  What better time was goir>' to come?  Was there any reason to keep
hanging onto ' 196 ALEX HALEY

here in this stinking darkness?  He wished desperately that he could
communicate as he once did with his shackle- mate, but the Wolof was a pagan.

Mutterings of anger at the Foulah's failure to act were cut short by his
dramatic message: The attack, he announced, would come the next time the men
on their level of the hold were on deck being washed and jumping in their
chains, when the toubob seemed most relaxed.  "Many among us will die," the
Foulah said, "as our brother has died for us--but our brothers below " will
avenge us.  "

There was grunting approval in the murmurings that circulated now.

And Kunta lay in the darkness listening to the raspings of a stolen file
rubbing against chains.  He knew for weeks that the file marks had been
carefully covered with filth so that the toubob wouldn't see.

He lay fixing in his mind the faces of those who turned the great wheel of
the canoe, since their lives were the only ones to be spared.

But during that long night in the hold, Kunta and the other men began to hear
an odd new sound they had never heard before.  It seemed to be coming through
the deck from over their heads.  Silence fell rapidly in the hold and,
listening intently, Kunta guessed that stronger winds must be making the
great white cloths flap much harder than usual.  Soon there was another
sound, as if rice was falling onto the deck; he guessed after a while that it
must be rain pelting down.

Then he was sure that he heard, unmistakably, the muffled crack and rumble of
heavy thunder.

Feet could be heard pounding on the deck overhead, and the big canoe began to
pitch and shudder.  Kunta's screams were joined by others' as each movement
up and down, or from side to side, sent the chained men's naked shoulders,
elbows, and buttocks--already festered and bleeding --grinding down even
harder against the rough boards beneath them, grating away still more of the
soft, infected skin until the muscles underneath began rubbing against the
boards.  The hot, lancing pains that shot from head to foot almost blacked
him out, and it was as if from afar that he became dimly aware of the sound
of water pouring down into the hold--and of shrieks amid a bedlam of terror.

ROOTS 197

The water poured more and more rapidly into the hold until Kunta heard the
sound of something heavy, like some great coarse cloth, being dragged over
the deck above.  Moments later, the flood subsided to a trickle--but then
Kunta began to sweat and gag.  The toubob had covered the holes above them to
shut out the water, but in so doing they had cut off all air from the
outside, trapping the heat and stench entirely within the hold.  It was
beyond tolerance, and the men began to choke and vomit, rattling their
shackles frantically and screaming in panic.  Kunta's nose, throat, and then
his lungs felt as if they were being stuffed with blazing cotton.  He was
gasping for more breath to scream with.  Surrounded by the wild frenzy of
ierking chains and suffocating cries, he didn't even know it when both his
bladder and his bowels released themselves.

Sledgehammer waves crashed on the hull, and the timbers behind their heads
strained against the pegs that held them together.  The choked screams of the
men down in the hold grew louder when the great canoe plunged sickeningly
downward, shuddering as tons of ocean poured across her.  Then, miraculously,
she rose again under the torrential rains that beat down on her like
hailstones.  As the next mountainous broadside drove her back down again, and
up again--heeling, rolling, trembling-- the noise in the hold began to abate
as more and more of the chained men fainted and went limp.

When Kunta came to, he was up on deck, amazed to 5nd himself still alive.
The orange lights, moving about, made him think at first they were still
below.  Then he took a deep breath and realized it was fresh air.  He lay
sprawled on his back, which was exploding with pains so terrible that he
couldn't stop crying, even in front of the toubob.  He saw them far overhead,
ghostly in the moonlight, crawling along the cross arms of the tall, thick
poles; they seemed to be trying to unroll the great white cloths.  Then,
turning his pounding head toward a loud noise, Kunta saw still more toubob
stumbling up through the open hatchway, staggering as they dragged the limp,
shackled forms of naked men up onto the deck of the sanoe, dumping them down
near Kunta and others already piled up like so many logs.

Kunta's shackle mate was trembling violently and gag198 ALEX HALEY ging
between moans.  And Kunta's own gagging wouldn't stop as he watched the
white-haired chief toubob and the huge scarred one shouting and cursing at
the others, who were slipping and falling in the vomit underfoot, some of it
their own as they continued to drag up bodies from below.

The great canoe was still pitching heavily, and drenching spray now and then
splashed over the quarterdeck.  The chief toubob had difficulty keeping his
balance, now moving hurriedly, as another toubob followed him with a light.
One or the other of them would turn upward the face of each limp, naked man,
and the light would be held close; the chief toubob would peer closely and
sometimes he would put his fingers on one wrist of that shackled man.
Sometimes, then, cursing bitterly, he would bark an order and the other
toubob would lift and drop the man into the ocean.

Kunta knew these men had died below.  He asked himself how Allah, of whom it
was said that He was in all places at all times, could possibly be here.
Then he thought that even to question such a thing would make him no better
than the pagan shuddering and moaning alongside him.  And he turned his
thoughts to prayer for the souls of the men who had been thrown over the
side, joined already with their ancestors.  He envied them.

CHAPTER 39

By the time the dawn came, the weather had calmed and cleared, but the ship
still rolled in heavy swells.  Some of the men who still lay on their backs,
or on their sides, showed almost no signs of life; others were having
dreadful convulsions.  But along with most of the other men, Kunta had
managed to get himself into a sitting position that relieved somewhat the
horrible pains in his back and buttocks.

He looked dully at the backs of those nearby; all were bleeding afresh
through blood already dried and clotted, and he saw what seemed to be bones
showing at the shoulders and elbows.

With a vacant look in another direction, he could see a woman lying with her
legs wide apart; her private parts, turned in his direction, were smudged
with some strange grayish-yellowish paste, and his nose picked up some
indescribable smell that he knew must come from her.

Now and then one of the men who were still lying down would try to raise
himself up.  Some would only fall back, but among those who succeeded in
sitting up, Kunta noticed, was the Foulah leader.  He was bleeding heavily,
and his expression was of one who wasn't part of what was going on around
him.  Kunta didn't recognize many of the other men he saw.  He guessed that
they must be from the level below his.  These were the men whom the Foulah
had said would avenge the dead from the first level after the toubob were
attacked.  The attack.

Kunta didn't have the strength even to think about it any more.

In some of the faces around him, including that of the man he was shackled
to, Kunta saw that death was etched.  Without knowing why, he was sure they
were going to die.  The face of the Wolof was grayish in color, and each time
he gasped to breathe there was a bubbling sound in his nose.  Even the
Wolof's shoulder and elbow bones, which showed through the raw flesh, had a
grayish look.  Almost as if he knew that Kunta was looking at him, the
Wolof's eyes fluttered open and looked back at Kunta but without a sign of
recognition.  He was a pagan, but .  .  Kunta extended a finger weakly to
touch the Wolof on the arm.

But there was no sign of any awareness of Kunta's gesture, or of how much it
had meant 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 200 ALEX HALEY

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 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 shackle mate 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 waitings of the women of
the Wolof s village, mourning his death.

"Tou- bob 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 202 ALEX HALEY

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 traning 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 fire sticks 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 shackle mate 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 tou- bob 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 aisle
ways 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
204 ALEX HALEY

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 ROOTS 205

he poles, the toubob were pulling their maze of ropes to nove the sheets this
way and that, trying to pick up any ittle breeze.  From the toubob down on
the deck, they 'rew up buckets of water and sloshed them against the real
cloths.  But still the great canoe remained becalmed, nd gently it began to
roll back and forth upon the swells.

All the toubob were on the edges of their tempers now, he white-haired one
even shouting at his knife-scarred nate, who cursed and beat the lesser
toubob more than be- 'ore, and they in turn fought with each other even more
han they had before.

But there were no further heatings >t the shackled people, except on rare
occasions, and they Degan to spend almost all the daylight hours up on deck.
md--to Kunta's amazement--they were given a full pint if water every day.

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

When the stinging yellow powder was sprinkled next igainst Kunta's back, the
chief toubob applied a thick cloth aandage against his right shoulder.  Kunta
knew that meant us bone had begun showing through, as was the case with .  0
many other men already, especially the thinner ones, ivho had the least
muscle over their bones.  The bandaging nade Kunta's shoulder hurt even more
than before.  But ie hadn't been back down in the hold for long before the
lee ping blood made the soaked bandage slip loose.  It didn't natter.
Sometimes his mind would dwell on the horrors he lad been through, or on his
deep loathing of all toubob; sut mostly he just lay in the stinking darkness,
eyes gummy with some yellowish matter, hardly aware that he was still ilive.

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 ireams of working in the fields back in Juffure,
of leafy green farms, of fish leaping from the glassy surface of the aolong,
of fat antelope haunches roasting over glowing 206 ALEX HALEY

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.

Among the men who were still alive, Kunta was one of the last who were able
to climb down unassisted from their shelf and up the steps to the deck.  But
then his wasting legs began trembling and buckling under him and finally he,
too, had to be half carried and half dragged to the deck.  Moaning quietly,
with his head between his knees, rheumy eyes clamped tight, he sat limply
until his turn came to be cleaned.  The toubob now used a large soapy sponge
lest a hard-bristled brush do further damage to the men's gouged and bleeding
backs.  But Kunta was still better off than most, who were able only to lie
on their sides, seeming almost as if they had stopped breathing.

Among them all, only the remaining women and children were reasonably
healthy; they hadn't been shackled and chained down within the darkness,
filth, stench, lice, fleas, rats, and contagion.  The oldest of the surviving
women, one of about Binta's rains--Mbuto was her name, a Man- dinka of the
village of Kerewan--had such stateliness and dignity that even in her
nakedness it was as if she wore a robe.  The toubob didn't even stop her from
moving with comforting words among the shackled men lying sick on the deck,
rubbing fevered chests and foreheads.

"Mother!  Mother!"  Kunta whispered when he felt her soothing hands, and
another man, too weak to speak, just gaped his jaws in an attempt to smile.

Finally, Kunta could no longer even eat without help.  The draining shreds of
muscle in his shoulders and elbows refused to lift his hands enough for him
to claw into the food pan.  Often now the feeding was done with the men up
on deck, and one day Kunta's fingernails were scrabbling to get up over the
edges of the pan when the scar- faced toubob noticed it.  He barked an order
at one of the lesser toubob, who proceeded to force into Kunta's mouth a
hollow tube and pour the gruel through it.  Gagging on the tube, Kunta gulped
and slobbered the food down, then sprawled out on his belly.

The days were growing hotter, and even up on the deck everyone was sweltering
in the still air.  But after a few more days, Kunta began to feel a breath of
cooling breeze.  The big cloths up on the tall poles started to snap again
and soon were billowing in the wind.  The toubob up above were springing
about like monkeys again, and soon the big canoe was cutting through the
water with froth curling at her bow.

The next morning, more toubob than usual came thudding down through the
hatch, and much earlier than ever before.  With great excitement in their
words and movements, they rushed along the aisles, unchaining the men and
hurriedly helping them upward.  Stumbling up through the hatch behind a
number who were ahead of him, Kunta blinked in the early-morning light and
then saw the other toubob and the women and children standing at the rails.
The toubob were all laughing, cheering, and gesturing wildly.  Between the
scabbed backs of the other men, Kunta squinted and then saw .  .  .

Though still blurred in the distance, it was unmistakably some piece of
Allah's earth.  These toubob really did have some place to, put their feet
upon--the land of toubabo doo--which the ancient forefathers said stretched
from the sunrise to the sunset.  Kunta's whole body shook.  The sweat came
popping out and glistened on his forehead.  The voyage was over.  He had
lived through it all.  But his tears soon flooded the shoreline into a gray,
swimming mist, for Kunta knew that whatever came next was going to be yet
worse.

CHAPTER 40

Back down in the darkness of the hold, the chained men were too afraid to
open their mouths.  In the silence, Kunta could hear the ship's timbers
creaking, the muted ssss of the sea against the hull, and the dull dumpings
of toubob feet rushing about on the deck overhead.

Suddenly some Mandinka began shrieking the praises of Allah, and soon all the
others had joined him--until there was a bedlam of praise and praying and of
chains being rattled with all the strength the men could muster.  Amid the
noise, Kunta didn't hear the hatch when it scraped open, but the jarring
shaft of daylight stilled his tongue and jerked his head in that direction.
Blinking his eyes to compress the mucus in them, he watched dimly as the
toubob entered with their lanterns and began to herd them--with unusual
haste--back onto the deck.  Wielding their long- handled brushes once again,
the toubob ignored the men's screams as they scrubbed the encrusted filth
from their festering bodies, and the chief toubob moved down the line
sprinkling his yellow powder.  But this time, where the muscles were rubbed
through deeply, he signaled for his big assistant to apply a black substance
with a wide, flat brush.  When it touched Kunta's raw buttocks, the rocketing
pain smashed him dizzily to the deck.

As he lay with his whole body feeling as if it were on fire, he heard men
howling anew in terror, and snapping his head up, he saw several of the
toubob engaged in what could only be preparing the men to be eaten.  Several
of them, in pairs, were pushing first one chained man and then the next into
a kneeling position where he was held while a third toubob brushed onto his
head a white frothing stuff and then, with a narrow, gleaming thing, raked
the hair off his scalp, leaving blood trickling down across his face.

When they reached Kunta and seized him, he screamed ROOTS 209

nd struggled with all his might until a heavy kick in the ibs left him
gasping for breath while the skin on his head lumbly felt the frothing and
the scraping.  Next the chained Then's bodies were oiled until they shone,
and then they ere made to step into some odd loincloth that had two oles the
legs went through and that also covered their rivate parts.  Finally, under
the close scrutiny of the chief :oubob, they were chained prostrate along the
rails as the iun reached the center of the sky.  Kunta lay numbly, in a kind
of stupor.  It came into his amd that when they finally ate his flesh and
sucked the ones, his spirit would already have escaped to Allah.  He as
praying silently when barking shouts from the chief :oubob and his big helper
made him open his eyes in time o watch the lesser toubob dashing up the tall
poles.  Only his time their grunts, as they strained at the ropes, were lixed
with excited shouts and laughter.  A momeriflater lost of the great white
sheets slackened and crumpled [ownward.

Kunta's nostrils detected a new smell in the air; actually, it was a mingling
of many smells, most of them strange and unknown to him.  Then he thought he
heard new sounds in the distance, from across the water.

Lying on the deck, with this crusty eyes half shut, he couldn't tell from
where.  But soon the sounds grew closer, and as they did, his fearful
whimperings joined those of his mates.  As the sounds got louder and louder,
so did their praying and gibbering--until finally, in the light wind, Kunta
could smell the bodies of many unfamiliar toubob.  Just then the big canoe
bumped hard against something solid and unyielding, and it lurched heavily,
rocking back and forth until, for the first time since they had left Africa
four and a half moons before, it was secured by ropes and fell still.

The chained men sat frozen with terror.  Kunta's arms were locked around his
knees, and his eyes were clamped shut as if he were paralyzed.  For as long
as he could, he held his breath against the sickening waye of smells, but
when something clumped heavily onto the deck, he slit his eyes open and saw
two new toubob stepping down from a wide plank holding a white cloth over
their noses.  Moving briskly, they shook hands with the chief toubob, who was
now all grins, clearly anxious to please them.  Kunta silently begged Allah's
forgiveness and mercy as the toubob began 210 ALEX HALEY

rushing along the rails unchaining the black men and gesturing with shouts
for them to stand up.  When Kunta and his mates clutched at their chains--not
wanting to let go of what had become almost a part of their bodies--the whips
began to crack, first over their heads, then against their backs.  Instantly,
amid screams, they let go of the chains and stumbled to their feet.

Over the side of the big canoe, down on the dock, Kunta could see dozens of
toubob stamping, laughing, pointing in their excitement, with dozens more
running from all directions to join them.  Under the whips, they were driven
in a stumbling single file up over the side and down the sloping plank toward
the waiting mob.  Kunta's knees almost buckled under him as his feet touched
the toubob earth, but other toubob with cocked whips kept them moving closely
alongside the jeering crowd, their massed smell like the blow of a giant fist
in Kunta's face.  When one black man fell, crying out to Allah, his chains
pulled down the men ahead of and behind him.  Whips lashed them all back up
again as the toubob crowd screamed in excitement.

The impulse to dash and escape surged wildly in Kunta, but the whips kept his
chained line moving.  They trudged past toubob riding in extraordinary
two-wheeled and four- wheeled vehicles drawn by huge animals that looked a
little like donkeys; then past a toubob throng milling around in some kind of
marketplace stacked with colorful piles of what seemed to be fruits and
vegetables.  Finely clothed toubob regarded them with expressions of
loathing, while more roughly clad toubob pointed and hooted with enjoyment.
One of the latter, he noticed, was a she toubob, her stringy hair the color
of straw.  After seeing the hungry way the toubob on the great canoe had
lusted after black women, he was amazed to see that the toubob had women of
their own; but looking at this specimen, he could understand why they
preferred Africans.

Kunta darted a glance sideways as they passed a group of toubob screaming
crazily around a flurry of two cocks fighting with each other.  And hardly
had that din faded behind them when they came upon a shouting crowd leaping
this way and that to avoid being bowled over by three toubob boys as they
raced and dove after a squealing, filthy swine that looked shiny with grease.
Kunta couldn't believe his eyes.

As if lightning had struck him, Kunta then glimpsed two black men who were
not from the big canoe--a Man- dinka and a Serere, there was no doubt.  He
jerked his head around to stare as they walked quietly behind a toubob.  He
and his mates weren't alone after all in this terrible land!  And if these
men had been allowed to live, perhaps they too would be spared from the
cooking cauldron.  Kunta wanted to rush over and embrace them; but he saw
their expressionless faces and the fear in their downcast eyes.  And then his
nose picked up their smell; there was something wrong with it.  His mind
reeled; he couldn't comprehend how black men would docilely follow behind a
tou- bob who wasn't watching them or even carrying a weapon, rather than try
to run away--or kill him.

He didn't have time to think about it further, for sudjenly they found
themselves at the open door of a large, square house of baked mud bricks in
oblong shapes with iron bars set into a few open spaces along the sides.  The
chained men were whipped inside the wide door by the toubob guarding it, then
into a large room.  Kunta's feet Felt cool on the floor of hard-packed earth.
In the dim light that came through the two iron-barred openings, his
blinking eyes picked out the forms of five black men huddled long one wall.
They didn't so much as lift their heads as the toubob locked the wrists and
ankles of Kunta and his mates in thick iron cuffs attached to short chains
that were bolted to the walls.

Along with the others, Kunta then huddled down himself, with his chin against
his clasped knees, his mind dazed and reeling with all that he had seen and
heard and smelled since they had gotten off the great canoe.  After a little
while, another black man entered.  Without looking at anyone, he put down
some tins of water and food before each man and quickly left.  Kunta wasn't
hungry, but his throat was so dry that finally he couldn't stop himself from
sipping a small amount of the water; it tasted strange.  Numbly he watched
through one of the iron-barred spaces as the daylight faded into darkness.

The longer they sat there, the deeper Kunta sank into a kind of nameless
terror.  He felt that he would almost have preferred the dark hold of the big
canoe, for at least he had come to know what to expect next there.  He shrank
away whenever a toubob came into the room during the 212 ALEX HALEY

night; their smell was strange and overpowering.  But he was used to the
other smells--sweat, urine, dirty bodies, the stink as some chained man went
through the agony of relieving his bowels amid the others' mingled praying
and cursing and moaning and rattling of their chains.

Suddenly all the noises ceased when a toubob came in carrying a light such as
those that had been used on the big canoe, and behind him, in the soft
yellowish glow, another toubob who was striking with his whip some new black
one who was crying out in what sounded like the toubob tongue.  That one was
soon chained, and the two toubob left.

Kunta and his mates remained still, hearing the newcomer's sounds of
suffering and pain.

The dawn was near, Kunta sensed, when from somewhere there came into his head
as clearly as when he had been in manhood training the high, sharp voice of
the kin- tango: "A man is wise to study and learn from the animals."  It was
so shocking that Kunta sat bolt upright.  Was it finally some message from
Allah?  What could be the meaning of learning from the animals--here, now?
He was himself, if anything, like an animal in a trap.  His mind pictured
animals he had seen in traps.  But sometimes the animals escaped before they
were killed.

Which ones were they?

Finally, the answer came to him.  The animals he had known to escape from
their traps were those that had not gone raging around within the trap until
they were weakened to exhaustion; those that escaped had made themselves wait
quietly, conserving their strength until their captors came, and the animal
seized upon their carelessness to explode its energies in a desperate
attack--or more wise- ly--a flight toward freedom.

Kunta felt intensely more alert.  It was his first positive hope since he had
plotted with the others to kill the toubob on the big canoe.

His mind fastened upon it now: escape.  He must appear to the toubob to be
defeated.  He must not rage or fight yet; he must seem to have given up any
hope.

But even if he managed to escape, where would he run?  Where could he hide in
this strange land?  He knew the country around Juffure as he knew his own
hut, but here he knew nothing whatever.  He didn't even know if toubob had
forests, or if they did, whether he would find in them the signs that a
hunter would use.  Kunta told himself that ROOTS 213

jiese problems would simply have to be met as they came.

As the first streaks of dawn filtered through the barred endows, Kunta
dropped fitfully off to sleep.  But no sooner ad he closed his eyes, it
seemed, than he was awakened by the strange black one bringing containers of
water and food.  Kunta's stomach was clenched with hunger, but the food
smelled sickening, and he turned away.  His tongue felt foul and swollen.  He
tried to swallow the slime that was in his mouth, and his throat hurt with
the effort.

He looked dully about him at his mates from the big canoe; they all seemed
unseeing, unhearing--drawn within themselves.  Kunta turned his head to study
the five who were in the room when they arrived.  They wore ragged toubob
clothing.  Two of them were of the light brown sasso borro skin color that
the elders had said resulted from some toubob taking a black woman.  Then
Kunta looked at the newcomer who had been brought in during the night; he sat
slumped forward, with dried blood caked in his hair and staining the toubob
garment he wore, and one of his arms hung in an awkward way that told Kunta
it had been broken.

More time passed, and finally Kunta fell asleep again-- only to be awakened
once more, this time much later, by the arrival of another meal.  It was some
kind of steaming gruel, and it smelled even worse than the last thing they'd
set in front of him.  He shut his eyes not to see it, but when nearly all of
his mates snatched up the containers and began wolfing the stuff down, he
figured it might not be so bad after all.  If he was ever going to escape
from this place, thought Kunta, he would need strength.  He would force
himself to eat a little bit--but just a little.  Seizing the bowl, he brought
it to his open mouth and gulped and swallowed intil the gruel was gone.

Disgusted with himself, he banged the bowl back down and began to gag, but he
forced it down again.  He had to keep the food inside him if he was going to
live.

From that day on, three times a day, Kunta forced himself to eat the hated
food.  The black one who brought it same once each day with a bucket, hoe,
and shovel to clean up after them.  And once each afternoon, two toubob came
to paint more of the stinging black liquid over the men's worst open sores,
and sprinkled the yellow powder over the smaller sores.  Kunta despised
himself for the weakness 214 ALEX HALEY

that made him jerk and moan from the pain along with the others.

Through the barred window, Kunta counted finally six daylights and five
nights.  The first four nights, he had heard faintly from somewhere, not far
away, the screams of women whom he recognized from the big canoe.  He and his
mates had had to sit there, burning with humiliation at being helpless to
defend their women, let alone themselves.  But it was even worse tonight, for
there were no cries from the women.  What new horror had been visited upon
them?

Nearly every day, one or more of the strange black men in toubob clothes
would be shoved stumbling into the room and chained.  Slumped against the
wall behind them, or curled down on the floor, they always showed signs of
recent heatings, seeming not to know where they were or to care what might
happen to them next.  Then, usually before another day had passed, some
important-acting toubob would enter the room holding a rag over his nose, and
always one of those recent prisoners would start shrieking with terror as
that toubob kicked and shouted at him; then that black one would be taken
away.

Whenever he felt that each bellyful of food had settled, Kunta would try to
make his mind stop thinking in an effort to sleep.  Even a few minutes of
rest would blot out for that long a time this seemingly unending horror,
which for whatever reason was the divine will of Allah.  When Kunta couldn't
sleep, which was most of the time, he would try to force his mind onto things
other than his family or his village, for when he thought of them he would
soon be sobbing.

CHAPTER 41

Just after the seventh morning gruel, two toubob entered the barred room with
an armload of clothes.  One frightened man after another was unchained and
shown how to ROOTS 215

iut them on.  One garment covered the waist and legs, a econd the upper body.
When Kunta put them on, his sores --which had begun to show signs of
healing--immediately started itching.

In a little while, he began to hear the sound of voices iutside; quickly it
grew louder and louder.  Many toubob were gathering--talking, laughing--not
far beyond the >arred window.  Kunta and his mates sat in their toubob lothes
gripped with terror at what was about to happen-- whatever it might be.

When the two toubob returned, they quickly unchained and marched from the
room three of the five black ones who had originally been there.

All of them acted somehow as if this had happened to them enough times before
that it no longer mattered.  Then, within moments, there was a hange in the
toubob sounds from outside; it grew much quieter, and then one toubob began
to shout.  Struggling rainly to understand what was being said, Kunta
listened uncomprehendingly to the strange cries: "Fit as a fiddle!  Plenty of
spirit in this buck!"  And at brief intervals other toubob would interrupt
with loud exclamations: "Three hundred and fifty!"

"Four hundred!"   "Five!"   And the first toubob would shout: "Let's hear
six!   Look at him!   Works like a mule!"

Kunta shuddered with fear, his face running with sweat, breath tight in his
throat.  When four toubob came into the room--the first two plus two
others--Kunta felt paralyzed.  The new pair of toubob stood just within the
doorway holding short clubs in one hand and small metal objects in the other.
The other two moved along Kunta's side of the wall unlocking the iron cuffs.
When anyone cried out or scuffled, he was struck with a short, thick,
leather strap.  Even so, when Kunta felt himself touched, he came up snarling
with rage and terror.  A blow against his head made it seem to sxplode; he
felt only dimly a jerking at the chain on his cuffs.  When his head began to
clear, he was the first of a ehained line of six men stumbling through a wide
doorway out into the daylight.

"Just picked out of the trees!"  The shouting one was standing on a low
wooden platform with hundreds of other toubobs massed before him.  As they
gaped and gestured, Kunta's nose recoiled from the thickness of their stink.
He glimpsed a few black ones among the toubob, but their faces 216 ALEX HALEY

seemed to be seeing nothing.  Two of them were holding in chains two of the
black ones who had just been brought from the barred room.  Now the shouting
one began striding rapidly down the line of Kunta and his companions, his
eyes appraising them from head to foot.  Then he walked back up the line,
thrusting the butt of his whip against their chests and bellies, all the
while making his strange cries: "Bright as monkeys!  Can be trained for
anything!"  Then back at the end of the line, he prodded Kunta roughly toward
the raised platform.

But Kunta couldn't move, except to tremble; it was as if his senses had
deserted him.  The whip's butt seared across the scabbing crust of his
ulcerated buttocks; nearly collapsing under the pain, Kunta stumbled forward,
and the toubob clicked the free end of his chain into an iron thing.

"Top prime--young and supple!"  the toubob shouted.  Kunta was already so
numb with terror that he hardly noticed as the toubob crowd moved in more
closely around him.  Then, with short sticks and whip butts, they were
pushing apart his compressed lips to expose his clenched teeth, and with
their bare hands prodding him all over-- under his armpits, on his back, his
chest, his genitals.  Then some of those who had been inspecting Kunta began
to step back and make strange cries.

"Three hundred dollars!  .  .  .  three fifty!"  The shouting toubob laughed
scornfully.

"Five hundred!  .  .  .  six!"  He sounded angry.

"This is a choice young niggeri Do I hear seven fifty?"

"Seven fifty!"  came a shout.

He repeated the cry several times, then shouted

"Eight!"  until someone in the crowd shouted it back.  And then, before he
had a chance to speak again, someone else shouted,

"Eight fifty!"

No other calls came.  The shouting toubob unlocked Kunta's chain and jerked
him toward a toubob who came stepping forward.  Kunta felt an impulse to make
his move right then, but he knew he would never make it--and any.  way, he
couldn't seem to move his legs.

He saw a black one moving forward behind the toubob to whom the shouter had
handed his chain.  Kunta's eyes entreated this black one, who had distinctly
Wolof features, My Brother, you come from my country.  .  .  .  But the black
one seemed not even to see Kunta as, jerking hard on the chain so that Kunta
came stumbling after him, they began moving through the crowd.  Some of the
younger toubob laughed, jeered, and poked at Kunta with sticks as they
passed, but finally they left them behind and the black one stopped at a
large box sitting up off the ground on four wheels behind one of those
enormous donkey like animals he had seen on his way here from the big canoe.

With an angry sound, the black one grasped Kunta around the hips and boosted
him up over the side and onto the floor of the box, where he crumpled into a
heap, hearing the free end of his chain click again into something beneath a
raised seat at the front end of the box behind the animal.

Two large sacks of what smelled like some kind of grain were piled near where
Kunta lay.  His eyes were shut tight; he felt as if he never wanted to see
anything again-- especially this hated black slatee.

After what seemed a very long time, Kunta's nose told him that the toubob had
returned.  The toubob said something, and then he and the black one climbed
onto the front seat, which squeaked under their weight.  The black one made a
quick sound and flicked a leather thong across the animal's back; instantly
it began pulling the rolling box ahead.

Kunta was so dazed that for a while he didn't even hear the chain locked to
his ankle cuff rattling against the floor of the box.  He had no idea how far
they had traveled when his next clear thought came, and he slit his eyes open
far enough to study the chain at close range.  Yes, it was smaller than the
one that had bound him on the big canoe; if he collected his strength and
sprang, would this one tear loose from the box?

Kunta raised his eyes carefully to see the backs of the pair who sat ahead,
the toubob sitting stiffly at one end of the plank seat, the black one
slouched at the other end.  They both sat staring ahead as if they were
unaware that they were sharing the same seat.  Beneath it--somewhere in
shadow--the chain seemed to be securely fastened; he decided that it was not
yet time to jump.

The odor of the grain sacks alongside him was overpowering, but he could also
smell the toubob and his black driver--and soon he smelled some other black
people, quite nearby.  Without making a sound, Kunta inched his aching 218
ALEX HALEY

body upward against the rough side of the box, but he was afraid to lift his
head over the side, and didn't see them.

As he lay back down, the toubob turned his head around, and their eyes met.
Kunta felt frozen and weak with fear, but the toubob showed no expression and
turned his back again a moment later.  Emboldened by the toubob's
indifference, he sat up again--this time a little farther--when he heard a
singing sound in the distance gradually growing louder.  Not far ahead of
them he saw a toubob seated on the back of another animal like the one
pulling the rolling box.  The toubob held a coiled whip, and a chain from the
animal was linked to the wrist cuffs of about twenty blacks --or most of them
were black, some brown--walking in a line ahead of him.

Kunta blinked and squinted to see better.  Except for two fully clothed
women, they were all men and all bare from the waist up, and they were
singing with deep mournfulness.  He listened very carefully to the words, but
they made 'no sense whatever to him.  As the rolling box slowly passed them,
neither the blacks nor the toubob so much as glanced in their direction,
though they were close enough to touch.

Most of their backs, Kunta saw, were crisscrossed with whip scars, some of
them fresh, and he guessed at some of their tribes: Foulah, Yoruba,
Mauretanian, Wolof, Mandinka.  Of those he was more certain than of the
others, most of whom had had the misfortune to have toubob for fathers.

Beyond the blacks, as far as Kunta's runny eyes would let him see, there
stretched vast fields of crops growing in different colors.

Alongside the road was a field planted with what he recognized as maize.
Just as it was back in Juffure after the harvest, the stalks were brown and
stripped of ears.

Soon afterward, the toubob leaned over, took some bread and some kind of meat
out of a sack beneath the seat, broke off a piece of each, and set them on
the seat between him and the black one, who picked them up with a tip of his
hat and began to eat.  After a few moments the black one turned in his seat,
took a long look at Kunta, who was watching intently, and offered him a chunk
of bread.  He could smell it from where he lay, and the fragrance made his
mouth water, but he turned his head away.  The black one shrugged and popped
it into his own mouth.

Trying not to think about his hunger, Kunta looked out over the side of the
box and saw, at the far end of a field, ROOTS 219

what appeared to be a small cluster of people bent over, seemingly at work.
He thought they must be black, but they were too far away to be sure.  He
sniffed the air, trying to pick up their scent, but couldn't.

As the sun was setting, the box passed another like it, going in the opposite
direction, with a toubob at the reins and three first-kafo black children
riding behind him.  Trudging in chains behind the box were seven adult
blacks, four men wearing ragged clothes and three women in coarse gowns.
Kunta wondered why these were not also singing; then he saw the deep despair
on their faces as they flashed past.  He wondered where toubob was taking
them.

As the dusk deepened, small black bats began squeaking and darting jerkily
here and there, just as they did in Af- rica.  Kunta heard the toubob say
something to the black one, and before much longer the box turned off onto a
small road.  Kunta sat up and soon, in the distance, saw a large white house
through the trees.  His stomach clutched up: What in the name of Allah was to
happen now?  Was it here that he was coming to be eaten?  He slumped back
down in the box and lay as if he were lifeless.

CHAPTER 42

As the box rolled closer and closer to the house, Kunta began to smell--and
then hear--more black people.  Raising himself up on his elbows, he could
just make out three figures in the early dusk as they approached the wagon.
The largest among them was swinging one of those small flames Kunta had
become familiar with when the toubob had come down into the dark hold of the
big canoe; only this one was enclosed in something clear and shiny rather
than in metal.  He had never seen anything like it before; it looked hard,
but you could see through it as if it weren't there.  He didn't have the
chance to study it more closely, though, for the three blacks quickly stepped
to one side as 220 ALEX HALEY

a new toubob strode past them and up to the box, which promptly stopped
beside him.  The two toubob greeted one another, and then one of the blacks
held up the flame so that the toubob in the box could see better as he
climbed down to join the other one.  They clasped hands warmly and then
walked off together toward the house.

Hope surged in Kunta.  Would the black ones free him now?  But he no sooner
thought of it than the flame lit their faces as they stood looking at him
over the sides of the wagon; they were laughing at him.  What kind of blacks
were these who looked down upon their own kind and worked as goats for the
toubob?  Where had they come from?

They looked as Africans looked, but clearly they were not of Africa.

Then the one who had driven the rolling box clucked at the animal and snapped
the thongs and the box moved ahead.  The other blacks walked alongside, still
laughing, until it stopped again.  Climbing down, the driver walked back and
in the light of the flame jerked roughly at Kunta's chain, making threatening
sounds as he unlocked it under the seat, and then gestured for Kunta to get
out.

Kunta fought down the impulse to leap for the throats of the four blacks.
The odds were too high; his chance would come later.  Every muscle in his
body seemed to be screaming as he forced himself onto his knees and began to
crab backward in the box.  When he took too long to suit them, two of the
blacks grabbed Kunta, hoisted him roughly over the side, and half dropped him
onto the ground.  A moment later the driver had clicked the free end of
Kunta's chain around a thick pole.

As he lay there, flooded with pain, fear, and hatred, one of the blacks set
before him two tin containers.  In the light of the flame, Kunta could see
that one was nearly filled with water, and the other held some
strange-looking, strange-smelling food.  Even so, the saliva ran in Kunta's
mouth and down in his throat; but he didn't permit even his eyes to move.
The black ones watching him laughed.

Holding up the flame, the driver went over to the thick pole and lunged
heavily against the locked chain, clearly for Kunta to see that it could not
be broken.  Then he pointed with his foot at the water and the food, making
threatening sounds, and the others laughed again as the four of them walked
away.

ROOTS 221

Kunta lay there on the ground in the darkness, waiting for sleep to claim
them, wherever they had gone.  In his mind, he saw himself rearing up and
surging desperately again and again against the chain, with all of the
strength that he could muster, until it broke and he could escape to .  Just
then he smelted a dog approaching him, and heard it curiously sniffing.
Somehow he sensed that it was not his enemy.  But then, as the dog came
closer, he heard the sound of chewing and the click of teeth on the tin pan.
Though he wouldn't have eaten it himself, Kunta leaped up in rage, snarling
like a leopard.  The dog raced away, and from a short distance started
barking.  Within a moment, a door had squeaked open nearby and someone was
running toward him with a flame.  It was the driver, and Kunta sat staring
with cold fury as the driver anxiously examined the chain around the base of
the post, and next where the chain was attached to the iron cuff around
Kunta's ankle.  In the dim yellow light, Kunta saw the driver's expression of
satisfaction at the empty food plate.

With a hoarse grunt, he walked back to his hut, leaving Kunta in the darkness
wishing that he could fasten his hands around the throat of the dog.

After a while, Kunta groped around for the container of water and drank some
of the contents, but it didn't make him feel any better; in fact, the
strength felt drained from his body; it seemed as if he were only a shell.
Abandoning the idea of breaking the chain for now, anyway he felt as if Allah
had turned His back but why?  What thing so terrible had he ever done?  He
tried to review everything of any significance that he had ever done right or
wrong up to the morning when he was cutting a piece of wood to make himself a
drum and then, too late, heard a twig snap.  It seemed to him that every time
in his life when he had been punished, it had been because of carelessness
and inattention.

Kunta lay listening to the crickets, the whir of night birds, and the barking
of distant dogs and once to the sudden squeak of a mouse, then the crunch of
its bones breaking in the mouth of an animal that had killed it Every now and
then he would tense up with the urge to run, but he knew that even if he were
able to rip loose his chain, its rattling would swiftly awaken someone in the
huts nearby.

222 ALEX HALEY

He lay this way--with no thought of sleeping--until the first streaks of
dawn.  Struggling as well as his aching limbs would let him into a kneeling
position, he began his suba prayer.  As he was pressing his forehead against
the earth, however, he lost his balance and almost fell over on his side; it
made him furious to realize how weak he had become.

As the eastern sky slowly brightened, Kunta reached again for the water
container and drank what was left.  Hardly had he finished it when
approaching footsteps alerted him to the return of the four black men.
Hurriedly they hoisted Kunta back into the rolling box, which was driven to
the large white house, where the toubob was waiting to get onto the seat
again.  And before he knew it they were back on the main road, headed in the
same direction as before.

For a time in the clearing day, Kunta lay staring vacantly at the chain
rattling across the floor of the box to where it was locked under the seat.
Then, for a while, he let his eyes bore with hatred at the backs of the
toubob and the black ahead.  He wished he could kill them.  He made himself
remember that if he was to survive, having survived so much until now, he
must keep his senses collected, he must keep control of himself, he must make
himself wait, he must not expend his energy until he knew that it was the
right time.

It was around midmorning when Kunta heard what he knew instantly was a
blacksmith pounding on metal; lifting his head, Kunta strained his eyes to
see and finally located the sound somewhere beyond a thick growth of trees
they were passing.  He saw that much forest had been freshly cut, and stumps
grubbed up, and in some places, as the rolling box lurched along, Kunta saw
and smelled grayish smoke rising from where dry brush was being burned.  He
wondered if the toubob were thus fertilizing the earth for the next season's
crops, as it was done in Juffure.

Next, in the distance ahead, he saw a small square hut beside the road.  It
seemed to be made of logs, and in a cleared plot of earth before it, a toubob
man was plodding behind a brown bullock.  The toubob's hands were pressing
down hard against the curving handles of some large thing pulled by the
bullock that was tearing through the earth.  As they came nearer, Kunta saw
two more toubob--pale ROOTS 223

and thin--squatting on their haunches under a tree, three equally skinny
swine were rooting around them, and some chickens were pecking for food.  In
the hut's doorway stood a she toubob with red hair.

Then, dashing past her, came three small toubob shouting and waving toward
the rolling box.  Catching sight of Kunta, they shrieked with laughter and
pointed; he stared at them as if they were hyena cubs.

They ran alongside the wagon for a good way before turning back, and Kunta
lay realizing that he had seen with his own eyes an actual family of toubob.

Twice more, far from the road, Kunta saw large white toubob houses similar to
the one where the wagon had stopped the night before.  Each was the height of
two houses, as if one were on top of another; each had in front of it a row
of three or four huge white poles as big around --and almost as tall--as
trees; nearby each was a group of small, dark huts where Kunta guessed the
blacks lived; and surrounding each was a vastness of cotton fields, all of
them recently harvested, necked here and there with a tuft of white.

Somewhere between these two great houses, the rolling box overtook a strange
pair of people walking along the side of the road.  At first Kunta thought
they were black, but as the wagon came closer he saw that their skin was
reddish-brown, and they had long black hair tied to hang down their backs
like a rope, and they walked quickly, lightly in shoes and loincloths that
seemed to be made of hide, and they carried, bows and arrows.  They weren't
tou- bob, yet they weren't of Africa either; they even smelted different.
What sort of people were they?  Neither one seemed to notice the rolling box
as it went by, enveloping them in dust As the sun began to set, Kunta turned
his face toward the east, and by the time he had finished his silent evening
prayer to Allah, dusk was gathering.  He was getting so weak, after two days
without accepting any of the food he had been offered, that he had to lie
down limply in the bottom of the rolling box, hardly caring any more about
what was happening around him.

But Kunta managed to raise himself up again and look over the side when the
box stopped a little later.  Climbing down, the driver hung one of those
lights against the side of the box, got back in his seat, and resumed the
trip.  After 224 ALEX HALEY

a long while the toubob spoke briefly, and the black one replied; it was the
first time since they had started out that day that the two of them had
exchanged a sound.  Again the box stopped, and the driver got out and tossed
some kind of coverlet to Kunta, who ignored it.

Climbing back up onto the seat, the driver and the toubob pulled coverlets
over themselves and set out once again.

Though he was soon shivering, Kunta refused to reach for the coverlet and
draw it over him, not wishing to give them that satisfaction.

They offer me cover, he thought, yet they keep me in chains; and my own
people not only stand by and let it happen but actually do the toubob's dirty
business for him.  Kunta knew only that he must escape from this dreadful
place--or die in the attempt.  He dared not dream that he would ever see
Juffure again, but if he did, he vowed that all of The Gambia would learn
what the land of toubob was really like.

Kunta was nearly numb with cold when the rolling box turned suddenly off the
main road and onto a bumpier and smaller one.  Again he forced his aching
body upward far enough to squint into the darkness--and there in the distance
he saw the ghostly whiteness of another of the big houses.  As on the
previous night, the fear of what would befall him now coursed through Kunta
as they pulled up in front of the house--but he couldn't even smell any signs
of the toubob or black ones he expected to greet them.

When the box finally stopped, the toubob on the seat ahead of him dropped to
the ground with a grunt, bent and squatted down several times to un cramp his
muscles, then spoke briefly to the driver with a gesture back at Kunta, and
then walked away toward the big house.

Still no other blacks had appeared, and as the rolling box creaked on ahead
toward the nearby huts, Kunta lay in the back feigning indifference.  But he
was tense in every fiber, his pains forgotten.

His nostrils detected the smell of other blacks nearby; yet no one came
outside.  His hopes rose further.  Stopping the box near the huts, the black
one climbed heavily and clumsily to the ground and trudged over to the
nearest hut, the flame bobbing in his hand.  As he pushed the door open,
Kunta watched and waited, ready to spring, for him to go inside; but instead
he turned and came back to the box.  Putting his hands under the seat, he un
clicked Kunta's chain and held the loose end in one ROOTS 225

hand as he walked around to the back of the box.  Yet something made Kunta
still hold back.  The black one jerked the chain sharply and barked something
roughly to Kunta.  As the black one stood watching carefully, Kunta struggled
onto all fours--trying to look even weaker than he felt--and began crawling
backward as slowly and clumsily as possible.  As he had hoped, the black one
lost patience, leaned close, and with one powerful arm, levered Kunta up and
over the end of the wagon, and his upraised knee helped to break Kunta's fall
to the ground.

At that instant, Kunta exploded upward--his hands clamping around the
driver's big throat like the bone- cracking jaws of a hyena.  The flame
dropped to the ground as the black one lurched backward with a hoarse cry;
then he came storming back upright with his big hands pounding, tearing, and
clawing at Kunta's face and forearms.  But somehow Kunta found the strength
to grip the throat even tighter as he twisted his body desperately to avoid
the driver's club like blows with thrashing fists, feet, and knees.  Kunta's
grip would not be broken until the black one finally stumbled backward and
then down, with a deep gurgling sound, and then went limp.

Springing up, fearing above all another barking dog, Kunta slipped away like
a shadow from the fallen driver and the overturned flame.

He ran bent low, legs crashing through frosted stalks of cotton.  His
muscles, so long unused, screamed with pain, but the cold, rushing air felt
good upon his skin, and he had to stop himself from whooping out loud with
the pleasure of feeling so wildly free.

CHAPTER 43

The thorny brambles and vines of the brush at the edge of the forest seemed
to reach out and tear at Kunta's legs.  Ripping them aside with his hands, he
plunged on--stumbling and falling, picking himself up again--deeper and 226
ALEX HALEY

deeper into the forest.  Or so he thought, until the trees began to thin and
he burst suddenly into more low brush.  Ahead of him was another wide cotton
field and beyond it yet another big white house with small dark huts beside
it.  With shock and panic, Kunta sprang back into the wood, realizing that
all he had done was cross a narrow stretch of forest that separated two great
toubob farms.  Crouching behind a tree, he listened to the pounding of his
heart and head, and began to feel a stinging in his hands, arms, and feet.
Glancing down in the bright moonlight, he saw that they were cut and bleeding
from the thorns.  But what alarmed him more was that the moon was already
down in the sky; it would soon be dawn.  He knew that whatever he was going
to do, he had little time to decide.

Stumbling back into motion, Kunta knew after only a little while that his
muscles would not carry him much farther.  He must retreat into the thickest
part of the forest he could find and hide there.  So he went clawing his way
back, sometimes on all fours, his feet and arms and legs tangling in the
vines, until at last he found himself in a dense grove of trees.  Though his
lungs were threatening to burst, Kunta considered climbing one of them, but
the softness of the thick carpeting of leaves under his feet told him that
many of the trees' leaves had fallen off, which could make him easily seen,
so that his best concealment would be on the ground.

Crawling again, he settled finally--just as the sky began to lighten--in a
place of deep undergrowth.  Except for the wheeze of his own breath,
everything was very still, and it reminded him of his long, lonely vigils
guarding the groundnut fields with his faithful wuolo dog.  It was just then
that he heard in the distance the deep baying of a dog.  Perhaps he had heard
it only in his mind, he thought, snapping to alertness and straining his
ears.  But it came again-- only now there were two of them.  He didn't have
much time.

Kneeling toward the east, he prayed to Allah for deliverance, and just as he
finished, the deep-throated baying came again, closer this time.  Kunta
decided it was best to stay hidden where he was, but when he heard the
howling once again--closer still--just a few minutes later, it seemed that
they knew exactly where he was and his limbs wouldn't let him remain there a
moment longer.  Into the underbrush he crawled again, hunting for a deeper,
even more secreted place.  Every inch among the brambles raking at his hands
and knees was torture, but with every cry from the dogs he scrambled faster
and faster.  Yet the barking grew ever louder and closer, and Kunta was sure
that he could hear now the shouting of men behind the dogs.

He wasn't moving fast enough; springing up, he began to run--stumbling
through the brambles--as quickly and quietly as his exhaustion would permit.
Almost immediately he heard an explosion; the shock buckled his knees and
sent him sprawling into a tangle of briars.

The dogs were snarling at the very edge of the thicket now.  Quivering in
terror, Kunta could even smell them.  A moment later they were thrashing
through the underbrush straight for him.  Kunta made it up onto his knees
just as the two dogs came crashing through the brush and leaped on him,
yowling and slavering and snapping as they knocked him over, then sprang
backward to lunge at him again.

Snarling himself, Kunta fought wildly to fend them off, using his hands like
claws while he tried to crab backward away from them.  Then be heard the men
shouting from the edge of the brush, and again there was an explosion, this
time much louder.  As the dogs relented somewhat in their attack, Kunta heard
the men cursing and slashing through the brush with knives.

Behind the growling dogs, he saw first the black one he had choked.

He held a huge knife in one hand, a short club and a rope in the other, and
he looked murderous.  Kunta lay bleeding on his back, jaws clenched to keep
from screaming, expecting to be chopped into bits.

Then Kunta saw the toubob who had brought him here appear behind the black
one, his face reddish and sweating.  Kunta waited for the flash and the
explosion that he had learned on the big canoe could come from the fire stick
that a second toubob--one he hadn't seen before--pointed at him now.  But it
was the black one who now rushed forward furiously, raising his club, when
the chief toubob shouted.

The black one halted, and the toubob shouted at the dogs, who drew farther
back.  Then the toubob said something to the black one, who now moved forward
uncoiling his rope.  A heavy blow to Kunta's head sent him into a merciful
numbing shock.  He was dimly aware of being 228 ALEX HALEY

trussed up so tightly that the rope bit into his already bleeding skin; then
of being half lifted from among the brambles and made to walk.  Whenever he
lost his balance and fell down, a whip seared across his back.  When they
finally reached the forest's edge, Kunta saw three of the donkey- like
animals tied near several trees.

As they approached the animals, he tried to bolt away again, but a vicious
yank on the free end of the rope sent him tumbling down--and earned him a
kick in the ribs.  Now the second toubob, holding the rope, moved ahead of
Kunta, jerking him stumbling toward a tree near where the animals were tied.
The rope's free end was thrown over a lower limb, and the black one hauled on
it until Kunta's feet barely touched the ground.

The chief toubob's whistling whip began to lash against Kunta's back.

He writhed under the pain, refusing to make any sound, but each blow felt as
if it had torn him in half.  Finally he began screaming, but the lashing went
on.

Kunta was hardly conscious when at last the whip stopped falling.  He sensed
vaguely that he was being lowered and crumpling onto the ground; then that he
was being lifted and draped across the back of one of the animals; then he
was aware of movement.

The next thing Kunta knew--he had no idea how much time had passed--he was
lying spreadeagled on his back in some kind of hut.  A chain, he noticed, was
attached to an iron cuff on each wrist and ankle, and the four chains were
fixed to the base of four poles at the corners of the hut.  Even the
slightest movement brought such excruciating pain that for a long while he
lay completely still, his face wet with sweat and his breath coming in quick,
shallow gasps.

Without moving, he could see that a small, square, open space above him was
admitting daylight.  Out of the corner Of his eye, he could see a recessed
place in the wall, and within it a mostly burned log and some ashes.  On the
other side of the hut, he saw a wide, flat, lumpy thing of cloth on the
floor, with corn shucks showing through its holes; he guessed it might be
used as a bed.

As dusk showed through the open space above him, Kunta heard--from very
nearby--the blowing of a strange- sounding horn.  And before much more time
had passed, he heard the voices of what he smelled were many black ROOTS 229

people passing near where he was.  Then he smelled food cooking.  As his
spasms of hunger mingled with the pounding in his head and the stabbing pains
in his back and his thorn-cut arms and legs, he berated himself for not
having waited for a better time to escape, as a trapped animal would have
done.  He should have first observed and learned more of this strange place
and its pagan people.

Kunta's eyes were closed when the hut's door squeaked open; he could smell
the black one he had choked, who had helped to catch him.  He lay still and
pretended to be asleep--until a vicious kick in the ribs shot his eyes wide
open.  With a curse, the black one set something down just in front of
Kunta's face, dropped a covering over his body, and went back out, slamming
the door behind him.

The smell of the food before him hurt Kunta's stomach almost as much as the
pain in his back.  Finally, he opened his eyes.  There was some kind of mush
and some kind of meat piled upon a flat, round tin, and a squat, round gourd
of water beside it.  His spreadeagled wrists made it impossible to pick them
up, but both were close enough for him to reach with his mouth.  Just as he
was about to take a bite, Kunta smelled that the meat was the filthy swine,
and the bile from his stomach came spewing up and onto the tin plate.

Through the night, he lay drifting into and out of sleep and wondering about
these black ones who looked like Africans but ate pig.  It meant that they
were all strangers-- or traitors--to Allah.

Silently he begged Allah's forgiveness in advance if his lips would ever
touch any swine without his realizing it, or even if he ever ate from any
plate that any swine meat had ever been on.

Soon after the dawn showed again through the square opening, Kunta heard the
strange horn blow once more; then came the smell of food cooking, and the
voices of the black ones hurrying back and forth.  Then the man he despised
returned, bringing new food and water.  But when he saw that Kunta had
vomited over the untouched plate that was already there, he bent down with a
string of angry curses and rubbed the contents into Kunta's face.  Then he
set the new food and water before him, and left.

Kunta told himself that he would choke the food down later; he was too sick
even to think about it now.  After a little while, he heard the door open
again; this time he 230 ALEX HALEY

smelted the stench of toubob.  Kunta kept his eyes clamped shut, but when the
toubob muttered angrily, he feared another kick and opened them.  He found
himself staring up at the hated face of the toubob who had brought him here;
it was flushed with rage.  The toubob made cursing sounds and told him with
threatening gestures that if he didn't eat the food, he would get more
beating.  Then the toubob left.

Kunta managed to move his left hand far enough for the fingers to scratch up
a small mound of the hard dirt where the toubob's foot had been.  Pulling the
dirt closer, Kunta pressed his eyes shut and appealed to the spirits of evil
to curse forever the womb of the toubob and his family.

CHAPTER 44

Kunta had counted four days and three nights in the hut.  And each night he
had lain listening to the singing from the huts nearby--and feeling more
African than he ever felt in his own village.  What kind of black people they
must be, he thought, to spend their time singing here in the land of the
toubob.  He wondered how many of these strange black ones there were in all
of toubob land, those who didn't seem to know or care who or what they were.

Kunta felt a special closeness to the sun each time it rose.  He recalled
what an old man who had been an alcala had said down in the darkness of the
big canoe: "Each day's new sun will remind us that it rose in our Africa,
which is the navel of the earth."

Although he was spreadeagled by four chains, he had practiced until he had
learned a way to inch forward or backward on his back and buttocks to study
more closely the small but thick iron rings, like bracelets, that fastened
the chains to the four poles at the hut's corners.  The poles were about the
size of his lower leg, and he knew there ROOTS 231

was no hope of his ever breaking one, or of pulling one from the hard-packed
earth floor, for the upper ends went up through the hut's roof.  With his
eyes and then his fingers, Kunta carefully examined the small holes in the
thick metal rings; he had seen his captors insert a narrow metal thing into
these holes and turn them, making a click sound.  When he shook one of the
rings, it made the chain rattle--loud enough for someone to hear--so he gave
that up.  He tried putting one of the rings in his mouth and biting it as
hard as he could; finally one of his teeth cracked, lancing pains through his
head.

Seeking some dirt preferable to that of the floor in order to make a fetish
to the spirits, Kunta scraped out with his fingers a piece of the reddish,
hardened mud chinking between the logs.  Seeing short, black bristles within
the mud, he inspected one curiously; when he realized that it was a hair from
the filthy swine, he flung it away--along with the dirt--and wiped off the
hand that had held it.

On the fifth morning, the black one entered shortly after the wake-up horn
had blown, and Kunta tautened when he saw that along with his usual short,
flat club, the man carried two thick iron cuffs.  Bending down, he locked
each of Kunta's ankles within the cuffs, which were connected by a heavy
chain.  Only then did he unlock the four chains, one by one, that had kept
Klinta spreadeagled.  Free to move at last, Kunta couldn't stop himself from
springing upward--only to be struck down by the black one's waiting fist.  As
Kunta began pushing himself back upward, a booted foot dug viciously into his
ribs.  Stumbling upward once again in agony and rage, he was knocked down
even harder.  He hadn't realized how much the days of lying on his back had
sapped his strength, and he lay now fighting for breath as the black one
stood over him with an expression that told Kunta he would keep knocking him
down until he learned who was the master.

Now the black one gestured roughly for Kunta to get up.  When he couldn't
raise his body even onto his hands and knees, the black one jerked him to his
feet with a curse and shoved him forward, the ankle cuffs forcing Kunta to
hobble awkwardly.

The full force of daylight in the doorway blinded him at first, but after a
moment he began to make out a line of black people walking hastily nearby in
single file, followed 232 ALEX HALEY

closely by a toubob riding a "boss," as he had heard that strange animal
called.  Kunta knew from his smell that he was the one who had held the rope
after Kunta had been trapped by the dogs.  There were about ten or twelve
blacks --the women with red or white rags tied on their heads, most of the
men and children wearing ragged straw hats; but a few were bareheaded, and as
far as he could see, none of them wore a single sap hie charm around their
necks or arms.  But some of the men carried what seemed to be long, stout
knives, and the line seemed to be heading in the direction of the great
fields.  He thought that it must have been they whom he had heard at night
doing all that singing.  He felt nothing but contempt for them.  Turning his
blinking gaze, Kunta counted the huts they had come from: There were ten,
including his own--all very small, like his, and they didn't have the stout
look of the mud huts of his village, with their roofs of sweet-smelling
thatch.  They were arranged in rows of five each--positioned, Kunta noticed,
so that whatever went on among the blacks living there could be seen from the
big white house.

Abruptly the black one began jabbing at Kunta's chest with his finger, then
exclaiming,

"You--you Toby!"  Kunta didn't understand, and his face showed it, so the
black one kept jabbing him and saying the same thing over and over.  Slowly
it dawned on Kunta that the black one was attempting to make him understand
something he was saying in the strange toubob tongue.

When Kunta continued to stare at him dumbly, the black one began jabbing at
his own chest.

"Me Samson!"  he exclaimed.

"Samson!"  He moved his jabbing finger again to Kunta.

"You To-by!  Toby.  Massa say you name Toby!"

When what he meant began to sink in, it took all of Kunta's self-control to
grip his flooding rage without any facial sign of the slightest
understanding.  He wanted to shout

"I am Kunta Kinte, first son of Omoro, who is the son of the holy man Kairaba
Kunta Kinte!"

Losing patience with Kunta's apparent stupidity, the black one cursed,
shrugged his shoulders, and led him hobbling into another hut, where he
gestured for Kunta to wash himself in a large, wide tin tub that held some
water.  The black one threw into the water a rag and a brown chunk of what
Kunta's nose told him was some ROOTS 233 thing like the soap that Juffure
women made of hot melted fat mixed with the lye of water dripped through wood
ashes.  The black one watched, scowling, as Kunta took advantage of the
opportunity to wash himself.  When he was through, the black one tossed to
him some different toubob garments to cover his chest and legs, then a frayed
hat of yellowish straw such as the others wore.  How would these pagans fare
under the heat of Africa's sun, Kunta wondered.

The black one led him next to still another hut.  Inside, an old woman
irritably banged down before Kunta a flat tin of food.  He gulped down the
thick gruel, and a bread resembling munko cake, and washed it down with some
hot brown beefy-tasting broth from a gourd cup.  Next they went to a narrow,
cramped hut whose smell told of its use in advance.  Pretending to pull down
his lower garment, the black one hunched over a large hole cut into a plank
seat and grunted heavily as if he were relieving himself.  A small pile of
corncobs lay in one corner, and Kunta didn't know what to make of them.  But
he guessed that the black one's purpose was to demonstrate the toubob's
ways--of which he wished to learn all that he could, the better to escape.

As the black one led him past the next few huts, they went by an old man
seated in some strange chair; it was rocking slowly back and forth as he wove
dried cornshueks into what Kunta guessed was a broom.  Without looking up,
the old man cast toward him a not unkindly glance, but Kunta ignored it
coldly.

Picking up one of the long, stout knives that Kunta had seen the others
carrying, the black one motioned with his head toward the distant field,
grunting and gesturing for Kunta to follow him.

Hobbling along in the iron cuffs-- which were chafing his ankles--Kunta could
see in the field ahead that the females and the younger blacks were bending
up and down, gathering and piling dried cornstalks behind the older men in
front of them, who slashed down the stalks with swishing blows of their long
knives.

Most of the men's backs were bared and glistening with sweat.  His eyes
searched for any of the branding-iron marks such as his back bore--but he saw
only the "" that had been left by whips.  The toubob r(v<' -auaci.  .

234 ALEX HALEY

"boss," exchanged words briefly with the black one then fixed a threatening
stare on Kunta as the black one gest urea for his attention.  Slashing down
about a dozen cornstalks, the bIacK one turned, bent, and made motions for
Kunta to pick them up and pile them as the others were doing.  The touboo
jerked his horse closer alongside Kunta, his whip cocked and the scowl on his
face making his intent clear if Kunta should refuse to obey.  Enraged at his
helplessness, Kunta bent down and picked up two of the cornstalks.
Hesitating, he heard the black one's knife swishing ahead.  Bending over
again, he picked up two more cornstalks, and two more.  He could feel the
stares of other black ones upon him from adjacent rows, and could see the
feet of the toubob's horse.  He could feel the relief of the other blacks,
and at last the horse's feet moved away.

Without raising his head, Kunta saw that the toubob rode this way or that to
wherever he saw someone who wasn't working swiftly enough to please him, and
then with an angry shout, his lash would go cracking down across a back.

Off in the distance, Kunta saw that there was a road.  On it, a few times
during the hot afternoon, through the sweat pouring down his forehead and
stinging in his eyes, he caught glances of a lone rider on a horse, and twice
he saw a wagon being drawn.  Turning his head the other way, he could see the
edge of the forest into which he had tried to escape.  And from where he was
piling the cornstalks now, he could see the forest's narrowness, which had
helped him to get caught, because he had not realized that narrowness before.
After a while, Kunta had to stop glancing in that direction, for the urge to
spring up and bound toward those trees was almost irresistible.  Each step he
took, in any case, reminded him that he would never get five steps across the
field wearing those iron hobbles.  As he worked through the afternoon, Kunta
decided that before he tried his next escape, he must find some kind of
weapon to fight dogs and men with.

No servant of Allah should ever fail to fight if he is attacked, he reminded
himself.  If it was dogs or men, wounded buffalo or hungry lions, no son of .
^Omoro Kinte would ever entertain the thought of giving up.  "'^i^t was
after sundown when the horn sounded once again ROOTS 235

--this time in the distance.  As Kunta watched the other blacks hurrying into
a line, he wished he could stop thinking of them as belonging to the tribes
they resembled, for they were but unworthy pagans not fit to mingle with
those who had come with him on the big canoe.

But how stupid the toubob must be to have those of Fulani blood--even such
poor specimens as these--picking up cornstalks instead of tending cattle;
anyone knew that the Fulani were born to tend cattle, that indeed Fulani and
cattle talked together.  This thought was interrupted as the toubob on his
"hoss" cracked the whip to direct Kunta to the end of the line.  As he
obeyed, the squat, heavy woman at the end of the line took several quick
forward steps, trying to get as far as possible from Kunta.  He felt like
spitting on her.

As they began to march--each hobbling step chafing at his ankles, which had
been rubbed raw and were beginning to seep blood--Kunta heard some hounds
barking far away.  He shivered, remembering those that had tracked him and
attacked him.  Then his mind flashed a memory of bow his own wuolo had died
fighting the men who had captured him in Africa.

Back in his hut, Kunta kneeled and touched his forehead to the hard dirt
floor in the direction in which he knew the next sun would rise.

He prayed for a long time to make up for the two prayers he had been unable
to perform out in the field, which would certainly have been interrupted by a
lash across his back from the toubob who rode the "boss."

After finishing his prayer, Kunta sat bolt upright and spoke softly for a
while in the secret sira kango tongue, asking his ancestors to help him
endure^ Then--pressing between his fingers a pair of cock's feathers he had
managed to pick up without being noticed while "Samson" had led him around
that morning--he wondered when he would get the chance to steal a fresh egg.
With the feathers of the cock and some finely crushed fresh eggshell, he
would be able to prepare a powerful fetish to the spirits, whom he would ask
to bless the dust where his last footsteps had touched in his village.  If
that dust was blessed, his footprints would one day reappear in Juffure,
where ev -' man's footprints were recognizable to his nei"1-' -nadder of 11"
238 ALEX HALEY they would rejoice at this sign that Kunta Kinte was still
alive and that he would return safely to his village.  Someday.

For the thousandth time, he relived the nightmare of his capture.  If only
the cracking twig that alerted him had snapped a single footstep earlier, he
could have leaped and snatched up his spear.  Tears of rage came welling up
into Kunta's eyes.  It seemed to him that for moons without end, all that he
had known was being tracked and attacked and captured and chained.

No!  He would not allow himself to act this way.  After all, he was a man
now, seventeen rains of age, too old to weep and wallow in self-pity.  Wiping
away the tears, he crawled onto his thin, lumpy mattress of dried corn shucks
and tried to go to sleep--but all he could think of was the name

"To-by" he had been given, and rage rose in him once more.  Furiously, he
kicked his legs in frustration-- but the movement only gouged the iron cuffs
deeper into his ankles, which made him cry again.

Would he ever grow up to be a man like Omoro?  He wondered if his father
still thought of him; and if his mother had given to Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi
the love that had been taken away from her when he was stolen.  He thought of
all of Juffure, and of how he had never realized more than now how very
deeply he loved his village.  As it had often been on the big canoe, Kunta
lay for half the night with scenes of Juffure flashing through his mind,
until he made himself shut his eyes and finally sleep came.

CHAPTER 45

With each passing day, the hobbles on his ankles made it more and more
difficult and painful for Kunta to get around.  But he kept on telling
himself that the chances of gaining freedom depended upon continuing to force
hhaself to do whatever was wanted of him, all behind a mask of complete
blankness and stupidity.  As he did so, his eyes, ears, and nose would miss
nothing--no weapon he might use, no toubob weakness he might exploit--until
finally his captors were lulled into removing the cuffs.  Then he would run
away again.

Soon after the conch horn blew each morning, Kunta would limp outside to
watch as the strange black ones emerged from their huts, the sleepiness still
in their faces, and splashed themselves with water from buckets drawn up in
the well nearby.  Missing the sound of the village women's pestles thumping
the couscous for their families' morning meals, he would enter the hut of the
old cooking woman and bolt down whatever she gave him--except for any filthy
pork.

As he ate each morning, his eyes would search the hut for a possible weapon
he might take without being detected.  But apart from the black utensils that
hung on hooks above her fireplace, there were only the round, flat tin things
upon which she gave him what he ate with his fingers.  He had seen her eating
with a slender metal object that had three or four closely spaced points to
stab the food with.  He wondered what it was, and thought that although it
was small it might be useful--if he could ever catch her eyes averted for a
moment when the shiny object was within reach.

One morning, as he was eating his gruel, watching as the cooking woman cut a
piece of meat with a knife he hadn't seen before and plotting what he would
do with it if it were in his hands instead of hers, he heard a piercing
squeal of agony from outside the hut.  It was so close to his thoughts that
he nearly jumped from his seat.

Hobbling outside, he found the others already lined up for work-many of them
still chewing the last bites of "breakfast," lest they get a lashing for
being late--while there on the ground beside them lay a swine thrashing about
with blood pulsing from its cut throat as two black men lifted it into a
steaming pot of water, then withdrew it and scraped off the hair.  The
swine's skin was the color of a toubob, he noticed, as they suspended it by
the heels, slit open its belly, and pulled out its insides.  Kunta's nose
stifled at the spreading smell of guts, and as he marched off with the others
toward the fields, he had to suppress a shudder of revulsion 238 ALEX HALEY

at the thought of having to live among these pagan eaters of such a filthy
animal.

There was frost on the cornstalks every morning now, and a haziness hung low
over the fields until the heat of the climbing sun would burn it away.
Allah's powers never ceased to amaze Kunta--that even in a place as distant
as this toubob land was across the big water, Allah's sun and moon still rose
and crossed the sky; though the sun was not so hot nor the moon so beautiful
as in Juffure.  It was only the people in this accursed place who seemed not
of Allah's doing.

The toubob were inhuman, and as for the blacks, it was simply senseless to
try to understand them.

When the sun reached the middle of the sky, again the conch horn blew,
signaling another lineup for the arrival of a wooden sled pulled by an animal
similar to a horse, but more resembling a huge donkey, which Kunta had
overheard being spoken of as a "mule."

Walking beside the sled was the old cooking woman, who proceeded to pass out
flat cakes of bread and a gourdful of some kind of stew to each person in the
line, who either stood or sat and gulped it down, then drank some water
dipped from a barrel that was also on the sled.

Every day, Kunta warily smelled the stew before tasting it, to make sure he
didn't put any swine meat into his mouth, but it usually contained only
vegetables and no meat that he could see or smell at all.  He felt better
about eating the bread, for he had seen some of the black women making corn
into meal by beating it in a mortar with a pestle of stone, about as it was
done in Africa, although Binta's pestle was made of wood.

Some days they served foods Kunta knew of from his home, such as ground nuts
and kanjo--which was called "okra" --and so-so, which was called "black-eyed
peas."  And he saw how much these black ones loved the large fruit that he
heard here being called "watermelon."  But he saw that Allah appeared to have
denied these people the mangoes, the hearts of palm, the breadfruits, and so
many of the other delicacies that grew almost anywhere one cared to look on
the vines and trees and bushes in Africa.

Every now and then the toubob who had brought Kunta to this place--the one
they called "massa" --rode out into the fields when they were working.  In
his whitish straw hat, as he spoke to the toubob field boss, he gestured with
a long, slender, plaited leather switch, and Kunta noticed ROOTS 239

that the toubob "oberseer" grinned and shuffled almost as much as the blacks
whenever he was around.

Many such strange things happened each day, and Kunta would sit thinking
about them back in his hut while he waited to find sleep.

These black ones seemed to have no concern in their lives beyond pleasing the
toubob with his lashing whip.  It sickened him to think how these black ones
jumped about their work whenever they saw a toubob, and how, if that toubob
spoke a word to them, they rushed to do whatever he told them to.  Kunta
couldn't fathom what had happened to so destroy their minds that they acted
like goats and monkeys.

Perhaps it was because they had been born in this place rather than in
Africa, because the only homes they had ever known were the toubob's huts of
logs glued together with mud and swine bristles.  These black ones had never
known what it meant to sweat under the sun not for toubob masters but for
themselves and their own people.

But no matter how long he stayed among them, Kunta vowed never to become like
them, and each night his mind would go exploring again into ways to escape
from this despised land.  He couldn't keep from reviling himself almost
nightly for his previous failure to get away.

Playing back in his mind what it had been like among the thorn bushes and the
slavering dogs, he knew that he must have a better plan for the next time.
First he had to make himself a sap hie charm to insure safety and success.
Then he must either find or make some kind of weapon.  Even a sharpened stick
could have speared through those dogs' bellies, he thought, and he could have
been away again before the black one and the toubob had been able to cut
their way through the underbrush to where they had found him fighting off the
dogs.

Finally, he must acquaint himself with the surrounding countryside so that
when he escaped again, he would know where to look for better hiding places.

Though he often lay awake half the night, restless with such thoughts, Kunta
always awoke before the first crowing of the cocks, which always aroused the
other fowl.  The birds in this place, he noticed, merely twittered and sang--
nothing like the deafening squawks of great flocks of green parrots that had
opened the mornings in Juffure.  There didn't seem to be any parrots here, or
monkeys either, 240 ALEX HALEY

which always began the day at home by chattering angrily in the trees
overhead, breaking off sticks and hurling them to the ground at the people
underneath.  Nor had Kunta seen any goats here--a fact he found no less
incredible than that these people kept swine in pens"--pigs" or "hogs," they
called them--and even fed the filthy things.

But the squealing of the swine, it seemed to Kunta, was no uglier than the
language of the toubob who so closely resembled them.  He would have given
anything to hear even a sentence of Mandinka, or any other African tongue.
He missed his chain mates from the big canoe--even those who weren't
Moslem--and he wondered what had happened to them.  Where had they been
taken?  To other tou- bob farms such as this one?  Wherever they were, were
they longing as he was to hear once again the sweetness of their own
tongues--and yet feeling shut out and alone, as he did, because they knew
nothing of the toubob language?

Kunta realized that he would have to learn something of this strange speech
if he was ever to understand enough about the toubob or his ways to escape
from him.  Without letting anyone know, he already recognized some words:
"pig," "hog," "watermelon," "black-eyed peas," "oberseer," "massa,"

and especially "yessuh, massa," which was about the only thing he ever heard
the black ones say to them.  He had also heard the black ones describe the
she toubob who lived with "massa" in the big white house as "the missus."
Once, from a distance, Kunta had glimpsed her, a bony creature the color of a
toad's underbelly, as she walked around cutting off some flowers among the
vines and bushes that grew alongside the big house.

Most of the other toubob words that Kunta heard still confused him.

But behind his expressionless mask, he tried hard to make sense of them, and
slowly he began to associate various sounds with certain objects and actions.
But one sound in particular was extremely puzzling to him, though he heard
it exclaimed over and over nearly every day by toubob and blacks alike.
What, he wondered, was a "nigger"

CHAPTER 46

With the cutting and piling of the cornstalks at last completed, the
"oberseer" began assigning different blacks to a variety of tasks after the
conch horn blew each dawn.  One morning Kunta was given the job of snapping
loose from their thick vines and piling onto a "wagon," as he'd learned they
called the rolling boxes, a load of large, heavy vegetables the color of
overripe mangoes and somewhat resembling the big gourds that women in Juffure
dried out and cut in half to make household bowls.  The blacks here called
them punk ins

Riding with the punk ins on the wagon to unload them at a large building
called the "barn," Kunta was able to see that some of the black men were
sawing a big tree into thick sections and splitting them with axes and wedges
into firewood that children were stacking into long rows as high as their
heads.  In another place, two men were hanging over thin poles the large
leaves of what his nose told him was the filthy pagan tobacco; he had smelled
it once before on one of the trips he had taken with his father.

As he rode back and forth to the "barn," he saw that just as it was done in
his own village, many things were being dried for later use.

Some women were collecting a thick brown sage grass he heard them call it,
and tying it into bundles.  And some of the garden's vegetables were being
spread out on cloths to dry.  Even moss--which had been gathered by groups of
children and plunged into boiling water--was being dried as well; he had no
idea why.

It turned his stomach to watch--and listen--as he passed a pen where still
more swine were being butchered.  Their hair, too, he noticed, was being
dried and saved--probably for mortar--but the thing that really sickened him
was to see the swines' bladders being removed, blown up, tied at 242 ALEX
HALEY

the ends, and hung up to dry along a fence; Allah only knew for what unholy
purpose.

When he had finished harvesting and storing the "pun- kins," Kunta was sent
with several others to a grove of trees, the limbs of which they were told to
shake vigorously so that the nuts growing in them would fall to the ground,
where they were picked up by first-kafo children carrying baskets.  Kunta
picked up one of the nuts and hid it in his clothes to try later when he was
alone; it wasn't bad.

When the last of these tasks was done, the men were put to work repairing
things that needed it.  Kunta helped another man fix a fence.  And the women
seemed to be busy in a general cleaning of the big white house and their own
huts.  He saw some of them washing things, first boiling them in a large
black tub, then rubbing them up and down against a wrinkled piece of tin in
soapy water; he wondered why none of them knew how to wash clothing properly
by beating it against rocks.

Kunta noticed that the whip of the "oberseer" seemed to strike down upon
someone's back much less often than before.  He felt in the atmosphere
something similar to the time in Juffure when the harvest had all been put
safely into the storehouses.  Even before the evening's conch horn would blow
to announce the end of the day's work, some of the black men would begin
cavorting and prancing and singing among themselves.  The "oberseer" would
wheel his horse around and brandish his whip, but Kunta could tell he didn't
really mean it.

And soon the other men would join in, and then the women--singing words that
made no sense at all to Kunta.  He was so filled with disgust for all of them
that he was glad when the conch horn finally signaled for them to return to
their huts.

In the evenings, Kunta would sit down sideways just inside the doorway of his
hut, heels flat against the packed dirt floor to minimize the iron cuffs'
contact with his festering ankles.  If there was any light breeze, he enjoyed
feeling it blowing against him, and thinking about the fresh carpet of gold
and crimson leaves he would find under the trees the next morning.  At Such
times, his mind would wander back to harvest-season evenings in Juffure, with
the mosquitoes and other insects tormenting the people as they sat around the
smoky night fires and settled into long con verROOTS 243

sat ions that would be punctuated now and then by the distant snarling of
leopards and the screaming of hyenas.

One thing he didn't hear, it occurred to him, and hadn't heard since he left
Africa, was the sound of drums.  The toubob probably didn't allow these black
people to have any drums; that had to be the reason.  But why?  Was it
because the toubob knew and feared how the sound of the drums could quicken
the blood of everyone in a village, until even the little children and the
toothless old ones would dance wildly?  Or how the rhythm of the drums would
drive wrestlers to their greatest feats of strength?  Or how the hypnotic
beat could send' warriors into a frenzy against their enemies?  Or perhaps
the toubob were simply afraid to allow a form of communication they couldn't
understand that could travel the distance between one farm and another.

But these heathen blacks wouldn't understand drum talk any better than the
toubob.  Kunta was forced to concede, though--if only with great
reluctance--that these pagan blacks might not be totally irredeemable.
Ignorant as they were, some of the things they did were purely African, and
he could tell that they were totally unaware of it themselves.  For one
thing, he had heard all his life the very same sounds of exclamation,
accompanied by the very same hand gestures and facial expressions.  And the
way these blacks moved their bodies was also identical.  No less so was the
way these blacks laughed when they were among themselves--with their whole
bodies, just like the people of Juffure.

And Kunta had been reminded of Africa in the way that black women here wore
their hair tied up with strings into very tight plaits--although African
women often decorated their plaits with colorful beads.  And the women of
this place knotted cloth pieces over their heads, although they didn't tie
them correctly.  Kunta saw that even some of these black men wore their hair
in short plaits, too, as some men did in Africa.

Kunta also saw Africa in the way that black children here were trained to
treat their elders with politeness and respect.  He saw it in the way that
mothers carried their babies with their plump little legs straddling the
mothers' bodies.  He noticed even such small customs as how the 244 ALEX
HALEY

older ones among these blacks would sit in the evenings rubbing their gums
and teeth with the finely crushed end of a twig, which would have been
lemongrass root in Juffure.  And though he found it difficult to understand
how they could do it here in toubob land, Kunta had to admit that these
blacks' great love of singing and dancing was unmistakably African.

But what really began to soften his heart somewhat toward these strange
people was the fact that over the past moon, their great showing of distaste
for him had continued only when the "oberseer" or the "massa" was around.
When Kunta came by anywhere the blacks were among themselves, most of them by
now would quickly nod, and he would notice their expressions of concern for
the worsening condition of his left ankle.  Though he always coldly ignored
them and hobbled on, he would sometimes find himself later almost wishing
that he had returned their nods.

One night, when Kunta had fallen asleep but drifted again into wakefulness,
as he often did, he lay staring up into the darkness and feeling that Allah
had somehow, for some reason, willed him to be here in this place amid the
lost tribe of a great black family that reached its roots back among the
ancient forefathers; but unlike himself, these black ones in this place had
no knowledge whatsoever of who they were and where they'd come from.

Feeling around him, in some strange way, the presence |C of his holy-man
grandfather, Kunta reached out into the darkness.  There was nothing to be
felt, but he began speaking aloud to the Alquaran Kairaba Kunta Kinte,
imploring him to make known the purpose of his mission here, if there be any.
He was startled to hear the sound of his own voice.  Up to this moment in
the toubob's land, he had never uttered a sound addressed to anyone but
Allah, except for those cries that had been, torn from him by a lash.

The next morning, as be joined the others in line for the march to work,
Kunta almost caught himself saying, "Mornin'," as he had heard them greet
each other every day.  But though he knew enough toubob words by now not only
to understand a good deal of what was said to him but also to make himself
somewhat understood as well, something made him decide to continue keeping
that knowledge to himself.

ROOTS 245

It occurred to Kunta that these blacks masked their true feelings for the
toubob as carefully as he did his changing attitude toward them.

He had by now many times witnessed the blacks' grinning faces turn to
bitterness the instant a toubob turned his head away.  He had seen them break
their working tools on purpose, and then act totally unaware of how it
happened as the "oberseer" bitterly cursed them for their clumsiness.  And he
had seen how blacks in the field, for all their show of rushing about
whenever the toubob was nearby, were really taking twice as much time as they
needed to do whatever they were doing.

He was beginning to realize, too, that like the Man- dink as own secret sira
kango language, these blacks shared some kind of communication known only
among themselves.  Sometimes when they were working out in the field, Kunta's
glance would catch a small, quick gesture or movement of the head.  Or one of
them would utter some strange, brief exclamation; at unpredictable intervals
another, and then another, would repeat it, always just beyond the hearing of
the "oberseer" as he rode about on his horse.  And sometimes with him right
there among them, they would begin singing something that told Kunta --even
though he couldn't understand it--that some message was being passed, just as
the women had done for the men on the big canoe.

When darkness had fallen among the huts and the lamp lights no longer glowed
from the windows in the big house, Kunta's sharp ears would detect the swift
rustling of one or two blacks slipping away from "slave row" --and a few
hours later, slipping back again.  He wondered where they were going and for
what--and why they were crazy enough to come back.  And the next morning in
the fields, he would try to guess which of them had done it.  Whoever it was,
he thought he just might possibly learn to trust them.

Two huts away from Kunta, the blacks would seat themselves around the small
fire of the old cooking woman every evening after "supper," and the sight
would fill Kunta with a melancholy memory of Juffure, except that the women
here sat with the men, and some of both sexes were puffing away on pagan
tobacco pipes that now and then glowed dully in the gathering darkness.
Listening intently from where he sat just inside his doorway, Kunta could
246 ALEX HALEY

hear them talking over the rasping of the crickets and the distant hooting of
owls in the forest.  Though he couldn't understand the words, he felt the
bitterness in their tone.

Even in the dark, Kunta by now could picture in his mind the face of
whichever black was talking.  His mind had filed away the voices of each of
the dozen adults, along with the name of the tribe he felt that particular
one most resembled.  He knew which ones among them generally acted more
carefree, and which seldom even smiled, a few of them not even around the
toubob.

These -evening meetings had a general pattern that Kunta had learned.

The usual first talker was usually the woman who cooked in the big house.
She mimicked things said by both the "massa" and the "missus."

Then he heard the big black one who had captured him imitating the
"oberseer," and he listened with astonishment as the others all but choked
trying to stifle their laughter, lest they be heard iir the big white house.

But then the laughter would subside and they would sit around talking among
themselves.  Kunta heard the helpless, haunted tone of some, and the anger of
others, even though he grasped only a little of what they discussed.  He had
the feeling that they were recalling things that had happened to them earlier
in their lives.  Some of the women in particular would be talking and then
suddenly break into tears.

Finally the talking would grow quiet as one of the women began to sing, and
the others joined in.  Kunta couldn't understand the words"--No-body knows de
troubles I'se seed" --but he felt the sadness in the singing.

At last there came a voice that Kunta knew was the oldest man among them, the
one who sat in the rocking chair and wove things of corn shucks and who blew
the conch horn.  The others would bow their heads, and he would begin
speaking slowly what Kunta guessed was some kind of prayer, though it was
certainly not to Allah.  But Kunta remembered what was said by the old alcala
down in the big canoe: "Allah knows every language."  While the prayer
continued, Kunta kept hearing the same odd sound exclaimed sharply by both
the old man and others who kept interrupting him with it: "Oh Lawd!"  He
wondered if this "Oh Lawd" was their Allah, A few days later, the night winds
began to blow with a BOOTS 247

coldness beyond any that Kunta had ever felt, and he woke up to find the last
leaves stripped from the trees.  As he stood shivering in line to go out to
the fields, he was bewildered when the "oberseer" directed everyone into the
barn instead.  Even the massa and the missus were there, and with them four
other finely dressed toubob who watched and cheered as the blacks were
separated into two groups and made to race each other at ripping off and
flinging aside the whitened, dried outside shucks from the piled harvest of
corn.

Then the toubob and the blacks--in two groups--ate and drank their fill.  The
old black man who prayed at night then took up some kind of musical
instrument with strings running down its length--it reminded Kunta of the
ancient kora from his own homeland--and began to make some very odd music on
it by jerking some kind of wand back and forth across the strings.  The other
blacks got up and began to dance--wildly--as the watching toubob, even the
"oberseer," gleefully clapped and shouted from the sidelines.  Their faces
reddened with excitement, all the toubob suddenly stood up, and as the blacks
shrank to the side, they clapped their way out into the middle of the floor
and began to dance in an awkward way while the old man played as if he had
gone mad and the other blacks jumped up and down and clapped and screamed as
if they were seeing the greatest performance of their lives.

It made Kunta think of a story he had been told by his beloved old
Grandmother Nyo Boto when he was in the first kafo.  She had told how the
king of a village had called together all of the musicians and commanded them
to play their very best for him to dance for the people, including even the
slaves.  And the people were all delighted and they left all singing loudly
to the skies and there had never been another king like him.

Back in his hut later that night reflecting upon what he had seen, it
occurred to Kunta that in some strong, strange, and very deep way, the blacks
and the toubob had some need for each other.  Not only during the dancing in
the barn, but also on many other occasions, it had seemed to him that the
toubob were at their happiest when they were close around the black
ones--even when they were beating them.

CHAPTER 47

Kunta's left ankle had become so infected that pus draining from the wound
all but covered the iron cuff with a sickly yellow slickness, and his
crippled limping finally caused the "oberseer" to take a close look.  Turning
his head away, he told Samson to remove the cuffs.

It was still painful to raise his foot, but Kunta was so thrilled to be
unfettered that he hardly felt it.  And that night, after the others had gone
to bed and all had become still, Kunta limped outside and stole away once
again.  Crossing a field in the opposite direction from the one he had fled
across the last time, he headed toward what he knew was a wider, deeper
forest on the other side.  He had reached a ravine and was clambering up the
far side on his belly when he heard the first sound of a movement in the
distance.  He lay still with his heart pounding as he heard heavy footfalls
approaching and finally the hoarse voice of Samson cursing and shouting

"Toby!

Toby!  " Gripping a stout stick he had sharpened into a crude spear, Kunta
felt strangely calm, almost numb, as his eyes coldly watched the bulky
silhouette moving quickly this way and that in the brush at the top of the
ravine.  Something made him sense that Samson feared for himself if Kunta
succeeded in getting away.  Closer and closer he stalked--Kunta coiled tight
but motionless as a stone-- and then the moment came.  Hurling the spear with
all his might, he grunted slightly with the pain it caused and Sam- son,
hearing him, sprang instantly to one side; it missed him by a hair.

Kunta tried to run, but the weakness of his ankles made him hardly able to
keep upright, and when he whirled to fight, Samson was upon him, slamming
with his greater weight behind each blow, until Kunta was driven to the
earth.  Hauling him back upward, Samson kept pounding, ROOTS 249

aiming only at his chest and belly, as Kunta tried to keep his body twisting
as he gouged and bit and clawed.  Then one massive blow sent him crashing
down again, this time to stay.  He couldn't even move to defend himself any
further.

Gasping for breath, Samson tied Kunta's wrists tightly together with a rope,
and then began jerking Kunta along by its free end, back toward the farm,
kicking him savagely whenever he stumbled or faltered, and cursing him every
step of the way.

It was all Kunta could do to keep staggering and lurching behind Samson.
Dizzy from pain and exhaustion--and disgust with himself--he grimly
anticipated the heatings he would receive when they reached his hut.  But
when they finally arrived--shortly before dawn--Samson only gave him another
kick or two and then left him alone lying in a heap.

Kunta was so used up that he trembled.  But with his teeth he began to gnash
and tear at the fibers of the rope binding his wrists together, until his
teeth hurt like flashes of fire.  But the rope finally came apart just as the
conch horn blew.  Kunta lay weeping.  He had failed again, and he prayed to
Allah.

Through the days that followed, it was as if he and Samson shared some secret
pact of hatred.  Kunta knew how closely he was being watched; he knew that
Samson was waiting for any excuse to hurt him in a manner the toubob would
approve.  Kunta responded by going through the motions of doing whatever work
he was given to do as if nothing had happened--but even faster and more
efficiently than before.  He had noticed how the "oberseer" paid less
attention to those who worked the hardest or did the most grinning.  Kunta
couldn't bring himself to grin, but with grim satisfaction he noted that the
more he sweated, the less often the lash fell across his back.

One evening after work, Kunta was passing near the barn when he spotted a
thick iron wedge lying half concealed among some of the sawed sections of
trees where the "oberseer" had two men splitting firewood.  Glancing around
quickly in all directions, and seeing no one watching, Kunta snatched up the
wedge and, concealing it in his shirt, hurried to his hut.  Using it to dig a
hole in the hard dirt floor, he placed the wedge in the hole, packed the
loose 250 ALEX HALEY

dirt back over it, then beat it down carefully with a rock until the floor
looked completely undisturbed.

He spent a sleepless night worrying that a wedge discovered missing might
cause all of the cabins to be searched.  He felt better when there was no
outcry the following day, but he still wasn't sure just how he might employ
the wedge to help himself escape, when that time came again.

What he really wanted to get his hands on was one of those long knives that
the "oberseer" would issue to a few of the men each morning.  But each
evening he would see the "oberseer" demanding the knives back and counting
them carefully.  With one of those knives, he could cut brush to move more
quickly within a forest, and if he had to, he could kill a dog--or a man.

One cold afternoon almost a moon later--the sky bleak and slaty--Kunta was on
his way across one of the fields to help another man repair a fence when, to
his astonishment, what looked like salt began to fall from the sky, at first
lightly, then more rapidly and thickly.  As the salt became a flaky
whiteness, he heard the blacks nearby exclaiming,

"Snow!"  and guessed that was what they called it.

When he bent down to pick some of it up, it was cold to his touch--and even
colder when he licked it off a finger with his tongue.  It stung, and it had
no taste whatever.  He tried to smell it, but not only did there seem to be
no odor either, it also disappeared into watery nothing- |C ness.  And
wherever he looked on the ground was a whitish film.

But by the time he reached the other side of the field, the "snow" had
stopped and even begun to melt away.  Hiding his amazement, Kunta composed
himself and nodded silently to his black partner, who was waiting by the
broken fence.  They set to work--Kunta helping the other man to string a kind
of metal twine that he called "wire."

After a while they reached a place almost hidden by tall grass, and as the
other man hacked some of it down with the long knife he carried, Kunta's eyes
were gauging the distance between where he stood and the nearest woods.  He
knew that Samson was nowhere near and the "oberseer" was keeping watch in
another field that day.  Kunta worked busily, to give the other man no
suspicion of what was in his mind.  But his breath came tensely ROOTS 251

as he stood holding the wire tight and looking down on the head of the man
bent over his work.  The knife had been left a few steps behind them, where
the chopping of the brush had stopped.

With a silent prayer to Allah, Kunta clasped his hands together, lifted them
high, and brought them down across the back of the man's neck with all the
violence of which his slight body was capable.  The man crumpled without a
sound, as if he had been pole axed.  Within a moment, Kunta had bound the
man's ankles and wrists with the wire.

Snatching up the long knife, Kunta suppressed the impulse to stab him--this
was not the hated Samson--and went running toward the woods, bent over almost
double.  He felt a lightness, as if he were running in a dream, as if this
weren't really happening at all.

He came out of it a few moments later--when he heard the man he had left
alive yelling at the top of his lungs.  He should have killed him, Kunta
thought, furious with himself, as he tried to run yet faster.  Instead of
fighting his way deeply into the underbrush when he reached the woods, he
skirted it this time.  He knew that he had to achieve distance first, then
concealment.  If he got far enough fast enough, he would have time to find a
good place to hide and rest before moving on under cover of the night.

Kunta was prepared to live in the woods as the animals did.  He had learned
many things about this toubob land by now, together with what he already knew
from Africa.  He would capture rabbits and other rodents with snare traps and
cook them over a fire that wouldn't smoke.  As he ran, he stayed in the area
where the brush would conceal him but wasn't thick enough to slow him down.

By nightfall, Kunta knew that he had run a good distance.  Yet he kept going,
crossing gullies and ravines, and for quite a way down the bed of a shallow
stream.  Only when it was completely dark did he allow himself to stop,
hiding himself in a spot where the brush was dense but from which he could
easily run if he had to.  As he lay there in the darkness, he listened
carefully for the sound of dogs.  But there was nothing but stillness all
around him.  Was it possible?  Was he really going to make it this time?

Just then he felt a cold fluttering on his face, and 252 ALEX HALEY

reached up with his hand.

"Snow" was falling again!  Soon he was covered and surrounded by whiteness as
far as he could see.  Silently it fell, deeper and deeper, until Kunta began
to fear he was going to be buried in it; he was already freezing.  Finally he
couldn't stop himself from leaping up and running to look for better cover.

He had run a good way when he stumbled and fell; he wasn't hurt, but when he
looked back, he saw with horror that his feet had left a trail in the snow so
deep that a blind man could follow him.  He knew that there was no way he
could erase the tracks, and he knew that the moming was now not far away.
The only possible answer was more distance.  He tried to increase his speed,
but he had been running most of the night, and his breath was coming in
labored gasps.  The long knife had begun to feel heavy; it would cut brush,
but it wouldn't melt "snow."  The sky was beginning to lighten in the east
when he heard, far ahead of him, the faint sound of conch horns.  He changed
course in the next stride.  But he had the sinking feeling that there was
nowhere he could find to rest safely amid this blanketing whiteness.

When he heard the distant baying of the dogs, a rage flooded up in him such
as he had never felt before.  He ran like a hunted leopard, but the barking
grew louder and louder, and finally, when he glanced back over his shoulder
for the tenth time, he saw them gaining on him.  The men couldn't be far
behind.  Then he heard a gun fire, and somehow it propelled him forward even
faster than before.  But the dogs caught up with him anyway.  When they were
but strides away, Kunta whirled and crouched down, snarling back at them.  As
they came lunging forward with their fangs bared, he too lunged at them,
slashing open the first dog's belly with a single sideways swipe of the
knife; with another blur of his arm, he hacked the blade between the eyes of
the next one.

Springing away, Kunta began running again.  But soon he heard the men on
horses crashing through the brush behind him, and he all but dove for the
deeper brush where the horses couldn't go.  Then there was another shot, and
another and he felt a flashing pain in his leg.

Knocked down in a heap, he had staggered upright again when the toubob
shouted and fired again, and he heard ROOTS 253

the bullets thud into trees by his head.  Let them kill me, thought Kunta; I
will die as a man should.  Then another shot hit the same leg, and it smashed
him down like a giant fist.  He was snarling on the ground when he saw the
"oberseer" and another toubob coming toward him with their guns leveled and
he was about to leap up and force them to shoot him again and be done with
it, but the wounds in his leg wouldn't let him rise.

The other toubob held his gun at Kunta's head as the "oberseer" jerked off
Kunta's clothing until he stood naked in the snow, the blood trickling down
his leg and staining the whiteness at his feet.

Cursing with each breath, the "oberseer" knocked Kunta all but senseless with
his fist; then both of them tied him facing a large tree, with his wrists
bound on the other side.

The lash began cutting into the flesh across Kunta's shoulders and back, with
the "oberseer" grunting and Kunta shuddering under the force of each blow.
After a while Kunta couldn't stop himself from screaming with the pain, but
the beating went on until his sagging body pressed against the tree.  His
shoulders and back were covered with long, half-opened bleeding welts that in
some places exposed the muscles beneath.  He couldn't be sure, but the next
thing Kunta knew he had the feeling he was falling.  Then he felt the
coldness of the snow against him and everything went black.

He came to in his hut, and along with his senses, pain returned--excruciating
and enveloping.  The slightest movement made him cry out in agony; and he was
back in chains.  But even worse, his nose informed him that his body was
wrapped from feet to chin in a large cloth soaked with grease of the swine.
When the old cooking woman came in with food, he tried to spit at her, but
succeeded only in throwing up.  He thought he saw compassion in her eyes.

Two days later, he was awakened early in the morning by the sounds of
festivities.  He heard black people outside the big house shouting "Christmas
gif, Massa!," and he wondered what they could possibly have to celebrate.  He
wanted to die, so that his soul could join the ancestors; he wanted to be
done forever with misery unending in this toubob land, so Stifling and
stinking that he couldn't draw 254 ALEX HALEY

a clean breath in it.  He boiled with fury that instead of beating him like a
man, the toubob had stripped him naked.  When he became well, he would take
revenge-- and he would escape again.  Or he would die.

CHAPTER 48

When Kunta finally emerged from his hut, again with both of his ankles
shackled, most of the other blacks avoided him, rolling their eyes in fear of
being near him, and moving quickly elsewhere, as if he were a wild animal of
some kind.  Only the old cooking woman and the old man who blew the conch
horn would look at him directly.

Samson was nowhere to be seen.  Kunta had no idea where he had gone, but
Kunta was glad.  Then, a few days later, he saw the hated black one bearing
the unhealed marks of a lash; he was gladder still.  But at the slightest
excuse, the lash of the toubob "oberseer" fell once again on Kunta's back as
well.

He knew every day that he was being watched as he went through the motions of
his work, like the others moving more quickly when the toubob came anywhere
near, then slowing down as they left.

Unspeaking, Kunta did whatever he was ordered to do.  And when the day was
over, he carried his melancholy--deep within himself-- from the fields back
to the dingy little hut where he slept.

In his loneliness, Kunta began talking to himself, most often in imaginary
conversations with his family.  He would talk to them mostly in his mind, but
sometimes aloud.

"Fa," he would say, "these black ones are not like us.  Their bones, their
blood, their sinews, their hands, their feet are not their own.  They live
and breathe not for themselves but for the toubob.  Nor do they own anything
at all, not even their own children.  They are fed and nursed and bred for
others."

"Mother," he would say, "these women wear cloths ROOTS 255

upon their heads, but they do not know how to tie them; there is little that
they cook that does not contain the meat or the greases of the filthy swine;
and many of them have lain down with the toubob, for I see their children who
are cursed with the sasso-borro half color.  "

And he would talk with his brothers Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi, telling them
that even the wisest of the elders could never really adequately impress upon
them the importance of realizing that the most vicious of the forest animals
was not half as dangerous as the toubob.

And so the moons passed in this way, and soon the spikes of "ice" had fallen
and melted into water.  And before long after that, green grass came peeping
through the dark-reddish earth, the trees began to show their buds, and the
birds were singing once again.  And then came the plowing of the fields and
the planting of the endless rows.  Finally the sun's rays upon the soil made
it so hot that Kunta was obliged to step quickly, and if he had to stop, to
keep his feet moving to prevent them from blistering.

Kunta had bided his time and minded his own business, waiting for his keepers
to grow careless and take their eyes off him once again.  But he had the
feeling that even the other blacks were still keeping an eye on him, even
when the "oberseer" and the other toubob weren't around.  He had to find some
way not ^ to be so closely watched.

Perhaps he could take advantage of the fact that the tou- bob didn't look at
blacks as people but as things.  Since the toubob's reactions to these black
things seemed to depend on how those things acted, he decided to act as
inconspicuous as possible.

Though it made him despise himself, Kunta forced himself to start behaving
the way the other blacks did whenever the toubob came anywhere near.  Hard as
he tried, he couldn't bring himself to grin and shuffle, but he made an
effort to appear cooperative, if not friendly; and he made a great show of
looking busy.  He had also learned a good many more toubob words by now,
always keenly listening to everything that was said around him, either out in
the fields or around the huts at night, and though he still chose not to
speak himself, he began to make it clear that he could understand.

Cotton--one of the main crops on the farm--grew quickly here in the toubob's
land.  Soon its flowers had 256 ALEX HALEY

turned into hard green bolls and split open, each filled with fluffy balls,
until the fields as far as Kunta could see were vast seas of whiteness,
dwarfing the fields he had seen around Juffure.  It was time to harvest, and
the wake- up hour began blowing earlier in the morning, it seemed to Kunta,
and the whip of the "oberseer" was cracking in warning even before the
"slaves," as they were called, could tumble from their beds.

By watching others out in the fields, Kunta soon learned that a hunched
position made his long canvas sack seem to drag less heavily behind him as
the endlessly repeated handfuls of cotton from the bolls slowly filled his
sack.  Then he would drag it to be emptied in the wagon that waited at the
end of the rows.  Kunta filled his sack twice a day, which was about average,
although there were some --hated and envied by the others for bending their
backs so hard to please the toubob, and succeeding at it--who could pick
cotton so fast that their hands seemed a blur; by the time the horn blew at
dusk, their sacks would have been filled and emptied into the wagon at least
three times.

When each cotton wagon was filled, it was taken to a storehouse on the farm,
but Kunta noticed that the overflowing wagons of tobacco harvested in the
larger fields adjoining his were driven away somewhere down the road.  Four
days passed before it returned empty--just in time to pass another loaded
wagon on its way out.

Kunta also began seeing other loaded tobacco wagons, doubtlessly from other
farms, rolling along the main road in the distance, drawn sometimes by as
many as four mules.  Kunta didn't know where the wagons were going, but he
knew they went a long way, for he had seen the utter exhaustion of Samson and
other drivers when they had returned from one of their trips.

Perhaps they would go far enough to take him to freedom.  Kunta found it hard
to get through the next several days in his excitement with this tremendous
idea.  He ruled out quickly any effort to hide on one of this farm's wagons;
there would be no time without someone's eyes too near for him to slip
unnoticed into a load of tobacco.  It must be a wagon moving along the big
road from some other farm.  Using the pretext of going to the outhouse late
that night, Kunta made sure that no one was about, then went to a place where
he could see the road in the moon ROOTS 257 light.  Sure enough--the tobacco
wagons were traveling at night.  He could see the nickering lights each wagon
carried, until finally those small specks of brightness would disappear in
the distance.

He planned and schemed every minute, no details of the local tobacco wagons
escaping his notice.  Picking in the fields, his hands fairly flew; he even
made himself grin if the "oberseer" rode anywhere near.

And all the time he was thinking how he would be able to leap onto the rear
end of a loaded, rolling wagon at night and burrow under the tobacco without
being heard by the drivers up front because of the bumping wagon's noise, and
unseen not only because of the darkness but also because of the tall mound of
leaves between the drivers and the rear of the wagon.  It filled him with
revulsion even to think of having to touch and smell the pagan plant he had
managed to stay away from all his life, but if that was the only way to get
away, he felt sure that Allah would forgive him.

CHAPTER 49

Waiting one evening soon afterward behind the outhouse, as the slaves called
the hut where they went to relieve themselves, Kunta killed with a rock one
of the rabbits that abounded in the woods nearby.

Carefully he sliced it thinly and dried it as he had learned in manhood
training, for he would need to take some nourishment along with him.  Then,
with a smooth rock, he honed the rusted and bent knife blade he had found and
straightened, and wired it into a wooden handle that he had carved.  But even
more important than the food and the knife was the sap hie he had made--a
cock's feather to attract the spirits, a horse's hair for strength, a bird's
wishbone for success--all tightly wrapped and sewn within a small square of
gunny sacking with a needle he had made from a thorn.  He realized the
foolishness of wishing that his sap hie might be blessed by 258 ALEX HALEY

a holy man, but any sap hie was better than no sap hie at all.

He hadn't slept all night, but far from being tired, it was all Kunta could
do not to burst with excitement to keep from showing any emotion at all
throughout the next day's working in the fields.  For tonight would be the
night.  Back in his hut after the evening meal, his hands trembled as he
pushed into his pocket the knife and the dried slices of rabbit, then tied
his sap hie tightly around his upper right arm.  He could hardly stand
hearing the familiar early-night routine of the other blacks; for each
moment, which seemed to be taking forever to pass, might bring some
unexpected occurrence that could ruin his plan.  But the bone-weary field
hands' mournful singing and praying soon ended.  To let them get safely
asleep, Kunta waited as much longer as he dared.

Then, grasping his homemade knife, he eased out into the dark night.

Sensing no one about, he bent low and ran as fast as he could go, plunging
after a while into a small, thick growth of brush just below where the big
road curved.  He huddled down, breathing hard.  Suppose no more wagons were
coming tonight?  The thought lanced through him.

And then a nearly paralyzing, worse fear: Suppose the driver's helper sits as
a rear lookout?  But he had to take the chance.

He heard a wagon coming minutes before he saw its flickering light.

Teeth clenched, muscles quivering, Kunta felt ready to collapse.  The wagon
seemed barely crawling.  But finally, it was directly across from him and
slowly passing.  Two dim figures sat on its front seat.

Feeling like screaming, he lunged from the growth of brush.  Trotting low
behind the squeaking, lurching wagon, Kunta awaited the road's next rough
spot; then his outstretched hand clawed over the tailboard, and he was
vaulting upward, over the top, and into the mountain of tobacco.  He was on
board!

Frantically he went burrowing in.  The leaves were packed together far more
tightly than he had expected, but at last his body was concealed.  Even after
pawing open an air space to breathe more freely the stench of the filthy weed
almost made him sick he had to keep moving his back and shoulders a bit this
way or that, trying to get comfortable under the pressing weight.  But
finally he found the right position, and the rocking motion of the wagon,
ROOTS 259

cushioned by the leaves, which were very warm around him, soon rhade him
drowsy.

A loud bump brought him awake with a sickening start, and he began to think
about being discovered.  Where was the wagon going, and how long would it
take to get there?  And when it arrived, would he be able to slip away
unseen?  Or would he find himself trailed and trapped again?

Why had he not thought of this before?  A picture flashed into his mind of
the dogs, and Samson, and the toubob with their guns, and Kunta shuddered.
Considering what they did to him last time, he knew that this time his life
would depend upon not getting caught.

But the more he thought of it, the stronger his urge grew to leave the wagon
now.  With his hands, he parted the leaves enough to poke his head out- Out
in the moonlight were endless fields and countryside.  He couldn't jump out
now.  The moon was bright enough to help his pursuers as much as it could
help him.  And the longer he rode, the less likely it was that the dogs could
ever track him.  He covered up the hole and tried to calm himself; but every
time the wagon lurched, he reared that it was going to stop, and his heart
would nearly leap from his chest.

Much later, when he opened the hole again and saw that it was nearing dawn,
Kunta made up his mind.  He had to leave the wagon right now, before he came
any closer to the enemy of open daylight.  Praying to Allah, he grasped the
handle of his knife and began to wriggle out of his hole.  When his entire
body was free, he waited again for the wagon to lurch.  It seemed to take an
eternity, but when it finally did he made a light leap--and was on the road.
A moment later he was out of sight in the bushes.

Kunta swung in a wide arc to avoid two toubob farms where he could see the
familiar big house with the small, dark huts nearby.  The sounds of their
wake-up horns floated across the still air to his ears, and as the dawn
brightened, he was slashing through underbrush deeper and deeper into what he
knew was a wide expanse of forest.  It was cool in the dense woods, and the
dew that sprinkled onto him felt good, and he swung his knife as if it were
weightless, grunting in his pleasure with each swing.  During the early
afternoon, he happened upon a small stream of clear water tippling over mossy
rocks, and frogs jumped in alarm as he stopped to drink from it with 260
ALEX HALEY 1

his cupped hands.  Looking around and feeling safe enough to rest for a
while, he sat down on the bank and reached into his pocket.  Taking out a
piece of the dried rabbit and swishing it around in the stream, he put it in
his mouth and chewed.  The earth was springy and soft beneath him, and the
only sounds he could hear were made by the toads and the insects and the
birds.  He listened to them as he ate, and watched sunlight stippling the
leafy boughs above him with splashes of gold among the green; and he told
himself that he was glad he didn't have to run as hard or as steadily as he
had before, for exhaustion had made him an easy prey.

On and on he ran, for the rest of the afternoon, and after pausing for his
sundown prayer, he went on still farther until darkness--and
weariness--forced him to stop for the night.  Lying on his bed of leaves and
grass, he decided that later he would build himself a shelter of forked
sticks with a roof of grass, as he had learned in manhood training.  Sleep
claimed him quickly, but several times during the night he was awakened by
mosquitoes, and he heard the snarlings of wild animals in the distance as
they made their kills, Up with the first rays of the sun, Kunta quickly
sharpened his knife and then was off again.  Awhile later he came upon what
was clearly a trail where a number of men had walked; although he could see
that it had not been used in a long time, he ran back into the woods as fast
as he could go.

Deeper and deeper into the forest, his knife kept slashing.  Several times he
saw snakes, but on the toubob farm he had learned that they would not attack
unless they were frightened or cornered, so he let them slither away.  Now
and then he would imagine that he heard a dog barking somewhere, and he would
shiver, for more than men, he feared dogs' noses.

Several times during the day, Kunta got into foliage so dense that in some
places even his knife wasn't stout enough to clear a path, and he had to
return and find another way.  Twice he stopped to sharpen his knife, which
seemed to be getting dull more and more often, but when it didn't work any
better afterward, he suspected that the constant slashing at briars, bushes,
and vines had begun to sap his strength.  So he paused to rest again, ate
some ROOTS 261

more rabbit--and some wild blackberries--and drank water that he found in
cupped leaves of plants at the bases of trees.  That night he rested by
another stream, plunging into sleep the moment he lay down, deaf to the cries
of animals and night birds, insensible even to the buzzing and biting of the
insects that were drawn to his sweaty body.

It wasn't until the next morning that Kunta began to think about where he was
going.  He hadn't let himself think of it before.  Since he couldn't know
where he was going because he didn't have any idea where he was, he decided
that his only course was to avoid nearness to any other human beings, black
or toubob, and to keep running toward the sunrise.  The maps of Africa he'd
seen as a boy showed the big water to the west, so he knew that eventually
he'd reach it if he kept moving east.  But when he thought about what might
happen then, even if he wasn't caught; of how he would ever be able to cross
the water, even if he had a boat; of how he would ever get safely to the
other side, even if he knew the way--he began to get deeply frightened.
Between prayers, he fingered the sap hie charm on his arm even as he ran.

That night, as he lay hidden beneath a bush, he found himself thinking of the
Mandinkas' greatest hero, the warrior Sundiata, who had been a crippled slave
so meanly treated by his African master that he had escaped and gone hiding
in the swamps, where he found and organized other escaped ones into a
conquering army that carved out the vast Mandinka Empire.  Maybe, Kunta
thought as he set out again on this fourth day, he could find other escaped
Africans somewhere here in the land of toubob, and maybe they would be as
desperate as he was to feel their toes once again in the dust of their native
land.  Maybe enough of them together could build or steal a big canoe.

And then .  Kunta's reverie was interrupted by a terrible sound.  He stopped
in his tracks.  No, it was impossible!  But there was no mistake; it was the
baying of hounds.  Wildly he went hacking at the brush, stumbling and falling
and scrambling up again.  Soon he was so tired that when he fell again, he
just sat there, very still, clutching the handle of his knife and listening.
But he heard nothing now--nothing but the sounds of the birds and the insects.

Had he really heard the dogs?  The thought tormented 262 ALEX HALEY

him.  He didn't know which was his worst enemy: the toil- bob or his own
imagination.  He couldn't afford to assume that he hadn't really heard them,
so he started running .  again; the only safety was to keep moving.  But
soon--exhausted not only by having to race so far and so fast, but also by
fear itself--he had to rest again.  He would close his eyes for just a
moment, and then get going again.

He awoke in a sweat, sitting "bolt upright.  It was pitch dark!  He had slept
the day away!  Shaking his head, he was trying to figure out what had wakened
him when suddenly he heard it again: the baying of dogs, this time much
closer than before.  He sprang up and away so frantically that it was several
moments before it flashed upon his mind that he had forgotten his long knife.
He dashed back to where he had lain, but the springy vines were a maze, and
though he knew--maddeningly--that he had to be within arm's length of it, no
amount of groping and scrabbling enabled him to lay his hand on it.

As the baying grew steadily louder, his stomach began to churn.  If he didn't
find it, he knew he would get captured again--or worse.  With his hands
jerking around everywhere underfoot, he finally grabbed hold of a rock about
the size of his fist.  With a desperate cry, he snatched it up and bolted
into the deep brush.  , All that night, like one possessed, he ran deeper and
deeper into the forest--tripping, falling, tangling his feet in : vines,
stopping only for moments to catch his breath: But | the hounds kept gaining
on him, closer and closer, and ; finally, soon after dawn, he could see them
over his shoulder.  It was like a nightmare repeating itself.  He couldn't ,
run any farther.

Turning and crouching in a little clearing I with his back against a tree, he
was ready for them--right ; hand clutching a stout limb he had snapped off
another tree \ while he was running at top speed, left hand holding the rock
in a grip of death.

The dogs began to lunge toward Kunta, but with a hideous cry he lashed the
club at them so ferociously that they retreated and cowered just beyond its
range, barking and slavering, until the two toubob appeared on their horses.

Kunta had never seen these men before.  The younger one drew a gun, but the
older one waved him back as he got down off his horse and walked toward
Kunta.  He was calmly uncoiling a long black whip.

ROOTS 263

Kunta stood there wild-eyed, his body shaking, his brain flashing a memory of
toubob faces in the wood grove, on the big canoe, in the prison, in the place
where he had been sold, on the heathen farm, in the woods where he had been
caught, beaten, lashed, and shot three times before.  As the toubob's arm
reared backward with the lash, Kunta's arm whipped forward with a viciousness
that sent him falling sideways as his fingers released the rock.

He heard the toubob shout; then a bullet cracked past his ear, and the dogs
were upon him.  As he rolled over and over on the ground ripping at the dogs,
Kunta glimpsed one toubob's face with blood running down it.  Kunta was
snarling like a wild animal when they called off the dogs and approached him
with their guns drawn.  He knew from their faces that he would die now, and
he didn't care.  One lunged forward and grabbed him while the other clubbed
with the gun, but it still took all of their strength to hold him, for he was
writhing, fighting, moaning, shrieking in both Arabic and Mandinka--until
they clubbed him again.  Wrestling him violently toward a tree, they tore the
clothes off him and tied him tightly to it around the middle of his body.  He
steeled himself to be beaten to death.

But then the bleeding toubob halted abruptly, and a strange look came onto
his face, almost a smile, and he spoke briefly, hoarsely to the younger one.
The younger one grinned and nodded, then went back to his horse and unlashed
a short-handled hunting ax that had been stowed against the saddle.  He
chopped a rotting tree trunk away from its roots and pulled it over next to
Kunta.

Standing before him, the bleeding one began making gestures.  He pointed to
Kunta's genitals, then to the hunting knife in his belt.

Then he pointed to Kunta's foot, and then to the ax in his hand.  When Kunta
understood, he howled and kicked--and was clubbed again.  Deep in his marrow,
a voice shouted that a man, to be a man, must have sons.  And Kunta's hands
flew down to cover his foto.  The two toubob were wickedly grinning.

One pushed the trunk under Kunta's right foot as the other tied the foot to
the trunk so tightly that all of Kunta's raging couldn't free it.  The
bleeding toubob picked up the ax.  Kunta was screaming and thrashing as the
ax flashed up, then down so fast--severing skin, tendons, muscles, bone
--that Kunta heard the ax thud into the trunk as the 264 ALEX HALEY

shock of it sent the agony deep into his brain.  As the explosion of pain
bolted through him, Kunta's upper body spasmed forward and his hands went
flailing downward as if to save the front half of his foot, which was falling
forward, as bright red blood jetted from the stump as he plunged into
blackness.

CHAPTER 50

For the better part of a day, Kunta lapsed into and out of consciousness, his
eyes closed, the muscles of his face seeming to sag, with spittle dribbling
from a corner of his open mouth.  As he gradually grew aware that he was
alive, the terrible pain seemed to split into parts--pounding within his
head, lancing throughout his body, and searing in his right leg.  When his
eyes required too much effort to open, he tried to remember what had
happened.  Then it came to him--the flushed, contorted toubob face behind the
ax flashing upward, the thunk against the stump, the front of his foot
toppling off.  Then the throbbing in Kunta's head surged so violently that he
lapsed mercifully back into blackness.

The next time he opened his eyes, he found himself staring at a spider web on
the ceiling.  After a while, he managed to stir just enough to realize that
his chest, wrists, and ankles were tied down, but his right foot and the back
of his head were propped against something soft, and he was wearing some kind
of gown.  And mingled with his agony was the smell of something like tar.  He
had thought he knew all about suffering before, but this was worse.

He was mumbling to Allah when the door of the hut was pushed open; he stopped
instantly.  A tall toubob he had never seen came in carrying a small black
bag.  His face was set in an angry way, though the anger seemed not to be
directed at Kunta.  Waving away the buzzing flies, ROOTS 265

the toubob bent down alongside him, Kunta could see only his back; then
something the toubob did to his foot brought such a shock that Kunta
shrieked' like a woman, rearing upward against the chest rope.

Finally turning around to face him, the toubob placed his palm against
Kunta's forehead and then grasped his wrist lightly and held it for a long
moment.  Then he stood up, and while he watched the grimaces on Kunta's drawn
face, called out sharply,

"Bell!"

A black-skinned woman, short and powerfully built, with a stern but not
forbidding face, soon came inside bringing water in a tin container.  In some
peculiar way, Kunta felt that he recognized her, that in some dream she had
been already there looking down at him and bending beside him with sips of
water.  The toubob spoke to her in a gentle way as he took something from his
black bag and stirred it into a cup of the water.  Again the toubob spoke,
and now the black woman kneeled and one of her hands raised the back of
Kunta's head as the other tilted the cup for him to drink, which he did,
being too sick and weak to resist.

His fleeting downward glance enabled him to catch a glimpse of the tip of the
huge bandaging over his right foot; it was rust-colored with dried blood.  He
shuddered, wanting to spring up, but his muscles felt as useless as the
vile-tasting stuff that he was permitting to go down his throat.  The black
woman then eased his head back down, the toubob said something to her again,
and she replied, and the two of them went out, Almost before they were gone,
Kunta floated off into deep sleep.  When next he opened his eyes late that
night, he couldn't remember where he was.  His right foot felt as if it were
afire; he started to jerk it upward, but the movement made him cry out.  His
mind lapsed off into a shadowy blur of images and thoughts, each of them
drifting beyond his grasp as quickly as they came.  Glimpsing Binta, he told
her that he was hurt, but not to worry, for he would be home again as soon as
he was able.  Then he saw a family of birds flying high in the sky and a
spear piercing one of them.  He felt himself falling, crying out, desperately
clutching out at nothingness.

When he woke up again, Kunta felt sure that something terrible had happened
to his foot; or had it been a night266 ALEX HALEY mare?  He only knew that he
was very sick.  His whole right side felt numb; his throat was dry; his
parched lips were starting to split from fever; be was soaked in sweat, and
it had a sickly smell.  Was it possible that anyone would really chop off
another's foot?  Then he remembered that toubob pointing to his foot and to
his genitals, and the horrible expression on his face.  Again the rage
flooded up; and Kunta made an effort to flex his toes.  It brought a blinding
sheet of pain.  He lay there waiting for it to subside, but it wouldn't.  And
it was unbearable--except that somehow he was bearing it.  He hated himself
for wanting that toubob to come back with more of whatever it was he put in
the water that had given him some ease.

Time and again he tried to pull his hands free of the loose binding at his
sides, but to no avail.  He lay there writhing and groaning in anguish when
the door opened again.  It was the black woman, the yellowish light from a
flame flickering on her black face.  Smiling, she began making sounds, facial
expressions, and motions that Kunta knew were an effort to make him
understand something.  Pointing toward the hut's door, she pantomimed a tall
man walking in, then giving something to drink to a moaning person, who then
broadly smiled as if feeling much better.  Kunta made no sign that he
understood her mesm|^;," ing that the tall toubob was a man of medicine.

Shrugging, she squatted down and began pressing a damp, cooling cloth against
Kunta's forehead.  He hated her no less for it.  Then she motioned that she
was going to raise his head for him to sip some of the soup she had brought.
Swallowing it, he felt flashing anger at her pleased look.  Then she made a
small hole in the dirt floor into which she set a round, long, waxy thing and
lighted a flame at the top of it.  With gesture and expression, she asked
finally if there was anything else he wanted.  He just glowered at her, and
finally she left.

Kunta stared at the flame, trying to think, until it guttered out against the
dirt.  In the darkness, the kill-toubob plotting in the big canoe came into
his mind; he longed to be a warrior in a great black army slaughtering toubob
as fast as his arms could swing.  But then Kunta was shuddering, fearful that
he was dying himself, even though that would mean he would be forevermore
with Allah.  After all, none had ever returned from Allah to tell what it was
like ROOTS 267

with Him; nor had any ever returned to their villages to tell what it was
like with the toubob.

On Bell's next visit, she looked down with deep concern into Kunta's
bloodshot and yellowing eyes, which had sunk farther into his fevered face.
He lay steadily shuddering, groaning, even thinner than when he had been
brought here the week before.  She went back outside, but within an hour was
back with thick cloths, two steaming pots, and a pair of folded quilts.
Moving quickly and--for some reason--furtively, she covered Kunta's bared
chest with a thick, steaming poultice of boiled leaves mixed and mashed with
something acrid.  The poultice was so blistering hot that Kunta moaned and
tried to shake it off, but Bell firmly shoved him back.  Dipping cloths into
her other steaming pot, she wrung them out and packed them over the poultice,
then covered Kunta with the two quilts.

She sat and watched the sweat pour from him onto the dirt floor in rivulets.
With a corner of her apron.  Bell dabbed at the sweat that trickled into his
closed eyes, and finally he lay entirely limp.  Only when she felt the chest
cloths and found them barely warm did she remove them.  Then, wiping his
chest clean of all traces of the poultice, she covered him with the quilts
and left.

When he next awakened, Kunta was too weak even to move his body, which felt
about to suffocate under the heavy quilts.  But--without any gratitude--he
knew that his fever was broken.

He lay wondering where that woman had learned to do what she had done.  It
was like Binta's medicines from his childhood, the herbs of Allah's earth
passed down from the ancestors.  And Kunta's mind played back to him, as
well, the black woman's secretive manner, making him realize that it had not
been toubob medicine.  Not only was he sure that the toubob were unaware of
it, he knew that the toubob should never know of it.  And Kunta found himself
studying the black woman's face in his mind.  What was it the toubob had
called her?

"Bell."

With reluctance, after a while, Kunta decided that more than any other tribe,
the woman resembled his own.  He tried to picture her in Juffure, pounding
her breakfast couscous, paddling her dugout canoe through the belong,
bringing in the sheaves of the rice harvest balanced on her head.  But then
Kunta reviled himself for the ridiculousness 268 ALEX HALEY

of thinking of his village in any connection with these pagan, heathen black
ones here in the toubob's land.

Kunta's pains had become less constant now, and less intense; it hurt now
mostly when he tried to strain against the bonds in his desperate achings to
move around.  But the flies tormented him badly, buzzing around his bandaged
foot, or what was left of it, and now and then he would jerk that leg a
little to make the flies swarm up awhile before returning.

Kunta began to wonder where he was.  Not only was this not his own hut, but
he could also tell from the sounds outside, and the voices of black people
walking by, that he had been taken to some new farm.

Lying there, he could smell their cooking and hear their early-night talking
and singing and praying, and the horn blowing in the morning.

And each day the tall toubob came into the hut, always making Kunta's foot
hurt as he changed the bandage.  But when Bell came three times daily--she
brought food and water, along with a smile and a warm hand on his fore-
head--he had to remind himself that these blacks were no better than the
toubob.  This black and this toubob may not mean him any harm--though it was
too soon to be sure--but it was the black Samson who had beaten him almost to
death, and it was toubob who had lashed him and shot him and cut his foot
off.  The more he gained in strength, the deeper grew his rage at having to
lie there helpless, unable even to move anywhere, when for all of his
seventeen rains he had been able to run, bound, and climb anywhere he wanted
to.  It was monstrous beyond understanding or endurance.

When the tall toubob untied Kunta's wrists from the short stakes that had
held them at his sides, Kunta spent the next few hours trying futilely to
raise his arms; they were too heavy.  Grimly, bitterly, relentlessly, he
began forcing usefulness back into his arms by flexing his fingers over and
over, then making fists--until finally he could raise his arms.  Next he
began struggling to pull himself up on his elbows, and once he succeeded, he
spent hours braced thus staring down at the bandaging over his stump.  It
seemed as big as a "punkin," though it was less bloody than the previous
bandagings he had glimpsed as the tou- bob took them off.  But when he tried
now to raise the ROOTS 269

knee of that same leg, he found that he couldn't yet bear the pain.

He took out his fury and his humiliation on Bell when she came to visit him
the next time, snarling at her in Mandinka and banging down the tin cup after
he drank.  Only later did he realize that it was the first time since he
arrived in toubob's land that he had spoken to anyone else aloud.  It made
him even more furious to recall that her eyes had seemed warm despite his
show of anger.

One day, after Kunta had been there for nearly three weeks, the toubob
motioned for him to sit up as he began to unwrap the bandaging.  As it came
nearer to the foot, Kunta saw the cloth stickily discolored with a thick,
yellowish matter.  Then he had to clamp his jaws as the tou- bob removed the
final cloth--and Kunta's senses reeled when he saw the swollen heel half of
his foot covered with a hideous thick, brownish scab.  Kunta almost screamed.
Sprinkling something over the wound, the toubob applied only a light, loose
bandaging over it, then picked up his black bag and hurriedly left.

For the next two days.  Bell repeated what the toubob had done, speaking
softly as Kunta cringed and turned away.  When the toubob returned on the
third day, Kunta's heart leaped when he saw him carrying two stout straight
sticks with forked tops; Kunta had seen hurt people walk with them in
Juffure.  Bracing the stout forks under his arms, the toubob showed him how
to hobble about swinging his right foot clear of the ground.

Kunta refused to move until they both left.  Then he struggled to pull
himself upright, leaning against the wall of the hut until he could endure
the throbbing of his leg without falling down.  Sweat was coursing down his
face before he had maneuvered the forks of the sticks underneath his armpits.
Giddy, wavering, never moving far from the wall for support, he managed a
few awkward, hopping forward swings of his body, the bandaged stump
threatening his balance with every movement.

When Bell brought his breakfast the next morning, Kunta's glance caught the
quick pleasure on her face at the marks made by the ends of the forked sticks
in the hard dirt floor.  Kunta frowned at her, angry at himself for not
remembering to wipe away those marks; He refused to 270 ALEX HALEY

touch the food until the woman left, but then he ate it quickly, knowing that
he wanted its strength now.  Within a few days, he was hobbling freely about
within the hut.

CHAPTER 51

In many ways, this toubob farm was very different from the last one, Kunta
began to discover the first time he was able to get to the hut's doorway on
his crutches and stand looking around outside.  The black people's low cabins
were all neatly whitewashed, and they seemed to be in far better condition,
as was the one that he was in.

It contained a small, bare table, a wall shelf on which were a tin plate, a
drinking gourd, a "spoon," and those toubob eating utensils for which Kunta
had finally learned the names: a "fork" and a "knife" ; he thought it stupid
for them to let him have such things within his reach.  And his sleeping mat
on the floor had a thicker stuffing of com- shucks.  Some of the huts he saw
nearby even had small garden plots behind them, and the one closest to the
tou- bob's big house had a colorful, circular flower patch growing in front
of it.

From where he stood in the doorway, Kunta could see anyone walking in any
direction, and whenever he did, he would quickly crutch back inside and
remain there for some time before venturing back to the doorway.

Kunta's nose located the outhouse.  Each day, he held back his urges until he
knew that most of them were out at their tasks in the fields, and
then--carefully making sure that no one was nearby--he would go crutching
quickly across the short distance to make use of the place, and then get
safely back.

It was a couple of weeks before Kunta began to make brief ventures beyond
that nearby hut, and the hut of slave row's cooking woman, who wasn't Bell,
he was surprised to discover.  As soon as he was well enough to get ROOTS 271

around.  Bell had stopped bringing him his meals--or even visiting.  He
wondered what had become of her--until one day, as he was standing in his
doorway, he caught sight of her coming out the back door of the big house.
But either she didn't see him or she pretended not to, as she walked right
past him on her way to the outhouse.  So she was just like the others after
all; he had known it all along.  Less often, Kunta caught glimpses of the
tall tou- bob, who was usually getting into a black-covered buggy that would
then go hurrying away, with its two horses being driven by a black who sat on
a seat up front.

After a few more days, Kunta began to stay outside his hut even when the
field workers returned in the evening, shambling along in a tired group.
Remembering the other farm he had been on, he wondered why these black ones
weren't being followed by some toubob with a whip on a horse.  They passed by
Kunta--without seeming to pay him any attention at all--and disappeared into
their huts.  But within a few moments most of them were back outside again
going about their chores.  The men did things around the barn, the women
milked cows and fed chickens.  And the children lugged buckets of water and
as much firewood as their arms could carry; they were obviously unaware that
twice as much could be carried if they would bundle the wood and balance it,
or the water buckets, on their heads.

As the days passed, he began to see that although these black ones lived
better than those on the previous toubob farm, they seemed to have no more
realization than the others that they were a lost tribe, that any kind of
respect or appreciation for themselves had been squeezed out of them so
thoroughly that they seemed to feel that their lives were as they should be.
All they seemed to be concerned about was not getting beaten, having enough
to eat and somewhere to sleep.  There weren't many nights that Kunta finally
managed to fall asleep before lying awake burning with fury at the misery of
his people.  But they didn't even seem to know that they were miserable.

So what business was it of his if these people seemed to be satisfied with
their pathetic lot?  He lay feeling as if a little more of him was dying
every day, that while any will to live was left to him, he should try to
escape yet again, whatever the odds or the consequences.  What good 270 ALEX
HALEY

touch the food until the woman left, but then he ate it quickly, knowing that
he wanted its strength now.  Within a few days, he was hobbling freely about
within the but.

CHAPTER 51

In many ways, this toubob farm was very different from the last one, Kunta
began to discover the first time he was able to get to the hut's doorway on
his crutches and stand looking around outside.  The black people's low cabins
were all neatly whitewashed, and they seemed to be in far better condition,
as was the one that he was in.

It contained a small, bare table, a wall shelf on which were a tin plate, a
drinking gourd, a "spoon," and those toubob eating utensils for which Kunta
had finally learned the names: a "fork" and a "knife" ; he thought it stupid
for them to let him have such things within his reach.  And his sleeping mat
on the floor had a thicker stuffing of corn- shucks.  Some of the huts he saw
nearby even had small garden plots behind them, and the one closest to the
tou- bob's big house had a colorful, circular flower patch growing in front
of it.  From where he stood in the doorway, Kunta could see anyone walking in
any direction, and whenever he did, he would quickly crutch back inside and
remain there for some time before venturing back to the doorway.

Kunta's nose located the outhouse.  Each day, he held back his urges until he
knew that most of them were out at their tasks in the fields, and
then--carefully making sure that no one was nearby--he would go crutching
quickly across the short distance to make use of the place, and then get
safely back.

It was a couple of weeks before Kunta began to make brief ventures beyond
that nearby hut, and the hut of slave row's cooking woman, who wasn't Bell,
he was surprised to discover.  As soon as he was well enough to get ROOTS 271

around.  Bell had stopped bringing him his meals--or even visiting.  He
wondered what had become of her--until one day, as he was standing in his
doorway, he caught sight of her coming out the back door of the big house.
But either she didn't see him or she pretended not to, as she walked right
past him on her way to the outhouse.  So she was just like the others after
all; he had known it all along.  Less often, Kunta caught glimpses of the
tall tou- bob, who was usually getting into a black-covered buggy that would
then go hurrying away, with its two horses being driven by a black who sat on
a seat up front.

After a few more days, Kunta began to stay outside his hut even when the
field workers returned in the evening, shambling along in a tired group.
Remembering the other farm he had been on, he wondered why these black ones
weren't being followed by some toubob with a whip on a horse.  They passed by
Kunta--without seeming to pay him any attention at all--and disappeared into
their huts.  But within a few moments most of them were back outside again
going about their chores.  The men did things around the barn, the women
milked cows and fed chickens.  And the children lugged buckets of water and
as much firewood as their arms could carry; they were obviously unaware that
twice as much could be carried if they would bundle the wood and balance it,
or the water buckets, on their heads.

As the days passed, he began to see that although these black ones lived
better than those on the previous toubob farm, they seemed to have no more
realization than the others that they were a lost tribe, that any kind of
respect or appreciation for themselves had been squeezed out of them so
thoroughly that they seemed to feel that their lives were as they should be.
All they seemed to be concerned about was not getting beaten, having enough
to eat and somewhere to sleep.  There weren't many nights that Kunta finally
managed to fall asleep before lying awake burning with fury at the misery of
his people.  But they didn't even seem to know that they were miserable.

So what business was it of his if these people seemed to be satisfied with
their pathetic lot?  He lay feeling as if a little more of him was dying
every day, that while any will to live was left to him, he should try to
escape yet again, whatever the odds or the consequences.  What good 272 ALEX
HALEY

was he anymore--alive or dead?  In the twelve moons since he was snatched
from Juffure--how much older than his rains he had become.

It didn't help matters any that no one seemed to have found any kind of
useful work for Kunta to do, though he was getting around ably enough on his
crutches.  He managed to convey the impression that he was occupied
sufficiently by himself and that he had no need or desire to associate with
anybody.  But Kunta sensed that the other blacks didn't trust him any more
than he trusted them.  Alone in the nights, though, he was so lonely and
depressed, spending hours staring up into the darkness, that he felt as if he
were falling in upon himself.  It was like a sickness spreading within him.
He was amazed and ashamed to realize that he felt the need for love.

Kunta happened to be outside one day when the tou- bob's buggy rolled into
the yard with the black driver's seat shared by a man of sasso borro color.
When the tou- bob got out and went into the big house, the buggy came on
nearer the huts and stopped again.  Kunta saw the driver grasp the brown one
under his arms to help him descend, for one of his hands seemed to be encased
in what looked like hardened white mud.  Kunta had no idea what it was, but
it seemed likely that the hand was injured in some way.  Reaching back into
the buggy with his good hand, the brown one took out an oddly shaped dark box
and then followed the driver down the row of huts to the one at the end that
Kunta knew was empty.

Kunta was so filled with curiosity that in the morning he made it his
business to hobble down to that hut.  He hadn't expected to find the brown
one seated just inside his doorway.  They simply looked at each other.  The
man's face and eyes were expressionless.  And so was his voice when he said

"What you want?"  Kunta had no idea what he was saying.

"You one a dem African niggers."  Kunta recognized that word he'd heard so
often, but not the rest.  He just stood there.

"Well, git on, den!"  Kunta heard the sharpness, sensed the dismissal.  He
all but stumbled, wheeling around, and went crutching in angry embarrassment
back on up to his own hut.

He grew so furious every time he thought about that brown one that he wished
he knew enough of the toubob tongue to go and shout,

"At least I'm black, not brown ROOTS 273

like you!  " From that day on, Kunta wouldn't look in the direction of that
hut whenever he was outside.  But he couldn't quell his curiosity about the
fact that after each evening's meal, most of the other blacks hastened to
gather at that last hut.  And, listening intently from within his own
doorway, Kunta could hear the voice of the brown one talking almost steadily.
Sometimes the others burst into laughter, and at intervals he could hear
them barraging him with questions.  Who or what was he, Kunta ached to know.

In midafternoon about two weeks later, the brown one chanced to be emerging
from the privy at the very moment Kunta was approaching it.

The brown one's bulky white arm covering was gone, and his hands were
plaiting two corn shucks as the furious Kunta rapidly crutched on past.
Sitting inside, Kunta's head whirled with the insults he wished he could have
expressed.  When he came back outside, the brown one was calmly standing
there, his matter-of-fact expression as if nothing had ever happened between
them.  Still twisting and plaiting corn shucks between his fingers, he
beckoned with his head for Kunta to follow him.

It was so totally unexpected--and disarming--that Kunta found himself
following the brown one back to his cabin without a word.  Obediently, Kunta
sat down on the stool the brown one pointed to and watched as his host seated
himself on the other stool, still plaiting.  Kunta wondered if he knew that
he was plaiting much the same as Africans did.

After a while more of reflective silence, the brown one began speaking: "I
been hearin' 'bout you so mad.  You lucky dey ain't kilt you.  Dey could of,
an' been inside de law.  Jes' like when dat white man broke my hand 'cause I
got tired of fiddlin'.  Law say anybody catch you 'scapin' can kill you and
no punishment for him.  Dat law gits read out again eve'y six months in white
folks' churches.  Looka here, don't start me on white folks' laws.  Startin'
up a new settlement, dey firs' builds a courthouse, fo' passin' more laws;
nex' buildin's a church to prove dey's Christians.  I b'lieve all dat
Virginia's House of Burgess do is pass more laws 'against niggers.

It's a law niggers can't carry no gun, even no stick that look like a club.
Law say twenty lashes you get caught widdout a travelin' pass, ten lashes ifn
you 274 ALEX HALEY

looks white folks in dey eyes, thirty lashes if'n you raises your hand
'against a white Christian.  Law say no nigger preachin' less'n a white man
dere to listen; law say can't be no nigger funeral if dey think it's a
meetin'.  Law say cut your ear off ifn white folks swear you lied, both ears
if dey claim you lied twice.  Law say you kill anybody white, you hang; kill
not her nigger, you jes' gits whipped.

Law say reward a Indian Catchin' a 'scaped nigger wid all de tobacco dat
Indian can carry.  Law 'against teachin' any nigger to read or write, or
givin' any nigger any book.  Dey's even a law 'against niggers beatin' any
drums any dat African stuff.  "

Kunta sensed that the brown one knew he couldn't understand, but that he both
liked to talk and feel that Kunta's listening might somehow bring him at
least closer to comprehension.  Looking at the brown one's face as he spoke,
and listening to his tone, Kunta felt he almost could understand.  And it
made him want to both laugh and cry that someone was actually talking to him
as one human being to another.

" " Bout your foot, looka here, it ain't jes' foots and arms but dicks an'
nuts gits cut off.  I seen plenty ruined niggers like dat still workin'.
Seen niggers beat till meat cut off dey bones.  Nigger womens full of baby
gits beat lyin' face down over a hole dug for dey bellies.  Niggers gits
scraped raw, den covered with turpentine or salt, den rubbed wid straw.
Niggers caught talkin' 'bout revolt made to dance on hot embers tildey falls.
Ain't hardly nothin' ain't done to niggers, an' if dey die 'cause of it,
ain't no crime long as dey's owned by whoever done it, or had it done.  Dat's
de law.  An' if you thinks dat's bad, you ought to hear what folks tell gits
did to dem niggers dat some slave boats sells crost the water on dem West
Indies sugar plantations.  "

Kunta was still there listening and trying to understand when a
first-kafo-sized boy came in with the brown one's evening meal.  When he saw
Kunta there, he dashed out and soon returned with a covered plate for him,
too.  Kunta and the brown one wordlessly ate together, and then Kunta
abruptly rose to leave, knowing that the others would soon be coming to the
hut, but the brown one's gesture signaled Kunta to stay.

As the others began arriving a few minutes later, none were able to mask
their surprise at seeing Kunta there ROOTS 275

particularly Bell, who was one of the last to show up.  Like most of the
rest, she simply nodded--but with the trace of a smile, it seemed to Kunta.
In the gathering darkness, the brown one proceeded to hold forth for the
group as he had done for Kunta, who guessed that he was telling them some
kind of stories.  Kunta could tell when a story ended, for abruptly they
would all laugh--or ask questions.  Now and then Kunta recognized some of the
words that had become familiar to his ears.

When he went back to his own hut, Kunta was in a turmoil of emotion about
mingling with these black ones.  Sleepless late that night, his mind still
tumbling with conflicts, he recalled something Omoro had said once when Kunta
had refused to let go of a choice mango after Lamin begged for a bite: "When
you clench your fist, no one can put anything in your hand, nor can your hand
pick up anything."

But he also knew that his father would be in the fullest of agreement with
him that, no matter what, he must never become anything like these black
people.  Yet each night, he felt strangely drawn to go among them at the hut
of the brown one.  He resisted the temptation, but almost every afternoon
now, Kunta would hobble over to visit with the brown one when he was alone.

"Git my fingers back to workin' right to fiddle again," he said while weaving
his corn shucks one day.

"Any kin of luck, dis massa here go 'head an' buy me an' hire me out.  I done
fiddled all over Virginia, make good money for him an' me both.  Ain't much I
ain't seen an' done, even ifn you don't know what I'm talkin' 'bout.  White
folks says all Africans knows is livin' in grass huts an runnin' 'roun'
killin' an' eatin' one not her

He paused in his monologue, as if expecting some kind of reaction, but Kunta
just sat there watching and listening impassively and fingering his sap hie
charm.

"See what I mean?  You got to put away all dat stuff," said the brown one,
pointing to the charm.

"Give it up.  You ain't going' nowheres, so you might's well face facks an'
start fittin' in, Toby, you hear?"

Kunta's face flashed with anger.

"Kunta Kinte!"  he blurted, astonished at himself.

The brown one was equally amazed.

"Looka here, he can talk!  But I'm tellin' you, boy, you got to for git all
dat 276 ALEX HALEY

African talk.  Make white folks mad an' scare niggers.  Yo' name Toby.

Dey calls me Fiddler.  " He pointed to himself.  " Say dat.  Fiddler!  "

Kunta looked at him blankly, though he understood exactly what Be meant.

"Fiddler!  I's a fiddler.  Understan'--fiddler?"  He made a sawing motion
across his left arm with the other hand.  This time Kunta wasn't pretending
when he looked blank.

Exasperated, the brown one got up and brought from a corner the oddly shaped
box that Kunta had seen him arrive with.  Opening it, he lifted out an even
more oddly shaped light brown wooden thing with a slender black neck and four
taut, thin strings running almost its length.  It was the same musical
instrument he had heard the old man play at the other farm.

"Fiddle!"  exclaimed the brown one.

Since they were alone, Kunta decided to say it.  He repeated the sound:
"Piddle."

Looking pleased, the brown one put the fiddle away and closed the case.
Then, glancing around, he pointed.  "Bucket!"  Kunta repeated it, fixing in
his head what that thing was.

"Now, water!"  Kunta repeated it.

After they had gone through a score or more of new words, the brown one
pointed silently at the fiddle, the bucket, water, chair, corn shucks and
other objects, his face a question mark for Kunta to repeat the right words
for all of them.  A few of the names he promptly repeated; he fumbled with a
few others and was corrected; and some sounds he was unable to say at all.
The brown one refreshed him on those, then reviewed him on them all.  "You
ain't dumb as you looks," he grunted by suppertime.

The lessons continued through the following days and stretched into weeks.
To Kunta's astonishment, he began to discover that he was becoming able not
only to understand but also to make himself understood to the brown one in a
rudimentary way.  And the main thing he wanted him to understand was why he
refused to surrender his name or his heritage, and why he would rather die a
free man on the run than live out his life as a slave.  He didn't have the
words to tell it as he wished, but he knew the brown one understood, for he
frowned and shook his head.  One afternoon not long afterward, arriving at
the brown one's hut, Kunta found another visitor already there.  It was the
old man he'd seen now and then hoeing in the ROOTS 277

flower garden near the big house.  With a glance at the brown one's affirming
nod, Kunta sat down.

The old man began to speak.

"Fiddler here tell me you run away four times.  You see what it got you.
Jes' hopes you done learned your lesson like I done.

"Cause you ain't done nothin' new.  My young days, I run off so much dey near
'bout tore my hide off 'fore I got it in my head ain't nowhere to run to.
Run two states away, dey jes' tell about it in dey papers an' sooner later
you gits cotched an nearly kilt, an' win' up right back where you come from.
Ain't hardly nobody ain't thought about runnin'.  De grin- run' est niggers
thinks about it.

But ain't nobody I ever knowed ever got away.  Time you settled down and made
de best of things de way dey is, 'stead of wastin' yo' young years, like I
did, plottin' what cain't be done.  I done got of an wore out now.  Reckon
since you been born I been actin' like de no-good, lazy, shiftless,
head-scratchin' nigger white folks says us is.  Only reason massa keep me
here, he know I ain't got no good auction value, an' he git more out of me
jes' halfway doin' de gardenin'.  But I hears tell from Bell massa gwine put
you to workin' wid me tomorrow.  "

Knowing that Kunta had understood hardly any of what the gardener had said,
the fiddler spent the next half hour explaining what the old man had told
him--only slowly and more simply, in words Kunta was familiar with.  He had
mixed feelings about nearly everything the gardener had said.  He understood
that the old man meant well by his advice--and he was beginning to believe
that escape was indeed impossible--but even if he never got away, he could
never pay the price of giving up who and what he had been born in order to
live out his years without another beating.  And the thought of spending them
as a crippled gardener filled him with rage and humiliation.  But perhaps
just for a while, until he got his strength back.  And it might be good to
get his mind off himself and his hands in the soil again--even if it wasn't
his own.

The next day, the old gardener showed Kunta what to do.  As he chopped away
at the weeds that seemed to spring up daily among the vegetables, so did
Kunta.  As he plucked tomato worms and potato bugs from the plants and
squashed them underfoot, so did Kunta.  They got along well, but apart from
working side by side, they 278 ALEX HALEY

didn't communicate much, either.  Usually the old man would only make grunts
and gestures whenever Kunta needed to be shown how to do some new task, and
Kunta, without responding, simply did as he was told.

He didn't mind the silence; as a matter of fact, his ears needed a few hours'
rest each day between conversations with the fiddler, who ran his mouth every
minute they were together.

That night after the evening meal, Kunta was sitting in the doorway of his
hut when the man called Gildon--who made the horse and mule collars and also
shod the black people--walked up to him and held out a pair of shoes.  At the
orders of the "massa," he said he had made them especially for Kunta.  Taking
them and nodding his thanks, ^ Kunta turned them over and over in his hands
before deciding to try them on.  It felt strange to have such things | on his
feet, but they fit perfectly--even though the front : half of the right shoe
was stuffed with cotton.  The shoe- ?  maker bent down to tie the lacings,
then suggested that Kunta get up and walk around in them to see how they.  "
felt.  The left shoe was fine, but he felt tiny stinging sensations in his
right foot as he walked awkwardly and gingerly around outside his hut without
the crutches.

Seeing his discomfort, the shoemaker said that was because of the T stump,
not the shoe, and he would get used to it.  ; Later that day, Kunta walked a
bit farther, testing, but the right foot was still uncomfortable, so he
removed a little of the cotton stuffing and put it back on.  It felt better,
and finally he dared to put his full weight on that foot, : and there wasn't
any undue pain.  Every now and then he would continue to experience the
phantom pain of his right toes aching, as he had nearly every day since he :
started walking around, and he would glance downward-- always with
surprise--to find that he didn't have any.  But he kept practicing walking
around, and feeling better than he let his face show; he had been afraid that
he would always have to walk with crutches.

That same week the massa's buggy returned from a trip, and the black driver,
Luther, hurried to Kunta's hut, beckoning him down to the fiddler's, where
Kunta watched him say something, grinning broadly.

Then with gestures toward the big house and with selected key words, the
fiddler made Kunta nod in understanding that Massa ROOTS 279

William Waller, the toubob who lived in the big house, now owned Kunta.

"Luther say he just got a deed to you from his brother who had you at first,
so you his now."  As usual, Kunta did not let his face show his feelings.  He
was angry and ashamed that anyone could "own" him; but he was also deeply
relieved, for he had feared that one day he would be taken back to that other
"plantation," as he now knew the toubob farms were called.  The fiddler
waited until Luther had left before he spoke again--partly to Kunta and
partly to himself.

"Niggers here say Massa William a good master, an' I seen worse.  But ain't
none of 'em no good.  Dey all lives off us niggers.  Niggers is the biggest
thing dey got."

CHAPTER 52

Almost every day now, when work was done, Kunta Would return to his hut and
after his evening prayer would scratch up the dirt in a little square on his
floor and draw Arabic characters in it with a stick, then sit looking for a
long time at what he had written, often until supper.  Then he would rub out
what he had written, and it would be time to go down and sit among the others
as the fiddler talked.

Somehow his praying and his studying made it all right to mix with them.
That way, it seemed to him he could remain himself without having to remain
by himself.  Anyway, if they had been in Africa, there would have been
someone like the fiddler to go to, only he would have been a wandering
musician and griot traveling from one village to the next and singing as he
played his kora or his balafon in between the telling of fascinating stories
drawn from his adventures.

Just as it had been done in Africa, Kunta had also begun to keep track of the
passing of time by dropping a small pebble into a gourd on the morning after
each new moon.  First he had dropped into the gourd 12 rounded, 280 ALEX
HALEY

multicolored stones for the 12 moons he guessed he'd spent on the first
toubob farm; then he had dropped in six more for the time he'd been here on
this new farm; and then he had carefully counted out 204 stones for the 17
rains he'd reached when he was taken from Juffure, and dropped them into the
gourd.  Adding them all up, he figured that he was now into his nineteenth
rain.

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 ROOTS 281

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 head loads 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 282 ALEX HALEY

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 pot liquor 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 the 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.

"Nimblel 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 in his chair, he added,

"Harder clan dat."

The fiddler grinned.

"You awright, African!"

CHAPTER 53

The "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 corn shuck
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 284 ALEX HALEY

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 pitch forking 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.

ROOTS 285

"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 mass as
children.

The following crispy cold morning saw the starting of new tasks.

Kunta watched as the women mixed hot melted tallow with woo dash 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 286 ALEX HALEY

"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 corn shucks 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
ROOTS 287

to spin woolen thread from which they would weave cloth for the making of
winter clothes.

The garden's plowing, planting, and cultivating went by for Kunta in a
sweating blur of dawns to darks.  Early in the mid-summer month they called

"July," those who worked out in the fields would return exhausted to their
huts every night as they pressed to complete the last hoeing of grass from
around the waist-high cotton and corn that was heavy with tasseled heads.  It
was hard work, but at least there was plenty to eat in the storehouses that
had been filled to^verflowing the past fall.  At this time in Juffure, Kunta
thought, the people's stomachs would be aching as they made soup from roots,
grub worms grass, and anything else they could find, because the crops and
fruits so lushly green were not yet ripe.

The "laying by" had to be finished before the second "Sunday" in July, Kunta
learned, when the blacks from most of the plantations in this area--which was
called "Spotsylvania County" --would be permitted to travel someplace to join
in some kind of "camp meetin'."  Since, whatever it was, it had to do with
their Allah, no one even suggested that Kunta go along with the more than
twenty of them who left very early that Sunday morning, packed into a wagon
whose use Massa Waller had approved.

Nearly everyone was gone for the next few days--so many that few would have
been there to notice if Kunta had tried to run away again--but he knew that
even though he had learned to get around all right and make himself fairly
useful, he would never be able to get very far before some slave catcher
caught up with him again.  Though it shamed him to admit it, he had begun to
prefer life as he was allowed to live it here on this plantation to the
certainty of being captured and probably killed if he tried to escape again.
Deep in his heart, he knew he would never see his home again, and he could
feel something precious and irretrievable dying inside of him forever.  But
hope remained alive; though he might never see his family again, perhaps
someday he might be able to have one of his own.

CHAPTER 54

Another year had passed--so fast that Kunta could hardly believe it--and the
stones in his gourd told him that he had reached his twentieth rain.  It was
cold again, and

"Christmas" was once more in the air.  Though he felt the same as he always
had about the black ones' Allah, they were having such a good time that he
began to feel his own Allah would have no objection to his merely observing
the activities that went on during this festive season.

Two of the men, having received week-long traveling passes from Massa Waller,
were packing to go and visit their mates living on other plantations; one of
the men was going to see a new baby for the first time.  But every hut except
theirs--and Kunta's--was busy with some kind of preparations, chiefly the
fixing up of party clothes with lace and beads, and the taking of nuts and
apples from their storage places.

And up in the big house, all of Bell's pots and pans were bubbling with yams
and rabbits and roast pig--and many dishes made from animals Kunta had never
seen or heard of until he came to this country: turkey, 'coons, 'possums, and
the like.  Though he was hesitant at first, the succulent smells from her
kitchen soon persuaded Kunta to try everything--except for pig, of course.
Nor was he interested in sampling the liquor Massa Waller had promised for
the black ones: two barrels of hard cider, one of wine, and a keg of whiskey
he had brought in his buggy from somewhere else.

Kunta could tell that some of the liquor was being quietly consumed in
advance, no little of it by the fiddler.  And along with the drinkers'
antics, the black children were running around holding dried hog bladders on
sticks closer and closer to fires until each one burst with a loud ROOTS 289

bang amid general laughing and shouting.  He thought it was all unbelievably
stupid and disgusting.

When the day finally came, the drinking and eating began in earnest.

From the door of his hut, Kunta watched as guests of Massa Waller's arrived
for the midday feast, and afterward as the slaves assembled close by the big
house and began to sing, led by Bell, he saw the massa raise the window,
smiling; then he and the other white folks came outside and stood listening,
seeming to be enthralled.  After that the massa sent Bell tq tell the fiddler
to come and play for them, which he did.

Kunta could understand their having to do what they were told, but why did
they seem to enjoy it so much?  And if the whites were so fond of their
slaves that they gave them presents, why didn't they make them really happy
and set them free?  But he wondered if some of these blacks, like pets, would
be able to survive, as he could, unless they were taken care of.

But was he any better than they were?  Was he all that different?

Slowly but surely, he couldn't deny that he was easing into acceptance of
their ways.  He was most troubled about his deepening friendship with the
fiddler.  His drinking of liquor deeply offended Kunta, and yet had not a
pagan the right to be a pagan?  The fiddler's boastfulness also bothered
Kunta, yet he believed that all the fiddler had boasted of was true.  But the
fiddler's crude and irreverent sense of humor, was distasteful to him; and
Kunta had come to dislike intensely hearing the fiddler call him "nigger,"
since he had learned that it was the white man's name for blacks.  But had it
not been the fiddler who had taken it upon himself to teach him to talk?  Was
it not he whose friendship had made it easier for him to feel less of a
stranger with the other blacks?  Kunta decided that he wanted to know the
fiddler better.

Whenever the proper time came, in the best roundabout way he could, he would
ask the fiddler about some of the questions that were in his mind.  But two
more pebbles had been dropped into his gourd before one quiet Sunday
afternoon, when no one was working, he went down to the familiar last hut on
slave row, and found the fiddler in a rare quiet mood.

After exchanging greetings, they were both silent for a 290 ALEX HALEY

time.  Then, just to make conversation, Kunta said he had overheard the
massa's driver, Luther, say that white folks were talking about "taxes"
wherever he drove the massa.  What were taxes, anyway, he wanted to know.

"Taxes is money got to be paid extry on near 'bout anything white folks
buys," replied the fiddler.

"Dat king 'crost de water puts on de taxes to keep him rich."

It was so unlike the fiddler to be so brief that Kunta figured he must be in
a bad mood.  Discouraged, he sat there for a while in silence, but finally he
decided to spit out what was really on his mind: "Where you was 'fo' here?"

The fiddler stared at him for a long, tense moment.  Then he spoke, his voice
cutting.

"I know every nigger here figgerin' 'bout me!

Wouldn't tell nobody else nothin'!  But you diff'rent.  "

He glared at Kunta.

"You know how come you diff'rent?  " Cause you don't know nothin'!  You done
got snatched over here, an' got your foot cut, you thinks you been through
all dey is!  Well, you ain't de only one had it bad.  " His voice was angry.

"You ever tells what I'm gonna tell you, I'll catch you upside de head!"

"I ain't!"  Kunta declared.

The fiddler leaned forward and spoke softly so as not to be overheard.

"Massa I had in No'th Ca'lina got drowned.  Ain't nobody's bid ness how.
Anyway, same night I lit out, an' he ain't had no wife or young'uns to claim
me.  I hid out with Injuns 'til I figured it was safe to leave an' git here
to Virginia an' keep on fiddlin'."

"What

"Virginia'?"  asked Kunta.

"Man, you really don't know nothin', does you?  Virginia the colony you
livin' in, if you want to call dis livin'."

"What's a colony?"

"You even dumber'n you look.  Dey's thirteen colonies that go to make up this
country.  Down south of here there's the Ca'linas, and up north they's
Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and a bunch of others.

I ain't never been up dere, an' neither has most niggers.  I hear tell lotta
white folks up dere don't hold with slavery and sets us folk free.  Myself,
I'm kind of a half-free nigger.  I have to be roun' some massa 'case patty
rollers ever catches me.  " Kunta didn't understand, but he acted as if he
did, since he didn't feel like getting insulted again.

ROOTS 291

"You ever seen Injuns?"  the fiddler demanded.

Kunta hesitated.

"I seen some."

"Dey was here 'fo' white folks.  White folks tell you one of dem name
Columbus discover dis place.  But if he found' Injuns here, he ain't discover
it, is he?"  The fiddler was warming to his subject.

"White man figger whoever somewhere 'fore him don't count.  He call dem
savages."

The fiddler paused to appreciate his wit, and then went on.

"You ever seen Injuns' tee pees Kunta shook his head no.  The fiddler
enclosed three of his spread fingers within a small rag.

"De fingers is poles an' de rag is hides.  Dey lives inside dat."

He smiled.

"Being' from Africa, you prob'ly thinks you knows all dey is 'bout hunting'
and like that, but ain't nobody hunts or travels good as Injuns.  Once one go
somewhere it's a map in his head how he went.

But Injun mammies--dey calls 'em squaws--carries dey young'uns on dey backs,
like I hears y'all's mammies does in Africa.  "

Kunta was surprised that the fiddler knew that, and ouldn't help showing it.
The fiddler smiled again and continued the lesson.

"Some Injuns hates niggers, an' some likes us.  Niggers an' lan' is Injuns'
big troubles with white folks.  White folks wants all the Injuns' land and
hates Injuns what hides niggers!"  The fiddler's eyes searched Kunta's face.

"Y'all Africans and Injuns made de same mistake--lettin' white folks into
where you live.  You offered him to eat and sleep, then first thing you know
he kickin' you out or lockin' you up!"

The fiddler paused again.  Then suddenly he burst out: "What put me out with
you African niggers, looka here!  I knowed five or six ack like you!  Don't
know how come I took up wid you in de firs' place!  You git over here
figgerin' niggers here ought to be like you is!  How you 'spec we gon' know
'bout Africa?  We ain't never been dere, an' ain't going' neither!"  Glaring
at Kunta, be lapsed into silence.

And fearful of provoking another outburst, Kunta soon left without another
word, rocked onto his heels by what the fiddler had said to him.  But the
more he thought about it back in his hut, the better he felt about it.  The
fiddler had taken off his mask; that meant he was beginning to trust Kunta.
For the first time in his acquaintance with 292 ALEX HALEY

anyone in the three rains since he had been stolen from his homeland, Kunta
was actually beginning to know someone.

CHAPTER 55

Over the next several days, as he worked in the garden, Kunta thought a great
deal about how long it had taken him to realize how little he really knew
about the fiddler, and about how much more there was to know about him.
Almost certainly, he reflected, no less of a mask was still being worn for
him by the old gardener, whom Kunta had been going to visit now and then.
And he didn't know Bell much better, though he and she had some daily
exchange of talk--or rather, Kunta mostly listened while he ate whatever food
she gave him; but it was always about small and , impersonal matters.  It
occurred to him how both Bell and the gardener had sometimes started to say
something, or hinted at something, but then never finished.  They were both
cautious people in general, but it seemed they were especially so with him.
He decided to get to know them both better.  On his next visit to the old
gardener, Kunta began in his indirect Mandinka way by asking about something
the fiddler had told him.  Kunta said he had heard about patty rollers but he
was uncertain who or what they were.

"Dey's low-down po* white trash dat ain't never owned a nigger in dey lives!"
the old gardener said heatedly.

"It's a of' Virginia law to patrol de roads, or anywhere else niggers is, an'
whip an' jail any of 'em gits cotched widdout a writ-out pass from dey massa.
An' who gits hired to do it is dem po' whites what jes' loves cot ching an'
beatin' somebody else's niggers 'cause dey ain't got none.  What's behind it,
y'understan', all white folks scared to death dat any loose nigger is
plannin' a re-volt.  Fact, ain't nothin' patty rollers loves more'n claimin'
to suspicion some ROOTS 293

nigger, an' bustin' in an' strippin' him buck naked right before his wife an'
young'uns an' beatin' him bloody.  " , Seeing Kunta's interest, and pleased
by his visit, the old gardener went on: " Massa we got don't 'prove a dat.
It's how come he don't have no oberseer.  He say he don't want nobody beatin'
his niggers.  He tells his niggers to obersee deyselves, jes' do de work like
dey know to, an' don't never break none a his rules.  He swear sun won't set
here on no nigger break his rules.  "

Kunta wondered what the rules were, but the gardener kept on talking.

"Reason massa like he is 'cause he of a family was rich even 'fore dey come
here from dat England 'crost de water.  Dem Wallers always been what most
mass as jes' tries to act like dey is.

"Cause most of dese mass as ain't nothin' but coon hunters what got hole of a
piece of lan' an' one or two niggers dey worked half to death, an' jes' kep'
on growin' from dat.

"Ain't many plantations got a whole lot of slaves.  Mos* of 'em jes' maybe
anywhere from one to five or six niggers.  Us twenty here make dis one pretty
big.  Two out of every three white folks ain't got no slaves at all, dat's
what I beared.  Real big plantations with fifty or a hunnud slaves is mostly
where de black dirt is; dem river bottoms like in Louisiana, Miss'ippi, an'
Alabama got some, too; an' dem coasts a Geo'gia an' South Ca'lina where dey
grows rice."

"How of' you?"  Kunta asked abruptly.

The gardener looked at him.

"Older'n you or anybody else thinks I is."  He sat as if musing for a moment.

"I beared the Indians' war whoopin' when I was a chile."

After a silent moment with his head -down, he glanced up at Kunta and began
singing,

"Ah yah, tair umbam, boowah" -- Kunta sat astounded.

"Kee lay zee day nic olay, man lun dee nic o lay ah wah nee" Stopping, the
old man said,

"My mammy used to sing dat.  Say she got it from her mammy, who come from
Africa, same as you did.  You know by dem sounds where she come from?"

"Soun' like Serere tribe," said Kunta.

"But I don't know dem words.  I beared Serere spoke on the boat what brung
me."

The old gardener looked furtively around.

"Gon' shut up wid dat singin'.  Some nigger hear it an' tell massa.  White
folks don' want no niggers talkin' no African."

Kunta had been about to say that there was no question 294 ALEX HALEY

the old man was a fellow Gambian, of Wolof blood, with their high noses and
flat lips and skins even deeper black than most other Gambian tribes.  But
when the gardener said what he said, he decided it was better not to speak of
such things.  So he changed the subject, asking where the old man was from
and how he had ended up on this plantation.  The gardener didn't answer right
away.  But finally, he said,

"Nigger suffered a lot like I is learn a lot," and he looked carefully at
Kunta, appearing to be deciding whether or not to go on.

"I were a good man once.  I could ben' a crowbar over my leg.  I could lit a
sack of meal dat would fell a mule.  Or I could lif a grown man by he belt
wif my arm straight out.  But I got worked an' beat near 'bout to death 'fo'
my massa what done it sign me over to dis massa to pay a bill."  He paused.

"Now I done got enfeebled, I jes' wants to res' out whatever time I got let."

His eyes searched Kunta,

"Sho' don' know how come I'm tellin' you dis.  I ain't really bad off as I
ack.  But massa won't sell me long as he think I'm bad off.  I seen you
caught on how to garden some, though."  He hesitated.

"I could git back out dere an he'p ifn you wants me to--but not too much.  I
jes' ain't much good no mo'," he said sadly.

Kunta thanked the old man for offering, but reassured him that he'd be able
to get along fine.  A few minutes later he excused himself, and on his way
back to his hut, got angry with himself for not feeling more compassion
toward the old man.  He was sorry he had been through so much, but he
couldn't help turning a cold ear toward anyone who just rolled over and gave
up.

The very next day, Kunta decided to see if he could get Bell talking too.
Since he knew that Massa Waller was her favorite subject, he began by asking
why he wasn't married.  "Him sho' was married--him an' Miss Priscilla, same
year I come here.  She was pretty as a hummin'bird.  Wasn't hardly no
bigger'n one, neither.  Dat's how come she died birthin' dey first baby.  Was
a little gal; it died, too.

Terri- blest time I guess anybody ever seen 'roun' here.  An' massa ain't
never been "the same man since.  Jes' work, work, work, seem like sometime he
tryin' to kill his self He cain't bear to think a nobody sick or hurt he can
he'p.  Massa would doctor a sick cat quick as he would some hurt nigger he
hear 'bout, like dat fiddler you always talkin' to--or like when you was
brung here.  He got so mad 'bout how ROOTS 295

dey done your foot, he even bought you away from his own brother John.

"Co'se wunt his doin', it was dem po' cracker nigger catchers he hired, who
say you tried to kill 'em."

Kunta listened, realizing that just as he was only beginning to appreciate
the individual depths and dimensions of the black ones, it had never occurred
to him that even white folks could also have human sufferings, though their
ways in general could never be forgiven.  He found himself wishing that he
could speak the white folks' tongue well enough to say all this to Bell--and
to tell her the story his old grandmother Nyo Boto had told him about the boy
who tried to help the trapped crocodile, the story Nyo Boto always ended with,

"In the world, the payment for good is often bad."

Thinking of home reminded Kunta of something he'd been wanting to tell Bell
for a long time, and this seemed like a good moment.  Except for her brown
color, he told her proudly, she looked almost like a handsome Mandinka woman.

He didn't have long to wait for her response to this great compliment.

"What fool stuff you talkin' 'bout?"  she said irately.

"Don' know how come white folks keep on emptyin' out boat loads a you Africa
Diggers!"

CHAPTER 56

For the next month.  Bell wouldn't speak to Kunta--and even carried her own
basket back to the big house after she had come for the vegetables.  Then,
early one Monday morning, she came rushing out to the garden, eyes wide with
excitement, and blurted,

"Sheriff jes' rid off!  He tol' massa been some big fightin' up Nawth
somewhere call Boston!  It's dem white folks so mad 'bout dem king's taxes
from 'crost de big water.  Massa got Luther hitchin' de buggy to git to de
county seat.  He sho' upset!"

298 ALEX HALEY

Suppertime found everyone clustered around the fiddler's hut for his and the
gardener's opinions, the gardener being slave row's oldest person, the
fiddler its best traveled and most worldly.

"When it was?"  somebody asked, and the gardener said, "Well, anything we
hears from up Nawth got to of happened a while back."

The fiddler added,

"I beared dat from up roun' where dat Boston is, ten days is de quickest dat
fast bosses can git word here to Virginia."

In the deepening dusk, the massa's buggy returned.  Luther hurried to slave
row with further details he had picked up: "Dey's tellin' it dat one night
some a dem Boston peoples got so mad 'bout dem king's taxes dey marched on
dat king's soldiers.  Dem soldiers commence to shootin', an' firs' one kilt
was a nigger name a Cdspus Attucks.  Dey callin' it

"De Boston Massacree'!"

Little else was talked of for the next few days, as Kunta listened, unsure
what it was all about and why white folks--and even the blacks--were so agog
about whatever was happening so far away.  Hardly a day passed without two or
three passing slaves "Yooo-hooo-ah-hoooing" from the big road with a new
rumor.  And Luther kept bringing regular reports from house slaves, stable
hands and other drivers he talked with on every journey the massa made to
attend sick people or to discuss what was going on in New England with other
mass as in their big houses, or the county seat or nearby towns.

"White folks ain't got no secrets," the fiddler said to Kunta.

"Dey's swamped deyselves wid niggers.  Ain't much dey do, hardly nowheres dey
go, it ain't niggers listenin'.  If dey eatin' an' talkin', nigger gal
servin' 'em actia* dumber'n she is, 'memberin' eve'y word she hear.

Even when white folks gits so scared dey starts spellin' out words, if any
niggers roun', well, plenty house niggers ain't long repeatin' it letter for
letter to de nearest nigger what can spell an' piece together what was said.
I mean dem niggers don' sleep 'fore dey knows what dem white folks was
talkin' 'bout.  "

What was happening "up Nawth" continued to arrive piece by piece through the
summer and into the fall.  Then, as time passed, Luther began to report that
as exercised as white folks were about the taxes, that wasn't their only
ROOTS 297

worry.

"Dey's sayin' it's some counties got twice many niggers as white folks.
Dey's worryin' dat king 'crost the water might start offerin' us niggers
freedom to fight 'against dese white folks."

Luther waited for the gasps of his audience to subside.

"Fact," he said, "done beared some white folks so scared, done took to
lockin' dey doors at night, done even quit talkin' roun' dey house niggers."

K-until lay on his mattress at night for weeks afterward thinking about
"freedom."  As far as he could tell, it meant having no massa at all, doing
as one wanted, going wherever one pleased.  But it was ridiculous, he decided
finally, to think that white folks would bring blacks all the way across the
big water to work as slaves--and then set them free.  It would never happen.

Shortly before Christmas, some of Massa Waller's relatives arrived for a
visit, and their black buggy driver was eating his fill in Bell's kitchen
while regaling her with the latest news.

"Done beared datover in Geo'gia," he said, "nigger name a George Leile, de
Baptis' white folks done give 'im a license to preach to niggers up an' down
de Savannah River.  Hear de claim he gon' start a African Baptis' church in
Savannah.  First time I heard 'bout any nigger church.  .  .

"Bell said,

"I heard 'bout one 'fo' now in Petersburg, right here in Virginia.  But tell
me, you beared anythin' about de white folks' troubles up Nawth?"

"Well, I hear tell while back whole lotta impo'tant white folks had a big
meetin' in dat Philadelphia.  Dey call it de First Continental Congress."

Bell said she bad heard that.  In fact, she had painstakingly read it in
Massa Waller's Virginia Gazette, and then she had shared the information with
the old gardener and the fiddler.  They were the only ones who knew she could
read a little.  When they had spoken about it recently, the gardener and the
fiddler had agreed that Kunta shouldn't be told of her ability.  True, he
knew how to keep his mouth shut, and he had come to understand and express
things unexpectedly well for anyone from Africa, but they felt that he
couldn't yet fully appreciate how serious the consequences would be if the
massa got the slightest hint that she could read: He would sell her away that
same day.

By early the next year--1775--almost no news from any source was without some
further development in Phil298 ALEX HALEY

adelphia.  Even from what Kunta heard and could understand, it was clear that
the white folks were moving toward a crisis with the king across the big
water in the place called England.  And there was a lot of exclaiming about
some Massa Patrick Henry having cried out,

"Give me liberty or give me death!"  Kunta liked that, but he couldn't
understand how somebody white could say it; white folks looked pretty free to
him.

Within a month came news that two whites named William Dawes and Paul Revere
had raced on horses to warn somebody of hundreds of king's soldiers heading
for somewhere called

"Concord" to destroy rifles and bullets that were stored there.  And soon
afterward they heard that in a furious battle at

"Lexington," some

"Minutemen" had lost only a handful while killing over two hundred king's
soldiers.  Scarcely two days later came word that yet another thousand of
them had fallen in a bloody battle at a place called

"Bunker Hill."

"White folks at the county seat is laughin', sayin' dem king's soldiers
wears red coats not to show de blood," said Luther.

"Heared some a dat blood getting' spilt by niggers fightin' long side white
folks."  Wherever he went now, he said, he kept on hearing that Virginia mass
as were showing greater than usual signs of mistrust toward their
slaves"--even dey oldest house niggers!"

Relishing his new importance along slave row, Luther arrived home from a trip
in June to find an anxious audience awaiting his latest news.

"It's some Massa George Washington got picked to run a army.

Nigger tol' me he's beared he got a big plantation wid plenty a slaves.  " He
said he had also heard that some New England slaves had been set free to help
fight the king's redcoats.

"I knowed it!"  the fiddler exclaimed.

"Niggers gon' git dragged in it an' kilt, jes' like dat French an' Indian
War.  Den soon's it's over, white folks be right back whippin' niggers!"

"Maybe not," said Luther.

"Heared some white folks call themselves Quakers done put together a
AntiSlavery Society, up in dat Philadelphia.  Reckon dey's some white folks
jes' don't believe in niggers being' slaves."

"Me neither," put in the fiddler.

The frequent bits of news that Bell contributed would sound as if she had
been discussing them with the massa himself, but she finally admitted that
she had been listening ROOTS 299

at the keyhole of the dining room whenever the massa had guests, for not long
ago he had curtly told her to serve them and leave immediately, closing the
door behind her; then she had heard him lock it

"An' I knows dat man bettern his mammy!"  she muttered indignantly.

"What he say in dere after he lock de do'?"  asked the fiddler impatiently.

"Well, tonight he say don't seem no way not to fight dem English folks.  He
speck dey gon' send big boat loads a soldiers over here.  He say it's over
two hunnud thousand slaves just in Virginia, an' de biggest worry is if dem
Englishmans ever riles up us niggers 'against white folks.  Massa say he feel
loyal to de king as any man, but ain't nobody can stan' dem taxes."

"Gen'l Washington done stopped 'em taking any more niggers in the Army," said
Luther, "but some free niggers up Nawth is arguin' dey's part of dis country
an' wants to fight."

"Dey sho' gon' git dey chance, jes' let 'enough white folks git kilt,"

said the fiddler.

"Dem free niggers is crazy."

But the news that followed two weeks later was even bigger.  Lord Dunmore,
the royal governor of Virginia, had proclaimed freedom for slaves who would
leave their plantations to serve on his English fleet of fishing boats and
frigates.

"Massa fit to be tied," reported Bell.

"Man come to dinner say lotta talk 'bout ehainin' or jailin' slaves
suspicioned a joinin' up--or even thinkin' 'bout it--an' maybe kidnapin' an'
hangin' dat Lord Dunmore."

Kunta had been given the job of watering and feeding the horses of the
flushed, agitated mass as who visited the grim-jawed Massa Waller.

And Kunta told how some of the horses had sweat-soaked flanks from long, hard
riding, and how some of the mass as were even driving their own buggies.  One
of them, he told the others, was John Waller, the massa's brother, the man
who had bought Kunta when they took him off the boat eight years before.
After all that time, he had known that hated face at first glance, but the
man had tossed the reins to Kunta with no apparent recognition.

"Don' ack so surprised," said the fiddler.

"Massa like him ain't gone say howdy to no nigger.

"Specially if'n he 'members who you is."

300 ALEX HALEY

Over the next few weeks.  Bell learned at the keyhole of the massa's and his
visitors' alarm and fury that thousands of Georgia, South Carolina, and
Virginia slaves were said to be boldly fleeing their plantations to join Lord
Dunmore.  Some said they had heard that most of the fleeing slaves were
simply heading for the North.  But all the whites agreed on the need to start
breeding more bloodhounds.

Then one day Massa Waller called Bell into the living room and twice read
slowly aloud a marked item in his Virginia Gazette.  He ordered Bell to show
it to the slaves, and handed the paper to her.  She did as she was told, and
they reacted just as she had--less with fear than anger.  "Be not, ye
Negroes, tempted to ruin yourselves .  .  .

whether we suffer or not, if you desert us, you most certainly will.  "

Before returning the Gazette, Bell spelled out for her own information
several other news items in the privacy of her cabin, and among them were
reports of actual or predicted slave revolts.  Later the massa shouted at her
for not returning the paper before supper, and Bell apologized in tears.  But
soon she was sent out again with another message--this time the news that
Virginia's House of Burgesses had decreed "death without benefit of clergy
for all Negro or other slaves conspiring to rebel or make insurrections."

"What do it mean?"  a field hand asked, and the fiddler replied, "Uprise, an'
white folks won't call no preacher when dey kills you!"

Luther heard that some white folks called "'lories," and some other kind
called

"Scotchmen," were joining with the English.

"An' sheriff's nigger tol' me dat Lord Dunmore's ruinin' river plantations,
burnin' big houses, an' tellin' de niggers he free 'em if'n dey come on an'
jine 'im."  Luther ; told how in Yorktown and other towns, any blacks caught
out at night were being whipped and jailed.  ; Christmas that year was but a
word.  Lord Dunmore was reported to have barely outraced a mob onto the
safety of his flagship.  And a week later came the incredible news .  that
Dunmore, with his fleet off Norfolk, had ordered the city emptied within one
hour.  Then his guns began a bombardment that set raging fires, and much of
Norfolk had .  been reduced to ashes.  In what was left, Bell reported, '.

water and food were scarce, and fever had broken out, ', killing so many that
Hampton Roads' waters were dotted ; ROOTS 301

with bloated bodies drifting ashore with the tides.

"Say dey's buryin' 'em in san' and mud," said Luther.

"An' lotta niggers near 'bout starvin' an' scared to death on dem English
boats."

Mulling over all these terrible events, Kunta felt that in some unfathomable
way, all of this suffering must have some meaning, some reason, that Allah
must have willed it.  Whatever was going to happen next, both to black and
white, must be His design.

It was early in 1776 when Kunta and the others heard that a General
Cornwallis had come from England with boatfuls of sailors and soldiers trying
to cross a big

"York River," but a great storm had scattered the boats.  They heard next
that another Continental Congress had met, with a group of mass as from
Virginia moving for complete separation from the English.  Then two months of
minor news passed before Luther returned from the county seat with the news
that after another meeting on July 4, "All the white folks I seen is jes'
carryin' on!  Somethin' 'bout some Decoration a Ind'pen'ence.  Heared 'em say
Massa John Hancock done writ his name real big so the king wouldn't have to
strain none to see it."

On his next trips to the county seat, Luther returned with accounts he had
heard that in Baltimore, a life-sized rag doll "king" had been carted through
the streets, then thrown into a bonfire surrounded by white people shouting

"Tyrant!  Tyrant!"  And in Richmond, rifles had been fired in volleys as
shouting white people waved their torches and drank toasts to each other.
Along the subdued slave row, the old gardener said,

"Ain't nothin' neither way for niggers to holler 'bout.  England or here,
dey's all white folks."

Later that summer.  Bell bustled over to slave row with news from a dinner
guest that the House of Burgesses had just recently passed an act that "say
dey gon' take niggers in the Army as drummers, fifers, or pioneers."

"What's pioneers?"  asked a field hand.

"It mean git stuck up front an' git kilt!"  said the fiddler.

Luther soon brought home an exciting account of a big battle right there in
Virginia that had slaves fighting on both sides.  Amid a hail of musket balls
from hundreds of redcoats and Tories, along with a group of convicts and
blacks, a smaller force of white

"Colonials" and their 302 ALEX HALEY

blacks was driven across a bridge, but in the rear a slave soldier named
Billy Flora had ripped up and hurled away enough planks from the bridge that
the English forces had to stop and withdraw, saving the day for the Colonial
forces.

"Rip up a bridge!  Dat musta been some strong nigger!"  the gardener
exclaimed.

When the French entered the war on the Colonial side in 1778, Bell relayed
reports that one state after another was authorizing the enlisting of slaves
with the promise of freedom when the war was won.

"Now ain't but two states lef dat say dey ain't gon' never let niggers fight,
dat's South Ca'lina an' Geo'gia."

"Dat de only thing good I ever beared 'bout neither one a dem!"  said the
fiddler.

As much as he hated slavery, it seemed to Kuhta that no good could come of
the white folks giving guns to blacks.  First of all, the whites would always
have more guns than the blacks, so any attempt to revolt would end in defeat.
And he thought about how in his own homeland, guns and bullets had been
given by the toubob to evil chiefs and kings, until blacks were fighting
blacks, village against village, and selling those they conquered--their own
people--into chains.

Once Bell heard the massa say that as many as five thousand blacks, both free
and slave, were in the fighting that was going on, and Luther regularly
brought stories of blacks fighting and dying alongside their mass as Luther
also told of some all-black companies from "up Nawth," even one all-black
battalion called

"The Bucks of America " Even dey colonel is a nigger," said Luther.

"His name Middleton."  He looked archly at the fiddler.

"You won't never guess what he is!"

"What you mean?"  said the fiddler.

"He a fiddler, too!  An' it's time to do some fiddlin'!"

Then Luther hummed and sang a new song he had heard in the county seat.  The
catchiness of it was easy to pick up, and soon others were singing it, and
still others beating time with sticks.

"Yankee Doodle came to town, ridin' on a pony.  .  .  ."  And when the
fiddler started playing, the slave row young'uns began to dance and clap
their hands.

With May of 1781 came the astounding story that red ROOTS 303 coats on
horses had ruined Massa Thomas Jefferson's plantation called Monticello.  The
crops had been destroyed, the barn burned, the livestock run off, and all the
horses and thirty slaves had been taken.

"White folks sayin' Virginia got to be saved," Luther reported, and soon
after he told of white joy because General Washington's army was headed there.

"An* niggers a plenty is in it!"

October brought reports that the combined forces of Washington and Lafayette
had poured shot and shell into -Yorktown, attacking England's Cornwallis.
And they soon learned of other battles raging in Virginia, New York, North
Carolina Maryland, and other states.

Then in the third week of the month came the news that set even slave row
shouting: "Cornwallis done surrendered!  War am ober!  Freedom am won!"

Luther barely had time to sleep between buggy journeys now, and the massa was
even smiling again--for the first time in years, said Bell.

"Ev'ywhere I's been, de niggers is hollerin' loud as white folks,"

said Luther.

But he said that slaves everywhere had rejoiced most over their special hero,

"OF Billy" Flora, who had recently been discharged and carried his faithful
musket back to Norfolk.

"Y'all come here!"  Bell shouted, summoning the others on slave row not long
after.

"Massa jes' tol' me dey done named that Philadelphia firs' capital of
Newnited States!"  But it was Luther who told them later,

"Massa Jefferson done put up some kin' of Manumission Ack.  It say mass as
got de right to free niggers, but tell me dem Quakers an' antislavery folks
an' free niggers up Nawth is hollerin' an' going' on 'cause the Aek say mass
as don't have to, not less'n dey wants to."

When General Washington disbanded the army early in November of 1783,
formally ending what most people had begun calling

"The Seven Years' War," Bell told everyone in slave row,

"Massa say gon' be peace now."

"Ain't gon' be no peace, not long as it's white folks," said the fiddler
sourly, " 'cause ain't nothin' dey loves bet- tern killin'."

His glance flicked among the faces around him.

"Jes' watch what I tell you--it's gon' be worsen it was for us niggers."

304 ALEX HALEY

Kunta and the old gardener sat later talking quietly.  "You seen aplenty
since you been here.  How long it's been, anyhow?"  Kunta didn't know, and
that troubled him.

That night, when he was alone, Kunta spent hours carefully arranging into
piles of twelve all of the multicolored pebbles that he had dropped
faithfully into his gourd with each new moon.  He was so stunned by what the
stones finally told him that the gardener never learned the answer to his
question.  Surrounding him there on the dirt floor of his hut were seventeen
piles of stones.  He was thirty-four rains old!  What in the name of Allah
had happened to his life?  He had been in the white man's land as long as he
had lived in Juffure.  Was he still an African, or had he become a "nigger,"
as the others called themselves?  Was he even a man?  He was the same age as
his father when he had seen him last, yet he had no sons of his own, no wife,
no family, no village, no people, no homeland; almost no past at all that
seemed real to him anymore--and no future he could see.

It was as if The Gambia had been a dream he'd had once long ago.  Or was he
still asleep?  And if he was, would he ever waken?

CHAPTER 57

Kunta didn't have long to brood about the future, for a few days later came
news that took the plantation by storm.  A captured runaway house girl
reported Bell breathlessly after the sheriff arrived for a hushed meeting
with the massa behind closed doors, had admitted under a lashing that her
crude escape route had been drawn for her by none other than the massa's
driver, Luther.

Storming out to slave row before Luther could run away, Massa Waller
confronted him with the sheriff and demanded angrily to know if it was true.
Terrified, Luther admitted that it was.  Red-faced with rage, the massa
lifted his arm to strike, but when Luther begged for mercy, he ROOTS 305

lowered it again and stood there staring silently at Luther for a long
moment, tears of fury welling in his eyes.

At last he spoke, very quietly: "Sheriff, put this man under arrest and take
him to jail.  He is to be sold at the next slave auction."

And without another word he turned and walked back to the house, ignoring
Luther's anguished sobs.

Speculation had hardly begun about who would be assigned to replace him as
the massa's driver when Bell came out one night and told Kunta that the massa
wanted to see him right away.  Everyone watched--but no one was surprised--as
he went Gripping into the house behind Bell.

Though he suspected why he had been called, Kunta felt a little scared, for
he had never spoken to the massa or even been beyond Bell's kitchen in the
big house during all his sixteen years on the plantation.

As Bell led him through the kitchen into a hallway, his eyes goggled at the
shining floor and the high, papered walls.  She knocked at a huge carved
door.  He heard the massa say,

"Come in'" and Bell went on inside, turning to beckon expressionlessly to
Kunta.  He couldn't believe the size of the room; it seemed as big as the
inside of the barn.  The polished oaken floor was covered with rugs, and the
walls were hung with paintings and tapestries.  The richly dark, matched
furniture was waxed, and long rows of books sat on recessed shelves.

Massa Waller sat at a desk reading under an oil lamp with a circular shade of
greenish glass, and his finger held his place in his book when, after a
moment, he turned around to face Kunta.

"Toby, I need a buggy driver.  You've grown into a man on this place, and I
believe you're loyal."  His widely set blue eyes seemed to pierce Kunta.

"Bell tells me that you never drink.  I like that, and I've noticed how you
conduct yourself."  Massa Waller paused.  Bell shot a look at Kunta.
"Yassuh, Massa," he said quickly.

"You know what happened to Luther?"  the massa asked.

"Yassuh," said Kunta.  The massa's eyes narrowed, and his voice turned cold
and hard.

"I'd sell you in a minute," he said.

"I'd sell Bell if you two had no better sense."

As they stood there silently, the massa reopened his book.

"All right, start driving me tomorrow.  I'm going to Newport.  I'll show you
the way until you learn."  The massa glanced at Bell.

"Get him the proper clothes.  And 306 ALEX HALEY

tell the fiddler that he'll be replacing Toby in the garden.  "

"Yassuh, Massa," Bell said, as she and Kunta left.

Bell brought him the clothing, but it was the fiddler and the old gardener
who supervised Kunta's dressing early the next morning in the starched and
pressed canvas trousers and cotton hemp shirt.  They didn't look too bad, but
that black string tie they helped him put on next, he felt, made him look
ridiculous.

"Newport ain't nowhere to drive, jes' right up next to Spotsylvania
Courthouse," said the old gardener.

"It's one a de of Waller family big houses."

The fiddler--who by this time had been told of his own new duties as well as
Kunta's--was walking around inspecting him with an expression that revealed
transparently both his pleasure and his jealousy.

"You a sho' nun special nigger now, no two ways 'bout it.  Jes' don't let it
git to yo* head."

It was unnecessary advice for one who--even after all this time--found no
dignity in anything he was made to do for the white man.  But whatever small
excitement Kunta felt at the prospect of being able to leave his garden
behind and widen his horizons--as his uncles Janneh and Saloum had done--was
soon forgotten in the heat of his new duties.

Summoned by his patients at any hour of the day or night, Massa Waller would
call Kunta rushing from his hut to hitch the horses for breakneck rides to
homes sometimes many miles from the plantation down narrow, twisting roads
that were hardly smoother than the countryside around them.  Lurching and
careening over ruts and potholes, laying on the whip until the horses heaved
for breath, Massa Waller clinging to his canopied rear seat, Kunta showed a
knack for the reins that somehow saw them safely to their destination even in
the spring thaw, when the red-clay roads turned into treacherous rivers of
mud.

Early one morning, the massa's brother John came galloping in, frantically
reporting that his wife's labor pains had begun, although it was two months
before the birth had been expected.  Massa John's horse was too exhausted to
return without rest, and Kunta had driven both of them back to Massa John's
barely in the nick of time.  Kunta's ROOTS 307

own overheated horses hadn't cooled down enough for him to give them water
when he heard the shrill cries of a newborn baby.  It was a five-pound girl,
the massa told him on their way home, and they were going to call her Anne.

And so it went.  During that same frantic summer and fall, there was a plague
of black vomiting that claimed victims all over the county--so many that
Massa Waller and Kunta couldn't keep up with them, and soon drove themselves
into fever.  Downing copious dosages of quinine to keep them going, they
saved more lives than they lost.  But Kunta's own life became a blur of
countless big-house kitchens, catnaps on pallets in strange huts or in
haymows, and endless hours of sitting in the buggy outside shanties and grand
homes listening to the same cries of pain while he waited for the massa to
reappear so that they could return home--or more often drive on to the next
patient.

But Massa Waller didn't travel always in the midst of crisis.

Sometimes entire weeks would pass without anything more urgent than routine
house calls or visits to one of a seemingly inexhaustible assortment of
relatives and friends whose plantations were located somewhere within driving
distance.  On such occasions--particularly in the spring and summer, when the
meadows were thick with flowers, wild strawberries, and blackberry thickets,
and the fences were trellised with lushly growing vines--the buggy would roll
along leisurely behind its finely matched pair of bay horses, Massa Waller
sometimes nodding off under the black canopy that shielded him from the sun.
Everywhere were quail whirring up, brilliant red cardinals hopping about,
meadowlarks and whippoorwills calling out.  Now and then a bull snake sunning
on the road, disturbed by the oncoming buggy, would go slithering for safety,
or a buzzard would go flapping heavily away from its dead rabbit.  But
Kunta's favorite sight was a lonely old oak or cedar in the middle of a
field; it would send his mind back to the baobabs of Africa, and to the
elders' saying that wherever one stood alone, there had once been a village.
At such times he would think of Juffure.

On his social calls, the massa went most often to visit his parents at
Enfield, their plantation on the borderline between King William County and
King and Queen County.  Approaching it--like all the Waller family big
houses--the 308 ALEX HALEY

buggy would roll down a long double avenue of huge old trees and stop beneath
a massive black walnut tree on the wide front lawn.  The house, which was
much bigger and richer looking than the massa's, sat on a slight rise
overlooking a narrow, slow-moving river.

During his first few months of driving, the cooks at the various plantations
in whose kitchens Kunta was fed--but most especially Hattie Mae, the fat,
haughty, shiny-black cook at Enfield--had eyed him critically, as fiercely
possessive of their domains as Bell was at Massa Waller's.  Confronted with
Kunta's stiff dignity and reserve, though, none quite ventured to challenge
him in any way directly, and he would silently clean his plate of whatever
they served him, excepting any pork.  Eventually, however, they began to get
used to his quiet ways, and after his sixth or seventh visit, even the cook
at Enfield apparently decided that he was fit for her to talk to and deigned
to speak to him.

"You know where you at?"  she asked him suddenly one day in the middle of his
meal.  He didn't answer, and she didn't wait for one.

"Dis here's de first Newnited States house of de Wallers.  Nobody but Wallers
lived here for a hunerd an' fifty years!"  She said that when Enfield had
been built it was only half its present size, but that later another house
had been brought up from near the river and added on.

"Our fireplace is bricks brought in boats from England," she said proudly.
Kunta nodded politely as she droned on, but he was impressed.

Once in a while, Massa Waller would pay a visit to New- port, Kunta's first
destination as a driver; it seemed impossible to believe that an entire year
had passed since then.  An old uncle and aunt of the massa's lived there in a
house that looked to Kunta very much like Enfield.  While the white folks ate
in the dining room, the cook at New- port would feed Kunta in the kitchen,
strutting around with a large ring of keys on a thin leather belt around the
top of her apron.  He had noticed by now that every senior housemaid wore
such a key ring.  On it, he had learned, in addition to her keys for the
pantry, the smokehouse, the cooling cellar, and other food-storage places,
were the keys to all the rooms and closets in the big house.

Every cook he'd met would walk in a way to make those keys jangle ROOTS 309

as a badge of how important and trusted she was, but none jangled them louder
than this one.

On a recent visit, having decided--like the cook at En- field--that he might
be all right after all, she pressed a finger to her Ups and led Kunta on
tiptoe to a small room farther within the big house.  Making a great show of
unlocking the door with one of the keys at her waist, she led him inside and
pointed to one wall.  On it was a mounted display of what she explained were
the Wallers' coat of arms, their silver seal, a suit of armor, silver
pistols, a silver sword, and the prayer book of the original Colonel Waller.
Pleased at the ill-concealed amazement on Kunta's face, she exclaimed, "01'
colonel built dat Enfield, but he buried right here."  And walking outside,
she showed him the grave and its lettered tombstone.  After a minute, as
Kunta stared at it, she asked with a rehearsed casualness, "You wanna know
what it say?"  Kunta nodded his head, and rapidly she "read" the long since
memorized inscription: "Sacred to Memory of Colonel John Waller, Gentleman,
third son of John Waller and Mary Key, who settled in Virginia in 1635, from
Newport Paganel, Buckinghamshire."

Several cousins of massa's, Kunta soon discovered, lived at Prospect Hill,
also in Spotsylvania County.  Like Enfield, the big house here was one and a
half stories high, as were nearly all very old big houses, the cook at
Prospect Hill told him, because the king had put an extra tax on two- story
houses.  Unlike Enfield, Prospect Hill was rather small--smaller than the
other Waller family houses--but none, she informed him, whether or not he
cared to listen, had as wide an entrance hall or as steep a circular stairway.

"You ain't gwine upstairs, but no reason you cain't know us got four-poster
canopy beds up dere so tall dey has to use stepladders, an' under dem is
chill un trundle beds.  An' lemme tell you sump'n.

Dem beds, de chimney bricks, house beams, hinges on de do's, eve' anything
usn's got in here was made or did by slave niggers.  "

In the backyard, she showed Kunta the first weaving house he had ever seen,
and nearby were the slave quarters--which were about the same as theirs--and
below them was a pond, and farther beyond was a slaves' graveyard.

"I knows you ain't want to see dat," she said, reading his thoughts.  He
wondered if she also knew how strange 310 ALEX HALEY

and sad he found it to hear her talking--as so many others did--about
"usn's," and acting as if she owned the plantation she lived on instead of
the other way around.

CHAPTER 58

"How come massa been seem' so much a dat no-good brother a his las' few
months?"  asked Bell one evening after Kunta trudged in after arriving home
from a visit to Massa John's plantation.

"I thought they was no love los' 'tween dem two."

"Look to me like massa jes' gone crazy 'bout dat li'l of' gal baby dey got,"
said Kunta wearily.

"She sho is a cute li'l thin'," said Bell.  After a thoughtful pause, she
added,

"Reckon Missy Anne seem to massa like dat li'l gal of his own he los'."

That hadn't occurred to Kunta, who still found it difficult to think of
toubob as actual human beings.

"She gon' be a whole year of' dis November, ain't she?"  asked Bell.

Kunta shrugged.  All he knew was that all this running back and forth between
the two plantations was wearing ruts in the road--and in his rump.  Even
though he had no use for Massa John's sour-faced buggy driver Roosby, he told
Bell he was grateful for the rest when the massa invited his brother to visit
him for a change the week before.

As they were leaving that day.  Bell recalled, the massa had looked as happy
as his little niece when he tossed her in the air and caught her, squealing
and laughing, before handing her up to her mother in the buggy.  Kunta hadn't
noticed and he didn't care--and he couldn't understand why Bell did.

One afternoon a few days later, on their way home from a house call on one of
Massa Waller's patients at a plantation not far from Newport, the massa
called out sharply to Kunta that he had just passed a turn they should ROOTS
311

have taken.  Kunta had been driving without seeing, so shocked was he by what
he had just seen at the patient's big house.  Even as he muttered an apology
and turned the buggy hastily around, he couldn't rid his mind of the sight of
the heavy, very black, Wolof-looking woman he had seen in the backyard.  She
had been sitting on a stump, both of her large breasts hanging out,
matter-of-factly suckling a white infant at one and a black infant at the
other.  It was a revolting sight to Kunta, and an astonishing one, but when
he told the gardener about it later, the old man said,

"Ain't hardly a massa in Virginia ain't sucked a black mammy, or leas' was
raised up by one."

Almost as repulsive to Kunta was something he'd seen all too much of--the
kind of demeaning "games" that went on at the plantations he visited between
white and black "young'uns" of about the same age.

The white children seemed to love nothing more than playing "massa" and
pretending to beat the black ones, or playing "bosses" by climbing onto their
backs and making them scramble about on all fours.  Playing "school," the
white children would "teach" the black to read and write, with many cuffings
and shriekings about their "dumbness."  Yet after lunch-- which the black
children would spend fanning the massa and his family with leafy branches to
keep flies away--the white and black children would lie down together and
take naps on pallets.

After seeing such things, Kunta would always tell Bell, the fiddler, and the
gardener that he'd never understand the toubob if he lived to a hundred
rains.  And they would always laugh and tell him that they'd seen this sort
of thing--and more--all of their lives.

Sometimes, they told him, as the white and black "young'uns" grew up
together, they became very attached to one another.  Bell recalled two
occasions when the massa had been called to attend white girls who had fallen
ill when their lifelong black playmates had been sold away for some reason.
Their mass as and mistresses had been advised that their daughters'
hysterical grief was such that they might well grow weaker and weaker until
they died, unless their little girlfriends were quickly found and bought back.

The fiddler said that a lot of black young'uns had learned to play the
violin, the harpsichord, or other instruments by 312 ALEX HALEY

listening and observing as their white playmates were taught by music masters
whom their rich mass as had hired from across the big water.

The old gardener said that on his second plantation a white and black boy
grew up together until finally the young massa took the black one off with
him to William and Mary College.

"CU' Massa ain't like it a'tall but 01' Missy say

"It's his nigger if he want to!"  An' when dis nigger git back later on, he
tol' us in slave row dat dey was heap more young mass as dere wid dey niggers
as valets, sleepin' right in de room wid 'em.  He say heap of times dey take
dey niggers wid 'em to classes, den dey argue later on whose nigger learnt
demos Dat nigger from my plantation couldn't jes' read an' write, he could
figger, too, an 'cite dem poems an' stuff dey has at colleges.  I got sol'
away roun' den.  Wonder whatever become a him?  "

"Lucky if he ain't dead," the fiddler said.  " " Cause white folks is quick
to spic ion a nigger like dat be de first to hatch a uprisin' or a re-volt
somewhere.  Don't pay to know too much, jes' like I tol' dis African here
when he started drivin' massa.  Mouf shut an' ears open, dafr's de way you
learns demos"-- Kunta found out how true that was soon afterward, when Massa
Waller offered a ride to a friend of his from one plantation to another.

Talking as if he wasn't there-- and saying things that Kunta would have found
extraordinary even if they hadn't known there was a black sitting right in
front of them--they spoke about the frustrating slowness of their slaves'
separation of cotton fibers from the seeds by hand when demands for cotton
cloth were rapidly increasing.  They discussed how more and more, only the
largest planters could afford to buy slaves at the robbery prices being
demanded by the slave traders and slave-ship agents.

"But even if you can afford it, bigness can create more problems than it
solves," said the massa.

"The more slaves you've got, the likelier it is that some kind of revolt
could be fomented."

"We should never have let them bear arms against white men during the war,"
said his companion.

"Now we witness the result!"  He went on to tell how, at a large plantation
near Fredericksburg, some former slave soldiers had been caught just before a
planned revolt, but only because ROOTS 313

a housemaid had gotten some wind of it and told her mistress in tears.

"They had muskets, scythe blades, pitchforks, they had even made spears,"
said the massa's friend.  "It's said their plot was to kill and burn by night
and hide by day and keep moving.  One of their ringleaders said they expected
to die, but not before they had done what the war had showed them they could
do to white people."

"They could have cost many innocent lives," he heard the massa reply gravely.
Massa Waller went on to say that he had read somewhere that over two hundred
slave outbreaks had occurred since the first slave ships came.

"I've been saying for years that our greatest danger is that slaves are
coming to outnumber whites."

"You're right!"  his friend exclaimed.

"You don't know who's shuffling and grinning and planning to cut your throat.
Even the ones right in your house.  You simply can't trust any of them.
It's in their very nature."

His back as rigid as a board, Kunta heard the massa say, "As a doctor, more
than once I've seen white deaths that-- well, I'll not go into details, but
let's just say I've thought some of them suspicious."

Hardly feeling the reins in his hands, Kunta was unable to comprehend that
they could seem so incredibly unaware of him.  His mind tumbled with things
that he too had heard during the nearly two years now that he had been
driving the.  buggy for the massa.  He had heard many a whispering of cooks
and maids grinning and bowing as they served food containing some of their
own bodily wastes.  And he had been told of white folks' meals containing
bits of ground glass, or arsenic, or other poisons.  He had even heard
stories about white babies going into mysterious fatal comas without any
trace of the darning needle that had been thrust by housemaids into their
soft heads where the hair was thickest.  And a big-house cook had pointed out
to him the former hut of an old mammy nurse who had been beaten badly and
then sold away after severely injuring a young massa who had hit her.

It seemed to Kunta that black women here were even more defiant and
rebellious than the men.  But perhaps it only appeared that way because the
women were more direct and personal about it; they would usually take revenge
against white folks who had wronged them.  The men tended to be more
secretive and less vengeful.  The 314 ALEX HALEY

fiddler had told Kunta about a white overseer who had been hanged from a tree
by the father of a black girl he had been caught raping; but violence against
whites by black men was most often ignited by news of white atrocities or
slave rebellions and-the like.

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 mass
as 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.

i;5 , Kunta had never been invited to join them--probably, C ^ he thought,
because they felt that his foot would make ^9 ; him useless to them in an
actual revolt.  Whatever their |-t,t";* .  reasons for leaving him out, he
felt it was just as well.  J-w,1 Though he wished them luck in whatever they
might de||^" ride to do, Kunta didn't believe that a rebellion could trt"'
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, j 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.

CHAPTER 59

Dozing 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
grownups and 316 ALEX HALEY

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, 0 Lawd, fer I'd
rut her 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 mass as 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 ROOTS 317

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 patty rollers 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 mass as 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 318 ALEX HALEY

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 freel"

CHAPTER 60

Even 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 ROOTS 319

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 we' out to run his mouf like
he use to, which is fine wid me.  An' he git ting dollar an' a halfa 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 sebenty-five cents fo'
his self 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 of' 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 320 ALEX HALEY

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 mass as 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 eve' body 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 ;$ ROOTS 321

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 drum like gourd instrument
called a qua-qua, and doing it with a sharpness and power that made Kunta
know the musician was an African.

It was all he could do to stand still until the door closed behind the massa.
Then Kunta tossed the reins to the waiting stable boy and raced as fast as
his half foot would let him around the side of the house and across the
backyard.  The sound, which was getting louder and louder, seemed to be
coming from the middle of a crowd of blacks stomping and clapping beneath a
string of lanterns that the Wallers had allowed the slaves to put up for
their own Thanksgiving celebration.  Ignoring their indignant exclamations as
he pushed his way through them, Kunta burst into the open circle, and there
he was: a lean, gray- haired, very black man squatted on the ground pounding
on his qua-qua between a mandolin player and two beef- bone clackers.

As they nicked glances up at the sudden commotion, Kunta's eyes met his--and
a moment later they all but sprang toward each other, the other blacks
gawking, then snickering, as they embraced.

"A hsalakium-salaam!"

"Malakium-salaam!"

The words came as if neither of them had ever left Africa.  Kunta shoved the
older man away to arm's length.  "I ain't seed you here befo'," he exclaimed.

"Jes' sol' here from not her plantation," the other said.

"My massa yo' massa's young' un said Kunta.

"I drives his buggy."

The men around them had begun muttering with impatience for the music to
start again, and they were obviously uncomfortable at this open display of
Africanness.  Both Kunta and the qua-qua player knew they mustn't aggravate
the others any further, or one of them might report to the white folks.

"I be back!"  said Kunta.

"Salakium-salaam!"  said the qua-qua player, squatting back down.

Kunta stood there for a moment as the music began again, then turned
abruptly, walked through the crowd with his head down--frustrated and
embarrassed--and went to wait in the buggy for Massa Waller.

322 ALEX HM.  EY

Over the weeks that followed, Kunta's mind tumbled with questions about the
qua-qua player.  What was his tribe?  Clearly he was not Mandinka, nor of any
of the other tribes Kunta had ever seen or heard about either in The Gambia
or on the big canoe.  His gray hair said that he was much older; Kunta
wondered if he had as many rains as Omoro would by now.  And how had each of
them sensed that the other was a servant of Allah?  The qua-qua player's ease
with toubob speech as well as with Islam said that he had been a long time in
the white folks' land, probably for more rains than Kunta had.  The qua-qua
player said that he had recently been sold to Massa Waller's father; where in
toubob land had he been for all those rains before now?

Kunta reviewed in his mind the other Africans he had chanced to see--most of
them, unfortunately, when he was with the massa and couldn't afford even to
nod at them, let alone meet them--in his three rains of driving the massa's
buggy.  Among them had even been one or two who were unquestionably
Mandinkas.  Most of the Africans he had glimpsed as they drove past the
Saturday morning slave auctions.  But after what had happened one morning
about six months before, he had decided never to drive the buggy anywhere
near the auctions if he could possibly avoid it without massa suspecting his
reason.  As they drove by that day, a chained young Jola woman had begun
shrieking piteously.  Turning to see what was the matter, he saw the wide
eyes of the Jola woman fixed on him on the high seat of the buggy, her mouth
open in a scream, beseeching him to help her.  In bitter, flooding shame,
Kunta had lashed his whip down across both horses' rumps and they all but
bucked ahead, jolting the massa backward, terrifying Kunta at what he had
done, but the massa had said nothing.

Once Kunta had met an African slave in the county seat while he was waiting
for the massa one afternoon, but neither one of them could understand the
other's tribal language, and the other man hadn't yet learned to speak the
toubob tongue.  It seemed unbelievable to Kunta that it was only after twenty
rains in the white folks' land that he had met another African with whom he
could communicate.

But for the next two months, into the spring of 1788, ROOTS 323

it seemed to Kunta that the massa visited every patient, relative, and friend
wi'hin five counties--except for his own parents at Enfield.  Once he
considered asking him for a traveling pass, which he had never done before,
but he knew that would involve questions about where he intended to go and
why.  He could say he was going to see Liza, the cook at Enfield, but that
would let the massa think there was something between them; and he might
mention it to his parents, and they might mention it to Liza, and then he'd
never hear the end of it, because he knew she had her eye on him and the
feeling was definitely not mutual, so Kunta dropped the idea.

In his impatience to get back to Enfield, he had begun to grow irritable with
Bell--the more so because he couldn't talk with her about it--or so he told
himself, knowing all too well her aversion toward anything African.  Thinking
about confiding in the fiddler and the old gnrden- er, he had finally decided
that although they wouldn't tell anyone else, they wouldn't be able to
appreciate the magnitude of meeting someone to talk to from one's native land
after twenty rains.

Then one Sunday after lunch, without any notice at all, the massa sent out to
have him hitch up the team: He was going to Enfield.  Kunta almost leaped
from his seat and out the door.  Bell staring after him in amazement.

Liza was busy among her pots when he entered the kitchen at Enfield.

He asked how she was.  adding quickly that he wasn't hungry.  She looked
warmly at him.

"Ain't seen you in a time," she said, her voice soft.  Then her face became
somber.

"Heared 'bout you an' dat African we done got.  Massa beared, too.  Some dem
niggers tol' 'im.  but he ain't said nothin', so I wouldn' worry 'bout it."
She grasped and squeezed Kunta's hand.

"You jes' wait a minute."

Kunta felt ready to explode with impatience, but Liza was deftly making and
wrapping two thick beef sandwiches.  She gave them to him, again pressing his
hand within hers.  Then she walked him toward the kitchen door, where she
hesitated.

"Sump'n you ain't never ax me, so I ain't tol' you--my mammy was an African
nigger.  Reckon dat's how come I likes you so much."

Seeing Kunta's anxiety to leave, she turned abruptly and pointed.

"Oat hut wid de broke ch'i'inev his'n.  Most de niggers massa's let go off
today.  Dey won't git back fo' 324 ALEX HALEY

dark.  You jes' be sho' you at yo' buggy fo' your massa come out!  "

Limping quickly down slave row, Kunta knocked at the door of the ramshackle
one-room hut.

"Who dat?"  said the voice he remembered.

"Ah-salakium-salaam!"  said Kunta.  He heard a quick muffled movement within,
and the door swung open wide.

CHAPTER 61

Since they were Africans, neither man showed how much this moment had been
awaited by both of them.  The older man offered Kunta his only chair, but
when he saw that his guest preferred to squat on the dirt floor as he would
have done in a village back home, the qua-qua player grunted with
satisfaction, lighted the candle on his leaning table, and squatted down
himself.

"I comes from Ghana, an' mine is de Akan peoples.  De white folks gimme de
name Pompey, but my real one's Boteng Bediako.  I's been a long time here.
Six white folks' plantations, an' I hopes dis de las' one.  How 'bout you?"

Trying to copy the Ghanaian's terse way of speaking, Kunta told him of The
Gambia, of luffure, of being Mandinka, of his family; of his capture and
escapes, his foot, doing gardening, and now driving the buggy.

The Ghanaian listened intently, and when Kunta finished the Ghanaian sat
thinking awhile before he spoke again.

"We's all sufferirf.  A man wise, he try to learn from it."  He paused and
looked appraisingly at Kunta.

"How of' you is?"  Kunta said thirty-seven rains.

"You ain't look it.  I's sixty-six."

"You ain't look dat neither," said Kunta.

"Well, I's been here longer'n you been born.  Wishes back den I coulda knowed
sump'n dat I's learned now.  But you still young, so I tell it to you.  01'
gran'Tinmas in you country, dey tell young'uns de stories?"  Kunta said
ROOTS 325

that they did.

"Den I tell you one.  It's 'bout growin' up where I come from.

"I 'members how de chief a our Akan peoples use to set in this big chair made
outa elephants' teeth, an' it was a man always held a umbrella over his head.
Den long side was de man de chief spoke through.  Only way he ever talked,
or anybody could talk to him, was through dis man.  An' den a boy set at de
chief's feet.  Dis boy stood for de chiefs soul, an' he run de chiefs
messages to de people.  Dis boy run wid a thick-bladed sword, so whoever seed
'im comin' knowed 'zactly who he was.  I growed up being dat boy, runnin'
messages 'mongst de peoples.  Dat's how de white mens cotched me."

Kunta was about to speak when the Ghanaian held up his hand.

"Dat ain't de end a de story.  What I's getting' to, on top of de chiefs
umbrella was dis carvin' of a hand holdin' a egg.  Dat stood for de care a
chief used his powers wid.  An' dat man de chief talked through, he always
held a staff.  An' on dat staff a turtle was carved.  Turtle stood for dat de
key to livin' is patience."  The Ghanaian paused.  "An' it was a bee carved
on de shell a dat turtle.

Bee stood for dat nothin' can't sting through de turtle's hard shell.  "

In the flickering candlelight of the hut, the Ghanaian paused.

"Dis is what I wants to pass on to you, dat I's learned in de white folks'
land.  What you needs most to live here is patience--wid a hard shell."

In Africa, Kunta was sure, this man would have been a kin tango or an alcala,
if not a chief himself.  But he didn't know how to say what he felt, and just
sat there without saying anything.

"Look like you got both," said the Ghanaian finally with a smile.

Kunta began to stammer an apology, but his tongue still seemed to be tied.
The Ghanaian smiled again, fell silent for a moment himself, then spoke again.

"You Mandinkas spoke of in my country as great travelers an' traders."

He left the statement in midair, clearly waiting for Kunta to say something.

At last Kunta found his voice.

"You heard right..  My uncles is travelers.  Listenin' to stories dey used to
tell, seem like dey been jus' 'bout eve' where Me and my father once, we went
to a new village dey done started a 326 ALEX HALEY

long ways from Juffure.  I was plannin' to go to Mecca an' Timbuktu an' Mali
an' all like dey done, but I got stole 'fore I had de chance.  "

"I knows some 'bout Africa," said the Ghanaian.

"De chief had me teached by de wise men.  I ain't forgot what dey said.  An'
I's tried to put it together -wid things I's beared an' seed since I been
here, an' I knows dat most of us dat's brought here is stole from West
Africa--from up roun' your Gambia all de way down de coast to my Guinea.  Is
you heard of what white folks calls de

"Gold Coast'?"

Kunta said that he hadn't.

"Dey named it dat 'count of de gold dere.

Dat coast go clear up to de Volta.  It's dat coast where de white folks
cotches de Fanti an' de Ashanti peoples.  It's dem Ashantis dat's said to
lead most of de uprisins' an' revolts when dey's brought here.

"Spite dat, de white folks pays some of dey biggest prices for dem, 'cause
dey's smart an' strong an' dey's got spirit.

"Den what dey calls de

"Slave Coast' is where dey gits de Yorubas an' Dahomans, an' roun' de tip of
de Niger dey gits de Ibo."  Kunta said that he had heard the Ibo were a
gentle people.

The Ghanaian nodded.

"Ts beared of thirty Ibos joined hands an' walked into a river, all singin',
an' drowned together.  Dat was in Lou'siana."

Kunta was starting to get worried that the massa might be ready to leave and
he might keep him waiting, and a moment of silence passed between them.  As
Kunta's mind cast about for some topic appropriate to leave on, the Ghanaiaa
said,

"Sho ain't nobody here to set an' talk wid like us is.  Heap a times qua-qua
got to say what I got on my mind.  Reckon maybe I was talkirf to you widout
knowin' you was dere."

Deeply moved, Kunta looked the Ghanaian in the eye for a long moment, and
then they got up.  In the candlelight, Kunta noticed on the table the
forgotten two sandwiches that Liza had given him.  He pointed to them and
smiled.

"We can eat anytime.  Now I knows you got to go,"

said the Ghanaian.

"In my country, whilst we was talkin', I'd a been carvin' somelhin' out of a
thorn to give you."

Kunta said that in The Gambia, he would have been ROOTS 327

carving something from a large dried mango seed.

"Whole heap of times I done wished I had a mango seed to plant an' grow up to
re ming me a home," he said.

The Ghanaian looked solemnly at Kunta.  Then he smiled.

"You's young.

Seeds you's got a-plenty, you jes* needs de wife to plant 'em in.  "

Kunta was so embarrassed that he didn't know how to reply.  The Ghanaian
thrust out his left arm, and they shook their left hands in the African
manner, meaning that they would soon meet again.

"A hsalakium-salaam."

"Malakium-salaam."

And Kunta cripped hurriedly out into the deepening dusk, past the other small
huts, and up toward the big house, wondering if the massa had already come
out looking for him.  But it was another half hour before the massa appeared,
and as Kunta drove the buggy homeward-scarcely feeling the reins in his hands
or hearing the horses' hooves on the road--he felt as if he had been talking
with his dear father Omoro.  No evening of his life had ever meant more to
him.

CHAPTER 62

"Seen Toby passin' yestiday, hollered at 'im,

"Hey, drop by an' set awhile, nigger!"  You oughta seen de look he give me,
an' ain't even spoke!  What you reckon it is?  " the fiddler asked the
gardener.  The gardener had no idea, and they both asked Bell.

"Cain't tell.  If he sick or sump'n, he oughta say so.  I'm jes' leavin' him
'lone, he actin' so funny!"  she declared.  \ Even Massa Waller noticed that
his commendably reserved and reliable driver seemed not to be his usual self.
He hoped it wasn't an incubating stage of a current local contagion to which
they both had been exposed, so one day he asked Kunta if he felt badly.

"Nawsuh,"

Kunta quickly I 328 ALEX HALEY

replied, so Massa Waller put further concern out of his mind, so long as his
driver got him where he was going.

Kunta had been rocked to the core by his encounter with the Ghanaian, and
that very fact made it clear to him how lost he had become.  Day by day, year
by year, he had become less resisting, more accepting, until finally, without
even realizing it, he had forgotten who he was.  It was true that he had come
to know better and learned to get along with the fiddler, the gardener.
Bell, and the other blacks, but he knew now that he could never really be one
of them, any more than they could be like him.  Alongside the Ghanaian, in
fact, the fiddler and the gardener and Bell now seemed to Kunta only
irritating.  He was glad that they were keeping their distance.  Lying on his
pallet at night, he ;^ \ i was torn with guilt and shame about what he had
let happen ;; ,"a'" "' to himself.  He had still been an African when he used
to |^; awaken suddenly here in his cabin, jerking upright, shocked ij^y, to
discover that he wasn't in Juffure; but the last time that |7 happened had
been many years ago.  He had still been an H^ African when his memories of
The Gambia and its people if had been the only thing that sustained him; but
months might pass now without his having a single thought about Juffure.  He
had still been an African back in those early years when each new outrage had
sent him onto his knees imploring Allah to give him strength and
understanding; how long had it been since he had even properly prayed to
Allah?

,^1'^" His learning to speak the toubob tongue, he realized, S^',1; had
played a big part in it.  In this everyday talking, he {'" '-J' seldom even
thought of Mandinka words any more, excepting those few that for some reason
his mind still clung to.  Indeed, by now--Kunta grimly faced it--he even
thought in the toubob tongue.  In countless things he did as well as said and
thought, his Mandinka ways had slowly been replaced by those of the blacks he
had been among.  The only thing in which he felt he could take some small
pride was that in twenty rains he had never touched the meat of the swine.

Kunta searched his mind; there must have been something else of his original
self that he could find someplace.  And there was: He had kept his dignity.
Through everything, he had worn his dignity as once in Juffure he had worn
his sap hie charms to keep away the evil spirits.  He ROOTS 329

vowed to himself that now more than ever, his dignity must become as a shield
between him and all of those who called themselves "niggers."  How ignorant
of themselves they were; they knew nothing of their ancestors, as he had been
taught from boyhood.  Kunta reviewed in his mind the names of the Kintes from
the ancient clan in old Mali down across the generations in Mauretania, then
in The Gambia all the way to his brothers and himself; and he thought of how
the same ancestral knowledge was possessed by every member of his kafo.

It set Kunta to reminiscing about those boyhood friends.  At first he was
only surprised, but then he grew shocked when he found that he couldn't
remember their names.  Their faces came back to him--along with memories of
them racing out beyond the village gate like blackbirds to serve as
chattering escorts in Juffure for every traveler who passed by; hurling
sticks at the scuiding monkeys overhead, who promptly hurled them back; of
contests they'd held to see who could eat six mangoes the fastest.  But try
as Kunta might, he couldn't recall their names, not one of them.  He could
see his kafo gathered, frowning at him.

In his hut, and driving the massa, Kunta racked his brain.  And finally the
names did begin to come, one by one: yes, Sitafa Silla--he and Kunta had been
best friends!  And Kalilu Conteh--he had stalked and caught the parrot at the
kin tango command.  Sefo Kela--he had asked the Council of Elders for
permission to have a teriya sexual friendship with that widow.

The faces of some of the elders began to come back now, and with them the
names he thought he had long since forgotten.  The kin tango was Silla Ba
Bibba!  The alimamo was Kujali Demba!  The wadanela was Karamo Tamba!  Kunta
remembered his third-kafo graduating ceremony, where he had read his Koranic
verses so well that Omoro and Binta gave a fat goat to the arafang, whose
name was Brima Cesay.  Remembering them all filled Kunta with joy--until it
occurred to him that those elders would have died by now, and his kafo mates
whom he remembered as little boys would be his age back in Juffure--and he
would never see them again.  For the first time in many years, he cried
himself to sleep.

In the county seat a few days later, another buggy driver told Kunta that
some free blacks up North who called 330 ALEX HALEY

themselves

"The Negro Union" had proposed a mass return to Africa of all blacks--both
free and slaves.  The very thought of it excited Kunta, even as he scoffed
that it couldn't ever happen, with mass as not only competing to buy blacks
but also paying higher prices than ever.  Though he knew the fiddler would
almost rather stay a slave in Virginia than go to Africa a free man, Kunta
wished he could discuss it with him, for the fiddler always seemed to know
all there was to know about what was going on anywhere if it had anything to
do with freedom.

But for almost two months now Kunta hadn't done more than scowl at the
fiddler or at Bell and the gardener either.  Not that he needed them or even
liked them that much, of course--but the feeling of being stranded kept
growing within him.  By the time the next new moon rose, and he miserably
dropped another pebble into his gourd, he was feeling inexpressibly lonely,
as if he had cut himself off from the world.

The next time Kunta saw the fiddler pass by, he nodded at him uncertainly,
but the fiddler kept walking as if he hadn't even seen anyone.  Kunta was
furiously embarrassed.  " The very next day he and the old gardener saw each
other at the same moment, and without missing a step, the gardener turned in
another direction.  Both hurt and bitter-- and with a mounting sense of
guilt--Kunta paced back and forth in his hut for more hours that night.  The
next morning, bracing himself, he cripped outside and down slave row to the
door of the once-familiar last hut.  He knocked.

The door opened.

"What you want?"  the fiddler asked coldly.

Swallowing with embarrassment, Kunta said,

"Jes' fig- gered I'd come by."

The fiddler spat on the ground.

"Look here, nigger, now hear what I tells you.  Me an' Bell an' de of' man
been 'scussin' you.  An' we all 'grees if it's anythin' we can't stan', it's
a sometimey nigger!"  He glared at Kunta.

"Dat'salt been wrong wid you!  You ain't sick or nothin'."

Kunta stood looking at his shoes.  After a moment, the fiddler's glare
softened and he stepped aside.

"Since you's already here, c'mon in.

But I'm gon' tell you--show yo' ass one mo' time, an' you won't git spoke to
again 'til you's of as Methuselah!  "

ROOTS 331

Choking down his rage and humiliation, Kunta went on inside and sat down, and
after a seemingly endless silence between them--which the fiddler obviously
had no intention of ending--Kunta forced himself to tell about the
back-to-Africa proposal.  The fiddler said coolly that he had long known
about that, and that there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that it would
ever happen.

Seeing Kunta's hurt expression, the fiddler seemed to relent a little.

"Lemme tell you sump'n I bets you ain't beared.  Up Nawth in New York, dey's
what you call a Manumission Society dat done open a school for free niggers
what wants to get learned readin' an' writin' an' all kin's a trades."

Kunta was so happy and relieved to have the fiddler talking to him again that
he hardly heard what his old friend was saying to him.  A few minutes later,
the fiddler stopped talking for a moment and sat looking at Kunta inquiringly.

"Is I keepin' you up?"  he asked finally.

"Hmm?"  said Kunta, who had been lost in thought "I ax you a question 'bout
five minutes ago."

"Sorry, I was thinkin' 'bout sump'n."

"Well, since you don' know how to listen, I show ya how it's done."

He sat back and crossed his arms.

"Ain't you gonna go on wid what you was sayin'?"  asked Kunta.

"By now I forgits what I was sayin'.  Is you for git what you was thinkin'?"

"It ain't impo'tant.  Jes' sump'n been on my mind."

"Better get it off dere fo' you gits a headache--or gives me one."

"I cain't 'scuss it."

"Huh!"  said the fiddler, acting insulted.

"Ifn dat de way you feel .

.  "

"Ain't you.  It's jes' too personal."

A light began to dawn in the fiddler's eye.

"Don' tell mel It's 'bout a woman, right?"

"Ain't nothin' a de kin'!"  said Kunta, flushing with embarrassment.

He sat speechless for a moment, then got up and said,

"Well, I be late fo' work, so I see ya later.  Thanks fo' talkin' wid me."

"Sho thing.  Jes' lemme know when you wants to do some talkin'."

332 ALEX HALEY

How had he known?  Kunta asked himself on his way to the stable.  And why had
he insisted on making him talk about it?  It was only with the greatest
reluctance that Kunta had even let himself think about it.

But lately he could hardly seem to think about anything else.  It had to do
with the Ghanaian's advice about planting his seeds.

CHAPTER 63

Long before he met the Ghanaian, Kunta had often had a hollow feeling
whenever he thought about the fact that if he had been in Juffure, he would
have had three or four sons by now--along with the wife who had given birth
to them.  What usually occasioned these thoughts was when about once each
moon, Kunta had a dream from which he always awakened abruptly in the
darkness, acutely embarrassed at the hot stickiness that had just burst from
his still rigid foto.  Lying awake afterward, he thought not so much of a
wife as he did about how he knew that there was hardly a slave row where some
man and woman who cared for one another had not simply begun living together
in whichever's hut was the better one.

There were many reasons why Kunta didn't want to think about getting married.
For one thing, it seemed to involve the couple's "jumpin' de broomstick"
before witnesses from slave row, which seemed ridiculous to Kunta for such a
solemn occasion.  In a few cases he had heard of, certain favored house
servants might repeat their vows before some white preacher with the massa
and mistress looking on, but that was a pagan ceremony.  If marrying someone
in whatever manner was even to be thought about, the proper bride's age for a
Mandinka was fourteen to sixteen rains, with the man about thirty.  And in
his years in the white folks' land, Kunta hadn't seen one black female of
fourteen to sixteen--or even twenty to twenty-five--whom he had not
considered preposterously giggling and silly; ROOTS 333

especially when on Sundays, or for festivities, they painted and powdered
their faces until they looked to him more like the death dancers in Juffure
who covered themselves with ashes.

As for the twenty or so older women whom Kunta had come to know, they were
mostly senior cooks at the big houses where he had driven Massa Waller, such
as Liza at Enfield.  In fact, Liza was the only one among them all whom he
had come to look forward to seeing.  She had no mate, and she had given Kunta
clear signs of her willingness, if not her anxiety, to get him into much
closer quarters than he had ever responded to, although he had thought about
it privately.  He would have died of shame if there had been any way for her
to suspect even remotely that more than once it had been she about whom he
had had the sticky dream.

Suppose--just suppose--he were to take Liza for a wife, Kunta thought.  It
would mean that they would be like so many couples he knew, living
separately, each of them on the plantation of their own massa.  Usually the
man was permitted Saturday afternoon traveling passes to visit his wife, so
long as he faithfully returned before dark on Sun- day in order to rest up
from his often long trip before work resumed at dawn on Monday.  Kunta told
himself that he would want no part of a wife living not where he was.  And he
told himself that settled the matter.

But his mind, as if on its own, kept on thinking about it.

Considering how talkative and smothery Liza was, and how he liked to spend a
lot of time alone, maybe their being able to see each other just on weekends
would be a blessing in disguise.  And if he were to marry Liza, it was
unlikely that they would have to live as so many black couples did, in fear
that one of them, or both, might get sold away.  For the massa seemed to be
happy with him, and Liza was owned by the massa's parents, who apparently
liked her.  The family connections would also make unlikely the kind of
frictions that sometimes arose when two mass as were involved, sometimes even
causing one or both of them to forbid the marriage.

On the other hand, Kunta thought .  .  .  over and over he turned it in his
mind.  But no matter how many perfectly sound reasons he could think' of for
marrying Liza, some- fesag held him back.  Then one night, while he was lying
334 ALEX HALEY

in bed trying to fall asleep, it struck him like a lightning bolt!  --there
was another woman he might consider.

Bell.

He thought he must be crazy.  She was nearly three times too old--probably
beyond forty rains.  It was absurd to think about it.

Bell.

Kunta tried to hurl her from his mind.  She had entered it only because he
had known her for so long, he told himself.  He had never even dreamed of
her.  Grimly, he remembered a parade of indignities and irritations she had
inflicted on him.  He remembered how she used to all but slam the screen door
in his face when he carried her vegetable basket to the kitchen.  Even more
keenly, he remembered her indignation when he told her she looked Man- dinka;
she was a heathen.

Furthermore, she was just generally argumentative and bossy.  And she talked
too much.

But he couldn't help remembering how, when he had lain wanting to die, she
had visited him five and six times daily; how she had nursed and fed him,
even cleaned his soiling of himself, and how her hot poultice of mashed
leaves had broken his fever.  She was also strong and healthy.  And she did
cook endless good things in her black pots.

The better she began to look to him, the ruder he was to her whenever he had
to go to the kitchen, and the sooner he would leave when he had told her or
found out from her whatever he had come for.  She began to stare at his
retreating back even more coldly than before.

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 ROOTS 335

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 men 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 othern 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!"

CHAPTER 64

For 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 anyone'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.

336 ALEX HALEY

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 fean 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 ROOTS
337 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, 338 ALEX HALEY

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 Gripping 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 his 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 ROOTS 339

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 greetings, 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 340 ALEX HALEY

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 fence row 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 ground
vine entangled the shoe on his left foot, Kunta stumbled--his shoulder
brushing against Bell--arid 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 an nuder 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' bin- ness."  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 ROOTS 341

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.  "

Kunta knew the farm instantly.  He could see the pond in his mind, and the
surrounding fields.

"But dey business dealin's don't make no difference, 'cause all dem Wallers
is very close," Bell continued.

"Dey's 'mongst de oldes' families in Virginia.  Fact, dey was of' family in
dat Eng- land even 'fo' dey come crost de water to here.  Was all kinds of

"Sirs' an' stuff, all b'longin' to de Church of England.  Was one of dem what
writ poems, name of Massa Edmund Waller.

His younger brother Massa John Waller was de one what comes here first.  He
weren't but eighteen, I's beared massa say, when some King Charles de Secon'
give him a big lan' grant over where Kent County is now.  "

Their pace had become much slower as Bell talked, and Kunta couldn't have
been more pleased with Bell's steady talking, although he had already heard
from some other Waller family cooks at least some of the things she was
saying, though he never would have told her that.

"Anyhow, dis John Waller married a Miss Mary Key, an' dey built de Enfield
big house where you takes massa to see his folks.  An' dey had three boys,
'specially John de Secon', de younges', who come to be a whole heap of things
--read de law while he was a sheriff, den was in de House of Burgesses, an'
he helped to found Fredericksburg an' to put together Spotsylvania County.
It was him an' his Missis Dorothy what built Newport, an' dey had six
young'uns.  An' cose out of all demit commence to be Waller chilluns
spreadin' all over, an' growin' on up, an' havin' young'uns of dey own.  Our
massa an de other Wallers what lives 342 ALEX HALEY

roun' here ain't but a han'ful of 'em all.  Dey's all pretty much
high-respected peoples, too, sheriffs an' preachers, county clerks.

House of Burgesses, doctors like massa; whole heap of 'em fought in de
Revolution, an' I don't know what all.  "

Kunta had become so absorbed in what Bell was saying that he was startled
when she stopped walking.

"We better git on back," she said.

"Traipsin' out here till all hours 'mongst dese weeds, be oversleepin' in de
mornin'."  They turned around, and when Bell was quiet for a minute, and
Kunta didn't say anything, she realized that he wasn't going to tell her
whatever he had on his mind, so she went on chattering about whatever came
into her mind until they got back to her cabin, where she turned to face him
and fell silent.  He stood there looking at her for a long, agonizing moment,
and then finally he spoke: "Well, it getting' late like you said.  So I see
you tomorra."

As he walked away, still carrying the harnesses.  Bell realized that he
hadn't told her whatever it was that he wanted to talk to her about.  Well,
she told herself--afraid to think that it might be what she thought it
was--he'll get around to it in his own time.

It was just as well that she wasn't in a hurry, for though Kunta began to
spend a lot of time in Bell's kitchen as she went about her work, she found
herself, as usual, doing most of the talking.  But she liked having him there
to listen.

"I found' out," she told him one day, "dat massa done writ out a will that if
he die an' ain't got married, his slaves gon' go to little Missy Anne.  But
de will say if he do marry, den he wife would git us slaves when he die."
Even so, Bell didn't seem to be unduly disturbed.

"Sho' is a plenty of 'em roun' here would love to grab de massa, but he ain't
never married no mo'."

She paused.

"Jes' de same as I ain't."

Kunta almost dropped the fork from his hand.  He was positive that he had
heard Bell correctly, and he was jolted to know that Bell had been married
before, for it was unthinkable that a desirable wife should not be a virgin.
Kunta soon was out of the kitchen and gone into his own cabin.  He knew that
he must think hard upon this matter.

Two weeks of silence had passed before Bell casually invited Kunta to eat
supper with her in her cabin that ROOTS 343

night.  He was so astounded that he didn't know what to say.  He had never
been alone in a hut with a woman other than his own mother or grandmother.
It wouldn't be right.  But when he couldn't find the words to speak, she told
him what time to show up, and that was that.

He scrubbed himself in a tin tub from head to foot, using a rough cloth and a
bar of brown lye soap.  Then he scrubbed himself again, and yet a third time.
Then he dried himself, and while he was putting on his clothes, he found
himself singing softly a song from his village,

"Man- dumbe, your long neck is very beautiful."  -- Bell didn't have a long
neck, nor was she beautiful, but he had to admit to himself that when he was
around her, he had a good feeling.  And he knew that she felt the same.

Bell's cabin was the biggest one on the plantation, and the one nearest to
the big house, with a small bed of flowers growing before it.  Knowing her
kitchen, her cabin's immaculate neatness was no more than Kunta would expect.
The room he entered when she opened the door had a feeling of cozy comfort,
with its wall of mud-chinked logs and a chimney of homemade bricks that
widened down from the roof to her large fireplace, alongside which hung her
shining cooking utensils.

And Kunta noticed that instead of the usual one room with one window, such as
he had, Bell's cabin had two rooms and two windows, both covered with
shutters that she could pull down in case of rain, or when it grew cold.  The
curtained rear room was obviously where she slept, and Kunta kept his eyes
averted from that doorway.  On her oblong table in the center of the room he
was in, there were knives and forks and spoons standing in a jar, and some
flowers from her garden in another, and two lighted candles were sitting in
squat clay holders, and at either end of the table was a high-backed,
cane-bottomed chair.

Bell asked him to sit in a rocking chair that was nearer the fireplace.  He
did, sitting down carefully, for he had never been in one of these
contraptions before, but trying hard to act casual about the whole visit as
Bell seemed to be.

"I been so busy I ain't even lit de fire," she said, and Kunta all but leaped
up out of the chair, glad to have something he could do with his hands.
Striking the flint sharply 344 ALEX HALEY

against the piece of iron, he lighted the fluffy cotton that Bell had already
placed under fat pine sticks beneath the oak logs, and quickly they caught
fire.

"Don't know how come I ax you to come here nohow, place in a mess, an' I
ain't got nothin' ready," Bell said, bustling about her pots.

"Ain't no hurry wid me," Kunta made himself respond.  But her already cooked
chicken with dumplings, which she well knew that Kunta loved, was soon
bubbling.  And when she had served him, she chided him for gobbling so.  But
Kunta didn't quit until the third helping, with Bell insisting that there was
still a little more in the pot.

"Naw, I's fit to bus'," said Kunta truthfully.  And after a few more minutes
of small talk, he got up and said he had to get on home.

Pausing in the doorway, he looked at Bell, and Bell looked at him, and
neither of them said anything, and then Bell turned her eyes away, and Kunta
Gripped on down along slave row to his own cabin.

He awakened more lighthearted than he had felt since leaving Africa--but he
told no one why he was acting so uncharacteristically cheerful and outgoing.
But he hardly needed to.  Word began to get around that Kunta had actually
been seen smiling and even laughing in Bell's kitchen.  And at first every
week or so, then twice a week.

Bell would invite Kunta home for supper.  Though he thought that once in a
while he should make some excuse, he could never bring himself to say no.
And always Bell cooked things Kunta had let her know were also grown in The
Gambia, such as black-eyed peas, okra, a stew made of peanuts, or yams baked
with butter.

Most of their conversations were still one-sided, but neither one seemed to
mind.  Her favorite topic, of course, was Massa Waller, and it never ceased
to amaze Kunta how much Bell knew that he didn't about the man he spent so
much more time with than she did.

"Massa funny 'bout different things," Bell said.

"Like he believe in banks, all right enough, but he keep money hid, too;
nobody else don't know where but me.  He funny 'bout his niggers, too.  He do
'bout anything for 'em, but if one mess up, he'll sell 'im jes' like he done
Luther.  ] " "Mother thing massa funny 'bout," Bell went on.

"He ; won't have a yaller nigger on his place.  You ever notice, i ROOTS 345

'ceptin' fo' de fiddler, ain't nothin' here but black niggers?  Massa tell
anybody jes' what he think 'bout it, too.  I done beared 'im tellin' some of
de biggest mens in dis county, I mean ones dat got plenty yaller niggers
deyselves, dat too many white mens is havin' slave chilluns, so dey ain't
doin' nothin' but buyin' an' sellin' dey own blood, an' it need to be
stopped.  "

Though he never showed it, and he kept up a steady drone of "uh-huhs" when
Bell was talking, Kunta would sometimes listen with one ear while he thought
about something else.  Once when she cooked him a hoe cake, using mea) she
had made in the mortar and pestle he had carved for her, Kunta was watching
her in his mind's eye beating the couscous for breakfast in some African
village while she stood at the stove telling him that hoe cakes got their
name from slaves cooking them on the flat edge of a hoe when they were
working out in the fields.

Now and then Bell even gave Kunta some special dish to take to the fiddler
and the gardener.  He wasn't seeing as much of them as he had, but they
seemed to understand, and the time they spent apart even seemed to increase
the pleasure of conversation with 'hem whenever they got together.  Though he
never discussed Bell with them--and they never brought her up--it was clear
from their expressions that they knew she and he were courtin' as welt as if
their meetings took place on the front lawn.  Kunta found this vaguely
embarrassing, but there seemed to be nothing he could do about it--not that
he particularly cared to.

He was more concerned that there remained some serious matters he wanted to
take up with Bell, but he never could quite seem to get around to them.
Among them was the fact that she kept on her front-room wall a large, framed
picture of the yellow-haired

"Jesus,"

who seemed to be a relative of their heathen "0 Lawd."  But finally he did
manage to mention it, and Bell promptly said,

"Ain't but two places everybody's headin' for, heab'n or hell, and where you
going', dat's yo' business!"  And she would say no more about it.  Her reply
discomfited him every time he thought of it, but finally he decided that she
had a right to her beliefs, however misguided, just as he had a right to his.
Unshaken, he had been born with Allah and he was going to die with
Allah--although he hadn't been praying to Him 346 ALEX HALEY

regularly again ever since he started seeing a lot of Bell.  He resolved to
correct that and hoped that Allah would forgive him.

Anyway, he couldn't feel too harshly about someone, even a pagan Christian,
who was so good to one of another faith, even someone as worthy as he was.
She was so nice to him, in fact, that Kunta wanted to do something special
for her--something at least as special as the mortar and pestle.  So one day
when he was on his way over to Massa John's to pick up Missy Anne for a
weekend visit with Massa Waller, Kunta stopped off by a fine patch of
bulrushes he had often noticed, and picked some of the best he could find.
With the rushes split into fine pieces, and with some selected, soft inner
white corn shucks over the next several days he plaited an intricate mat with
a bold Mandinka design in its center.  It came out even better than he had
expected, and he presented it to Bell the next time she had him over for
supper.  She looked upward from the mat to Kunta.

"Ain't nobody gon' put dey feets on dat!"  she exclaimed, turning and
disappearing into her bedroom.  Back a few moments later with a hand behind
her, she said,

"Dis was gonna be for yo' Christmas, but I make you something' else."

She held out her hand.  It was a pair of finely knitted woolen socks--one of
them with a half foot, the front part filled with soft woolen cushion.
Neither he nor Bell seemed to know what to say.

He could smell the aroma of the food she had been simmering, ready to be
served, but a strange feeling was sweeping over him as they kept on looking
at each other.  Bell's hand suddenly grasped his, and with a single motion
she blew out both of the candles and swiftly, with Kunta feeling as if he
were a leaf being borne by a rushing stream, they went together through the
curtained doorway into the other room and lay down facing one another on the
bed.  Looking deeply into his eyes, she reached out to him, they drew
together, and for the first time in the thirty-nine rains of his life, he
held a woman in his arms.

FR1;CHAPTER 65

"Massa ain't want to believe me when I tol' 'im," Bell said to Kunta.

"But he finally say he feel us ought to think on it lor a spell yet, 'cause
peoples git ting married is sucred in de eyes of Jesus."  To Kunta, however,
Massa Waller said not a word about it during the next few weeks.  Then one
night Bell came running out to Kunta's cabin and reported breathlessly,

"I done tol' 'im we still wants to marry, an' he say, well, den, he reckon
it's awright!"

The news coursed swiftly through slave row.  Kunta was embarrassed as
different ones offered their congratulations.  He could have choked Bell for
telling even Missy Anne when she came next to visit her uncle, for the first
thing she did after finding out was race about screaming,

"Bell gon' git married!  Bell gon' git married!"  Yet at the same time, deep
inside himself, Kunta felt that it was improper for him to feel any
displeasure at such an announcement, since the Mandinka people considered
marriage to be the most important thing after birth itself.

Bell somehow managed to get the massa's promise not to use the buggy--or
Kunta--for the entire Sunday before Christmas, when everyone would be off
work and therefore available to attend the wedding.

"I knows you don't want no marriage in de big house," she told Kunta, "like
we could of had if I'd of asked massa.  And I knows he don't really want dat
neither, so at leas' y'all togedder on dat."  She arranged for it to be held
in the front yard alongside the oval flower garden.

Everybody on slave row was there in their Sunday best, and standing together
across from them were Massa Waller with little Missy Anne and her parents.
But as far as Kunta was concerned, the guest of honor--and, in a very real
sense, the one responsible for the whole thing-- was his friend the Ghanaian,
who had hitched a ride all the 348 ALEX HALEY |

way from Enfield just to be there.  As Kunta walked with" Bell out into the
center of the yard, he turned his head!  toward the qua-qua player, and they
exchanged a long; look before Bell's main praying and singing friend.  Aunt]
Sukey, the plantation's laundress, stepped forward to con' duct the ceremony.

After calling for all present to stand closer together, she said, "Now, I ax
everybody here to: pray for dis union dat God 'bout to make.  I wants y'all
to pray dat dis here couple is gwine a stay togedder" -- slw hesitated "--an'
dat nothin' don't happen to cause 'em to] git sol' away from one not her

And pray dat dey has goodJ healthy young'uns.  " And then very solemnly.

Aunt Sukey; -placed a broomstick on the close-cropped grass just in; front of
Kunta and Bell, whom she now motioned to link; their arms.  ?

Kunta felt as if he were suffocating.  In his mind was!  |jy.  ; flashing how
marriages were conducted in his Juffure.  He ^ could see the dancers, hear
the praise singers and the prayers, and the talking drums relaying the glad
tidings _> to other villages.  He hoped that he would be forgiven for F what
he was doing, that whatever words were spoken to^ their pagan God, Allah
would understand that Kunta still; believed in Him and only Him.  And then,
as if from afar, he heard Aunt Sukey asking,

"Now, y'all two is sho' you wants to git married?"

Softly, alongside Kunta, Bell said, I ^" " I does.  " And Aunt Sukey turned
her gaze to Kunta; he I Q ;^ felt her eyes boring into him.

And then Bell was squeezing .  li,"" ^ his arm very hard.  He forced the
words from his mouth: Iss!

"I does."  And then Aunt Sukey said,

"Den, in de eyes of 1^;1 Jesus, y'all jump into de holy lan' of matrimony."

Kunta and Bell jumped high over the broomstick together, as Bell had forced
him to practice over and over the day before.  He felt ridiculous doing it,
but she had.  warned that a marriage would meet the very worst kind of bad
luck if the feet of either person should touch the broomstick, and whoever
did it would be the first to die.

As they landed safely together on the other side of the broom, all the
observers applauded and cheered, and when they had quieted.  Aunt Sukey spoke
again: "What God done j'ined, let no man pull asunder.

Now y'all be faithful to one not her She looked at Kunta directly.

"An' be good Christians."  Aunt Sukey turned next to look ROOTS 349

at Massa Waller.

"Massa, is it anything you cares to say for dis here occasion?"

The massa clearly looked as if he would prefer not to, but he stepped forward
and spoke softly.

"He's got a good woman in Bell.  And she's got a good boy.  And my family
here, along with myself, wish them the rest of their lives of good luck."
The loud cheering that followed from all of the slave-row people was
punctuated with the happy squeals of little Missy Anne, who was jumping up
and down, until her mother pulled her away, and all the Wall- ers went into
the big house to let the blacks continue the celebration in their own way.

Aunt Sukey and other friends of Bell's had helped her cook enough pots of
food that they all but hid the top of a long table.  And amid the feasting
and good cheer, everyone there but Kunta and the Ghanaian partook of the
brandy and wines that the massa had sent up from the big-house cellar as his
gift.  With the fiddler playing steadily and loudly on his instrument ever
since the party began, Kunta didn't know how he'd managed to sneak a drink,
but from the way he swayed as he played, it was clear that he'd managed to
get hold of more than one.  He had endured the fiddler's drinking so often
that he was resigned to it, but when he saw Bell busy filling and refilling
her wine glass, he began to get increasingly concerned and embarrassed.

He was shocked to overhear her exclaiming to Sister Mandy, another of her
friends,

"Been had my eye on him for ten years!"  And not long after that, she wobbled
over, threw her arms around him, and kissed him full on the mouth right there
in front of everyone, amid crude jokes, elbows in the ribs, and uproarious
laughter.  Kunta was taut as a bowstring by the time the rest of the guests
finally began to take their leave.  Finally, they were all alone there in the
yard, and as Bell wove unsteadily toward him, she said softly in a slurred
voice, "Now you done bought de cow, you gits all de milk you wants!"  He was
horrified to hear her talk so.

But it wasn't long before he got over it.  In fact.  before many weeks had
passed, he had gained considerably more knowledge of what a big.

strong, healthy woman was really like.  His hands had explored in the
darkness until now he knew for a certainty that Bell's big behind was
entirely 350 ALEX HALEY

her own, and none of it was one of those padded bustles that he had heard
many women were wearing to make their behinds look big.  Though he hadn't
seen her naked-- she always blew out the candles before he got the chance--
he had been permitted to see her breasts, whose largeness he noted with
satisfaction was the kind that would supply much milk for a man child and
that was very good.  But it had been with horror that Kunta first saw the
deep lash marks on Bell's back.

"I's carryin' scars to my grave jes' like my mammy did," Bell said, "but my
back sure ain't as bad as your'n," and Kunta was taken with surprise, for he
hadn't seen his own back.  He had all but forgotten all those lashings, over
twenty years ago.

With her warmth always beside him, Kunta greatly enjoyed sleeping in Bell's
tall bad on its soft mattress, filled as it was with cotton instead of straw
or corn shucks Her handmade quilts, too, were comfortable and warm, and it
was a completely new and luxurious experience for him to sleep between a pair
of sheets.  Almost as pleasurable for him were the nicely fitted shirts she
made for him, then washed, starched, and ironed freshly every day.  Bell even
softened the leather of his stiff, high-topped shoes by greasing them with
tallow, and she knitted him more socks that were thickly cushioned to fit his
half foot.

After years of driving the massa all day and returning at night to a cold
supper before crawling onto his solitary pallet, now Bell saw to it that the
same supper she fed the massa--unless it was pork, of course--was simmering
over the fireplace in their cabin when he got home.  And he liked eating on
her white crockery dishes with the knives, spoons, and forks she had
obviously supplied for herself from the big house.  Bell had even whitewashed
her cabin--he often had to remind himself that now it was their cabin--on the
outside as well as the inside.  All in all, he was amazed to find that he
liked almost everything about her, and he would have rebuked himself for not
having come to his senses sooner if he hadn't been feeling too good to spend
much time thinking about all the years he'd wasted.  He just couldn't believe
how different things were, how much better life was, than it had been just a
few months before and a few yards away.

CHAPTER 66

As close as they'd become since they "jumped de broom," there were times when
Kunta would sense that Bell still didn't totally trust him.  Sometimes when
she was talking to him in the kitchen or the cabin, she would nearly say
something, then abruptly veer off onto another subject, filling Kunta with a
rush of anger that only his pride enabled him to conceal.  And on more than
one occasion, he had learned things from the fiddler or the gardener that had
to have been picked up at the massa's keyhole.  It didn't matter to him what
it was she was telling them; what hurt was that she wasn't telling him, that
she was keeping secrets from her own husband.  What hurt him even more was
that he had always been so open in sharing with her and them news they might
never have learned otherwise, or at least not for a long time.  Kunta began
to let weeks go by without telling even Bell about whatever he had overheard
in town.  When she finally said something to him about it, he said he guessed
things had just been kind of quiet lately, and maybe it's just as well
because the news never seemed to be any good.  But the next time he came back
from town, he figured she'd learned her lesson, and he told her that he'd
overheard the massa telling one of his friends that he'd just read that in
New Orleans a white doctor named Benjamin Rush had written recently that when
his longtime black assistant, a slave named James Derham, had learned as much
medicine from him as he felt he knew himself, he had set him free.

"Ain't he de one what become a doctor his self and got even mo' famous clan
de man what learned him?"  asked Bell.

"How you know dat?  Massa say he jes' read 'bout it his self an ain't nobody
been here fo' you to hear him 352 ALEX HALEY

tell about it," said Kunta, as irritated as he was perplexed.

"Oh, I got my ways," Bell replied mysteriously, changing the subject.

As far as Kunta was concerned, that was the last time she'd ever hear any
news from him, and he didn't say another word about it--or almost anything
else--for the next week or so.  Finally Bell got the hint, and after a good
dinner by candlelight there in the cabin one Sunday night, she put her hand
on his shoulder and said quietly, "Something been hard on my mind to tell
you."  Going into their bedroom, she returned in a moment with one of the
Virginia Gazettes that Kunta knew she kept in a stack beneath their bed.  He
had always assumed that she simply enjoyed turning the pages, as he knew so
many blacks did, as well as those poor whites who walked around on Saturdays
in the county seat with newspapers opened before their faces, though Kunta
and everyone else who saw them knew perfectly well that they couldn't read a
word.  But in some way now, as he saw the secretive look on Bell's face, he
sensed with astonishment what she was about to say.

"I can read some," Bell hesitated.

"Massa sell me fo' sunup if'n he knowed dat."

Kunta made no response, for he had learned that Bell would do more talking on
her own than if she was asked questions.

"I's knowed some a de words ever since I was a young' un she continued.

"It were de chilluns of my massa back den that teached me.  Dey liked to play
teacher, 'cause dey was going to school, an' de massa and missis didn't pay
it no tent ion on count of how de white folks tells deyselves dat niggers is
too dumb to learn anythin'."

Kunta thought about the old black he saw regularly at the Spotsylvania County
courthouse, who had swept and mopped there for years, with none of the whites
ever dreaming that he had copied the handwriting they left lying around on
papers until he had gotten good enough at it to forge and sign traveling
passes, which he sold to blacks.

Peering hard at the tip of her forefinger as it moved down the paper's front
page.  Bell said finally,

"Here where de House of Burgesses done met again."  She studied the print
closely.

"Done passed a new law 'bout taxes."  Kunta was simply amazed.  Bell moved to
a place farther down the ROOTS 353

page.

"Right here it's something' not her 'bout dat England done sent some niggers
from dere back to Africa."  Bell glanced upward at Kunta.

"You want me to pick out mo' what dey say 'bout dat?"  Kunta nodded.

Bell needed several minutes of staring at her finger, with her lips silently
forming letters and words.  Then she spoke again.

"Well, ain't sho 'bout it all, but fo' hunnud niggers done been sent
somewheres called, look like.  Sierra Leone, on land de England bought from a
king dat's dere, an' de niggers is been give some land apiece 'long wid some
money for a 'lowance."

When it seemed as if the very effort of reading had fatigued her, she went
thumbing through the inside pages, pointing out to Kunta one after another
identical small figures that were recognizable as men carrying a bundle at
the end of a stick over their shoulders, and with her finger on the block of
print under one of these figures, she said,

"Dat's always 'scribin' dese runaway niggers-- like it was one 'bout you de
las' time you run off.  It tell what color dey is, what marks dey got on dey
faces or arms or legs or backs from being' beat or branded.  An' it tell what
dey was wearin' when dey run off, an sich as dat.  An' den it tell who dey
belongst to, and what reward being' offered to whoever catch demand bring dem
back.  I seen it be much as five hunnud, an' I seen it be where de nigger
done run so much dat he massa so mad he advertise ten dollars fo' de live
nigger back an' fi'teen fo' jes' his head."

Finally she set the paper down with a sigh, seemingly fatigued by the effort
of reading.

"Now you knows how I found' out 'bout dat nigger doctor.  Same way de massa
did."

Kunta asked if she didn't think she might be taking chances reading the
massa's paper like that.

"I'se real careful," she said.

"But I tell you one time I got scared to death wid massa," Bell added.

"One day he jes' walked in on me when I s'posed to be dustin' in de livin'
room, but what I was doin' was looking in one a dem books a his'n.  Lawd, I
like to froze.  Massa jes' stood dere a minute lookin' at me.  But he never
said nothin'.  He jes' walked out, an' from de next day to dis day it's been
a lock on his bookcase."

When Bell put away the newspaper back under the bed, she was quiet for a
while, and Kunta knew her well 354 ALEX HALEY

enough by now to know that she still had something on her mind.  They were
about ready to go to bed when she abruptly seated herself at the table, as if
she had just made up her mind about something, and with an expression both
furtive and proud on her face, drew from her apron pocket a pencil and a
folded piece of paper.  Smoothing out the paper, she began to print some
letters very carefully.

"You know what dat is?"  she asked, and before Kunta could say no, answered,

"Well, dat's my name.  Be-1-1."  Kunta stared at the penciled characters,
remembering how for years he had shrunk away from any closeness to toubob
writing, thinking it contained some toubob greegrees that might bring him
harm--but he still wasn't too sure that was so farfetched.  Bell now printed
some more letters.

"Dat's your name, K-u-n-t-a."  She beamed up at him.  Despite himself, Kunta
couldn't resist bending a little closer to study the strange markings.  But
then Bell got up, crumpled the paper, and threw it onto the dying embers in
the fireplace.

"Ain't never gone git caught wid no writin'."

Several weeks had passed before Kunta finally decided to do something about
an irritation that had been eating at him ever since Bell showed him so
proudly that she could read and write.  Like their white mass as these
plantation-born blacks seemed to take it for granted that those who had come
from Africa had just climbed down from the trees, let alone had any
experience whatever with education.

So very casually one evening after supper, he knelt down before the cabin's
fireplace and raked a pile of ashes out onto the hearth, then used his hands
to flatten and smooth them out.  With Bell watching curiously, he then took a
slender whittled stick from his pocket and proceeded to scratch into the
ashes his name in Arabic characters.

Bell wouldn't let him finish, demanding,

"What dat?"  Kunta told her.

Then, having made his point, he swept the ashes back into the fireplace, sat
down in the rocking chair, and waited for her to ask him how he'd learned to
write.  He didn't have long to wait.  and for the rest of the evening he
talked, and Bell listened for a change.  Tn his halting speech, Kunta told
her how all the children in ROOTS 355

his village were taught to write, with pens made of hollowed dried grass
stalks, and ink of water mixed with crushed pot black He told her about the
arafang, and how his lessons were conducted both mornings and evenings.
Warming to his subject, and enjoying the novelty of seeing Bell with her
mouth shut for a while, Kunta told her how the students in Juffure had to be
able to read well from the Koran before they could graduate, and he even
recited for her some Koranic verses.  He could tell she was intrigued, but it
seemed amazing to him that this was the very first time in all the years he'd
known her that she had ever shown the slightest interest in anything about
Africa.

Bell tapped the top of the table between them.

"How y'all Africans say 'table'?"  she asked.

Although he hadn't spoken in Mandinka since he left Africa, the word "meso"
popped from Kunta's mouth almost before he realized it, and he felt a surge
of pride.

"How 'bout dot?"  asked Bell, pointing at her chair.

"Sirango," said Kunta.  He was so pleased with himself that he got up and
began to walk around in the cabin, pointing at things.

Tapping Bell's black iron pot over the fireplace, he said "kalero,"

and then a candle on the table: "kandio."  Astonished, Bell had risen from
her chair and was following him around.  Kunta nudged a burlap bag with his
shoe and said "boto," touched a dried gourd and said "mirango," then a basket
that the old gardener had woven: "sinsingo."  He led Bell on into their
bedroom.

"Larango," he said, pointing to their bed, and then a pillow: "kunglarang."
Then at the window: "janerango," and at the roof: "kankarango."

"Lawd have mercy!"  exclaimed Bell.  That was far more respect for his
homeland than he had ever expected to arouse in Bell.

"Now it time to put our head on de kunglarang," said Kunta, sitting down on
the edge of the bed and starting to undress.  Bell knitted her brow, then
laughed and put her arms around him.  He hadn't felt so good in a long time.

CHAPTER 67

Though Kunta still liked to visit and swap stories with the fiddler and the
gardener, it didn't happen nearly as often as it used to when he was single.
This was hardly surprising, since he spent most of his free time with Bell
now.  But even when they did get together lately, they seemed to feel
differently toward him than- before--certainly not unfriendly, but undeniably
less companionable.  It had been they who practically pushed Kunta into
Bell's arms, yet now that he was married, they acted a little as if they were
afraid it might be catching--or that it might never be; his obvious
contentment with hearth and home didn't make them feel any warmer on cold
winter nights.  But if he didn't feel as close to them as before--in the
comradeship they had shared as single men, despite their different |^
origins--he felt somehow more accepted now, as if by ics^.  ;" marrying Bell
he had become one of them.  Though their |^'.i' conversations with their
married friend weren't as earthy jji^ as they had sometimes been before--not
that Kunta would |^' admit even to himself that he had ever enjoyed the
fiddler's crudities--they had become, with the building of trust and the
passage of years, even deeper and more serious.

"Scairt!"  declared the fiddler one night.

"Dat's how come white folks so busy countin' everybody in dat census!  Dey
scairt dey's done brung mo' niggers 'mongst 'em clan dey is white folks!"
declared the fiddler.

Kunta said that Bell had told him she'd read in the Gazette that in Virginia,
the census had recorded only a few more thousand whites than blacks.

"White folks scairder of free niggers clan dey is of us'ns!"  the old
gardener put in.

"I's beared it's near 'bout sixty thousand free niggers jes' in Virginia,"
the fiddler said.

"So it ain't no tellin' how many slave niggers.  But even dis state ain't
where demos ROOTS 357

is.  Dat's down in dem states where de richest lan' make the bes' crops, an'
dey got water for boats to take dey crops to de markets, an' .  .  "

"Yeah, dem places it He's two niggers for every white folks!"  the old
gardener interrupted.

"All down in dat Lou'siana Delta, an' de Yazoo Miss'ippi where dey grows
sugar cane, an' all down in dat black belt of Alabama, South Ca'lina, and
Geo'gia where dey grows all dat rice an' indigo, let me tell you dat down on
dem great big 'way-back-plantations, dey's got all kinds of niggers ain't
never been counted."

"Some o' dem plantations so big dey's split up into littler ones wid
oberseers in charge," the fiddler said.

"An' de mass as datowns dem big plantations is mostly dem big lawyers an'
politicians an' businessmen what lives in de cities, an' dey wimminfolks
don't want no parts of no plantations 'ceptin' maybe to bring out fancy
carriages full of dey friends maybe for Thanksgivin' or Christmas, or
summertime picnics."

"But you know what," the old gardener exclaimed, "dem rich city white folks
is de very kin' 'mongst which it's dem dat speaks 'against slavery."

The fiddler cut him off.

"Humph!  Dat don' mean nothin'!  Always been some big white folks dat wants
de slavery 'bolished.  Shoot, slavery been outlawed here in Virginia ten
years now but law or no, you notice we still slaves, an' dey still bringin'
in more shiploads of niggers."

"Where dey all being' taken?"  asked Kunta.

"Some buggy drivers I knows say dey mass as go on long trips where dey don'
hardly see another black face for days at a time."

"It's a plenty whole counties dat ain't even got one big plantation on 'em,
an' hardly no niggers at all said the gardener.

"Jes' nothin' but dem little rocky farms dat's sol' for fifty cents a acre to
dem white folks so po' dey eats dirt.  An' not a whole lot better off clan
dem is de ones dat got not much better land an' jes' a handful of slaves."

"One place I heard 'bout ain't got no handful o' niggers, it's dem West
Indies, whatever dem is," said the fiddler, turning to Kunta.

"You know where?  It's 'crost de water like you come from."  Kunta shook his
head.

"Anyway."  the fiddler went on,

"I hears it's many as a thou san niggers b'longin' to one massa dere, raisin'
and cutting' dat cane dat dey makes sugar an 'lasses an' rum 358 ALEX HALEY

out of.  Dey tells me a whole lots of dem ships like brung you over here
stops off African niggers in dem West Indies to keep 'em awhile jes' to
fatten 'em up from dem long trips dat gits 'em so sick an' starved dey's near
'bout dead.  Fattens 'em up, den brings 'em on here to git de better prices
for niggers dat's fit to work.  Leas'ways, dat's what I'se beared.  "

It had never failed to amaze Kunta how the fiddler and the gardener seemed to
know so much about things they'd never seen and places they'd never been to,
for he distinctly recalled having heard both of them say they had never been
outside of Virginia and North Carolina.

He had traveled far more widely than they had--not only all the way from
Africa but also back and forth across the state in the massa's buggy--but
they still knew so much more than he did that even after all these years of
talking to them, he was finding out things he hadn't known before.

It didn't really bother Kunta to find out how ignorant he was, since they
were helping him become less so; but it troubled him deeply to learn over the
years that even he was better informed than the average slave.  From what
he'd been able to observe, most blacks literally didn't even know where they
were, let alone who they were.

"I bet you half de niggers in Virginia ain't never been off dey mass as
plantations," said Bell when he raised the subject with her.

"An' ain't never heard of nowhere else 'ceptin' maybe -Richmond an'
Fredericksburg an' up Nawth, an' don' have no idea where none of dem is.  De
white folks keeps niggers ign'ant o' where dey is 'cause dey so worried 'bout
niggers uprisin' or 'scapin'."

Before Kunta had the chance to recover from his surprise at hearing an
insight like this one coming from Bell rather than the fiddler or the
gardener, she spoke again.  "You reckon you still would run again ifn you had
de chance?"

Kunta was stunned by the question, and for a long time he didn't answer.
Then finally he said,

"Well, long time I ain't done no thinkin' 'bout dat."

"Whole lots of times I he's thinkin' a heap o' things nobody wouldn't figger
I does," said Bell.

"Like sometime I gits to thinkin' 'bout being' free, like I hears 'bout dem
dat gits away up to de Nawth."

She looked closely at ROOTS 359

Kunta.

"Don' care how good de massa is, I gits to feelin' like if you an' me was
younger'n we is, I believes I'd be ready to leave 'way from here tonight."
As Kunta sat there astonished, she said quietly, "Reckon I'se got to be too
old and scairt now."

Bell could have been reading the thought he was having at that moment about
himself, and it hit him like a fist.  He was too old to run away again and
too beat up.  And scared.  All the pain and terror of those terrible days and
nights of running came back: the blistered feet, the bursting lungs, the
bleeding hands, the tearing thorns, the baying of the hounds, the snarling
jaws, the gunshots, the sting of the lash, the falling ax.  Without even
realizing it, Kunta had plunged into a black depression.  Knowing that she
had aroused it without meaning to, but knowing also that she'd only make it
worse by talking about it any further, even to apologize.  Bell simply got up
and went to bed.

When he finally realized that she was gone, Kunta felt badly that he had cut
her out of his thoughts.  And it pained him to think how grievously he had
underestimated her and the other blacks.

Though they never showed it except to those they loved, and sometimes not
even then, he realized at last that they felt--and hated--no less than he the
oppressiveness under which they all lived.  He wished he could find a way to
tell her how sorry he was, how he felt her pain, how grateful he was to feel
her love, how strong he felt the bond between them growing deep within
himself.  Quietly he got up.  went into the bedroom, took off his clothes,
got into bed.  took her in his arms.  and made love to her--and she to
him--with a kind of desperate intensity.

CHAPTER 68

For several weeks, it seemed to Kunta that Bell had been acting very oddly.
For one thing, she was hardly talking; but she wasn't even in a bad mood.
And she was casting what he felt were peculiar looks at him, then sighing
loudly when he stared back.

And she had begun smiling mysteriously to herself while rocking in her chair,
sometimes even humming tunes.  Then one night, just after they'd blown out
the candle and climbed into bed, she grasped Kunta's hand and placed it
tenderly on her stomach.  Something inside her moved beneath his hand.  Kunta
sprang up fit to split with joy.

Over the next days, he hardly noticed where he was driving.  For all he knew,
the massa could have been pulling the buggy and the horses sitting on the
seat behind him, so filled was his mind's eye with visions of Bell paddling
down the belong to the rice fields with his man- child bundled snugly on her
back.  He thought of little else but the myriad significances of this coming
firstborn, even as for Binta and Omoro he had been the firstborn.  He vowed
that just as they and others had done for him in Juffure, he was going to
teach this man child to be a true man, no matter what trials and hazards that
might involve here in the land of the toubob.  For it was the job of a father
to be as a giant tree to his man child For where girl children simply ate
food until they grew big enough to marry and go away--and girl children were
their mothers' concerns, in any case--it was the man child who carried on his
family's name and reputation, and when the time came that his parents were
old and tottering, it would be the well-reared man child who put nothing
before taking care of them.

Bell's pregnancy took Kunta's mind even farther back to Africa than his
encounter with the Ghanaian had done.

ROOTS 361

One night, in fact, he completely forgot Bell was in the cabin while he
patiently counted out all the pebbles in his gourd, discovering with
astonishment that he hadn't seen his homeland now for exactly 221/S rains.
But most evenings she would be talking almost steadily while he sat there
hearing less than usual and gazing off at nothing.

"He jes' go off into his Africanisms," Bell would tell Aunt Sukey, and after
a while Bell would rise unnoticed from her chair, quietly leave the
room--muttering to herself-- and go to sleep alone.

It had been one such night when, about an hour after she'd gone to bed, Kunta
was snapped back to the cabin by moans from the bedroom.

Was it time?  Rushing in, he found her still asleep, but rolling back and
forth on the verge of screaming.  When he leaned over to touch her cheek, she
sat bolt upright there in the darkness, soaked with sweat and breathing hard.

"Lawd, I'm scairt to death for dis baby in my belly!"  she said as she put
her arms around him.  Kunta didn't understand until she composed herself
enough to tell how she had dreamed that at a white folks' party game, they
had announced that the first prize would be the next black baby to be born on
that massa's plantation.  Bell was so distraught that Kunta found himself in
the unaccustomed role of calming her with assurances that she knew Massa
Waller never would do such a thing.  He made her agree with that, then
climbed into bed alongside her, and finally she went back to sleep.

But Kunta didn't; he lay thinking for quite some time of how he had heard of
such things being done--of unborn black babies being given as presents,
wagered as gambling bets at card tables and cockfights.

The fiddler had told him how the dying massa of a pregnant fifteen-year-old
black girl named Mary had willed as slaves to each of his five daughters one
apiece of her first five babies.  He had heard of black children being
security for loans, of creditors claiming them while they were yet in their
mother's belly, of debtors selling them in advance to raise cash.  At that
time in the Spotsylvania County seat slave auctions, he knew the average
price that was being asked and paid for a healthy black baby past six months
of age--when it was assumed then that it would live--was around two hundred
dollars.

362 ALEX HALEY

None of this was very far from his mind when Bell laughingly told him one
evening in the cabin about three months later that during the day the
inquisitive Missy Anne had demanded to know why Bell's belly was growing so
big.

"I tol' Missy Anne,

"I got a li'l biscuit in de oven, honey."

" Kunta was hardly able to keep Bell from seeing his anger at the attention
and affection she lavished on that pampered, doll-like child, who was to him
but another in the seemingly endless parade of " li'l missies" and " li'l
mass as he had seen at so many big houses.

Now with Bell about to have a child of her own--and his own--it incensed him
to think about the firstborn son of Kunta and Bell Kinte romping in "play"
with toubob children who would grow up to become their mass as--and sometimes
even 'the fathers of their own children.

And Kunta had been to more than a few plantations where one of the slave
children was almost the same color as his massa's-- in fact, they often
looked like twins--because both of them had the same white father.  Before
Kunta let anything like that happen to Bell, he vowed that he would kill the
massa rather than become one of those men he had seen holding their wife's
"high-yaller" baby and living somehow with the knowledge that if he uttered
publicly so much as a complaining word, he would certainly get beaten, if not
worse.

Kunta thought about how "high-yaller" slave girls brought high prices at the
county seat slave auctions.  He had seen them being sold, and he had heard
many times about the purposes for which they were bought.  And he thought of
the many stories he had heard about "highyaller" man children--about how they
were likely to get mysteriously taken away as babies never to be seen again,
because of the white fear that otherwise they might grow up into
white-looking men and escape to where they weren't known and mix the
blackness in their blood with that of white women.  Every time Kunta thought
about any aspect of blood mixing, he would thank Allah that he and Bell could
share the comfort of knowing that whatever otherwise might prove to be His
will, their man child was going to be black.

It was early one night in September of 1790 when the labor pains began to
take hold of Bell.  But she wouldn't ROOTS 363

yet let Kunta go for the massa, who had said that he would personally attend
her, with Sister Mandy to be in readiness as his assistant if he should need
her.  Each time the pains came.  Bell lay on the bed gritting her teeth to
keep from crying out, and she would tighten her grip on Kunta's hand with the
strength of a man.

It was during one of the brief intervals between the pains that Bell turned
her sweating face to Kunta and said,

"It's something I oughta tol' you 'fore now.  I's already done had two
chilluns, long time ago, 'fore I ever come here, 'tore 1 was sixteen years
of'."  Kunta stood looking down at the anguished Bell, astounded.  Had he
known this--no, he would have married her anyway--but he felt betrayed that
she hadn't told him before.  Making herself gasp out the words between
contractions.  Bell told him about the two daughters from whom she had been
sold away.

"Jes' nothin' but babies is all dey was."  She began to weep.

"One was jes' startin' to walk good, an' de othern weren't a year old
hardly."  -- She started to go on, but a spasm of pain clamped her mouth shut
and tightened her grip on his hand.  When it finally subsided, her grip
didn't loosen; she looked up at him through her tears andreading his racing
thoughts--said,

"Case you wond'rin', dere daddy weren't no massa or no oberseer.  Was a field
nigger 'bout my age.  We didn't know no better."

The pains came again, much sooner than before, and her nails dug into his
palm as her mouth opened wide in a soundless scream.  Kunta rushed from the
cabin down to Sister Mandy's hut, where he banged the door and called to her
hoarsely, then ran on as fast as he could go to the big house.  His knocking
and calling finally brought Massa Waller, who needed but one glance at Kunta
to say,

"I'll be right there!"

Hearing Bell's anguished moans rise into shrieks that went ripping through
the quiet of slave row pushed from Kunta's mind any thought of what Bell had
revealed to him.  As much as he wanted to be by Bell's side, he was glad
Sister Mandy had ordered him outside, where he squatted at the door trying to
imagine what must be going on inside.  He had never learned much about
childbirth in Africa, since that was considered women's affair, but he had
heard that a woman birthed a child while kneeling 364 ALEX HALEY

over cloths spread on the floor, then sat in a part of water to clean away
the blood, and he wondered if that's what was happening now.

It occurred to Kunta that far away in Juffure, Binta and Omoro were becoming
grandparents, and it saddened him to know not only that they would never see
his man child-- or he them--but also that they would never know he'd had one.

Hearing the first sharp cries of another voice, Kunta sprang upright.

A few minutes later, the massa emerged looking haggard.

"She had a hard time.  She's forty-three years old," he said to Kunta.

"But she'll be fine in a couple of days."  The massa gestured toward the
cabin door.  "Give -Mandy a little while to clean up, then you go on in there
and see your baby girl."

A girlchi}dl Kunta was still struggling to compose himself when Sister Mandy
appeared at the doorway, smiling and beckoning him inside.

Gripping through the front room, he pushed aside the curtain at the bedroom
door and there they were.  As he moved quietly to her side, a floorboard
squeaked and Bell opened her eyes, managing a weak smile.

Absently, he found her hand and squeezed, but he scarcely felt it, for he
couldn't stop staring at the face of the infant who lay beside her.  It was
almost as black as his, and the features were unmistakably Mandinka.  Though
it was a girl child--which must be the will of Allah--it was nonetheless a
child, and he felt a deep pride and serenity in the knowledge that the blood
of the Kintes, which had coursed down through the centuries like a mighty
river, would continue to flow for still another generation.

Kunta's next thoughts, standing there at the bedside, were of a fitting name
for his child.  Though he knew enough not to ask the massa for eight days off
from work to spend deciding on it, as a new father would in Africa, he knew
that the matter would require long and serious reflection, for he knew that
what a child was called would really influence the kind of person he or she
became.  Then it flashed into his mind that whatever name he gave her, she
would be also called by the last name of the massa; the thought was so
infuriating that Kunta vowed before Allah that this girl child would grow up
knowing her own true name.

ROOTS 365

Abruptly, without a word, he turned and left.  With the sky just beginning to
show the traces of early dawn, he went outside and started walking down along
the fence- row where he and Bell had shared their courtship.  He had to
think.  Remembering what she had told him about her life's greatest
grief--having been sold away from her two infant girl children--he searched
his mind for a name, some Mandinka word, that would have as its meaning
Bell's deepest wish never to suffer such a loss again, a name that would
protect its owner from ever losing her.  Suddenly he had it!  Turning the
word over and over in his mind, he resisted the temptation to speak it aloud,
even just for himself, for that would have been improper.  Yes, that had to
be it!  Exhilarated with his good luck in such a short while, Kunta hurried
back along the fence row to the cabin.

But when he told Bell that he was prepared for his child to be named, she
protested far more strongly than be would have thought her capable of in her
condition.  "What's sich a rush to name 'er?  Name 'er what?  We ain't talked
'bout no name nohow!"  Kunta knew well how stubborn Bell could be once she
got her back up, so there was anguish as well as anger in his voice as he
searched for the.  right words to explain that there were certain traditions
that must be honored, certain procedures that must be followed in the naming
of a child; chief among them was the selection of that name by the father
alone, who was permitted to tell no one what it was until he had revealed it
to the child, and that this was only right.  He went on to say that haste was
essential lest their child hear first some name that the massa might decide
upon for her.

"Now I sees!"  said Bell.

"Dese Africanisms you so full of ain't gon' do nothin' but make trouble.  An'
dey ain't gon' be none of dem heathen ways an names, neither, for dis chile!"

In a fury, Kunta stormed out of the cabin--and nearly bumped into Aunt Sukey
and Sister Mandy on their way in with armloads of towels and steaming pots of
water.

"

" Gratulations, Br'er Toby, we comin' to look in on Bell.   "

But Kunta scarcely grunted at them as he passed.  A field hand named Cato was
headed out to ring the first bell of the morning, signaling the others out of
their cabins for 366 ALEX HALEY

buckets of water from the well to wash up with before break last

Kunta quickly turned ott slave row to take the back path lhat led to the
barn, wanting as much distance as he could get between him and those heathen
blacks whom the toubob had trained to shrink away in fear from anything
smacking of the Africa that had been their very source-place.

In the sanctuary of the barn, Kunta angrily fed, watered, and then rubbed
down the horses.  When he knew that it was time for the massa to have his
breakfast, he took the long way around again on his way to the big-house
kitchen door, where he asked Aunt Sukey, who was filling in for Bell, if the
massa was going to need the buggy.

Refusing to speak or even turn around, she shook her head and left the room
without even offering him any food.  Limping back to the barn, Kunta wondered
what Bell had told Aunt Sukey and Sister Mandy for them to go gossiping
through slave row; then he told himself that he couldn't care less.

He had to do something with himself; he couldn't just idle away more hours
around the barn.  Moving outside with the buggy harnesses, he set about his
familiar task of killing time by oiling them unnecessarily, as he had just
done only two weeks before.  He wanted to go back to the cabin to see the
baby--and even Bell--but anger rose every time he thought of what a disgrace
it was that the wife of a Kinte could want her child to bear some toubob
name, which would be nothing but the first step toward a lifetime of
self-contempt.

About noontime, Kunta saw Aunt Sukey taking in to Bell a pot of some
food--some kind of soup, probably.  It made him hungry to think about it; a
few minutes later he went out behind the barn where some recently harvested
sweet potatoes had been mounded under straw for curing, picked out four of
the smaller ones, and--feeling very sorry for himself--ate them raw to
appease his stomach.

Dusk was descending before he could bring himself to go home.  When he opened
the front door and walked in, there was no sound of response from Bell in the
bedroom.  She could be asleep, he thought, leaning over to light a candle on
the table.

"Dat you?"

He could detect no special harshness in Bell's tone.

ROOTS 367

Grunting noncommittally, he picked up the candle, pushed aside the curtain,
and went into the bedroom.  In the ruddy glow, he could see that the
expression on her face was as adamant as his own.

"Looka here, Kunta," she said, wasting no time getting to the point, "it's
some things I knows 'bout our massa bet tern you does.  You git him mad wid
dat African stuff, he sells us all three at-de next county seat auction jes'
sho's we born!"

Containing the anger within him as well as he could, Kunta stumbled for the
words that could make Bell understand the absoluteness of his determination
that whatever the risks, his child would bear no toubob name, and that
moreover she would be given her name in the proper manner.

As deeply as Bell disapproved, she was even more apprehensive of what Kunta
might do if she refused.  So with deep misgivings, she finally acquiesced.

"What kin' o' voodoo you got to do?"  she asked dubiously.

When he said he was simply going to take the baby outdoors for a while, she
insisted that he wait until the child awakened and she had nursed her so that
she wouldn't be hungry and crying, and Kunta immediately agreed.  Bell
reckoned that the baby wouldn't wake up for at least another two hours, by
which time it would be most unlikely that anyone in slave row would still be
up to see whatever mumbo jumbo Kunta was going to perform.  Though she didn't
show it, Bell was still angry that Kunta prevented her from helping him pick
a name for the daughter she had just brought into the world amid such agony;
and she dreaded finding out what African-sounding, forbidden name Kunta had
come up with, but she was sure that she could deal with the baby's name later
in her own way.

It was near midnight when Kunta emerged from the cabin, carrying his
firstborn wrapped snugly in a blanket.  He walked until he felt they were far
enough from slave row that it couldn't cast a pall over what was about to
take place.

Then, under the moon and the stars, Kunta raised the baby upward, turning the
blanketed bundle in his hands so that the baby's right ear touched against
his lips.  And then slowly and distinctly, in Mandinka, he whispered three
times into the tiny ear,

"Your name is Kizzy.  Your name 368 ALEX HALEY

is Kizzy.  Your name is Kizzy.  " It was done, as it had been done with all
of the Kinte ancestors, as it had been done with himself, as it would have
been done with this infant had she been born in her ancestral homeland.  She
had become the first person to know who she was.

Kunta felt Africa pumping in his veins--and flowing from him into the child,
the flesh of him and Bell--as he walked on a little farther.

Then again he stopped, and lifting a small corner of the blanket he bared the
infant's small black face to the heavens, and this time he spoke aloud to her
in Mandinka: "Behold, the only thing greater than yourself!"

When Kunta returned with the baby to the cabin.  Bell all but snatched her
away, her face tight with fear and resentment as she opened the blanket and
examined her from head to toe, not knowing what she was looking for and
hoping she wouldn't find it.  Satisfied that he hadn't done anything
unspeakable--at least nothing that showed --she put the baby to bed, came
back into the front room, sat down in the chair across from him, folded her
hands carefully in her lap, and asked, "Awright, lemme have it."

"Have what?"

"De name, African, what you call her?"

"Kizzy."

"Kizzy!  Ain't nobody never beared no name like dat!"

Kunta explained that in Mandinka

"Kizzy" meant "you sit down," or "you stay put," which, in turn, meant that
unlike Bell's previous two babies, this child would never get sold away.

She refused to be placated.

"Jes* start troubles!"  she insisted.  But when she felt Kunta's anger
starting to rise again she thought it would be wise to relent.  She said she
seemed to recall her mother speaking of a grandmother whose name was

"Kibby," which sounded very much the same; at least that's what they could
tell the massa if he got suspicious.

The next morning.  Bell did her best to hide her nervousness when the massa
came to look in on her--even forcing herself to laugh good-naturedly as she
told him the baby's name.  He only commented that it was an odd name, but he
said nothing against it, and Bell breathed a heavy sigh of relief the moment
he stepped out the door.

Back ROOTS 369

in the big house, before leaving for a day of visiting his patients with
Kunta driving him, Massa Waller opened the large black Bible that he kept
locked in a case in the drawing room, turned to a page devoted to plantation
records, dipped his pen in the inkwell, and wrote in fine black script:
"Kizzy Waller, born September 12, 1790."

CHAPTER 69

"She jes' like a li'l nigger doll!"  squealed Missy Anne, hopping
ecstatically up and down, clapping her hands with delight, as she saw Kizzy
for the first time three days later in Bell's kitchen.

"Cain't she be mine?"

Bell smiled widely with pleasure.

"Well, she belongs!  to me an' her daddy, honey, but jes' soon's she big
enough, you sho' can play wid her all you wants!"

And so she did.  As often as not, whenever Kunta went to the kitchen now to
find out if the buggy would be needed, or simply to visit Bell, he would find
the massa's flaxen-haired little niece--four years old now--bent over the
edge of Kizzy's basket cooing down at her.

"Jes' pretty as you can be.  We gonna have plenty fun soon's you get some
size, you hear me?  You jes' hurry up an' grow, now!"  Kunta never said
anything about it, but it galled him to think how that toubob child acted as
if Kizzy had entered the world to serve as her plaything, like some
extraordinary doll.  Bell hadn't even respected his manhood and fatherhood
enough to ask his feelings about his daughter playing with the daughter of
the man who bought him, he thought bitterly.

It seemed to him sometimes that Bell was less concerned about his feelings
than she was about the massa's.  He'd lost count of the evenings she'd spent
talking about what a blessing it was that little Missy Anne had come along to
replace Massa Waller's real daughter, who had died at birth along with her
mother.

370 ALEX HALEY

"Oh, Lawd, I jes' even hates to think back on it," she told him sniffing one
night.

"Po' li'l pretty Missis Priscilla weren't hardly no bigger'n a bird.  Walkin'
roun' here every day singin' to herself an' smilin' at me an' pattin'
herself, jes' waitin' for her baby's time.  An' den dat mornin' jes."
a-sereamin' and finally dyin', her an' de li'l baby gal, too!  Look like I
ain't hardly seen po' massa do no smilin' since ---leastways not 'til dis
here li'l Missy Anne.  "

Kunta felt no pity for the massa's loneliness, but it seemed to him that
getting married again would keep the massa too busy to spend so much time
doting on his niece, and that way would almost certainly cut down on Missy
Anne's visits to the plantation--and therefore to play with Kizzy.

"Ever since then I been watchin' how massa git dat li'l gal in his lap, hoi'
her close, talk to her, sing her to sleep, an' den jes' set on dere holdin'
her ruthern put her to bed.  Jes' act like he don't never want his eyes to
leave her all de time she be roun' here.  An' I know it's 'cause he's her
daddy in his heart."

It could only dispose the massa even more kindly toward both of them, not to
mention toward Kizzy, Bell would tell him, for Missy Anne to strike up a
friendship that would bring her over to the massa's house even more often
than before.  Nor could it hurt Massa John and his sickly wife, she reasoned
slyly, that their daughter was developing a special closeness to her uncle, "
'cause den de closer dey figgers dey is to massa's money."  However important
the massa's brother acted, she said she knew for a fact that he borrowed from
the massa now and then, and Kunta knew enough not to disbelieve her--not that
he really cared which toubob was richer than which, since they were all alike
to him.

Oftentimes now, since Kizzy's arrival, as Kunta drove the massa around to see
his patients and his friends, he would find himself sharing the wish Bell had
often expressed that the massa would marry again--although Kunta's reasons
were entirely different from Bell's.

"He jes' He's so pitiful to me livin' all by his self in dis big house.
Fact, I believes dat's how come he keep y'all always out dere in de buggy on
dem roads, he jes' want to keep his self movin', ruthern settin' roun' here
by his self Lawd, even UTol' Missy Anne ROOTS 371

sees it!  Las' time she was here, I was servin' dem lunch an' all of a sudden
she say,

"Uncle William, how come you ain't got no wife like everybody else?"  An' po'
thing, he didn't know what to say to her.  "

Though he had never told Bell about it because he knew how much she loved
prying into toubob affairs, Kunta knew of several women who would run almost
on their tiptoes out to meet the massa's buggy whenever Kunta turned into
their driveway.  The fat black cook of one of massa's more incurable patients
had told Kunta scornfully,

"Dat hateful huzzy ain't got nothin' wrong dat catchin' yo' massa wouldn't
cure mighty fast.  She done already drive one man to de grave wid her ornery,
evil ways, an' now she jes' claimin' sickness to keep yo' massa comin' back
here.  I sho' wish he could see her soon's y'all leave, a-hollerin' an'
carryin' on at us niggers like we was mules or something', an' she don't
never touch dem medicines he give 'er!"  There was another woman patient who
would always come onto her front porch with the massa as he left, clinging to
one of his arms as if she might fall, and looking up into his face while
fluttering her fan weakly.

But with both of these women, the massa always acted very stiff and formal,
and his visits always seemed to be shorter than with his other patients.

So the months kept on rolling past, with Missy Anne being brought to visit
Massa Waller about twice a week, and each time she came she'd spend hours
playing with Kizzy.  Though he was helpless to do anything about it, Kunta
tried at least to avoid seeing them together, but they seemed to be
everywhere he turned, and he couldn't escape the sight of his little girl
being patted, kissed, or fondled by the massa's niece.  It filled him with
revulsion --and reminded him of an African saying so old that it had come
down from the forefathers: "In the end, the cat always eats the mouse it's
played with."

The only thing that made it bearable for Kunta was the days and nights in
between her visits.  It was summer by the time Kizzy began to crawl, and Bell
and Kunta would spend the evenings in their cabin watching with delight as
she scuttled about the floor with her little diapered behind upraised.  But
then Missy Anne would show up again and off they'd go, with the older girl
frisking in 372 ALEX HALEY

circles around her shouting,

"C'mon, Kizzy, c'mon!"  and Kizzy crawling in pursuit as quickly as she
could, gurgling with pleasure at the game and the attention.  Bell would beam
with pleasure, but she'd know that even if Kunta was away driving the massa,
he only needed to find out that Missy Anne had been there to return to the
cabin that night with his face set and his lips compressed, and for the rest
of the night he would be totally withdrawn, which Bell found extremely
irritating.  But when she considered what might happen if Kunta should ever
exhibit his feelings even vaguely in any manner that might reach the massa,
she was also a little frightened when he acted that way.

So Bell tried to convince Kunta that no harm could come of the relationship
if only he could bring himself to accept it.  Oftentimes, she told him, white
girls grew up into lifetimes of true devotion and even deep loyalties to
black childhood playmates.  " To' you commence to driving de buggy," she
said, "dey was a white missis died havin' a chile--jes' like his own missis
did--only dis time de baby girl lived an' got suckled by a nigger woman what
jes' had a baby girl o' her own.  Dem li'l gals had growed up near 'bout like
sisters when dat massa married again.  But dat new missis was so strong
'against dem gals being' close, she finally 'suaded dat massa to sell away de
black gal an' her mammy both."  But the moment they were gone, she went on,
the white girl went into such continuing hysterics that time and again Massa
Waller was sent for, until finally be told the father that further weakness
and grief would kill his daughter unless the black girl was returned.

"Dat massa was 'bout ready to whip dat new wife of his'n.  He lef on his
ridin' boss an' ain't no tellin' how much he must o' spent trackin down de
nigger trader dat took de gal an' her mammy away, an' den bvcyirf dem back
from de new massa de nigger trader had sol' dem to.  But he brung back dat
black gal an' got a lawyer an deeded her over to be de property o' his own
gal."

And Bell said that even now, years later, though that white girl had grown to
womanhood, she had never entirely regained her health.

"De black one still livin' right wid her an' takin' care of her, an' neither
one ain't never even married!"

"As far as Kunta was concerned, if Bell had intended ROOTS 373

her story as an argument against friendship between blacks and whites rather
than in tavor of it, she could hardly have made a more eloquent case.

CHAPTER 70

From about the time Kizzy had been born, both Kunta and the fiddler had
returned to the plantation now and then with news about some island across
the big water called "Haiti," where it was said that around thirty-six
thousand mostly French whiles were outnumbered by about half a million blacks
who had been brought there on ships from Africa to slave on huge plantations
growing sugar cane, coffee, indigo, and cocoa.  One night Bell said she had
heard Massa Waller telling his dinner guests that reportedly Haiti's rich
class of whites lived like kings while snubbing the many poorer whites who
couldn't afford slaves of their own.

" " Magin' dat!  Who ever beared o' such a thing?  " said the fiddler
sarcastically.

"Hush!"  said Bell, laughing, and went on to say that the massa then told his
horrified guests that for several generations in Haiti, so much breeding had
gone on between white men and slave women that there were now almost
twenty-eight thousand mulattoes and high-yallers, commonly called "colored
people," of whom nearly all had been given freedom by their French owners and
fathers.  According to one of the other guests, said Bell, these "colored
people" invariably sought yet lighter-complexioned mates, with their goal
being children of entirely white appearance, and those who remained visibly
mulatto would bribe officials for documents declaring that their forefathers
had been Indians or Spanish or anything but Afri- cans.  As astonishing as he
found it to believe, and as deeply as he deplored it, Massa Waller had said
that through the gift deeds or the last wills of many whites, 374 ALEX HALEY

quite a sizable number of these "coloreds" had come to own at least one tilth
of all the Haitian land--and its slaves --that they vacationed in France and
schooled their children there just as the rich whites did, and even snubbed
poor whites.  Bell's audience was as delighted to hear that as the massa's
had been scandalized.

"You gon' laugh out o' de other sides you' moufs," the fiddler interrupted,
"when you hears what I beared some o' dem rich mass as talkin' 'bout at one
o' dem society co- tillyums I played at a while back."  The mass as he said,
were nodding their heads as they discussed how those poor whites down in
Haiti hated those mulattoes and high-yallers so much that they'd signed
petitions until France finally passed laws prohibiting "coloreds" from
walking about at night, from sitting alongside whites in churches, or even
from wearing the same kind of fabrics in their clothes.  In the meantime,
said the fiddler, both whites and "coloreds" would take out their bitterness
toward each other on Haiti's half-million black slaves.

Kunta said he had overheard talk in town among laughing whites that made it
sound as if Haitian slaves were suffering worse than here.  He said he'd
heard that blacks getting beaten to death or buried alive as punishment was
commonplace, and that pregnant black women were often driven at work until
they miscarried.  Since he felt it wouldn't have served any purpose other
than to terrify them, he didn't tell them that he had heard about even more
inhuman bestialities, such as a black man's hands being nailed to a wall
until he was forced to eat his own cut-off ears; a toubob woman having all
her slaves' tongues cut out; another gagging a black child's mouth until he
starved.

In the wake of such horror stories over the past nine or ten months, it
didn't surprise Kunta, on one of his trips to town during this summer of
1791, to learn that Haiti's black slaves had risen in a wild, bloody revolt.
Thousands of them had swept forth slaughtering, clubbing, and beheading white
men, gutting children, raping women, and burning every plantation building
until northern Haiti lay in smoking ruins and the terrorized escaped white
population was fighting to stay alive and lashing back--torturing, killing,
even skinning every black they could catch.  But they had been only a handful
of survivors steadily dwindling before the wildly spreading black revolt,
until by the ROOTS 375

end of August the few remaining thousands of whites still alive were in
hiding places or trying to flee the island.

Kunta said he had never seen Spotsylvania County's toubob so angry and afraid.

"Seem like dey's even scairder clan de las' uprisin' right here in Virginia,"
said the fiddler.  "Was maybe two, three years after you come, but you still
weren't hardly talkin' to nobody, so don' reckon you even knowed it.  Was
right over yonder in New Wales, in Han- over County, during one Christmas
time.  A oberseer beat some young nigger to de groun', an' dat nigger sprung
up an' went at him wid a ax.  But he missed 'im, an' de other niggers jumped
de oberseer an beat 'im so bad dat de first nigger come an' saved his life.
Dat oberseer went run- run' for help, all bloody, an' meanwhile dem mad
niggers caught two more white mens an' tied 'em up and was beating on 'em
when a great big bunch a' whites come a-runnin' wid guns.  Dem niggers took
cover in a barn, an' de white folks tried to sweet-talk 'em to come on out,
but dem niggers come a-rushin' wid barrel staves an' clubs, an' it woun' up
wid two niggers shot dead an' a lot of both white mens an' niggers hurt.  Dey
put out militia patrols, an' some mo' laws was passed, an' sich as dat, till
it simmered down.  Dis here Haiti thing done freshened white folks' minds,
'cause dey knows jes' good as me it's a whole heap o' niggers right under dey
noses wouldn't need nothin' but de right spark to rise up right now, an' once
dat ever get to spreadin', yessuh, it be de same as Haiti right here in
Virginia."  The fiddler clearly relished the thought.

Kunta was soon to see the whites' fright for himself wherever he drove in the
towns, or near the crossroads stores, taverns, church meeting houses or
wherever else they gathered in small, agitated clusters, their faces red and
scowling whenever he or any other black passed nearby.  Even the massa, who
rarely spoke to Kunta other than to tell him where he wanted t& be driven,
made even those words noticeably colder and more clipped.  Within a week, the
Spotsylvania County militia was patrolling the roads, demanding to know the
destination and to inspect the traveling permit of any passing blacks, and
beating and jailing any they thought acted or even looked suspicious.  At a
meeting of the area's mass as the soon approaching big annual harvest frolic
for slaves was canceled, along with all other black gatherings beyond home
plantations; and even 376 ALEX HALEY

any home slave-row dancing or prayer meetings were to be watched by an
overseer or some other white.

"When massa tol' me dat, I tol' him me an' Aunt Sukey an' Sister Mandy gits
on our knees an' prays to Jesus togedder every Sunday an' any other chance we
gits, but he ain't say nothing 'bout watchin' us, so we gon' keep right on
pray in'1" Bell told the others on slave row.

Alone at home with Kunta and Kizzy for the next several nights, in search of
the latest news.  Bell spelled her way through several newspapers the massa
thought he had discarded.  It took her the better part of an hour on one big
story before she could tell him that "some kin' o' Bill o' Rights done got.
.  ."  Bell hesitated and drew a deep breath, "well, it done got rat-ti-fied,
or something' not her But there were far more reports about recent events in
Haiti-- most of which they'd already heard through the slave grapevine.  The
gist of most of them, she said, was that the Haitian slave revolt could
easily spread foolhardy notions among black malcontents in this country, that
extreme restrictions and harsh punishments should be imposed.  As she folded
up the papers and put them away.  Bell said, " Look like to me ain't much
more dey can do 'against us, less'n it's jes' chain us all up, I reckon.  "

Over the next month or two, however, news of further developments in Haiti
slowly ebbed, and with it came a gradual easing of tensions--and a lightening
of restrictions --throughout the South, The harvest season had begun,!  and
whites were congratulating one another on the bumper cotton crop--and the
record prices they were getting for it.

The fiddler was being sent for to play at so many big- house balls and
parties that during the daytime when he i was back home, he did little more
than sleep.

"Look like dem mass as makin' so much cotton money dey jes' gwine dance
deyselves to death!"  he told Kunta.  , ^ It wasn't long, however, until the
white folks had some- : thing to be unhappy about again.  On his visits to
the county seat with the massa, Kunta began to hear angry talk, of increasing
numbers of "antislavery societies" organized!  by "traitors to the white
race" not only in the North but) also in the South.  Highly dubious, he told
Bell what he had.  heard, and she said she'd been reading the same thing itt
the massa's newspapers, which attributed their recent andi rapid growth to
Haiti's black revolt.

ROOTS 377

"Keeps tryin' tell you it's some good white folks!"  she exclaimed.

"Fact of de matter, 1'se beared a whole heap of 'em was 'against de firs'
ships ever bringin' any y'all African niggers here!"  Kunta wondered where on
earth Bell thought her own grandparents had come from, but she was so wound
up that he let it pass.  " " Co'se, anytime something' like dat he's in de
paper," she went on, " de mass as gits riled up, rantin' an' hollerin' 'bout
enemies of de country an' sich as dat, but what's port ant is de mo' white
folks 'against slavery says what dey thinks, den de mo' of dem mass as git to
wonderin' in dey secret heart is dey right or not.  " She stared at Kunta.  "
"Specially dem callin' deyselves Christians."

She looked at him again, a slyness in her eyes.

"What you think me an' Aunt Sukey an' Sister Mandy he's talkin' 'bout dese
Sundays massa think we Jes' singin' an' prayin'?  I follows white folks
close.  Take dem Quakers.  Dey was 'against slavin' even 'fo' dat Rebolurion.
I means right here in Virginia," she went on.

"An' plenty o' dem was mass as ownin' a heap o' niggers.  But den preachers
commence to sayin' niggers was human bein's, wid rights to be free like
anybody else, an' you 'members some Quaker mass as started to lettin' dey
niggers loose, an' even helpin' 'em git up Nawth.  By now it done got to
where de Quakers dat's still keepin' dey niggers is being' talked 'bout by de
res', an' I'se beared if dey still don't let dem niggers go, dey gwine git
disowned by dey church.  Gwine on right today, sho' is!"  Bell exclaimed.

"An dem Methodists is de nex' bes'.  I 'members readin' ten, 'leben years
back, Methodists called a great big meetin' in Baltimore, an' finally dey
'greed slavin' was 'against Gawd's laws an' dat anybody callin' his self
Christian wouldn't have it did to deyselves.  So it's mostly de Methodists
an' Quakers makin' church fuss to git laws to free niggers.  Dem Baptist an'
Presbyterian white folks--dat's what massa an' all de Wallers is--well, dey
seems like to me jes' halfhearted.  Dey's mostly worried 'bout dey own
freedom to worship like dey pleases, an' den how dey can keep a clear
conscience an' dey niggers bofe."

For all of Bell's talk of whites who were against slavery --even though she
had read some of it in the massa's own newspaper--Kunta had never once heard
a toubob opinion expressed that was not absolutely the opposite.  And 378
ALEX HALEY

during that spring and summer of 1792, the massa shared his buggy with some
of the biggest and richest mass as politicians, lawyers, and merchants in the
state.  Unless something else was more pressing, their ever-ready topic of
conversation was the problems created for them by blacks.

Whoever would successfully manage slaves, someone would always say, must
first understand that their African pasts of living in jungles with animals
gave them a natural inheritance of stupidity, laziness, and unclean habits,
and that the Christian duty of those God had blessed with superiority was to
teach these creatures some sense of discipline, morality, and respect for
work--through example, of course, but also with laws and punishment as
needed, although encouragement and rewards should certainly be given to those
who proved deserving.

Any laxity on the part of whites, the conversation always continued, would
simply invite the kind of dishonesty, tricks, and cunning that came naturally
to a lower species, and the bleatings of antislavery societies and others
like them could come only from those, particularly in the North, who had
never owned any black ones themselves or tried to run a plantation with them;
such people couldn't be expected to realize how one's patience, heart,
spirit, and very soul could be strained to the breaking point by the trials
and burdens of owning slaves.

Kunta had been listening to the same outrageous nonsense for so long that it
had become like a litany to him, and he hardly paid any attention to it
anymore.  But sometimes.  while he drove along, he couldn't help asking
himself why it was that his countrymen didn't simply kill every toubob who
set foot on African soil.  He was never able to give himself an answer that
he was able to accept.

CHAPTER 71

It was about the noon hour on a sultry day late in August when Aunt Sukey
came waddling as fast as she could out to the fiddler among his tomato plants
and--between gasps --told him that she was worried to death about the old
gardener.  When he didn't come to her cabin for breakfast, she hadn't thought
anything about it, she said breathlessly, but when he didn't appear for lunch
either, she became concerned, went to his cabin door, knocked, and called as
loudly as she could, but got no answer, became alarmed, and thought she'd
better come to find out if the fiddler had seen him anywhere.  He hadn't.

"Knowed it somehow or not her even 'fore I went in dere," the fiddler told
Kunta that night.  And Kunta said that he had been unable to explain an eerie
feeling he had himself as he had driven the massa homeward that afternoon.

"He was jes' lyin dere in bed real peaceful like," said the fiddler, "wid a
li'l smile on 'is face.  Look like he sleepin'.  But Aunt Sukey say he
awready waked up in heab'm."  He said he had gone to take the sad news out to
those working in the fields, and the boss field hand Cato returned with him
to help wash the body and place it on a cooling board.  Then they had hung
the old gardener's sweat-browned straw hat on the outside of his door in the
traditional sign of mourning before the field workers returned and gathered
in front of the cabin to pay their last respects, and then Cato and another
field hand went to dig a grave.

Kunta returned to his cabin feeling doubly grieved--not only because the
gardener was dead, but also because he hadn't been visiting him as much as he
could have ever since Kizzy was born.  It had just seemed that there was
hardly enough time anymore; and now it was too late.  He arrived to find Bell
in tears, which he expected, but he was 380 ALEX HALEY

taken aback at the reason she gave for crying.

"Jes' always seem like to me he was de daddy I ain't never seed," she sobbed.

"Don't know how come I didn't never let him know, but it ain't gon' never
seem de same widout him being roun' here."  She and Kunta ate their supper in
silence before taking Kizzy with them--bundled against the cool autumn
night--to join the others "settin' wid de dead" until late into the night.

Kunta sat a little apart from the others, with the restless Kizzy on his lap
during the first hour of prayers and soft singing, and then some hushed
conversation was begun by Sister Mandy, asking if anyone there could recall
the old man ever having mentioned any living relatives.  The fiddler said,

"One time 'way back I 'members he said he never knowed his mammy.  Dat's all
I ever beared him say of family."  Since the fiddler had been the closest
among them to the old man, and he would know if anyone did, it was decided
that there was probably no one to whom word should be sent.

Another prayer was said, another song was sung, then Aunt Sukey said, "Seem
like he done always belonged to some a' de Wallers.  I'se beared him talk
'bout de massa ridin' on his shoulders as a boy, so I reckon dat's why massa
bring him here later on when he got his own big house."

"Massa real sorry, too," said Bell.

"He say for me to tell y'all won't be no workin' for halfa day tomorra."

"Well, leas' he gwine git buried right," said Ada, the field-hand mother of
the boy Noah, who sat impassively beside her.

"It's a-plenty o' mass as jes' 'lows you to quit workin' long enough to come
look at de dead nigger 'fore he git stuck in de ground still warm."

"Well, all dese Wallers is quality white folks, so wouldn't none us here have
to worry 'bout dat," said Bell.

Others started talking then about how rich plantation owners sometimes staged
very elaborate funerals for usually either long-time big-house cooks or for
the old mammies who had suckled and helped to raise two or even three broods
of the family's children.

"Dey even gits buried in de white folks' graveyards, wid flat rocks to mark
where dey is."

What a heartwarming--if somewhat belated--reward for a lifetime of toil,
thought Kunta bitterly.  He rememROOTS 381

be red the gardener telling him that he had come to the massa's big house as
a strong young stable hand which he had remained for many years until he was
kicked badly by a horse.  He stayed on the job, but gradually he had become
more and more disabled, and finally Massa Waller had told him to spend his
remaining years doing whatever he felt able to do.  With Kunta as his
assistant, he had tended the vegetable garden until he was too feeble to do
even that, and from then on had spent most of his time weaving corn- shucks
into hats and straw into chair bottoms and fans until advancing arthritis had
crippled even his fingers.  Kunta recalled another old man he had seen now
and then at a rich big house across the county.  Though he had long since
been allowed to retire, he demanded every morning that some younger blacks
carry him out to the garden, where he would lie on his side plucking weeds
with gnarled hands among the flowerbeds of his equally old and crippled
beloved lifetime missis.  And these were the lucky ones, Kunta knew.  Many
old folks began to get beaten when they were no longer able to perform their
previous quota of work, and finally they got sold away for perhaps twenty or
thirty dollars to some "po' white trash" farmerwith aspirations of rising
into the planter class--who worked them literally to death.

Kunta was snapped out of those thoughts as everyone rose from their seats all
around him, said a final prayer, and headed wearily home for a few hours of
sleep that were left before daybreak.

Right after breakfast, the fiddler dressed the old man in the worn dark suit
the old man had been given many years before by Massa Waller's daddy.  His
few other clothes had been burned, since whoever might wear a dead person's
clothes would soon die too.  Bell told Kunta.  Then Cato tied the body on a
wide board that he had shaped to a point at both ends with an ax.

A little while later, Massa Waller came out of the big house carrying his big
black Bible and fell in behind the slave-row people as they walked with a
peculiar pausing, hitching step behind the body being drawn on a mule cart.
They were softly chanting a song Kunta had never heard before: "In de
mawnin', when I gits dere, gwine tell my Jesus hi'dy!  Hi'dy!  .  .  .  In de
mawnin', gwine to rise up, tell my Jesus hi'dy!  Hi'dy!  .  .  ."  They kept
on singing all the 382 ALEX HALEY

way to the slave graveyard, which Kunta had noticed everyone avoided in a
deep fear of what they called "ghoses" and "haints," which he felt must bear
some resemblance to his Africa's evil spirits.  His people also avoided the
burial ground, but out of consideration for the dead whom they didn't wish to
disturb, rather than out of fear.

When Massa Waller stopped on one side of the grave, his slaves on the other,
old Aunt Sukey began to pray.  Then a young field-hand woman named Pearl sang
a sad song,

"Hurry home, my weary soul ... I beared from heab'm today.  .  .  .  Hurry
'long, my weary soul .  .  .  my sin's forgived, an' my soul's set free.  ..
."  And then Massa Waller spoke with his head bowed,

"Josephus, you have' been a good and faithful servant.  May God rest and
bless your soul.  Amen," Through his sorrow, Kunta was surprised to hear that
the old gardener had been called

"Josephus."  He wondered what the gardener's true name had been--the name of
his African forefathers--and to what tribe they had belonged.  He wondered if
the gardener himself had known.  More likely he had died as he had lived--
without ever learning who he really was.  Through misted eyes, Kunta and the
others watched as Cato and his helper lowered the old man into the earth he
had spent so many years making things grow in.  When the shovelfuls of dirt
began to thud down onto his face and chest, Kunta gulped and blinked back the
tears as the women around him began to weep and the men to clear their
throats and blow their noses.

As they trudged silently back from the graveyard, Kunta thought how the
family and close friends of one who had died in Juffure would wail and roll
in ashes and dust within their huts while the other villagers danced outside,
for most African people believed that there could be no sorrow without
happiness, no death without life, in that cycle that his own father had
explained to him when his beloved Grandma Yaisa had died.  He remembered that
Omoro had told him,

"Stop weeping now, Kunta," and explained that Grandma had only joined another
of the three peoples in every village--those who had gone to be with Allah,
those who were still living, and those who were yet to be born.  For a
moment, Kunta thought he must try to explain that to Bell, but he knew she
wouldn't understand.  His heart ROOTS 383

sank--until he decided a moment later that this would become another of the
many things he would one day tell Kizzy about the homeland she would never
see.

CHAPTER 72

The death of the gardener continued to weigh so heavily on Kunta's mind that
Bell finally said something about it one evening after Kizzy went to bed.

"Looka here, Kunta, I knows how you felt 'bout dat gardener, but ain't it
'bout time you snap out of it an' jine de livin'?"  He just glared at her.

"Suit yo'se'f.  But ain't gwine be much of a sec on birfday fo' Kizzy nex'
Sunday wid you mopin' roun' like dis."

"I be fine," said Kunta stiffly, hoping Bell couldn't tell that he'd
forgotten all about it.

He had five days to make Kizzy a present.  By Thursday afternoon he had
carved a beautiful Mandinka doll out of pine wood, rubbed it with linseed oil
and lampblack, then polished it until it shone like the ebony carvings of his
homeland.  And

"Bell, who had long since finished making her a dress, was in the
kitchen--dipping two tiny pink candles to put on the chocolate cake Aunt
Sukey and Sister Mandy were going to help them eat on Sunday evening --when
Massa John's driver Roosby arrived in the buggy.

Bell had to bite her tongue when the massa, beaming, called her in to
announce that Missy Anne had persuaded her parents to let her spend an entire
weekend with her uncle; she'd be arriving tomorrow evening.

"Make sure you have a guest room ready," said the massa.

"And why don't you bake a cake or something for Sunday?  My niece tells me
your little girl is celebrating a birthday, and she'd like to have a
party--just the two of them--up in her room.  Anne also asked if she could
spend the night with her up here in the house, and I said that would be all
right, 384 ALEX HALEY

so be sure to prepare a pallet for the floor at the foot of the bed.  "

When Bell broke the news to Kunta--adding that the cake she was going to make
would have to be served in the big house instead of their cabin, and that
Kizzy was going to be so busy partying with Missy Anne that they wouldn't be
able to have a party of their own--Kunta was so angry that he couldn't speak
or even look at her.  Stomping outside, he went straight to the barn, where
he'd hidden the doll under a pile of straw, and pulled it out.

He had vowed to Allah that this kind of thing would never happen to his
Kizzy--but what could he do?  He felt such a sickening sense of frustration
that he could almost begin to understand why these blacks finally came to
believe that resisting the toubob was as useless as a flower trying to keep
its head above the falling snow.  But then, staring at the doll, he thought
of the black mother he'd heard about who had bashed out her infant's brains
against the auction block, screaming,

"Ain't gon' do to her what you done to me!"  And he raised the doll over his
head to dash it against the wall; then lowered it.

No, he could never do that to her.  But what about escape?  Bell herself had
mentioned it once.  Would she really go?  And if she would, could they ever
make it--at their age, with his half foot, with a child barely old enough to
walk?  He hadn't seriously considered the idea for many years, but he did
know the region by now as well as he did the plantation itself.  Maybe .  .  .

Dropping the doll, he got up and walked back to the cabin.  But Bell started
talking before he got the chance to.  "Kunta, I feels de same as you, but
listen to me!  I rut her dis clan her growin' up a fiel'-han' young' un like
dat li'l of' Noah.  He ain't but two years older'n Kizzy, an' awready dey
done started takin' him out dere to pullin' weeds an' totin' water.  Don'
care how else you feels, seem like you got to 'gree wid d'at."  As usual
Kunta said nothing, but he had seen and done enough during his
quarter-century years as a slave to know that the life of a field hand was
the life of a farm animal, and he would rather die than be responsible for
sentencing his daughter to such a fate.

Then one evening a few weeks later, he arrived home to find Bell waiting at
the door with the cup of cold milk he always looked forward to after a long
drive.  When he i ROOTS 385

sat down in his rocking chair to wait for supper, she came up behind him
and--without even being asked--rubbed his back in just the spot where she
knew it always hurt after a day at the reins.  When she set a plate of his
favorite African stew in front of him, he knew she must be trying to soften
him up for something, but he knew enough not to ask her what.  All the way
through supper she chattered even more than usual about things that mattered
even less than usual, and he was beginning to wonder if she'd ever get around
to it when, about an hour after supper, as they were getting ready to go to
bed, she stopped talking for a long moment, took a deep breath, and put her
hand on his arm.  He knew this was it.

"Kunta, 1 don' know how to tell you this, so I'll jes' spit it out.

Massa done tol' me he promise Missy Anne to drop Kizzy off at Massa John's to
spen' de day wid her when he pass by dere on his roun's tomorra.  "

This was too much.  It was outrageous enough to have to sit by and watch
while Kizzy was turned slowly into a well-mannered lap dog, but now that
she'd been housebroken, they wanted him to deliver the animal to its new
keeper.  Kunta shut his eyes, struggling to contain his rage, then leaped up
from his chair--pulling his arm viciously away from Bell--and bolted out the
door.  While she lay sleepless in their bed that night, he sat sleepless in
the stable beneath his harnesses.

Both of them were weeping.

When they pulled up in front of Massa John's house the next morning.

Missy Anne ran out to meet them before Kunta even had the chance to lift
Kizzy to the ground.  She didn't even say goodbye, he thought bitterly,
hearing behind them the pealings of girlish laughter as he swerved the horses
back down the driveway toward the main road.

It was late afternoon and he had been waiting several hours for the massa
outside a big house about twenty miles down the road when a slave came out
and told him that Massa Waller might have to sit up all night with their sick
missy, and for Kunta to come back for him the next day.  Morosely, Kunta
obeyed, arriving to find that Missy Anne had begged her sickly mother to let
Kizzy stay overnight.  Deeply relieved when the reply came that their noise
had given her a headache, Kunta was soon rolling back homeward again with
Kizzy holding on and bouncing beside him on the narrow driver's seat.

386 ALEX HALEY

As they rode along, it dawned on Kunta that this was the first time he had
been absolutely alone with her since the night he had told her what her name
was.  He felt a strange and mounting exhilaration as they drove on into the
gathering dusk.  But he also felt rather foolish.  As much thought as he had
given to his plans for and his responsibilities to this firstborn, he found
himself uncertain how to act.  Abruptly he lifted Kizzy up onto his lap.
Awkwardly he felt her arms, her legs, her head, as she squirmed and stared at
him curiously.  He lifted her again, testing how much she weighed.  Then,
very gravely, he placed the reins within her warm, small palms--and soon
Kizzy's happy laughter seemed the most delightful sound he had ever heard.

"You pretty li'l gal," he said to her finally.  She just looked at him.

"You look jes' like my little brudder Madi."

She just kept looking at him.

"Fa!"  he said, pointing to himself.  She looked at his finger.  Tapping his
chest, he repeated,

"Fa."  But she had turned her attention back to the horses.  Flicking the
reins, she squealed,

"Giddup!"  imitating something else she'd heard him say.  She smiled proudly
up at him, but he looked so hurt that it faded quickly, and they rode on the
rest of the way in silence.

It was weeks later, while they were riding home from a second visit with
Missy Anne, that Kizzy leaned over toward Kunta, stuck her chubby little
finger against his chest, and with a twinkle in her eye, said, "Fa!"

He was thrilled.

"Ee to mu Kiz7.y leh!"  he said, taking her finger and pointing it back at
her.

"Yo' name Kizzy."  He paused.

"Kizzy!"

She began to smile, recognizing her own name.  He pointed toward himself.

"Kunta Kinte."

But Kizzy seemed perplexed.  She pointed at him: "Fa!"  This time they both
smiled wide.

By midsummer Kunta was delighted with how fast Kizzy was learning the words
he was teaching her--and how much she seemed to be enjoying their rides
together.  He began to think there might be hope for her yet.  Then one day
she happened to repeat a word or two of Mandinka when she was alone with
Bell, who later had sent Kizzy over to Aunt Sukey's for supper and was
waiting for Kunta when he got home that night.

"Ain't you got no sense at all man?"  she shouted.

"Don't you know you better pay me tent ion--git dat chile an' all ROOTS 387

us in bad trouble wid dat mess!  You better git in yo hard head she ain't no
African!  " Kunta never had come so close to striking Bell.

Not only had she committed the unthinkable offense of raising her voice to
her husband; but even worse, she had disowned his blood and his seed.  Could
not one breathe a word of one's true heritage without fearing punishment from
some toubob?  Yet something warned him not to vent the wrath he felt, for any
head-on collision with Bell might somehow end his buggy trips with Kizzy.
But then he thought she couldn't do that without telling the massa why, and
she would never dare to tell.  Even so, he couldn't comprehend what had ever
possessed him to marry any woman born in toubob land.

While he was waiting for the massa to finish a.  house call at a nearby
plantation the next day, another buggy driver told Kunta the latest story
he'd heard about Toussaint, a former slave who had organized a large army of
black rebels in Haiti and was leading them successfully against not only the
French but also the Spanish and the English.

Toussaint, the driver said, had learned about war from reading books about
famous ancient fighters named

"Alexander the Great" and

"Julius Caesar," and that these books had been given to him by his former
massa, whom he later helped escape from Haiti to the

"Newnited States."  Over the past few months.  Toussaint had become for Kunta
a hero, ranking second in stature only to the legendary Mandinka warrior
Sundiata, and Kunta could hardly wait to get back home and pass this
fascinating story along to the others.

He forgot to tell them.  Bell met him at the stable with the news that Kizzy
had come down with a fever and broken out in bumps.  The massa called it
"mumps," and Kunta was worried until Bell told him it was only normal in
young'uns.  When he learned later that Missy Anne had been ordered to stay
away until Kizzy recovered--for at least two weeks--he was even a little bit
happy about it.  But Kizzy had been sick only a few days when Massa John's
driver Roosby showed up with a fully dressed toubob doll from Missy Anne.
Kizzy fell in love with it.  She sat in bed Imagine the doll close, rocking
it back and forth, excliimi'na with her eyes half shut.

"Jes' so pretty!"  Kunta left without a word and stormed across the yard to
the barn.  The doll was still in the loft where he'd dropped it 388 ALEX
HALEY

and forgotten it months before.  Wiping it off on his sleeve, he carried it
back to the cabin and almost shoved it at Kizzy.  She laughed with pleasure
when she saw it, and even Bell admired it.  But Kunta could see, after a few
minutes, that Kizzy liked the toubob doll better, and for the first time in
his life, he was furious with his daughter.

It didn't make him any happier to notice how eagerly the two girls made up
for the weeks of being together they had missed.  Allhough sometimes Kunta
was told to take Kizzy to play at Missy Anne's house, it was no secret that
Missy Anne preferred to visit at her uncle's, since her mother was quick to
complain of headaches because of the noise they made, and would even' resort
to fainting spells as a final weapon, according to their cook.  Omega.  But,
she said, "of' missy" had her match in her quick-tongued daughter.  Roosby
told Bell one day that his missis had yelled at the girls,

"You're actin' just like niggers!"  and Missy Anne had shot back,

"Well, niggers has more fun than us, 'cause they ain't got nothin' to worry
about!"  But the two girls made all the noise they pleased at Massa Waller's.
Kunta seldom drove the buggy either way along the flowered drive without
hearing the girls shrieking somewhere as they romped in the house, the yards,
the garden, and--despite Bell's best efforts to prevent it--even in the
chicken coops, the hog pen, and the barn, as well as the unlocked slave-row
cabins.

One afternoon, while Kunta was off with the massa, Kizzy took Missy Anne into
her cabin to show her Kunta's gourd of pebbles, which she had discovered and
become fascinated with while she was home with the mumps.  Bell, who happened
to walk in just as Kizzy was reaching into the mouth of the gourd, took one
look and yelled,

"Git 'way from yo' daddy's rocks!  Dey's how he tell how of' he is!"  The
next day Roosby arrived with a letter for the massa from his brother, and
five minutes later Massa Waller called Bell into the drawing room, the
sharpness of his tone frightening her before she left the kitchen.

"Missy Anne told her parents about something she saw in your cabin.

What is this African voodoo about rocks being put into a gourd every full
moon?  " he demanded.

Her mind racing.  Bell blurted,

"Rocks?  Rocks, Massa?"

"You know very well what I mean!"  said the massa.

ROOTS 389

Bell forced a nervous giggle.

"Oh, I knows what you's talkin' 'bout.

Nawsuh, Massa, ain't no voodoo.  01' African nigger I got jes cain't count,
datall, Massa.  So every new moon, he drop li'l rock in de gourd so all dem
rocks say how of he is!  "

Massa Waller, still frowning, gestured for Bell to return to the kitchen.
Ten minutes later she charged into the cabin, snatched Kizzy from Kunta's
lap, and laid into her rear end with an open hand--almost screaming,

"Don't you never bring dat gal in here no mo', I'll wring yo' neck, you hear
me!"

After sending the weeping Kizzy fleeing to bed.  Bell managed to calm herself
enough to explain to Kunta.

"I knows dem gourd an' rocks ain't no harm," she said, "but it jes' go to
show you what I tol' you 'bout dem African things brings troubles!  An' massa
don't never for git nothing!"

Kunta felt such an impotent fury that he couldn't eat supper.  After driving
the massa nearly every day for over twenty rains, Kunta was amazed and
enraged that it could still be a matter of suspicion that he simply recorded
his age by dropping stones into a gourd.

It was another two weeks before the tension subsided enough for Missy Anne's
visits to resume, but once they did it was as if the incident had never
happened; Kunta was almost sorry.  With the berry season in full bloom, the
girls ranged up and down the vine-covered fence rows finding the dark green
wild strawberry patches and coming home with full pails, their hands--and
mouths--tinted crimson.  Other days they would return with such treasures as
snail shells, a wren's nest, or a crusted old arrowhead, all of which they
would exhibit gleefully to Bell before hiding them somewhere with great
secrecy, where after they might make mud pies.  By the mid afternoons after
trooping into the kitchen covered to the elbows with mud-pie batter and being
ordered straight outside again to wash up at the well, the joyfully exhausted
pair would eat snacks that Bell had ready for them and then lie down together
on a quilt pallet for a nap.  If Missy Anne was staying overnight, after her
supper with the massa, she would keep him company until her bedtime, when he
would send her out to tell Bell that it was time for her story.  And Bell
390 ALEX HALEY

would bring in an equally worn-out Kizzy and tell them both about the further
adventures of Br'er Rabbit getting tricked by Br'er Fox, who finally got
tricked himself.

Kunta resented this deepening intimacy between the two girls even more
intensely than when he saw it coming in Kizzy's crib.  Part of him, he had to
admit, was pleased that Kizzy was enjoying her girlhood so much, and he had
come to agree with Bell that even being a toubob's pet was better than having
to spend her life in the fields.  But he was sure that every now and then he
could sense even in Bell a certain uneasiness when she was watching the girls
romping and playing so closely together.  He would dare to think that at
least some of those times.  Bell must have felt and feared the same things he
did.  Some nights in their cabin, as he watched her caressing Kizzy in her
lap and humming one of her

"Jesus" songs, he would have the feeling, as she looked down at the sleepy
face, that she was afraid for her, that she wanted to warn her child about
caring too much for any toubob, no matter how mutual the affection seemed.
Kizzy was too young to understand such things, but Bell knew all too well
that wrenching anguish could result from trusting toubob; had they not sold
her away from her first two babies?  There was no way even to guess at what
might lie ahead for Kizzy, but also for him and Bell.

But he knew one thing: Allah would wreak terrible vengeance on any toubob who
ever harmed their Kizzy.

CHAPTER 73

Two Sundays every month, Kunta drove the massa to church at the Waller
Meetinghouse about five miles from the plantation.  The fiddler had told him
that not only the Wallers but also several other important white families had
built their own meeting houses around the county.  Kunta had been surprised
to discover that the services also were ROOTS 391

attended by some of the neighboring lesser white families and even some of
the area's "po' crackers," whom the buggy had often passed as they came and
went on foot, carrying their shoes by the strings over their shoulders.
Neither the massa nor any of the other "quality folk," as Bell called them,
ever stopped to offer "po' crackers" a ride; and Kunta was glad of it.

There would always be a long, droning sermon between a lot of equally
listless singing and praying, and when it was finally over, everybody would
come trailing outside one by one and shake hands with the preacher, and Kunta
would notice with amusement how both the "po' crackers" and those of the
massa's class would smile and tip their hats at one another, acting as if
their both being white made them both the same.  But then when they would
spread their picnic lunches under the trees, it was always with the two
classes on opposite sides of the churchyard-- as if they had just happened to
sit apart.

While he was waiting and watching this solemn rite with the other drivers one
Sunday, Roosby said under his breath, just loud enough for the others to hear,

"Seem like white folks don' 'joy dey eatin' no more'n dey worshipin'."  Kunta
thought to himself that in all the years he had known Bell, he had always
managed to claim some urgent chore whenever the time came for one of her

"Jesus" meetings in slave row, but all the way from the barn he had heard
enough of the black ones' caterwauling and carrying on to convince him that
one of the few things about the toubob that he found worthy of admiration was
their preference for quieter worship.

It was only a week or so later that Bell reminded Kunta about the "big camp
meetin'" she planned to go to in late July.  It had been the blacks' big
summer event every year since he'd come to the plantation, and since every
previous year he had found an excuse not to go along, he was amazed that she
would still have the nerve to ask him.  He knew little about what went on at
these huge gatherings, beyond that they had to do with Bell's heathen
religion, and he wanted no part of it.  But Bell once more insisted.

"I knows how bad you always wants to go," she said, her voice heavy with
sarcasm.

"Jes' thought I'd tell you far 'enough ahead so's you can work it into yo'
plans."

Kunta couldn't think of a smart answer, and he didn't 392 ALEX HALEY

want to start an argument anyway, so he just said,

"I think about it," though he had no intention of going.

By the day before the meeting, when he pulled up at the big-house front door
after a trip to the county seat, the massa said,

"I won't be needing the buggy tomorrow, Toby.  But I've given Bell and the
other women permission to go to that camp meeting tomorrow, and I said it
would be all right for you to drive them over in the wagon."

Churning with anger, positive that Bell had plotted this, Kunta tied up the
horses behind the barn and, without taking the time to unhitch them, headed
straight for the cabin.  Bell took one look at him standing in the doorway
and said, "Couldn't think up no other way to git you dere when Kizzy git
christened."

"Git what?"

"Christened.  Dat mean she jine de church."

"What church?  Dat '0 Lawd' religion o' your'n?"

"Don' let's start dat again.  Ain't nothin' to do wid me.  Missy Anne done ax
her folks to take Kizzy to dey meetin'- house on Sundays an' set in de back
whilst dey prays up front.  But she can't go to no white folks' church less'n
she christened."

"Den she ain't gwine no church!"

"You still don' unnerstan', does you, African?  It a priv'- lege to be axed
to dey church.  You say no, de nex' thing you an' me both out pickin' cotton."

As they set out the next morning, Kunta sat rigidly staring straight ahead
from his high driver's seat, refusing to look back even at his laughing,
excited daughter as she sat on her mother's lap, between the other women and
their picnic baskets.  For a while, they simply chattered among themselves,
then they began singing: "We-uh climbin' Ja- cob's ladder.  .  .  .  We-uh
climbin' Jacob's ladder.  .  .  .  We- uh climbin' Jacob's ladder .  .  .
soldiers of de Cross.  ..."  Kunta was so disgusted that he began slapping
the reins across the mules' rumps, making the buggy lurch forward and
jostling his passengers--but he couldn't seem to do it hard enough or often
enough to shut them up.

He could even hear Kizzy's piping little voice among the others.  The toubob
didn't need to steal his child, bethought bitterly, if his own wife was
willing to give her away.

Similarly crowded wagons were coming out of other plantations' side roads,
and with every happy wave and ROOTS 393

greeting as they rode along, Kunta became more and more indignant.  By the
time they reached the campground--in a flowered, rolling meadow--he had
worked himself into such a state that he hardly noticed the dozen or more
wagons that were already there and the others that were arriving from all
directions.  As each wagon pulled to a halt, the occupants would pile noisily
out, hooting and hallooing, soon joining Bell and the others who were kissing
and hugging each other in the milling crowd.  Slowly it dawned on Kunta that
he had never seen so many black people together in one place in toubob land,
and he began to pay attention.

While the women assembled their baskets of food in a grove of trees, the men
began to drift toward a small knoll in the middle of a meadow.  Kunta
tethered the mules to a stake that he drove into the ground, and then sat
down behind the wagon--but in such a way that he could see everything that
went on.  After a while, all of the men had taken seats close to one another
on the ground near the top of the knoll--all excepting four who appeared to
be the oldest among them; they remained standing And then, as if by some
prearranged signal, the man who seemed to be the oldest of the four--he was
very black and stooped and thin, with a white beard--suddenly reared back his
head and shouted loudly toward where the women were, "I say, chilluns of
JESUS!"

Unable to believe his eyes or ears, Kunta watched as the women swiftly turned
and shouted as one,

"Yes, Lawd!"  then came hurrying and jostling to sit behind the gathered men.
Kunta was astonished at how much it reminded him of the way the people of
Juffure sat at the Council of Elders' meetings once each moon.

The old man shouted again: "I say--is y'all chilluns of JESUS?"

"Yes, Lawd!"

Now, the three other old men stepped out in front of the oldest one, and one
after another, they cried out: "Gon' come a time we be jes' gawd's slaves!"

"Yes, Lawd!"  shouted all who sat on the ground.

"You make you'se'f ready, Jesus STAY ready!"

"Yes, Lawd!"

"Know what de Holy Father said to me jes' now?"  He say,

"Ain't NOBODY strangers!"  " 394 ALEX HALEY

A massed shouting rose, all but drowning out what the oldest of the four had
begun to say.  In a strange way even Kunta felt some of the excitement.
Finally the crowd quieted enough for him to hear what the graybeard was
saying.

"Chilluns o' Gawd, dey is a PROMISE lan'!  Dat's where ev'body b'lieve in Him
gon' go!  An' dem dat b'lieve, dat's where dey gon' LIVE--for all e-terni-ty!
.  .  ."

Soon the old man was sweating profusely, his arms flailing the air, his body
quivering with the intensity of his singsong exclamations, his voice rasping
with emotion.

"It tell us in de Bible dat de lamb an' de lion gwine lay down TOGETHER!"
The old man threw his head backward, flinging his hands toward the sky.

"Ain't gon be no mass as an' slaves NO MO'!  Jes' gon' be all gawd's

CHILLUNS!  "

Then, suddenly, some woman leaped up and began shrieking, "0 Jesus!  0 Jesus!
0 Jesus!  0 Jesus!"  It set off others around her, and within minutes two
dozen or more women were screaming and jerking themselves about.  It flashed
into Kunta's mind how the fiddler had once told him that on some plantations
where the mass as forbade slaves to worship, they concealed a large iron pot
in the woods nearby, where those who felt the spirit move them would stick
their heads inside and shout, the pot muffling the noise sufficiently for it
not to be heard by the massa or the overseer.

It was in the middle of this thought that Kunta saw, with profound shock and
embarrassment, that Bell was among the women who were staggering and
screeching.  Just then one of them shouted,

"I'se gawd's chile!"  toppled to the ground as if felled by a blow, and lay
there quivering.  Others joined her and began writhing and moaning on the
grass.  Another woman who had been flinging herself violently about now went
as rigid as a post, screaming out, "0 Lawd!  Jes' you, Jesus!"

Kunta could tell that none of them had planned whatever they were doing.  It
was just happening as they felt it-- the way his own people danced to the
spirits back at home, acting out what they felt inside.

As the shouting and the twitching began to subside, it occurred to Kunta that
this was the way the dancing in Juffure had ended--seemingly in exhaustion.
And he could see that in some way, these ROOTS 395

people, too, seemed to be both spent and at peace with themselves.

Then, one after another, they began to get up from the ground and shout out
to the others: "My back pained me so bad till 1 talked to my Lawd.  He say to
me,

"You stan' up straight," an' I ain't hurt since.  "

"Didn't meet my Lawd Jesus till He saved my soul, an' now I puts my love tor
Him up against anybody's!"

There were others.  Then, finally, one of the old men led a prayer, and when
it was over everybody shouted "A-MEN!"  and began to sing loudly and with
tremendous spirit: "I got shoes, you got shoes, all Gawd's chilluns got
shoes!  Whcn-uh gits to Heab'm, gon' put on mah shoes, gon' walk all ovah
Gawd's Heab'm!  Heab'm!  Ev'body tellin' 'bout Heab'm ain't gwine dere!
Heab'm!  Heab'm!  I'm gon' walk all ovah Gawd's Heab'm!"

As they sang the song, they had gotten up from the ground, one by one, and
begun to walk very slowly, following the gray-haired preacher, down from the
knoll and across the meadow.  By the time the song ended, they had reached
the banks of a pond on the other side, where the preacher turned to face
them, flanked by the other three elders, and held up his arms.

"An' now, brothers an' sisters, de time is come fo' yo' sinners what ain't
been cleansed to wash away yo' sins in de River JORDAN!"

"0 yeah!"  shouted a woman on the bank.

"It's time to squench out de fires o' Hell in de holy waters o' de Promise
LAN'!"

"Say it!"  came another shout.

"All dose ready to dive down fo' dey almighty soul an' rise up ag'in wid de
Lawd, remain standin'.  Res' o' you what done been baptize or ain't ready fo'
Jesus yet, sed- down!"

As Kunta watched in astonishment, all but twelve or fifteen of them sat down.
While the others lined up at the water's edge, the preacher and the
strongest of the four elders marched right into the pond, stopping and
turning when they were immersed up to their hips.

Addressing himself to the teen-age girl who was first in line, the preacher
spoke.

"Is you ready, chile?"  She nodded.  "Den come ahead!"

396 ALEX HALEY

Grasping both of her arms, the two remaining elders led her into the pond,
stumbling, to meet the others in the middle.  Placing his right hand on the
girl's forehead while the biggest elder grabbed her shoulders with both hands
from behind and the other two men tightened their grip on her arms, the
preacher said, "0 Lawd, let dis chile be wash clean," and then he pushed her
backward while the man behind pulled her shoulders back and down until she
was completely under water.

As the bubbles rose to the surface and her limbs began to thrash the water,
they turned their gaze heavenward and held on tight.  Soon she started
kicking wildly and heaving her body violently; it was all they could do to
hold her under.

"ALMOST!"  the preacher shouted, over the churning commotion beneath his arms.

"NOW!"  They pulled her upward from the water, gasping for breath, spewing
water, struggling frantically as they half carried her back to shore --and
into the arms of her waiting mother.

Then they turned to the next in line--a boy in his early twenties who stood
staring at them, too terrified to move.  They practically had to drag him in.
Kunta watched with his mouth open wider as each person--next a middle-aged
man, then another young girl around twelve, then an elderly woman who could
barely walk--were led one by one into the pond and subjected to the same
incredible ordeal.  Why did they do it?  What sort of cruel

"Gawd" demanded such suffering for those who wished to believe in him?  How
could half drowning someone wash away his evil?  Kunta's mind teemed with
questions--none of which he could answer---until finally the last one had
been pulled spluttering from the water.

It must be over, he thought.  But the preacher, wiping his face with his
sopping sleeve, stood in the pond and spoke again: "An' now, is dey any
'mongst y'all wishes to consecrate dey chilluns to JESUS dis holy day?"  Four
women stood up--the first of them Bell, holding Kizzy by the hand.

Kunta leaped up beside the wagon.  Surely they wouldn't!  But then he saw
Bell leading the way to the bank of the pond, and began to walk--slowly,
uncertainly at first, then faster and faster--toward the crowd at the water's
edge.  When the preacher beckoned to Bell, she leaned down to pick up Kizzy
in her arms and strode vigorously into the water.  For the first time in
twenty-five years, since the day ROOTS 397

his foot had been chopped, Kunta began to run--but when he reached the pond,
his loot throbbing.  Bell was standing in the middle at the preacher's side.
Gasping to catch his breath, Kunta opened his mouth to call out--just as the
preacher began to speak: "Dearly beloved, we's gathered here to welcome
another lamb unto de fold!  What de Chile's name, sister?"

"Kizzy, reveren'."

"Lawd .  .."  he began, placing his left hand under Kizzy's head and
squeezing his eyes shut.

"Naw!"  Kunta shouted hoarsely.

Bell's head jerked around; her eyes were burning into his.  The preacher
stood looking from him to her and back again.  Kizzy began to whimper.

"Hush, chile," Bell whispered.  Kunta felt the hostile stares surrounding
him.  Everything hung poised.

Bell broke the stillness.

"It's awright, reveren'.  Dat's jes' my African husban'.  He don' unnerstan'.
I 'splain to him later.  You go 'head."

Kunta, too stunned to speak, saw the preacher shrug, turn back to Kizzy, shut
his eyes, and start again.

"Lawd, wid dis holy water, bless dis chile.  .  .  .  What her name again,
sister?"

"Kizzy."

"Bless dis chile Kizzy and take her wid you safe into dat Promise Lan'!"
With that the preacher dipped his right hand into the water, flicked a few
drops into Kizzy's face, and shouted

"AMEN!"

Bell turned, carried Kizzy back to shore, trudged up out of the water, and
stood dripping in front of Kunta.  Feeling foolish and ashamed, he looked
down at her muddy feet, then raised his eyes to meet hers, which were
wet--with tears?  She put Kizzy in his arms.

"It awright.  She jes' wet," he said, his rough hand caressing Kizzy's face.

"All dat runnin', you must be hungry.  I sure is.  Le's go eat.  I brung
fried chicken an' devil eggs an' dat sweet tater custard you can't never git
enough of."

"Sound good," said Kunta.

Bell took his arm and they walked slowly back across the meadow to where
their picnic basket sat on the grass in the shade of a walnut tree.

CHAPTER 74

Bell told Kizzy one night in the cabin,

"You's gwine on seven years of'I Fiel-hand young'uns be awready out dere
workin' ev'yday--like dat Noah--so you's gwine start being' some use to me in
de big house!"  Knowing by now how her father felt about such things, Kizzy
looked uncertainly at Kunta.

"You hear what yo' mammy say," he said without conviction.  Bell already had
discussed it with him, and he had to agree that it was prudent for Kizzy to
start doing some work that was visible to Massa Waller, rather than continue
solely as a playmate for Missy Anne.  He privately further liked the idea of
her making herself useful, since in Juffure at her age mothers started
teaching their daughters the skills that would later enable their fathers to
demand a good bride price from a prospective husband.  But he knew Bell
didn't expect his enthusiasm about anything to bring Kizzy even closer to the
toubob--and take her even farther away from him and the sense of dignity and
heritage he was still determined to instill in her.  When Bell reported a few
mornings later that Kizzy was already learning to polish silverware, scrub
floors, wax woodwork, even to make up the massa's bed, Kunta found it
difficult to share her pride in such accomplishments.  But when he saw his
daughter emptying then washing the white-enameled slop jar in which the massa
relieved himself at night, Kunta recoiled in anger, convinced that his worst
fears had been fulfilled.

He bridled, too, at the counsel he would hear Bell giving Kizzy about how to
be a personal maid.

"Now, you listen to me good, gal!  It ain't every nigger git chance to work
fer quality white folks like massa.

Right off, dat put ; you 'bove de rest o' young 'uns.  Now, de big thing is
to | learn what massa want without him never havin' to tell you.  You gwine
start git ting up an' out early wid me, 'way | ROOTS 399

'fo' massa do.  Dat's how I gits a head start on 'im---done always b'lieve in
dat.  First thing, gwine show you how to whup de dus' out'n his coat an'
pants when you hangs 'em out to air on de clothesline.

Jes' be sho' you don't break or scratch none o' de buttons"-- and so on,
sometimes for hours at a time.

Not a single evening passed, it seemed to Kunta, without more instructions,
down to the most ridiculous detail.  "For blackin' his shoes," she told Kizzy
one night,

"I shakes up in a jar li'l simmon beer an' lampblack wid li'l sweet oil un'
rock candy.  Dat stan' overnight, den shake it up good again, it make dem
black shoes of his'n shine like glass."  Before he could stand no more of it
and retreated for relief to the fiddler's hut, Kunta acquired such invaluable
household hints as "if you set a teaspoon o' black pepper an' brown sugar
mashed to a paste wid a li'l cow's cream in a saucer in a room, ain't no
flies comin' in dere nohow!"  And that soiled wallpaper was best cleaned by
rubbing it with the crumbly insides of two-day-old biscuits.

Kizzy seemed to be paying attention to her lessons, even if Kunta didn't, for
Bell reported one day, weeks later, that the massa had mentioned to her that
he was pleased with the way the andirons in the fireplace had been shining
since Kizzy started polishing them.

But whenever Missy Anne came over for a visit, of course, the massa didn't
have to say that Kizzy was excused from work for the duration of her stay.
Then, as always, the two girls would go romping and skipping about, jumping
rope, playing hide-and-seek and a few games they invented.

"Playing nigger," bursting open a ripe watermelon and jamming their faces
down into its crisp wetness one afternoon, they ruined the fronts of their
dresses, prompting Bell to send Kizzy yelping with a backhand slap, and to
snap even at Missy Anne.

"You knows you's raised bet tern dat!  Ten years of', gwine to school, an'
'fo' you knows it gwine be a high-class missy!"

Though Kunta no longer bothered to complain about it, he remained a most
difficult mate for Bell to deal with during Missy Anne's visits and for at
least another day afterward.  But whenever Kunta was told to drive Kizzy to
Massa John's house, it was all he could do to keep from showing his eagerness
to be alone again with his girl child ia the buggy.  By this time, Kizzy had
come to understand 400 ALEX HALEY

that whatever was said during their buggy rides was a matter between the two
of them, so he considered it safer now to teach her more about his homeland
without fear that Bell would find them out.

Rolling along the dusty Spotsylvania County roads, he would tell her the
Mandinka names of things they passed along the road.  Pointing at a tree,
he'd say "yiro," then downward at the road, "silo."  As they passed a grazing
cow, he'd say, "ninsemuso," and went over a small bridge, "salo."  Once when
they got caught in a sudden shower, Kunta shouted ".wnjio," waving out at the
rain, and when the sun reappeared, pointing at it, he said "tilo."  Kizzy
would watch his mouth intently as he said each word, then imitate what she
saw with her own lips, repeating it over and over until she got it right.
Soon she began pointing to things herself and asking him for their Mandinka
names.  One day they were hardly beyond the shadow of the big house when
Kizzy poked him in the ribs, tapped her finger above an ear and whispered,

"What you call my head?"

"Kungo," Kunta whispered back.   She tweaked her hair; he said "kuntinyo."
She pinched her nose; he told her "nungo" ; she squeezed her ear; he said
"tulo."   Giggling, Kizzy jerked up her foot and tapped her large toe.

"Sinkumha!"

exclaimed Kunta.  Seizing her exploring forefinger, wiggling it, he said
"bulokonding."  Touching her mouth, he said "da."  Then Kizzy seized Kunta's
forefinger and pointed it at him.

"Fa!"  she exclaimed.

He felt overwhelmed with his love for her.

Pointing to a sluggish small river they were passing a little later, Kunta
said

"Dat a bolongo."  He told her that in his homeland he had lived near a river
called the

"Kamby Bolongo."  That evehing, when on the way back home.  passing by it
again, Kizzy pointed and shouted, "Kamby Go- longo!"  Of course, she didn't
understand when he tried to explain that this was the Mattaponi River, not
the Gambia River, but he was so delighted that she remembered the name at all
that it didn't seem to matter.  The Kamby Go- longo, he said, was much
bigger, swifter, and more powerful that this puny specimen.  He wanted to
tell her how the life-giving river was revered by his people as a symbol of
fertility, but he couldn't find a way to say it, so he told her about the
fish that teemed in it--including the powerful, succulent kujalo, which
sometimes leaped right into a caROOTS 401 noe--and about the vast living
carpet of birds that floated on it until some young boy like himself would
jump growling from the brush on the banks so that he could watch them rise up
and fill the sky like some feathery snowstorm.  Kunta said that reminded him
of a time his Grandmother Yaisa had told him about when Allah sent The Gambia
a plague of locusts so terrible that they darkened the sun and devoured
everything green until the wind shifted and carried them out to sea, where
they finally fell and were eaten by the fish.

"Do I got a gran'ma?"  asked Kizzy.

"You got two--my mammy and yo' mammy's mammy."

"How come dey ain't wid us?"

"Dey don' know where we is," said Kunta.

"Does you know where we is?"

he asked her a moment later.

"We's in de buggy," Kizzy said.

"I means where does we live."

"At Massa Waller's."

"An' where dat is?"

"Dat way," she said, pointing down the road.  Disinterested in their subject,
she said,

"Tell me some more 'bout dem bugs an' things where you come from."

"Well, dey's big red ants knows how to cross rivers on leafs, dat fights wars
an' marches like a army, an builds hills dey lives in dat's taller clan a
man."

"Dey sound scary.  You step-on 'em?"

"Not less'n you has to.  Every critter got a right to be here same as you.
Even de grass is live an' got a soul jes' like people does."

"Won't walk on de grass no mo', den.  I stay in de buggy."

Kunta smiled.

"Wasn't no buggies where I come from.  Walked wherever we was going'.  One
time I walked four days wid my pappy all de way from Juffure to my uncles'
village."

"What Joofah-ray?"

"Done tol' you don' know how many times, dat where I come from."

"I thought you was from Africa.  Dat Gambia you talks about in Africa?"

"Gambia a country in Africa.  Juffure a village in Gambia."

"Well, where dey at.  Pappy?"

"

" Crost de bi, "How big dat " So big it tak "Four what?"   "Moons.

Like "How come y "

"Cause mooi " What you ca "A rain."

Kizzy mused "How you ge " In a big boa "Bigger clan ( in?"

"Big enough ) " How come i "I use to wisi " How come?  " " "Cause we a " How
you ge "Got sick fro each other."

"Whyn't you ; " De toubob h "Who 'toubob : " White folks.  " \ " How come y

                                      II

"Was jes' out lookin' fera pie grab me an' taki " How of' you "Sebenteen."
"Dey ask yo' Kunta looked too ifn dey could I is."

"You got broi " Had three I | dey's all growed i: "We go see d( ; " We cain't
go | "We's gon' sol ROOTS 403

"Jes* Massa John's.  We don't show up, dey have de dogs out at us by sundown."

"

" Cause dey worried 'bout us?   "

"

" Cause we b'longs to dem, jes' like dese bosses pullin' us.   "

"Like I b'longs to you an' mammy?"

"You'se our young' un Dat different."

"Missy Anne say she want me fo' her own."

"You ain't no doll fo' her to play wid."

"I plays wid her, too.  She done tole me she my bes' frien'."

"You can't be nobody's frien' an' slave both."

"How come.  Pappy?"

"

" Cause frien's don't own one not her

"Don't mammy an' you b'long to one not her Ain't y'all frien's?"

"Ain't de same.  We b'longs to each other 'cause we wants to, 'cause we loves
each other."

"Well, I loves Missy Anne, so I wants to b'long to her."

"Couldn't never work out."

"What you mean?"

"You couldn't be happy when y'all grow up."

"Would too.  I bet you wouldn't be happy."

"Yo sho' right 'bout dat!"

"Aw, Pappy, I couldn't never leave you an Mammy."

"An' chile, speck we couldn't never let you go, neither!"

CHAPTER 75

Late one afternoon, the driver for Massa Waller's parents at Enfield brought
him their invitation to attend a dinner party in honor of an important
Richmond businessman who had stopped for a night's lodging on his way to
Fredericks- burg.  About a dozen buggies were already parked outside the
Enfield big house when Kunta arrived with the massa soon after dark.

404 ALEX HALEY

Though he had been there many times in the eight years since he and Bell were
married, it had been only during the past few months that the fat black cook
Hattie, who had been so smitten with Kunta, decided to begin speaking with
him again--ever since he had brought Kizzy along with Missy Anne one day on a
visit to her grandparents.

Tonight, when he went to the kitchen door to say hello-- and for something to
eat--she invited him in to visit while she, her helper, and four serving
women completed their preparations for dinner; Kunta thought that he had
never seen so much food bubbling in so many pots and pans.

"How dat li'l puddin'-pie young' un o' your'n?"  Hattie asked between sips
and sniffs.

"She fine," said Kunta.

"Bell got her learnin' how to cook now.

S'prise me other night wid a apple betty she done made.  "

"Dat li'l dickens.  Nex' thing you know, I be eatin' her cookies 'stead o'
her eatin' mine.  She musta put away halfa jar o' my ginger snaps las' time
she here."

With a last look at the mouth-watering three or four kinds of breads that
were baking in the oven, Hattie turned to the oldest of the serving women, in
their starched yellow smocks, and said,

"We'se ready.  Go tell missis."  As the woman disappeared through the
swinging door, she told the other three,

"I come after y'all wid a ladle ifn yo' slops one drop o' soup on my bes'
linen when you settin' down de bowls.  Git to work now.  Pearl," she said to
her teenage helper.

"Git dem turnip greens, de sweet cawn, squash, an' okra in de good china
tureens whilst I wrestles dis here saddle o' mutton onto de carvin' boA few
minutes later, one of the serving women came back in, whispered intently to
Hattie at some length, and then hurried back out again.

Hattie turned to Kunta.

"You 'members few months back when one dem tradin' boats got raided
somewheres on de big water by dat France?"

Kunta nodded.

"Fiddler say he heard dat Pres'dent Adams so mad he sent de whole Newnited
States Navy to whup 'em."

"Well, dey sho' did.  Louvina jes' now tol' me dat man in dere from Richmon'
say dey done took away eighty boats b'longin' to dat France.

She say de white folks in ROOTS 405

dere act like dey nigh 'bout ready to start singin' an' dancin 'bout teachin'
dat France a lesson.  "

As she spoke, Kunta had begun digging into the heaping plateful of food she
had set before him, while he marveled at the very sight of the roast beef,
baked ham, turkey, chicken, and duck she was now busily arranging on big
platters waiting to be served.  He had just swallowed a mouthful of buttered
sweet potato when the four serving women came bustling back into the
kitchen--all loaded down with empty bowls and spoons.

"De soup's et!"  Hattie announced to Kunta.  A moment later the serving women
were trooping out again with heaped trays, and Hattie mopped her face with
her apron and said,

"Got 'bout fo'ty minutes befo' dey ready fo' dessert.  You was gon* say
sump'n befo'?"

"Jes' gon' say eighty boats don' make me no difference," said Kunta, "long's
white folks messin' wid one not her 'stead o' us.  Seem like dey ain't happy
less'n dey's messin' wid somebody."

" Tend who dey messin' wid, way I sees it," said Hattie.  "Las' year was a
mulatto led a re-volt 'against dat Toussaint, an' he mighta won ifn de
Pres'dent hadn't of sent his boats down dere to he'p Toussaint."

"Heared Massa Waller say Toussaint ain't got sense 'enough to be no gen'l.
let alone run no country on his own," said Kunta.

"He say jes' watch, all dem slaves dat done got free in dat Haiti gwine wind
up whole lot wuss off clan dey was under dey of' mass as

"Co'se, dat's what white folks hopin'.  But I specks dey's awready better off
workin' de plantations deyselves."

One of the serving women, who had returned to the kitchen and was listening
to the conversation, spoke up: "Dat what dey's talkin' 'bout in dere right
now--free niggers.  Say it's way too many, thirteen thou san jes' here in
Virginia.  De jedge say he all fo' freein' niggers dat do sump'n outstandin',
like dem what fit in dat Revolution long side dey mass as or dem what tol'
white folks 'bout any nigger uprisin' plan, or dat nigger dat come up wid dat
herb medicine dat even white folks claim cure near 'bout everythin'.  De
jedge say he feel mass as got de right in de wills to free of' faithful
niggers.  But him an' ev'body in dere say dey's dead set 'against dem Quakers
and some 406 ALEX HALEY

other white folks settin' dey niggers free fo' nothin'.  " Th serving woman
headed for the door, adding,

"Jedge sa mark his words, some new laws gwine be made to put crimp in dat
right soon."

Hattie asked Kunta,

"What yo' think o' dat Mass; Alexander Hamilton up Nawth sayin' all free
nigger; i; oughta be sent to Africa 'cause niggers an' white folks toe I;
different an ain't gwine never git 'long?"

"He right, dat's what I thinks," said Kunta.

"But white j folks talks dat an' keeps bringin' mo' from Africa!"

| "You know why well's I do," said Hattie.

"Puts 'ere down in Georgia an' de Carolinas to keep up wid de cottor s, crop
every since dat cotton gin come in few years back, | Same reason plenty mass
as 'roun' here sellin' dey nigger' " i off down South for much as two, three
times what de) I paid fo' dem.  "

| "Fiddler say de big mass as down South got mean po ; cracker oberseers
drivin' niggers like mules clearin' lan' for ^ new cotton fiel said Kunta.

"Yeah, it's how come de papers lately so full o' notices | 'bout runaways,"
said Hattie.  i Just then the serving women began returning to the | kitchen
with dirty plates and platters.  Hattie beamed proud ly.

"Look like dey's done et all dey can hoi'.

"Bout now; if, massa pourin' de champagne whilst de table git cleared fo' i,
dessert," she told Kunta.

"See how you like dese plum i puddin' tarts."  She set one on a saucer in
front of him, II " " Sides dat dey's git ting brandied peaches in dere, but 1
\ recollecks you don't touch no liquor.  "

i Enjoying the succulent tart, Kunta found himself recalling a runaway slave
advertisement that Bell had read to him recently from the Gazette.

"Tall mulatto wench," i1 I; said, "very large breasts of which the right one
has a deep - scar.  A sly liar and thief, who may be showing a large forged
pass, since previous owner let her learn to write ; so-the, or who may be
claiming herself a free nigger."  i Hattie sat down heavily, fingered a
brandied peach from I a jar and popped it into her mouth.  Glancing across
the ; kitchen at two high tubs filled with glasses, dishes, cutlery, and
utensils yet to be washed and put away, she let out a .  " loud sigh and said
wearily,

"Know one thing, sho' be glad i: to see my bed dis night, 'cause Lawd, I jes*
plum we' out."

CHAPTER 76

For many years now, Kunta had gotten up every morning before dawn, earlier
than anyone else on slave row--so early that some of the others were
convinced that "dat African" could see in the dark like a cat.  Whatever they
wanted to think was fine with him as long as he was left alone to slip away
to the barn, where he would face the first faint streaking of the day
prostrated between two large bundles of hay, offering up his daily suba
prayer to Allah.  Afterward, by the time he had pitched some hay into the
horses' feed trough, he knew that Bell and Kizzy would be washed, dressed,
and ready to get things under way in the big house, and the boss field hand
Cato would be up and out with Ada's son Noah, who would soon be" ringing the
bell to wake the other slaves.

Almost every morning, Noah would nod and say

"Morning " with such solemn reserve that he reminded Kunta of the Jaloff
people in Africa, of whom it was said that if one greeted you in the morning,
he had uttered his last good word for the day.  But although they had said
little to each other, he liked Noah, perhaps because he reminded Kunta of
himself at about the same age--the serious manner, the way he went about his
work and minded his own business, the way he spoke little but watched
everything.  He had often noticed Noah doing a thing that he also
did--standing somewhere with his eyes quietly following the rom pings of
Kizzy and Missy Anne around the plantation.

Once when Kunta had been watching from the barn door as they rolled a hoop
across the backyard, giggling and screaming, he had been about to go back
inside when he saw Noah standing over by Cato's cabin, also watching.  Their
eyes met, and they looked at each other for a long moment before both turned
away.  Kunta wondered what had Noah been thinking--and had the feeling that,
likewise, Noah 408 ALEX HALEY

was wondering what he was thinking.  Kunta knew somehow that they were both
thinking the same things.

At ten, Noah was two years older than Kizzy, but that difference wasn't great
enough to explain why the two hadn't even become friends, let alone
playmates, since they were the only slave children on the plantation.  Kunta
had noticed that whenever they passed near each other, each of them always
acted as if they had not even seen the other, and he couldn't figure out
why--unless it was because even at their age they had begun to sense the
custom that house slaves and field slaves didn't mix with one another.

Whatever the reason, Noah spent his days out with oth- -I ers in the fields
while Kizzy swept, dusted, polished the i brass, and tidied up the massa's
bedroom every day--for | Bell to inspect later with a hickory switch in her
hand.  On ii Saturdays, when Missy Anne usually came to call, Kizzy | would
somehow miraculously manage to finish her chores i in half the time it took
her every other day, and the two 1: of them would spend the rest of the day
playing--except- I ing at midday if the massa happened to be home for lunch,
Then he and Missy Anne would eat in the dining room with Kizzy standing
behind them gently fanning a leafy branch l^ to keep away flies, as Bell
shuttled in and out serving the i food and keeping a sharp eye on both girls,
having warned them beforehand,

"Y'all lemme catch you even-thinkin' 'bout gigglin' in dere wid massa, I'll
tan both yo' hides!"

i Kunta by now was pretty much resigned to sharing his |; Kizzy with Massa
Waller, Bell, and Missy Anne.  He tried not to think about what they must
have her doing up there in the big house, and he spent as much time as
possible in the barn when Missy Anne was around.  But it was all he could do
to wait until each Sunday afternoon, when church would be over and Missy Anne
would go back home with her parents.

Later on these afternoons, usually Massa Waller would be either resting or
passing the time with company in the parlor.  Bell would be off with Aunt
Sukey and g Sister Mandy at their weekly

"Jesus meetin's" --and Kunta K would be free to spend another couple of
treasured hours ?  alone with his daughter.

i When the weather was good, they'd go walking--usually '-.  along the
vine-covered fence row where he had gone almost ; nine years before to think
of the name

"Kizzy" for his new girl child Out beyond where anyone would be likely to see
ROOTS 409

them Kunta would clasp Kizzy's soft little hand in his own as, feeling no
need to speak, they would stroll down to a little stream, and sitting close
together beneath a shade tree they would eat whatever Kizzy had brought along
from the kitchen--usually cold buttered biscuits filled with his favorite
blackberry preserves.  Then they would begin talking.

Mostly he'd talk and she'd interrupt him constantly with questions, most of
which would begin,

"How come .  .  ."  But one day Kunta didn't get to open his mouth before she
piped up eagerly,

"You wanna hear what Missy Anne learned me yestiddy?"

He didn't care to hear of anything having to do with that giggling white
creature, but not wishing to hurt his Kizzy's feelings, he said,

"I'm listenin'."

"Peter, Peter, punkin eater," she recited, "had a wife an' couldn' keeper,
put 'er in a punkin shell, dere he kep' 'er very well.  .  .

"" Dat it?  " he asked.

She nodded.

"You like it?"

He thought it was just what he would have expected from Missy Anne:
completely asinine.

"You says it real good," he hedged.

"Bet you can't say it good as me," she said with a twinkle.  / "Ain't tryin'
to!"

"Come on.  Pappy, say it to me jes' once."

"Git 'way from me wid dat mess!"  He sounded more exasperated than he really
was.  But she kept insisting and finally, feeling a bit foolish that his
Kizzy was able to twine him around her finger so easily, he made a stumbling
effort to repeat the ridiculous lines--just to make her leave him alone, he
told himself.

Before she could urge him to try the rhyme again, the thought flashed to
Kunta of reciting something else to her --perhaps a few verses from the
Koran, so that she might know how beautiful they could sound--then he
realized such verses would make no more sense to her than

"Peter, Peter" had to him.  So he decided to tell her a story.

She had already heard about the crocodile and the little boy.  so he tried
the one about the lazy turtle who talked the stun id leonard into giving him
a ride by pleading that he was too sick to walk.

410 ALEX HALEY

"Where you hears all dem stones you tells?"  Kizzy asked when he was through.

"Heared 'em when I was yo' age--from a wise of' gran'- mammy name Nyo Boto."
Suddenly Kunta laughed with delight, remembering: "She was bald-headed as a
egg!  Didn't have no teeth, neither, but dat sharp tongue o' hern sho' made
up fer it!  Loved us young'uns like her own, though."

"She ain't had none of 'er own?"

"Had two when she was real young, long time 'fo' she come to Juffure.

But they got took away in a fight 'tween her village an' not her tribe.
Reckon she never got over it.  "

Kunta fell silent, stunned with a thought that had never occurred to him
before: The same thing had happened to Bell when she was young.

He wished he could tell Kizzy about her two half sisters, but he knew it
would only upset ; her--not to mention Bell, who hadn't spoken of it since I
she told him of her lost daughters on the night of Kizzy's birth.  But hadn't
he--hadn't all of those who had been ; chained beside him on the slave ship
been torn away from .  , their own mothers?  Hadn't all the countless other
thousands who had come before--and since?

"Dey brung us here naked!"  he heard himself blurting.

1 Kizzy jerked up her head, staring; but he couldn't stop.

2 "Even took our names away.  Dem like you gits horned here don't even know
who dey is!  But you jes' much Kinte as I is!  Don't never fo'git datUs'ns
fo'fathers was traders, I travelers, holy men--all de way back hunnuds o'
rains into dat lan' call 01' Mali!  You unnerstan' what I'm talkin' 'bout,
Chile?"

"Yes, Pappy," she said obediently, but he knew she didn't.  He had an idea.
Picking up a stick, smoothing a | place in the dirt between them, he
scratched some char- I acters in Arabic.

                                      I

"Dat my name--Kun-ta Kin-te," he said, tracing the | characters slowly with
his finger.

She stared, fascinated.

"Pappy, now do my name."  He did.  She laughed.

"Dat say Kizzy?"  He nodded.

"Would you learn me to write like you does?"  Kizzy asked.  "Wouldn't be
fittin'," said Kunta sternly.  "Why not?"  She sounded hurt.

                                      I

"In Africa, only boys learns how to read an' write.  Girls , ain't got no use
fer it--ov^r here, neither."

ROOTS 411

"How come mammy can read an' write, den?"

Sternly, he said,

"Don't you be talkin' dat!  You hear me?  Ain't nobody's business!  White
folks don' like none us doin."  no readin' or writin'!  "

"How come?"

"

" Cause dey figgers less we knows, less trouble we makes.   "

"I wouldn't make no trouble," she said, pouting.

"If'n we don' hurry up an' git back to de cabin, yo' mammy gon' make trouble
fo' us both."

Kunta got up and started walking, then stopped and turned, realizing that
Kizzy was not behind him.  She was still by the bank of the stream, gazing at
a pebble she had seen.

"Come on now, it's time to go."  She looked up at him, and he walked over and
reached out his hand.

"Tell you what," he said.

"You pick up dat pebble an' bring it 'long an' hide it somewheres safe, an'
if'n you keeps yo' mouth shet 'bout it, nex' new moon mornin' I let you drop
it in my gourd."

"Oh, Pappy!"  She was beaming.

CHAPTER 77

It was almost time for Kizzy to drop another pebble into Kunta's gourd--about
a year later, in the summer of 1800--when the massa told Bell he was going to
Fredericksburg for about a week on business, and it was arranged that his
brother would be coming over "to look after things" while he was away.  When
Kunta heard the news, he was even more upset than the rest of slave row, for
he hated leaving Bell and Kizzy exposed to his former owner even more than he
disliked having to be away from them for so long.  Of course, he said nothing
about these concerns, but on the morning of departure, as he left the cabin
to hitch up the horses, he was taken aback that it seemed 412 ALEX HALEY

almost as if Bell had read his mind.  She said,

"Massa John sho' ain't like his brother, but 1 knows how to deal wid his
kin'.  An' it ain't but a week.  So don't you worry none.  We be fine."

"I ain't worryin'," said Kunta, hoping she couldn't tell he was lying.

Kneeling to kiss Kizzy, he whispered in her ear,

"Don't for git dat new moon pebble, now," and she winked conspiratorially as
Bell pretended not to have heard, although she had known what they were doing
for almost nine months now.

For the next two days of the massa's absence, everything went on pretty much
as usual, although Bell was mildly annoyed at nearly everything Massa John
said or did.  She particularly disliked how he sat up late in the study at
night, drinking his brother's best whiskey from the bottle, smoking his own
big, black, smelly cigars and flicking the ashes on the carpet.  Still, Massa
John didn't interfere too much with Bell's normal routine, and he stayed
mostly to himself.

But the midmorning of the third day.  Bell was out sweeping off the front
porch when a white man on a lathered horse came galloping up and leaped off,
demanding to see the massa.

Ten minutes later, the man left as hurriedly as he had come.  Massa John
barked down the hallway for Bell to come into the study.  He looked deeply
shaken, and it flashed in Bell's mind that something terrible had happened to
Kunta and the massa.  She was sure of it when he brusquely ordered her to
assemble all the slaves in the backyard.

They all gathered, standing in a line, tense with fear, as he flung open the
back screen door and stalked out toward them; he had a revolver conspicuous
in his belt.

Coldly scanning their faces, he said.

"I just got word of some Richmond niggers' plot to kidnap the governor,
massacre the Richmond white people, and burn the city."  The slaves gawked at
one another in astonishment as he went on.

"Thanks to God--an' a few smart niggers who found out and told their mass as
just in time--the plot's been crushed, and most of the niggers that started
it already caupht.

Armed patrols are on the roads lookin' for the rest, an' I'm gonna make sure
none of 'em decides to stop off here for the night.

"Case any o' you got uprising notions, ROOTS 413

I'm gonna be patrollm' day and night.  None of you're to set foot off this
property!  I don't want no gatherin' of any kind; an' nobody outside their
own cabin after dark!  " Patting his revolver, he said, " I'm not as patient
an' soft with niggers as my brother!  Any of you even looks like you're
thinkin' about steppin' outa line, his doctorin' won't patch up a bullet
'tween your eyes.  Now git!  "

Massa John was as good as his word.  For the next two days, he enraged Bell
by insisting upon watching Kizzy taste his food before he'd eat it.  He
roamed the fields on horseback during the day and sat on the porch at night
with a shotgun across his lap--his vigilance so absolute that the slave-row
people dared not try even discussing the uprising, let alone plan one of
their own.  After receiving and reading the next issue of the Gazette, Massa
John burned it in the fireplace; and when a neighboring massa visited one
afternoon, he ordered Bell to leave the house and they huddled talking in the
study with the windows shut.  So it was impossible for anyone even to find
out more about the plot, or especially about its aftermath, which was what
had Bell and the others worried sick--not about Kun- ta, since he'd be safe
with the massa, but about the fiddler, who had left on the day before they
had to play at a big society ball in Richmond.

The slave-row people could only imagine what might be happening to black
strangers in Richmond at the hands of enraged, panic-stricken whites.

The fiddler still hadn't returned when Kunta and the massa did--three days
early--their trip cut short by the uprising.  Upon Massa John's departure
later that day, the restrictions he'd imposed were relaxed somewhat, although
not completely, and the massa was very cold toward everyone.  It wasn't until
Kunta and Bell were alone in their cabin that he could tell her of what he'd
overheard in Fredericksburg: that the black revolters already captured had
been tortured into helping the authorities round up others involved, and some
had confessed that the revolt had been planned by a free blacksmith named
Gabriel Prosser, who had recruited around two hundred hand-picked black
men--butlers, gardeners, janitors, waiters, ironworkers, rope makers, coal
miners, boatmen, even preachers--and trained them for more than a year.
Prosser was still at large, and the militia was combing the countryside for
suspects, said Kunta; poor-white pate rollers were terror414 ALEX HALEY
izing the roads; and there were rumors about some mass as beating slaves,
some to death, for little or no provocation, "Look like our only hope is we's
all dey got," said Bell.  "If'n dey kills us off, dey won't have no slaves no
mo'."

"Fiddler back?"  asked Kunta, ashamed that he'd been so engrossed in telling
what had happened that he hadn'l thought of his friend until now.

Bell shook her head.

"We all been mighty worried.  Bul dat fiddler a crafty nigger.  He get home
awright."

Kunta didn't fully agree.

"He ain't home yet."

When the fiddler didn't return the next day, the massa wrote a message
notifying the sheriff, and told Kunta to deliver it to the county seat.
Kunta had done so--seeing the sheriff read the message and silently shake his
head Then returning homeward, Kunta had driven slowly for three or four
miles, staring gloomily at the road ahead, wondering if he'd ever see the
fiddler again, feeling badi) that he had never actually expressed that he
considered hire a good friend--despite his drinking, his cussing, and ottiei
shortcomings--when he heard a poor imitation of a whitt "cracker" drawl,

"Hey, nigger!"

Kunta thought he must be hearing things.

"Where d< hell you think you going'?"  the voice came again, and reining the
horses, Kunta looked around and along both sides of the road, but saw nobody.
Then, suddenly,

"You ain't gol no travel pass, boy, you in a heap o' trouble" --and there,
climbing from a ditch, ragged and torn, cut and bruised covered with mud
while carrying his battered case and grinning from ear to ear, was the
fiddler.

Kunta let out a shout, jumping down from his seat and within seconds he and
the fiddler were hugging and whirling each other around, laughing.

"You de spittin' image of a African I knows," exclaimed the fiddler, "but
couldn't be him--he wouldn't never Ie' nobody know he glad to see 'em."

"Don't know why I is," said Kunta, embarrassed at himself.

"Fine welcome fo' a frien' what crawled on his han's an knees all de way back
from Richmon' jes' to see yo' ugl} face again."

Kunta's seriousness conveyed the degree of his concern "Was it bad.

Fiddler?  "

"Bad ain't even close to it.  Thought sho' I'd be playin ROOTS 415

a duet wid angels fo' I got out'n dere!  " As Kunta took the muddy fiddle
case and they both clambered into the wagon, the fiddler continued talking,
nonstop.

"Richmon' white folks jes' 'bout crazy scared.  Militiamens ever' where stop-
pin' niggers, an' dem widout a travel pass next stop in jail wid a headache.
An' dem de lucky ones.

Packs o' po* crackers roamin' de streets like wil' dogs, jumpin' on niggers,
beatin' some so bad can't hardly tell who dey was.

"De ball I'se playin' at break up halfway through when dey gits firs' word
'bout de uprisin', missies screamin' an runnin' roun' in circles, mass as
pullin' guns on us niggers up on de ban' stan

"Midst all de ruckus, I slips into de kitchen an' hid in a garbage can till
eve' body gone.  Den I climbs out a window and took to de back streets,
stayin' 'way from lights.  I'd got to de edge o' town when all of a sudden I
hears dis shoutin' behin' me, den a whole lotta feets runnin' same way I is.
Sump'n tell me dey ain't black, but I ain't waitin' to fin' out.  I cuts
'roun' de nex' corner flyin' low, but I hears 'em gainin' on me, an' I'se
'bout to say my prayers when I sees a real low porch dat I rolls right under.

"It's real tight under dere, an' I'se inchin' further back jes' when dem
crackers goes runnin' by wid torches sboutin' " Git dat nigger!  " I bumps
'against sump'n big an' sof, an' a hand clap over my mouf, an' a nigger voice
say,

"Nex' time, knock!"  Turns out it's a warehouse night watchman seen a mob
tear a frien' o' his apart, an' he ain't got no tent ion o' comin' out from
under dat porch 'til nex' spring, ifn it take dat long to blow over.

"Well, after a while I wishes 'im luck, an' heads out again an' makes it to
de woods.  Dat was five days ago.  Would a made it here in fo', but so many
pate rollers on de roads, I had to keep to de woods, eatin' berries, sleepin'
in de thickets wid de rabbits.  Did all right 'til yestiddy a few miles east
o' here, bunch o' real mean crackers cotched me in de open.

"Dey's jes' spoilin' to whup deyselves a nigger, maybe even string 'im
up--dey had a rope right dere wid 'em!  Dey's shovin' me back an' fo'th,
axin' whose nigger I is an' where I think I'se going' but not payin' no tent
ion to what I tells 'em--'til I says I'se a fiddler.

Dey hoi' on, dey thinks I'se lyin', an' hollers,

"Well, le's hear you play, den!"

"African, le'me tell you sump'n.  I open up dat fiddle 416 ALEX HALEY

case an' you ain't never heard no concert like I give right out dere in de
middle o' de road.  Played

"Turkey in de Straw' you know po' crackers loves dat an' 'fo' I'm warmed up
good, I had dem all a-hootin' an' clappin' an' tappin' dey feets, an' I ain't
quit tildey's had dey fill an' tell me to go 'head an' don't dillydally git
ting my tail home.  An' I ain't neither!  Done hit de ditch whenever I seen a
boss or buggy, or wagon comin', until dis one was youl An' here I is!"

As they rolled into the narrow road leading to the big house, soon they heard
shouting and then saw the people of slave row running to meet the wagon.

"Might think a body was missed 'round here" although the fiddler was
grinning, Kunta could sense how moved the man was, as, grinning himself, he
said,

"Look like you gon' have to tell de whole story all over again."

"You ever knowed dat to stop me?"  asked the fiddler.  "Leas'ways I'se here
to tell ill"

CHAPTER 78

In the months that followed, with the capture, trial, and execution of one
conspirator after another, and finally of Gabriel Prosser himself, news of
the Richmond uprising and of the tensions it generated gradually subsided,
and once more politics became the chief discussion topic among the massa and
his friends, and therefore also within slave row.  As best Kunta, Bell, and
the fiddler could piece together what they overheard in various ways about
the voting for the next President, a Massa Aaron Burr had run a tie with the
famous Massa Thomas Jefferson who finally had gotten the job, apparently
since he was supported by the powerful Massa Alexander Hamilton; and Massa
Burr, an archenemy of Massa Hamilton, had been made Vice President.

No one seemed to know much about Massa Burr, but ROOTS 417

Kunta learned from a buggy driver who had been born in Virginia not far from
Massa Jefferson's Monticello plantation that his slaves declared there
couldn't be a better massa.

"Dat driver tol' me Massa Jefferson ain't never lowed his oberseers to whup
nobody," Kunta shared with the slave-row people.

"An' dey all eats good, an' he let de womens spin an' sew 'em all good
clothes, an' he b'lieve in lettin' 'em learn different trades."  After Massa
Jefferson returned home from one long trip, Kunta had heard, his slaves had
met him two miles from the plantation, unhitched the horses, and gleefully
pulled the carriage that long distance to the Monticello big house, where
they carried him on their shoulders to the doorstep.

The fiddler snorted.

"Pref near eve' body know plenty dem niggers Massa Jefferson's own chilluns
by high-yaller woman he own, name o' Sally Hemings."  He was about to say
more when Bell contributed the most interesting thing she knew.  " " Cordin'
to a kitchen maid he use to have dere," she said, " ain't nothin' Massa
Jefferson rut her eat clan a rabbit soaked all night in oil, thyme, rosemary,
an' garlic, den next day simmered down in wine till de meat fallin' off de
bones.  "

"You don' say!"  exclaimed the fiddler sarcastically.

"See how soon you gits not her piece dat rhubarb pie you keeps axin' me to
make!"  snapped Bell.

"See how soon I axes you!"  he shot back.

Refusing to get caught in the middle, as he had so often been in the past--in
trying to make peace when his wife and the fiddler started in on each other,
then turned on him for butting in--Kunta acted as if he hadn't heard, and
simply continued where he'd left off before they interrupted.

"I beared Massa Jefferson say slavery jes' bad for white folks as for us'ns,
an' he 'gree wid Massa Hamilton it's }es' too much nachel diff'rence fo'
white an' black folks ever to learn to live wid one not her peaceful.  Dey
say Massa Jefferson want to see us set free, but not stickin' roun' dis
country takin' po' white folks' jobs--he favor shippin' us back to Africa,
gradual, widout big fuss an' mess."

"Massa Jefferson better talk to dem slave traders," said the fiddler, "
'cause look like dey got diff'rent ideas which way de ships oughta go."

"Seem like lately when massa go to other plantations, I 418 ALEX HALEY

hears "bout lots of people git ting sol'," said Kunta.

"Whole families dat's been all dey lives rouri' here is git ting sol' off
down South by dey mass as Even passed one dem slave traders yestiddy on de
road.

He wave an' grin an' tip 'is hat, but massa ack like he ain't even seed 'im.
"

"Humph!  Dem slave traders getting' thick as flies in de towns," said the
fiddler.

"Las' time I went to Fredericks- burg, dey was buzzin' after sump'n of' an'
dried-up as me, 'til I flash my pass.  I seed a poof' gray beard nigger git
sol' off fo' six hunnud dollars.  Young healthy buck use to fetch dat.  But
datof' nigger sho' didn't go quiet!  Dey's jerkin' 'im otTn de auction block,
an' he bawlin' out, " Y'all white folks done made Gawd's earth a livin' HELL
fo' my peoples!  But jes' sho* as JEDGMENT MAWNIN' gwine come, y'all's hell
gwine bounce BACK.  on y'all dat brung it!  Ain't no BEGGIN' gwine stop it
from

"STROYIN' you!  No MEDICINES y'all make ... no RUNNIN' y'all do ... none
y'all's GUNS ... no PRAYIN', no NOTHIN' he'p y'all den!"

By dat time dey'd drug 'im off.  01' nigger sound' like a preacher or sump'n,
de way he carry on.  "

Kunta saw Bell's sudden agitation.

"Dat of' man" -- she asked, "he real black an' skinny, kin' o' stooped over
an' got a white beard an' had a big scar down his neck?"

The fiddler looked startled.

"Yeah!  Sho' was!  Sho' did.  All dem things--you know who he was?"

Bell looked at Kunta as if she were ready to weep.

"Dat de preacher what christened Kizzy," she said somberly.

Kunta was visiting in the fiddler's cabin late the next day when Cato knocked
at the open door.

"What you doin' out dere?  Come on in!"  the fiddler shouted.

Cato did.  Both Kunta and the fiddler were very glad that he had come.

Only recently they had expressed mutual wishing that the quiet, solid head
field hand Cato was closer to them, as the old gardener had been.

Cato seemed ill at ease.

"Jes' want to say I b'lieves it be good if y'all maybe don' tell de scaries'
things y'all hears 'bout so many folks git tin sol' off down South" -- Cato
hesitated.

"Reason why I'm tellin' y'all de truth, out in de fields de folks is git ting
so scairt dey gwine git sol', dey jes' can' hardly keep dey minds on no
workin'."  Again he paused briefly.

"Leas'ways nobody 'ceptin' me an' dat boy Noah.  I figgers if I gits sol',
well, I'se jes' sol', ain't much ROOTS 419

I can do 'bout it.  An' dat Noah--don' seem like he scairt o' nothin'.  "

After several minutes of talk among the three of them-- during which Kunta
sensed Cato's warm response to their warm welcoming of his visit--they agreed
that it would probably be best if only they, not even Bell, shared the news
that was the most frightening, that could only alarm the others needlessly.

But one night in the cabin a week or so later.  Bell looked up abruptly from
her knitting and said,

"Seem like de cat got some tongues roun' here--either dator white folks done
quit sellin' niggers, an' I knows I got mo' sense clan dat!"

Grunting in embarrassment, Kunta was amazed that she --and probably all the
other people on slave row--had guessed intuitively that he and the fiddler
weren't telling them all they knew anymore.  So he began reporting slave sale
stories again--omitting the most unpleasant details.  But he stressed news
about successful runaways, featuring the black grapevine tales he had heard
about wily, fast talking slaves in the act of escaping and making fools of
ignorant poor cracker pate rollers One night he told them of a high-yaller
butler and a black stable hand having stolen a buggy, horse, and fine
clothing and a hat that the high yaller wore while he pretended to be a rich
massa loudly cursing his black buggy driver whenever he drew within earshot
of any white patrols they met along their rapid buggy ride into the North and
automatic freedom.  Another time Kunta told of a no less audacious slave who
always galloped his mule almost into the pate rollers faces before halting
and unrolling with a flourish a large, fine-print document that he said would
explain his urgent errand for his massa--gambling always correctly that the
illiterate white crackers would wave him on rather than admit they couldn't
read.  Kunta often now set the slave-row people to laughing--telling such as
how other escaping blacks had so perfected an act of chronic stuttering that
disgusted "pa- terollers" told them to get along their way rather than spend
obvious hours trying to question them.  He told of runaways' affected fearful
reluctance before finally apologetically confiding how much their rich,
powerful mass as despised poor whites and how harshly they dealt with any
interference with their servants.  One night Kunta set slave 420 ALEX HALEY

row to roaring about a house slave he'd been told of who reached safety up
North just a jump ahead of his hotly pursuing massa, who quickly summoned a
policeman.

"You know you my nigger!"  the massa screamed wildly at his slave, who simply
looked blank and, kept exclaiming,

"He'p me Gawd, I ain't never set eyes on dat white man!"  --convincing a
gathered crowd, along with the policeman who ordered the furious white man to
quiet down and move on or he'd have to arrest him for disturbing the peace.

For years now Kunta had managed to avoid going anywhere near any slave
auction, ever since the one where the girl had futilely cried out to him for
help.  But a few months after his talk with Cato and the fiddler, one early
afternoon Kunta drove the massa into the public square of the county seat
just as a slave sale was beginning.

"Oyez, oyez, gentlemen of Spotsylvania, I offer the finest lot of niggers
ever seen in y'all's lives!"  As the auctioneer shouted to the crowd, his
beefy, younger assistant jerked an old slave woman up onto the platform.

"A fine cook!"  he began--but she began screaming, gesturing frantically to a
white man in the crowd: "Massa Philip!

Philip!  you act like you done forgot I worked fo' you an' yo' brudders'
daddy when y'all was jes' young'uns!  Knows I'se of' an' ain't much now, but
please, Lawd, keep me!  I work for you hard, Massa Philip!  Please, suh, don'
let 'em whup me to death somewheres down South!  "

"Stop the buggy, Toby!"  the massa ordered.

Kunta's blood ran cold as he reined the horses to a halt.  Why after all
these years of showing no interest in slave auctions did Massa Waller want to
watch one?  Was he thinking of buying someone, or what?

Was it the pitiful woman's heartbreaking outburst?  Whomever she had appealed
to yelled back some ridicule, and the crowd was still laughing when a trader
bought her for seven hundred dollars.

"He'p me.  Gawd, Jesus, Lawd, he'p me!"  she cried as the trader's black
helper began shoving her roughly toward the slave pen.

"Git yo' black hands off'n me, nigger!"  she screamed, and the crowd rocked
with laughter.  Kunta bit his lip, blinking back tears.

"Prize buck o' the lot, gentlemen!"  Next on the platform was a young black
man, glaring baleful hatred, his ROOTS 421

barrel chest and thickly muscled body crisscrossed with the angry, reddish
welts of a very recent, severe lashing.  "This one jes' needed some
remindin'!  He'll heal up quick!  He can plow a mule into the ground!  Pick
you four hundred pounds of cotton any day!  Look at 'im!  A natural stud--if
your wenches ain't bearin' every year like they ought!  A steal at any
price!"  The chained young man brought fourteen hundred dollars.

Kunta's vision blurred anew as a weeping mulatto woman great with child was
led onto the platform.

"Two for the price of one, or one for free, dependin' on how you look at it!"
shouted the auctioneer.

"Pickaninnies today worth a hundred dollars soon's they draw breath!"

She brought a thousand dollars.

It was becoming unendurable when the next one came, being pulled along by her
chain--and Kunta nearly fell from his seat.  The teen-aged black girl,
quaking with terror, in her build, her skin color, even her facial features,
might have been an older Kizzy!  As if Kunta had been pole axed, he heard the
auctioneer start his spiel: "A fine trained housemaid--or she's prime
breedin' stock if you want one!"  he added with a leering wink.  Inviting
closer inspection, he abruptly loosened the neck piece of the girl's sack
dress, which fell about her feet as she screamed, weeping, flinging her arms
downward in an effort to cover her nakedness from the ogling crowd, several
of whom jostled forward, reaching out to poke and fondle her.

"That's enough!  Let's get out of here!"  the massa commanded--an instant
before Kunta felt he would have done it anyway.

Kunta hardly saw the road before them as they rode back toward the
plantation; his mind was reeling.  What if the girl had really been his
Kizzy?  What if the cook had been his Bell?  What if they both were sold away
from him?  Or he from them?  It was too horrible to think about--but he could
think of nothing else.

Even before the buggy reached the big house, Kunta intuitively sensed that
something was wrong, perhaps because it was a warm summer evening, yet he saw
none of the slave-row people strolling or sitting around outside.  Dropping
the massa off, Kunta hurriedly unhitched and stabled the horses, then headed
straight for the kitchen, 422 ALEX HALEY

where he knew Bell now would be preparing the massa's supper.  She didn't
hear him until he asked through the screen door,

"You awright?"

"Oh, Kunta!"  Whirling around, her eyes wide with shock, loudly she blurted,

"Slave trader done been here!"  Then, lowering her voice,

"I

heard Cato's whippoorwill whistle from out in de fiel' an' run to de front
window.  Minute I seed dat citified-lookin' white man git ting off his hoss,
I jes' smelt what he was!  Lawd a mercy!  I open de do' by time he got up de
steps.  He ax to see my massa or missis.  I say my missis in de graveyard, an
my massa a doctor off tendin' sick peoples, an' no tellin' what time o' night
he git back.  Den he throw me dis smirkin' look an' ban' me a li'l card wid
printin' on it an' say give dat to massa an' tell 'im he be back.  Well, I'se
feared not to give massa de card--finally jes' stuck it on his desk.  "

"Bell!"  a call came from the living room.

She nearly dropped her spoon.  She whispered,

"Wait!  I be back!"  Kunta waited--hardly daring to breathe, expecting the
worst--until he saw the returning Bell's expression of immense relief.

"He say he want early supper!  De card gone from de desk where I lef it, but
he don' say nothin' 'bout it, an' fo' sho' I ain't neither!"

After supper.  Bell filled in the field hands on the developments after
Cato's warning whistle, and Aunt Sukey started crying.

"Lawd, y'all think massa gwine sell some us?"

"Ain't nobody never gon' beat me no mo'!"  declared Cato's big wife, Beulah.

A long, heavy silence fell.  Kunta could think of nothing to say; but he knew
he wasn't going to tell them about the auction.

"Well," said the fiddler finally, "massa ain't one o* dem wid a whole lotta
spare niggers.  An' he is one dem got plenty money, so ain't needin" to sell
no niggers to pay debts, like a whole lot doin'.  "

Kunta hoped the others found the fiddler's comforting effort more convincing
than he did.  Bell looked a little hopeful.

"I knows massa, or anyhow, I thinks I does.  Long as we's all been here, he
ain't never sol' off nobody-- leas' ways nobody 'cept dat buggy driver
Luther, an' dat 'cause Luther drawed dat map to he'p a gal try to 'scape."

ROOTS 423

Bell hesitated before continuing.

"Naw!"  she said.

"Massa wouldn't get rid o' none us widout no good cause--any y'all speck he
would?"

But nobody answered.

CHAPTER 79

Kunta's ears were riveted upon the massa's dialogue with a favorite one of
his cousins, who was being brought home for dinner, as they sat in the rear
of the rolling buggy.

"At a county seat auction the other day," the massa was saying,

"I

was astonished that everyday field hands are selling for twice to three times
what they fetched just a few years ago.  And from advertisements I read in
the Gazette, carpenters, brick masons blacksmiths--in fact, slaves who are
really experienced in about any trade, leather workers sail makers musicians,
whatever, are going for as much as twenty-five hundred dollars apiece.  "

"It's the same everywhere since this new cotton gin!"  exclaimed the massa's
cousin.

"More than a million slaves already in the country, I've been told, yet the
ships still can't seem to bring enough new ones to supply those Deep South
bottom lands trying to meet the demand of the northern mills."

"What's concerning me is that too many otherwise sensible planters, in their
eagerness for quick profits, may be starting to see our state of Virginia
eventually losing its best quality of slaves, even the best breeding stock,"
said Massa Waller, "and that's just plain foolishness!"

"Foolishness?  Hasn't Virginia got more slaves than she needs?  They cost
more to maintain than most are worth in work."

"Maybe today," said the massa, "but how do we know our needs five, ten years
from today?  Who would have predicted such a cotton boom as this ten years
ago?  And I've never gone along with your very popular talk of slaves' keep
costing so much.  It seems to me on any place that's 424 ALEX HALEY

just halfway well organized, don't they plant, raise, and harvest what they
eat?  And they're usually prolific--every pickaninny that's born is worth
money to you, too.  A lot are fully capable of learning skills to make them
even more valuable.  I'm convinced that slaves and land, in that order, are a
man's best investments today.  I'd never sell either of mine for the same
reason--they're the backbone of our system.  "

"The system may be starting to change without many realizing it,"

said the massa's cousin.

"Look at these upstart rednecks strutting around as if they've entered the
planter class just because they've bought one or two broken- down slaves to
finish working them to death at building up their pitiful little crops of
cotton and tobacco.

They're beyond contempt, but rednecks seem to breed even faster than niggers.
Just in sheer numbers they may begin to encroach on our land before long as
well as on our labor.  "

"Well, I don't think we have much to worry about" --the massa chuckled,
seemingly amused at his thought"--not as long as poor whites are competing
with free blacks to buy the cast-off slaves."

His cousin joined him in laughter.

"Yes, isn't it unbelievable?  I hear that half the free niggers in the cities
work day and night to save enough money to buy their kinfolk, and then set
them free."

"It's why we have so many free blacks in the South," said the massa.

"I think we're permitting too many of them in Virginia," said his cousin.

"It's not just how they're sapping our labor supply by buying up their kin
and creating more free blacks.  They're also at the root of most uprisings.
We don't ever want to forget that blacksmith in Richmond."

"True!"  said Massa Waller.

"But I still think that with enough good, strict laws to keep them in their
places, and proper examples made of troublemakers, then most of them can
serve useful purposes--in the cities.  I'm told that right now, they just
about dominate in most of the trades."

"In the traveling I do, I've seen myself how widespread that is,"

said his cousin.

"They're warehouse and waterfront workers, merchants, undertakers, gardeners.
They're the best cooks, also musicians, of course!  And I've heard there's
not even one white barber in the whole city of ROOTS 425

Lynchburg.  I'd have to grow a beard!  I'd never let one of them near my
throat with a razor!  "

They both laughed.  But then the massa grew serious.

"I think the cities may be spawning for us a bigger social problem than free
blacks--I mean these slick-tongued con- man slave traders.  I hear most are
former tavern owners, speculators, jackleg teachers, lawyers, preachers, and
the like.  Three or four have approached me in the county seat offering
sight-unseen prices for my slaves, and one even had the nerve to leave his
card here at the house!  Far as I'm concerned, they're totally vultures
without scruples."

They had arrived at Massa Waller's house, and Kunta-- seeming as if he hadn't
heard a word they'd said--jumped down to help them out.  By the time they'd
gone inside, washed up after^ the dusty ride, then settled in the drawing
room and called Bell to bring them drinks, she and everyone else on the
plantation knew from Kunta the vital fact that the massa had no plans to sell
them.  And not long after supper, Kunta repeated to his rapt slave-row
audience the entire conversation, as best he could duplicate it.

There was silence for a moment.  Then Sister Mandy spoke.

"Massa an' his cousin talkin' 'bout free niggers savin' up to buy kinfolks
free.

I wants to know how dem free niggers got dey selves free!  "

"Well," said the fiddler, "whole lotta city slaves' mass as lets 'em learn
trades, den hires 'em out fo' pay an' gives 'em some de money, like massa do
wid me.  So wid ten, fi'teen years o' savin', if'n he real lucky, a hire-out
nigger can maybe give his massa de money to buy his self free."

"Dat why you keeps so busy fiddlin'?"  asked Cato.

"Ain't doin' it 'cause I loves to see white folks dance," said the fiddler.

"You got 'enough to buy yo'self yet?"

"If I did, I wouldn' be here fo' you to ax dat question."  Everyone laughed.

"Is you close, anyways?"  Cato persisted.

"Don' give up, does you?"  said the fiddler, exasperated.  "I'se closer'n I
was las' week, but not close I'se gwine be nex' week."

"Awright, but when you gits it, what you gwine do?"

"Split de win', brudder!  Headin' Nawth!  Hear some dem northern free niggers
livin' bet tern plenty white folks, an' 426 ALEX HALEY

dat sound' good to me.  Speck I move in nex' door to on dem high-tone
mulattoes an' start talkin' high-toned an' dressin' up in silk like dey does,
an' start to playin' de harp an' gwine to meetin's to 'scuss books an'
raisin' flowers an' sich as dat.  "

When the laughter lessened.  Aunt Sukey asked,

"What y'all think 'bout what white folks always says dat dem mulattoes an'
high yallers do so good 'cause de whole lot o' white blood dey got in 'em
make 'em smartern we is?"

"Well, white mens sho' mixes roun' 'enough dey blood!"  Bell said
noncommittally.

"Watch yo' talk 'bout my mammy's oberseer!"  the fiddler exclaimed, trying to
look insulted.  Cato almost fell off his chair laughing till Beulah gave his
head a whack with the back of her hand.

"Git serious here!"  the fiddler went on.

"Aunt Sukey ax a question I 'tends to answer!  If you jedgin' by sich as me,
den you know light-skinned niggers got to be smart!  Or take dat brown-skin
Benjamin Banneker what white folks calls a genius wid figgers, even studyin'
de stars an' moon --but whole heap o' smart niggers black like y'all, too!"  .

Bell said,

"I done beared massa talk 'bout a James Der- ham nigger doctor in New
Orleans.  White doctor what teached 'im claim he know more 'n he do, an' he
black as dey gits, too."

"Tell you an udder one," said the fiddler.

"Dat Prince Hall what started dat nigger Masonic Order!  I seen pictures some
dem big preachers what started dem nigger churches, most of 'em so black you
couldn't hardly see 'em less'n dey eyes was open.  An' what 'bout dat Phyllis
Wheatley what writes dem pomes white folks say so fine, an' dat Gustavus
Vassa what writes books?"  The fiddler glanced in Kunta's direction.

"Dey's both straight-from-Africa niggers, not nary drop o' white folks'
blood, an' dey sho' don't sound' all dat dumb to me!"

Then laughing, the fiddler said, " " Co'se, dey's always dumb black
niggers--take Cato here .  .  .  " He sprang up and ran with Cato two steps
behind.

"Cotch you, I'll dumb you upside de head!"  Cato shouted.

When the others stopped guffawing, Kunta spoke.

"Laugh all y'all want.  All niggers de same to white folks.  One drop o'
nigger blood means nigger if you's even whitern dem--an I'se seed plenty dat
is."

ROOTS 427

It was about a month later when the fiddler returned from one of his trips
bearing news that he had seen elating whites everywhere he'd been--and that
plunged slave row into gloom: The French leader named Napoleon had sent
across the big water a huge army which, after much fighting and bloodshed,
had taken Haiti back from the blacks and their liberator.  General Toussaint.
Invited to dinner by the victorious French army's general, Toussaint had
made the mistake of accepting; during the meal, the waiters seized and
trussed him, and rushed him onto a ship bound for France, where he had been
taken in chains before Napoleon, who had plotted the entire treachery.

Being the black General Toussaint's greatest admirer on the plantation, Kunta
took the news harder than anyone else.  He was still sitting dejectedly in
the fiddler's cabin when the last of the others trudged silently out.

"I knows how you felt 'bout dat Toussaint," said the fiddler, "an' I don'
want you to think I takes it light, but I got a piece o' news I jes' cain't
hoi' in another minute!"

Kunta glanced grimly at the fiddler, further offended that he looked ready to
pop open with happiness.  What news could be so good as to affect anyone's
proper respect for the humiliation of the greatest black leader of all time?

"I done it!"  The fiddler was a study of excitement.

"I din't say nothin' jes' a month back when Cato axed how much I had saved
up, but den I was jes' a few dollars short --an' now I jes' done made it wid
dis trip!  Took me playin' over nine hunnud times fo' white folks to dance,
an' I sho' din't know if I'd ever make it, so I din't talk 'bout it wid
nobody--not even you--'til I done it!  African, I got dat seven hunnud
dollars what massa long time ago tol' me I'd have to earn to buy myself free!"

Kunta was too thunderstruck to speak.

"Looka here!"  said the fiddler, ripping open his mattress and dumping the
contents out onto the floor; hundreds of dollar bills eddied about their feet.

"An' looka here!"  he said, dragging a gunny sack out from under the bed and
emptying it, clinking, on top of the bills--hundreds of coins of every
denomination.

"Well, African, you gwine say sump'n, or jes' stan' dere wid yo' mouf open?"

"Don't know what to say," said Kunta.

428 ALEX HALEY

"How 'bout " gratulations'?  "

"Jes" seem too good to be true.  "

"It true awright.  I done counted it a thou san times.  Even got 'enough
extra to buy me a cardboard suitcase!"

Kunta just couldn't believe it.  The fiddler was really going to be free!  It
wasn't just a dream.  Kunta felt like laughing and crying--for himself as
much as for his friend.

The.  fiddler knelt and began scooping up the money.  "Look, you deafn dumb
'bout dis till tomorrow mawnin', awright?  Dat when I goes to see massa an'
tell 'im he seven hunnud dollars richer!  You gwine be glad as he is to see
me go?"

"Glad fo' you.  Not fo' me," said Kunta.

"If you tryin' to make me feel so sorry for you, I buy you free, too, you
gwine wait a spell!  Done took me thutty-three years fiddlin' to freedom!"

By the time Kunta got back to his own cabin, he had begun to miss the fiddler
already, and Bell mistook his sadness for grief about Toussaint, so he didn't
have to hide-- or explain--what he was feeling.

When he went by the fiddler's cabin the next morning after feeding the
horses, he found it empty, so he went to ask Bell if he was in with the massa.

"He let an hour ago.  Ack like he seen a ghost.  What de matter wid 'im, an'
what he want wid massa anyways?"

"What he say when he come out?"  asked Kunta.

"Don' say nothin'.  Tol' you he went pas' me like I wasn't dere."

Without another word, Kunta walked out the screen door and back toward slave
row--with Bell shouting after him,

"Now where you going'?"  And when he didn't answer: "Dat right!  Don't tell
me nothin'!  I'se jes' yo' wife!"  Kunta had disappeared.

After asking around, knocking at every cabin door, even peeking inside the
privy and shouting

"Fiddler!"  in the barn, Kunta headed down along the fence row When he had
gone a good way, he heard it--sad, slow strains of a song he had heard blacks
at an "0 Lawd" camp meeting singing once .  .  .  only this time it was being
played on a fiddle.  The fiddler's music was always rollicking and happy;
this sounded almost as if the fiddle were sobbing, drifting up along the
fence row

Quickening his stride, Kunta came within sight of an oak ROOTS 429

tree spreading half over a brook down near the edge of Massa Waller's
property.  Approaching closer, he saw the fiddler's shoes extending from
behind the tree.  Just then, the music stopped--and so did Kunta, feeling
suddenly like an intruder.  He stood still, waiting for the fiddling to
resume, but the drone of bees and the burble of the streum were the only
sounds that broke the silence.  At last, almost sheepishly, Kunta moved
around the tree and faced the fiddler.  One glance was all he needed to know
what had happened--the light was gone from his friend's face; the familiar
sparkle in his eyes had been extinguished.

"You need so; the mattress stuflin'?"  The fiddler's voice was cracking.

Kunta said nothing.  Tears began to drip down along the fiddler's cheeks; he
brushed them furiously away as it they were acid, and the words came in a
rush: "I tells 'im I finally got de money to buy me free--ev'y penny of it.
He hem an' haw a minute, an' look at de ceilin'.  Den he gratulaic me on
savin' up so much.  But den he tells me if I wants to, de seven hunnud could
be a down payment, 'cause in doin' business he got to consider how de slave
prices done gone way up since dat cotton gin come in.  He say now he couldn't
'cept no less'n fifteen hunnud at de leas' fo' a good money-makin' fiddler
like me, dat he could git twenty-five hunnud fo' if he was to sell me to
somebody else.  He say he real sorry, but he hope I under stan business is
business, an' he have to git fair return on his 'vestment."  The fiddler
began openly sobbing now.

"He say being' free ain't all it cracked up to be nohow, an' he wish me debes
luck in comin' up wid de res' if I insists .  .  .  an' he tell me keep up de
good work ... an' when I got out, would I ax Bell to bring 'im some coffee."

He fell silent.  Kunta just stood there.

"Dat son-of-a-bitch!"  the fiddler screamed suddenly, and flinging back his
arm, he hurled his fiddle into the stream.

Kunta waded in to get it, but even before he reached down, he could see it
was broken.

CHAPTER 80

When Kunta got home with the massa well into one night a few rnon.  hs later.
Bell was less irritated than concerned that they were both too tired even to
eat the good supper she'd prepared.  For a strange fever had begun to strike
throughout the county, and the two men had been leaving earlier each morning
and coming back later each night in the massa's efforts as the county's
doctor to keep up with the spreading contagion.

Kunta was so worn out, slumped in his rocking chair, staring vacantly at the
fire, that he didn't even notice Bell feeling his forehead and taking off his
shoes.  And hal fan hour passed before he realized suddenly that Kizzy wasn't
on his lap, as usual, showing him some new plaything she'd made or prattling
about what She'd done that day.

"Where dat chile?"  he asked finally.  "Put 'er to bed an hour ago,"

said Bell.  "She ain't sick, is she?"  he asked, sitting up.  "Naw, jes'
tuckered out from play.  Missy Anne come over today."  Kunta was too
exhausted even to feel his customary annoyance, but Bell changed the subject
anyway.  "While Roosby waitin' to take 'er home, he tell me he beared de
fiddler playin' other night at a ball he took Massa John to over in
Fredericksburg.  He say he didn't hardly recognize de fiddlin', it jes' don't
sound' de same.  I didn't tell 'im de fiddler his self ain't de same since he
find out he ain't free."

                                      I

"Seem like he don't care 'bout nothin' no mo'," said Kunta.

"Sho' seem dat.  He keep to his self don't hardly even nod to nobody no mo',
'ceptin' Kizzy when she bring 'im supper an' set wid 'im whilst he eat it.
She de onliest one he ROOTS 431

want anythin' to do wid.  Don't even spen' no time wid you no mo'.  "

"What wid dis fever going' roun' lately," said Kunta wearily,

"I ain't hardly had no time or stren'th for visitin' no ways

"Yeah, I been noticin', an' you ain't gon' set up here half de night, you
going' straight to bed."

"Leave me 'lone, woman.  I'm fine."

"Naw you ain't!"  Bell said decisively, taking him by the hand, helping him
up, and leading him into the bedroom without his further resistance.  Kunta
sat on the edge of the bed while she helped him out of his clothes; then he
lay down, sighing.

"Roll over an' I gives you a back rub

He obeyed, and she began kneading his back with her stiffened fingers.

He winced.

"What's de matter?  I ain't rubbin' all dat hard."

"Ain't nothin'."

"Do dis hurt here, too?"  she asked, pressing down farther toward the small
of his back.

"Owl"

"Don't like de looks o* dis," she said, lightening her touch to a caress.

"I'se jes' tired.  All I need's a night's sleep."

"We'll see," she said, blowing out the candle and climbing in beside him.

But when she had served the massa his breakfast the next morning.

Bell had to tell him that Kunta had been unable to rise from his bed.

"Probably fever," said the massa, trying to conceal his irritation.

"You know what to do.  In the meanwhile, there's an epidemic going on and
I've got to have a driver."

"Yassa, Massa."  She thought for a moment.

"You got any objection to dat fiel'-hand boy Noah?  He done growed up so fast
he 'bout man-size now.  Handle de mules good, he sho' could drive yo' bosses,
too, sun."

"How old is he now?"

"Well suh, Noah roun' two years older'n my Kizzy, so dat" -- she paused to
count on her fingers, "--dat make him thirteen or fo'teen, I b'lieve, suh."

"Too young," said the massa.

"You go tell that fiddler to 432 ALEX HALEY

take over.  He's not doing that much in the garden, or with his fiddle
either, lately.  Have him hitch up the horses and get around front right
away.  "

On her way to the fiddler's cabin.  Bell guessed that he'd be either very
indifferent or very upset about the news.  He was both.  He didn't seem to
care one way or the other about having to drive the massa, but when he
learned that Kunta was ill, the fiddler got so concerned that she had to talk
him out of stopping off at their cabin before picking up the massa.

From that day on, the fiddler was a changed man--certainly no happier than
he'd been acting for the past few months, but caring, considerate, and
tireless as he drove the massa all about the county day and night, and then
came home to help Bell care for Kunta and others on slave row who also had
come down with the fever.

Before long, so many people were sick--both on the plantation and off--that
the massa pressed Bell into service as his assistant.  While he attended the
whites, the boy Noah drove her around in the mule cart taking care of the
blacks.

"Massa got his medicines, I got mine," she confided to the fiddler.  After
administering the massa's drugs, she gave her patients her secret brew of
dried, powdered herbs mixed with water from boiled persimmon tree bark--that
she swore would work better and faster than any white folks' remedy.  But
what would really cure them, she confided to Sister Mandy and Aunt Sukey, was
that always she knelt down at a patient's bedside and prayed for him.

"Whatever He bring on man.  He can take away if He want to," she said.

But some of her patients died anyway--as well as Massa Waller's.

As Kunta's own condition steadily worsened, despite everything Bell and the
massa could do, her prayers became more and more fervent.

Kunta's strange, silent, stubborn ways had been entirely forgotten as,
herself too tired to sleep, she sat by his bed each night as he lay sweating
heavily, tossing, moaning, or at times babbling in spells of delirium beneath
the several quilts she'd piled on him.  She would hold his hot, dry hand in
hers, desperately afraid that she might never be able to tell him what had
taken this, after all these years, for her fully to realize: that he was a
man of caliber of strength, and of character, that she ROOTS 433

had never known the equal of, and she loved him very deeply.

He had been in a coma for three days when Missy Anne came to visit the massa
and found Kizzy in the cabin, with Bell, Sister Mandy, and Aunt Sukey, all of
them weeping and praying.  Tearful herself.  Missy Anne returned to the big
house and told the weary Massa Waller that she wanted to read something from
the Bible for Kizzy's pappy.  But she said she didn't know what would be a
good place to read from, so would he please show her?  The massa's eyes drank
in the wet-eyed earnestness of his beloved niece, and getting up from the
couch, he unlocked his bookcase and took out his big Bible.  After a
thoughtful moment, he turned to a page and pointed out with his forefinger
the exact spot where she should begin.

As the word passed in slave row that Missy Anne was going to read something,
everyone quickly assembled outside Bell and Kunta's cabin, and she started to
read: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.  He maketh me to lie down
in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters.  He restoreth my
soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake."
Missy Anne paused, frowning at the page, then went on.

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no
evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me."  She
paused again, this time for a deep breath, and looked up uncertainly at the
faces watching her.

Deeply moved.  Sister Mandy couldn't stop herself from exclaiming, "Lawd,
listen to dat chile!  Done growed up an' learnt to read so good!"

Amid a hubbub of praises from others, Noah's mother Ada marveled, "Look like
jes' yestiddy she runnin' roun' here in diapers!  How of' she now?"

"Ain't long turnt fo'teen!"  said Bell as proudly as if she were her own.

"Please read us a li'l mo', honey!"

Flushed with their compliments, Missy Anne read the final verse of the
Twenty-third Psalm.

Between treatment and prayer, a few days later Kunta showed signs of
beginning to rally.  Bell knew he was going to be all right when he glared at
her and snatched from around his neck the dried rabbit's foot and the bag of
434 ALEX HALEY

asafoetida she had tied there to ward off further bad luck and sickness.  And
Kizzy knew it when she whispered into his ear that on the past new-moon
morning she had put a pretty pebble into his gourd, and his drawn face found
a broad smile.  And Kunta knew that the fiddler was going to be all right
when Kunta waked up one morning with a start to the sound of fiddling beside
his bed.

"I mus' be dreamin'," said Kunta, opening his eyes.  "Not no mo', you ain't,"
said the fiddler.

"I'se sick an' tired o' drivin' yo' massa all over hell an' gone.  Got burn
holes in my coat from his eyes at my back.  Time you either git up or move
over, nigger!"

CHAPTER 81

Kunta was sitting up in bed the next day when he heard Kizzy enter the cabin
laughing and chattering with Missy Anne, who was on vacation from school, and
he heard them pulling back chairs to sit at the table in the next room.

"Kizzy, have you studied your lessons?"  Missy Anne sternly demanded, playing
teacher.

"Yes, ma'am," snickered Kizzy.

"Very well, then--what's that?"

After a short silence, the intently listening Kunta heard Kizzy falter that
she couldn't remember.  || "It's a D," said Missy Anne.

"Now what's this one?"

Almost instantly Kizzy cried triumphantly,

"Dat's dat circle, a O!"

Both girls laughed happily.

"Good!  You ain't forgot it.  Now, what's that?"

"Ah ... uh ... urn ..."  Then Kizzy exulted,

"Dat's G!"

"Right!"

After another brief silence, Missy Anne said,

"Now, see that?  D-O-G.

What's that?  "

ROOTS 435

Kizzy's silence told him that she didn't know--as neither did he.

"Dog!"  Missy Anne exclaimed.

"You hear me?  Don't forget, D-O-G!  You got to learn all the letters good,
then we'll do some more about how they make words."

After the girls left the cabin, Kunta lay thinking hard.  He couldn't help
feeling some pride in Kizzy's learning ability.  On another hand, he couldn't
stomach that it was toubob things her head was being stuffed with.  It maybe
explained why lately she had seemed to show less interest in their
conversations about Africa.  It might be too late, but he wondered if he
should reconsider his decision not to teach her how to read in Arabic.  But
then he thought that would be as foolish as encouraging her to continue her
lessons with Missy Anne.

Suppose Massa Waller were to discover that Kizzy could read--in any language!
That would be a good way to end the white girl's "school teaching," and yet
better, it might even end their relationship.  But the trouble was that Kunta
couldn't be sure the massa would let the matter stop at that.  So Kizzy's
"school" continued at least two or three times weekly, until Missy Anne had
to return to her own daily studies--about the time that Kunta, now adequately
recovered, returned to relieve the happy fiddler of driving the massa in his
buggy.

But even after Missy Anne was gone, night after night, as Bell sewed or
knitted and Kunta rocked in his chair before the fireplace, Kizzy would sit
bent over the table, her pencil almost touching her cheek, carefully copying
words from a book Missy Anne had given her or from a torn piece of one of the
massa's discarded newspapers.  Sitting with his back to them, Kunta sometimes
would hear Kizzy involve Bell, although Kizzy knew of her mother's ability to
read and write a bit herself.

"Naw, data A, Mammy," Kizzy might explain, "an' data 0.  It ain't nothin' but
a li'l circle."

In time, she began to move on to words, just as Missy Anne did with her.

"Dat's 'dog," an dat's 'cat' .  an' dat dere's

"Kizzy' .  .  .

an' dis here's yo' name, B-E-L-L.  How you like dat?  You write it now.  "
And Bell would made a great pretense of struggling with the pencil as she
scrawled it out, deliberately making some mistakes so that Kizzy would have a
chance to correct her.

"You does like I shows you, Mammy, you can write good as me," said Kizzy,
436 ALEX HALEY

proud of having something to teach her mother for a change.

One night a few weeks later, after Kizzy had fallen asleep at the table after
hours of copying her latest writing lesson from Missy Anne, Bell sent her
daughter to bed and soon after herself lay alongside Kunta and said quietly,

"Ain't no game no mo'.  Dat chile awready know more'n I does.  I jes' hopes
it he's awright, Lawd have mercy!"

Over the months that followed, Kizzy and Missy Anne continued to visit one
another, mostly on weekends, but not every weekend, and after a while, Kunta
began to detect-- or wishfully felt that he did--if not exactly a cooling
between the two of them, at least some slow, subtle ebbing in their
closeness, a gradual growing apart as Missy Anne began to ripen toward young
womanhood four years ahead of Kizzy.

Finally the milestone of her long-awaited sixteenth birthday was about to
arrive, but three days before the party that was being planned, the willful,
hot-headed Missy Anne galloped angrily over to Massa Waller's house--bareback
on their buggy horse--and told him, amid copious tears, that her sickly
mother was affecting one of her week-long headaches as an effort to call it
off.  And with much pouting, eyelash fluttering, and tugging his sleeve, she
implored him to let her party be at his house instead.  Unable to refuse her
anything she'd ever asked, he said yes, of course, and as Roosby rushed all
over the county informing the dozens of teen-aged guests about the change of
address.  Bell and Kizzy helped Missy Anne with all of the frantic
last-minute preparations.  They were completed barely in time for Kizzy to
help Missy Anne into her party gown and downstairs to greet her guests.

But then, as Bell told Kunta fater, from the moment the first carriage
arrived.  Missy Anne suddenly had acted as if she didn't even know the
starchly uniformed, aproned Kizzy, who kept circulating among the guests
bearing trays of refreshments, "till depo chile come bustin' in de kitchen
cryin' her eyes out."  That night in the cabin, Kizzy was still weeping as
Bell tried to comfort her.

"She jes' done growed up into a young missy, now, honey, an' her mind on dem
kind o' things.  Ain't she think no less o' you, or really meant no harm.
Dis time always come, fo' any us ROOTS 437

dat's growed up real close wid white young'uns, when you jes' got to go yo'
own way, an' dey goes dere's.  "

Kunta sat seething with the same emotions he had felt when he had first seen
Missy Anne playing with the infant Kizzy in her basket.

Across the twelve rains since then, he had asked Allah many times to end the
toubob girl's closeness to his Kizzy--and though finally his prayers had been
answered, still it both hurt and angered him to see her so deeply wounded.
But it had been necessary, and surely from this experience she would learn
and remember.  Moreover, from the tightness that Kunta had seen in Bell's
face as she had been talking to Kizzy, he felt some hope that even Bell might
have gotten cured of at least some of her sickening great affection for the
obviously treacherous, conniving "young missy."

Missy Anne still continued to visit at Massa Waller's, although much less
often than before since--as Roosby confided to Bell--young mass as had begun
to occupy her time.  When she visited, she always saw Kizzy; and usually
she'd bring along an old dress for Bell to "let out" for Kizzy, who was
physically bigger, despite being years younger.  But now, as if by some
unspoken agreement, the two of them would spend around a half hour together,
walking and talking quietly in the backyard near slave row, and then.  Missy
Anne would leave.

Kizzy would always stand looking after her, then very quickly she would walk
back into the cabin and bury herself in study, often reading and writing
until suppertime.  Kunta still didn't like the idea of her increasing
abilities to do either, but he accepted that she must have something to
occupy herself with now that she'd lost her lifelong friend.  His Kizzy was
herself now approaching adolescence, he reflected, which likely was going to
present them both with a whole new area of worries.

Just after Christmas of the next year--1803--the winds blew the snow into
deep, feathery drifts until in places the roads were hidden and impassable
for all but the biggest wagons.  When the massa went out--in response to only
the most desperate summons--he had to ride on one of the horses, and Kunta
stayed behind, busily helping Cato, Noah, and the fiddler to keep the
driveway clear and to chop wood to keep all of the fireplaces steadily going.

438 ALEX HALEY

Cut off as they were--even from Massa Waller's Gazette, which had stopped
arriving about a month before with the first big snow--the slave-row people
were still talking about the last bits of news that had gotten through to
them: how pleased the white mass as were with the way President Jefferson was
"runnin the gubmint," despite the mass as initial reservations toward his
views regarding slaves.  Since taking office.  President Jefferson had
reduced the size of the Army and Navy, lowered the public debt, even
abolished the personal property tax--that last act, the fiddler said,
particularly having impressed those of the massa class with his greatness.

But Kunta said that when he had made his last trip to the county seat before
they had gotten snowed in, white folks had seemed to him even more excited
about President Jefferson's purchase of the huge "Louisiana Territory" for
but three cents an acre.

"What I likes 'bout it," he said, " 'cordin' to what I beared, dat Massa
Napoleon had to sell it so cheap 'cause he in sich hot water in France over
what it cost 'im in money, 'long wid fifty thou san Frenchmans got killed or
died 'fo' dey beat dat Toussaint in Haiti."

They were all still warming themselves in the glow of that thought a later
afternoon when a black rider arrived amid a snowstorm with an urgently ill
patient's message for the massa--and another of dismal news for the slave
row: In a damp dungeon on a remote French mountain where Napoleon had sent
him, Haiti's General Toussaint had died of cold and starvation.

Three days later, Kunta was still feeling stricken and depressed when he
trudged back to the cabin one afternoon for a mug of hot soup, and stamping
snow from his shoes, then entering pulling off his gloves, he found Kizzy
stretched out on her pallet in the front room, her face drawn and frightened.

"She feelin' poly," was the explanation that Bell offered as she strained a
cup of her herb tea and ordered Kizzy to sit up and drink it.  Kunta sensed
that something more was being kept from him; then when he was a few more
minutes there in the over-warm, tightly closed, mud-chinked cabin, his
nostrils helped him to guess that Kizzy was experiencing her first time of
the bloodiness.

He had watched his Kizzy growing and maturing almost every day now for nearly
thirteen rains, and he had lately ROOTS 439

come to accept within himself that her ripening into womanhood would be only
a matter of time; yet somehow he felt completely unprepared for this pungent
evidence.  After another day abed, though, the hardy Kizzy was back up and
about in the cabin, then back at work in the big house--and it was as if
overnight that Kunta began actually noticing for the first time how his
girichild's always previously narrow body had budded.  With a kind of
embarrassed awe, he saw that somehow she had gotten mango- sized breasts and
that her buttocks had begun to swell and curve.  She even seemed to be
walking in a less girlish way.  Now, whenever he came through the bedroom
separator curtain into the front room where Kizzy slept, he began to avert
his eyes, and whenever Kizzy happened not to be clothed fully, he sensed that
she felt the same.

In Africa now, he thought--Africa had sometimes seemed so distantly in the
past--Bell would be instructing Kizzy in how to make her skin shine using
shea-tree butter, and how to fashionably beautifully blacken her mouth,
palms, and soles, using the powdered crust from the bottom of cooking pots.
And Kizzy would at her present age already be starting to attract men who
were seeking for themselves a finely raised, well-trained, virginal young
wife.  Kunta felt jolted even by the thought of some man's foto entering
Kizzy's thighs; then he felt better after reassuring himself that this would
happen only after a proper wedding.  In his homeland at this time, as Kizzy's
fa, he would be assuming his responsibility to appraise very closely the
personal qualities as well as the family backgrounds of whatever men began to
show marriageable interest in Kizzy --in order to select the most ideal of
them for her; and he would also be deciding now what proper bride price would
be asked for her hand.

But after a while, as he continued to shovel snow along with the fiddler,
young Noah, and Cato, Kunta found himself gradually feeling increasingly
ridiculous that he was even thinking about these African customs and
traditions anymore; for not only would they never be observed here, nor
respected--indeed, he would also be hooted at if he so much as mentioned
them, even to other blacks.  And anyway, he couldn't think of any likely,
well-qualified suitor for Kizzy who was of proper marriageable age--between
thirty and thirty-five rains--but there he was doing it again I 440 ALEX
HALEY

He was going to have to force himself to start thinking along lines of the
marrying customs here in the toubob's country--where girls generally
married"--jumpin' de broom," it was called--someone who was around their same
age.

Immediately then Kunta began thinking about Noah.  He had always liked the
boy.  At fifteen, two years older than Kizzy, Noah seemed to be no less
mature, serious, and responsible than he was big and strong.  The more Kunta
thought about it, the only thing he could find lacking with Noah, in fact,
was that he had never seemed to show the slightest personal interest in
Kizzy--not to mention that Kizzy herself seemed to act as if Noah didn't
exist.  Kunta pondered: Why weren't they any more interested than that in
each other, at the least in being friends?  After all, Noah was very much as
he himself had been as a young man, and therefore he was highly worthy of
Kizzy's attention, if not her admiration.  He wondered: Wasn't there
something he could do to influence them into each other's paths?  But then
Kunta sensed that probably would be the best way to insure their never
getting together.  He decided, as usual, that it was wisest that he mind his
own business--and, as he-had heard Bell put it, with "de sap startin' to
rise" within the young pair of them who were living right there in the same
slave row, he privately would ask if Allah would consider helping nature to
take its

CHAPTER 82

"You listen here, gal, don' you never lemme hear 'bout you fannin' yo' tail
roun' dat Noah no mo'!  I take a hik'ry stick to you in a minute."  Headed
home, Kunta stopped in his tracks two or three steps from the door of the
cabin and I stood listening as Bell went on: "Why, you ain't even turned
ROOTS 441

sixteen yet!  What yo' pappy think, you carryin' on like dat?  "

He quietly turned and went back down along the path to the privacy of the
barn, to consider the implications of what he had heard.

"Fannin' her tail" --around Noah!  Bell personally hadn't seen whatever it
was, but someone had told her.  No doubt it had been Aunt Sukey or Sister
Mandy: Knowing those old biddies, it wouldn't surprise him if either or both
of them had witnessed something completely innocent and made it sound
suggestive just to have something to cluck about.  But what?  From what he'd
overheard, Bell probably wouldn't tell him unless it was repeated and she
needed him to put a stop to it.  It was a kind of thing he'd never dream of
querying Bell about, for that was too much like women's gossip.

But what if it hadn't been so innocent?  Had Kizzy been flaunting herself
before Noah?  And if she had, what had he done to encourage it?  He had
seemed to be a young man of honor, of good character--but you never knew.

Kunta wasn't sure how to feel or what to think.  In any case, as Bell had
said, their daughter was only fifteen, which in the customs of the toubob's
land was still too young for her to be thinking about getting married.  He
realized that he wasn't feeling very African about it, but somehow he Just
didn't feel ready to think about Kizzy walking around with a big belly as
he'd seen on so many girls her age, even younger.

If she did marry Noah, though, he thought, at least their child would be
black and not one of those pale sasso borro babies, products of the mothers
having been raped by lusting mass as or overseers.  Kunta thanked Allah that
neither his Kizzy nor any other slave-row women ever had faced that
horrifying experience, or at least not since he had been there, for countless
times he had heard Massa Waller strongly expressing among friends his
convictions against white and black bloods being mixed.

The next few weeks, as the opportunity would present, Kunta covertly watched
Kizzy's bottom for any signs of wiggling.  He never caught her at it, but
once or twice both he and she were startled when he came upon her in the
cabin twirling round and round, tossing her head and humming dreamily to
herself.  Kunta also kept a close eye 442 ALEX HALEY

on Noah; he noticed that now--unlike before--Noah and Kizzy would nod and
smile whenever they passed each other within the sight of anyone else.  The
more he mused on it, the more strongly he speculated that they were
skillfully concealing their ardor.  After a while Kunta decided that there
should be no harm in Noah and Kizzy's publicly taking conversational walks
together; in his accompanying her to camp meeting, or to the
"dance-ol'Jenny-down" frolics that were held each summer, where Noah as her
partner would surely be preferable to some impudent stranger.  Indeed, it was
possible that, after another rain or so for them both, Noah might even make
Kizzy a good mate.

An awareness began to dawn within Kunta that Noah had begun to observe him,
just as closely as the other way around, and now Kunta anticipated,
nervously, that the boy was trying to muster the nerve to ask if he could
marry Kizzy.  It was on a Sunday afternoon in early April-- Massa Waller had
brought a family of guests home with him after church, and Kunta was outside
the barn polishing the guests' buggy--when something told him to glance up,
and he saw the dark, slender Noah walking purposefully down along the path
from slave row.

Reaching Kunta, he spoke without hesitation, as if his words were rehearsed:
"01' suh, you's de onliest one I feels like I can trust.  I got to tell
somebody.  I can't live no mo' like dis.  I got to run away."

Kunta was so astounded that at first he could think of nothing to say--he
just stood there staring at Noah.

Kunta finally found some words.

"You ain't gon' run nowhere wid Kizzy!"  It wasn't a question but a statement.

"Nawsuh, wouldn't want to git 'er in no trouble."

Kunta felt embarrassed.  After a while he said non- committaUy,

"Reckon sometime ever' body feel like runnin'."

Noah's eyes inspected his.

"Kizzy tol' me Miss Bell say you run off fo' times."

Kunta nodded, his face still showing nothing of how he was thinking back on
himself at the same age, freshly arrived, so desperately obsessed with run,
run, run that every day spent waiting and watching for the next even
half-decent opportunity was an unbearable torment.

A swift realization thrust itself into his head that if Kizzy didn't ROOTS
443

know, as Noah's earlier statement could be interpreted she didn't, then
whenever her loved one suddenly disappeared, she was sure to be utterly
devastated--so soon again after her crushing heartbreak involving the toubob
girl.  He thought that it just couldn't be helped.  He thought that, for
numerous reasons, whatever he said to Noah must be considered carefully.

He said gravely,

"Ain't gwine tell you run or don't run.  But less'n you ready to die if you
gits caught, you ain't ready."

"Ain't plannin' to git caught," said Noah.

"I'se beared de main thing is you follows de Nawth Star, an' it's different
Quaker white folks an' free niggers he'ps you hide in de day times Den you's
free once you hits dat Ohio."

How little he knows, thought Kunta.  How could escaping seem anywhere near so
simple?  But then he realized that Noah was young--as he had been; also that
like most slaves, Noah had seldom set foot beyond the boundaries of his
plantation.  This was why most of those who ran, field .  hands especially,
were usually captured so soon, bleeding from briar cuts, half starved and
stumbling around in forests and swamps full of water moccasins and
rattlesnakes.  In a rush, Kunta remembered the running, the dogs, the guns,
the whips--the ax.

"You don' know what you talkin' 'bout, boy!"  he rasped, regretting his words
almost as they were uttered.

"What I mean to say--it jes' ain't dat easy!  You know 'bout dem bloodhounds
dey uses to coteh you?"

Noah's right hand slid into his pocket and withdrew a knife.  He nicked it
open, the blade honed until it gleamed dully.

"I figgers dead dogs don't eat nobody."  Cato had said that Noah feared
nothing.

"Jes' can't let nothin' stop me," Noah said, closing the knife and returning
it into his pocket.

"Well, if you gwine run, you gwine run," said Kunta.

"Don't know 'zactly when," said Noah.

"Jes' knows I got to go."

Kunta re-emphasized awkwardly,

"Jes' make sho' Kizzy ain't in none o' dis."

Noah didn't seem offended.  His eyes met Kunta's squarely.

"Nawsuh."  He hesitated.

"But when I gits Nawth, I means to work an' buy her free."

He paused.

"You ain't gon' tell her none o' dis, is you?"

444 ALEX HALEY

Now Kunta hesitated.  Then he said,

"Dat 'tween you and her."

"I tell her in good time," said Noah.

Impulsively, Kunta grasped the young man's hand between both of his own.

"I hopes you makes it."

"Well, I see you!"  said Noah, and he turned to walk back toward slave row.

Sitting that night in the cabin's front room, staring into the low flames of
the hickory log burning in the fireplace, Kunta wore a faraway expression
that made both Bell and Kizzy know out of past experiences that it would be
futile to make any effort to talk with him.  Quietly Bell knitted.  Kizzy was
as usual hunched over the table practicing her writing.  At sunup, Kunta
decided he would ask Allah to grant Noah good luck.  He thought afresh that
if Noah did get away, it would yet again crush utterly Kizzy's trusting faith
that already had been wounded so badly by Missy Anne.  He glanced up and
watched his precious Kizzy's face as her lips moved silently, following her
finger across a page.  The lives of all black people in the toubob land
seemed full of suffering, but he wished he could spare her some of it.

CHAPTER 83

It was a week after Kizzy's sixteenth birthday, the early morning of the
first Monday of October, when the slave- row field hands were gathering as
usual to leave for their day^s work, when someone asked curiously,

"Where Noah at?"  Kunta, who happened to be standing nearby talking to Cato,
knew immediately that he was gone.  He saw heads glancing around, Kizzy's
among them, straining to maintain a mask of casual surprise.  Their eyes
met--she had to look away.

"Thought he was out here early wid you," said Noah's mother Ada to Cato.

ROOTS 445

"Naw, I was aimin' to give 'im de debbil fo' sleepin' late," said Cato.

Cato went banging his fist at the closed door of the cabin, once occupied by
the old gardener, but which Noah had inherited recently on his eighteenth
birthday.  Jerking the door open, Cato charged inside, shouting angrily,

"Noah!"  He came out looking worried.

"Ain't like 'im," he said quietly.  Then he ordered everyone to go quickly
and search their cabins, the toilet, the storerooms, the fields.

All the others ran off in all directions; Kunta volunteered to search the
barn.

"NOAH!  NOAH!"  he called loudly for the benefit of any who might hear,
although he knew there was no need of it, as the animals in their stalls
stopped chewing their morning hay to look at him oddly.  Then, peering from
the door and seeing no one coming that way, Kunta hastened back inside to
climb quickly to the hayloft, where he prostrated himself and made his second
appeal to Allah for Noah's successful escape.

Cato worriedly dispatched the rest of the field hands off to their work,
telling them that he and the fiddler would join them shortly; the fiddler had
wisely volunteered to help with the fieldwork ever since his income from
playing for dances had fallen off.

"B'lieve he done run," the fiddler muttered to Kunta as they stood in the
backyard.

As Kunta grunted.  Bell said,

"He ain't never been missin', an' he don't slip off nights."

Then Cato said what was uppermost in all of their minds.  "Gwine have to tell
massa, Lawd have mercy!"  After a hurried consultation, Bell recommended that
Massa Walter not be told until after he had eaten his breakfast, " 'case de
boy done jes' eased off somewhere an' got scairt to slip back 'fo' it's dark
again, less'n dem road pate rollers cotches 'im."

Bell served the massa his favorite breakfast--canned peaches in heavy cream,
hickory-smoked fried ham, scrambled eggs, grits, heated apple butter, and
buttermilk biscuits --and waited for him to ask for his second cup of coffee
before speaking.

"Massa" -- she swallowed, "--Massa, Cato ax me to tell you look like dat boy
Noah ain't here dis mawnin'!"

446 ALEX HALEY

The massa set down his cup, frowning.

"Where is he, then?  Are you trying to tell me he's off drunk or tomcat ting
somewhere, and you think he'll slip back today, or are you saying you think
he's trying to run?"

"All us sayin', Massa," Bell quavered, "is seem like he ain't here, an' us
done searched eve'ywheres."

Massa Waller studied his coffee cup.

"I'll give him until tonight--no, tomorrow morning--before I take action."

"Massa, he a good boy, born and bred right here on yo' place, an' work good
all his life, ain't never give you or nobody a minute's trouble" He looked
levelly at Bell.

"If he's trying to run, he'll be sorry."

"Yassuh, Massa."  Bell fled to the yard, where she told the others what the
massa had said.  But no sooner had Cato and the fiddler hurried off toward
the fields than Massa Waller called Bell back and ordered the buggy.

All day long, as he drove him from one patient to the next, Kunta soared from
exhilaration--as he thought of Noah running--to anguish as he thought of the
thorns and the briars and the dogs.  And he felt what hope and suffering
Kizzy must be enduring.

At that night's huddled gathering, everyone spoke barely above whispers.

"Dat boy done lef here.

"Fo' now, I done seed it in his eyes," Aunt Sukey said.

"Well, I knows he ain't no young' un to jes' steal off git ting drunk, no
suhl" said Sister Mandy.

Noah's mother Ada was hoarse from a day of weeping.  "My baby sho' ain't
never talked to me nothin' 'bout no runnin'!  Lawd, y'all reckon massa gwine
sell 'im?"  No one chose to reply.

When they returned to their cabin, Kizzy burst into tears the moment she got
inside; Kunta felt helpless and tongue- tied.  But without a word.  Bell went
over to the table, put her arms around her sobbing daughter, and pulled her
head against her stomach.

Tuesday morning came, still with no sign of Noah, and Massa Waller ordered
Kunta to drive him to the county fc seat, where he went directly to the
Spotsylvania jailhouse.  After about hal fan hour, he came out with the
sheriff, ordering Kunta brusquely to tie the sheriff's horse behind ROOTS 447

the buggy and then to drive them home.

"We'll be dropping the sheriff off at the Creek Road," said the massa.

"So many niggers runnin' these days, can't hardly keep track--they'd rut her
take their chances in the woods than get sold down South" -- The sheriff was
talking from when the buggy started rolling.

"Since I've had a plantation," said Massa Waller,

"I've never sold one of mine unless my rules were broken, and they know that
well."

"But it's mighty rare niggers appreciate good masters, Doctor, you know
that," said the sheriff.

"You say this boy around eighteen?

Well, I'd guess if he's like most field hands his age, there's fair odds he's
tryin' to make it North.  " Kunta stiffened.

"If he was a house nigger, they're generally slicker, faster talkers, they
like to try passin' themselves off as free niggers or tell the road
patrollers they're on their master's errands and lost their traveling passes,
tryin' to make it to Richmond or some other big city where they can easier
hide among so many niggers and maybe find jobs."  The sheriff paused.

"Besides his mammy on your place, this boy of yours got any other kin livin'
anywheres he might be tryin' to get to?"

"None that I know of."

"Well, would you happen to know if he's got some gal somewhere, because these
young bucks get their sap risin', they'll leave your mule in the field and
take off."

"Not to my knowledge," said the massa.

"But there's a gal on my place, my cook's young' un she's still fairly young,
fifteen or sixteen, if I guess correctly.  I don't know if they've been hay
stacking or not."

Kunta nearly quit breathing.

"I've known 'em to have pickaninnies at the age of twelve!"  the sheriff
chortled.

"Plenty of these young nigger wenches even draw white men, and nigger boys'll
do anything!"

Through churning outrage, Kunta heard Massa Waller's abrupt chilliness.

"I have the least possible personal contact with my slaves, and neither know
nor concern myself regarding their personal affairs!"

"Yes, yes, of course," said the sheriff quickly.

But then the massa's tone eased.

"Along your line of thinjdng, though, this boy could have slipped off to see
448 ALEX HALEY

some other plantation gal.  I don't know, and of course the others wouldn't
say if they did.  In fact, anything might have happened--some fight, perhaps;
he could be half dead somewhere.  It's even possible that some of these
slave-stealing poor whites could have grabbed him.

That's been going on around here, as you know; even some of the more
unscrupulous traders engage in it.  Again, I don't know.  But I'm told this
is the boy's first time being unaccounted for.  "

His general manner now more careful, the sheriff said, "You told me he was
born on your place and never traveled much?"

"I'd guess he wouldn't have any idea how to get even to Richmond, let alone
North," said the massa.

"Niggers exchange a lot of information, though," the sheriff said.

"We've picked up some and beat it out of them that they practically had maps
in their heads of where they'd been told to run and where to hide.  A lot of
this can be traced to nigger-loving white people like the Quakers and
Methodists.  But since he ain't never been nowhere, |i ain't never tried
runnin' before, and ain't never give you no other trouble to now, sounds like
to me a good bet a couple more nights in the woods might bring him back,
scared to death and half starved.  A nigger's powerfully moved by a hungry
belly.  And that'll save you spending to advertise in the Gazette or hiring
some of these nigger catchers with their dogs to track him.  He just don't
sound to my experience like one of them hard, outlaw niggers that's slipping
around in and out of the swamps and woods right now, killing people's cattle
and hogs like they would rabbits."

"I hope you're right," said Massa Waller, "but whatever the case, he's broken
my rules by leaving without permission to begin with, so I'll be selling him
South immediately."  Kunta's fists squeezed the reins so tightly that his
nails dug into his palms.

"Then that's a good twelve to fifteen hundred dollars you've got runnin
around loose somewhere," said the sheriff.

"You've written me his description, I'll sure get it to the county road
patrollers, and if we pick 'im up--or we hear anything--I'll let you know
right away."

Saturday morning after breakfast, Kunta was currycombing a horse outside the
barn when he thought he ROOTS 449

heard Cato's whippoorwill whistle.  Cocking his head, he heard it again.  He
tied the horse quickly to a nearby post and Gripped rapidly up the path to
the cabin.  From its front window he could see almost from where the main
road intersected with the big-house driveway.

Inside the big house, he knew that Cato's call had also alerted Bell and
Kizzy.

Then he saw the wagon rolling down the driveway--and with surging alarm
recognized the sheriff at the reins.  Merciful Allah, had Noah been caught?
As he watched the sheriff dismount, Kunta's long-trained instincts tugged at
him to hasten out and provide the visitor's winded horse with water and a
rubdown, but it was as if he were paralyzed where he stood, staring from the
cabin window, as the sheriff hurried up the big-house front steps two at a
time.

Only a few minutes passed before Kunta saw Bell almost stumbling out the back
door.  She started running-- and Kunta was seized with a horrible premonition
the instant before she nearly snatched their cabin door off its hinges.

Her face was twisted, tear-streaked.

"Sheriff an' massa talkin' to Kizzy!"  she squealed.

The words numbed him.  For a moment he just stared disbelievingly at her, but
then violently seizing and shaking her, he demanded,

"What he want?"  ' Her voice rising, choking, breaking, she managed to tell
him that the sheriff was scarcely in the house before the massa had yelled
for Kizzy to come from tidying his room upstairs.  When I heard him holler at
her from de kitchen, I flew to git in de drawin' room hallway where I always
listens from, but I couldn't make out nothin' clear 'cept he was mighty
mad"-- Bell gasped and swallowed.

"Den beared massa ringin' my bell, an' I run back to look like I was comin'
from de cook house But massa was a-waitin' in de do' way wid his han' holdin'
de knob behin' him.  Ain't never seed 'im look like he did at me.  He tol' me
col' as ice to git out'n de house an' stay out 'til I'm sent for!"  Bell
moved to the small window, staring at the big house, unable to believe that
what she had just said had really happened.

"Lawd Gawd, what in de wori' sheriff want wid my chile?"

she asked incredulously.

Kunta's mind was clawing desperately for something to 450 ALEX HALEY

do.  Could he rush out to the fields, at least to alert those who were
chopping there?  But his instincts said that anything could happen with him
gone.

As Bell went through the curtains into their bedroom, beseeching Jesus at the
top of her lungs, he could barely restrain himself from raging in and yelling
that she must see now what he had been trying to tell her for nearly forty
rains about being so gullible, deluded, and deceived about the goodness of
the massa--or any other toubob.

"Gwine back in dere!"  cried Bell suddenly.  She came charging through the
curtain and out the door.

Kunta watched as she disappeared inside the kitchen.  What was she going to
do?  He ran out after her and peered in through the screen door.  The kitchen
was empty and the inside door was swinging shut.  He went inside, silencing
the screen door as it closed, and tiptoed across the kitchen.  Standing there
with one hand on the door, the other clenched, he strained his ears for the
slightest sound--but all he could hear was his own labored breathing.

Then he heard: "Massa?"  Bell had called softly.  There was no answer.

"Massa?"  she called again, louder, sharply.

He heard the drawing room door open.

"Where my Kizzy, Massa?"

"She's in my safekeeping," he said stonily.

"We're not having another one running off."

"I jes' don't under stan you, Massa."  Bell spoke so softly that Kunta could
hardly hear her.

"De chile ain't been out'n yo' yard, hardly."

The massa started to say something, then stopped.

"It's possible you really don't know what she's done," he said.

"The boy Noah has been captured, but not before severely knifing the two road
patrolmen who challenged a false traveling pass he was carrying.  After being
subdued by force, he finally confessed that the pass had been written not by
me but by your daughter.  She has admitted it to the sheriff."

There was silence for a long, agonizing moment, then Kunta heard a scream and
running footsteps.  As he whipped open the door.  Bell came bolting past
him--shoving him aside with the force of a man--and out the back door.  The
hall was empty, the drawing room door shut.

ROOTS 451

He ran out after her, catching up with her at the cabin door.

"Massa gon' sell Kizzy, I knows it!"  Bell started screaming, and inside him
something snapped.

"Gwine git 'er!"  he choked out.

Gripping back toward the big house and into the kitchen as fast as he could
go, with Bell not far behind.  Wild with fury, he snatched open the inside
door and went charging down the unspeakably forbidden hallway.

The massa and the sheriff spun with disbelieving faces as the drawing room
door came jerking open.  Kunta halted there abruptly, his eyes burning with
murder.  Bell screamed from behind him,

"Where our baby at?  We come to git 'er!"

Kunta saw the sheriff's right hand sliding toward his bolstered gun as the
massa seethed,

"Get out!"

"You niggers can't hear?"  The sheriffs hand was withdrawing the pistol, and
Kunta was tensed to plunge for it-- just as Bell's voice trembled behind him

"Yassa" --and he felt her desperately pulling his arm.  Then his feet were
moving backward through the doorway--and suddenly the door was slammed behind
them, a key clicking sharply in the lock.

As Kunta crouched with his wife in the hall, drowning in his shame, they
heard some tense, muted conversation between the massa and the sheriff .  .
.  then the sound of feet moving, scuffling faintly .  .  .

then Kizzy's crying, and the sound of the front door slamming shut.

"Kizzy!  Kizzy chile!  Lawd Gawd, don't let 'em sell my Kizzy!"  As she burst
out the back door with Kunta behind her.  Bell's screams reached away out to
where the field hands were, who came racing.  Cato arrived in time to see
Bell screeching insanely, springing up and down with Kunta bear hugging her
to the ground.  Massa Waller was descending the front steps ahead of the
sheriff, who was hauling Kizzy after him--weeping and jerking herself
backward-- at the end of a chain.

"Mammy!  Maaaaaaamy!"  Kizzy screamed.

Bell and Kunta leaped up from the ground and went raging around the side of
the house like two charging lions.  The sheriff drew his gun and pointed it
straight at Bell: She stopped in her tracks.  She stared at Kizzy.  Bell tore
452 ALEX HALEY

the question from her throat: "You done dis thing dey says?"  They all
watched Kizzy's agony as her reddened, weeping eyes gave her answer in a mute
way--darting imploringly from Bell and Kunta to the sheriff and the
massa--but she said nothing.

"0 my Lawd Gawd!"  Bell shrieked.

"Massa, please have mercy!  She ain't meant to do it!  She ain't knowed what
she was doin'!  Missy Anne de one teached 'er to write!"

Massa Waller spoke glacially.

"The law is the law.  She's broken my rules.  She's committed a felony.  She
may have aided in a murder.  I'm told one of those white men may die."

"Ain't her cut de man, Massa!  Massa, she worked for you ever since she big
'enough to carry your slop jar An' I done cooked an' waited on you ban' an'
foot over forty years, an' he .  .  ."  gesturing at Kunta, she stuttered,
"he done driv you eve'ywhere you been for near 'bout dat long.  Massa, don'
all dat count for sump'n?"

Massa Waller would not look directly at her.

"You were doing your jobs.  She's going to be sold--that's all there is to
it."

"Jes* cheap, low-class white folks splits up families!"  shouted Bell.

"You ain't dat kin'!"

Angrily, Massa Waller gestured to the sheriff, who began to wrench Kizzy
roughly toward the wagon.

Bell blocked their path.

"Den sell me an' 'er pappy wider!  Don' split us up!"

"Get out of the way!"  barked the sheriff, roughly shoving her aside.

Bellowing, Kunta sprang forward like a leopard, pummeling the sheriff to the
ground with his fists.

"Save me, Fa!"  Kizzy screamed.  He grabbed her around the waist and began
pulling frantically at her chain.

When the sheriff's pistol butt crashed above his ear, Kunta's head seemed to
explode as he crumpled to his knees.  Bell lunged toward the sheriff, but his
out flung arm threw her off balance, falling heavily as he dumped Kizzy into
the back of his wagon and snapped a lock on her chain.  Leaping nimbly onto
the seat, the sheriff lashed the horse, whose forward jerk sent the wagon
lurching as Kunta clambered up.  Dazed, head pounding, ignoring the pistol,
he went scrambling after the wagon as it gathered speed.

ROOTS 453

"Missy Annel .  .  .  Missy Annnnnnnnnnnne!"  Kizzy was screeching it at the
top of her voice.

"Missy Annnnnnnne!"  Again and again, the screams came; they seemed to hang
in the air behind the wagon swiftly rolling toward the main road.

When Kunta began stumbling, gasping for breath, the wagon was a half mile
away; when- he halted, for a long time he stood looking after it until the
dust had settled and the road stretched empty as far as he could see.

The massa turned and walked very quickly with his head down back into the
house, past Bell huddled sobbing by the bottom step.  As if Kunta were
sleepwalking, he came Gripping slowly back up the driveway--when an African
remembrance flashed into his mind, and near the front of the house he bent
down and started peering around.  Determining the clearest prints that
Kizzy's bare feet had left in the dust, scooping up the double handful
containing those footprints, he went rushing toward the cabin: The ancient
forefathers said that precious dust kept in some safe place would insure
Kizzy's return to where she made the footprints.  He burst through the
cabin's open door, his eyes sweeping the room and falling upon his gourd on a
shelf containing his pebbles.  Springing over there, in the instant before
opening his cupped hands to drop in the dirt, suddenly he knew the truth: His
Kizzy was gone; she would not return.  He would never see his Kizzy again.

His face contorting, Kunta flung his dust toward the cabin's roof.

Tears bursting from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his
head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all
his strength, and it shattered against the packed-earth floor, his 662
pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting
wildly in all directions.

CHAPTER 84

Weak and dazed, Kizzy lay in the darkness," on some burlap sacks, in the
cabin where she had been pushed when the mule cart arrived shortly after
dusk.  She wondered vaguely what time it was; it seemed that night had gone
on forever.  She began tossing and twisting, trying to force herself to think
of something--anything--that didn't terrify her.  Finally, for the hundredth
time, she tried to concentrate on figuring out how to get " up Nawth," where
she had heard so often that black people could find freedom if they escaped.
If she went the wrong way, she might wind up " deep Souf," where people said
mass as and overseers were even worse than Massa Waller.  Which way was "
nawth"?

She didn't know.  I'm going to escape anyway, she swore bitterly.

It was as if a pin pricked her spine when she heard the first creaking of the
cabin's door.  Springing upright and backward in the dark, she saw the figure
entering furtively, with a cupped hand shielding a candle's flame.  Above it
she recognized the face of the white man who had purchased her, and she saw
that his other hand was holding up a short-handled whip, cocked ready for
use.  But it was the glazed leer on the white man's face that froze her where
she stood.

"Rather not have to hurt you none," he said, the smell of his liquored breath
nearly suffocating her.  She sensed his intent.  He wanted to do with her
what Pappy did with Mammy when she heard strange sounds from their
curtained-off room after they thought she was asleep.  He wanted to do what
Noah had urged her to do when they had gone walking down along the fence row
and which she almost had given in to, several times, especially the night
before he had left, but he had frightened her too much when he exclaimed
hoarsely,

"I

wants you wid my baby!  "

ROOTS 455

She thought that this white man must be insane to think that she was going to
permit him to do that with her.

"Am' got no time to play with you now!"  The white man's words were slurred.
Kizzy's eyes were judging how to bolt past him to flee into the night--but he
seemed to read that impulse, moving a little bit sideways, not taking his
gaze off her as he leaned over and tilted the candle to drain its melted wax
onto the seat of the cabin's single broken chair; then the small flame
flickered upright.  Inching slowly backward, Kizzy felt her shoulders
brushing the cabin's wall.

"Ain't you got sense enough to know I'm your new massa?"  He watched her,
grimacing some kind of a smile.

"You a fair-lookin' wench.  Might even set you free, if I like you enough" --
When he sprang, seizing Kizzy, she wrenched loose, shrieking, as with an
angry curse he brought the whip cracking down across the back of her neck.

"I'll take the hide off you!"  Lunging like a wild woman, Kizzy clawed at his
contorted face, but slowly he forced her roughly to the floor.  Pushing back
upward, she was shoved down again.  Then the man was on his knees beside her,
one of his hands choking back her screams"--Please, Massa, please!"  --the
other stuffing dirty burlap sacking into her mouth until she gagged.  As she
flailed her arms in agony and arched her back to shake him off, he banged her
head against the floor, again, again, again, then began slapping her--more
and more excitedly--until Kizzy felt her dress being snatched upward, her
undergarments being ripped.  Frantically thrashing, the sack in her mouth
muffling her cries, she felt his hands fumbling upward between her thighs,
finding, fingering her private parts, squeezing and spreading them.  Striking
her another numbing blow, the man jerked down his suspenders, made motions at
his trousers' front.  Then came the searing pain as he forced his way into
her, and Kizzy's senses seemed to explode.  On and on it went, until finally
she lost consciousness.

In the early dawn, Kizzy blinked her eyes open.  She was engulfed in shame to
find a young black woman bending over her and sponging her private parts
gently with a rag and warm, soapy water.  When Kizzy's nose told her that she
had also soiled herself, she shut her eyes in embarrassment, soon feeling the
woman cleaning her there as well.

When Kizzy slitted her eyes open again, she saw that the 456 ALEX HALEY

woman's face seemed as expressionless as if she were washing clothes, as if
this were but another of the many tasks she had been called upon to perform
in her life.  Finally laying a clean towel over Kizzy's loins, she glanced up
at Kizzy's face.

"Reckon you ain't feel like talkin' none now," the woman said quietly,
gathering up the dirty rags and her water pail preparing to leave.  Clutching
these things in the crook of one arm, she bent again and used her free hand
to draw up a burlap sack to cover most of Kizzy's body.  " " Fore long, I
bring you sump'n to eat"-- she said, and went on out of the cabin door.

Kizzy lay there feeling as if she were suspended in midair.  She tried to
deny to herself that the unspeakable, unthinkable thing had really happened,
but the lancing pains of her torn privates reminded her that it had.  She
felt a deep uncleanness, a disgrace that could never be erased.  She tried
shifting her position, but the pains seemed to spread.  Holding her body
still, she clutched the sack tightly about her, as if somehow to cocoon
herself against any more outrage, but the pains grew worse.

Kizzy's mind raced back across the past-four days and nights.  She could
still see her parents' terrified faces, still hear their helpless cries as
she was rushed away.  She could still feel herself struggling to escape from
the white trader whom the Spotsylvania County sheriff had turned her over to;
she had nearly slipped free after pleading that she had to relieve herself.
Finally they had reached some small town where--after long, bitterly angry
haggling-the trader at last had sold her to this new massa, who had awaited
the nightfall to violate her.  Mammy!  Pappy!  If only screaming for them
could reach them--but they didn't even know where she was.  And who knows
what might have happened to them?  She knew that Massa Waller would never
sell anyone he owned "less'n dey breaks his rules."  But in trying to stop
the massa from selling her, they must have broken a dozen of those rules.

And Noah, what of Noah?  Somewhere beaten to death?  Again, it came back to
Kizzy vividly, Noah demanding angrily that to prove her love, she must use
her writing ability to forge a traveling pass for him to show if he should be
seen, stopped, and questioned by patrollers or any other suspicious whites.
She remembered the grim determination etched on his face as be pledged to her
that ROOTS 457

once he got up North, with just a little money saved from a job he would
quickly find,

"Gwine steal back here an' slip you Nawth, too, fo' de res' our days
togedder."  She sobbed anew.  She knew she would never see him again.  Or her
parents.  Unless .  .  .

Her thoughts leaped with a sudden hope!  Missy Anne had sworn since girlhood
that when she married some handsome, rich young massa, Kizzy alone must be
her personal maid, later to care for the houseful of children.  Was it
possible that when she found out Kizzy was gone, she had gone screaming,
ranting, pleading to Massa Waller?  Missy Anne could sway him more than
anyone else on earth!  Could the massa have sent out some men searching for
the slave dealer, to learn where he had sold her, to buy her back?

But now a new freshet of grief poured from Kizzy.  She realized that the
sheriff knew exactly who the slave dealer was; they would certainly have
traced her by now!  She felt even more desperately lost, even more totally
abandoned.  Later, when she had no more tears left to shed, she lay imploring
God to destroy her, if He felt she deserved all this, just because she loved
Noah.  Feeling some slickness seeping between her upper legs, Kizzy knew that
she was continuing to bleed.  But the pain had subsided to a throbbing.

When the cabin's door came creaking open again, Kizzy had sprung up and was
rearing backward against the wall before she realized that it was the woman.
She was carrying a steaming small pot, with a bowl and spoon, and Kizzy
slumped back down onto the dirt floor as the woman put the pot on the table,
then spooned some food into the bowl, which she placed down alongside Kizzy.
Kizzy acted as if she saw neither the food nor the woman, who squatted beside
her and began talking as matter-of-factly as if they had known each other for
years.

"I'se de big-house cook.  My name Malizy.  What your'n?"

Finally Kizzy felt stupid not to answer.

"It Kizzy, Miss Malizy."

The woman made an approving grunt.

"You sounds well- raised."  She glanced at the untouched stew in the bowl.
"I reckon you know you let vittles git cold dey don't do you no good."  Miss
Malizy sounded almost like Sister Mandy or Aunt Sukey.

458 ALEX HALEY

Hesitantly picking up the spoon, Kizzy tasted the stew, then began to eat
some of it, slowly.

"How of' you is?"  asked Miss Malizy.

"I'se sixteen, ma'am."

"Massa boun' for hell jes' sho's he born!"  exclaimed Miss Malizy, half under
her breath.  Looking at Kizzy, she said, "Jes' well's to tell you massa one
dem what loves nigger womens, 'specially young'uns like you is.  He use to
mess wid me, I ain't but roun' nine years older'Ti you, but he quit after he
brung missy here an' made me de cook, workin' right dere in de house where
she is, thanks be to Gawd!"  Miss Malizy grimaced.

"Speck you gwine be seem' 'im in here regular."

Seeing Kizzy's hand fly to her mouth, Miss Malizy said, "Honey, you jes'
well's realize you's a nigger woman.  De kind of white man massa is, you
either gives in, or he gwine make you wish you had, one way or not her An'
lemme tell you, dis massa a mean thing if you cross 'im.  Fact, ain't never
knowed nobody git mad de way he do.  Ever'thing can be gwine 'long jes' fine,
den let jes' anythin' happen dat rile 'im," Miss Malizy snapped her fingers,
"quick as dat he can fiy red hot an' ack like he done gone crazy!"

Kizzy's thoughts were racing.  Once darkness fell, before he came again, she
must escape.  But it was as if Miss Malizy read her mind.

"Don't you even start thinkin' 'bout runnin' nowhere, honey!  He jes' have
you hunted down wid dem blood dogs, an' you in a worser mess.

Jes' calm yo'self.  De next fo', five days he ain't gon' be here nohow.  Him
an his of' nigger chicken trainer already done left for one dem big chicken
fights halfway 'crost de state.  " Miss Malizy paused.

"Massa don't care 'bout nothin' much as dem fightin' chickens o' his'n."

She went on talking nonstop--about how the massa, who had grown to adulthood
as a po' cracker, bought a twenty-five-cent raffle ticket that won him a good
fighting rooster, which got him started on the road to becoming one of the
area's more successful gamecock owners.

Kizzy finally interrupted.

"Don't he sleep wid his missis?"

"Sho' he do!"  said Miss Malizy.

"He jes' love womens.  You won't never see much o' her 'cause she scairt to
death o' 'im, an' she keep real quiet an' stay close.  She whole lot
younger'n he is; she was jes' fo'teen, same kind of po' cracker he was, when
he married 'er an' brung 'er here.

ROOTS 459

But she done found' out he don't care much for her as he do his chickens"--
As Miss Malizy continued talking about the massa, his wife, and his chickens,
Kizzy's thoughts drifted away once again to thoughts of escape.

"Gal!  Is you payin' me tent ion

"Yes'm," she replied quickly.  Mi&s Malizy's frown eased.

"Well, I specks you better, since I'se 'quaintin you wid where you is!"

Briefly she studied Kizzy.

"Where you come from, anyhow?"  Kizzy said from Spotsylvania County,
Virginia.  "Ain't never beared of it!

Anyhow, dis here's Caswell County in North Ca'liny.  " Kizzy's expression
showed that she had no idea where that was, though she had often heard of
-North Carolina, and she had the impression that it was somewhere near
Virginia.

"Looka here, does you even know massa's name?"  asked Miss Malizy.

Kizzy looked blank.

"Him's Massa Torn Lea" -- She reflected a moment.

"Reckon now dat make you Kizzy Lea."

"My name Kizzy Waller!"  Kizzy exclaimed in protest.  Then, with a flash, she
remembered that all of this had happened to her at the hands of Massa Waller,
whose name she bore, and she began weeping.

"Don't take on so, honey!"  exclaimed Miss Malizy.

"You sho' knows niggers takes whoever's dey massa's name.  Nigger names don't
make no difference nohow, jes' sump'n to call 'em" -- Kizzy said,

"My pappy real name Kunta Kinte.  He a African."

"You don't say!"  Miss Malizy appeared taken aback.  "I'se beared my
great-gran'daddy was one dem Africans, too!  My mammy say her mammy told her
he was blacker'n tar, wid scars zigzaggin' down both cheeks.

But my mammy never said his name"-- Miss Malizy paused.  " You know yo'
mammy, too?  "

" " Co'se I does.  My mammy name Bell.  She a big-house cook like you is.
An' my pappy drive de massa's buggy-- leas' he did.  "

"You jes' come from being' wid yo' mammy an' pappy both?"  Miss Malizy
couldn't believe it.

"Lawd, ain't many us gits to know both our folks 'fo' somebody git sol' away!"

Sensing that Miss Malizy was preparing to leave, suddenly dreading being left
alone again, Kizzy sought a way to extend the conversation.

"You talks a whole lot like my 460 ALEX HALEY

mammy," she offered.  Miss Malizy seemed startled, then very pleased.

"I specks she a good Christian woman like I is."  Hesitantly, Kizzy asked
something that had crossed her mind.

"What kin' of work dey gwine have me doin' here, Miss Malizy?"

Miss Malizy seemed astounded at the question.

"What you gon' do?"  she demanded.

"Massa ain't tol' you how many niggers here?"  Kizzy shook her head.

"Honeychile, you makin' zactly five!  An' dat's countin' Mingo, de of' nigger
dat live down 'mongst de chickens.  So it's me cook- in', washin', an'
housekeepin', an' Sister Sarah an' Uncle Pompey workin' in de fiel', where
you sho' gwine go too--- dat you is!"

Miss Malizy's brows lifted at the dismay on Kizzy's face.  "What work you
done where you was?"

"Cleanin' in de big house, an' helpin' my mammy in de kitchen," Kizzy
answered in a faltering voice.

"Figgered sump'n like dat when I see dem soft hands of your'n!  Well, you
sho* better git ready for some calluses an' corns soon's massa git back!"
Miss Malizy then seemed to feel that she should soften a bit.

"Po' thing!  Listen here to me, you been used to one dem rich massa's places.
But dis here one dem po' crackers what scrabbled an' scraped till he got
holt a li'l lan' an' built a house dat ain't nothin' but a big front to make
'em look better off clan dey is.

Plenty crackers like dat roun' here.  Dey got a sayin',

"Farm a hunnud acres wid fo' niggers."  Well, he too tight to buy even dat
many.

"Co'se, he ain't got but eighty-some acres, an' farmin' jes' 'enough of dat
to lay claim to being' a massa.  His big thing is his hunnud an' some
fightin' chickens dat Mingo nigger helpin' him raise an' train to bet on in
fights.  Only thing massa spen' any money on is dem chickens.  He always
swearin' to missy one day dem chickens gwine see 'em rich.  He git drunk an'
teller one dese days he gwine buil' her a house so big it have six columns
'crost de front, an' be two stories tall, an' even finer'n de houses o' dese
real rich mass as hereabouts what snubs 'em so bad, like dey still depo
crackers dey started out!  Fact, massa claim he savin' up for de day he buil'
dat fine house.  Hmph!  Might, for all I know.  I know he too tight even to
have a stable boy let alone a nigger to drive 'im places like near 'bout all
mass as has.  He hitch up his own buggy an' wagon both, saddle his own boss,
an' he drive his self

ROOTS 461

Honey, de only reason / ain't out in de fiel' is missis can't hardly cook
water, an' he love to eat.

"Sides dat, he likes de looks of havin' a house servin' nigger for when dey
guests come.  When he git to drinkin' out somewhere, he love vi ting in
guests for dinner, tryin' to put on de dog, an' 'specially if he been winnin'
pretty good, bettin' on his roosters at dem cockfights.  But anyhow, he
finally had to see wasn't no way jes' Uncle Pompey an' Sister Sarah could
farm much as he like to plant, an' he had to git somebody else.  Dat's how
come he bought you" -- Miss Malizy paused.

"You know how much you cost?"

Kizzy said weakly,

"No'm."

"Well, I reckon six to seb'n hundred dollars, considerin' de prices I'se
heard him say niggers costin' now days an' you being' strong an' young,
lookin' like a good breeder, too, dat'll bring 'im free pickaninnies."

With Kizzy again speechless.  Miss Malizy moved closer to the door and
stopped.

"Fact, I wouldn't o' been surprised if massa stuck you in wid one dem stud
niggers some rich mass as keeps on dey places an' hires out.  But it look
like to me he figgerin' on breedin' you his self

CHAPTER 85

The conversation was short.

"Massa, I gwine have a baby."

"Well, what you expectin' me to do about it?  I know you better not start
playin' sick, tryin' to get out of workin'!"

But he did start coming to Kizzy's cabin less often as her belly began to
grow.  Slaving out under the hot sun, Kizzy went through dizzy spells as well
as morning sickness in the course of her painful initiation to fieldwork.
Torturous blisters on both her palms would burst, fill with fluid again, then
burst again from their steady friction against the rough, heavy handle of her
hoe.  Chopping 462 ALEX HALEY

along, trying to keep not too far behind the experienced, short, stout, black
Uncle Pompey, and the wiry, light- brown-skinned Sister Sarah--both of whom
she felt were still deciding what to think of her--she would strain to recall
everything she had ever heard her mammy say about the having of young'uns.
She felt she'd give anything if Bell could be here beside her now.  Despite
her humiliation at being great with child and having to face her mammy-- who
had warned repeatedly of the disgrace that could befall her "if'n you keeps
messin' roun' wid dat Noah an' winds up too close" --Kizzy knew she'd
understand that it hadn't been her fault, and she'd let her know the things
she needed to know.

She could almost hear Bell's voice telling her sadly, as she had so often,
what she believed had caused the tragic deaths of both the wife and baby of
Massa Waller: "Po' lil thing was jes' built too small to birth dat great big
baby!"  Was she herself built big enough?  Kizzy wondered frantically.  Was
there any way to tell?  She remembered once when she and Missy Anne had stood
goggle-eyed, watching a cow deliver a calf, then their whispering that
despite what grownups told them about storks bringing babies, maybe mothers
had to squeeze them out through their privates in the same gruesome way.

The older women.  Miss Malizy and Sister Sarah, seemed to take hardly any
notice of her steadily enlarging belly-- and breasts--so Kizzy decided
angrily that it would be as big a waste of time to confide her fears to them
as it would to Massa Lea.  Certainly he couldn't have been less concerned as
he rode around the plantation on his horse, yelling threats at anyone he felt
wasn't working fast enough.

When the baby came--in the winter of 1806--Sister Sarah served as the
midwife.  After what seemed an eternity of moaning, screaming, feeling as if
she were ripping apart, Kizzy lay bathed in sweat, staring in wonder at the
wriggling infant grinning Sister Sarah was holding up.

It was a boy--but his skin seemed to be almost high-yaller.

Seeing Kizzy's alarm, Sister Sarah assured her,

"New babies takes leas' a month to darken to dey full color, honey!"  But
Kizzy's apprehension deepened as she examined her baby several times every
day; when a full month passed, she knew that the child's permanent color was
going to be at best a pecan-colored brown.

ROOTS 463

She remembered her mammy's proud boast,

"Ain't nothing but black niggers here on massa's place."  And she tried not
to think about "sasso-borro," the name her ebony-black father--his mouth
curled in scorn--used to Call those with mulatto skin.  She was grateful that
they weren't there to see --and share--her shame.  But she knew that she'd
never be able to hold her head up again even if they never saw the child, for
all anyone had to do was compare her color and the baby's to know what had
happened--and with whom.  She thought of Noah and felt even more ashamed.
"Dis our to' chance 'fo' I leaves, baby, how come you can't?"  she heard him
say again.  She wished desperately that she had, that this was Noah's baby;
at least it would be black.

"Gal, what's de matter you ain't happy, great big of' fine chile like dat!"
said Miss Malizy one morning, noticing how sad Kizzy looked and how awkwardly
she was holding the baby, almost at her side, as if she found it hard even to
look at her child.  In a rush of understanding, Miss Malizy blurted,

"Honey, what you lettin' bother you ain't no need to worry 'bout.  Don't make
no difference, 'cause dese days an' times don't nobody care, ain't even pay
no tent ion It git ting to be near 'bout many mulattoes as it is black
niggers like us.  It's jes' de way things is, dat's all" Miss Malizy's eyes
were pleading with Kizzy.

"An' you can be sho' massa ain't never gwine claim de chile, not no way at
all He jes' see a young' un he glad he ain't had to pay for, dat he gwine
stick out in de fields same as you is.  So de only thing for you to feel is
dat big, fine baby's your'n, honey--data ll it is to it!"

That way of seeing things helped Kizzy to collect herself, at least somewhat.

"But what gwine happen," she asked, "when sometime or not her missis sho'
catch sight dis chile, Miss Malizy?"

"She know he ain't no good!  I wisht I had a penny for every white woman
knows dey husbands got chilluns by niggers.  Main thing, I 'speck missis be
jealous 'cause seem like she ain't able to have none."

The next night Massa Lea came to the cabin--about a month after the baby was
born--he bent over the bed and held his candle close to the face of the
sleeping baby.  "Hmmmm.  Ain't bad-looking.  Good-sized, too."  With his
forefinger, he jiggled one of the clenched, tiny fists and 464 ALEX HALEY

said, turning to Kizzy,

"All right.  This weekend will make enough time off.  Monday you go back to
the field."

"But Massa, I ought to stay to nuss 'im!"  she said foolishly.

His rage exploded in her ears.

"Shut up and do as you're told!  You're through being pampered by some fancy
Virginia blue blood Take that pickaninny with you to the field, or I'll keep
that baby and sell you out of here so quick your head swims!"

Scared silly, Kizzy burst into weeping at even the thought of being sold away
from her child.

"Yassuh, Massa!"  she cried, cringing.

Seeing her crushed submission, his anger quickly abated, but then Kizzy began
to sense--with disbelief--that he had actually come intending to use her
again, even now, with the baby sleeping right beside them.

"Massa, Massa, it too soon," she pleaded tearfully.

"I ain't healed up' right yet, Massa!"  But when he simply ignored her, she
struggled only long enough to put out the candle, after which she endured the
ordeal quietly, terrified that the baby would awaken.  She was relieved that
he still seemed to be sleeping even when the massa spent himself, and then
was clambering up, preparing to go.  In the darkness, as he snapped his
suspenders onto his shoulders, he said, "Well, got to call him something"
--Kizzy lay with her breath sucked in.  After another moment, he said,

"Call him George--that's after the hardest-working nigger I ever saw."  After
another pause, the massa continued, as if talking to himself,

"George.  Yeah.  Tomorrow I'll write it in my Bible.  Yeah, that's a good
name--George!"  And he went on out.

Kizzy cleaned herself off and then lay back down, unsure which outrage to be
most furious about.  She had thought earlier of either

"Kunta" or

"Kinte" as ideal names, though uncertain of what the massa's reaction might
be to their uncommon sounds.  But she dared not risk igniting his temper with
any objection to the name he'd chosen.  She thought with a new horror of what
her African pappy would think of it, knowing what importance he attached to
names.  Kizzy remembered how her pappy had told her that in his homeland, the
naming of sons was the most important thing of all, " 'cause de sons becomes
dey families' mens!"

She lay thinking of how she had never understood why ROOTS 465

her pappy had always felt so bitter against the world of white
people"--toubob" was his word for them.  She thought of Bell's saying to her,

"You's so lucky it scare me, chile, 'cause you don' really know what being' a
nigger is, an' I hopes to de good Lawd you don' never have to fin' out."
Well, she had found out--and there seemed no limit to the anguish whites were
capable of wreaking upon black people.  But the worst thing they did, Kunta
had said, was to keep them ignorant of who they are, to keep them from being
fully human.

"De reason yo' pappy took holt of my feelin's from de firs'," her mammy had
told her, "was he de proudest black man I ever seed!"

Before she fell asleep, Kizzy decided that however base her baby's origins,
however light his color, whatever name the massa forced upon him, she would
never regard him as other than the grandson of an African.  '

CHAPTER 86

Since Uncle Pompey had never said much beyond

"How do?"  to Kizzy when he saw her in the mornings, she was surprised and
deeply touched when she arrived in the field with her baby on her first day
back at work.

Uncle Pompey approached her shyly and, touching the brim of his sweatstained
straw hat, pointed toward the trees at the edge of the field.

"Figgered you could put de baby under dere," he said.  Not sure what he
meant, Kizzy squinted and saw something beneath one of the trees.  Her eyes
were soon glistening with tears, for when she walked over to it, she saw that
it was a little lean-to, its top thatched with freshly cut long grass,
thick-stemmed weeds, and green leaves.

Gratefully Kizzy spread her clean crocus sack upon the sheltered leafy
cushion and laid the baby on it.  He cried briefly, but with her comforting
sounds and pats, soon ha 466 ALEX HALEY

was gurgling and inspecting his fingers.  Rejoining her two companions, who
were working in the tobacco, she said, "Sho' 'predates dat, Uncle Pompey."
He grunted and^ chopped faster, trying to conceal his embarrassment.  At
intervals Kizzy would hurry over and check on her baby, and about every three
hours, when it began crying, she would sit down and let it nurse at one of
her breasts, which were taut with milk.

"Yo' baby jes' perkin' us all up, 'cause sho', ain't nothin' else roun' here
to pay no tent ion Sister Sarah said a few days later, addressing Kizzy but
casting a sly eye at Uncle Pompey, whose return look was as if at some
persistent mosquito.  By now, when each workday ended with the setting sun.
Sister Sarah insisted on carrying the baby as Kizzy took their two hoes for
the tired trudge back to slave row, which was nothing more than four small
box- like, one-windowed cabins near a large chinquapin tree.  Usually the
early darkness would have fallen by the time Kizzy hurriedly lighted sticks
in her small fireplace to 'cook something from her remaining rations, which
were issued each Saturday morning by Massa Lea.  Eating quickly, she would
lie down on her corn shuck mattress, playing with George but not nursing him
until hunger made him start bawling.  Then, encouraging him to drink to his
fullest, she would hold him over her shoulder, rubbing his back to help him
burp, and then she would play with him again.  She kept them both awake as
late as she could, wanting the baby to sleep as long as possible before he
would awaken for his next night feeding.  It was during this interim
that--twice or three times weekly--the massa would come to force himself upon
her.  He would always smell of liquor, but she had decided--for the sake of
the baby as well as her own--not to try resisting him anymore.  Filled with
loathing, she would lie cold and still, with her legs apart, as he took of
her his grunting pleasure.  When it ended and he got up, she would keep lying
there with her eyes closed--hearing the dime or sometimes the quarter that he
would always drop on her table--until he left.  Kizzy would wonder if the
missis, too, was lying awake in the big house, which was close enough to be
within earshot; what must she think, how must she feel, when the massa came
to their bed still smelling of another woman?

ROOTS 467

Finally, after nursing George twice again before daybreak, she fell into a
deep sleep--just in time to be roused by Uncle Pompey knocking at the door to
wake her up.  Kizzy ate breakfast and nursed the baby again before Sister
Sarah arrived to carry him out to one of the fields.  There was a separate
field for corn, tobacco, and cotton, and Uncle Pompey had by now constructed
a little tree- shaded shelter at the edge of each one.

When the massa and missis finished their midday meal on Sunday, they always
left soon after for their weekly buggy ride, and while they were gone, slave
row's handful of folk would gather round the chinquapin tree for an hour of
visiting.  Now that Kizzy and her son had joined them, Miss Malizy and Sister
Sarah would promptly begin their tug-of-war over who would get to hold the
restless George.

Uncle Pompey, who sat puffing his pipe, seemed to enjoy talking to Kizzy,
perhaps because she'd listen to him with far fewer interruptions and far more
respect than the two older women would.  / "Dis place weren't nothin' but
jes' woods worth 'bout fifty cents a acre," said Pompey one afternoon, "when
massa got his firs' thirty acres an' his firs' nigger name George, same as
yo' young' un here.  He jes' plain worked dat nigger to death."  Seeing Kizzy
gasp.  Uncle Pompey halted.

"Sump'n de matter?"  he asked.

"Nawsuh, nothin'!"  Kizzy quickly collected herself, and Uncle Pompey
continued.

"When I come here, massa'd done had dat po' nigger a year, cutting' trees,
gougin' up stumps, clearin' brush enough to plow an' plant to make his first
crop.  Den one day me an' dat nigger was sawin' logs into de very planks in
dat big house yonder."  Uncle Pompey pointed.

"Lawd, I heard dis 'culiar sound an' glanced up from my end o' de saw.  Dis
George nigger's eyes was rollin', he grab at his chest, an' drop down
dead--jes' like dat."

Kizzy changed the subject.

"Every since I come here, been hearin' y'all go on 'bout fightin' chickens.
Ain't hardly beared 'bout none befo'" -- "Well, I'se sho' beared massa say
dey fights a-plenty o' *em in dat Virginia," said Miss Malizy.

"Reckon it jes' wasn't nowhere close where you was at."

"Don't none us know no whole lot 'bout 'em here, 468 ALEX HALEY

neither," said Uncle Pompey, " 'ceptin' dey's jes some special kin' of
roosters born an' bred to kill one not her an' mens gambles whole lots of
money on 'em.  "

Sister Sarah chimed in.

"Onliest somebody could tell you mo' 'bout 'em is datof' Mingo nigger what
live down dere wid dem chickens."

Seeing Kizzy's open-mouthed surprise.  Miss Malizy exclaimed,

"Done tol' you dat firs' day you got here.  You jes' ain't seed 'im yet."

She laughed.

"And you might not never see 'im!"

"I been here fo'teen years," said Sister Sarah, "an' I ain't seed dat nigger
mon eight, ten times!  He jes' rut her be 'mongst chickens clan peoples!
Hmph!"  she snorted.

"Fact, I specks his mammy hatched him!"

While Kizzy joined in the laughter.  Sister Sarah leaned toward Miss Malizy,
her arms outstretched.

"Here, lemme hoi' dat chile awhile."

Grudgingly, Miss Malizy relinquished the baby.

"Well, anyhow," she said, "dem chickens sho' took massa an' missis from
being' raggedy to ridin' roun' here puttin' on sich big airs now."  She made
a mimicking grand gesture.

"Dat's massa throwin' up his hand when dey buggy passin' some rich mass as
carriages!"  Her finger resembled a butterfly in motion.

"Dat's missis' handkerchief aflutter- in' 'til she 'bout to fall out'n de
buggy!"

Amid the loud guffawing.  Miss Malizy needed a while to recover herself.
Then, as she reached out to take the baby back.  Sister Sarah snapped,

"You wait!  I ain't had 'im but a minute!"

It delighted Kizzy to see them compete over her child, and to watch Uncle
Pompey watching quietly, then beaming instantly if the baby happened to look
his way, when he would make funny faces or movements with his fingers to hold
the child's attention.  George was crawling around one Sunday a few months
later when he started crying to nurse.  Kizzy was about to lift him when Miss
Malizy said, "Let 'im hoi' on jes' a bit, honey.  Dat boy big enough to start
eatin' sump'n now."  Hurrying to her cabin.  Miss Malizy returned in a few
moments, and they all watched as she used the back of a teaspoon to mash a
half teacup of com bread and potlikker into a mush.  Then, lifting George
onto her ample lap, she spooned a tiny portion into his ROOTS 489

mouth.  They all beamed as he wolfed it down and smacked his lips in
eagerness for more.

With George now starting to explore on all fours when they were out in the
fields, Kizzy tied a length of small rope about his waist to limit his range,
but she soon discovered that even within its reach, he was picking up and
eating dirt and crawling insects.  They all agreed that something had to be
done.

"Since he am' got to nuss no mo'," Miss Malizy suggested, "seem like if you
leaves 'im wid me, I can keep a good eye on 'im whilst you's in de fiel'."
Even Sister Sarah thought that made sense, and as much as Kizzy hated to, she
began delivering George to the big-house kitchen before she left each
morning, then retrieving him when she returned.  She almost wavered about her
decision when George's first recognizable word was "Mi'lize," but soon after
he clearly said

"Mammy," thrilling Kizzy to the core.  Then his next word was

"Unka'pomp," which made the old man look like he'd swallowed the sunshine.
And that was soon followed by "Sis'sira."

At one year, George was walking without assistance.  By fifteen months he was
even romping about, clearly reveling in the sheer joy of being at last
independent and on his own.  Now he seldom permitted any of them to hold him,
unless he was sleepy or didn't feel well, which was rare, for he was fairly
bursting with health and growth, thanks in no small part to his daily
stuffing by Miss Malizy with the best fare that the kitchen could afford.
Now during Sunday afternoons, as Kizzy and the other three doting adults
carried on their conversation, they feasted their eyes on the boy waddling
around, playing happily alone, with his soon baggy-wet diapers shortly
matching the dirt in color.

George was as delighted with tasting a twig as with catching a beetle or with
chasing a dragonfly, the yard cat, or the chickens--which he sent clucking
off in alarm to find another scratching place.  One Sunday the three women
held their sides in laughter at the spectacle of the usually somber Uncle
Pbmpey loping awkwardly for short distances trying to get a light breeze to
lift the kite he had made for the fascinated boy.

"Lem'me tell you, gal, you don't really know what you seem' yonder," Sister
Sarah remarked to Kizzy.  " " Po' dat ehile come here, once Pompey got in his
cabin, we wouldn't hardly see 'im no mo' tilde mornin'.  "

470 ALEX HALEY

"De truth!"  said Miss Malizy.

"I ain't even knowed Pompey had no fun in 'im!"

"Well, I know I sho' felt good when he put up dem 1'il shelters for George
when I first brung 'im to de fiel's," said Kizzy.

"You feel good!  Dat chile doin' us all good!"  said Sister Sarah.

Uncle Pompey further claimed George's attention when he began telling him
stories at the age of two.  With the Sunday sun setting and the evening
turning cool, Pompey would build a small, smoky fire of green wood to
discourage the mosquitoes as the three women would position their chairs
around the fire.  Then George would find his most comfortable position to
watch the mobile face and gesturing hands of Uncle Pompey as he told of

"Br'er Rabbit" and

"Br'er Bear," in time drawing upon such a seeming endless wealth of tales
that once Sister Sarah was moved to exclaim,

"Ain't never dreamt you knowed all dem stories!"  Uncle Pompey gave her a
cryptic glance and said, "Whole heap o' things 'bout me you don't know."
Sister Sarah, flouncing her head, affected great disgust.

"Hmph!  Sho' ain't nobody tryin' to fin' out!"  Uncle Pompey puffed solemnly
at his pipe, his crinkled eyes laughing.

"Miss Malizy, I gwine say sump'n to you," Kizzy declared one day.

"Sister Sarah an' Uncle Pompey always carryin' on like dey gits on each
other's nerves.  But sometimes I gits de feelin' it's sump'n like dey way of
courtin' one not her" -- "Chile, I don't know.  I know neither of 'em
wouldn't never say if it was.  But I speck dey jes' makin' some fun to pass
de time, data ll

You git of' as we is an' ain't got yo'self nobody, you done jes' git used to
it, since seem like ain't nothin' you can do 'bout it nohow.  "

Miss Malizy's eyes searched Kizzy before she went on.

"We's of', an' dat's dat, but being' young like you, honey, an' ain't got
nobody, dat's different!  I'se jes' wished massa'd buy somebody dat y'all
could jes' kin' of nachel git together!"

"Yes'm, Miss Malizy, ain't no need me actin' like I don't think 'bout it
neither, 'cause I sho' do."  Kizzy paused.  She then said what she was
certain they both knew.

"But massa ain't gwine do dat."  She felt a flash of appreciation that none
of them had ever mentioned, or even hinted at, what they all must know still
went on between her and the massa; ROOTS 471

at least they never mentioned it in her presence.

"Since we's talkin' close," she went on, "it was a man I knowed where I come
from.  I still thinks 'bout him a-plenty.  We was gwine git married, but den
everything got messed up.  Fact, dat's how come I got here."

Forcing more brightness into her tone, sensing Miss Malizy's genuinely
affectionate concern, Kizzy told her how it had been with Noah, ending
finally,

"I tells myself he jes' steady gwine 'bout lookin' fo' me, an' we's gwine
turn up face-to-face somewhere one dese days."  Kizzy's expression might have
been of someone praying.

"If dat was to happen, Miss Malizy, I tell you de truth, I b'lieve neither
one us would say nary word.  I b'lieve we jes' take one not her hand an' I
slip on in here and tell y'all good-bye, an' git George, an' we leave.  I
wouldn't even ax or care whereabouts.  Ain't never gwine for git de las'
thing he said to me.  He say,

"We spen' de res' our days togedder, baby!"

" Kizzy's voice broke and then both she and Miss Malizy were weeping, and
soon afterward Kizzy went back to her cabin.

One Sunday morning, a few weeks later, George was in the big house "helping"
Miss Malizy prepare the noon meal when Sister Sarah invited Kizzy into her
cabin for the first time since she had come to the Lea plantation.  Kizzy
stared at the much-chinked walls; they were all but covered with bunches of
dried roots and herbs hanging from pegs and nails, attesting to Sister
Sarah's claim that she could supply the nature cure for nearly any ailment.
Pointing to her only chair, she said,

"Set yo'self down, gal."  Kizzy sat, and Sister Sarah- went on, "I gwine tell
you sump'n ever' body don't know.  My mammy was a Louisiana Cajun woman what
teached me how to tell fortunes good."  She studied Kizzy's startled face.

"You want me to tell your'n?"

Instantly Kizzy remembered times when both Uncle Pompey and Miss Malizy had
mentioned that Sister Sarah had a gift for fortune-telling.  Kizzy heard
herself saying, "I reckon I would.

Sister Sarah.  "

Squatting on the floor.  Sister Sarah drew a large box from under the bed.
Removing from it a smaller box, she picked out two palmfuls of
mysterious-looking dried objects and slowly turned toward Kizzy.

Carefully arranging her objects into a symmetrical design, she produced a
thin, wand like stick from within the bosom of her dress and began vigorously
stirring them around.  Bending forward 472 ALEX HALEY

until her forehead actually touched the objects on the floor, she seemed to
be straining to straighten back upward when she spoke in an unnaturally high
tone,

"I hates to tell you what de sperrits says.

You ain't never gwine see yo' mammy an' yo' pappy no mo', leas' ways not in
dis wort"-- Kizzy burst into sobs.  Ignoring her entirely.  Sister Sarah
carefully rearranged her objects, then stirred and stirred again, much longer
than before, until Kizzy regained some control and her weeping had
diminished.  Through misty eyes, she stared in awe as the wand trembled and
quivered.  Then Sister Sarah began a mumbling that was barely audible: " Look
like jes' ain't dis Chile's good-luck time .  .  .

on lies man she gwine ever love .  he had a mighty hard road .  an' he love
her, too .  .  .  but de sperrits done tol' 'im it's debes to know de truth .
.  .  an' to give up jes' even hopin'.  .  .  .  "

Kizzy sprang upright, shrieking, this time highly agitating Sister Sarah.

"Shhhhh!  Shhhhh!  Shhhhh!  Don't 'sturb de sperrits, daughter!

SHHHHH!  SHHHHH!  SHHHHH!  " But Kizzy continued to scream, bolting outside
and across into her own cabin and slamming her door, as Uncle Pompey's cabin
door jerked open and the faces of Massa and Missis Lea, Miss Malizy, and
George appeared abruptly at windows of the big house and its kitchen.  Kizzy
was thrashing and wailing on her corn shuck mattress when George came
bursting in.

"Mammy!  Mammy!  What de matter?"  Her face tear-streaked and contorted, she
screamed hysterically at him,

"SHUT UP!"

CHAPTER 87

By George's third year, he had begun to demonstrate a determination to "help"
the slave-row grownups.

"Lawd, tryin' to carry some water for me, an' can't hardly lif up de bucket!"
Miss Malizy said, laughing.  And another time: "Dog if he ain't toted a
stick at a time 'til he fill up my ROOTS 473

wood box den he raked de ashes out'n de fireplace!  " Proud as Kizzy was, she
took pains not to repeat Miss Malizy's praises to George, whom she felt was
giving her headaches enough already.

"How come I ain't black like you is.  Mammy?"  he asked one night when they
were alone in the cabin, and gulping, Kizzy said,

"Peoples jes' born what color dey is, data ll But not many nights passed
before he raised the subject again.

"Mammy, who my pappy was?  Why ain't I never seed 'im?  Where he at?"  Kizzy
affected a threatening tone: "Jes' shut yo' mouth up!"  But hours later, she
lay awake beside him, still seeing his hurt, confused expression; and the
next morning delivering him to Miss Malizy, she apologized in a lame way.

"I jes' gits frazzled, you ax me so many questions."

But she knew that something better than that had to be told to her highly
alert, inquisitive son, something that he both could understand and would
accept.

"He tall, an' black as de night, an' didn't hardly never smile," she offered
finally.

"He blongst to you same as me, 'cept you calls him Gran'pappy!"  George
seemed interested and curious to hear more.  Telling him that his gran'pappy
had come on a ship from Africa "to a place my mammy said dey calls " Naplis',"

she said that a brother of her Massa Waller had brought him to a plantation
in Spotsylvania County, but he tried to escape.  Uncertain how to soften the
next part of the story, she decided to make it brief: "--an' when he kept on
runnin' 'way, dey chopped off half his foot."

A grimace twisted George's small face.

"How come dey done dat.

Mammy?  "

"He near 'bout kilt some nigger catchers."

"Catchin niggers fo' what?"

"Well, niggers dat had runned 'way."

"What dey was runnin' from?"

"From dey white mass as

"What de white mass as done to 'em?"

In frustration, she shrilled,

"Heish yo' mouf!  Git on 'way from me, worryin' me to death!"

But George never was silenced for long, any more than his appetite to know
more of his African gran'pappy ever was fully satisfied.

"Where 'bouts is dat Africa, Mammy?"  .  .  .

"Any li'l boys in dat Africa?"  .

                                      .

"What my gran'pappy's name was again?"

474 ALEX HALEY

Even beyond what she had hoped, George seemed to be building up his own image
of his gran'pappy, and--to the limits of her endurance--Kizzy tried to help
it along with tales from her own rich store of memories.

"Boy, I wish you could o' beared 'im singin' some o* dem African songs to me
when we be ridin' in de massa's buggy, an' I was a li'l gal, right roun' de
age you is now."  Kizzy would find herself smiling as she remembered with
what delight she used to sit on the high, narrow buggy seat alongside her
pappy as they went rolling along the hot, dusty Spotsylvania County roads;
how at other times she and Kunta would walk hand-in-hand along the fence row
that led to the stream where later she would walk hand-in-hand with Noah.

She said to George,

"Yo' gran'pappy like to tell me things in de African tongue.  Like he call a
fiddle a ko, or he call a river Kamby Bolongo, whole lotsa different,
funny-soundin' words like dat."  She thought how much it would please her
pappy, wherever he was, for his grandson also to know the African words.

"Ko!"  she said sharply.

"Can you say dat?"

"Ko," said George.

"All right, you so smart: " Kamby Bolongo'!  " George repeated it perfectly
the first time.  Sensing that she didn't intend to continue, he demanded,

"Say me some mo', Mammy!"  Overwhelmed with love for him, Kizzy promised him
more--later on--and then she put him, protesting, to bed.

CHAPTER 88

When George's sixth year came--meaning that he must start working in the
fields--Miss Malizy was heartsick to lose his company in the kitchen, but
Kizzy and Sister Sarah rejoiced to be getting him back at last.  From
George's first day of fieldwork, he seemed to relish it as a new realm of
adventure, and their loving eyes followed him as he ran ROOTS 475

around picking up rocks that might break the point of Uncle Pompey's oncoming
plow.  He scurried about bringing to each of them a bucket of cool drinking
water that he had trudged to get from the spring at the other end of the
field.  He even "helped" them with the corn and cotton planting, dropping at
least some of the seeds more or less where they should have gone along the
mounded rows.  When the three grownups laughed at his clumsy but determined
efforts to wield a hoe whose handle was longer than he was, George's own
broad smile displayed his characteristic good spirits.  They had a further
laugh when George insisted to Uncle Pompey that he could plow, and then
discovered that he wasn't tall enough to hold the plow handles but he
promptly wrapped his arms around the sides and hollered to the mule, "Git up!"

When they finally got back into their cabin in the late evenings, Kizzy
immediately began the next chore of cooking them a meal, as hungry as she
knew George must be.  But one night he proposed that the routine be changed.
"Mammy, you done worked hard all day.  How come you don't lay down an' res'
some 'fo' you cooks?"  He would even try to order her around if she felt like
letting him get away with it.  At times it seemed to Kizzy as if her son was
trying to fill in for a man whom she felt he sensed was missing in both of
their lives.

George was so independent and self-sufficient for a small boy that now or
then when he got a cold or some small injury.  Sister Sarah would insist upon
all but smothering him with her herb cures; and Kizzy would finish the job
with a plentiful salving of her love.  Sometimes, as they both lay before
sleeping, he would set Kizzy smiling to herself with the fantasies he'd share
with her there in the darkness.

"I'se gwine down dis big road," he whispered one night, "an' I looks up, an'
I sees dis great big of' bear a-runnin'.  .  .  seem like he tailer'n a hoss
.  .  .  an' I hollers,

"Mr.  Bear!  Hey, Mr. Bear!  You jes well's to git ready for me to turn you
inside out, cause you sho' ain't gwine hurt my mammy!"

" Or sometimes he would urge and urge and finally persuade his tired mammy
to join him in singing some of the songs that he had heard Miss Malizy sing
when he had spent his days with her in the big-house kitchen.   And the
little cabin would resound softly with their duets: " Oh, Mary, don't 'cha
weep, don't 'cha moan!

Oh, Mary, don't 'cha weep, 476 ALEX HALEY

don't 'cha moan!

"Cause of' Pharaoh's army done got drown-ded!  Oh, Mary, don't 'cha weep!"

Sometimes when nothing else attracted George within the cabin, the restless
six-year-old would stretch out before the fireplace.

Whittling a finger-sized stick to a point at one end, which he then charred
in the flames to make a sort of pencil, he would then draw on a piece of
white pine board the simple outline figures of people or animals.  Every time
he did it, Kizzy all but held her breath, fearing that George would next want
to learn to write or read.  But apparently the idea never occurred to him,
and Kizzy took great care never to mention writing or reading, which she felt
had forever scarred her life.  In fact, during all of Kizzy's years on the
Lea plantation, she had not once held a pen or pencil, a book or newspaper,
nor had she mentioned to anyone that she once read and wrote.  When she
thought about it, she would wonder if she still could, should she ever want
to, for any reason.  Then she would spell out in her head some words she felt
she still remembered correctly, and with intense concentration she would
mentally picture what those words would look like written--not that she was
sure what her handwriting would look like anymore.  Sometimes she'd be
tempted--but still she kept her sworn pact with herself never to write again.

Far more than she missed writing or reading, Kizzy felt the absence of news
about what was happening in the world beyond the plantation.

She remembered how her pappy would tell what he had heard and seen when he
returned from his trips with Massa Waller.  But any outside news was almost a
rarity here on this modest and isolated plantation, where the massa rode his
own horse and drove his own buggy.  This slave row found out what was going
on outside only when Massa and Missis Lea had guests for dinner--sometimes
months apart.  During one such dinner on a Sunday afternoon in 1812, Miss
Malizy ran down from the house to tell them,

"Dey's eatin' now an' I got to hurry right back, but dey's talkin' in dere
'bout some new war done started up wid dat England!  Seem like de En- gland
is sendin' whole shiploads of dey so'jers over here at us!"

"Ain't sendin' 'em over here at me!"  said Sister Sarah.  "Dem's white folks
fightin'!"

"Where dey fightin' dis war at?"  asked Uncle Pompey, ROOTS 477

and Miss Malizy said she hadn't heard.

"Well," he replied, "long as it's somewheres up Nnwth an' not nowhere roun'
here, don't make me no difference."

That night in the cabin, shsrp-eared little George asked Kizzy,

"What a war is, Mammy?"

She thought a moment before answering.

"Well, I reckon it's whole lots of mens fightin' 'against one not her

"Fiahtin' 'bout what?"

"Fightin' 'bout anything dey feels like."

"W;'l.  what de white folks an' dat England fightin' 'against one not her
'bout?"

"Bov.  " 's' a'"'* rev-r no end to 'splainin' you nothin'."

A half hour later.  Kizzy had to start smiling to herself in the darkness
when George began singing one of Miss Malizy's songs, barely audibly, as if
just for himself, "Gon' put on my long white robe!

Down by de ribber side Down by de ribber side Ain't gon' study de war no mo'!
"

After a very long time without further news, during another big-house dinner.
Miss Malizy reported,

"Dey sayin' dem Englands done took some city up Nawth dey calls " Detroit.  "
" Then again, months later, she said the massa, missis, and guests were
jubilantly discussing "some great big Newnited States ship dey's callin' '01'
Ironsides."  Dey's sayin' it done sunk plenty dem England ships wid its
fo'ty-fo' guns!  "

"Whoowee!"  exclaimed Uncle Pompey.

"Dat's 'enough to sink de ark!"

Then one Sunday in 1814, Miss Malizy had George "helping" her in the kitchen
when he came flying down to slave row, breathless with a message: "Miss
Malizy say tell y'all dat England's army done whupped five thou san Newnited
States so'jers, an' done burnt up both dat Capitol an' de White House."

"Lawd, where dat at?"  said Kizzy.

"In dat Washington Deecee," said Uncle Pompey.

"Dat's a fur piece from here."

"Jes' long as dey keeps killin' an' biirnin' one not her 'stead of us!"
exclaimed Sister Sarah.

Then during a dinner later that year.  Miss Malizy came hurrying to tell them,

"Be dog if dey ain't all in dere a- singin' sump'n 'bout dem Englands' ships
shootin' at some big fort near roun' Baltimore."

And Miss Malizy half talked and half sang what she bad heard.  Later that
afternoon, 478 ALEX HALEY

there was an odd noise outside, and the grownups hurried to open their cabin
doors and stood astonished: George had stuck a long turkey feather through
his hair and was high-stepping along, banging a stick against a dried gourd
and singing loudly his own version of what he had overheard from Miss Malizy:
"Oh, hey, can you see by dat dawn early light .  .  .  an' dem rockets' red
glare .  .  .  oh, dat star spangle banner wavin' .  .  .  oh, de lan' o' de
free, an' de home o' de brave" Within another year the boy's gift for mimicry
had become slave row's favorite entertainment, and one of George's most
popular requests was for his impression of Massa Lea.  First making sure that
the massa was nowhere near, then slitting his eyes and grimacing, George
drawled angrily,

"Less'n you niggers pick dis fiel' o' cotton clean 'fo' datsun set, y'all
ain't gon' git no mo rations to eat!"  Shaking with laughter, the adults
exclaimed among themselves, "Is you ever seed anything like dat young' un .
.  .

"I sho' ain't!"  .  .  .

"He jes' a caution!"  George needed but a brief observation of anyone to mock
them in a highly comical way--including one big-house dinner guest, a white
preacher, whom the massa had taken afterward to preach briefly to the slaves
down by the chinquapin tree.  And when George caught his first good glimpse
of the mysterious old Mingo who trained the massa's fighting game fowl George
was soon aping perfectly the old man's peculiar hitching gait.  Catching two
squawking barnyard chickens and holding them tightly by their legs, he thrust
them rapidly back and forth as if they were menacing each other while he
supplied their dialogue: "Big of' ugly buzzard-lookin' rascal, I'm gon'
scratch yo' eyes out!"  to which the second chicken replied scornfully,

"You ain't nothin' but halfa mouthful o' feathers!"

The following Saturday morning, as Massa Lea routinely distributed the slave
row's weekly rations, Kizzy, Sister Sarah, Miss Malizy, and Uncle Pompey were
standing dutifully before their cabin doors to receive their share when
George came tearing around a corner chasing a rat, then screeched to a stop,
having only narrowly missed colliding with the massa.  Massa Lea, half amused
affected a gruff tone: "What do you do to earn your rations around here,
boy?"  The four grownups all but collapsed as nine-year-old George, squaring
his shoulders confidently and looking ROOTS 479

the massa straight in the eye, declared,

"I works in yo' fields an' I preaches, Massa!"  Astounded, Massa Lee said,
"Well, let's hear you preach, then!"  With five pairs of eyes upon him,
George took a step backward and announced, "Dis dat white preacher you brung
down here, Massa" -- and suddenly he was flailing his arms and ranting,

"If you specks Uncle Pompey done took massa's hog, tell massa!  If you sees
Miss Malizy takin' missis' flour, tell missis!

"Cause if y'all's dat kin' o' good niggers, an' doin' well by yo' good massa
an' missis, den when y'all die, y'all might git into de kitchen of heab'n!"

Massa Lea was doubled over with laughter even before George
finished--whereupon, flashing his strong white teeth, the boy launched into
one of Miss Malizy's favorite songs,

"It's me, it's me, it's me, 0 Lawd, a-standin' in de need o' prayer!  Not my
mammy, not my pappy, but it's me, 0 Lawd, a-standin' in de need o' prayer!
Not de preacher, not de deacon, but me, 0 Lawd, a-standin' in de need o'
prayer!"

None of the adults had ever seen Massa Lea laugh so hard.  Obviously
captivated, he clapped George across the shoulders.

"Boy, you preach around here anytime you want to!"  Leaving the basket of
rations for them to divide among themselves, the massa went off back toward
the big house with his shoulders shaking, glancing back over his shoulder at
George, who stood there happily grinning.

Within weeks that summer, Massa Lea returned from a trip bringing two long
peacock plumes.  Sending Miss Malizy out to the fields to get George, he
carefully instructed the boy how he wanted the plumes waved gently back and
forth behind the guests he was inviting for dinner on the following Sunday
afternoon.

"Jes' puttin' on airs, tryin' to act like dey's rich white folks!"

scoffed Miss Malizy, after she had given Kizzy Missis Lea's instructions that
the boy must come to the big house scrubbed thoroughly and with his clothes
freshly washed, starched, and ironed.

George was so excited about his new role, and about all the attention that
was being paid to him--even by the massa and missis--that he could scarcely
contain himself.

The guests were still in the big house when Miss Malizy slipped from the
kitchen and ran to slave row, no longer able to keep from reporting to her
anxiously awaiting 480 ALEX HALEY

audience.

"Lemme tell y'all, dat young' un too much!"  Then she described George waving
the peacock plumes, "a-twisting his wrists an' bendin' his self back an'
forth, puttin on mo' airs clan massa an' missis!  An' after dessert, massa
was pourin' de wine, when seem like de idea jes' hit 'im, an' he say,

"Hey, boy, let's hear some preachin'!"  An' I declares I b'lieves dat young'
un been practicin'!

"Cause quick as dat he ax massa for some book to be his Bible, an' massa got
'im one.  Lawd!  Dat young' un jumped on missis' prettiest 'broidered
footstool!  Chile, he lit up dat dinin' room preachin'!  Den ain't nobody ax
'im, he commence to singin' his head off.  Dat was when I jes' run out!"  She
fled back to the big house, leaving Kizzy, Sister Sarah, and Uncle Pompey
wagging their heads and grinning in incredulous pride.

George had been such a success that Missis Lea began returning from her and
the massa's Sunday afternoon buggy rides telling Miss Malizy that previous
dinner guests whom they had met always asked about George.  After a while the
usually withdrawn Missis Lea even began to express her own fondness for him,
"an' Lawd knows, she ain't never liked no nigger!"  exclaimed Miss Malizy.
Gradually Missis Lea began finding chores for George to do in or around the
big house, until by his eleventh year it seemed to Kizzy that he spent hardly
half of his time out with them in the fields anymore.

And because waving his plumes at every dinner kept George in the dining room
hearing the white people's conversation, he began picking up more news than
Miss Malizy had ever been able to with her having to keep running back and
forth between the dining room and the kitchen.  Soon after the dinner guests
left, George would proudly tell all he had heard to the waiting ears in slave
row.  They were astonished to hear how one guest had said that "roun' 'bout
three thou san free niggers from lots o' different places held a big meetin'
in dat Philadelphia.  Dis white man say dem niggers sent some res'lution to
dat Pres'dent Madison dat both slave an' free niggers done helped build dis
country, well as to help fight all its wars, an' de Newnited States ain't
what it claim to be less'n niggers shares in all its blessin's."  And George
added, "Massa say any fool can see free niggers ought to be run out'n de
country!"

ROOTS 481

George reported that during a later dinner "dem white folks was so mad dey
turned red" in discussing recent news of huge slave revolts in the West
Indies.

"Lawd, y'all ought to o' beared 'em gwine on in dere 'bout ship sailors
tellin' dat Wes* Indian slave niggers is burnin' crops an' build- in's, even
beatin' an' chopping' up an' hangin' white folks dat was dey mass as After
subsequent dinners, George reported that a new ten-mile-an-hour speed record
had been achieved by a six-horse

"Concord Coach" between Boston and New York City, including rest stops; that
"a Massa Robert Fulton's new paddle-wheel steamboat done crost some

"Lantic Ocean inside o' twelve days!"  Later, a dinner guest had described a
showboat sensation.

"Bes' I could git it, dey calls it 'de minstrels'-- sound' like to me he say
white mens blackin' dey faces wid burnt corks an' singin' an' dancin' like
niggers."  Another Sunday dinner's conversation concerned Indians, George
said.

"One dem mens said de Cherokees is takin' up sump'n like eighty million acres
de white mens needs.  He say de gubmint would o' took care dem Injuns long
'fo' now if wasn't for some interferin' big white mens, 'specially two name
of Massa Davy Crockett an' Massa Daniel Webster."

One Sunday in 1818, George reported "sump'n dem guests was callin' de ' "
Merican Colonize Society' tryin' to send shiploads o' free niggers off to a

"Liberia' somewheres in dat Africa.  De white folks was a-laughin' 'bout de
free niggers being' tol' dat Liberia got bacon trees, wid de slices hangin'
down like leaves, an' 'lasses trees you jes' cuts to drain out all you can
drink!"  George said,

"Massa-swear far's he concerned, dey can't put dem free niggers on ships fas'
enough!"

"Hmph!"  snorted Sister Sarah.

"I sho' wouldn't go to no Africa wid all dem niggers up in trees wid monkeys"
-- "Where you git dat at?"  demanded Kizzy sharply.

"My pappy come from Africa, an' he sho' ain't never been in no trees!"

Indignantly, Sister Sarah spluttered, taken aback,

"Well, ever' body grow up hearin' dat!"

"Don't make it right," said Uncle Pompey, casting her a sidewise glance.

"Ain't no ship take you nohow, you ain't no free nigger."

"Well, I wouldn't go if I was!"  snapped Sister Sarah, flouncing her head and
squirting an amber stream of snuff 482 ALEX HALEY

into the dust, annoyed now at both Uncle Pompey and Kizzy, whom she made a
point of not bidding goodnight when the little gathering retired to their
cabins.  Kizzy, in turn, was no less seething at Sister Sarah's demeaning
implication about her wise, stiffly dignified father and his beloved African
homeland.

She was surprised and pleased to discover that even George was irritated at
what he felt was ridicule of his African gran'pappy.

Though he seemed reluctant to say anything, he couldn't help himself.

But when he finally did, she saw his concern about seeming disrespectful.

"Mammy, jes' seem like Sister Sarah maybe talk what ain't so, don't she?"

"Dat de truth!"  Kizzy emphatically agreed.

George sat quietly for a while before he spoke again.  "Mammy," he said
hesitantly, "is it maybe any li'l mo' you could tell me 'bout 'im?"

Kizzy felt a flooding of remorse that during the previous winter she had
gotten so exasperated with George's unending questions one night that she had
forbidden him to question her any further about his grandfather.  She said
softly now,

"Whole lot o' times I done tried to scrape in my min' if it's sump'n 'bout
yo' gran'pappy I ain't tol' you, an' seem like jes' ain't no mo'" -- She
paused.

"I knows you don't for git nothin'--but I tell you again any part of it if
you says so."

George was again quiet for a moment.

"Mammy," he said, "one time you tol' me gran'pappy give you de feelin' dat
de'main thing he kep' on his mind was tellin' you dem Africar things" --
"Yeah, it sho' seem like dat, plenty time," Kizzy said reflectively.

After another silence, George said,

"Mammy, I been thinkin'.  Same as you done fo' me, I gwine tell my chilluns "
bout gran'pappy.  " Kizzy smiled, it being so typical of her singular son to
be discussing at twelve his children of the future.

As George's favor continued to rise with the massa and the missis, he was
permitted increasing liberties without their ever really having to grant
them.  Now and then, especially during Sunday afternoons when they took buggy
rides, he would go wandering off somewhere on his own, sometimes for hours,
leaving the slave-row adults talking ROOTS 483

among themselves, as he curiously explored every corner of the Lea
plantation.  One such Sunday it was nearly dusk when he returned and told
Kizzy that he had spent the afternoon visiting with the old man who took care
of the massa's fighting chickens.

"I he'ped him catch a big of' rooster dat got loose, an' after dat me an' de
of' man got to talkin'.  He don't seem all dat 'culiar to me, like y'all
says.  Mammy.  An' I ain't never seen sich chickens!  It's roosters he said
ain't even grown yet jes' a-crowin' an jumpin' in dey pens, tryin' to git at
one not her to fight!  01' man let me pick some grass an' feed 'em, an' I
did.  He tol' me he take mo' pains raisin' dem chickens clan mos' mammies
does raisin' dey babies!"

Kizzy's hackles rose a bit at that but she made no response, half amused at
her son's being so excited about some chickens.

"He showed me how he rub dey backs an' necks an' legs, to help 'em fight
debes!"

- "You better stay 'way from down dere, boy!"  she cautioned.

"You know massa don't 'low nobody but datof' man down dere messin' wid dem
chickens!"

"Uncle Mingo say he gwine ax massa to let me come down dere an' help 'im feed
dem chickens!"

On their way out to the field the next morning, Kizzy told Sister Sarah of
George's latest adventure.  Sarah walked on in thoughtful silence.  Then she
said,

"I know you don't hardly want me tellin' you no mo' fortunes, but I'm gwine
tell you jes' a li'l 'bout dat George, anyhow."  She paused.  "He ain't never
gwine be what nobody would call no ordinary nigger!  He always gwine keep git
ting into sump'n new an' different jes' long as he draw breath."

CHAPTER 89

"He act like he well-raised, an' he seem like he handy, Massa," said Uncle
Mingo, concluding his description of the boy who lived up on slave row but
whose name he had neglected to ask.

When Massa Lea immediately agreed to give him a tryout, Mingo was greatly
pleased--since he had been wanting a helper for several years--but not really
surprised.  He was well aware that the massa was concerned about his gamecock
trainer's advancing age and uncertain health; for the past five or six months
he had fallen prey to increasingly frequent spells of bad coughing.  He also
knew that the massa's efforts to buy a promising young slave apprentice
trainer had come to nought among the area's other gamecock owners, who were
quite naturally disinclined to help him out.

"If I had any boy showing any signs of ability," the massa told him one had
said, "you got to have more sense than to think I'd sell him.  With that old
Mingo of yours training him, five or ten years from now I'd see him helping
you beat me!"  But the likeliest reason for Massa Lea's quick approval, Mingo
knew, was that Caswell County's annual coekfighting season would be opening
shortly with the big New Year "main" fight, and if the boy simply fed the
younger birds, Mingo would be able to spend that much more time conditioning
and training the freshly matured two-year-olds that soon would be brought in
from their open range walks

On the morning of George's first day on the job, Mingo showed him how to feed
the scores of cockerels that were kept in several pens, each containing young
birds of roughly the same age and size.  Seeing that the boy performed that
trial task acceptably, the old man next let him feed the more matured
"stags," not quite a year old but already trying to fight each other from
their triangular ROOTS 485

pens within the zigs and zags of a split-rail fence.  Through the days that
followed, Mingo kept George practically on the run, feeding the birds their
cracked corn, giving them clean grit, oyster shell, and charcoal, and
changing the sweet spring water in their drinking tins three times daily.

George had never dreamed that he could fee!  awe for chickens--especially the
stags, which were starting to grow spurs and to develop bright feather colors
as they strutted fearlessly about with their lustrous eyes flashing defiance.
If he was away from Uncle Mingo's immediate scrutiny, sometimes George would
laugh aloud at how some of the stags would suddenly rear back their heads and
crow awkwardly and throatily, as if they were trying to compete with the
frequent raucous cries of Mingo's six- or seven-year-old roosters--each
bearing the scars of many past battles-- that Uncle Mingo called catch cocks
and always fed himself.  George pictured himself as one of the stags and
Uncle Mingo as one of the old roosters.

At least once every day, when Massa Lea came riding on his horse down the
sandy road into -the gamecock training area, George would make himself as
inconspicuous as possible, having quickly sensed how much chillier the massa
was acting toward him.  George had heard Miss Malizy saying that the massa
didn't even permit the missis to come down where his chickens were, but she
had indignantly assured him that was the last thing she'd want to do.

The massa and Mingo would go walking around, inspecting the pens o g me owl,
v.  ith Mingo always keeping exactly one step behind, close enough to hear
and respond to whatever the massa said between the crowings of the scarred
old catch cock roosters.  George noticed that^ the massa spoke almost
eompanionably with Uncle Mingo, in sharp contrast to his brusque and cold
manner with Uncle Pompey, Sister Sarah, and his mammy, who were only field
hands.  Sometimes when their inspection tour brought them close enough to
wherever George was working, he would then overhear what they were saying.

"I figure to fight thirty cocks this season, Mingo, so we've got to bring in
around sixty or more from the range walk said the massa one day.

"Yassuh, Massa.  By de time we culls 'em out, we oughta have a good fo ty
birds dai'il train good."

George's head became more and more filled with ques486 ALEX HALEY

tions every day, but he had the feeling it would be best not to ask Uncle
Mingo anything he didn't have to.  Mingo scored it as a point in the boy's
favor that he could keep from talking too much, since wise game cockers kept
many secrets to themselves.  Mingo's small, quick, deeply squinting eyes,
meanwhile, missed no detail of how George performed his work.  Deliberately
he gave his orders briefly and then quickly walked away, to test how quickly
and well the boy would grasp and remember instructions; Mingo was pleased
that George seemed to need to be told most things only once.

After a while, Mingo told Massa Lea that he approved of George's care and
attention to the game fowl--but he carefully qualified himself: "Leas'ways
far as I been able to tell in jes' dis little bit o' time, Massa."

Mingo was totally unprepared for Massa Lea's reply: "I've been thinking you
need that boy down here all the time.  Your cabin's not big enough, so you
and him put up a shack somewhere so he'll be handy to you all the time."
Mingo was appalled at the prospect of anyone's sudden and total invasion of
the privacy that only he and the game- fowl had shared for over twenty years,
but he wasn't about to voice openly any disagreement.

After the massa had left, he spoke to George in a sour tone.

"Massa say I needs you down here all de time.  I reckon he must know sump'n I
don't."

"Yassuh," said George, struggling to keep his expression blank.

"But where I gwine stay at.  Uncle Mingo?"

"We got to buil' you a shack."

As much as he enjoyed the gamecocks and Uncle Mingo, George knew this would
mean the end of his enjoyable times in the big house, waving the peacock
plumes and preaching for the massa and the missis and their guests.  Even
Missis Lea had just begun to show that she'd taken a liking to him.  And he
thought of the good things he wouldn't get to eat from Miss Malizy in the
kitchen anymore.  But the worst part about leaving slave row was going to be
breaking the news to his mammy.

Kizzy was soaking her tired feet in a wash pan full of hot water when George
came in, his face unusually somber.  "Mammy, sump'n I got to tell you."

"Well, tired as I is, ehoppin' all day long, I don't want to hear no mo'
'bout dem chickens, tell you dat!"

ROOTS 487

"Well, ain't zackly dat."  He took a deep breath.  "Mammy, massa done tol' me
an' Uncle Mingo to buil' a shack an' move me down dere."

Kizzy sent some of the water splattering out of the pan as she leaped up,
seemingly ready to spring on George.  "Move you fo' what?  What you can't ido
stayin' up here where you always been?"

"Weren't my doin', Mammy!  It was massa!"  He stepped back from the fury on
her face, voice rising to a high- pitched cry.

"I ain't wantin' to leave you, Mammy!"

"You ain't of' enough to be movin' nowhere!  I bet it's datof' Mingo nigger
put massa up to it!"

"No'm, he didn't.  Mammy!

"Cause I can tell he don't like it neither!

He don't like nobody roun' him all de time.  He done tol' me he rut her be by
his self George wished he could think of something to say that would calm her
down.  "Massa feel like he being' good to me.  Mammy.  He treat Uncle Mingo
an' me nice, ain't like he acts to fiel' hands" -- Too late, he gulped
sickly, remembering that his mammy was a field hand.  Jealousy and bitterness
twisted her face as she grabbed George and shook him like a rag, screaming,

"Massa don't care nothin' 'bout you.  He may be yo' pappy, but he don't care
nothin' 'bout nobody but dem chickens!"

She was almost as stunned as he was by what she had said.

"It's true!  An' jes' well you know it 'fo' you's figgerin' he doin' you sich
favors!  Only thing massa wants is you's helpin' datof' crazy nigger take
care his chickens dat he figger gwine make him rich!"

George stood dumfounded.

She went pummeling at George with both fists.

"Well, what you hangin' on roun' here fo'?"  Whirling, she snatched up his
few items of clothing and flung them toward him.  "G'wan!  Git out'n dis
cabin!"

George stood there as if he had been pole axed.  Feeling her tears flooding
up and spilling out, Kizzy ran from the cabin and went bolting across to Miss
Malizy's.

George's own tears trickled down his face.  After a while, unsure what else
to do, he stuffed his few pieces of clothing into a sack and went stumbling
back down the road to the gamecock area.  He slept near one of the stag pens,
using his sack for his pillow.

488 ALEX HALEY

In the predawn, the early-rising Mingo came upon him asleep there and guessed
what had happened.  Throughout the day, he went out of his way to be gentle
with the boy, who went about his tasks silent and withdrawn.

During their two days of building the tiny shack, Mingo began speaking to him
as if he had only just now really become aware of George's presence.

"Yo' life got to be dese chickens, tildey's like yo' family, boy," he said
abruptly one morning--that being the foremost thing that he wanted to plant
in his mind.

But George made no response.  He couldn't think of anything but what his
mother had told him.  His massa was his pappy.  His pappy was his massa.  He
couldn't deal with it either way.

When the boy still said nothing, Mingo spoke again.

"I knows dem niggers up yonder thinks I'se peculiar" -- He hesitated.

"I reckon I is."  Now he fell silent.

George realized that Uncle Mingo expected him to respond.  But he couldn't
admit that that was exactly what he had heard about the old man.  So he asked
a question that had been on his mind since the first day he came to visit.

"Uncle Mingo, how come dese chickens ain't like de rest?"

"You's talkin' 'bout tame chickens ain't fit for nothin' 'cept eatin'," said
Uncle Mingo scornfully.

"Dese here birds near 'bout same as dey was back in dem jungles massa say dey
come from in ancient times.  Pact, I b'leeves you stick one dese cocks in de
jungle, he jes' fight to take over de hens an' kill any other roosters jes'
like he ain't never left."

George had other questions he'd been saving up to ask, but he hardly got the
chance to open his mouth once Uncle Mingo got going.  Any game cockerel that
crowed before reaching the stag stage, he said, should promptly have its neck
wrung, for crowing too early was a sure signal of cowardice later on.

"De true birds come out'n de egg wid de fightin' already in dey blood from
dey gran'daddies and great-gran'daddies.  Massa say 'way back, a man an' his
game chickens was like a man an' his dogs is now.  But dese birds got mo'
fightin' in 'em clan you fin' in dogs, or bulls, or bears, or 'coons, or
whole lots of mensi Massa say it's all de way up to kings an' pres' dents
fights game birds 'cause it's de greatest sport dey is."

Uncle Mingo noticed George staring at the latticework ROOTS 489

of small, livid scars on his black hands, wrists, and forearms.  Going over
to his cabin, Mingo returned shortly with a pair of curving steei spurs that
tapered to needle sharpness.

"De day you starts to handlin' birds, yo' hands gon' be lookin' like mine,
less'n you's mighty careful," said Uncle Mingo, and George was thrilled that
the old man seemed to consider it possible that he might put spurs on the
massa's game fowl one day.

Through the following weeks, though, long intervals would pass when Uncle
Mingo wouldn't permit much conversation, for it had been years since he had
talked with anyone except for the massa and the game chickens But the more he
began to get used to having George aroundand thinking of the boy as his
assistant--the oftener he would break his silence to address him, almost
always abruptly, about something he felt would help George to understand that
only the most superbly bred, conditioned, and trained game fowl could
consistently win fights and money for Massa Lea.

"Massa don't fear no man in de cockpit," Uncle Mingo told him one night.

"Fact, he love to match up 'against dem real rich mass as dat can 'ford dem
flocks o' much as a thousand birds so dey can pick out maybe dey bes' hundred
to fight wid ever' year.  You see we ain't got no great big flock, but massa
still win plenty bettin' 'against dem rich ones.  Dey don't like it cause he
done come up in de world from startin' out as a po' cracker.  But wid 'enough
real fine birds an' 'enough luck, massa could git to be jes' big an rich as
dey is" -- Uncle Mingo squinted at George.

"You hear me, boy?  Whole lots of peoples ain't realize how much money can be
winned in cock fighting I knows one thing, if somebody was to offer me a
hunnud-acre cotton or tobacco field, or a real good fightin' cock, I take de
bird every time.  Dat's how massa feel, too.  Dat's how come he ain't put his
money in no whole big lot of land or ownin' no big passel p' niggers."

By the time George turned fourteen, he began his Sun- days off by visiting
with his slave-row family, which he felt included Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah,
and Uncle Pompey no less than his own mammy.

Even after all this time, he would have to reassure her that he harbored no
ill will over the way she told him about his father.  But he still thought a
lot about his pappy, though he never discussed it with 490 ALEX HALEY

anyone, least of all the massa.  Everyone on slave row by now was openly awed
by his new status, though they tried to seem as if they weren't.

"I diapered yo' messy behind, an' you jes' let me catch you puttin' on any
airs, I still beat it in a minute!"  exclaimed Sister Sarah with affectionate
mock ferocity one Sunday morning.

George grinned.

"No'm, Sister Sarah, ain't got no airs."

But they were all consumed with curiosity about the mysterious things that
took place down in the forbidden area where he lived with the gamecocks.
George told them only things of a routine nature.  He said he had seen
gamecocks kill a rat, drive off a cat, even attack a fox.

But the game hens could be as bad-tempered as the roosters, he told them, and
sometimes even crowed, like the roosters.  He said that the massa was
vigilant against trespassers because of the high prices one could get for
even the stolen eggs of championship birds, not to mention for the birds
themselves, which thieves could easily take into another state and sell--or
even fight as their own.  When George said that Uncle Mingo had spoken of as
much as three thousand dollars having been paid for one bird by the very rich
game cocking Massa Jewett, Miss Malizy exclaimed, "Lawd, could o' bought
three-four niggers for less'n dat chicken!"

After he had talked with them at length, George would begin to' grow restless
and fidgety by early Sunday afternoon.  And soon he would go hurrying back
down the sandy road to his chickens.  Slowing down as he passed their pens
along the road, he would pluck fresh tender green grass, drop a handful into
each one, and sometimes stand awhile, enjoying the stags' contented gluck,
gluck, gluck as they gobbled it down.  About a year old now, they were
maturing into glossy full feather, with fire in their eyes, and entering a
stage of sudden explosive crowing and vicious flurrying efforts to get at
each other.

"De quicker de better we gits 'em out to de range walks to start matin'!"
Uncle Mingo had said not long ago.

George knew that would happen when the fully matured roosters already out on
the range walks would be brought in to be conditioned and trained for the
coming cock fighting season.

After visiting with the stags, George would usually ROOTS 491

spend the rest of his afternoon off wandering farther down the road into the
pine groves where the range walks were.  Occasionally he caught a glimpse of
one of the fully grown birds there ruling a covey of hens in total liberty.
Grass, seeds, grasshoppers, and other insects, he knew, were plentiful there,
along with good gravel for their craws and as much sweet, fresh water as they
wanted from the grove's several natural springs.

One chilly morning in early November, when Massa Lea arrived in the mule cart
Uncle Mingo and George were waiting with the crowing, viciously pecking stags
already collected in covered wicker baskets.

After loading them into the Cart, George helped Uncle Mingo catch his
favorite old scarred, squawking catcheock.

"He's just like you, Mingo," said Massa Lea with a laugh.

"Done all his fightin' an' breedin' in his young days.  Fit for nothin' but
to eat and crow now!"

Grinning, Uncle Mingo said,

"I ain't hardly even crowin' no mo' now, Massa."

Since George was as much in awe of Uncle Mingo as he was afraid of the massa,
he was happy to see them both in such rare good spirits.

Then the three of them climbed onto the mule cart Uncle Mingo seated
alongside the massa holding his old catcheock, and George balancing himself
in the back behind the baskets.

Finally Massa Lea stopped the cart deep in the pine grove.  He and Uncle
Mingo cocked their heads, listening carefully.  Then Mingo spoke softly.

"I hears 'em back in dere!"  Abruptly puffing his cheeks, he blew hard on the
head of the old catcheock, which promptly crowed vigorously.

Within seconds came a loud crowing from among the trees, and again the old
catehcock rooster crowed, its hackles rising.  Then goose pimples broke out
over George when he saw the magnificent gamecock that came bursting from the
edge of the grove.  Iridescent feathers were bristled high over the solid
body; the glossy tail feathers were arched.  A covey of about nine hens came
hurrying up nervously, scratching and clucking, as the range walk cock
powerfully beat its wings and gave a shattering crow, jerking its head about,
looking for the intruder.

Massa Lea spoke in a low tone.

"Let him see the catch- cock, Mingo!"

492 ALEX HALEY

Uncle Mingo hoisted it high, and the range walk cock seemed almost to explode
into the air straight after the old rooster.  Massa Lea moved swiftly,
grabbing the thrashing range walk cock in flight, deftly avoiding the
wickedly long natural spurs that George glimpsed as the massa thrust it into
a basket and closed the top.

"What you gawkin' for, boy?  Loose one dem stags!"  barked Uncle Mingo, as if
George had done it before.  He fumbled open the nearest basket, and the
released stag napped out beyond the mule cart and to the ground.  After no
more than a moment's hesitation, it flapped its wings, crowed loudly, dropped
one wing, and went strutting stiffly around one hen.  Then the new cock o'
the walk started chasing all the other hens back into the pine grove.

Twenty-eight mature two-year-olds had been replaced with year-old stags when
the mule cart returned just before dusk.  After doing it all over again to
get thirty-two more the next day, George felt he had been retrieving
gamecocks from range walks all his life.  He now busily fed and watered the
sixty cocks.  When they weren't eating, it seemed to him, they were crowing
and pecking angrily at the sides of their pens, constructed so as to prevent
their seeing each other, which would have caused some of them to get injured
in their violent efforts to fight.  With wonder, George beheld these
majestically wild, vicious, and beautiful birds.  They embodied everything
that Uncle Mingo ever had told him about their ancient bloodlines of courage,
about how both their physical design and their instincts made them ready to
fight any other gamecock to the death anytime, anywhere.

The massa believed in training twice as many birds as he planned to fight
during the season.

"Some birds jes' don't never pink up an' feed an' work like de rest," Uncle
Mingo explained to George, "an' dem what don't we's gwine to cull out."
Massa Lea began to arrive earlier than before to work along with Uncle Mingo,
studying the sixty birds, one by one, for several hours each day.
Overhearing snatches of their conversations, George gathered that they would
be culling out birds with any sores on their heads or bodies; or with what
they judged to be less than perfect beaks, necks, wings, legs, or over-all
configuration.  But the worst sin of all was not showing enough
aggressiveness.

One morning the massa arrived with a carton from the ROOTS 493

bie house.  George watched as Uncle Mingo measured out quantities of wheat
meal and oatmeal and mixed them into a paste with butter, a bottle of beer,
the whites of twelve game hen eggs, some wood sorrel, ground ivy, and a
little licorice.  The resulting dough was patted into thin, round cakes,
which were baked to crispness in a small earth oven.

"Dis bread give 'em strength," said Uncle Mingo, instructing George to break
the cakes into small bits, feed each bird three handfuls daily, and put a
little sand in their water pans each time he refilled them.

"I want 'em exercised down to nothin' but muscle and bone, Mingo!  I don't
want one ounce of fat in that cockpit!"  George heard the massa order.

"Gwine run dey tails off, Massa!"  Starting the next day, George was
sprinting back and forth tightly holding under an arm one of Uncle Mingo's
old catch cocks as it was hotly pursued by one after another of the cocks in
training.  As Mingo had instructed, George would occasionally let the
pursuing cock get close enough to spring up with its beak snapping and legs
scissoring at the furiously squawking catch cock

Catching the panting aggressor.  Uncle Mingo would quickly let it hungrily
peck up a walnut-sized ball of unsalted butter mixed with beaten herbs.  Then
he would put the tired bird on some soft straw within a deep basket, piling
more straw over the bird, up to the top, then closing the lid.

"It gwine sweat good down in dere now," he explained.  After exercising the
last of the cocks, George began removing the sweating birds from their
baskets.  Before he returned them to their pens.  Uncle Mingo licked each
bird's head and eyes with his tongue, explaining to George,

"Dat git 'em used to it if I has to suck blood clots out'n dey beaks to help
'em keep breath in when dey done got bad hurt fightin'."

By the end of a week, so many sharp, natural cock spurs had nicked George's
hands and forearms that Uncle Mingo grunted,

"You gwine git mistook fo' a game cocker you don't watch out!"  Except for
George's brief Christmas- morning visit to slave row, the holiday season
passed for him almost unnoticed.  Now, as the opening of the cock fighting
season approached, the birds' killer instincts were at such a fever pitch
that they crowed and pecked furiously at anything, beating their wings with a
loud whumping noise.  George found himself thinking how often he heard 494
ALEX HALEY

his mammy.  Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah, and Uncle Pompey bemoaning their lot;
little did they dream what an exciting life existed just a short walk down
the road.

Two days after the New Year, George grasped each gamecock in turn as Massa
Lea and Uncle Mingo closely snipped each bird's head feathers, shortened the
neck, wing, and rump feathers, then shaped the tail feathers into short,
curving fans.  George found it hard to believe how much the trimming
accentuated the birds' slim, compact bodies, snakelike necks, and big,
strong-beaked heads with their shining eyes.  Some of the birds' lower beaks
had to be trimmed, too, "for when they has to grab a mouth holt," explained
Uncle Mingo.  Finally, their natural spurs were scraped smooth and clean.

At the first light of opening day, Mingo and George were stowing the finally
selected twelve birds in square traveling coops woven of hickory strips.
Uncle Mingo fed each bird a walnut-sized lump of butter mixed with powdered
brown- sugar candy, then Massa Lea arrived in the wagon, carrying a peck of
red apples.  After George and Mingo loaded the twelve cock coops Mingo
climbed up on the seat beside the massa, and the wagon began rolling.

Glancing back.  Uncle Mingo rasped,

"You gwine or not?"

Leaping after them, George reached the wagon's tailgate and vaulted up and
in.  No one had said he was going!  After catching his breath, he hunkered
down into a squatting position.  The wagon's squeakings mingled in his ears
with the gamecocks' crowings, cluckings, and peckings.  He felt deep
gratitude and respect for Uncle Mingo and Massa Lea.  And he thought
again--always with perplexity and surprise--about his mammy's having said
that the massa was his daddy, or his daddy was the massa, whichever it was.

Farther along the road, George began seeing either ahead or emerging from
side roads other wagons, carts, carriages, and buggies, as well as horsemen,
and poor crackers on foot carrying bulging crocus sacks that George knew
contained gamecocks bedded in straw.  He wondered if Massa Lea had once
walked to cockfights like that with his first bird, which people said he had
won with a raffle ticket.  George saw that most of the vehicles carried one
or more white men and slaves, and every vehicle carried some cock ROOTS 495
pens.  He remembered Uncle Mingo's saying,

"Cockfightin' folks don't care nothin' 'bout time or distance when a big main
gwine happen."

George wondered if maybe some of those poor crackers afoot would someday come
-to own a farm and a big house like the massa did.

After about two hours, George began hearing whaf could only be the crowing of
many gamecocks faintly in the distance.  The incredible chorus grew steadily
louder as the wagon drew nearer to a heavy thicket of tall forest pines.  He
smelled the aroma of barbecuing meats; then the wagon was among others
maneuvering for places to park.  All around, horses and mules were tied to
hitching posts, snorting, stomping, swishing their tails, and many men were
talking.

"Tawm Leaf" The massa had just stood up in the wagon, flexing his knees to
relieve the stiffness.  George saw that the cry had come from several poor
crackers standing nearby exchanging a bottle among themselves, and was
thrilled at the instant recognition of his massa.  Waving at those men, Massa
Lea jumped to the ground and soon had joined the crowd.  Hundreds of white
people--from small boys holding their fathers' pants legs to old, wrinkled
men--were all milling about in conversational clusters.  Glancing around,
George saw that nearly all the slave people remained in vehicles, seemingly
attending to their cooped gamecocks, and the hundreds of birds sounded as if
they were staging a crowing contest.  George saw bedrolls under various
nearby wagons and guessed that the owners had come from such long distances
that they were going to have to stay overnight.  He could smell the pungent
aroma of corn liquor.

"Quit settin' dere gapin', boy!  We got to limber up dese birds!"  said Uncle
Mingo, who had just gotten the wagon parked.  Blocking out the unbelievable
excitement as best he could, George began opening the travel coops and
handing one after another angrily pecking bird into Uncle Mingo's gnarled
black hands, which proceeded to massage each bird's legs and wings.
Receiving the final bird.  Uncle Mingo said, "Chop up half dozen dem apples
good an' fine.  Dey's debes las' eatin' 'fo' dese birds gits to fightin'."
Then the old man's glance happened to catch the boy's glazed stare at' the
crowd, and Uncle Mingo re496 ALEX HALEY membered how it had been for him at
his first cockfight, longer ago than he cared to think about anymore.

"G'wan!"  he barked, "git out'n here an' run roun' li'l bit if you want to,
but be back 'fo' dey starts, you hear me?"

By the time his

"Yassuh" reached Uncle Mingo, George had vaulted over the wagon's side and
was gone.  Slithering among the jostling, drinking crowd, he darted this way
and that, the carpeting of pine needles springy under his bare feet.  He
passed dozens of cock coops containing crowing birds in an incredible array
of plumage from snow- white to coal-black, with every imaginable combination
of colors in between.

George stopped short when he saw it.  It was a large sunken circle, about two
feet deep, with padded sides, and its packed sandy clay floor was marked with
a small circle in its exact center and two straight lines equally distant
from each side.  The cockpit!  Looking up, he saw boisterous men finding
seats on a natural sloping rise behind it, a lot of them exchanging bottles.
Then he all but jumped from his skin at the nearby bellow of a reddish-faced
official, "Gentlemen, let's get started fighting these birds!"

George sped back like a hare, reaching the wagon only an instant before Massa
Lea did.  Then the massa and Uncle Mingo went walking around the wagon
talking in low tones as they glanced at the cooped birds.  Standing up on the
wagon's front seat, George could see over men's heads to the cockpit.  Four
men there were talking closely together as two others came toward them, each
cradling a gamecock under an arm.  Suddenly cries rose among the spectators:
"Ten on the red!"  .  .  .

"Taken!"  .  .  .

"Twenty on the blue!"  .  .  .

"Five of it!"

.  .

"Five more!"  .  .  .  "Covered!"  The cries grew louder and more numerous as
George saw the two birds being weighed and then fitted by their owners with
what George knew must be the needle- sharp steel gaffs.  His memory flashed
to Uncle Mingo once telling him that birds were seldom fought if either of
them was more than two ounces lighter or heavier than the other.

"Bill your cocks!"  cried someone at the edge of the cockpit.  Then quickly
he and two other men squatted outside the ring, as the two owners squatted,
within the circle, holding their birds closely enough to let them peck
briefly at each other.

ROOTS 497

"Get ready!"  Backing to their opposite starting marks, the two owners held
their birds onto the ground, straining to get at each other.

"Pit your cocks!"

With blurring speed, the gamecocks lunged against each other so hard that
each of them went bouncing backward, but recovering within a second, they
were up into the air shuffling their steel-gaffed legs.

Dropping back onto the pit floor, instantly they were airborne again, a
flurry of feathers.

"The red's cut!"  someone hollered, and George watched breathlessly as each
owner snatched his bird as it came down, examining the bird quickly, then set
it back on its start mark.  The cut, desperate red bird somehow sprang higher
than its opponent, and suddenly one of its scissoring legs had driven a steel
gaff into the brain of the blue bird.  It fell with its wings fluttering
convulsively in death.  Amid a welter of excited shouting and coarse cursing,
George heard the referee's loud announcement,

"The winner is Mr. Grayson's bird--a minute and ten seconds in the second
pitting!"

George's breath came in gasps.  He saw the next fight end even more quickly,
one owner angrily flinging aside his losing bird's bloody body as if it were
a rag.

"Dead bird jes' a mess of feathers," said Uncle Mingo close behind George.
The sixth or the seventh fight had ended when an official cried out,

"Mr.  Lea!"  .  The massa walked hurriedly away from the wagon cradling a
bird under his arm.  George remembered feeding that bird, exercising it,
holding it in his arms; he felt dizzy with pride.  Then the massa and his
opponent were by the cockpit, weighing in their birds, then fitting on the
steel gaffs amid a clamor of betting cries.

At

"Pit your cocks!"  the two birds smashed head-on; taking to the air, they
dropped back to the floor, furiously peeking, feinting, their snakelike necks
maneuvering, seeking any opening.

Again bursting upward, they beat at each other with their wings--and then
they fell with Massa Lea's bird reeling, obviously gaffed!  But within
seconds, in the next aerial flurry, the massa's bird fatally sank his own
gaff.

Massa Lea snatched up his bird--which was still crowing in triumph--and came
running back to the wagon.

498 ALEX HALEY

Only vaguely George heard,

"The winner is Mr. Lea's" -- as Uncle Mingo seized the bleeding bird, his
fingers flying over its body to locate the deep slash wound in the rib cage.
Clamping his lips over it.

Uncle Mingo's cheeks puckered inward with his force of sucking out the
clotted blood.  Suddenly thrusting the bird down before George's knees, Mingo
barked,

"Piss on it!  Right there!"  The thunderstruck George gaped.

"Piss!  Keep it from 'fectin'!"  Fumbling, George did so, his strong stream
splattering against the wounded bird and Uncle Mingo's hands.  Then Uncle
Mingo was packing the bird lightly between soft straw in a deep basket.

"B'lieve we save 'im, Massa!  What one you fightin' next?"  Massa Lea
gestured toward a coop.

"Git dat bird out, boy!"  George nearly fell over himself complying, and
Massa Lea went hurrying back toward the shouting crowd as another fight's
winner was announced.  Faintly, beneath the raucous crowing of hundreds of
cocks crowing, of men shouting new bets, George could hear the injured bird
clucking weakly in his basket.  He was sad, exultant, frightened; he had
never been so excited.  And on that crisp morning, a new game cocker had been
bora.

CHAPTER 90

"Look at 'im tryin' to out strut dem roosters!"  exclaimed Kizzy to Miss
Malizy, Sister Sarah, and Uncle Pompey.  George came striding up the road to
spend his Sunday morning with them.

"Hmph!"  Sister Sarah snorted with a glance at Kizzy.

"Aw, heish up, woman, we's jes' proud of 'im as you is!"

As George came on, still well beyond earshot.  Miss Malizy told the others
that only the previous evening she had overheard Massa Lea declare tipsily to
some game- cocker dinner guests that he had a boy who after four years of
apprenticeship seemed "natural born" to be ROOTS 499 come, in time, "the
equal of any white or black gamecock trainer in Caswell County."

"Massa say de of' Mingo nigger say dat boy jes' live an breathe chickens!

"Cordin' to massa, Mingo swear one evenin' late he was walkin' roun' down
dere an' seed George settin' hunched over kind of funny on a stump.  Mingo
say he ease up behin' real slow, an' he be dog if'n George wasn't talkin' to
some hens settin' on dey eggs.  He swear dat boy was tellin' dem hens all
'bout fights gwine be winned by de baby chicks de hens 'bout to hatch."

"Do Lawd!"  said Kizzy, her eyes bathing in the sight of her approaching son.
After the usual kissing and hugging with the women and handshaking with
Uncle Pompey, they all settled onto stools brought quickly from their cabins.
First they told George the latest white folks' news that Miss Malizy had
managed to overhear during the week.  The scant news this time was that more
and more strange-talking white folks from across the big water were said to
be arriving by the shiploads up North, swelling the numbers of those already
fighting to take the jobs previously held by free blacks, and there was also
steadily increasing talk of sending the free blacks on ships to Africa.
Living as he did in such isolation with that strange old man, they kidded
George, he couldn't be expected to know' about any of this, or about anything
else that was going on in the rest of the world"--less'n it git told to you
by some dem chickens" --and George laughingly agreed.

These weekly visits offered not only the pleasure of seeing his mammy and the
others but also of getting some relief from Uncle Mingo's cooking, which was
more suitable for chickens than for people.  Miss Malizy and Kizzy knew
enough by now to prepare at least two or three platefuls of George's favorite
dishes.

When his conversation began to lag--around noon, as usual--they knew he was
getting restless to leave, and after they had exacted his promise to pray
regularly, and after another round of huggings and kissings and pumping of
hands, George went hurrying back down the road with his basket of food to
share with Uncle Mingo.

In the summertime, George often spent the rest of his Sunday afternoon "off"
in a grassy pasture where Mingo could see him springing about catching
grasshoppers, which 500 ALEX HALEY

he would then feed as tidbits to the penned-up cockerels and stags.

But this was early winter, and the two-year-old birds had just been retrieved
from the range walks for training, and George was trying to salvage one of
the several birds that Mingo and the massa felt were probably too wild and
man-shy to respond properly to training and were likely to be culled out as
discards.  Mingo watched with affection and amusement as George forcibly
restrained the pecking, squawking, struggling stag and started crooning to
it, blowing gently on its head and neck, rubbing his face against the
brilliant feathers, massaging its body, legs, and wings--until it actually
began to settle down.

Mingo wished him luck, but he hoped George remembered what he had told him
about taking chances with an unreliable bird.  A game cocker breeding and
development of a fine game flock could represent a lifetime investment, and
it could all be lost in a single emotional gamble.  You simply couldn't risk
fighting a bird unless every detectable flaw had been permanently corrected.
And if it wasn't well, George had learned by now to quite calmly wring a
gamecock's neck.  He had come to share fully the massa's and Uncle Mingo's
view that the only worthwhile birds were those whose intense training and
conditioning, coupled with instinctive aggressiveness and courage, would
drive them to drop dead in a cockpit before they would quit fighting.

George loved it when the massa's birds killed their opponents swiftly and
without injury, sometimes within as little as thirty or forty seconds, but
privately--though he never would have breathed this to Mingo or Massa Lea--
nothing could match the thrill of watching a bird he had helped raise from a
baby chick battle to the death with another equally game champion, each of
them staggering, torn and bleeding, beaks lolling open, tongues hanging out,
wings dragging on the cockpit floor, bodies and legs trembling, until finally
both simply collapsed; then with the referee counting toward ten, the massa's
bird would find somehow one more ounce of strength to struggle up and drive
in a fatal spur.

George understood very well Mingo's deep attachment to the five or six
scarred old catch cocks that he treated almost as pets--especially the one he
said had won the biggest bet of the massa's career.

"Terriblest fight I ever seed!"  said ROOTS 501

Uncle Mingo, nodding toward that one-eyed veteran.

"It was h 'ck d?re in his prime, reckon three-four years 'fo' you come here.
Somehow or not her massa had got in dis great big New Year's main being'
backed by some real rich massa clear over in Surrey County, Virginia.  Dey
'nounced no less'n two hunnud cocks was to fight for a ten thousand dollars'
main stake, wid no less'n hunnud-dollar side bets.  Well, massa an' me took
twenty birds.  You lemme tell you, dem twenty birds was ready!  We driv days
in de wagon to git dere, feectin', waterin', an' massagin' dem birds in dey
coops as we went.  Well, git ting on near de end o' de fight- in', we'd
winned some, but we'd lost too many to git at dat main purse, an' massa was
plenty mad.  Den he found' out we " "a?  g'."  ine be matched 'against what
folks claimin' was de meanest mess o' feathers in Virginia.  You oughta
beared de hollerin' of bets on dat bird!

"Well, now!  Massa'd done hit his bottle a couple good licks, an' got all red
in de face as he could git!  An' out'n de birds we had Ie t.

he pick dato)' buzzard you's lookin' at right over dere.  Massa stuck dat
bird under one arm, an' commence walkin' roun' dat cockpit swearin' loud he
weren't backin' off nobody's bets!  He say he started wid nothin', if he win'
up wid nothin' again, he sho' wouldn't be no stranger to it!  Boy, lemme tell
you!  Dat tough of' meat an' pinfeathers over yonder went in dat cockpit, an'
he come out jes' barely, but datother bird was dead!  Dem referees 'nounced
dey'd been steady tryin' to kill one not her for nigh fo'teen minutes!  "
Uncle Mingo looked with warm nostalgia across at the old rooster.

"So bad cut up an' bleedin' he was s'posed to die, but I ain't slept a wink
'til I saved 'im!"

Uncle Mingo turned toward George.

"Fact, boy, dis sump'n I'se got to 'press on you mon I'se done--you got to do
everything you can to save hurt birds.  Even dem dat's been lucky 'enough to
kill quick, an' standin' up dere crowin' big an' actin' ready to fight again,
well, dey can fool you!  Soon's you git 'im back in yo' wagon, be sho' you
checks 'im good all over, real close!  Maybe he got jes' some 1'il spur cuts,
or nicks, dat can easy git 'fected.  Any sich cut, piss on it good.  If it's
any bleedin', put on a spider web compress, or li'l bit o' de soft belly fur
of a rabbit.  If you don't, two-three days later, yo' bird can start lookin'
like it's 502 ALEX HALEY

shrinkin' up, like a limp rag, den next thing you know yo' bird dead.

Gamebirds is like I hears racehosses is.  Dey's tough, but same time dey's
mighty delicate critters.  "

It seemed to George that Uncle Mingo must have taught him a thousand things,
yet thousands more were still in Uncle Mingo's head.  As hard as George had
tried to understand, he still couldn't comprehend how Mingo--and the
massa--could seem to sense which birds would prove to be the smartest,
boldest, and proudest in the cockpit.  It wasn't simply the assets you could
see, which by now even George had learned to recognize: the ideal short,
broad backs with the full, rounded chests tapering to a fine, straight keel
bone and a small, compact belly.  He knew that good, solid, round-boned wings
should have hardquilled, wide, glossy feathers that tended to meet under a
median-angled tail; that short, thick, muscular legs should be spaced well
apart, with stout spurs evenly spaced above strong feet whose long back toe
should spread well backward and flat to the ground.

Uncle Mingo would chide George for becoming so fond of some birds that he
seemed to forget their jungle instincts.  Now or then some gamecock docilely
being petted in George's lap would glimpse one of Uncle Mingo's old catch
cocks and with a shattering crow burst from George's grasp in violent pursuit
of the old bird, with George racing to stop them before one killed the other.
Uncle Mingo also repeatedly cautioned George to control his emotions better
when some bird of George's got killed in the cockpit; on several occasions
the big, strapping George had burst into tears.

"Nobody can't speck to win every fight, don' know how many times I got to
tell you dat!"  said Mingo.

Mingo also decided to let the boy know that for several months he had been
aware that George had been disappearing not long after full darkness fell,
then returning very late, recently close to daybreak.

Uncle Mingo was sure it had a connection with George's having once mentioned,
with elaborate casualness, that while he had been at the gristmill with Massa
Lea one day, he.  had met a pretty and nearly high-yaller big-house maid
named Charity from the adjacent plantation.

"All dese years down here, dese of' ears an' eyes o' mine's like a cat's.  I
knowed de first night you slipped off," Uncle Mingo said to.  his astounded
apprentice.

"Now, I ain't one to poke in nobody's business, ROOTS 503

but I'se gwine tell you sump'n.  You jes' be mighty sho' you ain't cotched by
some dese po' white pate rollers 'cause if dey don't beat you half to death
deyself, dey'll bring you back, an' don't you think massa won't lay his whip
'crost yo' ass!  " Uncle Mingo stared for a while across the grassy pasture
before he spoke again.

"You notice I ain't said quit slippin' off?"

"Yassuh," said George humbly.

During another silence, Mingo sat down on a favorite stump of his, leaned
slightly forward, and crossed his legs, with his hands clasped around his
knees.

"Boy!  I 'members back when I first found' out what gals was, too" and a new
light crept into Uncle Mingo's eyes as the aged features softened.

"It was dis here long, tall gal, she was still new to de county when her
massa bought a place right next to my massa's."  Uncle Mingo paused, smiling.

"Bes' I can 'scribe 'er, well, de niggers older'n me commence to callin' 'er

"Blacksnake'" -- Uncle Mingo went on, his smile growing wider and wider the
more he remembered--and he remembered plenty.  But George was too chagrined
at being caught to be embarrassed by anything Mingo was telling him.  It was
pretty clear though that he had underestimated the old man in more ways than
one.

CHAPTER 91

Walking up the road toward slave row one Sunday morning, George sensed that
something was wrong when he saw that neither his mammy nor any of the others
were standing around Kizzy's cabin to greet him, as they had never failed to
do before in the four years he'd spent with Uncle Mingo.  Quickening his
pace, he reached his mammy's cabin and was about to knock when the door was
snatched open and K-izzy practically jerked him inside, quickly shutting the
door beh'nd them, her face taut with fear.  "Is missis seed you?"

504 ALEX HALEY

"Ain't seed her.  Mammy!  What's the matter?"

"Lawd, boy!  Massa got word some free nigger over in Charleston, South
Ca'liny, name o' Denmark Vesey, had hunnuds o' niggers ready to kill no
tellin' how many white folks right tonight, if dey hadn't o' got caught.
Massa ain't long lef here actin' like he gone wild, a-wavin' his shotgun an'
threatenin' to kill anybody missy see outside dey cabins 'fo' he git back
from some big organizin' meetin'!"

Kizzy slid alongside the cabin's wall until she could look through the
cabin's single window toward the big house.  "She ain't still where she was
peepin' from!  Maybe she seen you comin' an' went an' hid!"  The absurdity of
Missis Lea hiding from him struck some of Kizzy's alarm into George.  "Run
back down wid dem chickens, boy.  No tellin' what massa do he catch you up
here!"

"I gwine stay here an' talk to massa, Mammy!"  He was thinking that in such
an extremity as this, he would even somehow indirectly remind the massa whose
father he was, which should curb his anger, at least somewhat.

"You plumb crazy?  Git outa here!"  Kizzy was shoving George toward the cabin
door.

"G'wan!  Git!  Mad as he was, he catch you here, jes' make it wuss on us.
Slip through dem bushes behin' de toilet 'til you's out'n sight o' missy!"

Kizzy seemed on the verge of hysteria.  The massa must have been worse than
he'd ever been before to terrify her so.

"Awright, Mammy," he said finally.

"But I ain't slippin' through no bushes.  I ain't done nothin' to nobody.
I'se gwine back down de road jes' same as I come up it."

"Awright, awright, jes' go 'head!"

Returning to the game fowl area, George had barely finished telling Uncle
Mingo what he had heard, fearing that he sounded foolish, when they heard a
horse galloping up.  Within moments Massa Lea sat glowering down at them from
his saddle, the reins in one hand, his shotgun in the other, and he directed
the cold fury of his words at George.

"My wife saw you, so y'all know what happened!"

"Yassuh" -- gulped George, staring at the shotgun.

Then, starting to dismount, Massa Lea changed his mind, and staying on his
horse, his face mottled with his anger, he told them,

"Plenty good white people would be dyin' tonight if one nigger hadn't told
his massa just in time.  Proves you never can trust none of you niggers!"
Massa Lea gestured with the shotgun.

"Ain't no tellin' ROOTS 505

what's in y'all's head off down here by yourselves!  But you just let me half
think anything funny, I'll blow your heads off quick as a rabbit's!  "
Glaring balefully at Uncle Mingo and George, Massa Lea wheeled his horse and
galloped back up the road.

A few minutes passed before Uncle Mingo even moved.  Then he spat viciously
and kicked away the hickory strips he had been weaving into a gamecock
carrying basket.  "Work a thou san years for a white man you still any
nigger!"  he exclaimed bitterly.  George didn't know what to say.  Opening
his mouth to speak again, then closing it, Mingo went toward his cabin, but
turning at the door, he looked back at George.

"Hear me, boy!  You thinks you's sump'n special wid massa, but nothin' don't
make no difference to mad, scared white folks!  Don't you be no fool an' slip
off nowhere till this blow over, you hear me?

I mean don't!  "

"Yassuh!"

George picked up the basket Mingo had been working on and sat down on a
nearby stump.  His fingers began to weave the hickory strips together as he
tried to collect his thoughts.  Once again Uncle Mingo had managed to divine
exactly what was going on inside his head.

George grew angry for permitting himself to believe that Massa Lea would ever
act like anything but a massa toward him.  He should have known better by now
how anguishing and fruitless it was to even think about the massa as his
pappy.  But he wished desperately that he knew someone he felt he could talk
with about it.  Not Uncle Mingo for that would involve admitting to Uncle
Mingo that he knew the massa was his pappy.  For the same reason, he could
never talk to Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah, or Uncle Pompey.  He wasn't sure if
they knew about the massa and his mammy, but if one did, then they all would,
because whatever anyone knew got told, even when it was about each other,
behind each other's backs, and he and Kizzy would be no exception.

He couldn't even raise the agonizing subject with his mammy not after her
fervently remorseful apologies for telling him about it in the first place.

After all these years, George wondered what his mammy really felt about the
whole excruciating thing, for by now, as far as he could see, she and the
massa acted as if they 506 ALEX HALEY

were no longer aware that the other existed, at least in that way.  It shamed
George even to think about his mammy having been with the massa as
Charity--and more recently Beulah--would be with him on those nights when he
slipped away from the plantation.

But then, seeping up from the recesses of his memory, came the recollection
of a night long ago, when he was three or four years old and awakened one
night feeling that the bed was moving, then lying still and terrified with
his eyes staring wide in the darkness, listening to the rustle of the corn
shucks and the grunting of the man who lay there beside him jerking up and
down on top of his mammy.  He had lain there in horror until the man got up;
heard the dull plink of a coin on the tabletop, the sound of footfalls, the
slam of the cabin door.  For a seemingly interminable time, George had fought
back scalding tears, keeping his eyes tightly closed, as if to shut out what
he had heard and seen.  But it would always come back like a wave of nausea
whenever he happened to notice on a shelf in his mother's cabin a glass jar
containing maybe an inch of coins.  As time passed, the depth of coins
increased, until finally he no longer could bring himself to look directly at
the jar.  Then when he was around ten years old, he noticed one day that the
jar was no longer there.  His mammy had never suspected that he knew anything
about it, and he vowed that she never would.

Though he was too proud ever to mention it, George had once considered
talking with Charity about his white father.  He thought she might
understand.  The opposite of Beulah, who was as black as charcoal.  Charity
was a considerably lighter mulatto than George; in fact, she had the tan skin
that very black people liked to call "high yaller."  Not only did Charity
seem to harbor no distress whatever about her color, she had laughingly
volunteered to George that her pappy was the white overseer on a big South
Carolina rice and indigo plantation with over a hundred slaves where she had
been born and reared until at eighteen she was sold at auction and bought by
Massa Teague to be their big-house maid.  On the subject of skin color, about
all that Charity had ever expressed any concern about was that in South
Carolina she had left behind her mammy and a younger brother who was
practically white.  She said that black-skinned young'uns had unmercifully
teased him until ROOTS 507

their mammy told him to yell back at his tormentors, "Turkey buzzard laid me!
Hot sun hatched me!  Gawd gimme dis color dat ain't none o' y'all black
niggers' business!"  From that time on.  Charity said, her brother had been
let alone.

But the problem of George's own color--and how he got it--was eclipsed for
the moment by his frustration at realizing that the near-uprising in faraway
Charleston was surely going to delay his following through with an idea he
had been developing carefully in his head for a long time.  In fact, nearly
two years had gone into his finally reaching a decision to try it out on
Uncle Mingo.  But there was no sense in telling him about it now, since the
whole thing would hang on whether or not Massa Lea would approve of the idea,
and he knew Massa Lea was going to remain angrily unapproachable about
anything for quite a while.  Though the massa stopped carrying the shotgun
after a week or so, he would inspect the game fowl only briefly every day,
and after terse instructions to Uncle Mingo, would ride off as grim-faced as
he had come.

George didn't really realize the full gravity of what had almost happened in
Charleston until, after another two weeks--despite Uncle Mingo's warning--he
found himself unable to resist any longer the temptation to slip out for a
visit with one of his girlfriends.

Impulsively, he decided to favor Charity this time, swayed by memories of
what a tigress she always was with him.  After waiting to hear Uncle Mingo's
snoring, he went loping for nearly an hour across the fields until he reached
the concealing pecan grove from which he always whistled his whippoorwill
call to her.  When he'd whistled four times without seeing the familiar "come
ahead" signal of a lighted candle waved briefly in Charity's window, he began
to worry.  Just when he was about to leave his hiding place and sneak on in
anyway, he saw movement in the trees ahead of him.  It was Charity.  George
rushed forward to embrace her, but she permitted him only the briefest hug
and kiss before pushing him away.

"What'sa matter, baby?"  he demanded, so aroused by her musky body aroma that
he hardly heard the quavering in her voice.

"You de bigges' fool, slippin' roun' now, many niggers as git ting shot by
pate rollers

508 ALEX HALEY

"Well, legit on in yo' cabin, den!"  said George, throwing an arm around her
waist.  But she moved away a';ain.

"You act like you ain't even heard 'bout no uprisin'!"

"I know was one, that's all" -- "I tell you 'bout it, den," and Charity said
she overheard her massa and missis saying that the ringleader, a Bible-
reading, free-black Charleston carpenter named Denmark Vesey, had spent years
in planning before cinfidi-ig in four close friends who helped him to recruit
and organize hundreds of the city's free and slave blacks.  Four heavily
armed groups of them had only awaited the signal to seize arsenals and other
key buildings, while others would burn all they could of the city and kill
every white they saw.  Even a horse company of black drivers would go dashing
wildly about in drays, carts, and wagons to confuse and obstruct white people
from assembling.

"But datSun- day mornin' some scairt nigger tol' his massa what s'posed to
happen dat midnight, den white mens was all over, catchin', beatin', an'
torturin' niggers to tell who was de up risers Dey's done hung over thirty of
'em by now, an' ever' where dey's throwin' de fear o' Gawd into niggers, jes'
like dey's doin' roun' here now, but 'specially in South Ca'liny.  Done run
out Charleston's free niggers an' burnt dey houses, de nigger preachers, too,
an' locked up dey churches, claimin' dat 'stid o' preachin', dey's been
teachin' niggers to read an' write" -- George had renewed his efforts to
start her moving toward the cabin.

"Ain't you been listenin' to me?"  she said, highly agitated.

"You git home 'fo' you's seed an' shot by some dese pate rollers

George protested that inside her cabin was safety from any pate rollers as
well as relief of his passion for her, which had caused him to risk being
shot already.

"Done tol' you, NAW!"

Exasperated, George finally shoved her roughly backward.

"Well, g'wan, den!"  And bitterly he went loping back the way he had come,
wishing furiously that he had gone to Beulah's instead, because it was too
late to go there now.

In the morning, George said to Mingo,

"Went up to see my mammy las' night, an' Miss Malizy was tellin' me what she
been hearin' massa tellin' missis 'bout dat uprisin'" -- Unsure if Mingo
would believe that story, he went on any ROOTS 509 way, telling what Charity
had said, and the old man listened intently.  Finishing, George asked,

"How come niggers here bouts git ting shot at 'bout sump'n clear in South
Ca'liny, Uncle Mingo?"

Uncle Mingo thought awhile before he said,

"All white folks scairt us niggers sometime gwine organize an' rise up
together" -- He snorted derisively.

"But niggers ain't gwine never do nothin' together."  He reflected for
another moment.

"But dis here shootin' an' killin' you talk 'bout gwine ease up like it
always do, soon's dey's kilt an' scairt niggers enough, an' soon's dey makes
whole passel o' new laws, an' soon's dey gits sick of payin' whole bunch o'
pecker- wood pate rollers

"How long all dat take?"  asked George, realizing as soon as he had said it
what a foolish question it was, and Uncle Mingo's quick look at him affirmed
the opinion.

"Well, I sho' ain't got no answer to dat!"  George fell silent, deciding not
to tell Uncle Mingo his idea until things had returned to normal with Massa
Lea.

In the course of the next couple of months, Massa Lea gradually did begin to
act more or less like his old self-- surly, most of the time, but not
dangerous.  And one day soon afterward George decided that the time was right.

"Uncle Mingo, I been studyin' a long time on sump'n" -- he began.

"I

b'lieves I got a idea might help massa's birds win mo' fights clan dey does.
" Mingo looked as if some special form of insanity had struck his strapping
seventeen- year-old assistant, who continued talking.

"I been five years gwine to de big chicken fights wid y'all.

Reckon two seasons back, I commence noticin' sump'n I been watchin' real
close every since.  Seem like every different game cocker massa's set o'
birds got dey own fightin' style"-- Scuffing the toe of one brogan against
the other, George avoided looking at the man who had been training game fowl
since long before he was born.

"We trains massa's birds to be real strong, wid real long wind, to win a lot
dey fights jes' by outlastin' de other birds.  But I done kept a count--demos
times we loses is when some bird flies up over massa's bird an' gaffs 'im
from de top, gin'ly in de head.  Uncle Mingo, I b'lieves if'n massa's birds
got stronger wings, like I b'lieves we could give 'em wid whole lot o'
special wing exercise, I b'lieves dey'd gin'ly fly big hern other birds, an'
kill even mo clan dey does now."

510 ALEX HALEY

Beneath his wrinkled brow, Mingo's deep-set eyes searched the grass between
George's and his own shoes.  It was a while before he spoke.

"I sees what you means.  I b'lieves you needs to tell massa."

"If you feels so, cain't you tell 'im?"

"Naw.  You thunk it up.  Massa hear it from you good as me."

George felt an immense sense of relief that at least Uncle Mingo didn't laugh
at the idea, but lying awake on his narrow corn shuck mattress that night,
George felt uneasy and afraid about telling Massa Lea.

Bracing himself on Monday morning when the massa appeared, George took a deep
breath and repeated almost calmly what he had said to Uncle Mingo, and he
added more detail about different game flocks characteristic fighting styles.
"--An' when you notices, Massa, dem birds o' Massa Graham's fights in a
fast, feisty way.  But Massa MacGregor's birds fights real cautious an'
wary-like.  Or Cap'n Peabody's strikes wid dey feets an' spurs close
together, but Massa Howard's scissors wid dey legs pretty wide apart.  Dat
rich Massa Jewett's birds, dey gin'ly fights low in de air, an dey peeks hard
when dey's on de groun*, an' any bird dey catches a good beak hold o' jes'
liable to git gaffed right dere" -- Avoiding the massa's face, George missed
his intensely attentive expression.

"Reckon what I'se tryin' to say, Massa, if you 'grees wid me an' Uncle Mingo
givin' yo' birds some whole lotsa strong wing exercisin' dat we oughta be
able to figger out, seem like dat help 'em to 'fly up highern de res' to gaff
'em from on top, an' speck nobody wouldn't quick catch on."

Massa Lea was staring at George as if he had never seen him before.

In the months that remained before the next cock fighting season, Massa Lea
spent more time than ever before in the game fowl training area, observing
and sometimes even joining Uncle Mingo and George as they tossed gamecocks
higher and higher into the air.  Descending with a frantic flapping of their
wings, trying to support their five to-six-pound weights, their wings grew
steadily stronger.

As George had prophesied, the 1823 cock fighting season opened and progressed
through one after another "main" contest, with no one seeming to detect how
or why the Lea birds were managing to win an even higher percentage of ROOTS
511

their fights than the year before.  Their steel gaffs had sunk fatally into
thirty-nine of their fifty-two opponents by the end of the season.

One morning about a week later, Massa Lea arrived--in high spirits--to check
on the recovery of the half dozen of his prime birds that had been injured
seriously during the season.

"Don't b'lieve dis'n gwine pull through, Massa," said Uncle Mingo, indicating
one so drooping and battered that Massa Lea's head quickly shook in agreement.

"But I speck dese in desenext two cages gwine heal up so good you be fightin'
'em again next season."  Mingo gestured next at the last three convalescing
birds.

"Dese here ain't gwine never be perfect enough fo' de big main fights no mo',
but we can use 'em as catch cocks if you wants to, Massa, or dey be good cull
birds anyhow."  Massa Lea expressed his satisfaction with the prognosis and
had started toward his horse when, turning, he spoke casually to George.

"These nights you slip out of here tomcat ting you'd better be mighty careful
about that bad nigger that's sweet on the same gal" -- George was so
dumfounded it took a full second before anger flared within him at Uncle
Mingo's obvious treachery.  But then he saw that Uncle Mingo's face was no
less astounded, as the massa continued.

"Missis Teague told my wife at their quilting club meeting she couldn't
figure out what had come over her yaller housemaid until lately some of the
other niggers told her the gal's wore out from two-timing you and some bad
buck older nigger" -- Massa Lea chuckled.

"Reckon the two of y'all sure must be tearin' up that gal!"

Charity!  Two-timing!  As George recalled furiously with what insistence she
had blocked him from her cabin that night, he forced himself to smile and
laugh nervously; Uncle Mingo joined in just as hollowly.  George felt
stricken.  Now that the massa had discovered that he had been slipping off
nights, what was he going to do to him?

Having paused to let George expect his anger, Massa Lea said instead--in an
incredible, almost man-to-man way "--Hell, long as you do your work, go on
and chase you some tail.  Just don't let some buck slice you to pieces-- and
don't get caught out on that road where the patrol is shootin' people's
niggers."

512 ALEX HALEY

"Nawsuh!  Sho' ain't" -- George was so confused he didn't know what to say.

"Sho' 'predates, Massa" -- Massa Lea climbed on his horse, a discernible
shaking of his shoulders suggesting to his gamecock trainers that he was
laughing to himself as he cantered on up the road.

Finally alone in his shack that night, after enduring Uncle Mingo's
frostiness through the rest of the day, free at last to vent his outrage at
Charity, George cursed her-- and vowed that he would turn his attentions,
which she obviously didn't deserve, to the surely more faithful, if less
hotly passionate, Beulah.  He also remembered that tall, cinnamon-colored
girl who had given him the eye at a secret frolic he had stumbled on in the
woods while hurrying homeward one night.  The only reason he hadn't tried her
then and there was he got so drunk on the white lightning she offered him
that he was barely able to stagger home by dawn.  But he remembered she said
her name was Ophelia and that she belonged to the very rich Massa Jewett, who
owned over a thousand game fowl or so it was said, and whose family had huge
plantations in Georgia and South Carolina as well as the one there in Caswell
County.  It was a long way to walk, but first chance he got, George decided
he was going to get better acquainted with that tasty-looking field girl
Massa Jewett probably didn't even know he owned.

CHAPTER 92

One Sunday morning George had left for his weekly visit on slave row by the
time Massa Lea showed up for daily inspection of the flock.  It was the
perfect moment.  After walking about and talking of game cocking for a while,
Uncle Mingo said, as if it had just occurred to him,

"Massa, you knows how every season we culls out dese fifteen or twenty good
birds dat's bet tern a whole lots o' folks fights ROOTS 513

wid.  I b'lieves you can make good side money if'n you lets dat boy fight yo'
culls in hack fights

Uncle Mingo knew well that the name of Torn Lea, throughout the length and
breadth of Caswell County, symbolized the rise of a poor white man to
eminence and a major game cocker who started out as a hack fighter with one
good bird.  Many a time he had told Uncle Mingo how fondly he looked back
upon those early, hungry days, declaring that their excitements were at least
the equal of those he had enjoyed in all of the major "mains" he had competed
in ever since.

The only significant differences, Massa Lea said, were that the big "main"
fights involved a better class of people as well as of gamecocks, and much
higher amounts of money were wagered; one might see really rich game cockers
winning--and losing--fortunes in the course of a single fight.  Hackfights
were for those who were able to fight only one or two or three usually
second- or third-rate birds--the poor whites, free blacks, or slaves whose
pocketbooks could afford bets ranging from twenty- five cents to a dollar,
with as much as perhaps twenty dollars being bet only when some hack fighter
went out of his head and put on the line everything he had in the world.

"What makes you think he can handle birds in a cockpit?"  asked Massa Lea.

Uncle Mingo was relieved to hear no objections to his proposal.

"Well, suh, close as you know dat boy watch fights, reckon he ain't missed a
move you made in de cockpits for five, six years, Massa.  An' put dat
togedder wid jes' how na'chel born he is wid roosters, sho' b'lieves he'd
need no mon a little teachin'.  Even fights he'd lose be jes' cull birds we
has roun' here dat you don't never hardly use nohow, suh."

"Uh-huh," the massa murmured, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

"Well, I don't see nothin' wrong with it.  Why don't you buff the spurs of
some culls and help him practice fights across the summer?  If he looks any
good by next season, yeah, I'll stake him a little for some bets,"

"Sho' will, yassuh!"  Uncle Mingo was exultant, since for months now in the
game fowl area's woodsy privacy, he and George had been mock-fighting culled
birds, their spurs harmlessly covered with a light leather pouch Uncle Mingo
had devised.  Being the cautious man he was, the old man 514 ALEX HALEY

hadn't ventured his suggestion to the massa without first ascertaining for
himself that his able apprentice showed genuine potential to develop into a
really good fight handler.  With enough back lighting experience, he thought
privately that George might someday become as expert as Massa Lea at handling
birds at a cockpit.  As Uncle Mingo had said, even the culls from a flock as
good as the massa's were superior to the ones usually pitted in the ma.  iy
hack fights that were staged each season in various impromptu and informal
settings around the county.  All in all, it seemed to Uncle Mingo that there
was practically no way George would miss.

"Well, boy, you jes' gwine stand dere will yo' mouth open?"  asked Uncle
Mingo when he broke the news that afternoon.

"Don't know what to say."

"Never thought I'd live to see de day when you ain't got nothin' to say."

"I... jes' don know how to thank you."  |1 "Wid all dem teeth showin', you
don' need to.  Le's get to work."

Every day that summer, he and Uncle Mingo spent at least an hour in the late
afternoons squatting on opposite sides of a makeshift cockpit, smaller in
diameter and shallower than the regular size, but still sufficient for
training.  After several weeks, the massa came down to observe one of the
sessions.  Impressed with the pit side agility and keen reflexes George
showed in handling his bird, he gave him a few cockfight pointers of his own.

"You want your bird to get the jump.  Now watch me" -- Taking over Mingo's
bird, he said,

"Okay, your referee's already hollered

"Get ready!"  You're down here holding your bird--but don't watch it!  Keep
your eyes on that referee's lips!  You want to tell the split second he's
going to say

"Pit!"  It's when his lips press together tight"-- Massa Lea compressed his
own lips.

"Right then snatch up your hands--you'll hear

"Pit' just as your bird gets out there first!"

Some afternoons, after their training session was done and the cull birds
they had used had been put back in their pens.  Uncle Mingo would sit and
tell George about the glory and the money that could be earned in hack fights
"Jes' like depo pecker woods hollers for massa to win, I'se ROOTS 515

seed niggers dat gits hollered for at de big hack fights An' it's much as
ten, twelve, even mo' dollars can be winned in one fight, boy!  "

"Ain't never had a dollar, Uncle Mingo!  Don't hardly know what a dollar look
like!"

"I ain't never had many neither.  Fact, ain't got no use for none no mo'.
But massa say he gwine stake you some bettin' money, an' if you wins' any, he
jes' might let you have some of it" -- "You reckon he do dat?"

"I specks, 'cause I know he got to be feelin' pretty good " bout dat
wing-strengthenin' idea of your'n what done put good money in his pocket
Thing is if he do, is you gwine have sense enough to save up what you git?  "

"Sho" do dat!  I sho' would!  "

"I'se even beared o' niggers winnin' an' savitf enough from hack fighting to
buy deyselves free from dey mass as

"Buy me an' my mammy both!"

Immediately Uncle Mingo rose from the stump he had been sitting on; the
lancing of jealousy that he had just experienced had not only come entirely
unexpectedly, but it was also so unsettling deep within him that he found it
hard to make any reply.  Then he heard himself snapping, "Well--reckon ain't
nothin' impossible!"  Wanting suddenly to get away from a feeling that his
own sense of sharing a truly close affection wasn't being equally
reciprocated, he walked quickly off toward his cabin, leaving George staring
after him, puzzled.

At a big cockfight main with Massa Lea early during the 1824 season.

Uncle Mingo heard from an old trainer he had known for years that a hack
fight was due to be held that coming Saturday afternoon behind the large barn
of a local plantation.

"Reckon he 'bout ready as he ever gwine be, Massa," Mingo told the massa
later.  On Saturday morning, as he had promised, Massa Lea came down and
counted out twenty dollars in small bills and coins to Uncle Mingo.

"Now, you know my policy," he said to both of them.

"Don't get in there fightin' a bird if you're afraid to bet on him!  If you
bet nothin' you'll never win nothin'!  I'm willin' to lose whatever you lose,
but I'm puttin' up the money and you're fightin' my chickens, so I want half
of any winnin's, you understand that?  And if I ever think there's any
messin' around with my money, I'll take it out 516 ALEX HALEY

of both your black hides!  " But they could clearly see that he was only
putting on a gruff act when he was really in a good humor as they chorused,

"Yassuh, Massa!"

Rounding the corner of the large gray-painted barn, trying not to show how
excited he was, George saw about twenty black hack fighters moving around,
laughing and talking on one side of a wide, shallow cockpit.

Recognizing about half of them from the big fights they'd attended with their
mass as as he had, he waved and smiled his greetings, exchanging nods with
others whose colorful dress and cockily independent air made him guess that
they must be free blacks.

Flicking glances at about an equal number of poor whites just across the
cockpit, he was surprised to find that he knew some of them, too, and
pridefully, he overheard one telling another,

"Them two's Torn Lea's niggers."  Both the black and white hack fighters soon
began untying their hay-filled crocus bags, withdrawing their crowing,
clucking birds and starting to limber them up as Uncle Mingo stepped around
the cockpit and said something to the stout, ruddy-faced referee, who nodded
with a glance across at George.

The boy was diligently massaging his stag when Mingo returned and began
working on the other bird they'd brought along.  George felt vaguely uneasy
at being physically closer than ever before to poor whites, who generally
meant nothing but trouble for blacks, but he reminded himself that Uncle
Mingo had told him on their way over here that hack fighting was the only
thing he knew of that poor whites and blacks did together.  The rule was that
only two whites or two blacks fought their birds against each other, but
anyone freely could bet on or against any bird in any fight.

With his bird well massaged and limbered up and nestled back in its sack,
George drank in more of the surrounding hubbub, and he saw yet more hack
fighters with filled sacks hurrying toward the barn when the referee began
waving his arms.

"All right, all right now!  Let's get started fightin these birds!

Jim Carter!  Ben Spehce!  Get over here and heel 'em up!  "

Two gaunt, shabbily dressed white men came forward, weighed in their birds,
then fitted on the steel gaffs amid ROOTS 51

sporadic shouted bets of twenty-five and fifty cents.  As fa as George was
concerned, neither bird looked any bettt than mediocre compared to the two
culls from the massa flock in his and Uncle Mingo's sacks.

At the cry

"Pit!"  the birds rushed out, burst into th air, and dropped back down,
flurrying and feinting fighting conventionally, George felt, and without the
quality c drama he always sensed with Uncle Mingo and the mass at the big
fights.  When at last one bird hung a gaff thi badly wounded the other in the
neck, it took minutes moi to finish to kill that George knew would have taken
a to\ class bird only seconds.  He watched the losing owner stal off bitterly
cursing his bad luck and holding his dead bir by the legs.  In a second
fight, then in a third, neither th winning nor losing birds showed George the
fight fire an style he was used to seeing, so diminishing his nervousnes that
as the fourth fight wore on, he all but cockily antic pated his own turn in
the cockpit.  But when it came, h heart immediately started pounding faster.

"All right, all right!  Now Mr. Roames' nigger with speckled gray, and Mr.
Lea's nigger with a red bird!  Y'a boys heel 'em up!"  George had recognized
his stocky blac opponent when they arrived; in fact, several times over th
past few years they had talked briefly at the big main fight Now, feeling
Uncle Mingo's eyes fastened on him, Geor^ went through the weighing-in and
then kneeled, unbuttor ing the bib pocket of his overalls and pulling out tt
wrapped gaffs.  Tying them onto his rooster's legs, he n membered Mingo's
admonition, "not too loose or dey ca git looser an' slide down, an' not too
tight less'n dey numi an' cramps his legs."  Hoping that he was achieving
just tl right tightness, George heard around him the cries,

"Fiff cents on de red!"  .  .  .

"Covered!"  .  .  .

"Dollar on c gray!"  .  "Got dat!"

"Fo' dollars on de red!"   It was Unc] Mingo, barking out by far the biggest
bet, triggering quick rash of cries to cover him.   George could feel tt
excitement of the crowd increasing along with his owi "Get ready!"

George kneeled, holding his rooster firmly against tt ground, feeling its
body vibrating in its anxiety to burst inl attack.

"Pit!"

518 ALEX HALEY

He had forgotten to watch the referee's lips!  By the time his hands jerked
up, the other bird was already blurring into motion.

Scrambling backward, George watched in horror as his bird got hit broadside
and knocked tumbling off balance, then gaffed in the right side with such
swiftness and force that it was sent reeling.  But recovering quickly, it
turned to the attack as a patch of feathers began to darken with blood.  The
two birds flurried upward, his own flying higher, but its gaffs somehow
missed on the way down.

Feinting, they went up again, about evenly high this time, both of their
gaffs flashing faster than anyone's eyes could follow.  George's heart
skipped beats for endless minutes as the birds pecked, feinted, lunged, and
leaped all over the cockpit.  He knew his rooster had to be weakening from
its steady loss of blood, even as it kept countering the rushes of the
spangled gray.  Then suddenly, with the flash of a spur, it was all over, and
George's bird lay quivering and fluttering in its final throes.  He scarcely
heard the bettors' shouts and curses as he snatched his dying bird from the
cockpit.  Tears bursting forth, he had pushed through the crowd of
astonished, staring men when Uncle Mingo roughly seized his elbow and
propelled him on beyond where anyone else could hear.

"You's actin' like a fool!"  he rasped.

"Go git datother bird fo' yo' next fight!"

"I ain't no good at it.  Uncle Mingo.  Done got massa's bird kilt!"

Mingo seemed incredulous.

"Anytime birds fight one gwine lose!  Ain't you never seen massa lose?  Now
git on back out dere!"  But neither his threats nor urgings were sufficient
to move the boy, and finally he stopped trying.  "Awright!  I ain't gwine
back tellin' massa we was scared to try winnin' his money back!"

Angrily, Uncle Mingo turned back toward the crowd around the cockpit.

Humiliated, George was surprised and grateful that he was hardly noticed by
the other hack fighters who had turned their attention to the next contest.
Two more fights passed before the referee cried out again,

"Torn Lea's nigger!"  In deeper shame, he heard Mingo bet ten dollars and get
it covered before the old man pitted the second of the massa's cull birds.
It expertly killed its opponent in less than two minutes.

Uncle Mingo's efforts to console George as they trudged ROOTS 519

back toward the plantation did little good.

"We done made two dollars, so how come you actin' like sump'n dyin'?"

"Jes' so shame o' losin'--an' reckon massa won't hardly want me losin' no mo'
his birds" -- Mingo was so upset that his boy seemed determined to become a
loser even before he got started that after George had moped around for three
days, acting as if he wanted the earth to open up and swallow him whole, he
spoke to Massa Lea about it.

"Would you have a word with dat boy, Massa?  Seem like he think it a disgrace
to lose one fight!"  When the massa next visited the game fowl area, he
accosted George.

"What's this I hear you can't lose a fight?"

"Massa, jes' feel terrible git ting yo' bird kilt!"

"Well, I've got twenty more I want you to fight!"

"Yassuh."  He was halfhearted even with the massa's reassurance.

But when George won with both birds in his next hack- fight, he began to
preen and crow like one of his winning roosters.  After proudly collecting
his bets, Uncle Mingo took him aside and whispered,

"Git yo' head big, you be losin' again!"

"Jes' lemme hoi' all dat money, Uncle Mingo!"  he exclaimed, holding out his
cupped hands.

As he stared at the pile of crumpled one-dollar bills and more in coins,
Mingo said laughingly,

"You take de money to massa.  Do y'all both good!"

On their way home, George tried for what seemed the hundredth time to
persuade Uncle Mingo to visit the slave row to meet his mammy, Miss Malizy,
Sister Sarah, and Uncle Pompey.

"Massa ain't got but de six o' us niggers, Uncle Mingo, look like de leas' we
could do is know one not her Dey sho' like to meet you.  I talks 'bout you
all de time when I'se dere, but dey feels like you don't like 'em or sump'n!"

"You an' dem both ought to know I can't be 'against nobody I don't even
know!"  said Mingo.

"Les' jes' keep it like it been, den dey ain't got to worry wid me, an' me
neither wid demAnd once again, when they reached the plantation, Mingo took
the path that would give him a wide berth around slave row.

Kizzy's eyes fairly bugged when she saw the bills and coins in George's palm.

"Lawdy, boy, where you git all dat?"  she demanded, calling Sister Sarah to
take a look.

520 ALEX HALEY

"How much is dat, anyhow?"  asked Sarah.

"Don't know, ma'am, but plenty mo' where it come from."

Sister Sarah towed George by his free hand to show the windfall to Uncle
Pompey.

"Speck I better git me a rooster," said the old man.

"But looka here, boy, dat's massa's money!"

"He gimme half!"  George explained proudly.

"Fact, I got to go give him his share right now."

Presenting himself 9f.  the ititchen, George showed Miss Malizy the money,
then asked to see the massa.

When Massa Lea pocketed his nine dollars' winnings, he laughed.

"Hell, I think Mingo's slippin' you my best birds and me the culls!"

George was beside himself!

In the next hack fight George won with two birds he had won with before, and
Massa Lea grew so intrigued by George's string of victories that he finally
ignored his self- imposed objections to attending a hack fight

The massa's unexpected arrival prompted hasty nudges and whispers among both
the white and black hack fighters Seeing even Uncle Mingo and George nervous
and uncertain, Massa Lea began to feel misgivings that he had come.  Then,
realizing that any initiative must be his own, he began grinning and waving
at one of the older poor whites.

"Hi, Jim."  Then to another: "Hey there, Pete!"  They grinned back, astounded
that he even remembered their names.

"Hey, Dave!"  he went on.

"See your wife kicked out the rest of your teeth--or was it that bad
whiskey?"  Amid uproarious laughter, the hack fight seemed nearly forgotten
as they crowded around the man who had started out as poor as any of them and
then became a legend for them.

Bursting with pride, George cradled his bird under one arm, and astonishing
Uncle Mingo as well as Massa Lea, he was suddenly strutting around the edges
of the cockpit.

"All right!  All right!"  he cried out loudly, "any y'all got any money, git
it on de line!  Don't care what you bets, if I cain't cover it, my massa sho'
can, rich as he is!"  Seeing the massa smiling, George grew yet louder.

"Dis here jes' his cull bird I's fightin', an' he beat anything out here!

C'mon!  "

An hour later, after batlyhooing a second winning fight, George had won
twenty-two dollars and Massa Lea nearly forty from accepting side bets
pressed upon him.  He really hated to take the money from men whom he knew to
be as dirt poor as he once had been, but he knew they would go the rest of
the year boastfully lying how they had lost ten times as much as they had in
betting against Torn Lea.

The cocky, self-proclaiming George was missed when he didn't show up at four
of Caswell County's next hack fights for Uncle Mingo was suffering from
another siege of severe coughing spells.  George saw how they came on him
suddenly, without warning, and then persisted, and he felt he shouldn't leave
his old teacher alone with the game fowl nor did he wish to go by himself.
But even when Mingo had improved somewhat, he said he still didn't feel quite
up to walking all the way to the next backlight--but he demanded that George
go anyway.

"You ain't no baby!  You sho' be gone quick enough if it was some gals dere!"

So George went alone, carrying in each hand a bulging bag containing a
gamecock cull.  As he came into view of the game cockers who had been missing
his recently colorful presence, one of them cried loudly, "Look out!  Here
come dat

"Chicken George'!"  There was a burst of laughter from them all, and he
heartily joined in.

The more he thought of it on his way home--with still more winnings in his
pocket--the better he liked the sound of that name.  It had a certain flair.

"Betcha none y'all can't guess what dey done name me at de hack fight he said
the moment he arrived on slave row.

"Naw, what?"

"Chicken George!"

"Do Lawd!"  exclaimed Sister Sarah.

Kizzy's love and pride shone from her eyes.

"Well," she said, "it's sho' 'bout close as anybody gwine git-to 'scribin you
now days

The nickname even amused Massa Lea when he was told it by Uncle Mingo, who
added wryly,

"Wonder to me dey ain't callin' 'im

"Cryin George," de way he still bust out cryin' anytime a bird he fightin'
git kilt.  Much as he winnin' now days don't make no difference!  Jes' let a
killin' gaff hit his rooster an' he gushin' and blubberin' an' hugging dat
bird like it his own chile.  Is you ever beared or seed de like of dat befo',
Massa?  "

522 AlEX HALEY Massa Lea laughed.

"Well, plenty times I've felt like crying myself when I'd bet a lot more'n I
ought to and my bird caught a gaff!  But, no, I guess he's the only one I've
heard of taldn' on like you say.  I think he just gets too attached to
chickens."

Not long afterward, at the biggest "main" of the year, the massa was
returning to the wagon carrying his bird, which had just won in the final
contest, when he heard someone shout,

"Oh, Mr. Lea!"  Turning, he was astonished to see the game cocker aristocrat
George Jewett striding toward him, smiling.

Massa Lea managed to make himself sound casual.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Jewett!"

Then they were shaking hands.

"Mr.  Lea, I'll be very frank, as one gentleman and game cocker to another.
I've recently lost my trainer.

The road patrol stopped him without a pass the other night.

Unfortunately, he tried to run and was shot, badly.  It's not likely he'll
pull through.  "

"Sorry to hear it--for you, I mean, not the nigger."  Massa Lea cursed his
confusion, guessing at what was coming.  The aristocrat wanted Mingo.

"Of course," said Jewett.

"So I find myself needing at 1^ least a temporary trainer, one who knows at
least something about birds" -- He paused.

"I've noticed at our cockfights you've got two of them.  I wouldn't think of
wanting your experienced older one, but I wonder if you would entertain a
fair offer for the other, the young one who's sparkin' one of the gals on my
place, my niggers tell me" -- Massa Lea's astonishment mixed with fury at
this evidence of treachery by Chicken George.  He sounded choked: "Oh, I see!"

Massa Jewett smiled again, knowing he'd drawn blood.  "Let me prove I'm not
wishing to engage us in bargaining."  He paused.

"Would three thousand be all right?"

Massa Lea was staggered, not sure if he had heard right

"I'm sorry, Mr. Jewett," he heard himself say flatly.  He felt the thrill of
refusing a rich blue blood

"All right."  Jewett's voice tightened.

"My final offer: four!"

"I'm just not selling my trainers, Mr. Jewett."

The rich game cocker face fell, his eyes had gone cold.  "I understand.  Of
course!  Good day to you, sir!"

ROOTS .  523

"The same to you, sir," said Massa Lea, and they strode away in opposite
directions.

The massa returned to the wagon as quickly as he could without running, his
rage rising.  Uncle Mingo and Chicken George, seeing his face, sat with their
own carefully blank.  Reaching the wagon, he brandished his fist at George,
his voice trembling with fury.

"I'll bash your brains in!  What the hell are you doin' over at
Jewett's--tellin' him how we train chickens?"

Chicken George turned ashen.

"Ain't tol' Massa Jewett nothin', Massa" -- He could hardly speak.

"Ain't spoke nary word to him, never, Massa!"  His total astonishment and
fright half convinced Massa Lea.

"You tryin' to tell me you're going' way the hell over there just to tomcat
with Jewett's wench?"  Even if it was innocent, he knew how every visit
exposed his apprentice trainer to Jewett's cunning, which could lead to
anything.

"Massa, Lawdy mercy" -- Another wagon now was pulling close by, with men
calling and waving to the massa.  Returning their waves, Massa Lea slitted
his mouth into a smile and went clambering up onto the farthest edge of the
wagon's seat, snapping at the terrified Uncle Mingo out of the corner of his
mouth,

"Drive, goddammit!"  A knife could have cut the tension during the seemingly
endless trip back to the plantation.  Nor was the tension much less taut
between Uncle Mingo and Chicken George during the rest of the day.  That
night a sleepless George lay in a sweat of anticipation over the punishment
he knew was coming.

But none came.  And a few days later the massa said to Uncle Mingo, as if
nothing had happened,

"Next week I've got a bid to fight birds just over the state line in
Virginia.  I know that long ride wouldn't do your coughing spells any good,
so I'll just take the boy."

"Yassuh, Massa."

Uncle Mingo had long known this day was coming; that's why the massa had
trained the boy to replace him.  But he hadn't dreamed it would come so soon.

CHAPTER 93

"What you thinkin' about so hard, boy?"

After more than an hour sharing the wagon's seat and watching the warm
February morning's fleecy clouds, the dusty road stretching ahead, or the
monotonously flexing muscles of the mules' rumps, Massa Lea's sudden question
startled Chicken George.

"Nothin'," he replied.

"Wasn't thinkin' 'bout nothin', Massa."

"Somethin' I ain't never understood about you niggers!"  There was an edge in
Massa Lea's voice.

"Man try to talk to y'all decent, you right away start acting stupid.  Makes
me madder'n hell, especially a nigger like you that talks his head off if he
wants to.  Don't you reckon white people would respect you more if you acted
like you had some sense?"

Chicken George's lulled mind had sprung to keen alertness.

"Dey might, den again some might not, Massa," he said carefully.

"It all depen'."

"There you go with that round-the-mulberry-bush talk.  Depend on what?"

Still parrying until he got a better idea of what the massa was up to,
Chicken George offered yet another meringue of words.

"Well, suh, I means like it depen' on what white folks you talkin' to, Massa,
leas' ways dat's what I gits de impression."

Massa Lea spat disgustedly over the side of the wagon.  "Feed and clothe a
nigger, put a roof over his head, give him everything else he needs in this
world, and that nigger'll never give you one straight answer!"

Chicken George risked a guess that the massa had simply decided upon impulse
to open some sort of conversation with him, hoping to enliven what had become
a boring and seemingly endless, wagon ride.

ROOTS 525

In order to stop irritating Massa Lea, he tested the water by saying, "You
wants de straight up-an'-down truth, Massa, I b'lieves mos' niggers figger
dey's being' smart to act maybe dumber'n dey really is, 'cause mos' niggers
is scairt o' white folks."

"Scared!"  exclaimed Massa Lea.

"Niggers slick as eels, that's what!  I guess it's scared niggers plottin'
uprisings to kill us every time we turn around!  Poisonin' white people's
food, even killin' babies!

Anything you can name against, white people, niggers doin' it all the time,
and when white people act to protect themselves, niggers hollerin' they so
scared!  "

Chicken George thought it would be wise to stop fiddling with the massa's
hair trigger temper.

"Don't b'lieve none on yo' place ever done nothin' like dat, Massa," he said
quietly.

"You niggers know I'd kill you if you did!"  A gamecock crowed loudly in its
coop behind them, and some others clucked in response.

George said nothing.  They were passing a large plantation, and he glanced
across at a group of slaves beating down the dead cornstalks in preparation
for plowing before the next planting.

Massa Lea spoke again.

"It makes me sick to think how tough niggers can make it for a man that's
worked hard all his life tryin' to build up something'."

The wagon rolled on in silence for a while, but Chicken George could feel the
massa's anger rising.  Finally the massa exclaimed,

"Boy, let me tell you something'!  You been all your life on my place with
your belly full.  You don't know nothin' about what it's like to grow up
scufflin' and half starvin' with ten brothers and sisters and your mama and
papa all sleeping in two hot, leaky rooms!"

Chicken George was astonished at such an admission from the massa, who went
on heatedly as if he had to get the painful memories out of his system.

"Boy, I can't remember when my mama's belly wasn't big with another baby.
And my papa chawin' his tobacco and half drunk forever hollerin' and cussin'
that none of us was workin' hard enough to suit him on ten rocky acres that I
wouldn't give fifty cents an acre for, where he called himself a farmer!"
Glaring at Chicken George, he said angrily,

"You want to know what changed my life?"

"Yassuh," said George.

526 ALEX HALEY

"This big faith-healer came.  Everybody was runnin around excited about his
big tent being' put up.  The openin' night everybody who could walk, even
those who needed to be carried, were overflowin' that tent.  Later on, people
said there had never been such a hellfire sermon and such miracle cures in
Caswell County.  I never will forget the sight of those hundreds of white
people leapin', screamin', shoutin', and testifyin'.  People fallin' out in
one not her arms, moanin' and twitchin' and havin' the jerks.  Worse than
you'll see at any nigger camp meetin'.  But midst all that ruckus and hoorah,
there was one thing that somehow or not her really hit me."  Massa Lea looked
at Chicken George.

"You know anything about the Bible?"

"Not--well, nawsuh, not to speak of."

"Bet you wouldn't of thought I know nothin' about it, either!  It was from
the Psalms.  I've got that place marked in my own Bible.  It says, " I have
been young and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor
His seed beggin' bread.  "

"After that preacher was long gone, that sayin' stuck in my head.  I turned
it up and down and sideways tryin' to figure out what meanin' it had for me.
Everything I saw in 5 ( my family just translated to beggin' bread.  We
didn't have nothin', and we wasn't going to get nothin'.  Finally it seemed
like that sayin' meant if I made myself to get righteous--in other words, if
I worked hard, and lived the best I knew how--I'd never have to beg for bread
when I was old."  The massa looked at Chicken George defiantly.

"Yassuh," said Chicken George, not knowing what else to say.

"That's when I left home," Massa Lea went on.

"I was eleven years old.  I hit the road, asking' any and everybody for a
job, doing anything, includin' nigger work.  I was ragged.  I ate scraps.  I
saved every cent I got, I mean for years, until I finally bought my first
twenty-five woods land acres, along with my first nigger, name of George.
Fact, that's who I named you for" -- The massa seemed to expect some response.

"Uncle Pompey tol' me 'bout 'im," said Chicken George.

"Yeah.  Pompey came along later, my second nigger.  Boy, you hear what I tell
you, I worked shoulder to shoulder alongside that George nigger, we slaved
from can to can't, ROOTS 527

rootin up stumps and brush and rocks to plant my first crop.  It wasn't
nothin' but the Lord that made me buy a twenty-five-cent lottery ticket, and
that ticket won me my first gamecock.  Boy, that was the best bird I ever
had!  Even when he got cut bad, I'd patch him up and he went on to win more
hack fights than anyone ever heard of one rooster doin'.  "

He paused.

"Don't know how come I'm sittin' up here talkin' this way to a nigger.  But I
guess a man just need to talk to somebody sometime."

He paused again.

"Can't do no talkin' to your wife, much.  Seem like once a woman catches a
husband to take care of them, they spend the rest of their lives either sick,
restin', or complainin' about something', with niggers waitin' on them hand
and foot.  Or they're forever pattin' tSeir faces with powder till they look
like ghosts" -- Chicken George couldn't believe his ears.  But the massa
couldn't seem to stop himself.

"Or then you can get the other kind, like my family.

I've wondered a lot of times why none of my nine brothers and sisters didn't
fight to get away like I did.  They're still scumin' and starvin' just the
same as the day I left--only now they've all got their own families.  "

Chicken George decided that he had best not acknowledge with even a "Yassuh"
anything the massa was saying about his family, some of whom George had seen
briefly talking with the massa when they were at cockfights or in town.
Massa Lea's brothers were dirt-poor crackers of the sort that not only the
rich planters but also even their slaves sneered at.  Time and again he had
seen how embarrassed the massa was to meet any of them.  He had overheard
their constant whining about hard times and their begging for money, and he
had seen the hatred on their faces when the massa gave them the fifty cents
or a dollar that he knew they were going to spend on white lightning.

Chicken George thought of how many times he had heard Miss Malizy tell how,
when the massa used to invite members of his family home for dinner" they
would eat and drink enough to glut three times their own number, and the
moment he was out of earshot, would heap scorn on him as if he were a dog.

"Any one of them could have done what I did!"  Massa 528 ALEX HALEY

Lea exclaimed beside him on the wagon seat.

"But they didn't have the gumption, so the hell with them!"  He fell silent
again--but not for long.

"One way or another, I've got things going' along pretty good now--a
respectable roof to live under, my hundred or so game birds and eighty-five
acres with over half of it in crops, along with the horse, mules, cows, and
hogs.  And I've got you few lazy niggers."

"Yassuh," said Chicken George, thinking that it might be reasonably safe to
express in a mild way another point of view.

"But us niggers works hard for you, too, Massa.  Long as I been knowin' my
mammy an' Miss Malizy an Sister Sarah an' Uncle Pompey an' Uncle Mingo--ain't
dey been workin' fo' you hard as dey can?"  And before the massa could reply,
he tacked on something Sister Sarah had mentioned during his visit to slave
row the previous Sunday.

"Fact, Massa, 'ceptin' for my mammy, ain't none of 'em less'n fifty years
ol'" -- He stopped himself, not about to add Sister Sarah's conclusion that
the massa was simply too cheap to buy any younger slaves, apparently
expecting to work the few he had until they dropped dead.

"You must not have been payin' attention to all I've been tellin' you, boy!
Ain't a nigger I got worked as hard as mel y: So don't come tellin' me how
hard niggers worki" "Yassuh."

" Yassuh' what?"

"Jes' yassuh.  You sho' work hard, too, Massa."

"Damn right!  You think it's easy being responsible for everything and
everybody on my place?  You think it's easy keepin' up a big flock of
chickens?"

"Nawsuh, I know for sho' dat's hard on you, Massa."  George thought of Uncle
Mingo's having attended the game flock every day for more than thirty
years--not to mention his own seven.  Then, as a ploy to emphasize Mingo's
decades of service, he asked innocently,

"Massa, is you got any idea how of' is Uncle Mingo?"

Massa Lea paused, rubbing his chin.

"Hell, I really don't know.  Let's see, I once figured he's around fifteen
years older'n I am--that would put him somewhere up in his early sixties.
And getting' older every day.  Seems like he's getting' sick more and more
every year.  How does he seem to you?  You're livin' down there around him."

Chicken George's mind flashed to Uncle Mingo's recent ROOTS 529

bout of coughing, the worst one he had ever yet suffered, as far as be knew.
Remembering how Miss Malizy and Sister Sarah often declared that the massa
viewed any claim of sickness on their part as sheer laziness, he said
finally, "Well, Massa, mos' de time seem like he feelin' fine, but I b'lieves
you really ought to know he do git real bad coughin' spells sometimes--so bad
I gits scared, 'cause he jes' like a daddy to me."

Catching himself too late, instantly he sensed a hostile reaction.  A bump in
the road set the cooped gamecocks clucking again, and for several moments the
wagon rolled on before Massa Lea demanded, "What's Mingo done so much for
you?  Was it him took you out of the fields and sent you down there with a
shack for yourself?"

"Nawsuh, you done all dat, Massa."

They rode on in silence for a while until the massa decided to speak again.

"I hadn't much thought about what you said there back a ways, but now that
you mention it, I really got me a bunch of old niggers.

Some of 'em bound, to start breakin' down on me anytime now, goddammiti Much
as niggers cost nowadays, I'm going' to have to buy one or two younger field
hands!  " He turned as if accosting Chicken George.

"You see what I'm talking about, the kind of things I have to worry about all
the time?"

"Yassuh, Massa."

"

" Yassuh, Massa!   " That's the nigger answer to everything!"

"You sho' wouldn't want no nigger disagreein' wid you, suh."

"Well, can't you find something to say besides

"Yassuh, Massa'?"

"Nawsuh--I means, well, suh, leas' you got some money to buy niggers wid,
Massa.  Dis season you winned so good in de cockfights."  Chicken George was
hoping to move the conversation onto a safer subject.

"Massa," he asked guilelessly, "is it any game cockers ain't got no farm at
all I means don't raise no crops, jes' nothin' but chickens?"

"Hmmmm.  Not that I know of, unless it's some of those city slickers, but I
never heard of any of them with enough birds to be called serious game
cockers He thought for a moment.

"In fact, it's usually the more gamecocks, the bigger the farm--like that Mr.
Jewett's place where you've been tomcat ting

530 ALEX HALEY

Chicken George could have kicked himself for handing the massa that kind of
an opening, and he quickly sought to close it.

"Ain't been over dere no mo', Massa."

After a pause, Massa Lea said,

"Found you another wench somewhere else, huh?"

Chicken George hesitated before replying.

"I stays close now, Massa."

Which avoided a direct lie.

Massa Lea scoffed.

"Big, strapping twenty-year-old buck like you?

Boy, don't tell me you're not slippin' around nights getting' plenty of that
good hot tail!  Hell, I could hire you out to stud; bet you'd like that!  "
The massa's face creased into a half leer.

"Good friend of mine says them black wenches got plenty good hot tail, now
tell me the truth, ain't that right, boy?"

Chicken George thought of the massa with his mammy.  Steaming inside, he said
slowly, almost coldly,

"Maybe dey is, Massa" -- Then, defensively,

"I don't know dat many" -- "Well, okay, you don't want to tell you've been
slippin' off my place at night, but I know it's time, and I know where you go
and how often you go.  I don't want that road patrol maybe shooting you like
happened to that Mr. Jewett's trainer nigger, so I'll tell you what I'm going
to do, boy.  When we get back, I'm going' to write you out a travelin' pass
to go chase tail every night if you want to!  Ain't never thought I'd do that
for no nigger!"

Massa Lea seemed almost embarrassed, then covered it with a frown.

"But I'm going to tell you one thing.  First time you mess up, don't get back
by daybreak, or too wore out to work, or I find out you've been on that
Jewett place again, or anything else you know you're not supposed to do, I'm
tearin' up the pass for good--and you along with it Got that?"

Chicken George was incredulous.

"Massa, I sho' 'predate dat!  Sho' do, Massa!"  ^ Expansively, Massa Lea
waved away the thanks.

"All right now, you see I'm not half bad as you niggers make out.  You can
tell 'em I know how to treat a nigger good if I want to."

The leering grin returned,

"Okay, what about them hot black wenches, boy?  How many can you mount in a
night?"

Chicken George was squirming in his seat.

"Suh, like I said, ain't know many" ROOTS 531

But his words seemed unheard as Massa Lea went on.  "I hear tell whole lots
of white men go and find nigger women for their pleasure.  You know that
happens, don't you, boy?"

"I'se beared of it, Massa," he said, trying not to think about the fact that
he was talking to his own father.  But apart from what went on in plantation
cabins, George knew that in Burlington, Greensboro, and Durham there were
"special houses," spoken of only in hushed tones, usually run by some free
black woman, where he had heard that white men paid from fifty cents to a
dollar to couple with women in their choice of colors from sooty black to
high yaller.

"Hell," the massa persisted,

"I'm just talkin' to you sittin up here by ourselves in this wagon.  From
what I hear tell, they're nigger women, all right, but by God they're women!
Especially if it's one of the kind that lets a man know she wants it as much
as he does.  I hear tell they can be as hot as firecrackers, not always
claimin' they're sick and whinin' about everythin' under the sun."  The massa
looked inquisitively at Chicken George.  "Bellow I know told me you nigger
boys can't never get enough of that hot black tail, that your experience?"

"Massa, nawsuh--leas' ways I means jes' now sho' ain't" -- "There you go
talkin' round the maypole again!"

"Don't mean roun' no pole, Massa."  Chicken George was trying his best to
project his seriousness.

"I'se tryin' to say sump'n to you I ain't never tol' nobody, Massa!  You know
dat Massa MacGregor wid dem spangle yellow birds in de cockfights?"

"Of course.  He and I talk a lot.  What's he got to do with it?"

"Well, you done give yo' word you gon' give rrie a pass, so ain't no need me
lyin'.  Well, yassuh, lately I beefa slippin out jes' like you say, visitin'
dis here gal over y Massa MacGregor's" -- His face was a study in earnestness.

"Dis here's sump'n I really been needin' to talk wid somebody I really can
talk to, Massa.  Jes' cain't figger 'er out!  She name Matilda, she work in
dey fiel', an' fill in if dey needs 'er in dey big house.  Massa, she de
firs' gal don't care what I'se said or tried, won't let herself be touched,
nmsiih!  Bes' I can git, She say she like me all right, 'cept 532 ALEX HALEY

she cain't stan' my ways--an' I tol* 'er I sho' ain't got no use for hern
neither.  I tol' her I can git all de womens I wants, she jes' say go git 'em
den, leave her alone.  "

Massa Lea was listening to Chicken George as incredulously as he had to the
massa.

"An' not her thing," he went on.

"Every time I goes back she keep quotin' de Bible on me!  How come she read
de Bible, a preacher massa raised 'er till his 'ligion made 'im sell his
niggers.  Fact, I tell you how 'ligious she is!  She beared 'bout bunch o'
free niggers givin' a big night frolic wid eatin' an' liquor an' dancin'
somewheres in de woods roun' over dere.  Well, dis gal, ain't but seb'nteen,
slip 'way from Massa MacGregor's an' bust in on dat frolic while it gwine on
hot an' heavy!  Dey says she commence sich a carryin' on, shoutin' for de
Lawd to come save dem sinners 'fo' de devil git dere an' burn 'em up, dat
every one dem free niggers near 'bout run over one not her leavin' dere, dey
fiddler hard behin' 'em!"

Massa Lea laughed uproariously.

"Sounds like a hell of a gal!  I'll say that!"

"Massa" -- Chicken George hesitated.  " " Fo' I met her, I is been catchin'
jes' much tail as you says--but dog if she ain't got me to feelin' mo' to it
clan jes' tail.  Man git to thinkin' 'bout jumpin' de broom wid a good
woman"-- Chicken George was astounded at himself.

"Dat is, if she have me," he said in a weak voice.  Then even more weakly,

"An' if'n you wouldn't make no objections" -- They rode on quite a way amid
the wagon's squeakings and the gamecocks' cluckings before Massa Lea spoke
again.

"Does Mr. MacGregor know you've been courtin' this gal of his?"

"Well, she being' a field han', don't 'magine she never say nothin' to him
directly, nawsuh.  But de big-house niggers knows, I speck some dem done tol'
it."

After another lull, Massa Lea asked,

"How many niggers has Mr. MacGregor got?"

"He got pretty big place, Massa.  Seem like from de size his slave row, I'd
reckon twenty or mo niggers, Massa."  George was confused by the questions.

"Been thinking," said the massa after another silence.  "Since you were born,
you never give me any real trouble-- in fact, you've helped me around the
place a lot, and I'm going' to do something' for you.  You just heard me
sayin' ROOTS 533

a while back I need some younger field-hand niggers.  Well, if that gal's big
enough fool to jump the broom with somebody loves runnin' tail as much as I
expect you won't never quit doin', then I'll ride over and talk with Mr.
MacGregor.  If he's got as many niggers as you say, he ought not to miss one
field gal all that much--if we can come to a decent price.  Then you could
move that gal--what's her name?  "

" " Tilda--Matilda, Massa," breathed Chicken George, unsure if he was hearing
right.

"Then you could move her over to my place, build y'all a cabin" George's
mouth worked, but no sound came out Finally he blurted, "Nothin' but
high-class massa do dat!"

Massa Lea grunted.  He gestured.

"Long as you understand your first place remains down with Mingo!"

"

" Co'se, suhl"

Mustering a scowl, Massa Lea directed a stabbing forefinger at his driver.

"After you get hitched, I'm takin' back that travelin' pass!

Help what's her name, Matilda, keep your black ass home where it belongs!  "

Chicken George was beyond words.

CHAPTER 94

When the sun rose on the morning of Chicken George's wedding in August of
1827, the groom was frantically fastening iron hinges onto the cured-oak
doorjamb of his still uncompleted two-room cabin.

Loping to the barn when that was done, he hurried back carrying over his head
the new door that Uncle Pompey had carved and stained with the juice of
crushed black walnut hulls, and mounted it in place.

Then, casting a worried glance at the rising sun, he stopped long enough to
wolf down the sausage and biscuit sandwich that had been practically thrown
at him by his mammy late the previous evening in her fury at his long
succession of put-offs, excuses, interruptions, and excurnLLA IIHLI.  I
sions.  He had waited so long, and worked so slowly, that she had finally
commanded everyone else not only to stop helping him anymore, but also even
to stop offering him any encouragement.

Chicken George next quickly filled a large keg with slaked lime and water,
stirred it vigorously, and--as fast as he could--dipped his large brush into
the mess and began slathering whitewash over the outside of the rough- sawn
planking.  It was about ten o'clock when he finally backed away, almost as
whitened as the cabin, to survey the completed job.  There was plenty of time
to spare, he told himself.

All he had to do was bathe and dress, then take the two-hour wagon ride to
the MacGregor plantation, where the wedding was due to start at one.

Bounding between the cabin and the well, he dashed three bucketfuls of water
into the new galvanized tub in the cabin's front room.

Humming loudly as he scrubbed himself, he dried himself off briskly and then
wrapped himself in the bleached-sacking towel to run into the bedroom.  After
climbing into his cotton long drawers, he slipped on his blue stiff-front
shirt, red socks, yellow pants, and yellow belt-backed suitcoat, and finally
his brand-new |>| bright-orange shoes, all of which he had bought with hack-
fighting winnings, an item at a time, over the past few months while he and
Massa Lea were traveling to various North Carolina cities.  Squeaking in his
stiff shoes over to the bedroom table and sitting down on Uncle Mingo's
wedding present, a carved stool with a seat of woven hickory strips, Chicken
George smiled widely at himself in the long-handled mirror that was going to
be one of his surprise presents for Matilda.  With the mirror's help, he
carefully arranged around his neck the green woolen scarf Matilda had knitted
for him.  Lookin' good, he had to admit There remained only the crowning
touch.  Pulling a round cardboard box out from under the bed, he removed the
top and with almost reverent gentleness lifted out the black derby hat that
was his wedding present from Massa Lea.  Turning it slowly around and around
on stiff forefingers, he savored its stylish shape almost sensuously before
returning to the mirror and positioning the derby at just the right rakish
tilt over one eye.

"Git out'n derel We been settin' a hour in dis wagon!"

ROOTS 535

His mammy Kizzy's shout from just outside the window left no doubt that her
rage was undiminished.

"Comin', Mammy!"  he hollered back.  After one last appreciation of his
ensemble in the mirror, he slipped a flat, small bottle of white lightning
into his inside coat pocket and emerged from the new cabin as if expecting
applause.  He was going to flash his biggest smile and tip his hat until he
got a look at the baleful glares of his mammy.

Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah, and Uncle Pompey, all sitting frozenly in their
Sunday best in the wagon.  Averting his glance and whistling as breezily as
he could manage, he climbed up onto the driver's seat--careful not to disturb
a crease--slapped the reins against the backs of the two mules, and they were
under way--only an hour late, Along the road, Chicken George sneaked several
fortifying nips from his bottle, and the wagon arrived at the MacGregor place
shortly after two.  Kizzy, Sister Sarah, and Miss Malizy descended amid
profuse apologies to the visibly worried and upset Matilda in her white gown.
Uncle Pompey unloaded the food baskets they had brought, and after pecking
at Matilda's cheek.  Chicken George went swaggering about slapping backs and
breathing liquor in the faces of the guests as he introduced himself.  Apart
from those he already knew who lived in Matilda's slave row, they were mostly
prayer-meeting folk she had recruited from among the slaves of two nearby
plantations and whom she had gotten permission to invite.  She wanted them to
meet her intended, and so did they.  Though most of them had heard a lot
about him from sources other than herself, their first actual sight of
Chicken George evoked reactions ranging from muttering to open-mouthed
astonishment.  As he cut his swath through the wedding party, he gave a wide
berth to Kizzy, Sister Sarah, and Miss Malizy, whose dagger stares were being
sharpened by every remark each was overhearing about the dubiousness of
Matilda's "catch."  Uncle Pompey had chosen simply to merge with the other
guests as if he were unaware of who the bridegroom was.

Finally, the hired white preacher came out of the big house, followed by the
Massas and Missis MacGregor and Lea.  They stopped in the backyard, the
preacher clutching his Bible like a shield, and the suddenly quiet crowd of
black people grouped stifHy a respectful distance away.  As uuu MLCA nHLtI
Matilda's missis had planned it, the wedding would combine some of the white
Christian wedding service with jumping the broom afterward.

Guiding her rapidly sobering groom by one yellow sleeve, Matilda positioned
them before the preacher, who cleared his throat and proceeded to read a few
solemn passages from his Bible.  Then he asked,

"Matilda and George, do you solemnly swear to take each other, for better or
worse, the rest of your lives?"

"I does," said Matilda softly.

"Yassuh!"  said Chicken George, much too loudly.

Flinching, the preacher paused and then said,

"I pronounce you man and wife!"

Among the black guests, someone sobbed.

"Now you may kiss the bride!"

Seizing Matilda, Chicken George crushed her m his arms and gave her a
resounding smack.  Amid the ensuing gasps and tongue-clucking, it occurred to
him that he might not be making the best impression, and while they locked
arms and jumped the broom, he racked his brains for something to say that
would lend some dignity to the occasion, something that would placate his
slave-row family and win over the rest of those Bible toters.  He had ill "De
Lawd is my shepherd!"  he proclaimed.

"He done give me what I wants!"

When he saw the stares and glares that greeted this announcement, he decided
to give up on them, and the first chance he got, he slipped the bottle from
his pocket and drained it dry.  The rest of the festivities--a wedding feast
and reception--passed in a blur, and it was Uncle Pompey who drove the Lea
plantation's wagon homeward through the sunset.  Grim and mortified.  Mammy
Kizzy, Miss Malizy, and Sister Sarah cast malevolent glances at the spectacle
behind them: the bridegroom snoring soundly with his head in the lap of his
tearful bride, his green scarf askew and most of his face concealed under his
black derby.

Chicken George snorted awake when the wagon jerked to a stop alongside their
new cabin.  Sensing groggily that he should beg everyone's forgiveness, he
began to try, but the doors of three cabins slammed like gunshots.  But he
wouldn't be denied a last courtly gesture.  Picking up his bride, he pushed
open the door with one foot and somehow ROOTS 537

maneuvered both of them inside without injury--only to stumble with her over
the tub of bathwater that still stood in the middle of the room.  It was the
final humiliation--but all was forgotten and forgiven when Matilda, with a
shriek of Joy, caught sight of her special wedding present: the highly
lacquered, eight-day-winding grandfather clock, as tall as herself, that
Chicken George had purchased with the last of his hack fight savings and
hauled in the back of the wagon all the way from Greensboro.

As he sat bleary-eyed on the floor where he'd fallen, bathwater soaking his
brand-new orange shoes, Matilda went over to him and reached out her hand to
help him up.

"You come wid me now, George.  I'm gwine put you to bed."

CHAPTER 95

By daybreak.  Chicken George was gone back down the road to his game fowl
Then, about an hour after breakfast, Miss Malizy heard someone calling her
name and, going to the kitchen door, she was startled to see the new bride,
whom she greeted and invited inside.

"No'm, thank you," said Matilda.

"I jes' wanted to ax which away is de fiel' dey's workin' in today, an'
whereabouts can I fin' me a hoe?"

A few minutes later, Matilda simply appeared and joined Kizzy, Sister Sarah,
and Uncle Pompey in the day's field work.  Late that evening they all
gathered about her in slave row, keeping her\ company until her husband got
home.  In the course of conversation, Matilda asked if any slave-row prayer
meetings were held regularly, and when she was told that none were, proposed
that one be made a part of each Sunday afternoon.

"Tell you de truth, I'se shame to say I ain't done nowhere near de prayin' I
ought to," said Kizzy.

538 ALEX HALEY

"Me neither," confessed Sister Sarah.

"Jes' ain't never seem to me no 'mount of prayin' is did nothin' to change
white folks," said Uncle Pompey.

"De Bible say Joseph was sol' a slave to de Egyptians, but de Lawd was wid
Joseph, an' de Lawd blessed de Egyptians' house for Joseph's sake," Matilda
said in a matter-of-fact manner.

Three glances, quickly exchanged, expressed their steadily mounting respect
for the young woman.

"Dat George tol' us yo' first massa a preacher," said Sister Sarah.

"You sound' like a preacher yo'se'f!"

"I'se a servant o' de Lawd, data ll replied Matilda.

Her prayer meetings began the following Sunday, two days after Chicken George
and Massa Lea had gone off in the wagon with twelve gamecocks.

"Massa say he finally got de right birds to go fight where de big money is,"
he explained, saying that this time the Lea birds would be competing in an
important "main" somewhere near Goldsboro.

One morning when they were out in the field, carefully employing a gentle
tone that suggested the sympathy of a forty-seven-year-old woman for a new
bride of eighteen, Sister Sarah said,

"Lawdy, honey, I 'spect yo' married life gwine be split up twixt you an' dem
chickens."

Matilda looked at her squarely.

"What I done always beared, an' b'lieved, is anybody's marriage jes' what dey
makes it.  An' I reckon he know what kin' he want our'n to be."

But having established her stand about marriage, Matilda would readily share
in any conversation about her colorful husband, whether it was humorous or
serious in nature.

"He done had itchy foots since he was a crawling' baby," Kizzy told her one
night, visiting in the new cabin.

"Yes, ma'am," said Matilda,

"I figgered dat when he come a-courtin'.

He wouldn't talk 'bout hardly nothin' 'cept rooster fightin' an' him an' de
massa travelin' somewheres.  " Hesitating, she then added in her frank way,

"But when he found' out weren't no man gwine have his way wid me 'fo' we'd
jumped a broom, Lawd, he had a fit!  Fact, one time I give up on seem' 'im
again.  Don't know what hit 'im, but I like to fell out de night he come
a-rushin' in an' say, " Look, let's us git hitched!  " " "Well, I'se sho'
glad he had de sense!"  said Kizzy.

"But ROOTS 539

now you's hitched, gal, I'se gwine tell you straight what's on my min'.  I
wants me some gran'chilluns!  "

"Ain't nothin wrong wid dat, Miss Kizzy.

"Cause I wants me some young'uns, too, same as other womens haves."

When Matilda announced two months later that she was in a family way, Kizzy
was beside herself.  Thinking about her son becoming a father made her think
about her father--more than she had in many years--and one evening when
Chicken George was away again, Kizzy asked, "Is he ever mentioned anything to
you 'bout his gran'pappy?"

"No'm, he ain't."  Matilda looked puzzled.

"He ain't?"  Seeing the older woman's disappointment, Matilda added quickly,

"Reckon he jes' ain't got to it yet, Mammy Kizzy."

Deciding that she'd better do it herself, since she remembered more than he
did anyway, Kizzy began telling Matilda of her life at Massa Waller's for
sixteen years until her sale to Massa Lea, and most of what she had to say
was about her African pappy and the many things he had told to her.  " Tilda,
how come I'se tellin' you all dis, I jes' wants you to under stan how I wants
dat chile in yo' belly an' any mo' you has to know all 'bout 'im, too, on
'count of he's dey great-gran'daddy."

"I sho' does under stan Mammy Kizzy," said Matilda, whereupon her
mother-in-law told yet more of her memories, with both of them feeling their
closeness growing throughout the rest of the evening.

Chicken George's and Matilda's baby boy was born during the spring of 1828,
with Sister Sarah serving as the midwife, assisted by a nervous Kizzy.  Her
joy about having a grandchild at last tempered her anger that the boy's
father was yet again off somewhere for a week with Massa Lea.  The following
evening, when the new mother felt up to it, everyone on slave row gathered at
the cabin to celebrate the birth of the second baby that had been born there
on the Lea plantation.

"You's finally

"Gran'mammy Kizzy' now!"  said Matilda, propped up in bed against some
pillows, nestling the baby and weakly smiling at her visitors.

"Lawd, yes!  Don't it sound' pretty!"  exclaimed Kizzy, her whole face one
big grin.

540 ALK HALEY

"Soun' like to me Kizzy git ting of', dat's what!"  said Uncle Pompey with a
twinkle in his eye.

"Hmph!  Ain't no woman here of' as some we knows!"  snorted Sister Sarah.

Finally, Miss Malizy commanded,

"Awright, time us all git out'n here an' let *em res'!"  And they all did,
except for Kizzy.

After being quietly thoughtful for a while, Matilda said, "Ma'am, I been
thinkin' 'bout what you tol' me 'bout yo' pappy.  Since I never even got to
see mine, I blieves George wouldn't care if dis child have my pappy's name.
It was Virgil, my mammy say."

The name instantly had Chicken George's hearty approval when he returned,
filled with such jubilance at the birth of a son that he could hardly contain
himself.  Black derby awry as his big hands swooped the infant up in the air,
he exclaimed,

"Mammy, 'member what I tol' you, I gwine tell my young'uns what you tol' me?"
His face alight, he made a little ceremony of seating himself before the
fireplace with Virgil held upright in his lap as he spoke to him in grand
tones.

"Listen here, boy!  Gwine tell you 'bout yo' great-gran'daddy.  He were a
African dat say he name

"Kunta Kinte."  He call a guitar a koan' a river "Kamby Bolongo," an' lot mo'
things wid African names.  - He say he was chopping' a tree to make his 1'ii
brother a drum when it was fo' mens come up an' grabbed 'im from.  ; behin'.
Den a big ship brung 'im 'crost de big water to a| place call "Naplis.  An'
he had runned off fo' times when he try to kill dem dat cotched 'im an' dey
cut half his foot off!"

Lifting the infant, he turned his face toward Kizzy.

"An*.  he jumped de broom wid de big-house cook name MissI Bell, an' dey had
a 1'il of' gal--an' dere she is, yo' gran' mammy grinnin' at you right dere!"
Matilda was beamin her approval as widely as Kizzy, whose eyes were moi with
love and pride.

With her husband away as much as he was, Matik began spending more of her
time in the evenings wil Gran'mammy Kizzy, and after a while they were poolir
their rations and eating their supper together.  Alwa^ Matilda would say the
grace as Kizzy sat quietly with h< hands folded and her head bowed.
Afterward Matil would nurse the baby, and then Kizzy would sit pro ROOTS 541

with little Virgil clasped against her body, rocking him back and forth,
either humming or singing to him softly as the grandfather clock ticked and
Matilda sat reading her worn Bible.  Even though it wasn't against the
massa's rules, Kizzy still disapproved of reading--but it was the Bible, so
she guessed no harm could come of it.  Usually, not too long after the baby
was asleep, Kizzy's head would begin bobbing, and often she would begin
murmuring to herself as she dozed.  When she leaned over to retrieve the
sleeping Virgil from Kizzy's arms, Matilda sometimes heard snatches of the
things she was mumbling.  They were always the same: "Mammy .  .  .  Pappy .
.  .

Don't let 'em take me!  .  .  .  My people's los'.  .  .  .  Ain't never see
'em no mo' dis worl' .  .  .  " Deeply touched, Matilda would whisper
something like,

"We's yo' people now, Gran'mammy Kizzy," and after putting Virgil to bed, she
would gently rouse the older woman--whom she was growing to love as she had
her own mother--and after accompanying her to her own cabin, Matilda would
often be wiping at her eyes on her way back.

On Sunday afternoons, only the three women attended Matilda's prayer'
services at first--until Sister Sarah's sharp tongue finally shamed Uncle
Pompey into joining them.  No one ever even thought about inviting Chicken
George, for even when he was at home, by Sunday noon he would have returned
to the game fowl area.  With the little group of five seated solemnly on
chairs brought from their cabins and placed in a half circle under the
chinquapin tree, Matilda would read some biblical passages she had selected.
Then, with her serious brown eyes searching each face, she would ask if any
among them would care to lead in prayer, and seeing that none of them did,
she would always say, "Well, den, will y'all jine me on bended knee?"  As
they all kneeled facing her, she would of fera moving, unpretentious prayer.
And afterward she'd lead them in singing some spirited song; even Uncle
Pompey's cracked, raspy baritone joined in as they made slave row resound
with such rousing spirituals as

"Joshua fit de battle o' Jericho!  Jericho!  Jericho!  .  .  .  An' de walls
come a-tumblin' down!"  The meeting turned then into a group discussion on
the general subject of faith.

"Dis is de Lawd's day.  We all got a soul to save an' a heab'n to maintain,"
Matilda might offer in her matter-of542 ALEX HALEY

fact way.

"We needs to keep in our minds who it was made us, an' dat was Gawd.  Den who
it was redeemed us, an' dat was Christ Jesus.

Christ Jesus teached us to be humble, an' mindful, dat we can be reborn in de
sperrit.  "

"I loves Lawd Jesus good as anybody," Kizzy testified humbly, "but y'all see,
I jes' ain't never knowed dat much 'bout 'im 'til I was up some size, even
though my mammy say she had me christened when I was jes' a 1'il thing, at
one dem big camp meetin's."

"Seem like to me we does debes if we's been put next to Gawd when we's
young'uns," said Sister Sarah.  She gestured at Virgil in his gran'mammy's
lap.  " " Cause dat way we starts out early soakin' up some 'ligion an'
settin' sto' by it.  "

Miss Malizy spoke to Uncle Pompey.

"You don't know, if you'd of started out early, you might of made a preacher.
You even got de look of one as it is."

"Preacher!  How I'm gwine preach an' cain't even read!"  he exclaimed.

"De Lawd put things to say in yo' mouth if He call you to preach,"

Matilda said.

"Dat husban' of your'n call his self preachin' roun' here once!"  said Miss
Malizy.

"He ever tol' you 'bout dat?"  They all laughed and Kizzy said,

"He sho' could of made some kin' o' preacher!  Much as he love to show off
an' run his mouth!"

"He'd o' been one dem trickin' an' trancin' preachers holdin' big revivals!"
said Sister Sarah.

They talked for a while about powerful preachers they had all either seen or
heard about.  Then Uncle Pompey told of his powerfully religious mother, whom
he remembered from boyhood on the plantation where he was born.

"She was big an' fat an' I reckon de shoutin'est woman anybody ever beared
of."

"Remind me of of' maid Sister Bessie on de plantation I was raised on," said
Miss Malizy.

"She was not her one dem shoutin' womens.

She'd got of' widout no husban' till it come one dem big camp meetin's.
Well, she shouted till she went in a trance.  She come out'n it sayin' she
jes' had a talk wid de Lawd.  She say He say her mission on de earth was to
save of' Br'er Timmons from going' to hell by him jumpin' de broom wid sich a
Christian woman as her!  Scared 'im so bad he jumped it, too!  "

ROOTS 543

Though few of those he ran into on his trips would have guessed from the way
he acted that Chicken George had jumped the broom--or ever would--he
surprised the women on slave row at home with how warmly he took to marriage
and how well he treated his wife and family.  Never did he return from a
cockfight--wearing his scarf and derby, which had become his costume, rain or
shine, summer or winter--without winnings to put away.  Most of the time,
giving Matilda a few dollars, he didn't have much money left after paying for
the gifts he, of course, always brought along not only for Matilda and his
mammy, but also for Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah, and Uncle Pompey as well as
for young Virgil.  He always came home, too, with at least an hour's worth of
news about whatever he had seen or heard about on his travels.  As his
slave-row family gathered around him, Kizzy would nearly always think how her
African pappy had brought another slave row most of its news, and now it was
her son.

Returning once from a long journey that had taken him to Charleston, Chicken
George described "so many dem great big sailin' ships dey poles look like a
thicket!  An' niggers like ants packin' an' polin' out dem great big tobacco
hogsheads an' all kinds o' other stuff to sail de water to dat England an'
different mo' places.  Look like wherever me an' massa travels now days it's
niggers diggin canals, an layin' dem gravel highways, an' buildin' railroads!
Niggers jes' buildin' dis country wid dey muscles!"

Another time he had heard that "de white folks threatening de Indians 'bout
takin' in so many niggers on dey reservations.  Plenty dem Creeks and
Seminoles done married niggers.  It's even some nigger Indian chiefs!  But I
hears dem Chocktaws, Chickasaws, an' Cherokees hates niggers even worsen
white folks does."

He would be asked far fewer questions than they really wanted to know the
answers to, and soon, making polite excuses, Kizzy, Miss Malizy, Sister
Sarah, and Uncle Pompey would disappear into their cabins to let him and
Matilda be alone.

"Done tol' myself you never gwine hear me wid no whole lot of complainin',
George," she told him one such night as they lay in bed, "but I sho' do feel
like I ain't hardly got no husban' a lot o' times."

"Knows what you means, honey, I sho' does," he said 544 ALEX HALEY

easily.

"Out dere travelin' wid massa, or sometime me and Uncle Mingo up all night
wid some dem sick chickens, I he's jes' thinkin' 'bout you an' de young' un

Matilda bit her tongue, choosing not to voice her doubts, even her suspicions
about some of the things he said.  Instead she asked,

"You figger it's ever gwine git any better, George?"

"Ever git massa rich enough!  So he be willin' to stay home his self

But look, it ain't hurtin' us none, baby!  Look how we's savin' if I can keep
bringin' in winnin's like I is.  "

"Money ain't you!"  said Matilda flatly, and then she made her tone softer.

"An' we'd save a lot mo' if you jes' ease up buyin' presents for ever' body
We all 'predates 'em, you knows dat!  But, George, where I ever gwine wear
sich as dat fine silk dress I specks bet tern any missy got!"

"Baby you can jes' put dat dress on right in here, den pull it off fo' me!"

"You's terrible!"

He was the most exciting man--beyond anyone she had even dreamed of knowing,
at least in that way.  And he certainly was a fine provider.

But she didn't really trust him, and she couldn't help wondering whether he
loved her and their baby as much as he did traveling with the massa.  Was
there anything in the Scriptures about chickens?

Vaguely she recalled something--in Matthew, if she wasn't mistaken--about "a
hen gathereth her chickens beneath her wings ..."

I must look that up, she told herself.

When she did have a husband at home, though, Matilda submerged her doubts and
disappointments and tried to be the best wife she knew how.  If she knew he
was coming, a big meal was waiting; if he came unexpectedly, she prepared one
right away, day or night.  After a while she quit trying to get him to bless
a meal, simply saying a short grace herself, then delighting in watching him
eat while he held the gurgling Virgil in his lap.  Then afterward, with the
boy put to bed, examining George's face, she pinched out blackheads; or
heating water to half fill the tin tub, she would wash his hair and his back;
and if he arrived complaining of aching feet, she would rub them with a warm
paste of roasted onions and homemade soap.  Finally, whenever the candles
were blown out and they were again between her fresh sheets.

Chicken George would make up for his absences to the utmost.  About the time
Virgil began to ROOTS 545

walk, Matilda was great with child again; she was surprised it hadn't
happened sooner.

With another child on the way, Gran'mammy Kizzy decided the time had come to
take her son aside and tell him a thing or two that had been on her mind for
a long time.  He arrived home from a trip one Sunday morning to find her
minding Virgil while Matilda was up in the big house helping Miss Malizy
prepare dinner for guests who were soon to arrive.

"You set down right dere!"  she said, wasting no time.  He did, eyebrows
risen.

"I don't care if you's grown now, I still brought you in dis worl', an' you
gwine listen!  God done give you a real good woman you ain't no ways treatin'
right!  I ain't foolin' wid you now!

You hear me?  I still take a stick to your behin' in a minute!  You got to
spen' mo' time wid yo' wife an' young' un an' her awready big wid yo' nex'
one, too!  "

"Mammy, what you 'speck?"  he said as irritably as he dared.

"When massa say,

"Go," tell him I ain't?  "

Kizzy's eyes were blazing.

"Ain't talkin' 'bout dat an' you know it!

Tellin' dat po' gal you settin' up nights tendin' sick chickens an' sich as
dat!  Where you git all dis lyin' an' drinkin' an' gamblin' an' runnin'
roun'?  You knows I ain't raised you like dat!  An' don't think dis jes' me
talkin'!  Tilda ain't no fool, she jes' ain't let you know she seem' right
through you, too!  " Without another word, Gran'- mammy Kizzy stalked angrily
from the cabin.

With Massa Lea being among the entrants for the great 1830 cock fighting
tournament in Charleston, no one could criticize Chicken George for being
away when the baby was born.  He returned as ecstatic to learn about his
second son--whom Matilda had already named Ashford, after her brother--as he
was aglow with his good luck.

"Massa winned over a thou san dollars, an' I winned fifty in de hack fights
Y'all ought to hear how white folks an' niggers both has started to hollerin',

"I'm bettin' on dat Chicken George'!"  He told her how in Charleston, Massa
Lea had learned that President Andrew Jackson was a man after their own style.

"Ain't nobody love cock fighting mon he do!  He call in dem big congress mens
an' senators an' he show 'em a time fightin' dem Tennessee birds o' his'n
right dere in dat White House!  Massa say dat Jackson gamble an' drink wid
any man.  Dey say when dem matchin' chestnut 546 ALEX HALEY

bosses pullin 'im in dat fine Pres'dent's coach, he be settin' up dere wid
his velvet-lined suitcase o' liquor right beside 'im!  Massa say far as
southern white men's concerned, he can stay Pres'dent till he git tired!  "
Matilda was unimpressed.

But Chicken George had seen something in Charleston that shook her--and the
others on slave row--as deeply as it had him.

"I bet you I seen a mile long o' niggers being' driv along in chains!"

"Lawdy!  Niggers from where?"  asked Miss Malizy.

"Some sol' out'n Nawth an' South Ca'liny, but mainly out'n Virginia was what
I beared!"  he said.

"Different Charleston niggers tol' me it's thou san o' niggers a month git
ting took to great big cotton plantations steady being' cleared out'n de
woods in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, an' Texas.  Dey say de
ol'-style nigger traders on a boss is gone, done become big companies wid
offices in big hotels!  Dey say it's even big paddle-wheel ships carryin'
nothin' but chained-up Virginia niggers down to New Orleans!  An' dey says"
-- "Jes* heish!"  Kizzy sprang upright.

"HEISH1" She went bolting toward her cabin in tears.

"What come over her?"  George asked Matilda after the others had left in
embarrassment .

"Ain't you know?"  she snapped.

"Her mammy an' pappy in Virginia las' she know, an' you scare her half to
death!"

Chicken George looked sick.  His face told her he hadn't realized, but
Matilda refused to let him off that easily.  She had become convinced that
for all of his worldliness, he was sorely lacking in sensitivity about too
many things.  "You knows well as I does Mammy Kizzy been sol' herself!  Jes'
like I was!"  she told him.  Anybody ever sol' ain't gwine never for git it!
An' won't never be de same no mo'!  " She looked at him significantly.

"You ain't never been.  Dat's how come you don't under stan no massa cain't
never be trusted--includin' your'n!"

"What you rilin' at me fo'?"  he demanded testily .

"You ax me what upset Mammy Kizzy an' I tol' you.  Ain't got no mo' to say
'bout it!"  Matilda caught herself.  She didn't want harshness between her
and her husband.  After a moment's silence, she managed a small smile.
"George, I knows what make Mammy Kizzy feel better!

Go make 'er come on over here to hear you tell dis baby 'bout his African
gran'pappy like you tol* Virgil.  " And that's just what he did.

CHAPTER 96

It was near dawn, and Chicken George was standing in the doorway swaying
slightly and grinning at Matilda, who was sitting up waiting for him.  His
black derby was askew.  "Fox got 'mongst de chickens," he slurred.

"Me an' Uncle Mingo been all night catehin' 'cm " Matilda's upraised hand
silenced him, and her tone was cold.

"Reckon de fox give you liquor an' sprinkled you wid dat rose water I smells
" Chicken George's mouth opened.  "Naw, George, you listen!  Look here, long
as I'se yo' wife, an' mammy to our chilluns, I be here when you leaves an' I
be here when you gits back, 'cause ain't us much as yo'self you's doin'
wrong.  It right in de Bible: " You sows what you reaps' sow single, you
reaps double!  An' Matthew sebenth chapter say, "Wid whatsoever measure you
metes out to others, dat shall be measured out to you again!"

" He tried to pretend that he was too outraged to speak, but he just
couldn't think of anything to say.   Turning, he reeled back out the door and
staggered down the road to sleep with the chickens.

But he was back the next day, derby hat in hand, and dutifully spent all but
a few nights with his family through the rest of that fall and winter, and
those few only when he and the massa were away briefly on some trip.  And
when Matilda's next labor pains quickened early one morning in January of
1831, although it was the height of game cocking season, he persuaded the
massa to let him stay home and to take the ailing Uncle Mingo along with him
to that day's fights.

Anxiously, he paced outside the cabin door, wincing and 548 ALEX HALEY

frowning as he listened to Matilda's anguished moans and cries.  Then,
hearing other voices, he tiptoed gingerly close and heard his Mammy Kizzy
urging,

"Keep pullin' 'against my hand--hard, honey!  .  .  .

Another breath .  .  .  deep!  .  .  .  dat's right .  .  .  Hold!  .  .  .
Hold!  "

Then Sister Sarah commanded,

"Bear down.  you hear me!  .  .  .  Now PUSH1

.  .  PUSH!  "

Then, soon: "Here it come .  ..  Yes, Lawd" -- When he heard sharp slaps,
then an infant's shrill cries, Chicken George backed away several steps,
dazed by what he had just heard.  It wasn't long before Gran'mammy Kizzy
emerged, her face creasing into a grin.

"Well, look like all y'all got in you is boys!"

He began leaping and springing about, whooping so boisterously that Miss
Malizy came bolting out the back door of the big house.  He ran to meet her,
scooped her up off her feet, whirled her around and around, and shouted" "
Dis one be name after me!  "

The next evening, for the third time, he gathered everyone around to listen
as he told his family's newest member about the African great-gran'daddy who
called himself Kunta Kinte.

At the end of a routine Caswell County landholders' meeting late that August,
the county courthouse was resounding with the parting calls of the local
planters as they began to disperse and head homeward.  Massa Lea was driving
his wagon--Chicken George squatting in the back with his pocket clasp knife,
gutting and scaling the string of hand-sized perch that the massa had just
bought from a vendor--when the wagon stopped abruptly.  George's eyes widened
as he sat up in time to see Massa Lea already on the ground hurrying along
with many other mass as toward a white man who had just dismounted from a
heaving, lathered horse.  He was shouting wildly (o his swiftly enlarging
crowd.  Snatches of his words reached Chicken George and the other blacks,
who listened gaping: "Don't know how many whole families dead" .  .  .

"women, babies" .  .  .  "sleepin' in their beds when the murderin' niggers
broke in" .  .  .  "axes, swords, clubs" .  .  .  "nigger preacher named Nat
Turner .  .  ."

The faces of the other blacks mirrored his own dread foreboding as the white
men cursed and gestured with ROOTS 549

flushed, furious faces.  His mind flashed back to those terror-filled months
after that revolt in Charleston had been foiled with no one hurt.  What on
earth would happen now?  Slit-eyed, the massa returned to the wagon, his face
frozen with rage.  Never looking back, he drove homeward at a mad gallop with
Chicken George hanging on in the wagon bed with both hands.

Reaching the big house, Massa Lea sprang from the wagon, leaving George
staring at the cleaned fish.  Moments later.  Miss Malizy ran out the kitchen
door and rushed across the backyard toward slave row, nailing her hands over
her bandannaed head.  Then the massa reappeared carrying his shotgun, his
voice rasping at George,

"Get to your cabin!"

Ordering everyone on slave row out of their quarters, Massa Lea told them
icily what Chicken George had already heard.  Knowing that he alone might
possibly temper the massa's wrath, George 'found his voice.

"Please, Massa" -- he said, quavering.  The shotgun jerked directly toward
him.

"Git!  Everything out of your cabins!  All you niggers, GIT!"  For the next
hour, carrying, dragging, heaping their meager belongings outside, under the
massa's searching eyes and abusive threats of what he would do to whomever he
found concealing any weapons or suspicious objects, they shook out every
cloth, opened every container, cut and tore apart every corn shuck
mattress--and still his fury seemed beyond any bounds.

With his boot he shattered Sister Sarah's box of nature remedies, sending her
dried roots and herbs flying while he yelled at her,

"Get rid of that damn voodoo!"  Before other cabins he flung away treasured
possessions and smashed others with his fists or his feet.  The four women
were weeping, old Uncle Pompey seemed paralyzed, the frightened children
clutched tearfully about Matilda's skirts.  Chicken George's own fury boiled
as Matilda cried out, almost in pain, when the shotgun's butt smashed the
front paneling of her precious grandfather clock.

"Let me find a sharpened nail in there, some nigger ll die!"

Leaving slave row in a shambles, the massa rode in the wagon bed holding his
shotgun as George drove them down to the game fowl training area.

Faced with the gun and the barked command for all of 550 ALEX HALEY

their belongings to be emptied out, the terrified old Uncle Mingo began
blurting,

"Ain't done nothin, Massa" -- "Trustin' niggers got whole families dead now!"
yelled Massa Lea.

Confiscating the axe, the hatchet, the thin wedge, a metal frame, and both of
their pocket knives, the massa loaded them all into the wagon as Chicken
George and Uncle Mingo stood watching.

"In case you niggers try to break in, I'm sleepin' with this shotgun!"  he
shouted at them, lashing the horse into a gallop and disappearing up the road
in a cloud of dust.

CHAPTER 97

"Hear you've got four boys in a row now!"  The massa was getting off his
horse in the game fowl training area.  It had taken a full year for the white
South's mingled fear and fury--including Massa Lea's--to fully subside.
Though he had resumed taking Chicken George with him to cockfights a month or
two after the revolt, the massa's obvious.

coldness had taken the rest of a year to thaw.  But for reasons unknown to
either man, their relationship had seemed to grow closer than ever before
ever since then.  Neither one ever mentioned it, but they hoped fervently
that there would be no more black uprisings.

"Yassuh!  Big of' fat boy borned *fo' daybreak, Massal" said Chicken George,
who was mixing a dozen game hen egg whites and a pint of beer with oatmeal,
cracked wheat, and a variety of crushed herbs to bake a fresh supply of the
gamecocks' special bread.  He had learned the "secret" recipe only that
morning, grudgingly, from ailing old Uncle Mingo, whom Massa Lea had ordered
to rest in his cabin until his unpredictable and increasingly severe
coughing- spells eased off.  In the meanwhile.  Chicken George alone was
intensely training twenty-odd top-prime gamecocks after almost ruthless
cullings from among the seventy-six ROOTS 551

freshly matured birds recently brought in off the range- walks.

It was but nine weeks from the day that he and Massa Lea were to leave for
New Orleans.  His years of local victories, plus no few in statewide
competitions, had finally emboldened the massa to pit his topmost dozen birds
in that city's renowned New Year's Day season-opening "main."  If the Lea
birds could win as many as half of their pittings against the caliber of
championship fighting cocks assembled there, the massa would not only win a
fortune but also find himself elevated overnight into recognition among the
entire South's major game cockers Just the possibility was so exciting that
Chicken George had been able to think of almost nothing else.

Massa Lea had walked his horse over and tied a small rope from its halter
onto the split-rail fence.  Ambling back over near George, the massa scuffed
the toe of his boot against a clump of grass and said, "Mighty funny, four
boy young'uns, an' you ain't never named none after me."

Chicken George was surprised, delighted--and embarrassed.

"You sho' right, Massa!"  he exclaimed lamely.  "Dat 'zactly what to name dat
boy--Tom!  Yassuh, TornI" The massa looked gratified.  Then he glanced toward
the small cabin beneath a tree, his expression serious.

"How's the old man?"

"Tell you de truth, Massa, middle of las' night, he had a bad coughin' spell.
Dat was 'fo' dey sent Uncle Pompey down here to git me up dere when Tilda
havin' de baby.  But when I cooked 'im sump'n to eat dis mo' run he set up
an' et it all, an' swear he feel fine.  He got mad when I tol' 'im he got to
stay in de bed till you say he can come out."

"Well, let the old buzzard stay in there another day, anyhow," said the massa.

"Maybe I ought to get a doctor to come down here and look him over.  That bad
c&ughing off and on, for long as it's been, it's no good!"

"Nawsuh.  But he sho' don' believe in no doctors, Massa" -- "I don't care
what he believes!  But we'll see how he does the rest of the week" -- For the
next hour, Massa Lea inspected the cockerels and the stags in their fence-row
pens, and finally the magnificent birds that Chicken George was conditioning
and 552 ALEX HALEY

training.  Massa Lea was pleased with what he saw.  Then, for a while, he
talked about the forthcoming trip.  It would take almost six weeks to reach
New Orleans, he said, in the heavy new wagon he was having custom-built in
Greens- boro.  It would have an extended bed with twelve fitted removable
cock coops, a special padded workbench for daily exercising of birds during
travel, along with special shelves, racks, and bins that Massa Lea had
specified to hold all necessary items and supplies for any long trips
carrying gamecocks.  It Would be ready in ten days.

When Massa Lea left.  Chicken George immersed himself in the day's remaining
tasks.  He was driving the gamecocks to the limit.  The massa had given him
the authority to use his own judgment in further culling out any birds in
which he discovered the slightest flaw of any sort, as only the most
comprehensively superb birds could stand a chance in the level of competition
awaiting them in New Orleans.

Working with the birds, he kept thinking about the music he had been told he
was going to hear in New Orleans, including big brass bands marching in the
streets.  The black sailor he had met in Charleston had also said that early
every Sunday afternoon, thousands of people would gather in a large public
square called

"Place Congo" to watch hundreds of slaves perform the dances of the African
places and peoples they had come from.  And the sailor had sworn that the New
Orleans waterfront surpassed any other he bad ever seen.  And the women!  An
unending supply of them, said the sailor, as exotic as they were willing, of
every kind and color, known as

"Creoles,"

"octoroons," and "quadroons."  He could hardly wait to get there.

Late that afternoon, after having meant to do so several times before when
some chore had detained him, George finally knocked, then stepped on inside
the cluttered, musty cabin of Uncle Mingo.

"How you feelin?"  George asked.

"Is it anything I can git you?"  But he didn't need to wait for an answer.

The old man was shockingly wan and weak--but as irritable as ever about his
enforced inactivity.

"Git on out'n here!  Go ax massa how I feelsl He know bet tern / does!"
Since Uncle Mingo clearly wished to be left alone.  Chicken George did leave,
thinking that Mingo was getting to be like his leathery, pin-feathered old
catch- cocks--tough old veterans of many battles, but with age ROOTS 553

catching up and taking its toll, leaving mostly the instincts.

By the time the last of the birds had been given their extra
wing-strengthening exercise and returned to their coops, it was shortly after
sundown, and Chicken George at last felt free to pay at least a brief visit
home.  Upon reaching his cabin, delighted to find Kizzy visiting with
Matilda, he told them with much chuckling about the morning's exchange with
the massa about naming the new baby Torn.  When he was through, he noticed
with great surprise that they seemed not to be sharing his enjoyment.

It was Matilda who spoke first, her words flat and noncommittal, "Well, I
reckon lotsa Toms in dis worl'."

His mammy looked as if she had just had to chew a bar of soap.

"I

'speck me an' Tilda feelin' de same thing, an' she rut her spare yo' feelings
'bout yo' precious massa.  Ain't nothin' wrong wid de name Torn.  Jes' sho'
wish it was some other Torn dis po' chile git named after"-- She hesitated,
then added quickly, " "Co'se, dat's jes' my 'pinion --ain't my young' un or
my businessi" "Well, it's de Lawd's business!"  snapped Matilda, stepping
across to get her Bible.  " " Fo' de chile was born, I was hunting' in de
Scripture to see what it say 'bout names.  Hurriedly she thumbed pages,
finding the section, page, and verse she sought, and read it aloud: "De
mem'ry of de jes' is blessed; but de name of de wicked shall rot!"

"Have mercy!"  exclaimed Gran'mammy Kizzy.

Chicken George rose, incensed.

"Awright den!  Which one y'all gwine tell massa we ain't?"  He stood glaring
at them.  He was getting sick of so many goa dings when he came in his own
house!  And he was fed up past the limit with Matilda's never-ending
damnation from the Bible.

He raked his mind for something he once heard, then it came.  "Y'all call 'im
for Torn de Baptis', den!"  He shouted it so loudly that the faces of his
three sons appeared in the bedroom doorway, and the day-old infant began
crying as Chicken George stomped out.

At that very moment, at the living room writing desk in the big house, Massa
Lea dipped his pen, then scrawled carefully inside his Bible's front cover a
fifth date-and- birth line below the four names already recorded there--
Chicken George and his first three sons: "September 20, 1833 ... boy born to
Matilda .  .  .  name Torn Lea."

Returning angrily down the road, George fumed that it 554 ALEX HALEY

wasn't that he didn't care for Matilda.  She was the finest, most loyal woman
he ever had met.  A fine wife, however, was not necessarily one who piously
chastized her husband every time he turned around just for being human.  A
man had a right now and then to enjoy the company of the kind of women who
wanted only to enjoy laughter, liquor, wit, and the body's urgencies.  And
from their past year's travels together, he knew that Massa Lea felt the
same.  After fighting their gamecocks near any sizable town, they always
stayed on an extra day, with the mules in a stable and some local game cocker
helper paid well to care for the cooped birds, while he and Massa Lea went
their separate ways.  Meeting at the stable early the next morning, they
would collect their gamecocks and ride on homeward, each nursing hangovers,
and neither one saying a word about the fact that he knew the other one had
been tomcat ting

It was five days before Chicken George's exasperation had diminished enough
for him to think about returning home.  Ready to forgive them, he strode up
the road to slave row and opened the cabin door.

"Lawd!  Is dat you, George?"  said Matilda.

"De chilluns be so glad to see dey pappy again!

"Specially dis one--his eyes wasn't open yet when you was here las'!"

Instantly furious, he was about to stalk right back outside when his glance
fell upon his older three sons--aged five, three, and two--huddled awkwardly
together, staring at him almost fearfully.  He felt an urge to grab them and
hug them close.  Soon he wouldn't be seeing them for three months when he
went to New Orleans; he must bring them some really nice presents.

Reluctantly, he sat down at the table when Matilda laid out a meal for him
and sat down to bless the food.  Then, standing back up, she said,

"Virgil, go ax Gran'mammy to come over here."

Chicken George stopped chewing, merely swallowing what he had in his mouth.
What did the two of them have planned to plague him with this time?

Kizzy knocked and came in hugging Matilda, kissing, petting, and clucking
over the three boys before glancing at her son.

"How do?

Ain't seen you so long!  "

"How you do.  Mammy?"  Though he was fuming, he tried to make a weak joke of
it.

Settling in a chair and accepting the baby from Matilda, ROOTS 555

his mammy spoke almost conversationally.

"George, yo' chilluns been wantin' to ax you sump'n " She turned.  "Ain't
you, Virgil?"

~ Chicken George saw the oldest boy hanging back.  What had they primed him
to say?

"Pappy," he said finally in his piping voice, "you gwine tell us 'bout our
great-gran'daddy?"

Matilda's eyes reached out to him.

"You's a good man, George," said Kizzy softly.

"Don't never let nobody tell you no different!  An' don't never git to
feelin' we don't love you.  I b'lieves maybe you gits mixed up Trout who you
is, an' sometime who we is.  We's yo' blood, jes' like dese chilluns'
great-gran'pappy."

"It's right in de Scriptures " said Matilda.  Seeing George's apprehensive
glance, she added,

"Everything in de Bible ain't sump'n hard.  De Scriptures have plenty 'bout
love."

Overwhelmed with emotion.  Chicken George moved his chair near the hearth.
The three boys squatted down before him, their eyes glistened with
anticipation, and Kizzy handed him the baby.  Composing himself, he cleared
his throat and began to tell his four sons their gran'mammy's story of their
great-gran'pappy.

"Pappy, I knows de story, toot" Virgil broke in.  Making a face at his
younger brothers, he went ahead and told it himself including even the
African words.

"He done beared it three times from you, and gran'- mammy don't cross de do'
sill widout tellin' it again!"  said Matilda with a laugh.

George thought: How long had it been since he last heard his wife laughing?

Trying to recapture the center of attention, Virgil jumped up and down.

"Gran'mammy say de African make us know who we is!"

"He do dat!"  said Gran'mammy Kizzy, beaming.

For the first time in a long time.  Chicken George felt that his cabin was
his home again.

CHAPTER 98

Four weeks late, the new wagon was ready to be picked up in Greensboro.  How
right the massa had been to have it built.  Chicken George reflected as they
drove there, for they must arrive in New Orleans not creaking and squeaking
in this battered old heap, but in the finest wagon money could buy--looking
the parts of a great game cocker and his trainer.  For the same reason,
before they left Greensboro, he must borrovy a dollar and a half from the
massa to buy a new black derby to go with the new green scarf that Matilda
had almost finished knitting.  He would also make sure that Matilda packed
both his green and yellow suits, his wide-webbed best red suspenders, and
plenty of shirts, drawers, socks, and handkerchiefs, for after the cock
fighting he knew he'd have to look right when they were out on the town.

Within moments after they arrived at the wagon maker shop, as he waited
outside, George began hearing snatches of loud argument behind the closed
door.  He'd known the massa long enough, to expect that sort of thing, so he
didn't bother to listen; he was too busy sifting'in his mind through the
tasks he had to take care of at home before they left.  The toughest one, he
knew, would be the job of culling seven more birds from the nineteen
magnificent specimens he had already trained to lethal keenness.  There was
room in the wagon for only a dozen, and selecting them would challenge not
only his own judgment and the massa's but also that of Uncle Mingo, who was
once again up, out, and about, as vinegary and tart-tongued as ever.

Inside the shop, Massa Lea's voice had risen to a shout: The inexcusable
delay in finishing the wagon had cost him money, which should be deducted
from the price.  The wagon maker was yelling back that he had rushed the job
ROOTS 557

as fast as he could, and the price should really be higher because cost of
materials had risen along with his free black workmen's outrageous salary
demands.  Listening now.  Chicken George guessed that the massa was actually
less angry than he seemed and was simply testing the wagon maker to see if an
argument might succeed in cutting at least a few dollars off the cost of the
wagon.

After a while something must have worked out inside, for the altercation
seemed to end, and soon Massa Lea and the wagon maker came out, still
red-faced but acting and talking now in a friendly way.

The tradesman shouted toward the area behind his shop, and a few more minutes
later, four blacks have into view, bent nearly double pulling the heavy new
custom-built wagon behind them.  George's eyes went wide at its sheer
craftsmanship and beauty.  He could feel the strength in its oaken frame and
body.  The center section of the luxuriously long bed showed the tops of the
twelve removable cock coops.  The iron axles and the hubs were obviously
superbly balanced and greased, for despite the vehicle's imposing weight, he
could hear no creaking or even rubbing sounds at aD.  Nor had he ever seen
Massa Lea's face split into such a grin.

"She's one of the best we've ever turned out!"  exclaimed the wagon master

"Nearly too pretty to drive!"  Expansively, Massa Lea said,

"Well, she's about to roll a long way!"  The wagon maker head wagged.

"New Or- leans!  That's a six-week trip.  Who all's going' with you?"

Massa Lea turned, gesturing at Chicken George on the old wagon driver's seat.

"My nigger there and twelve chickens!"

Anticipating the massa's command.  Chicken George jumped down and went back
to untie the pair of rented mules they'd brought along and led them over to
the new wagon.  One of the four blacks helped him hitch them up, then went
back to join the others, who were paying Chicken George no more attention
than he was to them; after all, they were free blacks, whom Massa Lee often
said he couldn't stand the sight of.  After walking around the wagon a few
times with his eyes shining and a big smile on his face, the massa shook
hands with the wagon maker thanked him, and climbed proudly up onto the seat
of the new wagon.  Wishing him good luck, the wagon maker stood there shaking
his head in admiration for his own work as 558 ALEX HALEY

Massa Lea led the way out of the lot with Chicken George following in the old
wagon.

On the long drive home--his new derby on the seat beside him, along with a
pair of elegant gray felt spats that had set him back a dollar--George
finished his mental checklist of chores that he had to take care of before
they left for New Orleans, and started thinking about what had to be done to
make sure things would keep running smoothly while they were gone.  As
difficult as he knew it would be to get along without him at home, he was
confident that Matilda and Kizzy would be equal to the task; and though Uncle
Mingo didn't get around quite as spryly anymore, and he was becoming
increasingly forgetful with each passing year, George was sure the old man
would be able to mind the chickens adequately until his return.  But sooner
or later, he knew he was going to need more help than Mingo would be able to
offer anymore.

Somehow he must find a way around his wife's and his mammy's blindness to the
rare opportunity he felt he could open for young Virgil, especially since at
nearly six years of age the boy would soon have to start working in the
fields.  During his absence, it had occurred to him that Virgil could be
assigned to help Uncle Mingo with the gamecocks--and then simply kept on in
the job after they re- turned--but he had hardly brought up the idea before
Matilda had flared,

"Let massa buy somebody to help 'im, den!"  and Kizzy had put in hotly,

"Dem chickens done stole 'enough from dis family!"  Wanting no new fights
with them, he hadn't tried to force the matter, but certainly didn't intend
to see the massa possibly buy some total stranger to intrude in his and Uncle
Mingo's private province.

Even if the massa knew better than to bring in an outsider, though, George
couldn't be sure if Virgil's help would be accepted by Uncle Mingo, who
seemed to be rankling more and more ever since his first helper had developed
with the massa a relationship closer than his own.  Only recently, in his
bitterness about not being allowed to come along with them to New Orleans,
Mingo had snapped,

"You an' massa figger y'all can trust me to feed de chickens while you's
gone?"

George wished that Uncle Mingo would realize that he had nothing to do with
the massa's decisions.  At the same time, he wondered why the old man
wouldn't simply face the fact that at seventy-odd years of age, he ROOTS 559

just wasn't in any kind of shape to travel for six weeks in either direction;
almost surely he would fall sick somewhere, with all of the extra problems
that would present to him and the massa.  George wished hard that he knew
some way to make Uncle Mingo feel better about the whole thing or at least
that Uncle Mingo would stop blaming him for everything.

Finally the two wagons turned off the big road and were rolling down the
driveway.  They were almost halfway to the big house when, to his amazement,
he saw Missis Lea come onto the front porch and down the steps.  A moment
later, out the back door, came Miss Malizy.  Then, hurrying from their
cabins, he saw Matilda and their boys, Mammy Kizzy, Sister Sarah, and Uncle
Pompey.  What are they all doing here Thursday afternoon, wondered George,
when they should be out in the fields?  Were they so anxious to see the fine
new wagon that they had risked the massa's anger?  Then he saw their faces,
and he knew that none of them cared anything about any new wagon.

When Missis Lea kept walking on to meet the massa's wagon, George reined to a
halt and leaned far over from his high driver's seat to hear better what she
said to the massa.  George saw the massa's body jerk upright as the missis
fled back toward the house.  Dumfounded, George watched as Massa Lea
clambered down from the new wagon and walked slowly, heavily back toward him.
He saw the face, pale with shock--and suddenly he knew!  The massa's words
reached him as if from a distance: "Mingo's dead."

Slumping sideways against the wagon seat George was bawling as he never had
before.  He hardly felt the massa and Uncle Pompey half wrestling him onto
the ground.  Then Pompey on one side and Matilda on the other were guiding
him toward slave row with others around them weeping afresh at seeing his
grief.  Matilda helped him to lurch inside their cabin, followed by Kizzy
with the baby.

When he had recovered himself, they told him what had happened.

"Y'all left Monday mornin'," said Matilda, "an' dat night nobody here slept
no good.  Seem like Tuesday morning we all got up feelin' like we'd heard
whole lots a hoot owls an' barkin' dogs.  Den we beared de screamin'" -- "Was
Malizy!"  exclaimed Kizzy.

"Lawd, she hollered!  Us all jes' flew out dere where she'd done gone to slop
de 560 ALEX HALEY

hogs.  An' dere he was.  Po' of soul layin' out on de road, look like some
pile o' rags!  "

He was still alive, said Matilda, but "was jes' one side o' his mouth movin'.
I got right down close on my knees an' could jes' barely make out he was
whisperin'.

"B'lieve I done had a stroke," he say.

"He'p me wid de chickens .  .  .  I ain't able--'" "Lawd have mercy, none us
knowed what to do!"  said Kizzy, but Uncle Pompey tried to lift the limp,
heavy form.  When he failed, their combined efforts finally succeeded in
lugging Uncle Mingo back to slave row and onto Pompey's bed.

"George, he stunk so bad, wid dat sick smell on 'im!"  said Matilda.

"We commence fannin' his face, an' he kept whisperin', 'de chickens ... got
to git back--'" "Miss Malizy done run an tol' missis by den," said Kizzy,
"an' she come a-wringin' her hands an' cryin' an' carryin' on!  But not 'bout
Br'er Mingo!  Naw!  First thing she hollering was somebody better git to dem
chickens less'n massa have a fit!  So Matilda called Virgil" -- "I sho'
didn't want to!"  said Matilda.

"You know how I feels 'bout dafc One of us 'enough down wid dem chickens.  "
Sides, I done beared you talkin' 'bout stray dogs an' foxes, K even wildcats
he's roun' tryin' to eat dem birds!  But bless de Chile's heart!  His eyes
was bucked scairt, but he say,

"Mammy, I go, I jes' don' know what to do!"

Uncle Pompey got a sack o' corn an' say,

"You throw han'ful dis to any chickens you sees, an' I be down dere soon's I
can--'" With no way to reach him and the massa, and Sister Sarah's telling
them that she feared Uncle Mingo was beyond what her roots could cure, and
not even the missis knowing how to contact any doctor, "weren't nothin' else
us could do 'cept jes' wait on y'all" they told him.

Matilda began weeping, and George reached out to hold her hand.

"She cryin' 'cause when we got back in Pompey's cabin after talkin' to the
missis, Mingo gone," said Kizzy.

"Lawd!  Knowed it jes' to look at 'im!"  She began sobbing herself.

"Po' of' soul done died all by his self

When Missis Lea was told, said Matilda, "she commence hollerin' she jes'
don't know what to do with dead peoples, 'cept she done beared massa say dey
starts to rottin' if dey's kept out mon a day.  She say be 'way past dat 'fo'
y'all git back, so us gwine have to dig a hole" ROOTS 561

"Lawd!"  exclaimed Kizzy.

"Below de willow grove de groun' kin' o' sof.  We took de shovel, Pompey an'
us wimmins dug an' dug, one at de time, 'til we had a hole enough to put 'im
in.  We come back, den Pompey bathed im up."

"He rubbed some glycerin on 'im Miss Malizy got from missy," said Matilda,
"den sprinkled on some dat perfume you brung me las' year."

"Weren't no decent clothes to put 'im in," continued Kizzy.

"De ones he had on stunk too bad, an' what I'll Pompey have was 'way too
tight, so jes' rolled 'im up in two sheets."  She said Uncle Pompey then had
cut two straight green limbs while the women found old planks, and they had
fashioned a litter.

"Have to say for missis dat when she seen us all bearin' 'im over to de
hole," said Matilda, "she did come a-runnin' wid dey Bible.  When we got 'im
dere, she read some Scripture, from de Psalms, an' den I prayed, axin' de
Lawd to please res' an' keep Mr. Mingo's soul" -- Then they had put the body
in the grave and covered it.

"We done 'im debes we could!  Don't care if you's mad," Matilda burst out,
misreading the anguish on her husband's face.

Grabbing her and squeezing her fiercely, he rasped,

"Nobody mad" -- too stifled by his emotions to convey in words his anger with
himself and the massa for not being there that morning.  There might have
been something they could have done to save him.

A little later, he left his cabin thinking about what concern, care, even
love had been shown to Uncle Mingo by those who had always claimed to dislike
him so.  Seeing Uncle Pompey, he walked over and wrung his hands, and they
talked a little while.  Nearly as old as Uncle Mingo had been, Pompey said he
had just come up from the game fowl area, leaving Virgil watching the
chickens.

"Dat a good boy y'all got, he sho' is!"  Then he said,

"When you goes down dere, since it ain't been no rain, you can still see in
de dus' o' de road de crooked trail where Br'er Mingo dragged his self all de
way up here in de night."

George didn't want to see that.  Leaving Uncle Pompey, he walked slowly to
below the willow grove.  A while passed before he could look directly at the
freshly mounded earth.  Moving about as if in a daze, picking up some rocks,
he 562 ALEX HALEY

arranged them in a design around the grave.  He felt unworthy.

In order to avoid Mingo's dust trail in the road, he cut through a field of
broken cornstalks to reach the game- fowl area.

"You done a good job.  Now you better go on back up to your mammy," he said,
patting Virgil roughly on the head, thrilling the boy with his first
compliment.  After he was gone, George sat down and stared at nothing, his
mind tumbling with scenes from the past fifteen years, listening to echoes of
his teacher, his friend, his nearest to a father he ever had known.  He could
almost hear the cracked voice barking orders, speaking more gently of
gamecock- ing; complaining bitterly about being cast aside: "You an' massa
figger y'all can trust me to feed de chickens whilst y'all's gone?"  George
felt himself drowning in remorse.

Questions came to him: Where was Uncle Mingo from before Massa Lea bought
him?  Who had been his family?  He had never mentioned any.  Had he a wife or
children somewhere?  George had been the closest person in the world to Uncle
Mingo, yet he knew so little about the man who had taught him everything he
knew.

Chicken George paced: Dear God, where was the beloved old shambling companion
with whom he had so many times trod every inch of this familiar place?

He stayed there alone through the next day and night.  It was Saturday
morning before Massa Lea showed up.  His face bleak Jand somber, he went
directly to the point.

"I've been thinking through this whole thing.  To start with, just burn
Mingo's cabin, now.  That's the best way to get rid of it."

A few minutes later they stood and watched as the flames consumed the small
cabin that for over forty years had been home to Uncle Mingo.

Chicken George sensed that the massa had something else on his mind; he was
unprepared for it when it came.

"I've been thinking about New Orleans," said the massa.

"There's too much at stake unless everything's right" -- He spoke slowly,
almost as if he were talking to himself.  "Can't leave without somebody here
to mind these chickens.  Take too much time to find somebody, maybe have to
teach them to boot.  No point in me going' by myself, that much driving and
twelve birds to look after.  No point going' to a' ROOTS 563

chicken fight unless you aim to win.  Just foolish to make the trip now"--
Chicken George swallowed.  All those months of planning ... all the massa's
spending ... all of the massa's hopes to join the South's most elite game
cocking circles .  .  .  those birds so magnificently trained to beat
anything with wings.  Swallowing a second time, he said,

"Yassuh."

CHAPTER 99

Working by himself down there with the game fowl was so strange and lonely
that Chicken George wondered how in the world Uncle Mingo had managed to do
it for over twenty-five years before he came to join him.

"When massa bought me," the old man had told him, "an' de flock got to
growin', he kept sayin' he gwine buy me some he'p, but he never did, an' I
reckon I jes' fin' out chickens maybe better company clan peoples is."
Though George felt that he, too, loved the birds about as much as any man
could, with him they could never take the place of people.  But he needed
someone to help him, he told himself, not to keep him company.

As far as he was concerned, Virgil still seemed the most sensible choice.  It
would keep things all in the family, and he could train the boy just as Uncle
Mingo had trained him.  But since he wasn't anxious to deal with Matilda and
Kizzy in order to get him, George tried to think of some game fowl trainer
acquaintance whom he might be able to persuade the massa to buy away from his
present owner.  But he knew that any real game cocker massa would have to be
in some truly desperate fix for money to even think about selling his
trainer, especially to such a competitor as Massa Lea.  So he began
considering black hack fighters but a good half of them were trainers like
himself fighting their massa's cull birds; and most of the others, like their
birds, were third-raters or shady characters who fought very good 564 ALEX
HALEY

birds that had been suspiciously acquired.  There were a number of free-black
hack fighters he had seen who were really good, and were available for hire
by the day, the week, the month, or even the year, but he knew there was no
way Massa Lea would ever permit even the best free- black trainer in North
Carolina on his place.  So George had no choice.  And finally one evening he
mustered his nerve to bring it up at home.

" " 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 datoldes' 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 / bring 'im, den he can stay jes' long
'enough 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 of '?  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 sound' 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!"

ROOTS 565

"Oh!  You's finally 'greein' he'd sell you, tool" "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 game birds 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 git ting 'long all right an' mindin' yo'
mammy an' gran'mammy?"

"Yassuh."

"Reckon dey feeds you pretty good, huh?"

"Yassuh."

"What you like to eat demos7' " Anythin' Mammy cooks us, yassuh.  "

566 ALEX HALEY

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 'imi" "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 Torn.

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 tram 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 cotton sacks picking endless tobacco worms, and
beating cornstalks down for fodder, in relentless seasonal succession.  With
a chuckle he remembered Uncle Mingo's saying,

"Gimme 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 game cockers 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 accusROOTS 567

tomed to not having anyone around to talk with, except for the chickens--in
particular the pin feathered veteran catch cock that had been practically
Uncle Mingo's pet.

"You could o' tol' us how sick he was, you of' walleyed 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 of'
man de way I is."  But the old catch cock 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 game- cockers 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 catch cock 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 fiftysix 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' being'
a nigger don' mean you have to be no slave.  Yo' massa don' never want you
thinkin' 'bout dat."  During his long solitudes in the game fowl 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.

568 ALEX HALEY

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 range- walk, 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 halfa
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 yeuow legs with their lethal
spurs.  Every ounce, every inch of it 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 freel

CHAPTER 100

The new cock fighting 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 CounROOTS 569

ty hack fights 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 not
her 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 bad massacred a garrison of white Texans,
including a woodsman named Davy Crock- ett, 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 cock fighter 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 beared 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 git ting 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' hunting' an' fightin'
one not her jes' mindin' dey own business.  Den here come 1'il of' boat o'
white folks a-wavin' an' grinnin'.

"Hey, y'all red mens!  How 'bout let us come catch /'" ' 570 ALEX HALEY

a bite an a nap 'mongst y'all an' le's be friends!  " Huh!  I betcha now days
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 Win- field Scott done warned 'em dat white folks
being' Christians ain't wantin' to shed no mo' Indians' blood, so dem wid any
sense best to hurry up an' git to movin'l 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' thou san 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!"

Chicken George laughed.

"We git right to work on a gal for you.

Mammy!  "

"You git out'n here!"  exclaimed Matilda.

But only a few months passed before a look at Matilda made it clear that
George intended to be a man of his word.

"Hmph!  Sho' can tell when dat man been spendin reglar time home!"

commented Sister Sarah.

"Seem like he wuss'n dem roosters!"  Miss Malizy agreed.

When her pains of labor came once again, the waiting, pacing George
heard--amid his wife's anguished moans and cries--his mother's yelps of

"Thank you, Jesus!  Thank you, Jesus!," and he needed no further advisement
that at last he had fathered a girl.

Even before the baby was cleaned off, Matilda told her mother-in-law that she
and George had agreed years before mat their first girl would be named Kizzy.

ROOTS 571

"Ain't done lived in vain!"  Gran'mammy cried at intervals throughout the
rest of the day.  Nothing would do for her then but that the following
afternoon Chicken George would come up from the game fowl area and tell once
again about the African great gran'pappy Kunta Kinte for the six boys and the
infant Kizzy in his lap.

One night about two months later, with all of the children finally asleep,
George asked, " Tilda, how much money is we got saved up?"

She looked at him, surprised.

"L'il over a hunnud dollars."

"Dat all?"

"Dat all!  It's a wonder it's dat much!  Ain't I been tellin' you all dese
years de way you spends ain't hardly no point even do no talkin' 'bout no
savin'!"

"Awright, awright," he said guiltily.

But Matilda pursued the point.

"Not countin' what you winned an' spent what I ain't never seed, which was
yo' business, you want to guess 'bout how much you done give me to save since
we been married, den you borrowin' back?"

"Awright, how much?"

Matilda paused for effect.

"Twixt three-fo' thou san dollars."

"Wheeeew!"  he whistled.

"I is?"

Watching his expression change, she sensed that she had never observed him
grow more serious in all their twelve years together.

"Off down yonder by myself so much," he said finally,

"I been thinkin' 'bout whole heap o' things" -- He paused.  She thought he
seemed almost embarrassed by whatever he was about to say.

"One thing I been thinkin', if'n us could save 'enough desenex' comin' years,
maybe us could buy ourselves free."

Matilda was too astounded to speak.

He gestured impatiently.

"I wish you git yo' pencil to figger some, an' quit buckin' yo' eyes at me
like you ain't got no sense!"

Still stunned, Matilda got her pencil and a piece of paper and sat back down
at the table.

"Trouble to start wid," he said, "jes* can't do aothin' but guess roun' what
massa'd ax for us all.  Me an' you an' de passel o' young'uns.  Start wid
you.  Roun' de county seat, I knows men fiel' ban's is bringin' 'bout a thou
san dollars 572 ALEX HALEY

apiece.  Wimmins is worth less, sole call you 'bout eight hunnud"Getting up,
bending to inspect Matilda's moving pencil, he sat back down.

"Den let's say massa let us have our chilluns, all eight, 'bout three hunnud
apiece" -- "Ain't but seb'n!"  said Matilda, "Dat new one you say started in
yo* belly ag'in make eight!"

"Oh!"  she said, smiling.  She figured at length.

"Dat make twenty-fo' hunnud" -- "Jes' for chilluns?"  His tone mingled doubt
with outrage.  Matilda refigured.

"Eight threes is twenty-fo'.  Plus de eight hunnud fo' me, dat make 'zactly
thirty hunnud-- dat's same as three thou san

"Wheeeew!"

"Don't carry on so yet!  De big one you!"  She looked at him.

"How much you figger fo' you?"

Serious as it was, he couldn't resist asking,

"What you think I'se worth?"

"If I'd o' knowed, I'd o' tried to buy you from massa myself."  They both
laughed.

"George, I don' even know how come we's talkin' sich as dis, nohow.  You know
good an' well massa ain't gwine never sell you!"

He didn't answer right away.  But then he said, " Tilda, I ain't never
mentioned dis, reckon since I know you don't hardly even like to hear massa's
name called.  But I betcha twenty-five different times, one or not her he
done talk to me 'bout whenever he git 'enough together to buil' de fine big
house he want, wid six columns crost de front, he say him an' missis could
live off'n what de crops make, an' he 'speck he be git ting out'n de
chicken-fightin' business, he say he steady git ting too of to keep puttin'
up wid all de worries."

"I have to see dat to blievc it, George.  Him or you neither ain't gwine
never give up messin' wid chickens!"

"I'm tellin' you what he sayl If you can listen!  Looka here.  Uncle Pompey
say massa 'bout sixty-three years of' right now.  Give 'im another five, six
years--it ain't easy fo' no real of' man to keep runnin' here an' yonder
fightin' no birds!  I didn't pay 'im much 'tendon neither till I kept
thinkin' dat, yeah, he really might let us buy ourselves, an 'specially if we
be payin' him 'enough would he'p 'im buil' dat big house he want" ROOTS 573

"Hmph," Matilda grunted without conviction.

"Awright, let's talk 'bout it.  What you reckon he'd want for you?"

"Well" -- His expression seemed to mingle pride in one way and pain in
another at what he was about to say.

"Well --nigger buggy driver o' dat rich Massa Jewett done swo' up an' down to
me one time dat he overheard his massa tellin' somebody he'd offered Massa
Lea fo' thou san dollars fo' me" -- "Whooooooee!"  Matilda was flabbergasted.

"See, you ain't never knowed de valuable nigger you sleeps wid!"  But quickly
he was serious again.

"I don't really b'lieve dat nigger.  I 'speck he jes' made up dat lie tryin'
to see if I'd be fool 'enough to swallow it.  Anyhow, I go by what's git ting
paid now days for niggers wid debes trades, like de carpenters an'
blacksmiths, sich as dem.

Dey's sellin' twix two-three thou san I knows dat fo' a fac'"-- He paused,
peering at her waiting pencil.

"Put down three thou san" -- He paused again.

"How much dat be?"

Matilda figured.  She said then that the total estimated cost to buy their
family would be sixty-two hundred dollars.  "But what " bout Mammy Kizzy?  "

"I git to Mammy!"  he said impatiently.  He thought.  "Mammy git ting pretty
of' now, dat he'p her cost less" -- "Dis year she tumin' fifty," said Matilda.

"Put down six hunnud dollars."  He watched the pencil move.

"Now what dat?"

Matilda's face strained with concentration.

"Now it's sixty-eight hunnud dollars."

"Whew!  Sho' make you start to see niggers is money to white folks."

George spoke very slowly.

"But I 'dare I b'lieves I can hack fight an' do it.

"Cose, gon' mean waitin' an' savin' up a long time" -- He noticed that
Matilda seemed discomfited.

"I knows right what's on yo' mind," he said.

"Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah, an' Uncle Pompey."

Matilda looked grateful that he knew.  He said,

"Dey's family to me even 'fo' dey was to you" -- "Lawd, George!"  she
exclaimed, "jes' don't see how jes' one man s'posed to be tryin' to buy ever'
body but I sho' jes' couldn't walk off an' leave dem!"

"We got plenty time, Tilda.  Let's us jes' cross dat bridge when we gits to
it."

574 ALEX HALEY

"Dat's de truth, you right."  She looked down at the figures that she had
written.

"George, I jes' can't hardly believe we's talkin' 'bout what we is" She felt
herself beginning to dare to believe it, that the two of them, together, were
actually engaging for the first time in a monumental family discussion.  She
felt an intense urge to spring around the table and embrace him as tightly as
she could.  But she felt too much to move--or even speak for a few moments.
Then she asked,

"George, how come you got to thinkin' dis?"

He was quiet for a moment.

"I got by myself, an seem like I jes' got to thinkin' mo', like I tol' you"
-- "Well," she said softly, "sho' is nice."

"We ain't git ting nowhere!"  he exclaimed.

"AH we ever doin' is git ting massa somewhere!"  Matilda felt like shouting

"Jubilee!"  but made herself keep still.

"I been talkin' wid free niggers when me an' massa go to cities," George went
on.

"Dey say de free niggers up Nawth is debes off.  Say dem lives 'mongst one
not her in dey own houses, an' gits good jobs.  Well, I know I can git me a
job!  Plenty cock fighting up Nawth!  Even famous cock fighting niggers I'se
beared live right in dat New York City, a Uncle Billy Roger, a Uncle Pete
what got a big flock an' own a great big gamblin joint, an' another one call

"Nigger Jackson' dey say don't nobody beat his birds, hardly!"  He further
astounded Matilda.

"An' not her thing--I wants to see our young'uns lea ming to read an' write,
like you can."

"Lawd, bet tern me, I hope!"  Matilda exclaimed, her eyes shining.

"An' I wants 'em to learn trades."  Abruptly he grinned, pausing for effect.

"How you reckon you look settin' in yo' own house, yo' own stuffed furniture,
an' all dem 1'il knickknacks?  How 'bout Miss Tilda be axin' de other free
nigger womens over for tea in de mornin's, an' y'all jes' settin' roun'
talkin' 'bout 'rangin' y'all's flowers, an sich as dat?"

Matilda burst into nearly shrieking laughter.

"Lawd, man, you is jes' crazy!"  When she stopped laughing, she felt more
love for him than she'd ever felt before.

"I reckon de Lawd is done give me what I needs dis night."  Eyes welling, she
put her hand on his.

"You really think we can do it, George?"

"What you think I'se been settin' up here talkin' 'bout, ^oman?"

ROOTS 575

"You 'member de night we 'greed to marry, what I tol' you?"  His face said
that he didn't.

"I tol' you sump'n out'n de first chapter o' Ruth.  Tol' you,

"Wither thou goes', I will go, an' where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy
people shall be my people--' You don't 'member me sayin' dat?"

"Yeah, I reckon."

"Well, I ain't never felt dat way more'n I does right now."

CHAPTER 101

Removing his derby with one hand, with the other Chicken George held out to
Massa Lea a small water pitcher that looked as if it were woven tightly of
thick strands of wire.  "My boy, Torn, de one we done name for you, Massa, he
done made dis for his gran'mammy, but I jes' want you to see it."

Looking dubious, Massa Lea took the pitcher by its carved cow horn handle and
gave it a cursory inspection.  "Uh-huh," he grunted noncommittally.

George realized that he'd have to try harder.

"Yassuh, made datout'n jes' of' rusty scrap barb wire, Massa.  Built 'im a
real hot charcoal fire an' kept bendin' an' meltin' one wire 'against not her
'til he got de shape, den give it a kin' o' brazin' all over.  Dat Torn
always been real handy, Massa" -- He halted again, wanting some response, but
none came.

Seeing that he'cThave to reveal his real intent without gaining the tactical
advantage of some advance positive reaction to Tom's craftsmanship, George
took the plunge.  "Yassuh, dis boy been so proud o' carryin' yo' name all his
life, Massa, us all really blieves he jes' git de chance, he make you a good
blacksmith" -- An instantly disapproving expression came upon Massa Lea's
face, as if by reflex, and it fueled George's determination not to fail
Matilda and Kizzy in his promise to help 576 ALEX HALEY

Torn.  He saw that he'd have to make what he knew would be the strongest
appeal to Massa Lea--picturing the financial advantages.

"Massa, every year money you's spendin' on blacksmith- in' you could be
savin'!  Ain't none us never tol' you how Torn awready been savin' you some,
sharpenin' hoe blades an' sickles an' different other tools--well as fixin'
lot o' things gits broken roun' here.  Reason I brings it up, when you sent
me over for dat Isaiah nigger blacksmith to put de new wheel rims on de
wagon, he was tellin' me Massa Askew been years promisin' him a helper dat he
need real bad, much work as he doin' to make money fo' his massa.  He tol' me
he sho' be glad to make a blacksmith out'n any good boy he could git holt of,
so I thought right 'way 'bout Torn .  If he was to learn, Massa, ain't jes'
he could do ever' thing we needs roun' here, but he could be takin' in work
to make you plenty money jes' like dat Isaiah nigger doin' for Massa Askew."

George felt sure he'd struck a nerve, but he couldn't be sure, for the massa
carefully showed no sign.

"Looks to me this boy of yours is spending more time making this kind of
stuff instead of working,"

said Massa Lea, thrusting the metal pitcher back into George's hands.

"Torn ain't missed a day since he started workin in yo' fiel's, Massa!  He do
sich as dis jes' on Sundays when he off!  Ever since he been any size, seem
like he got fixin' an' makin' things in 'is bloodi Every Sunday he out in dat
1'il of lean-to shed he done fixed his self behin' de barn, a-bum- in' an'
bangin' on sump'n not her

Fact, we's been scairt he 'sturb you an' de missis.  "

"Well, I'll think about it," Massa Lea said, turning abruptly and walking
away, leaving Chicken George standing there confused and
frustrated--purposely, he felt sure-- holding the metal pitcher.

Miss Malizy was seated in the kitchen peeling turnips when the massa walked
in.  She half turned around, no longer springing to her feet as she would
have done in years past, but she didn't think he'd mind, since she had
reached that point in age and service where some small infractions could be
permitted.

Massa Lea went straight to the point.

"What about this boy named Torn?"

ROOTS 577

Torn?  You means Tilda's Torn, Massa?  "

"Well, how many Toms out there?  You know the one I mean, what about him?"

Miss Malizy knew exactly why he was asking.  Just a few minutes before,
Gran'mammy Kizzy had told her of Chicken George's uncertainty about how Massa
Lea had reacted to his proposal.  Well, now she knew.

But her opinion of young Torn was so high--and not just because he'd made her
new S-curved pothooks--that she decided to hesitate a few seconds before
answering, in order to sound impartial.

"Well," she said finally, "a body wouldn't pick 'im out of a crowd to talk
to, Massa, 'cause de boy ain't never been much wid words.  But I sho* can
tell you fo' fac' he de smartes' young' un out dere, an' de good est o' dem
big boys, to boot!"  Miss Malizy paused meaningfully.

"An' I speck he gwine grow up to be mo' man in whole lot o' ways clan his
pappy is."

"What are you talking about?  What kind of ways?"

"Jes' man ways, Massa.  Mo' solid, an' 'pendable, an' not fo' no foolishness
no kin' o' way, an' like dat.  He gwine be de kin' o' man make some woman a
mighty good hus- ban'."

"Well, I hope he hasn't got matin' on his mind," said Massa Lea, probing, "
'cause I just permitted it with that oldest one--what's his name?"

"Virgil, Massa."

"Right.  And every weekend he's runnm' off to bed down with her over at the
Curry plantation when he ought to be here workin'l" "Nawsuh, not Torn.  He
too young for sich as daton his min', an' I 'speck he won't be too quick
'bout it even when he git grown, leas' not 'til he fin' jes' de right gal he
want" "You're too old to know about young bucks nowadays," said Massa Lea.

"Wouldn't surprise me if one left my plow and mule in the field to go chasm'
some gal."

" " Gree wid you if you talkin' 'bout dat Ashford, Massa, 'cause he took to
woman chasin' jes' like his pappy.  But Torn jes' ain't dat kin', data ll

"Well, all right.  If I go on what you say, the boy sounds like he might be
fit for something."

578 ALEX HALEY

"Go on what any us say " bout him, Massa.  " Miss Malizy concealed her
jubilation.

"Don' know what you axin' 'bout Torn fo', but he sho' de pick o' dem big
boys."

Massa Lea broke the news to Chicken George five days later.

"I've worked out an arrangement to board your Torn over at the Askew
plantation," he announced solemnly, "for a three-year apprenticeship with
that nigger blacksmith Isaiah."

George was so elated that it was all he could do to keep from picking up the
massa and spinning him around.  Instead, he just grinned from ear to ear and
began to sputter his appreciation.

"You'd better be right about that boy, George.  On the strength of your
assurances, I recommended him very highly to Massa Askew.  If he isn't as
good as you say, 111 have him back here so fast it'll make your head spin,
and if he gets out of line, if he betrays my trust in any way, 111 take it
out of your hide as his.  Do you understand?"

"He won't let you down, Massa.  You got my promise on dat.  Dat boy a chip
off de of' block."

"That's what I'm afraid of.  Have him packed and ready to leave in the
mornin'."

"Yassuh."  An' thank you, suh.  You won't never regret it.  "

Racing up to slave row as soon as the massa was gone, Chicken George was so
near to bursting with pride in his achievement when he told them the great
news that he didn't see the wry smiles exchanged by Matilda and Kizzy, who
had been the ones responsible for urging him to approach the massa in the
first place.  Soon he stood in the doorway hollering,

"TornI TornI You TornI"

"Yaaay, Pappy!"   His reply came from behind the barn.

"Boy, c'merel" A moment later Tom's mouth was open as wide as his eyes.  The
incredible news had come as a total surprise--for they hadn't wanted him to
be disappointed if the effort hadn't worked.  But as overjoyed as he was,
their heaped congratulations so embarrassed him that Torn got back outside as
quickly as he could--partly to give himself the chance to realize that his
dream had actually come true.  He hadn't noticed while he was in the cabin
that his little ROOTS 579

sisters, Kizzy and Mary, had scampered outside and breathlessly spread the
news among their brothers.

The lanky Virgil was just trotting up from his chores in the barn before
leaving for the plantation of his recent bride; he merely grunted something
noncommittal under his breath and hurried on past Torn, who smiled, since
Virgil had been in a daze ever since he had jumped the broom.

But Torn tensed when he saw stocky, powerful eighteen- year-old Ashford
approaching, trailed by their younger brothers James and Lewis.  After nearly
a lifetime of unaccountable hostility between him and Ashford, Torn wasn't
surprised at his snarling bitterness.

"You always been dey pet!  Butterin' up eve' body so you gits de favors!  Now
you gwine off laughin' at us still in de fiel'!"  He made a swift feint as if
to strike Torn, drawing gasps from James and Lewis.

"I'm.  gon' git you yet, jes' watch!"  And Ashford stalked off, Torn staring
levelly after him, certain that someday he and Ashford were going to have a
showdown.

What Torn heard from

"L'il George" was another kind of bitterness.

"Sho' wish I was you git ting 'way from here, 'fo' pappy work me to death
down dere!  Jes' 'cause I got his name, he figger I'se s'posed to be crazy as
be is 'bout chickens.  I hates dem stinkin' things!"

As for the ten-year-old Kizzy -and eight-year-old Mary, having spread the
news, they now trailed Torn around the rest of the afternoon, their shy looks
making it clear that he was their adored and favorite big brother.

The next morning, after seeing Torn off in the mule cart with Virgil, Kizzy,
Sister Sarah, and Matilda had just begun the day's chopping in the field when
Gran'mammy Kizzy observed,

"Anybody seen us all up dere snifflin' an' cryin' an' gwine on would o'
thought we weren't gwine never see dat chile ag'in."

"Hmph!  No mo' chile, honey!"  exclaimed Sister Sarah.

"Dat Torn de nex' man roun' dis place!"

CHAPTER 102

With a special traveling pass supplied by Massa Lea, Virgil had hung a
lantern on the mule cart and driven it through the night before Thanksgiving
in order to get Torn home from the Askew plantation in time for the big
dinner, after an absence of nine months.  As the cart rolled back into the
Lea driveway in the chilly November afternoon and Virgil quickened the mule
to a brisk trot, Torn had to press back tears as the familiar slave row came
into view and he saw all of those whom he had missed so much standing there
waiting for him.

Then they began waving and shouting, and moments later, grasping his bag of
the gifts that he had made with his own hands for each of them, he jumped to
the ground amid the huggings and kissings of the womenfolk.

"Bless 'is heart!"  .  .  .

"He look so good!"  .  .

"Don't he now!  See how dem shoulders an' arms done filled out!"  .  .  .

"Gran'mammy, leave me kiss Tomi" .  .  .

"Don't squeeze 'im all day, lemme git holt of 'im too, chile!"

Over their shoulders, Torn caught a glimpse of his two younger brothers,
James and Lewis, wearing awed expressions; he knew that L'il George was down
among the gamecocks with his father, and Virgil had told him that Ashford had
gotten the massa's permission to visit a girl on another plantation.

Then he saw the usually bedridden Uncle Pompey sitting outside his cabin in
an old cane chair, bundled in a heavy quilt.  As soon as he could maneuver
clear, Torn hurried over to shake the old man's puffy, trembling hand,
bending closer to hear the cracked and almost whispery voice.

"Jes' wants to make sho' you's really back to see us, boy" -- "Yassuh, Uncle
Pompey, mighty glad to git backl" "Awright, see you later on," the old man
quavered.

ROOTS 581

Torn was having trouble with his emotions.  In his now sixteen years, not
only had he never been treated so much like a man, but also he had never
before felt such an outpouring of his slave-row family's love and respect.

His two little sisters were still pulling and clamoring over him when they
heard a familiar voice trumpeting in the distance.

"Lawd, here come Mr. Rooster!"  exclaimed Matilda, and the women went
scurrying to set the Thanksgiving meal on the table.

When Chicken George came striding into the slave-row area, seeing Torn, he
beamed.

"Well, look what done got loose an' come home!"  He clapped Torn heavily
across the shoulders with his hand.

"Is you makin' any money yet?"

"Nawsuh, not yet, Pappy."

"What kin' of blacksmith you is ain't makin' no money?"  demanded George in
mock astonishment.

Torn remembered that he had always felt caught in a windstorm whenever
closely exposed to his father's bombastic way of expressing himself.

"Long ways yet from being no blacksmith.  Pappy, jes' tryin' to learn," he
said.

"Well, you tell dat Isaiah nigger I say hurry up an' learn you sump'n!"

"Yassuh," said Torn mechanically, his mind flashing that he could probably
never master even so much as half of what Mr. Isaiah was patiently making
every effort to help him learn.  He asked,

"Ain't L'il George comin' up here fo* dinner?"

"He might git here in time, an he might not," said Chicken George.

"He too lazy to finish what I give 'im to do firs' thing dis mornin', an' I
tol' 'im I don't want to see his face up here 'til he git it done!"  Chicken
George was moving over to Uncle.  Pompey

"Sho' glad to see you out'n yo' cabin.  Uncle Pompey.  How's you doin'?"

"Poly, son, mighty poly.  OF man jes' ain't no mo' good, data ll

"Don't give me dat stuff, nary bit!"  boomed Chicken George, and laughing, he
turned to Torn,

"Yo' of' Uncle Pompey one dem of' lizard kin' o' niggers gwine live to be a
hunnud!  Done got real low sick reckon two, three times since you been gone,
but every time de wimminfolks all snimin' ready to bury 'im, he git right
back up ag'in!"

The three of them were laughing when the voice of 582 ALEX HALEY

Gran'mammy Kizzy shrilled at them,

"Y'all bring Pompey on over here to de table now!"  Though the day was crisp,
the women had set up a long table under the chinquapin tree so that everybody
could enjoy their Thanksgiving dinner together.

James and Lewis seized Uncle Pompey's chair, with Sister Sarah running up
solicitously behind them.

"Don' drop 'im, now, he still ain't too of' to fan y'all's britches!"

called Chicken George.

When they were all seated, though Chicken George was at the head of the
table, it was pointedly to Torn that Matilda said,

"Son, grace de table."  The startled Torn wished he had anticipated this, to
have given advance thought to some prayer that would express the emotions he
was feeling about the warmth and strength of a family.  But with everyone's
head already bowed, all he could think of now was, "0 Lawd, bless dis food
we's 'bout to eat, we ax in de name de Father, de Son, an' de Holy Ghos'.
Amen."

"Amen!  .  .  .  Amen!"  others echoed up and down the table.  Then Matilda,
Gran'mammy Kizzy, and Sister Sarah began shuttling back and forth, setting
heaped and steaming bowls and platters at intervals along the table, and
urging all to help themselves, before they also finally sat back down.  For
several minutes not a word was spoken as everyone ate as if they were
starving, with appreciative grunts and smacking noises.  Then, after a while,
with either Matilda or Kizzy refilling his glass with fresh buttermilk or
putting more hot meat, vegetables, and com bread on his plate, they began
plying Torn with questions.

"Po' thing, is dey feedin' you any good over yonder?  Who cook fo' you
anyhow?"  asked Matilda.

Torn chewed his mouthful enough to reply,

"Mr.  Isaiah's wife.  Miss Emma."

"What color she is, what she look like?"  asked Kizzy.

"She black, sorta fat."

"Dat ain't got nothin' to do wider cookin'l" guffawed Chicken George.

"She cook any good, boy?"

"Pretty fair.  Pappy, yassuh," Torn nodded affirmatively.

"Well, ain't like yo' own mammy's nohow!"  snapped Sister Sarah.  Torn
murmured agreeably,

"No'm," thinking how indignant Miss Emma would have been to hear them, and
how indignant they'd be to know that she was a better cook.

ROOTS 583

"Her an' dat blacksmith man, is dey good Christian folks?"

"Yes'm, dey is," he said.  " " Specially Miss Emma, she read de Bible a whole
lots.  "

Torn was just finishing his third plateful when his mammy and gran'mammy
descended on him with still more, despite his vigorous head shaking He
managed a muffled protest: "Save sump'n for L'il George when he come!"

"Plenty let for 'im an' you knows it!"  said Matilda.  "Have not her piece
dis fried rabbit.  .  .  1'il mo' dese collard greens ... an' dis stewed
winter squash.  An' Malizy done sent down a great big sweet 'later custard
from de dinner she servin' in de big house.  Y'all knows how good dat is" --
Torn had started forking into the custard when Uncle Pompey cleared his
throat to speak, and everyone hushed up to hear him.

"Boy, is you shoein' mules an' bosses yet?"

"Dey lets me pull off de of' shoes, but I ain't put none on yet,"

said Torn, thinking how only the previous day it had been necessary to hobble
a vicious mule before it could be shod.  Loudly Chicken George hooted, " "
Speck he ain't got 'enough good hard mule kicks yet to be broke in good!
Mighty easy to mess up bosses' foots less'n somebody know what he doin'!
Heared 'bout one blacksmith nigger put de shoes on backwards, an' dat boss
wouldn't do nothin' but back up!  "

When he quit laughing at his own joke, Chicken George asked,

"How much y'all git for shoein' bosses an' mules?"

"Blieves de mens pays Massa Askew fo'teen cents a shoe," said Torn.

"Sho' ain't no money in it like fightin' chickensi" Chicken George exclaimed.

"Well, it's sho' plenty mo' use o' blacksmithin' clan it is dem chickens!"
snapped Gran'mammy Kizzy, her tone so cutting that Torn wanted to jump up and
hug her.  Then she went on, her voice suddenly tender,

"Son, what de man have you doin' in learnin' you how to blacksmith?"

Torn was glad she asked, for he wanted to share with his family some idea of
what he was doing.

"Well, Gran'- mammy, early every mornin' I has de forge fire going' good by
time Mr. Isaiah gits dere.  Den I lays out de tools I knows he gwine need for
de jobs he gwine be doin'.

"Cause when 584 ALEX HALEY

you shapin' red-hot iron, can't let it be coolin' down while you hunts for de
right hammers to hit it wid"-- " Lawd, de chile blacksmithin' already!  "
exclaimed Sister Sarah.

"No'm," said Torn.

"I he's what dey calls a 'striker."  If Mr. Isaiah makin' sump'n heavy, like
wagon axles or plowshares, den I hits wid de sledge wherever he tap his
hammer.  An' sometime 1'il simple jobs hell let me finish while he start
sump'n else.  "

"When he gwine let you start shoein de bosses?"  asked Chicken George, still
pushing, seeming almost as if he wanted to embarrass his blacksmithing son,
but Torn grinned.

"Dunno, Pappy, but I reckon soon's he feel like I kin do it widout 'is he'p.
Jes' like you said, I sho' has got kicked aplenty times.  Fact, some dem bad
ones git to rarin' up, dey won't only kick, dey'U bite a plug out'n you if
you ain't careful."

"Do white folks come roun' dat blacksmith shop, son?"  asked Sister Sarah.

"Yes, ma'am, whole lots of 'em.  Ain't hardly no day don't see leas'-a dozen
or mo' standin' roun' talkin' while dey's waiting for Mr. Isaiah to finish
whatever work dey done brung."

"Well, den what kind o' news is you done beared 'em talkin' 'bout dat maybe
we ain't, being' stuck off like we is here?"

Torn thought a moment, trying to remember what had Mr. Isaiah and Miss Emma
felt were the most important things they'd recently heard white people
talking about.  "Well, one thing was sump'n dey calls 'telegraph."  It was
some Massa Morse in Washington, D.  C.  " dat talked to somebody clear in
Baltimore.  Dey say he say,

"What have God wrought?"  But I ain't never got de straight of what it
s'posed to mean.  "

Every head around the dinner table tamed toward Matilda as their Bible
expert, but she seemed perplexed.  "I--well, I can't be sho',"

she said uncertainly, "but believe I ain't never read nothin' 'bout dat in de
Bible."

"Somehow or not her Mammy," said Torn, "seem like it weren't to do wid de
Bible.  Was jes' sump'n talked a long ways through de air."

He asked then if any of them were aware that a few months before.

President Polk had died of diarraea in NashROOTS 585

ville, Tennessee, and had been succeeded by President Zachary Taylor.

"Everybody know dat!"  exclaimed Chicken George.

"Well, you know so much, you ain't never told it in my hearin'," said Sister
Sarah sharply.

Torn said,

"White folks, 'specially dey young'uns, is been comin' roun' singing songs
s'posed to sound' like us, but dey was writ by a Massa Stephen Foster."  Torn
sang the little that he could remember of "01* Black Joe," "My 01' Kentucky
Home," and

"Massa's in de Col', Col' Ground."

"Sho' do sound' sump'n like niggers!"  Gran'mammy Kizzy exclaimed.

"Mr.  Isaiah say dat Massa Poster growed up spendin' a lotta time lissenin'
to nigger singin' in churches an' roun' de steamboats an' wharves," said Torn.

"Dat 'splain it!"  said Matilda.

"But ain't you beared of no doin's by none o' us?"

"Well, yas'm," said Torn, and he said that free blacks who brought work to
Mr. Isaiah had been talking a lot about famous northern blacks who were
fighting against slavery, traveling around, lecturing large mixed audiences
to tears and cheers by telling their life stories as-daves before they had
escaped to freedom.

"Like it's one name Frederick Douglass," Torn said.

"Dey says he was raised a slave boy in Maryland, an' he teached his self to
read an' write an' finally worked an' saved up enough to buy his self free
from his massa."

Matilda cast a meaningful glance at Chicken George as Torn went on.

"Dey says people gathers by de hunnuds anywhere he speak, an' he done writ a
book an' even started up a newspaper.

"It's famous womens, too.  Mammy."  Torn looked at Matilda, Gran'mammy Kizzy,
and Sister Sarah, and he told them of a former slave named Sojoumer Truth,
said to be over six feet tall, who also lectured before huge crowds of white
and black people, though she could neither read nor write.

Springing up from her seat, Gran'mammy Kizzy began wildly gesturing.

"Sees right now I needs to git up Nawth an' do me some talkin'."  She
mimicked as if she were facing a big audience,

"Y'all white folks listen here to Kizzy!  Ain't gwine have dis mess no mo'l
Us niggers sick an' tired o' slavin'!"

"Mammy, de boy say dat woman six feet!  You aint tall 586 ALEX HALEY

enough!  " Chicken George said, roaring with laughter, as the others around
the table glared at him in mock indignation.  Chagrined, Gran'mammy Kizzy sat
back down.

Torn told them of another famous escaped slave woman "She named Harriet
Tubman.  Ain't no tellin' how many times she come back South an' led out
different whole bunches o' folks like us to freedom up Nawth on sump'n dey's
callin' de

"Unnergroun' Railroad."  Fac', she done it so much dey claims by now white
folks got out forty thousand dollars' worth o' rewards fo' her, alive or
dead.  "

"Lawd have mercy, wouldn't o' thought white folks pay dat much to catch no
nigger in de worl'!"  said Sister Sarah.

He told them that in a far-distant state called California, two white men
were said to have been building a sawmill when they discovered an
unbelievable wealth of gold in the ground, and thousands of people were said
to be rushing in wagons, on mules, even afoot to reach the place where it was
claimed that gold could be dug up by the shovelful.

He said finally that in the North great debates on the subject of slavery
were being held between two white men named Stephen Douglas and Abraham
Lincoln.

"Which one 'em for de niggers?"  asked Gran'mammy Kizzy.

"Well, sound' like de Massa Lincoln, leas' ways debes I can tell,"

said Torn.

"Well, praise de Lawd an' give 'im stren'th!"  said Kizzy.

Sucking his teeth.  Chicken George got up patting his ample belly and turned
to Torn.

"Looka here, boy, why'n't you'n me stretch our legs, walk off some dat meal?"

"Yassuh, Pappy," Torn almost stammered, scarcely able to conceal his
amazement and trying to act casual.

The women, who were no less startled, exchanged quizzical, significant
glances when Chicken George and Torn set off together down the road.

Sister Sarah exclaimed softly, "Lawd, y'all realize dat boy done growed nigh
big as his daddy!"  James and Lewis stared after their father and older
brother nearly sick with envy, but they knew better than to invite themselves
along.  But the two younger girls, L'il Kizzy and Mary, couldn't resist
leaping up and happily starting to hop-skip along eight or ten steps behind
them.

Without even looking back at them.  Chicken George or ROOTS 587 dered,

"Git on back yonder an he'p y'all's mammy wid dem dishes!"

"Aw, Pappy!"  they whined in unison.

"Git, done tol' you!"

Half turning around with his eyes loving his little sisters, Torn chided them
gently,

"Ain't y'all hear Pappy?  We see you later on."

With the girls' complaining sounds behind them, they walked on in silence for
a little way and Chicken George spoke almost gruffly.

"Looka here, reckon you know I ain't meant no harm jes' teasin' you a 1'il at
dinner."

"Aw, nawsuh," Torn said, privately astounded at what amounted to an apology
from his father.

"I knowed you was jes' teasin'."

Grunting, Chicken George said,

"What say we head on down an' look in on dem chickens?  See what keepin' dat
no- count L'il George down dere so long.  All I knows, he mighta cooked an'
et up some dem chickens fo' his Thanksgivin' by now."

Torn laughed.

"L'il George mean well.  Pappy.  He jes' a 1'il slow.  He done tol' me he
jes' don' love dem birds like you does."  Torn paused, then decided to
venture his accompanying thought.

"I 'speck nobody in de worl' loves dem birds like you does."

But Chicken George agreed readily enough.

"Nobody in dis family, anyways.  I done tried 'em all--'ceptin' you.  Seem
like all de res' my boys willin' to spend dey lives draggin' from one end of
a fiel' to de other, lookin' up a mule's butt!"  He considered for a moment.

"Yo' black- smithin', wouldn't 'zackly call dat no high livin' neither--
nothin' like game cocking--but leas' ways it's a man's work."

Torn wondered if his father ever seriously respected anything excepting
fighting chickens.  He felt deeply grateful that somehow he had escaped into
the solid, stable trade of blacksmithing.  But he expressed his thoughts in
an oblique way.

"Don't see nothin' wrong wid fannin'.  Pappy.  If some folks wasn't farmin',
'speck nobody wouldn' be eatin'.  I jes' took to blacksmithin' same as you
wid game cocking 'cause I loves it, an' de Lawd gimme a knack fo' it.

Jes' ever' body don' love de same things.  "

"Well, leas' you an' me got sense to make money doin' what we likes,"

said Chicken George.

588 ALEX HALEY

Torn replied,

"You does, anyway.  I won't make no money fo' couple mo' years, 'til I'se
finished pr enticing an' goes to work for massa--dat is, if he gimme some de
money, like he do o' what you wins hack fighting

"Sho' he will!"  said Chicken George.

"Massa ain't bad as yo' mammy an' gran'mammy an' dem likes to claim.  He got
'is ornery ways, sho' is!  You jes' have to learn how to git to massa's good
side, like I does--keep 'im b'leevin' you considers 'im one dem high-class
mass as what do good by dcy niggers."  Chicken George paused.

"Dat Massa Askew whose place you over dere workin' on--you got any idea what
'mount o' money he give dat Isaiah nigger fo' his blacksmithin'?"

"I bleeves dollar a week," said Torn.

"I'se beared Mr. Isaiah's wife say dat's what he give her every week to save,
an' she do, every penny."

"Less'n a minute win mon dat fightin' chickensi" Chicken George exclaimed,
and then contained himself.

"Well, anyhow, you jes' leave de money part to me when you comes back here to
blacksmith fo' massa.  I talk to 'im good 'bout how cheap dat Massa Askew is
wid 'is nigger."

"Yassuh."

Chicken George was experiencing a peculiar feeling that he really wished to
insure having the alliance, even the approval of this particular one among
his six sons--not that anything was wrong with the other five, and despite
the fact that this one was by far the least likely ever to sport anything
like a green -scarf and black derby with a long feather in it; it -was just
that very clearly this Torn possessed qualities of responsibleness not
encountered every day, as well as an unusual individual durability and
strength.

They had walked on in silence for a while when Chicken George said abruptly,

"You ever think 'bout blacksmithin' fo' yo'self, boy?"

"What you mean?  How in de worl' I gwine do dat, Pappy?"

"You ever think 'bout savin' de money you gwine be makin' an' buyin' yo'self
free?"

Seeing Torn too thunderstruck to reply.  Chicken George kept talking.

"Few years back, roun* when L'il Kizzy born, one night me an' yo' mammy set
down an figgered 'bout how much ROOTS 589

it cost to buy us whole family free, 'cordin to prices fo' niggers dem days.
Come to roun' sixty-eight hunnud dollars"-- " Whew!  " Torn was shaking his
head.

"Hear me out!"  George said.

"Sho' it's a lot!  But ever since den, I been hack fighting my butt off, wid
yo' mammy savin' my share o' de winnins.  Ain'twinned as much as I'd figured
when I started out, but all de same don' nobody know but yo' mammy an'
me--an' now you--she got mon a thou san dollars buried in jars roun' de
backyard!"

Chicken George looked at Torn.

"Boy, I'se jes' thinking ..  ."

"Me, too.  Pappy!"  A gleam was in Tom's eyes.

"Lissen here, boy!"  The urgency increased in Chicken George's tone.

"If'n I keeps winnin' 'bout de same as in de past few seasons, I oughta have
three, fo' hunnud mo' stashed away time you starts blacksmithin' fo' massa."

Torn was eagerly nodding his head.

"An', Pappy, wid bofe us makin' money, mammy could bury maybe five, six
hunnud a year!"  he said excitedly.

"Yeah!"  Chicken George exclaimed.

"At dat rate, less'n nigger prices is riz a lot higher, we ought to have
'enough to buy us whole fam'ly free inside o'--lemme see now ..  ."

They both figured, using their fingers.  After a while, Torn exclaimed,
'"Bout fifteen years!"

"Where you learn to count sofas What you think 'bout my idea, boy?"

"Pappy, gwine blacksmith my head off!  I }es' wish you'd o' said something'
'fo' now."

"Wid two us, I knows we can do it!"  said George, beaming.

"Make dis family 'mount to sump'n!  Us all git up Nawth, raisin' chilhms an'
gran'chilluns free, like folks was meant to!  What you say, boy?"

Both deeply moved, Torn and Chicken George had impulsively grasped each other
about the shoulders when just then they turned to see the stout, pudgy figure
of L'il George approaching at a lumbering trot, shouting

"TornI TornI " and wearing a grin seeming almost as wide as himself.
Reaching them breathless, his chest heaving, he grabbed and pumped Tom's
hands, clapped him on the back, and stood there alternately wheezing and
grinning, with sweat making his plump cheeks shine.

"Glad ... to ... see ... you .  ..  TornI" he gasped finally.

590 ALEX HALEY

"Take it easy dere, boy!"  said Chicken George.

"You won't have strength to git toyo dinner."  "Never... too ... tired .

fo' .  .  .  dat.  .  .  Pappy!  " " Why'n't you git on up dere an' eat,
den," said Torn, " an we jine you by and by.  Pappy and me got things to talk
bout.  "

"Awright ... I ... see ... y'all .  .  .  later," said L'il George, needing
no further encouragement as he turned to head for slave row.

"Better hurry!"  Chicken George shouted after him.

"Don' know how long yo' mammy can hoi' off yo' brothers from eatin' up what's
let!"

Watching L'il George break into a waddling run, Torn and his father stood
holding their sides from laughter until he disappeared around the bend, still
gaining momentum.

"We better figger sixteen years 'fo* we gits free," Chicken George gasped.

"How come?"  asked Torn, quickly concerned.

"Way dat boy eat, gwine cost a year's pay jes' keepin' im fed 'til den!"

CHAPTER 103

In the memory of Chicken George, nothing had ever generated such excitement
among North Carolina game cockers as the news that spread swiftly during late
November of 1855 that the wealthy Massa Jewett was entertaining as his house
guest a titled, equally rich game cocker from England who had brought with
him across the ocean thirty of his purebred

"Old English Game" birds, said to be the finest breed of fighting cocks in
existence.  According to the news, the Englishman, Sir C.  Eric Russell, had
accepted Massa Jewett's written invitation to pit his birds against some of
the best in the United States.  Since as longtime friends they preferred not
to fight their gamecocks against one another, each of them would supply
twenty birds to fight any forty ROOTS 591

challenger birds whose collective owners would be expected to ante up their
half of a $30,000 main pot, and $250 side bets would be the minimum permitted
on each cockfight.  Another wealthy local game cocker volunteered to organize
the forty competitors--accepting only five birds apiece from seven other
owners besides himself.

It had not been really necessary for Massa Lea to tell his veteran trainer
that he was going after a share of such a huge pot.

"Well," he said upon return to the plantation after posting his $1,875 bond,
"we've got six weeks to train five birds."

"Yassuh, ought to be able to do dat, I reckon," Chicken George replied,
trying as hard--and as unsuccessfully--not to seem excited.   Apart from his
own deep thrill just to think of such a contest.   Chicken George exulted to
the assembled slave-row family that it seemed to him that sheer excitement
had rolled twenty-five years off Massa Lea.   "Dey's sho' pricin' out any
hack fighters he exclaimed.   " Massa say it's sho' de bigges' money fight he
ever got any- wheres near to--fac', de sec on bigges' he ever even beared of!
"

"Phew!  What bigger fight was dat?"  exclaimed Uncle Pompey.

Chicken George said,

"Reckon maybe twenty years back dis double-rich Massa Nicholas Amngton what
live near Nashville, Tennessee, took 'leben covered wagons, twenty- two mens,
and three hunnud birds clear crost no tellin' how many states, through
bandits an Indians an' everythin', tildey got to Mexico.  Dey fought 'against
not her three hunnud birds belongin' to de Pres'dent o' Mexico, a Gen'l Santa
Ana, what had so much money he couldn even count it, an' swo' he raised de
world's greatest gamecocks.  Well, Massa say de fightin' jes' dem two men's
birds went on a solid week!  De stake was so big dey main purse was a chest
apiece full o' money!  Massa say even dey side bets could o' broke mos' rich
mens.  In de end, dis Tennessee Massa Amngton won roun' halfa million
dollars!  His birds he called

"Cripple Tonys' after his crippled nigger trainer named Tony.  An' dat
Mexican Geni Santa Ana wanted one dem

"Cripple Tonys' so bad fo' a breedin' cock he paid its weight in gol'!"

"I see right now I better git in de chicken business," said Uncle Pompey.

592 ALEX HALEY

For most of the next six weeks, Chicken George and Massa Lea were seldom seen
by anyone else on the plantation.

"It's a good thing massa keepin' off down dere wid dem chickens, mad as of'
missis is!"  Miss Malizy told the others on slave row at the end of the third
week.

"I

heard her jes' screechin' at him 'bout takin' five thou san dollars out'n de
bank.  Heared her say it near 'bout half what dey got saved up from all dey
lives, an' she jes' hollered an' carried on 'bout 'im tryin' to keep up wid
dem real rich mass as what got a thou san times mo' money clan he is.  "
After shouting at the missis to shut up and mind her own damn business, the
massa had stalked out of the house, said Miss Malizy.

Listening grimly, but saying nothing, were Matilda and twenty-two-year-old
Torn, who four years before had returned to the plantation and built a
blacksmith shop behind the barn, where by now he was serving a thriving trade
of customers for Massa Lea.  Fit to burst with anger, Matilda had confided to
her son how Chicken George had furiously demanded and gotten their own
two-thousand-dollar cache of savings, which he was going to turn over to the
massa to be bet on the Lea birds.  Matilda, too, had screeched and wept in
desperate effort to reason with Chicken George, "but he act like he gone
crazy!"  she had told Torn.

"Hollered at me,

"Woman, I knows every bird we got from when dey Was eggs.  Three or fo' ain't
nothin' wid wings can beat!  Ain't Trout to pass up dis chance to zackly
double what we got saved no quicker'n it take one our chickens to kill
anothern!

Two minutes can save us eight, nine mo' years o' scrapin' an' savin' to buy
us free!  "" "Mammy, I know you tol' Pappy de savin' have to start over ag'in
if de chicken lose!"  Torn had exclaimed.

"Ain't only tol' im dat!  Tried my bes' to press on 'im he ain't got no right
to gamble wid our freedom!  But he got real mad, hollerin', " Ain't no way we
kin lose!  You gimme my money, woman!  "" And Matilda had done so, she had
told Torn, her face stricken.

In the game fowl area, Chicken George and Massa Lea finished culling
seventeen of the best range walk birds down to ten of the finest gamecocks
either of them had ever seen.  Then they began air-training those ten birds,
tossing them higher and higher, until finally eight of them flew as much as a
dozen yards before their feet touched the ground.

"I

ROOTS 593

'dare look like we's trainin' wil' turkeys, Massa!  " chortled Chicken George.

"They're going to need to be hawks up against Jewett's and that Englishman's
birds," said the massa.

When the great cockfight was but a week away, the massa rode off, and late
the following day he returned with six pairs of the finest obtainable Swedish
steel gaffs, their lengths as sharp as razors tapering to needle points.

After a final critical appraisal two days before the fight, each of the eight
birds seemed so perfect that there was simply no way to say which five were
best.  So the massa decided to take all eight and choose among them at the
last minute.

He told Chicken George that they would leave the following midnight in order
to arrive early enough for both the gamecocks and themselves to rest from the
long ride and be fresh for the big fights.  Chicken George knew that the
massa was itching as bad as he was just to get there.

The long ride through the darkness was uneventful.  As he drove, his gaze
idly upon the lantern glowing and bobbing at the end of the wagon's tongue
between the two mules.  Chicken George thought with mingled feelings of his
and Matilda's recent emotional altercation about the money.  He told himself
resentfully that he knew better than she did how many years of patient saving
it represented; after all, hadn't it been his own perennial scores upon
scores of hack fights that had earned it?  He'd never felt for a moment that
Matilda wasn't as good as wives came, so he regretted he'd had to shout her
down, upsetting her so badly, as apparently the massa had also been forced to
do within the big house, but on the other hand there were those times when
the head of a family simply had to make the important, hard decisions.  He
again heard Matilda's tearful cry, "George, you ain't got no right to gamble
wid all our freedom!"  How quickly she'd forgotten that it had been he in the
first place who had introduced the idea of accumulating enough to buy their
freedom.

And after all those slow years of saving, it was now nothing but a godsend
that the massa had confided that he needed more cash for side betting during
the forthcoming fights, not only to make a good showing before those snobby,
rich mass as but to win their money as well.  Chicken George 594 ALEX HALEY

grinned to himself, remembering with relish Massa Lea's utterly astounded
expression at hearing him say,

"I got 'bout two thousand dollars saved dat you can use to bet wid, Massa."
Upon recovering from his shock, Massa Lea had actually grabbed and shook his
trainer's hand, pledging his word that Chicken George would receive every
cent that was won in bets using his money, declaring, You ought to double it,
anyhow!  " The massa hesitated.

"Boy, what you gonna do with four thousand dollars?"

In that instant Chicken George had decided to take an even bigger gamble--to
reveal why he had been saving so long and so hard,

"Massa, don't mistake me none, ain't got nothin' but debes kin' o* feelin's
'bout you, Massa.  But me an' Tilda jes' got to talkin', an' Massa, we jes'
'cided we gwine try see couldn' us buy us an' our chilluns from you, an'
spen* out de res' our days free!"  Seeing Massa Lea clearly taken aback.
Chicken George again implored, "Please Lawd don't take us wrong, Massa" --
But then in one of Chicken George's most richly warning life experiences,
Massa Lea had said,

"Boy, I'm gonna tell you what's been on my mind about this chicken fight
we're going into.  I'm figuring for it td be my last big one.  Don't think
you even realize, I'm seventy-eight years old.  I've been over fifty years of
dragging back and forth every season worrying with raising and fighting these
chickens.  I'm sick of it.  You hear me!  I tell you what, boy!  With my cut
of that main pot and side bets, I'm figgerin' to win enough to build me and
my wife another house--not no great big mansion like I wanted one time, but
just five, six rooms, new, that's all we need.

And I hadn't thought about it until you just brought it up, but then won't be
no more point in owning a whole passel of y'all niggers to have to fend for.
Just Sarah and Malizy could cook and keep a good garden we can live off, and
have enough money in the bank not to never have to beg nobody for nothin'"--
Chicken George was barely breathing as Massa Lea went on.

"So I'm gonna tell you what, boy!  Y'all have served me well an' ain't never
give me no real trouble.  We win this chicken fight big, at least double both
our money, yeah, you just give me what you'll have, four thousand dollars,
and we'll call it square!  And you know good as I do all y'all niggers are
worth twice that!  Fact, I never told you, but once that rich Jewett offered
me four thousand just for you, ROOTS 595

an' I turned him down!  Yeah, an' y'all can go on free if that's what you
want!  "

Suddenly in tears.  Chicken George had lunged to embrace Massa Lea, who
quickly moved aside in embarrassment.

"Oh Lawdy, Massa, you don't know what you's say- in'!  Us wants to be free so
bad!"  Massa Lea's reply was strangely hoarse.

"Well, I don't know what y'all niggers'U do, free, without somebody lookin'
out for you.  An' I know my wife's going to raise all manners of hell about
me just the same as giving y'all away.  Hell, that blacksmith boy Torn alone
is worth a good twenty-five hundred plus he's making me good money to boot!"

Roughly the massa had shoved Chicken George.

"Git, nigger, before I change my mind!  Hell!  I must be crazy!  But I hope
your woman an' mammy and the rest y'all niggers find out I ain't bad as I
know they always make me out to be!"

"Aw nawsuh, nawsuh, Massa, thank you, Massa!"  Chicken George went scrambling
backward, as Massa Lea hastily departed up the road toward the big house.

Chicken George wished now more than ever that the bitter encounter with
Matilda had never occurred.  Now he decided it best to keep his triumphant
secret, to let Matilda, his mammy Kizzy, and the whole family learn of their
freedom as an absolutely total surprise.  Still, fit to burst with such a
secret, several times he nearly told Torn, but then always at the last moment
he didn't, for even as solid a man as Torn was, he was so close with both his
mammy and gran'mammy that he might swear them to secrecy, which would ruin
it.  Also that would activate among them the very sticky issue that according
to what the massa had said, Sister Sarah, Miss Malizy, and Uncle Pompey were
going to have to be left behind, though they were as much family as anybody
else.

So across the interim weeks, Chicken George, pent up with his secret, had
submerged himself body and soul into honing into absolute perfection the
final eight gamecocks that now were riding quietly in their coops behind him
and Massa Lea in the big custom-built wagon rolling along the lonely road
through the dark.  At intervals Chicken George wondered what the uncommonly
silent Massa Lea was thinking.

It was in the early daylight when they caught sight of 596 ALEX HALEY

the vast and motley throng that even this early had not only overrun the cock
fighting area but had also spilled into an adjoining pasture that was quickly
filling with other wagons, carriages, buggies, carts, and snorting mules and
horses.

"Tawm Leal" A group of poor crackers cried out upon seeing the massa climb
down from his huge wagon.

"Go git 'em, Tawm!"  As he adjusted his black derby.  Chicken George saw the
massa nodding at them in a friendly manner, but he kept on walking.  He knew
that the massa wavered between pride and embarrassment at his notoriety among
the crackers.  After halfa century as a game cocker in fact, Massa Lea was a
legend wherever chickens were fought locally, since even at his age of
seventy-eight, his ability to handle birds in a cockpit seemed undiminished.

Chicken George had never heard such a din of crowing gamecocks as he began
unpacking things for action.  A passing slave trainer stopped and told him
that among the crowd were many who had traveled for days from other states,
even as distant as Florida.  Glancing about as they talked.  Chicken George
saw that the usual spectator area was more than doubled, but already was
crawling with men guaranteeing themselves a seat.  Among those moving
steadily past the wagon, he saw as many strange faces both white and black as
he did familiar ones, and he felt pride when numerous among both races
obviously recognized him, usually nudging their companions and whispering.

The sprawling crowd's buzzing excitement rose to a yet higher pitch when
three judges came to the cockpit and began measuring and marking the starting
lines.  Another buzz arose when someone's gamecock fluttered loose and went
furiously attacking men in its path, even sending a dog yelping, until the
bird was cornered and caught.  And the crowd's noises swelled with each
arrival and identification of any of the area's well-known game
cockers--especially the rest of the eight who would be competing against the
sponsoring Massas Jewett and Russell.

"I ain't never seed no Englishman, is you?"  Chicken George overheard one
poor white man ask another, who said he hadn't either.  He also heard talk
about the titled Englishman's wealth, that he had not only a huge English
estate, but also rich holdings in places called Scotland, Are ROOTS 597
land, and Jamaica.  And he heard that Massa Jewett had proudly boasted among
friends of how his guest was known for fighting his birds anytime, anywhere,
against any competition, for any amount.

Chicken George was chopping a few apples into small bits to feed the birds
when suddenly the crowd noise rose to a roar--and standing up quickly in the
wagon he recognized the approaching canopied surrey driven by Massa Jewett's
always poker-faced black coachman.  In the back were the two rich mass as
smiling and waving down at the crowd, surging so thickly around them that the
carriage's finely matched horses had a hard time progressing.  And not far
behind came six wagons, each filled with tall cock coops, the lead wagon
driven by Massa Jewett's white trainer, alongside of whom sat a thin and
keen-nosed white man whom Chicken George overheard someone nearby exclaim
that the titled, wealthy Englishman had brought clear across the ocean just
to care for his birds.

But the oddly dressed, short, stockily built, and ruddy- complexioned English
nobleman himself was the milling crowd's major focus of attention as he rode
alongside Massa Jewett in the surrey, both of them looking every inch the
important, even lordly men they were, the Englishman seeming to display just
an extra touch of disdain and hauteur toward the jostling throng on the
ground.

Chicken George had attended so many cockfights that he turned to his work of
massaging the legs and wings of his birds, knowing out of experience that
different sounds of the crowd would tell him whatever was going on, without
his even looking.  Soon a referee shouted for a quieting of the hoots,
catcalls, and rebel yells that said that many in the crowd had already been
hard at their bottles.

Then he heard the first announcement: "Mr.  Fred Rudolph of Williamstown is
pitting his red bird against Sir C.  Eric Russell of England with his
speckled gray."

Then: "Bill your cocks!"

And then: "Pit!"  And the crowd's shouting, followed by a sudden awed hush,
told him as clearly as if he had been watching that the fight had quickly
been won by the Englishman's bird.

As each of the eight challengers in turn fought their string of five birds
alternately against one belonging either to Massa Jewett or the Englishman,
Chicken George had 598 ALEX HALEY

never heard such a roar of side betting in his life, and the battles within
the pit were often matched by the verbal contests between the crowd and the
referees shouting for quiet.  Now and then the crowd noises would tell the
busy Chicken George that both birds had been hurt badly enough for the
referees to stop the fight to let the owners doctor them up before the fight
continued.  George could tell from a special roaring of the crowd each time
one of the wealthy men's birds was beaten, which wasn't often, and he
wondered nervously how soon Massa Lea's turn was going to come.  George
guessed that the judges must be picking the order of challengers by plucking
their names on slips from a hat.

He would have loved to see at least some of the actual fighting, but so much
was at stake: He was not going to interrupt his massaging, not even for one
moment.  He thought fleetingly about what a fortune of money, some of it his
own years of savings, (he massa was only waiting to bet on the very birds
whose muscles he was gently kneading under his fingers.  Although only some
chosen five among them would fight, there was no way to guess which five, so
every one of the eight had to be in the very ultimate of physical readiness
and condition.  Chicken George had not often prayed in his life, but now he
did so.  He tried to picture what Matilda's face was going to look like,
first when he returned and dropped into her apron their money at least
doubled, and next when he would ask her to assemble the whole family, when he
would announce they were FREE.

Then he heard the shout of the referee: "The next five challenging birds are
owned and will be handled by Mr. Torn Lea of Caswell Countyl" George's heart
leaped up into his throat!  Clapping his derby tighter on his head, he sprang
down from the wagon, knowing the massa would be coming now to select his
first bird.

"Taaaaawm Leal" Above the crowd noise he heard the name being squalled out by
the poor crackers.  Then came advancing raucous rebel yells as a group of men
surged out of the crowd, surrounding the massa.  Reaching the wagon amid
them, he cupped his hand over his mouth and over the din shouted in George's
ear,

"These fellas will help us take 'em all over by the cockpit."

"Yassuh, Massa."

ROOTS 599

George went leaping back onto the wagon, handing down the eight cock coops to
the massa's poor-white companions, his thoughts flashing that in his
thirty-seven years of game- cocking he never had ceased to marvel at Massa
Lea's appearance of a totally detached calm in such tense times as now.  Then
they were all trooping back toward the cockpit through the crowd, Massa Lea
carrying the splendid dark buff bird he had chosen to fight first, and
Chicken George bringing up the rear carrying his woven basket of emergency
injury medications, rabbit underbelly fur, some leaves of fresh ivy,
glycerin, a ball of spider's web, and turpentine.  It was a worsening
push-and-shove progress the closer they got toward the cockpit, with the
alcoholic cries of

"Tawm Lea!"  ringing in their ears, as well as sometimes "That's his Chicken
George nigger!"  and George could feel the eyes on him as if they were
fingers, and it felt good, but kept both moving and looking straight ahead,
trying to appear as cool as the massa.

And then Chicken George saw the short, squat, titled Englishman standing
casually near the cockpit, holding a magnificent bird within the crook of his
left arm, as his eyes watchfully appraised the little procession of them
arriving with the challenger birds.  After exchanging curt nods with Massa
Lea, Russell set his bird on the scales and the referee sang out,

"Five pounds and fifteen ounces!"

The beautiful bird's silvery blue plumage reflected brilliantly in the
sunlight.

Then the massa stepped up with his dark buff bird, which was one of Chicken
George's particular favorites.  It was powerful, savage, its neck jerking
about like a rattlesnake, murder in its eyes, and it was seething to be
released.  When the referee shouted

"Six pounds even!"

the hard-drinking poor-white fans started yelling as if the extra ounce meant
the fight was won already.

"Taaaaawm Lea!  Go git that Britisher, Tawm!  Act like he mighty stuck up!
Take 'im down a peg!"

It was plain that Massa Lea's special fans were really well liquored, and
Chicken George saw the darkening flush of embarrassment on both the massa's
and the English- man's faces as, pretending not to hear, they kneeled to tie
on their birds' steel gaffs.  But the cries grew more loud and rude: "Them
chickens or ducks he fightin'?"  .  .  .

"Naw, it's swimmin' chickens!"  .  "Yeah!  He feed 'em fishes!"  The 600
ALEX HALEY

Englishman's face was angry.  The referee had begun dashing back and forth,
furiously waving his arms, shouting, "Gentlemen!  Please!"  But the derisive
laughter only spread and the wisecracks became more cutting: "Where's his red
coat at?"  .  "Do he fight foxes, too?"  .  "Naw, too slow, waddle like a
possum!"  .  "More like a bullfrog!"

"He look to me like a bloodhound!"

Massa Jewett strode out, angrily confronting the referee, his hands hacking
the air, but with his words drowned out by the chanting chorus,

"Tawmmm Leal" .  "Tawmmmmm LEAt" Now even the judges joined the referee,
dashing this way and that, flailing their arms, brandishing their fists and
barking repeatedly,

"The cockfight will stop unless there's quiet!"  .  .  .

"Y'all want that, keep it up!"

Slowly, the drunken cries and laughter began subsiding.  Chicken George saw
Massa Lea's face sick with his embarrassment, and that both the Englishman
and Massa Jewett were absolutely livid.

"Mr.  Leaf" When the Englishman loudly and abruptly snapped out the words,
almost instantly the crowd fell silent.

"Mr.  Lea, we both have such superb birds here, I wonder if you'd care to
join me in a special personal side bet?"

Chicken George knew that every man among the hundreds present sensed just as
he did the Englishman's tone of vengefulness and condescension behind his
manner of civility.  The back of the massa's neck, he saw, had suddenly
become flushed with his anger.

A few seconds brought Massa Lea's stiff reply: "That will suit me, sir.  What
is your proposition?"

The Englishman paused.  He appeared to be pondering the matter before he
spoke.

"Would ten thousand dollars be sufficient?"

He let the wave of gasps sweep the crowd, and then,

"That is, unless you haven't that much faith in your bird's chances, Mr.
Lea."  He stood looking at the massa, his thin smile clearly contemptuous.

The crowd's brief exclamatory rumbling quickly faded into a deathly
stillness; those who had been seated were standing up now.  Chicken George's
heart seemed to have stopped beating.  Like a distant echo be heard Miss
MaUzy's report of Missis Lea's fury that the five thousand dollars the massa
had withdrawn from the bank was "near 'bout ROOTS 601

half dey life savin's.  " So Chicken George knew Massa Lea couldn't dare to
call that bet.  But what possible response could he make not to be utterly
humiliated before this throng including practically everyone he knew?
Sharing his massa's agony.  Chicken George couldn't even bring himself to
look at him.  An eternity seemed to pass, then George doubted his ears.

Massa Lea's voice was strained.

"Sir, would you care to double that?

Twenty thousand!  "

The whole crowd vented exclamations of incredulity amid rustling, agitated
movements.  In sheer horror Chicken George realized that sum represented
Massa Lea's total assets in the world, his home, his land, his slaves, plus
Chicken George's savings.  He saw the Englishman's expression of utter
astonishment, before quickly he collected himself, his face now set and grim.

"A true sportsman!"  he exclaimed, extending his hand to Massa Lea.

"A bet, sir!  Let us heel up our birds!"

Suddenly then Chicken George understood: Massa Lea knew that his magnificent
dark buff bird would win.  Not only would the massa become instantly rich,
but this one crucial victory would make him forever a heroic legend for all
poor crackers, a symbol that even the snobbish, rich blue blood mass as could
be challenged and beaten!  None of them could ever again look down their'
noses at Torn Lea!

Massa Lea and the Englishman now bent down on their opposite sides of the
cockpit, and in that instant it seemed to Chicken George that the entire life
of the massa's bird flashed through his mind.  Even as a cockerel, its
unbelievably quick reflexes at first had caught his attention; then as a stag
its amazing viciousness saw it constantly trying to attack others through the
cracks in their fence- row pen; and when recently retrieved from the range
walk within seconds it had nearly killed the old catch cock before it could
be stopped.  The massa had picked that bird knowing how smart, aggressive,
and deep game it was.

For just a split second Chicken George seemed again to hear an outraged
Matilda.

"You's crazier even clan massal Wars' can happen to 'im is endin' up jes' a
po' cracker again, but you's gamblin' yo' whole famly's freedom on some
chickeni" Then the three judges stepped out, positioning themselves evenly
around the cockpit.  The referee poised as if 602 ALEX HALEY

he stood on eggs.  An atmosphere seemed to be hovering that everyone there
knew they were about to witness something to talk about for the rest of their
days.  Chicken George saw his massa and the Englishman holding down their
straining birds, both of their faces raised to watch the referee's lips.

"Pit]" The silvery blue and dark buff birds blurred toward each other,
crashing violently and bouncing backward.  Landing on their feet, both were
instantly again in the air, tearing to reach each other's vitals.  Beaks
snapping, spurs flashing were moving at a blinding speed, attacking with
ferocity that Chicken George had seldom seen equaled by any two birds in a
cockpit.  Suddenly the Englishman's silvery blue was hit, the massa's bird
had sunk a spur deeply into one of its wing bones; they fell off balance,
both struggling to loosen the stuck spur while pecking viciously at each
other's heads.

"Handle!  Thirty seconds!"  The referee's shout was barely uttered before
both the Englishman and Massa Lea sprang in; the spur freed, both men licked
their birds' disarrayed head feathers to smoothness again, then set them back
down on their starting lines, this time holding them by the tails.  "Get
ready.  .  .  .  Pit!"

Again the cocks met evenly high in midair, both sets of spurs seeking a
lethal strike, but failing to do so before they dropped back to the ground.
The massa's bird dashed, trying to knock its enemy off balance, but the
English bird feinted brilliantly sidewise, drawing the crowd's gasps as the
massa's bird lunged harmlessly past at full force.  Before he whirled about,
the English bird was upon him; they rolled furiously on the ground, then
regained their feet, battling furiously beak to beak, parting, beating at
each other with powerful wing blows above a flurry of slashing legs.  Again
they took to the air, dropping back again, ground-fighting with new fury.

A cry rose!  The English bird had drawn blood.  A spreading darkening area
showed on the breast of the massa's bird.  But he violently buffeted his
enemy with wing blows until it stumbled and he sprang above it for a kill.
But again the English bird brilliantly crouched, dodged, escaped.  Chicken
George had never witnessed such incredibly swift ROOTS 603

reflexes.  But the massa's bird now whirled forcefully enough to knock the
English bird onto its back.  He hit it twice in the chest, drawing blood, but
the English bird managed to flap into the air, and came down, striking the
massa's bird in the neck.

Chicken George had quit breathing as the bleeding birds sparred, circling,
heads low, each seeking an opening.  In a sudden bun ding flurry, the English
bird was overpowering the massa's bird, battering with its wings, its
striking spurs drawing more blood, then incredibly the massa's bird burst
into the air and as it came down sinking a spur into the English bird's
heart; it collapsed in a feathery heap, its beak gushing blood.

It came so swiftly that a second or so seemed to pass before the huge din
rose.  Screaming, red-faced men were springing up and down.

"Tawml Tawm!  He done iti" Chicken George, beyond happiness, saw them mobbing
the massa, pounding his back, pumping his hand.

"Tawm

"Leal Tawm Leal Torn LEA!"

We's gwine be free.  Chicken George kept thinking.  The actuality of soon
telling his family seemed unbelievable, inconceivable.  He glimpsed the
Englishman with his jaw set in a way that made one think of a bulldog.

"Mr.  LEA!"  Probably nothing else could have so quickly quieted the crowd.

The Englishman was walking, he stopped about three yards distant from the
massa.  He said,

"Your bird fought brilliantly.  Either one could have won it.  They were the
most perfectly matched pair I've ever seen.  I'm told you're a kind of
sportsman who might care to let your winnings ride on another contest between
birds of ours."

Massa Lea stood there, his face blanched.

For seconds cooped gamecocks cluckings and crowings were the only sounds
heard as thronged men tried to comprehend the potential of two gamecocks
battling with eighty thousand dollars at stake, winner take all.  .  Heads
had swiveled toward Massa Lea.  He seemed bewildered, uncertain.

For one split second his glance brushed Chicken George, working feverishly on
the injured bird.  Chicken George was as startled as others to hear his own
voice.

"Yo" birds whup anything wid feathers, Massal" The sea of white faces
swiveled toward him.

604 ALEX HALEY i "I've heard that your faithful darky is among the best
trainers, but I wouldn't rely too much on his advice.  I also have other very
good birds."

The words had come as if the rich Englishman regarded his previous loss about
as he might have a game of marbles, as if he were taunting Massa Lea.

Then Massa Lea sounded elaborately formal: "Yes, sir.  As you propose.

111 take pleasure in letting the sum ride on another fight.  "

The next several minutes of preparatory activities passed almost as a blur
for Chicken George.  Not a sound came from the surrounding crowd.

There had never been anything like this.  All of Chicken George's instincts
approved when Massa Lea indicated with a forefinger the coop containing the
bird that Chicken George had previously given a nickname.

"De Hawk, yassuh," he breathed, knowing precisely that bird's tendency for
seizing and holding an enemy with its beak while slashing with its spurs.  It
would be the countermeasure for birds trained to feint expertly, as the
previous contest had suggested was characteristic within the Englishman's
flock.

Cradling

"De Hawk" in his arm, Massa Lea went out to where the Englishman held a solid
dark gray bird.  The birds weighed in at six pounds even.

When

"Pit!"  came, bringing the anticipated rushing impact, somehow instead of
either bird taking to the air, they exchanged furious wing blows and Chicken
George could hear

"De Hawk's" beak snapping after a proper hold .  .  .  when somehow amid
mutual buffeting an English spur struck in savagely.  The massa's bird
stumbled and its head dropped limply for an instant before it collapsed, its
opened mouth streaming blood.

"0 Lawd!  0 Lawd!  0 Lawd!"  Chicken George went bolting, knocking aside men
in his lunge into the circular cockpit.  Bellowing like a baby, scooping up
the obviously mortally wounded

"Hawk," he sucked clotting blood from its beak as it weakly fluttered, dying
in his hands.  He struggled to his feet with the nearest men drawing back
from his bawling anguish as he stumbled back through the crowd and toward the
wagon cradling the dead bird.

Back about the pit a gathering of planters were wildly back-slapping and
congratulating the Englishman and Massa Jewett.  All of their backs were
turned to the strickROOTS 605

en, solitary figure of Massa Lea, who stood rooted, staring down with a
glazed look at the bloodstains in the cockpit.

Turning finally.  Sir C.  Eric Russell walked over to where Massa Lea was,
and Massa Lea slowly raised his eyes.

"What'd you say?"  he mumbled.

"I said, sir, it just wasn't your lucky day."

Massa Lea managed a trace of a smile.

Sir C.  Eric Russell said,

"Concerning the wager.  Of course, no one carries about such sums in his
pocket.  Why don't we settle up tomorrow?  Say, sometime in the afternoon" --
He paused.

"After the tea hour, at Mr. Jewett's home."

Numbly, Massa Lea nodded.

"Yes, sir."

The trip home took two hours.  Neither the massa nor Chicken George spoke a
word.  It was the longest ride Chicken George had ever taken.

But it had not been long enough, as the wagon pulled into the driveway.  When
Massa Lea returned from Massa Jewett's during the next day's dusk, he found
Chicken George mixing meal for the cockerels in the supply hut, where he had
spent most of the hours since Matilda's screams, wails, and shouting during
the previous night had finally driven him from their cabin; "George," the
massa said,

"I got something' hard to tell you."  He paused, groping for words.

"Don't know how to say it hardly.  But you already know I ain't had nowhere
near the money folks thinks I did.

Pact is, 'cept for a few thousand, 'bout all I own is the house, this land,
and you few niggers.  "

He's going to sell us, George sensed.

"Trouble is," the massa went on, "even all that ain't but roun' half what I
owe that god damned sonofabitch.  But he's offered me a break" The massa
hesitated again.

"You heard him say what he'd heard about you.  And he said today he could see
how good you train in both the birds fought" -- The massa took a deep breath.
George held his.

"Well, seems like he needs to replace a trainer he lost over in England
awhile back, and he thinks bringing back a nigger trainer would be fun."  The
massa couldn't look into George's disbelieving eyes and became more abrupt.

"Not to drag out this mess, he'll call us square for all I've got in cash, a
first and second mortgage on the house, and using 606 ALEX HALEY

you over in England long enough to train somebody else.  He says no more'n a
couple of years.  "

The massa forced himself to look Chicken George in the face.

"Can't tell you how bad I feel about this, George.  ... I ain't got no
choice.  He's lettin' me off light.  If I don't do it, I'm mint, everything I
ever worked for."

George couldn't find words.  What could he say?  After all, he was the
massa's slave.

"Now, I know you're wiped out, too, and I mean to make it up to you.

So I pledge you my word right here and now while you're gone I'll take care
of your woman and young'uns.  And the day you get home"-- Massa Lea paused,
sliding a hand into his pocket, withdrawing it, and holding a folded paper
that he unfolded and thrust before Chicken George.

"Know what that is?  Sat down an' wrote it out last night You're looking
right at your legal freedom paper, boy!  I'm gonna keep it in my strongbox to
hand you the day you come back!"

But after momentarily staring at the mysterious writing that covered most of
the square, white sheet of paper, Chicken George continued struggling to
control his fury.  "Massa," he said quietly,

"I was gwine buy us all free!  Now all I had gone, an' you sendin' me off
crost de water somewheres 'way from my wife an' chilluns besides.  How come
you can't leas' free dem now, den me when I gits back?"

Massa Lea's eyes narrowed.

"I don't need you tellin' me what to do, boy!  Ain't my fault you lost that
money!  I'm offerin' to do too much for you anyhow, that's the trouble with
niggers!  You better be careful of your mouth!"  The massa's face was
reddening.

"If it wasn't for you being' all your life here, I'd just go ahead an' sell
your ass!"

George looked at him, then shook his head.

"If all my life mean anythin' to you, Massa, how come you's jes' messin' it
up mo'?"

The massa's face set into hardness.

"Pack whatever you intend to take with you!  You leave for England Saturday."

CHAPTER 104

With Chicken George gone, his luck gone, and perhaps his nerve gone as well,
the fortunes of Massa Lea continued to decline.  At first, he ordered L'il
George into full-time daily care of the chickens, but toward the end of only
a third day, the massa found some of the cockerel pens' water pans empty and
the chubby, slow L'il George was sent fleeing with dire threats.  The
youngest boy, Lewis, nineteen, was next transferred from field work to take
on the job.  In preparation for the season's several remaining game cocking
matches, Massa Lea now was forced to take over most of the prefight training
and conditioning chores himself, since Lewis as yet simply did not know how.
He accompanied the massa to the various local contests, and each of those
days, the rest of the family gathering in the evenings awaited the return of
Lewis to tell them whatever bad happened.

The massa's birds had lost more fights than they won, Lewis always said, and
after a while that he had overheard men openly talking that Torn Lea was
trying to borrow money to make bets.

"Ain't many seem like dey wants to talk wid massa.  Dey jes' speaks or waves
quick an' keeps going' like he got de plague."

"Yeah, de plague o' dem knowin' now he po'," said Matilda.

"Po' cracker's all he ever beeni" Sister Sarah snapped.

It became slave row's common knowledge that Massa Lea had taken to drinking
heavily, almost every day, between his shouting matches with Missis Lea.

"Dat of' man ain't never been dis evil!"  Miss Malizy told her grimly
listening audience one night.

"He hit de house actin' jes' like a snake hollerin' an' cussin' ifn missy
even look at 'im.  An' all day long when he gone, she in dere 608 ALEX HALEY

cryin' she don't even never want to hear no more "bout no chickens!"

Matilda listened, emotionally drained from her own' weeping and praying since
her Chicken George had been gone.  Briefly her glances reviewed their
teen-aged daughters and six strong grown sons, three of them now with mates
and children.  Then her eyes came back to rest upon her blacksmith son, Torn,
as if she wished he would say something.  But who spoke instead was Lilly
Sue, Virgil's pregnant mate, who was briefly visiting from the nearby Curry
plantation where she lived, and fear was thick in her tone.

"I don' know y'all's massa good as you do, but I jes" feels he gwine do
something terrible, sbo's we born.  " A silence fell among them, no one being
willing to express their own guess, at least not aloud.

After the next morning's breakfast.  Miss Malizy waddled hurriedly from the
kitchen down to the blacksmith shop.  "Massa say tell you saddle his boss and
git it roun' to de front porch, Torn," she urged, her large eyes visibly
moist.  "Lawd, please hurry up, 'cause de things he been sayin' to poof'
missis jes' ain't hardly fittin'."

Without a word Torn soon tied the saddled horse to a gate post, and he had
just started back around the side of the big house when Massa Lea came
lurching through the front door.  Already red- faced from drinking, he
struggled up onto the horse's back and galloped away, weaving in the saddle.

Through a half-opened window, Torn could overhear Missis Lea weeping as if
her heart would break.  Feeling embarrassment for her, he continued across
the backyard to the blacksmith shed where he was just starting to beat a
dulled plow point into sharpness when Miss Malizy came again.

"Torn," she said,

"I 'dare seem like massa jes' win' up killin' his self he keep on like he
going', man nigh onto eighty years of'."

"You want to know the truth.  Miss Malizy," he replied,

"I b'lieve one way or not her dat's what he tryin' to do."

Massa Lea returned during the midafternoon, accompanied by another white man
on horseback, and from their respective kitchen and blacksmith shop
observation posts, both Miss Malizy and Torn saw with surprise that the pair
didn't dismount and enter the big house to freshen up and share a drink, as
was always previously done with any ROOTS 609

guests.  Instead, the horses were kept trotting on down the back road toward
the gamecock area.  Not hal fan hour later, Torn and Miss Malizy saw the
visitor come back riding rapidly alone, holding under one arm a frightened,
clucking game hen and Torn being outside was able to catch a fairly close
glimpse of the man's furious expression as he rode by.

It was at that night's usual slave-row gathering when Lewis told what
actually had happened.

"When I beared de bosses comin'," he said,

"I

jes' made sho' massa seed me workin' 'fo' I made myself scarce, over behin'
some bushes where I knowed I could see an' hear.

"Well, after some pretty hot barg^ainin', dey come to a hunnud-dollar
'greement fo' dis game hen settin' on a clutch o' eggs.  An' I seen de man
count out de money, den massa count it again 'fo' puttin' it in his pocket.
Right after den a misunderstandin' commence 'bout de man sayin' de eggs under
de hen went wid de deal.  Well, massa commence to cussin' like he crazy 1 He
run, grab up de hen an' wid his foot stomped an' squashed dat nest o' eggs
into one mess!  Dem two was nigh fightin' when all o' a sudden de odder man
snatched de hen an' jumped on his boss, yellin' he'd bus' massa's head if he
wasn't so damn ol'l" The uneasiness of the slave-row family deepened with
each passing day, and nights were spent in fitful sleep resultant from worry
of whatever might be the next frightful development.  Across that 1855 summer
and into the fall, with every angry outburst from the massa, with his every
departure or arrival, the rest of the family's eyes involuntarily would turn
to the twenty-two-year-old blacksmith Torn, as if appealing for his
direction, but Torn offered none.  By the crisp November, when there had been
a fine harvest from the massa's roughly sixty-five acres in cotton and
tobacco, which they knew he had been able to sell for a good price, one
Saturday dusk Matilda watched from her cabin window until she saw Tom's last
blacksmithing customer leave, and she hurried out there, her expression
telling him from long experience that something special was on her mind.

"Yas'm, Mammy?"  he asked, starting to bank the fire in his forge.

"I been thinkin', Torn.  All six you boys done growed up to be mens now.  You
ain't my oldes', but I'se yo' mammy 610 ALEX HALEY

an' knows you's got de level est head," Matilda said.

"Plus dat, you's de blacksmith an' dey's fiel' ban's.  So look like you's got
to be de main man o' dis fam'ly since yo' daddy gone 'bout eight months now"
-- Matilda hesitated, then added loyally, "leas' ways, 'til he git back."

Torn was frankly startled, for ever since his boyhood he had been his
family's most reserved member.  Although he and his brothers had all been
born and reared on Massa Lea's plantation, he had never become very close
with any of them, principally because he had been away for years as a
blacksmithing apprentice, and since his return as a man, he was at the
blacksmith shed, while the rest of his brothers were out in the fields.  He
had especially little contact anymore with Virgil, Ashford, and L'il George,
for differing reasons.  Virgil, now twenty-six, spent all his free time over
on the adjoining plantation with his wife Lilly Sue and their recently born
son, whom they had named Uriah.  As for Ashford, twenty-five, he and Torn had
always disliked and avoided each other, and Ashford had become more bitter at
the world than ever since a girl he desperately wanted to marry had a massa
who refused to let them jump the broom, calling Ashford an "uppity nigger."
And the twenty-four-year-old L'il George, now just plain fat, was also deep
in courtship with an adjoining plantation's cook, twice his age, which evoked
wry family comments that he would woo anyone who would fill his stomach.

Matilda's telling Torn that she saw him as the family leader startled him the
more since it implied his becoming their intermediary with Massa Lea, with
whom he intentionally had very little actual contact.

From when the equipment had been bought to establish a blacksmith shop, the
massa somehow had always seemed to respect Tom's quiet reserve, along with
his obvious competence at blacksmithing, which brought in an increasing flow
of customers.  They always paid the massa at the big house for whatever jobs
Torn had done, and each Sunday the massa gave Torn two dollars for his week's
work.

Along with Tom's ingrained reticence to talk very much with anyone was his
equal tendency to ponder deeply on private thoughts.  No one ever would have
dreamed that for two years or more he had turned over and over again in his
mind his father's descriptions of exciting potentials that "up Nawth" offered
to free black people, and Torn ROOTS 611

had weighed at great length proposing to the whole slave- row family that
instead of waiting more endless years trying to buy their freedom, they
should carefully plan and attempt a mass escape to the North, He had
reluctantly abandoned the idea in realization that Gran'mammy Kizzy must be
well into her sixties, and old Sister Sarah and Miss Malizy, who seemed the
same as family, were in their seventies.  He felt that those three would have
been the quickest to leave, but he seriously doubted if any of them would
survive the risks and rigors of such a desperate gamble.

More recently, Torn had privately deduced that the massa's recent cockfight
loss must have been even greater than he had fully revealed.  Torn had
closely watched Massa Lea becoming more strained, haggard, and aged with each
passing day and each emptied bottle of whiskey.  But Torn knew that the most
disturbing evidence of something deeply amiss was that by now, Lewis
declared, the massa had sold off at least half of his chickens, whose
bloodlines represented at least halfa century of careful breeding.

Then Christmas came, and ushered in the New Year of 1856, as a heavy pall
seemed to hang over not only the slave row, but also the entire plantation.
Then an early spring afternoon, another rider came up the entry lane.  At
first Miss Malizy appraised him as another chicken buyer.  But then, seeing
how differently the massa greeted this one, she grew apprehensive.  Smiling
and chit chatting with the man as he dismounted, the massa yelled to the
nearby L'il George to feed, water, and stable the horse for the night, then
graciously Massa Lea squired his visitor inside.

Before Miss Malizy even began serving the big-house supper, outside in slave
row the family members were exchanging fearful questions.

"Who dat man anyhow?"  .  .  .  "Ain't never seen 'im befo'l" .  .  , "Massa
ain't acted like dat no time recenti" .  .

"Well, what you reckon him here fo'7" They could hardly await the later
arrival and report of Miss Malizy.

"Dey ain't talked in my hearin' nothin' 'mount to nothing," she said.

"Could be 'cause of' missis was right dere."  Then Miss Malizy went on
emphatically,

"But somehow or not her I jes' don't nohow like datodder man's looks!  Seed
too many like 'im befo', shifty-eyed an' tryin' to act like dey's sump'n dey
ain'tl" 612 ALEX HALEY

A dozen pairs of slave-row eyes were monitoring the big- house windows from
slave row when the obvious movements of a lamp told that Missis Lea had left
the men in the living room and made her way upstairs to bed.  The living
room's lamp was still burning when the last of the slave-row family gave up
the vigil and went to bed, dreading the daybreak wake-up bell.

Matilda took her blacksmith son aside at her first chance, before breakfast.

"Torn, las' night wasn't no chance to tell you private, and ain't wanted to
scare ever' body to death, but Malizy tol' me she beared massa say he got to
pay two mor'gage notes on dey house, an' Malizy know dey ain't hardly got a
penny!  I jes' feels to my feets dat white man's a nigger buyer!"

"Me too," Torn said simply.  He was silent for a moment.  "Mammy, I been
thinkin', wid some different massa we jes' might fin' ourselves better off.
Dat is, long's we all stays together.  Dat's my big worry."

As others began to come out of their cabins for the morning, Matilda hurried
away rather than unduly alarming them by continuing the conversation.

After Missis Lea told Miss Malizy that she had a headache and wanted no
breakfast, the massa and his visitor ate a hearty one, and then set out
walking in the front yard, busily talking, their heads close together.
Before very long, they sauntered alongside the big house, into the backyard,
and finally over to where Torn was pumping his homemade bellows, sending
yellowish sparks flying up from his forge in which two flat sheets of iron
were approaching the heating necessary for their conversion into door hinges.
For several minutes the two men stood closely watching Torn use long-handled
tongs to remove the cherry-red iron sheets.  Deftly folding their middles
tightly about a shaping rod fixed into the hardy hole of his Fisher & Norris
anvil, forming the channel for hinge pins, he then steel-punched three screw
holes into each leaf.  Taking up his short-shanked cold chisel and his
favorite homemade four-pound hammer, he cut the leaves into the H-shaped
hinges that a customer had ordered, working all the while as if unaware of
his observers' presence.

Massa Lea finally spoke.

"He's a pretty fair blacksmith, if I do say so myself," he said casually.

The other man grunted affirmatively.  Then he began ROOTS 813

moving around under the little blacksmithing shed, eyeing the many examples
of Tom's craftsmanship that hung from nails and pegs.

Abruptly, the man addressed Torn directly.  "How old are you, boy?"

"Gwine on twenty-three now, sun,"

"How many young'uns you got?"

"Ain't got no wife yet, suh."

"Big, strong boy like you don't need no wife to have young'uns scattered
everywhere."

Torn said nothing, thinking how many white men's young'uns were scattered in
slave rows.

"You maybe one of these real religious niggers?"

Torn knew the man was trying to draw him out for a reason--almost certainly
to size him up for purchase.  He said pointedly,

"Imagines Massa Lea done tol' you we's mostly a family here, my mammy,
gran'mammy, an' brothers an' sisters an' young'uns.  We's all been raised to
believe in de Lawd an' de Bible, suh."

The man's eyes narrowed.

"Which one of y'all reads the Bible to the rest?"

Torn wasn't about to tell this ominous stranger that both his gran'mammy and
mammy could read.  He said,

"Reckon we all jes' growed up hearin' de Scriptures so much we knows 'em by
heart, suh."

Seeming to relax, the man returned to his original subject.

"You think you could handle the blacksmithing on a much bigger place than
this one?"

Torn felt ready to explode with the further confirmation that his sale was
planned, but he had to know if the family also was to be included.  Through
his rage to be dangled in suspense like this, again he probed,

"Well, suh, me an' de res' us here can raise crops an' do pret' near ever'
thing a place need, I guess" -- Leaving the seething Torn as calmly as they
had come, the massa and his guest had no more than headed out toward the
fields when old Miss Malizy came hurrying from the kitchen.

"What dem mens sayin', Torn?

Missis can't even look me in de eye.  "

Trying to control his voice, Torn said,

"It's gwine be some sellin'.

Miss Malizy, maybe all us, but could be jes'- me.  " Miss Malizy burst into
tears, and Torn roughly shook her shoulders.

"Miss Malizy, ain't no need o' eryin'!  Jes' like I tol' mammy, I 'speck some
new place see us better 614 ALEX HALEY

off clan here wid 'im.  " But try as Torn would, he couldn't ease the aged
Miss Malizy's grief.

Late that day the rest of them returned from the fields, Tom's brothers
wearing grim, stricken faces amid the women's copious weeping and wailing.
All of them were trying at once to tell how the massa and his visitor also
had come out watching them as they worked, with the stranger then moving from
one to another asking questions that left no doubt that they were being
appraised for sale.

Until into the wee hours, there was no way that the three people within the
big house could have missed hearing the rising pandemonium of grief and
terror that arose among the seventeen people in the slave row, most of the
men eventually reacting as hysterically as the women as they all became
seized in the contagion of grabbing and hugging whomever was nearest,
screaming that they would soon never see each other again.

"Lawd, deliver us from dis eeeeevil!"  shrieked Matilda in prayer.

Torn rang the next morning's wake-up bell with a prescience of doom.

Aged Miss Malizy had passed by him, making her way to the big-house kitchen
to prepare breakfast.  N01 ten minutes later she heavily returned to slave
row, her black face taut with fresh shock and glistening with fresh tears:
"Massa say don't nobody go nowhere.  He say when he finish break- fas'," he
want ever' body 'sembled out here.  "

Even sick, ancient Uncle Pompey was brought from his cabin in his chair as
all of them assembled, terrified.

When Massa Lea and his visitor came around the side of the big house, Massa
Lea's lurching walk told seventeen pairs of eyes that he had been drinking
even more heavily than usual, and when the pair of them stopped about four
yards before the slave-row people, the massa's voice was loud, angry, and
slurred.

"Y'all niggers keep your noses always stuck in my business, so ain't no news
to you this place going' broke.  Y'all too much burden for me to carry no
more, so I'm doin' some seffin' to this gentleman here" -- At the chorus of
shrieks and groans, the other man gestured roughly.

"Shut up!  All this carryin' on since last nightl" He glared up and down the
line until they quieted down.

"I ain't no ordinary nigger trader.  I represent one of ROOTS 615

the biggest, finest firms in the business.  We got branch offices, and boats
delivering niggers to order between Richmond Charleston, Memphis, and New
Orleans"-- Matilda cried out the first anguish in all their minds.  " We
gwine git sol' together, Massa?  "

"I told you shut up!  You'll find out!  I ought not to have to say your massa
here's a true gentleman, same as that fine lady up in that house eryin' her
heart out about your black hides.  They could get more to sell y'all apiece,
plenty more!"  He glanced at the quaking L'il Kizzy and Mary.  "You two
wenches ready right now to start breedin' pickaninnies worth four hundred an'
up apiece."  His glance fell on Matilda.

"Even if you git ting pretty old, you said you know how to cook.  Down South
a good cook'll bring twelve to fifteen hundred nowadays."  He looked at Torn.

"The way prices up now, reckon a prime stud blacksmith can easy fetch
twenty-five hundred, much as three thousand from somebody wants you to take
in customers like you doin' here."  His eyes scanned across Tom's five
brothers between twenty and twenty-eight years of age.

"And y'all field-hand bucks ought to be worth nine hundred to a thou san
apiece" -- The slave trader paused for effect.

"But y'all one lucky bunch of niggers 1 Your missis insists y'all got to be
sold together, and your massa's going' along with that!"

"Thank you, Missis!  Thank you, Jesus!"  Gran'mammy Kizzy cried out.

"Praise God!"  shrieked Matilda.

"SHUT UP!"  The slave trader angrily gestured.

"I've done my best to convince 'em different, but I ain't been able.  And it
just happen my firm's got some customers with a tobacco plantation ain't too
far from here!  Right near the North Carolina Railroad Company over in
Alamance County.  They're wantin' a family of niggers that's been together
an' won't give no trouble, no runaways or nothin' like that, an' with
experience to handle everything on their place.  Won't need no auctionin' you
off.  I'm told won't need no chainin' you up, nothin' like that, less'n I
have some trouble!"  He surveyed them coldly.

"All right, startin' right now, y'all I've spoke to consider yourselves my
niggers 'til I get you where you're going'.  I'm givin' you four days to put
your stuff together.  Saturday morning we'll get you moving over to Alamance
County in some wagons."

616 ALEX HALEY

Virgil was the first to find a stricken voice: "What 'bout my Lilly Sue an'
chile over at the Curry place?  You gwine buy dem too, ain't you, suh?"

Torn burst out,

"An' what 'bout our gran'mammy.  Sister Sarah, Miss Malizy, an' Uncle Pompey?
Dey's fam'ly you ain't mentioned" -- "Ain't meant to!  Can't be buyin' every
wench some buck's laid with, so he won't feel lonely!"  the slave trader
exclaimed sarcastically.

"As for these old wrecks here, they can't hardly walk, let alone work, no
customers gonna buy them!  But Mr. Lea's being good enough to let 'em keep
dragging on around here."

Amid an outburst of exclamations and weeping, Gran'- mammy Kizzy sprang
squarely before Massa Lea, words ripping from her throat.

"You done sent off yo' own boy, can't I teas' have gran'chilluns?"  As Massa
Lea quickly looked away, she slumped toward the ground, young, strong arms
grabbing and supporting her, while old Miss Malizy and Sister Sarah screamed
almost as one,

"Dey's all de fam'ly I got, Massa!"  .  "Me, too, Massa!  We's fifty-some
years togedder!"  The invalid ancient Uncle Pompey just sat, unable to rise
from his chair, tears streaming down his cheeks, staring blankly straight
ahead, his lips moving as in prayer.

"SHUT UP!"  the slave trader yelled.

"I'm tellin' you the last time!

You find out quick I know how to handle-niggers!  "

Tom's eyes sought and locked for a fleeting instant with those of Massa Lea,
and Torn hoarsely fully chose words,

"Massa, we's sho' sorry you's met bad luck, an' we knows only reason you's
sellin' us is you got to" -- Massa Lea seemed almost grateful before his eyes
again bent downward, and they had to strain to hear him.

"Naw, I ain't got nothin' 'against none of y'all, boy" -- He hesitated.
"Fact, I'd even call y'all good niggers, most of y'all born andjbred up right
on my place."

"Massa," gently Torn begged, "if dem Alamance County peoples won't take our
family's of' folks, ain't it some way you lemme buy 'em from you?  Dis man
done jes' say dey ain't worth much in money, an' I pay you good price.  I git
on my knees an' beg de new massa lemme fin' some hire-out blaeksmithin',
maybe for dat railroad, an' my brothers hire out and he'p too, suh."  Torn
was abjectly ROOTS 617

pleading, tears now starting down his cheeks,

"Massa, all we makes we sends you 'til we pays whatever you ax fo' Gran'mammy
and dese three mo' dat's fam'ly to us.  All we's been through togedder, we
sho' 'predate stayin' to- gedder, Massa" -- Massa Lea had stiffened.  But he
said,

"Awright!  Get me three hundred dollars apiece, you can have 'em" -- His palm
shot up before their exultation could fully erupt

"Hoi' on!  They stay here 'til the money's in my hand!"

Amid the groans and sobs, Tom's voice came, bleak, "Us kinda spec ted mon dat
from you, Massa, side ring everything."

"Get 'em out of here, trader!"  the massa snapped.  Turning on his heel, he
walked rapidly toward the big house.

Back in the desperately despairing slave row, even old Miss Malizy and Sister
Sarah were among those comforting Gran'mammy Kizzy.  She sat in her rocking
chair, that Torn had made for her, amid the welter of her family hugging;
kissing her, wetting her with their tears.  Everyone was crying.

From somewhere she found the strength, the courage to rasp hoarsely, "Don'
y'all take on so!  Me an' Sarah, Malizy, an' Pompey jes' wait here for George
'til he gits back.  Ain't gwine be dat long, it's awready gwine on de two
years.  Ifn he ain't got de money to buy us, den I 'speck won't take much mo'
time 'fo' Torn an' res' y'all boys will" -- Ashford gulped,

"Yes'm, we sho' will!"  Wanly she smiled at him, at them all.  " " Nother
thing," Gran'mammy Kizzy went on, " any y'all gits mo' chilluns 'fo' I sees
you ag'in, don't for git to tell 'em 'bout my folks, my mammy Bell, an' my
African pappy name Kunta Kinte, what be yo' chill un great-great-gran'pappy!
Hear me, now!  Tell 'em 'bout me, 'bout my George, 'bout yo'selves, tool An'
'bout what we been through 'midst dmeren' mass as Tell de chilluns all de
res' about who we is!  "

Amid a snuffling chorus of

"We sho' will" .  .  .

"Ain't gon' never fo'git, Gran'mammy," she brushed the nearest faces with her
hand.

"SHUSH, now!  Ever'thing gwine be fine!  Heish up, done tol' you!  Y'all
gwine flood me right out de do'!"

Pour days somehow passed with those who were leaving getting packed, and
finally Saturday morning came.  Everyone had been up through most of the
night.  With scarcely 618 ALEX HALEY

a word uttered, they gathered, holding each other's hands, watching the sun
come up.  Finally the wagons arrived.

One by one those who were leaving turned silently to embrace those who were
to remain behind.  "Where's Uncle Pompey?"

asked someone.  Miss Malizy said,

"Po' of' soul tol' me las' night he couldn't stan' to see y'all go" "I run
kiss 'im, anyhow!"  exclaimed L'il Kizzy, and went mnning toward the cabin.

In a little while, they heard her: "Oh, NO!"  Others already on the ground,
or leaping from the wagon, went dashing.  The old man sat there in his chair.
And he was dead.

CHAPTER 105

On the new plantation, it wasn't until the next Sunday, when Massa and Missis
Murray drove off in their buggy to attend church services, that the whole
family had a chance to sit down together for a talk.

"Well, I sho' ain't want to judge too quick," said Matilda, looking around at
all of her brood, "but all through de week me an' Missis Murray done plenty
talkin' in de kitchen whilst I been cookin'.  I got to say she an' dis new
massa sound's like good Christian peoples.  I feels like we's gwine be whole
lot better off here, 'cept yo' pappy still ain't back, an' Gran'mammy an' dem
still at Massa Lea's."

Again studying her children's faces, she asked,

"Well, from what y'all's seed an' beared, how y'all feel?"

Virgil spoke.

"Well, dis Massa Murray don't seem like he know much 'bout farmin', or being'
no massa, neither."

Matilda interrupted.

"Dat's 'cause dey was town folks runnin' a sto' in Burlington, 'til his uncle
died an' in 'is will lef 'em dis place."

Virgil said,

"Ever' time he done talked to me, he's said he lookin' fo' a white oberseer
to hire to work us.  I done ROOTS 619

kept tellin' 'im ain't no need to spend dat money, dat worsen a oberseer he
needed leas five, six mo' fiel' ban's.  Tol' 'im jes' give us chance, we
raise 'im good tobacco crops by ourself"-- Ashford broke in,

"I ain't stayin' long nowhere wid no cracker oberseer trackin' every move!"

After a pointed look at Ashford, Virgil went on.

"Massa Murray say he watch awhile an' see how we do."  He paused.

"I jes' 'bout begged 'im to buy my Lilly Sue an young' un from Massa Curry
back yonder an' bring 'em here.  Tol' 'im Lilly Sue work hard as anybody he
ever gon' git.  He say he think 'bout it, but to buy us, dey already done had
to take out a bank mor'gage on de big house, an' he see how much 'baccy he
sell dis year."  Virgil paused.  "So we all got to pitch in!  I can tell
odder white folks been givin' 'im plenty advisin' niggers won't half work by
deyselves.  Let 'im see any hangin' back an' playin' roun', we sho' liable
win' up wid some oberseer."  Glancing again at the sullen Ashford, Virgil
added,

"Fac', I 'speck it be good when Massa Murray ride out where we's workin' I'll
holler at y'all some, but y'all know why."

"Sho'l" burst out Ashford, "you an' somebody else I knows always tries to be
massa's special nigger!"

Torn tensed, but managed to seem as if he totally ignored Ashford's remark
while Virgil half rose, lancing forward a work-callused forefinger,

"Boy, lemme tell you, sump'n wrong anybody don' git 'long wid nobody!  Gwine
git you in big trouble one dese days!  Jes' speakin' fo' myself, if'n it he's
wid me, somebody gwine carry off one us!"

"Heish!  Bofe y'all heish up dat mess!"  Matilda glared at them both, then
particularly at Ashford, before turning an entreating look onto Torn, clearly
seeking an easing of the sudden tension.

"Torn, whole lot o' times I seen you an' Massa Murray talkin' down dere while
you puttin' up yo' shop.  What's yo' feelin's?"

Slowly, thoughtfully, Torn said,

"I 'gree we ought to be better off here.  But 'pend a lot on how we handles
it.  Like you said, Massa Murray don't 'pear no mean, lowdown white man.  I
feel like Virgil say, he jes' ain't had much 'sperience to put no trus' in
us.  Even mon dat, I bleeve he worried we git to figgerin' he's easy, dat's
how come he make his self act an' sound' harder'n he na'chly is, an' dat's
how come de oberseer talk."  Torn paused.

"Way I sees it, 620 ALEX HALEY

mammy handle de missis.  Res' us needs to teach de massa he do fine jes'
leave us 'lone.  "

After murmurs of approval, Matilda's tone was vibrant with her joy at clearly
a potentially promising family future,

"Well, now, linin' it up, 'long wid what y'all says, we's got to 'suade Massa
Murray to buy Lilly Sue an' dat 1'il Uriah, too.

"Bout y'all's pappy, ain't nothin' we can do but jes' wait.  He walk in here
one dese days" -- Giggling, Mary interrupted,

"Wid dat green scarf trailin', an' black derby settin' upon his head!"

"Sho' right 'bout dat, daughter," Matilda smiled with the others.  She went
on.

"An' 'cose I ain't even got to say 'bout git ting Gran'mammy, Sarah, an'
Malizy.  I already got Missis Murray promised to he'p wid dat.

"Scribed toer stronges' I could how it jes' 'bout tore us all up to have to
leave 'em.  Lawd!  Missis got to cryin' hard as I was!

She say weren't no use nobody includin' her axin' Massa Murray to buy no
three real of' womens, but she promise faithful she ax massa to git Torn
hire-out jobs, an' de res' y'all boys, too.  Sole all keep in mind we ain't
jes' here workin' for not her massa, we's workin' to git our fam'ly back to-
gedder.  "

With that resolve, the family settled into the planting season of 1856, with
Matilda commanding the increasing trust and appreciation of both Missis and
Massa Murray through her clear loyalty and sincerity, her excellent cooking,
and her spotless housekeeping.  The massa saw how Virgil steadily urged and
pressed his brothers and sisters toward a bumper tobacco crop.  He saw Torn
visibly putting the plantation into an enviable state of repair, his talented
hands wielding his mostly homemade tools, transforming foraged old rusted,
discarded, scrap iron into eventually scores of sturdy new farming tools and
implements, along with both functional and decorative household items.

Nearly every Sunday afternoon, unless the Murrays had gone off somewhere
themselves, various of the local plantation families would pay them welcoming
visits, along with their old friends from Burlington, Graham, Haw River,
Mebane, and other towns around.  In showing their guests about the big house
and yards, the Murrays always proudly pointed out different examples of Tom's
craftsmanship.

Few of their farm or township guests left without ROOTS 621

urging that the massa permit Torn to make or repair something for them, and
Massa Murray would agree.  Gradually more of Tom's custom-made articles
appeared about Ala- mance County, as word of mouth further advertised him,
and Missis Murray's original request that the massa seek hire-out jobs for
Torn became entirely unnecessary.  Soon, every day saw slave men, young and
old, come riding on mules, or sometimes afoot, bringing broken tools or other
items for Torn to fix.  Some mass as or missis sketched decorative items they
wanted made for their homes.  Or sometimes customers' requests required that
Massa Murray write out a traveling pass for Torn to ride a mule to other
plantations, or into local towns, to make on-site repairs or installations.
By 1857, Torn was working from dawn to dark every day excepting Sundays, his
over-all volume of work at least equaling that of Mr. Isaiah, who had taught
him.  The customers would pay Massa Murray, either at the big house or when
they saw him at church, such rates as fourteen cents a hoof for the shoeing
of horses, mules, or oxen, thirty-seven cents for a new wagon tire, eighteen
cents to mend a pitchfork, or six cents to sharpen a pick.  Prices for
customer-designed decorative work were specially negotiated, such as five
dollars for a trellis-shaped front gate adorned with oak leaves.  And each
weekend Massa Murray figured out for Tom's pay ten cents of each dollar that
his work had brought in during the previous week.  After thanking the massa,
Torn gave the weekly sum to his mother Matilda, who soon had it buried in one
of her glass jars whose locations only she and Torn knew.

On Saturday noons the workweek ended for the family's field hands.

L'il Kizzy and Mary, now nineteen and seventeen, respectively, quickly
bathed, wrapped their short, kinky braids tightly with string, and rubbed
their faces to shiny blackness with beeswax.  Then donning their best
starchily ironed cotton-print dresses, they soon appeared at the blacksmith
shop, one bringing a pitcher of water, or sometimes lemon egg with the other
carrying a gourd dipper.  Once Torn had quenched his thirst, they next
offered welcomed gourdfuls among each Saturday afternoon's invariable small
gathering of slave men whose mass as had sent them to pick up items that Torn
had promised to complete by the weekend.  Torn noted, with wry amusement, how
his sisters' lightest, gayest banter 622 ALEX HALEY

was always with the better-looking younger men.  One Saturday night he was
not surprised to overhear Matilda shrilly voicing chastisement: "I ain't
blin'!  Sees y'all down dere flouncing yo' tails 'mongst dem mens!"  L'il
Kizzy came back defiantly,

"Well, Mammy, we's wimmins!

Ain't met no mens at Massa Lea's!  " Matilda loudly muttered something that
Torn couldn't distinguish, but he suspected that she was privately less
disapproving than she was trying to act.  It was confirmed when, shortly
after, Matilda said to him,

"Look like you lettin' dem two gals go to courtin' right under yo' nose.
Reckon de leas' you can do is keep out a eye it ain't de wrong ones dey hooks
up wid!"

To the entire family's astonishment, not the particularly "flouncy" L'il
Kizzy but the much quieter Mary soon quietly announced her wish to "jump de
broom" with a stable hand from a plantation near the village of Mebane.  She
pleaded to Matilda,

"I knows you can he'p 'suade massa to sell me reasonable when Nicodemus'
massa ax 'im 'bout it.  Mammy, so us can live togedder!"  But Matilda only
muttered vaguely, sending Mary into tears.

"Lawd, Torn, I jes' don't know how to feel!"  Matilda said.  " " Cose I'se
happy fo' de gal, I see she so happy.  But jes' hates to see any us sol' off
no mo'.  "

"You's wrong.  Mammy.  You knows you is!"  Torn said.  "I sho' wouldn't want
to be married wid nobody livin" somewhere else.  Look what happened to
Virgil.  Ever since we got sol', you can see he sick 'bout Lilly Sue lef back
yonder.  "

"Son," she said, "don't tell me being' married to somebody you don't never
hardly see!  Whole lot o' times, looking at y'all chilluns he'p me know I got
a husban'" -- Matilda hesitated.

"But git ting back to Mary leavin', ain't jes' her on my min', it's all
y'all.  You workin' so much guess you ain't paid no tent ion but on Sundays
off nowadays don' hardly never see yo' brudders roun' here no mo', jes' you
an' Virgil.  De res' all off co'tin' heavy" -- "Mammy," Torn sharply
interrupted, "we's grown mens!"

"Sho' you is!"  retorted Matilda.

"Ain't what I'm git ting at!  I'se meanin' it look like dis fam'ly gwine
split to de winds 'fo' we ever gits it back togedder!"

In a silent moment between them, Torn was trying to think of what comforting
thing he might say, sensing that underlying his mother's recent quick
irritability or un ROOTS 623 accustomed depressions were the months now
passed beyond when his father should have returned.  As she had just
mentioned, she was again living with his absence.

Torn was shocked when abruptly Matilda glanced at him, "When you gwine git
married?"

"Ain't thinkin' 'bout dat now" -- Embarrassed, he hesitated, and changed the
subject.

"Thinkin' 'bout us git ting back Gran'mammy, Sister Sarah, an' Miss Malizy.
Mammy, 'bout how much we got saved up now?"

"No 'bout!  Tell you 'zactly!  Dat two dollars an' fo' cents you give me las'
Sunday make it eighty-seben dollars an' fi'ty-two cents."

Torn shook his head.

"Tse got to do better" -- "Sho' wish Virgil an' dem was he' ping mo'."

"Can't blame dem.  Hire-out fiel' work jes' hard to fin, 'cause mos' mass as
needin' it hires free niggers what works fit to kill deyselves to git dat
twenty-five cents a day less'n dey starves.  I jes' got to make mo'l
Gran'mammy, Sister Sarah, an' Miss Malizy, dey's all git ting of'I" "Yo'
gran'mammy right roun' sebenty now, an' Sarah an' Malizy nigh 'bout eighty."

A sudden thought struck Matilda; her features took on a faraway expression.

"Torn, you know what jes' come to me?  Yo* gran'mammy use to say her African
pappy kep' up wid how of' he was by droppin I'll rocks in a gourd.  You
'member her sayin' dat?"

"Yas'm, sho' does."  He paused.

"Wonder how of' was he?"

"Ain't never heard, teas' not to my recollection."  A puzzlement grew on her
face.

"Would 'pend when was you talkin' 'bout.  He'd o' been one age when
Gran'mammy Kizzy was sol' from him an' her mammy.  Den he'd o' been not her
age whenever de Lawd claimed *im" -- She hesitated.

"Wid Gran'mammy pushin' seb'my, you know her pappy got to be long dead'n
gone.  Her mammy, too.  Po' souls!"

"Yeah" -- said Torn, musing.

"Sometime I wonders what dey looked like.

Done beared so much 'bout 'em.  "

Matilda said,

"Me, too, son."  She straightened in her chair.

"But git ting back toyo gran'mammy, Sarah, an Malizy, every night down on my
knees, I jes' ax de Lawd to be wid 'em an' I prays any day yo' pappy git dere
wid lump o' money in 'is pocket an' buy 'em."  She laughed 624 ALEX HALEY

brightly.

"One mawnin' we looks up an' dere all fo* be, free as birds!"

"Dat be sho' one sight to see!"  grinned Torn.

A silence fell between them, each in their private thoughts.  Torn was
pondering that now was as good a time and atmosphere as any to confide in his
mother something he had kept carefully guarded from anyone, but which now did
seem likely to develop further.

He used as his avenue an earlier query of Matilda's.  "Mammy, while back you
ax ifn I ever think maybe 'bout git ting married?"

Matilda jerked upright, her face and eyes alight.

"Yeah, son?"

Torn could have kicked himself for ever having brought it up.  He all but
squirmed seeking how to go on.  Then, firmly,

"Well, I'se kinda met a gal, an' we been talkin' some" -- "Lawd-a-mussy,
TornI Who?"

"Ain't nobody you knows!  Her name Irene.  Some calls 'er

"Reeny."  She b'longst to dat Massa Edwin Holt, work in dey big house"-- " De
rich Massa Holt massa and missis talks 'bout own dat cotton mill on Alamance
Creek?  "

"Yas'm" -- "Dey big house where you put up dem pretty window grills?"

"Yas'm" -- Tom's expression was rather like that of a small boy caught taking
cookies.

"Lawdl" A beaming spread across Matilda's face.

"Somebody cotched of' coon at las'!"  Springing up, suddenly embracing her
embarrassed son, she burbled,

"I'se so happy fo' y'all, Torn, sho' is!"

"Hof on!  Hoi' on.  Mammy!"  Extricating himself, he gestured her back toward
her chair.

"I jes' say we been talkin'."

"Boy, you's my close-mouth des young' un since you first drawed breath!  If
you 'mits you's much as seed a gal, I know it mo' to it clan dat!"

He all but glared at her.

"Don* want no whisperin' to nobody, you hear me?"

"I know massa buyer fo' you, boy!  Tell me mo' 'bout 'er, TornI" So much was
tumbling in Matilda's head that it poured out together .  .  .

across the back of her mind ROOTS S25

flashed a vision of the wedding cakes she would bake .

"Gittin' late, got to go" -- But she beat him to the door.  "So glad somebody
be catchin' all y'all young'uns 'fo' long!  You's jes' my bes'!"  Matilda's
laughter was the happiest Torn had seen her in a long time.

"Gittin' older, guess I'se same as Gran'mammy Kizzy, wantin' mo'
gran'chilluns!"  Torn brushed past, hearing her as he strode outside,

"I live long 'enough, might even see some great-gran'chillunsi"

CHAPTER 106

A Sunday several months before, Massa and Missis Mur- ray had returned home
from church, and the massa almost immediately rang the bell for Matilda, whom
he told to have Torn come around to the front porch.

The massa's pleasure was showing both in his face and in his tone as he told
Torn that Mr. Edwin Holt, who owned the Holt Cotton Mill.  had sent him a
message that Missis Holt had recently been highly impressed with seeing some
of Tom's delicate ironwork; that she had already sketched a design for
decorative window grills that they hoped that Torn could soon make and
install at their

"Locust Grove" home.

With a traveling pass from Massa Murray, Torn left on a mule early the next
morning to see the sketches and measure the windows.  Massa Murray had told
him not to worry about whatever jobs awaited doing in his shop, and the massa
said that the best route was to follow the Haw River Road to the town of
Graham, then the Graham Road to Bellemont Church, where after a right turn
and about another two miles, the elegant Holt mansion would be impossible to
miss.

Arriving and identifying himself to a black gardener, Torn was told to wait
near the front steps.  Missis Holt herself soon came pleasantly
congratulating Tom's previous work that she had seen, and showing him her
sketches, 626 ALEX HALEY

which he carefully studied for an iron window grill having the visual effect
of a trellis amply covered with vines and leaves.

"B'leeves I can do dem, leas' I try my bes'.  Missis," he said, but he
pointed out that with so many windows needing the grills, each of which would
require much patiently tedious work, the completing of the task might take
two months.  Missis Holt said she would be delighted if it could be done in
that time, and handing Torn her sketches to keep and work by, she left him to
go about his necessary starting job of carefully measuring the many windows'
dimensions.

By the early afternoon, Torn was working on the upstairs windows opening onto
a veranda when his instincts registered someone watching him, and glancing
about, he blinked at the striking prettiness of the coppery-complexioned girl
holding a dust rag who stood quietly just within the next opened window.
Wearing a simple housemaid's uniform, her straight black hair coiled into a
large bun at the back of her head, she was evenly but warmly returning Tom's
stare.  Only his lifelong innate reserve enabled him to mask his jolting
inner reaction as, collecting himself, and quickly removing his hat, he
blurted,

"Hidy, miss."

"Hidy do, suhl" she replied, flashing a bright smile, and with that she
disappeared.

Finally riding back to the Murray plantation, Torn was surprised, and
unsettled, that he couldn't rid his mind of her.  Lying in his bed that
night, it hit him like a bolt that he hadn't even gotten her name.  He
guessed her age at nineteen or maybe twenty.  At last he slept, fitfully, and
awakened torturing himself that her prettiness guaranteed that she was
married, or surely was courting with somebody.

Making the basic grill frames, smoothly lap-welding four pre cut flat iron
bars into window-sized rectangles, was only a routine job.  After six days of
doing that, Torn began forcing white-hot rods through his set of successively
smaller steel reducing dies until he had long rods no thicker than ivy or
honeysuckle vines.  After Torn had experimentally heated and variously bent
several of these, dissatisfied, he began taking early-morning walks, closely
inspecting actual growing vines' graceful curvings and junctures.  Then he
bad a sense that his efforts to simulate them improved.

The work went along well, with Massa Murray explaining daily to sometimes
irate customers that Torn could at ROOTS 827 tend only the most urgent
emergency repair jobs until he had finished a major job for Mr. Edwin Holt,
which blunted the indignance of most.

Massa Murray, then Missis Murray came to the shop to observe, then they
brought visiting friends, until sometimes eight or ten of them stood silently
watching Torn work.  Plying his craft, he thought how blessed he was that all
people seemed even to expect being ignored by blacksmiths engrossed in what
they were doing.  He reflected upon how most slave men who brought him their
mass as repairing jobs usually seemed either morose, or they big-talked among
other slaves about the shop.  But if any white people appeared, in the
instant, all of the slaves grinned, shuffled, and otherwise began acting the
clown, as in fact Torn often previously had felt embarrassed to conclude
privately of his own derby-wearing, bombastic- talking father, Chicken George.

Torn felt further blessed with how sincerely he enjoyed feeling immersed, to
a degree even isolated, within his world of blacksmithing.  As he worked on
the window grills from the daylights until he could no longer see, his
private random musings would occupy his mind sometimes for hours before he
again caught himself thinking of the pretty housemaid he had met.

Making the leaves for the window grills would be his toughest test, he had
realized from when Missis Holt first showed him her sketches.

Again Torn walked, now intently studying nature's leaves.  Heating and
reheating inch-square iron pieces, beating them with his heavy, square-faced
hammer into delicately thin sheets, with his trimming shears he cut out
eventually scores of oversized heart-shaped patterns.  Since such thin metal
could quickly burn and ruin if a forge was too hot, he pumped his homemade
bellows with utmost care, hastily longing each red-hot thin sheet onto his
anvil and deftly shaping it into leafy contours with quick tappings of his
lightest ball-peen hammer.  " With intricate welding, Torn delicately veined
his leaves, and next stemmed them onto the vines.  He felt it good that no
two looked exactly the same, as he had observed in nature.  Finally, in his
seventh intensive week, Torn spot- welded his leafy vines onto their waiting
window-grill frames.

"Torn, I 'dare look like dey jes' growin' somewheres!"  Matilda exclaimed
it, staring in awe at her son's craftsman628

ALEX HALEY

ship.  Scarcely less demonstrative was L'il Kizzy, who by now was flirting
openly with three local young slave swains.  Even Tom's brothers and their
wives--only Ashford and Torn were single now--cast glances that mirrored
their further heightened respect for him.  Massa and Missis Murray could
hardly contain the extent of their pleasure, as well as their pride, that
they owned such a blacksmith.

In the wagon laden with window grills, Torn drove alone to the Holt big house
to install them.  When he held up one for Missis Holt to inspect, exclaiming,
and clapping her hands, ecstatic with pleasure, she called outside her
teenaged daughter and several grown young sons who happened to be there, and
all of them joined instantly in congratulating Torn.

Right away, he began the installations.  After two hours, the downstairs
window grills were in place, being further admired by the Holt family
members, as well as several of their slaves; he guessed that their grapevine
must have sped word of their missis' delight and they had come running to see
for themselves.  Where was she?  Torn was tense from wondering it as one of
the Holt sons directed him through the polished downstairs foyer to mount the
curving stairs to install the remaining grills at the second-floor veranda
windows.

It was the very area where she had been before.  How, whom, might he query,
without seeming more than curiously interested, as to who she was, where she
was, and what was her status?  In his frustration, Torn went at his work even
faster; he must finish quickly and leave, he told himself.

He was installing the third upstairs window grill when after a rush of
footsteps there she was, flushed, nearly breathless from hurrying.

He stood just tongue-tied.

"Hidy, Mr. Murray!"  It jolted him to realize she wouldn't know

"Lea,"

only that a Massa Murray owned him now.  He fumbled off his straw hat.

"Hidy, Miss Holt.  ..."

"Was down in de smokehouse smokin' meat, jes' beared you was here" Her gaze
swept to the last window grill he had fixed into place.

"Ooh, it jes' beautiful!"  she breathed.  "Passed Missis Emily downstairs
jes' havin' a fit 'bout what you done."

His glance flicked her field-hand head rag

"I thought you ROOTS 629

was a housemaid"-- It sounded such an inane thing to say.

"I loves doin' different things, an' dey lets me," she said, glancing about.

"I jes' run up here a minute.  Better git back to workin', an' you, too" --
He had to know more, at least her name.  He asked her.

"Irene," she said.

"Dey calls me

"Reeny.  What your'n?"

"Torn," he said.  As she had said, they had 'to get back to work.  He had to
gamble.

"Miss Irene, is--is you keepin' company wid anybody?"

She looked at him so long, so hard, he knew he had terribly blundered.

"I ain't never been knowed for not speakin' my mind, Mr. Murray.  When I seed
befo' how shy you was, I was scairt you wouldn't come talk with me no mo'."

Torn could have fallen off the veranda.

From then, he had begun asking Massa Murray for an all-day traveling pass
each Sunday, along with permission to use the mule cart He told his family as
well that he searched the roadsides for discarded metal objects to freshly
supply his blacksmith shop scrap pile.  He nearly always did find something
useful while driving different routes in the round trip of about two hours
each way to see Irene.

Not only she, but the others whom he met at the Holts' slave row could not
have received or treated him more warmly.

"You's so shy, smart as you is, folks jes' likes you," Irene candidly told
him.  They would ride usually to some reasonably private fairly nearby place
where Torn would unhitch the mule to let it graze on a long tether as they
walked, with Irene doing by far the most talking.

"My pappy a Injun, He name Hillian, my mammy say.  Dat 'count fo' de 'culiar
color I is," Irene volunteered matter-of-factly.

"Way back, my mammy run off from a real mean massa, an' in de woods some
Injuns cotched her an' took her to dey village where her an' my pappy got to-
gedder an' I got homed.  I weren't much size when some white mens 'tacked de
village, an' 'mongst de killin' captured my mammy an' brung us back to her
massa.  She say he beat her bad an' sol' us to some nigger trader, an' Massa
Holt bought us, what was lucky, 'cause dey's high-quality folks" -- Her eyes
nan-owed.

"Well, leas' mos'ly.  Anyhow, Mammy was dey washin' an' ironin' woman, right
up 'til she took sick an' died 'bout fo' years back, an' I been here 630
ALEX HALEY

ever since.  I'se eighteen now, gwine turn nineteen New Year's Day"She looked
at Torn in her frank way.

"How of is you?"

"Twenty-fo'," Torn said.

Telling Irene in turn the essential facts about his family, Torn said that as
yet they had but little knowledge of this new region of North Carolina into
which they had been sold.

"Well," she said,

"I's picked up a heap 'cause de Holts is mighty port ant folks, so nigh ever'
body big comes visitin', an' ginly I he's servin' an' I got ears."

"Dey says mos' dese Alamance County white folks' great great-gran'daddies
come here from Pennsylvania long 'fo' dat Revolution War, when wasn't much
nobody here bouts 'cept Sissipaw Injuns.  Some calls 'em Saxapaws.  But
English white so'jers kilt dem out 'til Saxapaw River de only thing even got
dey name now" -- Irene grimaced.

"My massa say dey'd run from hard times crost de water an' was crowding
Pennsylvania so bad dem Englishmans runnin' de Colonies 'nounced all de lan'
dey wanted be sellin' in dis part Nawth Ca'Iiny fo' less'n two cents a acre.
Well, massa say no end o' Quakers, Presbyterian Scotch-Irishers, an' Ger- man
Lutherans squeezed ever' thing dey could in covered wagons an' crost dem
Cumberian' an' Shenando' valleys.  Massa say sump'n like fo' hundred miles.
Dey bought what lan' dey could an' commence diggin', clearin', an' farmin',
jes' mo sly small farms dey worked deyselves, like mos' dis county's white
folks here bouts still does.  Dat's how come ain't many niggers as where it's
great big plantations."

Irene toured Torn on the following Sunday to her massa's cotton mill on a
bank of Alamance Creek, prideful as if both the mill and the Holt family were
her own.

After his hard work attending weekly scores of blacksmithing jobs, Torn
coveted each next Sunday when the cart rolled past the miles of split-rail
fences enclosing crops of corn, wheat, tobacco, and cotton, with an
occasional apple or peach orchard and modest farmhouses.  Passing other
blacks, who were nearly always afoot, they exchanged waves, Torn hoping they
understood that if he offered a ride, it would rob his privacy with Irene.
Abruptly stopping the mule sometimes, he would jump out and throw into the
cart's rear some rusty discarded metal he had spied while driving.  Once
Irene startled him, also jumping out, ROOTS 631

picking a wild rose.

"Ever since I was a 1'il gal I'se loved roses,"

she told him.

Meeting white people also out driving, or on horseback, Torn and Irene would
become as two statues, with both them and the white people staring straight
ahead.  Torn commented after a while that since in Alamance County he felt he
had seen fewer "po' cracker" type of whites than abounded where he previously
lived.

"I knows dem turkey-gobbler rednecks kin' you mean," she said.

"Naw, ain't many roun' here.  Any you sees He's gin'ly jes' passin' through.

De big white folks haves less use fo' 'em clan dey does niggers.  "

Torn expressed surprise at how Irene seemed to know something of every
crossroads store they passed, or church, schoolhouse, wagon shop, or whatever.

"Well, I jes' hears massa tellin' guests how his folks had sump'n to do wid
pret' near ever' thing in Alamance County,"

was how Irene explained it; then identifying a gristmill that they were
passing as belonging to her massa, she said,

"He turn lotta his wheat into flour, an' his cawn into whiskey to sell in
Fayetteville."

Privately, Torn gradually wearied of what began to sound to him as if Irene
relished a running chronology of implied praises of her owner and his family.
A Sunday when they ventured into the county-seat town of Graham, she said,

"De year dat big California gol' rush, my massa's daddy 'mongst de big mens
what bought de lan' an' built dis town to be de county seat."  The next
Sunday, as they drove along the Salisbury Road, she pointed out a prominent
rock marker,

"Right dere on massa's gran'daddy's plantation dey fought de Battle o'
Alamance.

Folks sick o' dat King's bad treatments took dey guns to his redcoats, an'
massa say dat battle what lit de fuse fo' de

"Mexican Revolution War roun' five years later on."

By this time, Matilda had grown irate.  It had strained her patience to the
limit to suppress the exciting secret for so long.

"Wha's de matter wid you?  Ack like you don't want nobody to see yo' Injun
gal!"

Checking his irritance, Torn only mumbled something unintelligible, and an
exasperated Matilda hit below the belt.

"Maybe she too good fo' us 'cause she b'longst to sich big-shot folks!"

For the first time Torn had ever done such a thing, he 632 ALEX HALEY

stalked away from his mother, refusing to dignify that with a reply.

He wished there was someone, anyone, with whom he could talk about what had
become his deep uncertainties regarding his continuing to keep company with
Irene.

He had finally admitted to himself how much he loved her.  Along with her
pretty mixed black and Indian features, unquestionably she was as charming,
tantalizing, and smart a potential mate as he would have dreamed for.  Yet
being as inherently deliberate and careful as he was, Torn felt that unless
two vital worries he had developed about Irene got solved, they could never
enjoy a truly successful union.

For one thing, deep within, Torn neither completely liked, nor completely
trusted any white person, his own Massa and Missis Murray included.  It
seriously bothered him that Irene seemed actually to adore if not worship the
whites who owned her; it strongly suggested that they would never see eye to
eye on a vital matter.

His second concern, seeming even less soluble, was that the Holt family
seemed scarcely less devoted to Irene, in the way that some prosperous massa
families often came to regard certain household slaves.  He knew that he
could never survive the charade of mating with any woman, then living apart
on different plantations, involving the steady indignity of their having to
ask their respective mass as to approve occasional marital visits.

Torn had even given thought to what might be the most honorable way, though
he knew that any would be excruciating, to withdraw from seeing Irene any
further.

"What de matter, Torn?"  she asked him on the next Sun- day, her tone full of
concern.

"Ain't nothin'."

They rode on silently for a while.  Then she said in her candid, open manner,

"Well, ain't gwine press you if you don't want to say, jes' long as you knows
I knows sump'n workin hard on you."

Hardly aware of the reins in his hands, Torn thought that among Irene's
qualities that he most admired were her frankness and honesty, yet for weeks,
months, he had been actually dishonest with her, in the sense that he had
evaded telling her his true thoughts, however painful it might prove to them
both.  And the longer be delayed would ROOTS 633

be continued dishonesty, as well as dragging out his bitter frustrations.

Torn strained to sound casual.

"While back, 'member I tol' you how my brudder Virgil's wife had to stay with
her massa when us got sol'?"

It being unconnected with his point, he did not speak of how after his own
recent personal appeal, Massa Murray had traveled to Caswell County and
successfully had purchased Lilly Sue and her son Uriah.

Forcing himself to go on, Torn said,

"Jes* feel like if I was ever maybe git thinkin' 'bout matin' up wid anybody
.  .  .  well, jes' don't b'leeve I could ifn we s'pose to be livin' on
different mass as plantations."

"Me neither!"  Her response was so quickly emphatic that Torn nearly dropped
the reins, doubting his ears.  He jerked about toward her, agape.

"What you mean?"  he stammered.

"Same as you jes' said!"

He practically accosted her.

"You know Massa an' Missis Holt ain't gwine sell you!"

"I git sol' whenever I gits ready!"  She looked at him calmly.

Torn felt a weakness coursing throughout his body.

"How you talkin' " bout?  "

"Not meanin' to sound' short, dat ain't yo' worry, it he's mine."

Limply, Torn heard himself saying,

"Well, why'n't you git sol' den" -- She seemed hesitant.  He nearly panicked.

She said,

"Awright.  You got any special time?"

"Reckon dat up to you, too" -- His mind was racing.  What earthly sum would
her massa demand for such a prize as she was .  if this was not all some wild
dream in the first place?

"You got to ax yo' massa if he buy me."

"He buy you," he said with more certainty than he felt.  He felt like a fool
then, asking,

"How much you reckon you be costin'?  Reckon he need to have a idea o' dat."

"

" Speck dey'U take whatever he offer, reasonable.   "

Torn just stared at her, and Irene at him.

"Torn Murray, you's in some ways de 'zasperatin'es' man I'se ever seed!  I
could o' tol' you dat since de day we firs' met!  Long as I been waitin' fo'
you to say sump'nl You 634 ALEX HALEY

jes' wait 'til I gits hoi' o' you, gwine knock out some dat stubbornness!  "
He scarcely felt her small fists pummeling his head, his shoulders, as he
took his first woman into his arms, the mule walking without guidance.

That night, lying abed, Torn began to see in his mind's eye how he was going
to make for her a rose of iron.  In a trip to the county seat he must buy
only a small bar of the finest newly wrought iron.

He must closely study a rose, how its stem and base were joined, how the
petals spread, each curving outward in its own way .  .  .  how to heat the
iron bar to just the orange redness for its quickest hammering to the wafer
thinness from which he would trim the rose petals' patterns that, once
reheated and tenderly, lovingly shaped, would be dipped into brine mixed with
oil, insuring her rose petals' delicate temper.  .

CHAPTER 107

First hearing the sound, then rapidly advancing upon the totally startling
sight of her treasured housemaid Irene huddled down and heavily sobbing
behind where the lower staircase curved into an arc.

Missis Emily Holt instantly reacted in alarm.

"What is it, Irene?"

Missis Emily bent, grasping and shaking the heaving shoulders.

"Get yourself up from there this minute and tell me!  What is it?"

Irene managed to stumble upright while gasping to her missis of her love for
Torn, whom she said she wished to many, rather than continuing her struggle
to resist her regular pursuit by certain young mass as Pressed by a suddenly
agitated Missis Holt to reveal their identities, Irene through her tears
blurted out two names.

That evening before dinner, a shaken Massa and Missis Holt agreed that it was
clearly in the best interests of the immediate family circle to be sold to
Massa Murray and quickly.

Still, because Missis and Massa Holt genuinely liked ROOTS 635

Irene, and highly approved of her choice of Torn for a mate, they insisted
that Massa and Missis Murray let them host the wedding and reception dinner.
All members of both the white and black Holt and Murray families would attend
in the Holt big-house front yard, with their minister performing the ceremony
and Massa Holt himself giving away the bride.

But amid the lovely, moving occasion, the outstanding sensation was the
delicately hand-wrought perfect long- stemmed rose of iron that the groom
Torn withdrew from inside his coat pocket and tenderly presented to his
radiant bride.  Amid the "oohs" and "ahhs" of the rest of the wedding
assembly, Irene embraced it with her eyes, then pressing it to her breast she
breathed,

"Torn, it's jes' too beautiful!  Ain't gwine never be far from dis rose--or
you neither!"

During the lavish reception dinner there in the yard after the beaming white
families had retired to their meal served within the big house, after
Matilda's third glass of the fine wine, she burbled to Irene,

"You's mon jes' a pretty daughter!  You's done saved me from worryin' if Torn
too shy ever to ax a gal to git married" -- Irene loudly and promptly
responded,

"He didn't!"  And the guests within earshot joined them in uproarious
laughter.

After the first week back at the Murray place, Tom's family soon joked among
themselves that ever since the wedding, his hammer had seemed to start
singing against his anvil.  Certainly no one had ever seen him talk so much,
or smile at so many people as often, or work as hard as he had since Irene
came.  Her treasured rose of iron graced the mantelpiece in their new cabin,
which he left at dawn and went out to kindle his forge, where after the
sounds of his tools shaping metals seldom went interrupted until that dusk's
final red-hot object was plunged into the stale water of his slake tub to
hiss and bubble as it cooled.  Customers who came for some minor repair or
merely to get a tool sharpened, he would usually ask if they could wait.
Some slaves liked to sit on foot-high sections of logs off to one side,
though most preferred shifting about in a loose group exchanging talk of
common interest.  On the opposite side, the waiting white customers generally
sat on the split-log benches that Torn had set up for them, positioned
carefully just within his earshot, though far enough away that 636 ALEX HALEY

the whites didn't suspect that as Torn worked, he was monitoring their
conversations.  Smoking and whittling and now or then taking nips from their
pocket flasks as they talked, they had come to regard Tom's shop as a locally
popular meeting place, supplying him now with a daily flow of small talk and
sometimes with fresh, important news that he told to his Irene, his mother
Matilda, and the rest of his slave-row family after their suppertimes.

Torn told his family what deep bitterness the white men expressed about
northern Abolitionists' mounting campaign against slavery.

"Dey's sayin' dat Pres'dent Buchanan better keep 'way from dat no-good bunch
o' nigger lovers if he 'speck any backin' here in de South."

But his white customers vented their worst hatred, he said, " 'against Massa
Abraham Lincoln what been talkin' 'bout freein' us slaves" "Sho' is de
truth," said Irene.

"Reckon leas' a year I been hearin' how if he don' shut up, gwine git de
Nawth an' de South in a war!"

"Y'all ought to of beared my of' massa rantin' an' cussin'!"

exclaimed Lilly Sue.

"He say dis Massa Lincoln got sich gangly legs an' arms an' a long, ugly,
hairy face can't nobody hardly tell if he look demos like a ape or gorilla!
Say he borned an' growed up dirt po' in some log cabin, an' cotched bears an'
polecats to git anythin' to eat, twixt splittin' logs into fence rails like a
nigger."

"Torn, ain't you tol' us Massa Lincoln a lawyer now- days?"  asked L'il
Kizzy, and Torn affirmatively grunted and nodded.

"Well, I don care what dese white folks says!"  declared Matilda.

"Massa Lincoln doin' good fo' us if he git dem so upset.  Fact, mo' I hear
'bout 'im, sound' to me he like Moses tryin' to free us chilluns o' Israeli"
"Well, he sho' can't do it too fas' to suit me," said Irene.

Both she and Lilly Sue had been bought by Massa Murray to increase his field
workers, as she dutifully did in the beginning.  But not many months had
passed when Irene asked her doting husband if he would build her a hand
loom--and she had one in the shortest time that his skilled hands could make
it.  Then the steady frump frump of her loom could be heard from three cabins
away as she worked into the nights until well beyond the rest of the
slave-row family's bedtime.  Before very long the visibly proud Torn was
some ROOTS 637 what self-consciously wearing a shirt that Irene had cut and
sewn from the cloth that she had made herself.

"I jes' loves doin' what my mammy teached me," she modestly responded to
congratulations.  She next carded, spun, wove, and sewed matching ruffled
dresses for an ecstatic Lilly Sue and L'il Kizzy--who now approaching the age
of twenty was demonstrating absolutely no interest in settling down, seeming
to prefer only successive flirtatious courtships, her newest swam, Amos,
being a general worker at the North Carolina Railroad Company's newly
completed hotel, ten miles distant at Company Shops.

Irene then made shirts for each of her brothers-in-law-- which genuinely
moved them, even Ashford--and finally matching aprons, smocks, and bonnets
for Matilda and herself.  Nor were Missis and next Massa any less openly
delighted with the amazingly finely stitched dress and shirt she made for
them, from cotton grown right on their own plantation.

"Why, it's just beautiful!"  Missis Murray exclaimed, turning around
displaying her dress to a beaming Matilda.

"I'll never figure, out why the Holts sold her to us at all, and even at a
reasonable price!"

Glibly avoiding the truth that Irene had confided, Matilda said, "Bes' I can
reckon.  Missis, is dey liked Torn so much."

Having a great love of colors, Irene avidly collected plants and leaves that
she needed for cloth dyeing, and the weekends of 1859's early autumn saw
cloth swatches in red, green, purple, blue, brown, and her favorite yellow
hanging out to dry on the rattan clotheslines.

Without anyone's formally deciding or even seeming to much notice it, Irene
gradually withdrew from doing further field work.  From the massa^ and missis
on down to Virgil's and Lilly Sue's peculiar-acting four-year-old Uriah,
everyone was far more aware of the increasing ways in which Irene was
contributing a new brightness to all of their lives.

"Reckon good part of what made me want Torn so much was 'cause I seed we both
jes' loves makin' things fo' folks," she told Matilda, who was rocking
comfortably in her chair before her dully glowing fireplace one chilly late
October evening.  After a pause, Irene looked at her mother-in-law in a sly,
under-eyed manner.

"Knowin' Torn," she said, "ain't no need me axin' if he done tol' you we's
makin sump'n else" 638 ALEX HALEY

It took a second to register.  Shrieking happily, springing up and tightly
embracing Irene, Matilda was beside herself with joy.

"Make a 1'il gal firs', honey, so I can hug an' rocker jes' like a doll!"

Irene did an incredible range of things across the winter months as her
pregnancy advanced.  Her hands seemed all but able to wreak a magic that soon
was being enjoyed within the big house as well as in every slave-row cabin.
She plaited rugs of cloth scraps; she made both tinted and scented
Christmas-New Year holiday season candles; she carved dried cows' horns into
pretty combs, and gourds into water dippers and birds' nests in fancy
designs.  She insisted until Matilda let her take over the weekly chore of
boiling, washing, and ironing everyone's clothes.  She put some of her
fragrant dried-rose leaves or sweet basil between the folded garments, making
the black and white Murrays alike smell about as fine as they felt.

That February Irene got urged into a three-way conspiracy by Matilda, who had
already enlisted an amused Ashford's assistance.  After explaining her plan,
Matilda fiercely cautioned,

"Don't'cha breathe nary word to Torn, you know how stiff an' proper he is!"
Privately seeing no harm in carrying out her instructions, Irene used her
first chance to draw aside her openly adoring sister-in-law L'il Kizzy, and
speak solemnly: "I'se done beared sump'n I kinda 'speck you'd want to.  Dat
Ashford whispin' it roun' dat look like some real pretty gal beatin' yo' time
wid dat railroad hotel man Amos" -- Irene hesitated just enough to confirm
L'il Kizzy's jealously narrowing eyes, then continued,

"Ashford say de gal right on de same plantation wid one o' his'n.  He claim
Amos go see her some weeknights, twixt seem' you Sundays.  De gal say 'fo'
long she gwine have Amos jumpin' de broom fo' sho'" -- L'il Kizzy gulped the
bait like a hungry blue catfish, a report that was immensely gratifying to
Matilda, who had concluded that after her covert observations of her fickle
daughter's previous swains, Amos seemed the most solid, sincere prospect fer
L'il Kizzy to quit flirting and settle down with.

Irene saw even her stoic Torn raise his brows during the following Sunday
afternoon after Amos arrived on his borrowed mule for his usual faithful
visit.  None of the family ever had seen L'il Kizzy in such a display of
effervescing ROOTS 639

gaiety, wit, and discreetly suggestive wiles as she practically showered on
the practically tongue-tied Amos, with whom she had previously acted more or
less bored.  After a few more of such Sundays, L'il Kizzy confessed to her
heroine Irene that she finally had fallen in love, which Irene promptly told
the deeply pleased Matilda.

But then when more Sundays had passed without any mention of jumping the
broom, Matilda confided to Irene, "I'se worried.  Knows ain't gwine be long
'fo' dey does sump'n.  You see how ever' time he come here, dey goes walkin',
right 'way from all us, an dey heads close to- gedder" Matilda paused.

"Irene, I'se worried 'bout two things.

Firs' thing, dey fool roun* an' git too close, de gal liable to win up in a
fam'ly way.  Other thing, dat boy so used to railroads an' folks travelin', I
wonders is dey maybe figgerin' to run off to up Nawth?

"Cause L'il Kizzy jes' wil' 'enough to try anythin', an' you know it!"

Upon Amos' arrival the next Sunday, Matilda promptly appeared bearing a
frosted layer cake and a large jug of lemonade.  In loud, pointed invitation,
she exclaimed to Amos that if she couldn't cook as well as L'il Kizzy,
perhaps Amos would be willing to suffer through a bit of the cake and
conversation.

"Fac', us don't never hardly even git to see you no mo', seem like!"

An audible groan from L'il Kizzy was instantly squelched with her catching a
hard glance from Torn, as Amos, without much acceptable alternative, took an
offered seat.  Then as the family small talk accompanied the refreshments,
Amos contributed a few strained, self-conscious syllables.  After a while,
apparently L'il Kizzy decided that her man was much more interesting than her
family was being enabled to appreciate.

"Amos, how come you don' tell 'em 'bout dem tall poles an' wires dem railroad
white folks ain't long put up?"  Her tone was less a request than a demand.

Fidgeting some, then Amos said,

"Well, ain't rightly know if'n I can 'zackly 'scribe whatever it is.  But
jes' las' month dey got through wid stringin' wires 'crost de tops o' real
tall poles stretchin' fur as you can see" -- "Well, what de poles an' wires
fo'?"  Matilda demanded.

"He git ting to dat.  Mammy!"

Amos looked embarrassed.

"Telegraph.  Bleeve dat's what dey calls it, ma'am.  I been an' looked at how
de wires 840 ALEX HALEY

leads inside de railroad station where de station agent got on his desk dis
contraption wid a funny kin' o' sideways handle.  Sometime he makin' it click
wid his finger.  But mo' times de contraption git to clickin' by itself.  It
mighty 'citin' to de white folks.  Now every mornin' a good-size bunch 'em
comes an ties up dey bosses to jes* be roun* waitin' fo* dat thing to git to
clickin'.  Dey says it's news from different places comin' over dem wires
'way up on dem poles.  "

"Amos, wait a minute, now" -- Torn spoke slowly.

"You's sayin' it bringin' news but ain't no talkin', jes' de clickin'?"

"Yassuh, Mr. Torn, like a great big cricket.  Seem like to me somehow or not
her de station agent he's git ting words out'n dat, 'til it stop.  Den pretty
soon he step outside an' tell dem odder mens what-all was said."

"Ain't dese white folks sump'n?"  exclaimed Matilda.

"De Lawd do tell!"  She beamed upon Amos almost as broadly as L'il Kizzy was.

Amos, obviously feeling much more at ease than before, elected now without
any prompting to tell them of another wonder.

"Mr.  Torn, is you ever been in any dem railroad repair shops?"

Torn was privately deciding that he liked this young man who appeared to be,
at last, his sister's choice to jump the broom with; he had manners.  He
seemed sincere, solid.

"Naw, son, I ain't," Torn said.

"Me an' my wife used to drive by de Company Shops village, but I ain't never
been inside none de buildin's."

"Well suh, I'se took plenty meals on trays from de hotel to de mens in all
twelve dem different shops, an' I reckon de busies' one de blacksmith shop.
Dey he's doin' sich in dere as straightenin' dem great big train axles what's
got bent, fixin' all manners o' other train troubles, an' makin all kinds o'
parts dat keeps de trains runnin'.  It's cranes in dere big as logs, bolted
to de ceilin', an I reckon twelve, fifteen blacksmith's each got a nigger
helper swingin' mauls an' sledges bigger'n I ever seen.  Dey got forges big
enough to roas* two, three whole cows in, an one dem nigger helpers tol' me
dey anvils weighs much as eight hundred pounds!"

"Whewl" whistled Torn, obviously much impressed.

"How much yo' anvil weigh, Torn?"  Irene asked.

"Right roun' two, hundred pounds, an' ain't ever' body could Uf' it."

ROOTS 641

"Amos" -- L'il Kizzy exclaimed, "you ain't tol' 'em nothin' 'bout yo' new
hotel where you works!"

"Hoi* on, none o' my hotel!"  Amos widely grinned.  "Sho' wisht it was!

Dey takes in money ban' over fis'l Lawd!  Well, 'magines y'all knows de hotel
ain't long built.  Folks says some mens pretty hot under de collar 'cause de
railroad pres' dent talked wid dem, but den picked Miss Nancy Hillard to
manage it.  She de one hired me, 'memberin' me workin' hard fo' her fam'ly,
growin' up.  Anyhow, de hotel got thirty rooms, wid six toilets out in de
backyard.  Folks pays a dollar a day fo' room an washbowl an' towel, 'long
wid breakfas', dinner, supper, an' a settin' chair on de front porch.
Sometime I hears Miss Nancy Jes' acarryin' on 'bout how mos' de railroad work
mens leaves her nice clean white sheets all grease an' soot-streaked, but den
she say well leas' dey spends ever' thing dey makes, so dey's he' ping de
Company Shops village git better off!  "

Again L'il Kizzy cued her Amos: "How 'bout y'all feedin' dem trainloads o'
folks?"

Amos smiled.

"Well, den's 'bout busy as us ever gits!  See, every day it He's de two
passenger trains, one runnin' eas', de odder wes'.

Gittin' to McLeansville or Hillsboro, 'pending which way it gwine, de tram's
conductor he telegraphs 'head to de hotel how many passengers an' crew he
got.  An' by time dat train git to our station, lemme tell y'all, Miss
Nancy's got all de stuff out on dem long tables hot an' steamin', an' all us
helpers jes' rarin' to go to feed dem folks!  I means it He's quail an' hams,
chickens, guineas, rabbit, beef; it's all kinds o' salads, an' bout any
vegetable you can name, 'long wid a whole table nothin' but desserts!  De
peoples piles off dat big of' train dat sets dere waitin' twenty minutes to
give 'em time to eat 'fo' dey gits back on boa'd an' it commence achuffin'
out an' gone again!  "- " De drummers, Amos!  " cried L'il Kizzy, with
everyone smiling at her pride.

"Yeah," said Amos.

"Dey's de ones Miss Nancy purely love to have put up in de hotel!  Sometime
two, three 'em git off'n de same train, an' me an' not her nigger hurries up
carryin' 'head o' 'em to de hotel dey suit bag an big heavy black web-strap
cases what we knows is full o' samples whatever dat 'ticular drummer's
sellin'.  Miss Nancy says dey's real genT mens keeps deyselves clean as pins,
an' really 'predates being' took good care of, an' I likes 'em, 642 ALEX
HALEY

too.  Some jes' quick to give you a dime as a nickel fo' carryin' dey bags,
shinin dey shoes, or doin' nigh 'bout anythin'!  Gin'ly dey washes up an'
walks roun' town talkin' wid folks.  After eatin dinner, dey'll set on de
porch, smoking or chawin' 'baccy an' jes' lookin', or talkin' tildey goes on
upstairs to bed.  Den nex' mornin' after breakfas', dey calls one us niggers
to tote dey samples cases over crost to dat blacksmith's what fo' a dollar a
day rents 'em a boss an' buggy, an' off dey drives to sell stuff at I reckon
'bout all de stores 'long de roads in dis county"-- In a spontaneity of sheer
admiration that Amos worked amid such wonders, the chubby L'il George
exclaimed, " Amos, boy, I ain't realized you is leadin' some life!  "

"Miss Nancy say de railroad bigges' thing since de hoss," Amos modestly
observed.

"She say soon's some mo' railroads gits dey tracks jined togedder, things
ain't gwine never be de same no mo'."

CHAPTER 108

Chicken George slowed his galloping, lathered horse barely enough for its
sharp turning off the main road into the lane, then abruptly his hands jerked
the reins taut.  It was the right place, but since he had seen it last:
unbelievable!  Beyond the weed-choked lane ahead, the once buff- colored Lea
home looked a mottled gray of peeling old paint; rags were stuffed where some
window panes had been; one side of the now heavily patched roof seemed almost
sagging.  Even the adjacent fields were barren, containing nothing but old
dried weathered stalks within the collapsing split-log fences.

Shocked, bewildered, he relaxed the reins to continue with the horse now
picking its way through the weeds.  Yet closer, he saw the big-house porch
aslant, the broken-down front steps; and the slave-row cabins' roofs were all
cavROOTS 643

ing in.  Not a cat, dog, or chicken was to be seen as he slid off the horse,
leading it now by its bridle alongside the house to the backyard.

He was no more prepared for the sight of the heavy old woman sitting bent
over on a piece of log, picking poke salad greens, dropping the stems about
her feet and the leaves into a cracked, rusting washbasin.  He recognized
that she had to be Miss Malizy, but so incredibly different it seemed
impossible.  His unnecessary loud "Whoa!"  caught her attention.

Miss Malizy quit picking the greens.  Raising her head, looking about, then
she saw him, but he could tell she didn't yet realize who he was.

"Miss Malizy!"  He ran over closer, halting uncertainly as he saw her face
still querying.  Her eyes squinting, she got him into better focus .  .
suddenly pushing one hand heavily down against the log, she helped herself
upward.  "George ... ain't'cha dat boy George?"

"Yes'm, Miss Malizy!"  He rushed to her now, grasping and embracing her large
flabbiness within his arms, close to crying.

"Lawd, boy, where you been at?  Used to be you was roun' here all de time!"

Her tone and words held some vacant ness as if she were unaware of nearly
five years' time lapse.

"Been crost de water in dat Englan', Miss Malizy.  Been fightin' chickens
over dere--Miss Malizy, where my wife an' mammy an' chilluns at?"

So was her face blankness, as if beyond any more emotion no matter whatever
else might happen.

"Ain't nobody hardly here no mo', boy!"

She sounded surprised that he didn't know it.

"Dey's all gone.  Jes' me an' massa's lef" -- "Gone where.  Miss Malizy?"  He
knew that her mind had weakened.

With a puffy hand she gestured toward the small willow grove still below the
slave row.

"Yo' mammy .  .  .  Kizzy her name .  .  .  layin' down yonder" -- A whooping
sob rose and burst from Chicken George's throat.  His hand flew up to muffle
it.

"Sarah, too, she down dere ... an' of' missy .  .  .  in de front yard--ain't
you seeder when you rid by?"

"Miss Malizy, where Tilda an' my chilluns?"

He didn't want to rattle her.  She had to think a moment.

644 ALEX HALEY

" Tilda?  Yeh.  Tilda good gal, sho' was.  Whole lotta chilluns, too.

Yeh.  Boy, you oughta knowed massa sol' off all 'em long time ago"" Where.
Miss Malizy, where to?  " Rage flooded him.  " Where massa.  Miss Malizy?  "

Her head turned toward the house.

"Up in dere still 'sleep, I reckons.  Git so drunk don' git up 'til late,
hollerin' he want to eat ... ain't no vittles, hardly .  .  .  boy, you bring
anything to cook?"

His

"No'm" floating back to the confused old lady, Chicken George burst through
the shambles of the kitchen and down the peeling hallway into the smelly,
messy living room to stop at the foot of the short staircase, bellowing
angrily

"Massa Leaf" He waited briefly.

"MASSA LEA!"

About tv go stomping up the stairs, he heard activity sounds.  After a
moment, from the right doorway the disheveled figure emerged, peering
downward.

Chicken George through his anger stood shocked to muteness at the shell of
his remembered massa, gaunt, unshaven, unkempt; obviously he had slept in
those clothes.  "Massa Lea?"

"George!"  The old man's body physically jerked.

"George!"  He came stumbling down the creaking staircase, stopping at its
foot; they stood staring at each other.  In Massa Lea's hollowed face, his
eyes were rheumy, then with high, cackling laughter he rushed with widening
arms to hug Chicken George, who sidestepped.  Catching Massa Lea's bony
hands, he shook them vigorously.

"George, so glad you're back!  Where all you been?  You due back here long
time ago!"

"Yassuh, yassuh.  Lawd Russell jes' lemme loose.  An' I been eight days git
ting here from de ship in Richmon'."

"Boy, come on in here in the kitchen!"  Massa Lea was tugging Chicken
George's wrists.  And when they reached there, he scraped back the broken
table's two chairs.

"Set, boy!

"LIZY!  Where my jug?

"LIZY'"

"Comin', Massa" -- the old woman's voice came from outside.

"She's done got addled since you left, don't know yesterday from tomorrow,"

said Massa Lea.

"Massa, where my fam'ly?"

ROOTS 645

"Boy, less us have a drink 'fore we talk!  Long as we been together, we ain't
never had a drink together!  So glad you back here, finally somebody to talk
to!"

"Ain't fo' talkin', Massa!  Where my fam'ly"

"

" LIZY!   "

"Yassuh" -- Her bulk moved through the door frame and she found and put a jug
and glasses on the table and then went back outside as if unaware of Chicken
George and Massa Lea there talking.

"Yeah, boy, I sure am sorry 'bout your mammy.  She just got too old, didn't
suffer much, and she went quick.  Put 'er in a good grave" Massa Lea was
pouring them drinks.

On purpose ain't mentionin' "Tilda an' de chilluns, it flashed through
Chicken George's mind.  Ain't changed none .  .  .  still tricky an'
dangerous as a snake .  .  .  got to keep from ffittin' 'im real mad .  .  .

" " Member de las' things you said to me, Massa?  Said you be settin' me free
jes' soon's I git back.  Well, here I is!  "

But Massa Lea gave no sign he'd even heard as he shoved a glass three
quarters filled across the table.  Then, lifting his own,

"Here yare, boy.  Le's drink to you being' back" -- / needs dis .  .  .
quaffing of the liquor.  Chicken George felt it searing down and warming
within him.

He tried again, obliquely.

"Sho's sorry to hear from Miss Malizy you los' missis, Massa."

Finishing his liquor, grunting, Massa Lea said,

"She just didn't wake up one mornin'.  Hated to see her go.  She never give
me any peace since that cockfight.  But I hated to see her go.  Hate to see
anybody go."

He belched.

"We all got to go" -- He ain't bad off as Miss Malizy, but he 'long de way.
He went now directly to the point.

"My

"Tilda an' young'uns, Massa, Miss Malizy say you sol' 'em" -- Massa Lea
glanced at him.

"Yeah, had to, boy.  Had to!  Bad luck got me down so bad.  Had to sell off
near 'bout the last of my land, everything, hell, even the chickens!"

About to flare.  Chicken George got cut off.

"Boy, I'm so po1 now, me an' Malizy's eatin' 'bout what we can pick an'
catch!"  Suddenly he cackled.

"Hell, sure 646 ALEX HALEY

ain't nothin' new!  I was homed po'!  " He got serious again.  " But now
you're back, you and me can get this place agoin' again, you hear me?

I know we can doer, boy!  "

All that repressed Chicken George from lunging up at Massa Lea was -his
lifelong conditioning knowledge of what would automatically follow physically
attacking any white man.  But his rasping anger contained his closeness to it.

"Massa, you sent me 'way from here wid yo' word to free me!  But I git back,
you done even sol' my fam'ly.  I wants my papers an' know where my wife and
chilluns is, Massa!"

"Thought I tol* you that!  They over in Alamance County, tobacco planter name
Murray, live not far from the railroad shops" -- Massa Lea's eyes were
narrowed.

"Don't you raise your voice at me, boy!"

Alamance .  .  .  Murray .  .  .  railroad shops.  Inking into memory those
key words.  Chicken George now managed a seeming contriteness,

"I'se sorry, jes* get excited, sho' ain't meant to, Massa" -- The massa's
expression wavered, then forgave.  / got to ease out'n 'im dat piece o' paper
he writ dat free me.

"I been down, boy!"  Hunching forward across the table, the massa squinted
fiercely,

"You hear me?

Nobody never know how down I been!  Ain't jes' meanin' money"-- He gestured
at his chest,

"Down in here!"  He seemed wanting a response-- "Yassuh."

"Seen hard days, boy!  Them sonsabitches used to holler my name crossin' the
street when I'm comin'.  Heared 'em laughin' Tiin' my back.  Sonsabitches!"
A bony fist banged the tabletop.

"Swore in my heart Torn Lea show 'em!  Now you back.  Git not her set of
chickens] Don't care I'm eighty-three ... we can doer, boy!"

"Massa" -- Massa Lea squinted closely,

"Forgot how old you now, boy?"

"Fifty-fo' now, Massa."

"You ain't!"

"Is, too, Massa.  To' long, be fifty-five" -- "Hell, I seen you the same
mornin' you birthed!  L'il of' wrinkled-up straw-colored nigger" Massa Lea
cackled.  "Hell, I give you your name!"

Pouring himself another smaller drink after Chicken ROOTS 647

George had waved his hand negatively, quickly Massa Lea peered around as if
to insure that only they were there.  "Reckon ain't no sense keepin' you
'mongst all them I got fooled!  They think I ain't got nothin' no more" -- He
gave Chicken George a conspiratorial look.

"I

got money!  Ain't much .  I got it hid!  Don't nobody but me know where!  "
He looked longer at Chicken George.

"Boy, when I go, you know who git what I got?  Still ownin' ten acres, too!
Lan' like money at the bank!  Whatever I got go to you!  You the closest I
got now, boy."

He seemed to be wrestling with -something.  Furtively he leaned yet closer.

"Hell, ain't no need not to face the fact.  It's blood 'tween us, boy!"

He done hit bottom fo' sho', sayin' dat.  His insides contracting, Chicken
George sat mutely.

"Jes' stay on even if a 1'il while, George" -- The whiskied face petitioned.

"I know you ain't the kin' go turnin' your back 'against them what helped you
in this worl'" -- Jes 'fo' 1 lef he showed me my freedom paper he'd writ an'
signed an' said he gwine keep in 'is strongbox.  Chicken George realized that
he was going to have to get Massa Lea yet drunker.  He studied the face
across the table, thinking being white de only thing he got lef .  "Massa,
never will fo'git how you bring me up--mighty few white men's good as dat" --
The watery eyes lighted.

"You was jes' 1'il shirttail nigger.  I shore remember" -- "Yassuh, you an'
Uncle- Mingo" -- "Or Mingo!  Damn his time!  Bes' nigger trainer it was" --
The wavering eyes found a focus on Chicken George "... 'til you learnt good .
.  .

started takin' you to fights an' leavin' Mingo"-- " .  .  hope you an' massa
trus' me to feed d'e chickens"-- The memory of old Uncle Mingo's bitterness
hurt even yet.

"

" Member, Massa, we was gwine to a big fight in New Orleans?   "

"Shore was!  An' never did make it" -- His brow wrinkled.

"Uncle Mingo died jes' befo' was how come."

"Yeah!   01' Mingo over under them willow trees now."   Along with my mammy
and Sister Sarah, and Miss Malizy whenever she go, 'pending which one y'all
goes first.

He wondered what either would do without the other.

648 ALEX HALEY

"Boy, you 'member me givin' you the travelin' pass to go catch all the tail
you wanted?"

Making himself simulate guffawing laughter.  Chicken George pounded the
tabletop himself, the massa continuing, "Damn right I did, 'cause you was
horny buck if I ever seen one.  An' we both catched aplenty tail them trips
we made, boy!  I knowed you was an' you knowed I was" "Yassuh!  Sho' did,
Massa!"

"An* you commence hack fighting an' I give you money to bet, an' you win your
ass off!"

"Sho' did, suh, de truth!  De truth!"

"Boy, we was a team, we was!"

Chicken George caught himself almost starting to share a thrilling in the
reminiscings; he also felt a little giddy from the whiskey.  He reminded
himself of his objective.  Reaching across the table, taking up the liquor
jug, he poured into his glass about an inch, closing a fist quickly around
the glass to mask the small amount as extending the bottle across the table,
he poured for Massa Lea about three quarters of a glassful.  Raising his
glass within his fist, appearing to lurch, his voice sounded slurring,

"Drink to good a massa as is anywhere!  Like dem Englishmans says, " Down de
hawtch!  "" Sipping of his, he watched Massa Lea quaff,

"Boy, it do me good you feel that away" -- " " Mother toas'!  " The two
glasses elevated.

"Fines' nigger I ever had!"  They drained their glasses.

Wiping his mouth with the back of a veiny hand, coughing from the whiskey's
impact, Massa Lea also slurred, "You ain't tol' me nothin' 'bout that
Englishman, boy-- what's his name?"

"Lawd Russell, Massa.  He got mo money'n he can count.  Got mon fo' hunnud
bloodline roosters to pick from to fight wid" -- Then after a purposeful
pause,

"But ain't nowhere de game cocker you is, Massa."

"You mean that, boy?"

"Ain't as smart, one thing.  An* ain't de man you is!  He jes' rich an'
lucky.  Ain't yo' quality o' white folks, Massa!"  Chicken George thought of
having overheard Sir C.  Eric Russell say to friends, "George's mawster's a
glorified hack- fighter."

Massa Lea's head lolled, he jerked it back upward, his eyes trying to focus
on Chicken George.  Where would he ROOTS 649

keep his strongbox?  Chicken George thought how the rest of his life's
condition would hang upon his obtaining the vividly remembered square sheet
of paper containing maybe three times more writing than a traveling pass,
over the signature.

"Massa, could I have 1'il mo' yo' liquor?"

"You know bet tern ask, boy .  .  all you wan" -- "I tol' am any dem English
folks bes' massa in de wori's what I got .

.  ain't nobody never hear me talkin' 'bout stayin' over dere .  .  .

hey, yo' glass git ting low, Massa"-- " .  .  Jes li'l be 'enough .  .  .
naw, you ain't that kin', boy .  .  .

never give no real trouble"-- " Nawsuh .  .  .  well, drinkin' to you 'gin,
suh"-- They did, some of the massa's liquor wetting his chin.  Chicken
George, feeling more of the whiskey's effect, suddenly sat up straighter,
seeing the massa's head lowering toward the tabletop .  .  .

"Y'always good to y'other niggers, too, Massa .  .  ."

The head wavered, stayed down.

"Tried to, boy .  .  .  tried to" -- It was muffled.

B'leeve he good'n drunk now.

"Yessuh, you'n missis bofe" -- "Good woman .  ..  lotta ways" -- The massa's
chest now also met the table.  Lifting his chair with minimal sound.  Chicken
George waited a suspenseful moment.  Moving to the entrance, he halted, then
not over loudly

"Massa!  .  .  .  Massa!"

Suddenly turning, catlike, within seconds he was searching every drawer
within any front-room furniture.  Halting, hearing only his breathing, he
hastened up the steps, cursing their creaking.

The impact of entering a white man's bedroom hit him.  He stopped .  .

involuntarily stepping backward, he glimpsed the conglomerate mess.

Sobering rapidly, he went back inside, assaulted by the mingled strong odors
of stale whiskey, urine, sweat, and unwashed clothes among the emptied
bottles.  Then as if possessed, he was pulling open, flinging aside things,
searching futilely.  Maybe under the bed.

Frantically dropping onto his knees, peering, he saw the strongbox.

Seizing it, in a trice he was back downstairs, tripping in the hallway.
Seeing the massa still slumped over on the table, turning, he hastened
through the front door.  Around 650 ALEX HALEY

at the side of the house, with his hands he wrestled to open the locked,
metal box.  Git on de hoss an' go--bus1 it open later.  But he had to be sure
he had the freedom paper.

The backyard wood chopping block caught his eyes, with the old ax near it on
the ground.  Nearly leaping there, jerking up the ax, setting the box lock
side up, with one smashing blow it burst open.  Bills, coins, folded papers
spilled out, and snatching open papers he instantly recognized it.  "What'cha
doin', boy?"

He nearly jumped from his skin.  But it was Miss Malizy sitting on her log,
unperturbed, quietly staring.  "What massa say?"  she asked vacantly.  "I got
to go.  Miss Malizy!"

"Well, reckon you better go 'head, den" -- "Gwine tell Tilda an 'de chilluns
you wishes 'em well" "That be nice, boy .   .   .   y'all take care" --
"Yes'm" -- swiftly moving, he embraced her tightly.   Oughta run see de
graves.

Then thinking it better to remember his mammy Kizzy and Sister Sarah as he
remembered them living.  Chicken George swept a last look over the crumbling
place where he was born and raised; unexpectedly blubbering, clutching the
freedom paper, he went running, and vaulting onto his horse ahead of the two
double saddle rolls containing his belongings, he went galloping back up
through the high weeds of the lane, not looking back.

CHAPTER 109

Near the fence row that flanked the main road, Irene was busily picking
leaves to press into dry perfumes when she looked up, hearing the sound of a
galloping horse's hoofs.  She gasped, seeing the horseman wearing a flowing
green scarf and a black derby with a curving rooster tail feather jutting up
from the hatband.

ROOTS 651

Waving her arms wildly, she raced toward the road, crying out at the top of
her lungs,

"Chicken George!  Chicken George!"  The rider reined up just beyond the
fence, his lathered horse heaving with relief.

"Do I know you, gal?"  he called, returning her smile.

"Nawsuh!  We aint never seen one not her but Torn, Mammy,

"Tilda, an' de fam'ly talk 'bout you so much I knows what you-look like."

He stared at her.

"My Torn and Tilda?"

"Yassuh!  Yo' wife an' my husban'--my baby's daddy!"

It took him a few seconds to register it.

"You an' Torn got a chile?"

She nodded, beaming and patting her protruding stomach.

"It due not her month!"  He shook his head.  "Lav."  d God!  Lawd God Amighty!

What's yo' name?  "

"Irene, sun!"

Telling him to ride on, she hurried clumsily as fast as she dared until she
reached within vocal range of where Virgil, Ashford, L'il George, James,
Lewis, L'il Kizzy, and Lilly Sue were planting in another section of the
plantation.  Her loud hallooing quickly brought a worried L'il Kizzy, who
raced back to relay the incredible news.

They all breathlessly reached the slave row, shouting and surging about their
father, mother, and Torn, and all trying at once to embrace him, until a
pummeled and disarrayed Chicken George was entirely overwhelmed with his
reception.

"Guess bes' y'all hears de bad news firs'," he told them, and then of the
deaths of Gran'mammy Kizzy and Sister Sarah.  "01' Missis Lea, she gone, too"
-- When their grief at their losses had abated somewhat, he described Miss
Malizy's condition, and then his experience with Massa Lea, finally resulting
in the freedom- paper that he triumphantly displayed.  Supper was eaten and
the night fell upon the family grouped raptly about him as he entered the
topic of his nearly five years in England.

"Gwine tell y'all de truth, reckon I'd need not her year tryin' tell all I'se
seed an' done over 'way 'crost all dat water!  My Lawd!"  But he gave them
now at least a few highlights of Sir C.  Eric Russell's great wealth and
social prestige; of his long purebred lineage and consistently winning game
flock and how as an expert black trainer from America he had proved
fascinating to lovers of game652 ALEX HALEY cocking in England, where fine
ladies would go strolling leading their small African boys dressed in silks
and velvet by golden chains about their necks.

"Ain't gwine lie, I'se glad I had all de 'speriences I is.  But Lawd knows
I'se missed y'all sump'n terrible!"

"Sho' don' look it to me--stretchin' two years out to mon fo'!"

Matilda snapped.

"Or biddy ain't changed a bit, is she?"  observed Chicken George to his
amused children.

"Hmphf Who so of'?"  Matilda shot back.

"Yo' head done got to showin' mo' gray clan mine is!"

He laughingly patted Matilda's shoulders as she feigned great indignance.
T'wa'nt me ain't wanted to git back!  I commence 'mindin' Lawd Russell soon's
dem two years done.  But one day after a while he come an' say I'se trainin'
his chickens so good, well as de young white feller was my helper dat he done
'cided sen' nudder sum o' money to Massa Lea, tellin' *im he need me one mo'
year--an' I nearly had a fit!  But what I'm gwine do?  Done debes I could--I
got in 'is letter fo' Massa Lea be sho' an' 'splain to y'all what happen"-- "
He ain't tol' us nary word!  " exclaimed Matilda, and Torn spoke.

"You know why?  He'd done sol' us off by dat time."

"Sho' right!  It's why us ain't beared!"

"Umh-huh!  Umh-huh!  See?  T'warn't me!"  Chicken George sounded pleased to
be vindicated.

After his bitter disappointment, he said he had extracted Sir Russell's
pledge that it would be the last year.

"Den I went 'head an' he'ped his chickens win dey bigges' season ever--leas'
dat's what he tol' me.  Den fin'ly he said he feel like I done teached de
young white feller 'enough dat he could take over, an' I jes' 'bout lit up
dat place carryin' on, I was so happy!

"Lemme tell y'all sump'n--it's a mighty few niggers ever has two whole
carriage loads of English folks 'companyin' 'em like dey did me, to
Southampton.  Dat's great big city by de water wid ain't no tellin' how many
ships gwine in an' out.  Lawd Russell had 'ranged for me ridin' steerage in
dis ship crost de ocean.

"Lawd!  De scar des I ever been!  We ain't got all dat far out dere 'fo'
commence to buckin' an' rearin' like a wil' boss!  Talk 'bout prayin'!"  --he
ignored Matilda's

"Hmph!"

ROOTS 653

"--seem like de whole ocean gone crazy, tryin' to wrench us to pieces!  But
den fin'ly it got ca'med down pretty fair an' it was even restful by time we
come in New York where ever' body got off" -- "New Yawk!"  L'il Kizzy
exclaimed.

"What'cha do dere, Pappy?"

"Gal, ain't I tellin' it fas' as I can?  Well, Lawd Russell had give one de
ship officers money wid 'instructions to put me on nudder ship dat'd git me
to Richmon'.  But de ship de officer made 'rangements wid weren't leavin' fo'
five, six days.  So I jes' walked up an' down in dat New Yawk, lissenin' an'
lookin'" -- "Where you to stay?"  asked Matilda.

"Roomin' house for colored--dat's same as niggers, where you think?  I had
money.  I got money, out in my saddlebags right now.  Gwine show it to y'all
in de mawnin'."  He glanced devilishly at Matilda.

"Might even give you hundred dollars, y'act right!"  As she snorted, he went
on, "Dat Lawd Russell tumt out to be a real good man.  Gimme dis pretty fair
piece o' money jes' 'fo' I let.  Say it strictly fo' me, not even to mention
it to Massa Lea, an' you knows fo' sho' I ain't.

"Really main thing I done was talked wid plenty dem New Yawk free niggers.
Seem like to memos 'em tryin' to keep from starvin', worse off'n we is.  But
it is like we's beared.  Some of 'em is livin' good!

Got different kinds dey own businesses, or nice-payin' jobs.  Few owns dey
own homes, an' more pays rents in sump'n dey calls 'partments, an' some de
young'uns git ting some school in', sich as dat.

"But whatever nigger I talked to mad as yellow jackets 'bout is all dem
'migratin' white folks ever' where you looks" -- "Dem Abolitions?"

yelped L'il Kizzy.

"You tellin' it or me?  Naw!  Sho' ain't!  Way I unnerstan', de Abolitions is
pret' much white folks what been in dis country teas' long as niggers is.
But dese I'se speakin' 'bout is pilin' off'n ships into New Yawk, in fact all
over de Nawth.  Dey's Irishers, mainly, you can't unnerstan' what dey's
sayin', an' lotta odder 'culiar kinds can't even speak English.  Fact, I
beared dey steps off de ships an firs' word dey learns is 'nagur," den next
thing dey's claimin' niggers takin' dey jobs' Dey's startin' fights an' riots
all de time--dey's wusser'n po' crackers!  "

654 ALEX HALEY

"Well, Lawd, I hope dey stays 'way from down here!"  said Irene.

"Look here, y'all, it'd take me not her week to tell half de going's on I
seed an' beared 'fo' dat ship bring me to Richmon'" -- "S'prise to me you
even got on it!"

"Woman, ain't you gon' never let me 'lone!  Man gone fo' years an' you actin'
like I lef yestiddy!"  The slightest suggestion of an edge was in Chicken
George's voice.

Torn asked quickly,

"You bought yo' hoss in Richmon'?"

"Dat's right!  Sebenty dollars!  She a real fas' speckle mare.  I figgered
free man gwine need a good hoss.  I rider hard as she could stan' it to Massa
Lea's" -- It being early April, everyone else was extremely busy.  Most of
the family were in the planting season's height.  Among cleaning, cooking,
and serving in the big house, Matilda had very little available free time.
Tom's customers kept him going at his hardest from daylight into deepening
dusk, and the nearly eight months' pregnant Irene was scarcely less occupied
among her diverse tasks.

No matter, across the next week.  Chicken George visited with them all.  But
out in the fields, it soon was as uncomfortably clear to them as to himself
that he and anything connected with field work were alien.  Matilda and
Irene's faces made quick smiles when he came near, then they made equally
quick apologies that they knew be understood that they had to get back to
what they were doing.  Several times, he dropped by to have some chat with
Torn while he blacksmithed.  But each time the atmosphere would grow tense.
The slaves who were waiting grew visibly nervous on seeing whatever as yet
unattended white customers abruptly quit their conversations, spit
emphatically and shift their bodies on the log benches, while eyeing the
wearer of the green scarf and the black derby with obvious silent suspicion.

Twice during these times, Torn happened to glance and see Massa Murray
starting down toward the shop, then turn back, and Torn knew why.  Matilda
had said that when the Murrays first learned of Chicken George's arrival,
"dey seem happy fo' us, but Torn, I worries, I knows dey's since had dey
heads togedder whole lot, den quits talkin' soon's I come in."

What was going to be Chicken George's "free" status ROOTS 655

there on the Murray plantation?  What was he going to do?  The questions hung
like a cloud in the minds of every individual among them .  .  excepting
Virgil's and Lilly Sue's four-year-old Uriah.

"You's my gran'pappy?"  Uriah seized his chance to say something directly to
the intriguing man who had seemed to occasion such a stir among all of the
other adults ever since his arrival several days before.

"What?"

The startled Chicken George had just wandered back into the slave row, deeply
rankled by his feeling of being rejected.  He eyed the child who stared at
him with large, curious eyes.

"Well, reckon I is."  About to walk on, George turned.

"What dey say yo' name?"

"Uriah, suh.  Gran'pappy, where bouts you work at?"

"What you talkin' " bout?  " He glared down at the boy.  " Who tol' you to ax
me dat?  "

"Nobody.  Jes' aK you."

He decided that the boy told the truth.

"Don* work nowheres I'se free."

The boy hesitated.

"Gran'pappy, what free is?"

Feeling ridiculous standing there being interrogated by a young' un

Chicken George started on, but then he thought of what Matilda had confided
of the boy- "Seem like he tend to be sickly, even maybe a 1'il square in de
head.-Next time you roun' 'im, notice how he apt to jes' keep starin' at
somebody even after dey's quit talkin'."  Turning about, Chicken George
searched the face of Uriah, and he saw what Matilda meant.  The boy did
project an impression of physical weakness and, except for his blinking, the
large eyes were as if they had fastened onto Chicken George, assessing his
every utterance or movement.  George felt uncomfortable.  The boy repeated
his question.

"Suh, what free is?"

"Free mean ain't nobody own you no mo'."  He had a sense that he was speaking
to the eyes.  He started off again.

"Mammy say you fights chickens.  What you fight 'em wid?"

Wheeling about, a retort on his tongue.  Chicken George perceived the
earnest, curious face of only a small boy.  And it stirred something within
him: granchile.

Critically he studied Uriah, thinking that there must be 656 ALEX HALEY

something appropriate to say to him.  And finally,

"Yo' mammy or anybody tol* you where you comes from?"

"Sun?  Comes from where?"  He had not been told, Chicken George saw, or if he
had, not in a way that he remembered.

"C'mon 'long wid me here, boy."

Also, it was something for him to do.  Followed by Uriah, Chicken George led
the way over to the cabin that he was sharing with Matilda.

"Now set yo'self down in dat chair an' don't be axin' no whole lotta
questions.  Jes' set an' lissen to what I tells you."

"Yassuh."

"Yo' pappy born of me an' yo' Gran'mammy Tilda."  He eyed the boy.

"You unncrstan's dat?"

"My pappy y'all young' un

"Dat's right.  You ain't dumas you looks.  Den my mammy name Kizzy.  So she
yo' great-gran'mammy.  Gran'- mammy Kizzy.  Say dat."

"Yassuh.  Gran'mammy Kizzy."

"Yeah.  Den her mammy name Bell."

He looked at the boy.

"Name Bell."

Chicken George grunted.

"Awright.  An' Kizzy's pappy name Kunta Kinte" -- "Kunta Kinte."

"Dat's right.  Well, him an Bell yo' great-greatgran'- folks" -- Nearly an
hour later, when Matilda came hurrying nervously into the cabin, wondering
what on earth had happened to Uriah, she found him dutifully repeating such
sounds as

"Kunta Kinte" and "ko" and

"Kamby Bolongo."  And Matilda decided that she had the time to sit down, and
beaming with satisfaction, she listened as Chicken George told their rapt
grandson the story of how his Afri- can great-great-gran'daddy had said he
was not far from his village, chopping some wood to make a drum, when he had
been surprised, overwhelmed, and stolen into slavery by four men, "--den a
ship brung 'im 'crost de big water to a place call

"Naplis, an' he was bought dere by a Massa John Waller what took 'im to his
plantation dat was in Spotsylvania County, Virginia ..."

The following Monday, Chicken George rode with Torn in the mule cart to buy
supplies in the county-seat town of ROOTS 657

Graham.  Little was said between them, each seeming mostly immersed in his
own thoughts.  As they went from one to another store.  Chicken George keenly
relished the quiet dignity with which his twenty-seven-year-old son dealt
with the various white merchants.

Then they went into a feed store that Torn said had recently been bought by a
former county sheriff named J.  D.  Cates.

The heavy-set Cates was seeming to ignore them as he moved about serving his
few white customers.  Some sense of warning rose within Torn; glancing, he
saw Cates looking covertly at the green-scar fed black-derbied Chicken
George, who was stepping about in a cocky manner visually inspecting items of
merchandise.  Intuitively Torn was heading toward his father to accomplish a
quick exit when Cates' voice cut through the store: "Hey, boy, fetch me a
dipper of water from that bucket over there!"

Cates was gazing directly at Torn, the eyes taunting, menacing.  Tom's
insides congealed as, under the threat of a white man's direct order, he
walked stony-faced to the bucket and returned with a dipper of water.  Cates
drank it at a gulp, his small eyes over the dipper's rim now on Chicken
George, who stood with his head slowly shaking.  Cates thrust the dipper
toward him.

"I'm still thirsty!"

Avoiding any quick moves.  Chicken George drew from his pocket his carefully
folded freedom paper and handed it to Cates.  Cates unfolded it and read.

"What're you doin' in our county?"  he asked coldly.

"He my pappy," Torn put in quickly.  Above all, he did not want his father
attempting any defiant talk.

"He jes' been give his freedom."

"Livin' with y'all now over at Mr. Murray's place?"

"Yassuh."

Glancing about at his white customers, Cates exclaimed, "Mr.  Murray ought to
know the laws of this state bet tern that!"

Uncertain what he meant, neither Torn nor George said anything.

Suddenly Cates' manner was almost affable.

"Well, when y'all boys get home, be shore to tell Mr. Murray I'll be out to
talk with him 'fore long."  With the sound of white men's laughter behind
them, Torn and Chicken George quickly left the store.

It was the next afternoon when Cates galloped down the 658 ALEX HALEY

driveway of the Murray big house.  A few minutes later, Torn glanced up from
his forge and saw Irene running toward the shop.  Hurrying past his few
waiting customers, he went to meet her.

"Mammy Tilda say let you know massa an dat white man on de porch steady
talkin'.  Leas' de man keep talkin' an' massa jes' noddin' an' noddin'."

"Awright, honey," said Torn.

"Don' be scairt.  You git on back now."

Irene fled.

Then, after about another half hour, she brought word that Cates had left,
"an' now massa an' missis got dey heads togedder."  ^ But nothing happened
until Matilda was serving supper to Massa and Missis Murray, whom she saw
were eating in a strained silence.

Finally, when she brought their dessert and coffee, Massa Murray said, in a
tight voice,

"Matilda, tell your husband I want to see him out on the porch right away."

"Yassuh, Massa."

She found Chicken George with Torn down at the blacksmith shop.

Chicken George forced a laugh when he got the message.

"Reckon he might want to see if I git 'im some fightin' roosters!"

Adjusting his scarf and tilting his derby to a jauntier angle, he walked
briskly toward the big house.  Massa Murray was waiting there, seated in a
rocker on the porch.  Chicken George stopped in the yard at the foot of the
stairs.

" Tilda say you wants to see me" suh.  "

"Yes, I do, George.  111 come right to the point.  Your family has brought
Missis Murray and me much happiness here" -- "Yassuh," George put in, "an"
dey sho' speaks de highes* of y'all, too, Massa!  "

The massa firmed his voice.

"But I'm afraid we're going to have to solve a problem--concerning you."  He
paused.  "I understand that in Burlington yesterday you met Mr. J.  D.
Cates, our former county sheriff" -- "Yassuh, reckon could say I met 'im,
Massa."

"Well, you probably know Mr. Cates has visited me today.  He brought to my
attention a North Carolina law that forbids any freed black from staying
within the state for more than sixty days, or he must be re-enslaved."

ROOTS 659

It took a moment to sink in.  Chicken George stared disbelievingly at Massa
Murray.  He couldn't speak.

"I'm really sorry, boy.  I know it don't seem fair to you."

"Do it seem fair to you, Massa Murray?"

The massa hesitated.

"No, to tell you the truth.  But the law is the law."  He paused.

"But if you would want to choose to stay here, I'll guarantee you'll be
treated well.  You have my word on that."

"Yo' word, Massa Murray?"  George's eyes were impassive.

That night George and Matilda lay under their quilt, hands touching, both
staring up at the ceiling.  " Tilda," he said after a long while, "guess
ain't nothin' to do but stay.  Seem like runnin's all I ever done."

"Naw, George."  She shook her head slowly back and forth.  " " Cause you de
firs' one us ever free.  You got to stay free, so us have somebody free in
dis family.  You jes' can't go back to being' a slave!  "

Chicken George began to cry.  And Matilda was weeping with him.  Two evenings
later, she was not feeling well enough to join him in having supper with Torn
and Irene in their small cabin.  The conversation turned to their child,
which was due within two weeks, and Chicken George grew solemn.

"Be sho' y'all tells dat chile 'bout our fam'ly, y'all hear me?"

"Pappy, ain't none my chilluns gon' grow up widdout knowin'."  Torn strained
a smile.

"I reckon if I don't tell 'em, Gran'mammy Kizzy come back to set me straight."

There was silence for a while as the three of them sat staring at the fire.

Finally Chicken George spoke again.

"Me an' Tilda was countin'.  I got forty more days 'fo' I has to leave,
'cordin' to what de law say.  But I been thinkin' ain't no good time to go.
Ain't no point keep jes' puttin' off" -- He sprang up from his chair,
fiercely embracing Torn and Irene.

"I be back!"  he rasped brokenly.

"Take care one not her He bolted through the door.

CHAPTER 110

It was early in November of 1860, and Torn was hurrying to finish his last
blacksmithing task before darkness fell.  He made it.  Then, banking the fire
in his forge, he trudged wearily home to have supper with Irene, who was
nursing their baby girl, Maria, now halfa year old.  But they ate wordlessly,
because Irene elected not to interrupt his thoughtful silence.  And afterward
they joined the rest of the family crowded into Matilda's cabin, cracking and
shelling hickory nuts that she and Irene--who was again pregnant--had been
collecting for use in the special cakes and pies they planned to bake for
Christmas and New Year's.

Torn sat listening to the light conversation without comment--or even seeming
to hear--and then, finally, during a lull, he leaned forward in his chair and
spoke: "Y'all 'member different times I'se said white mens talkin' 'roun' my
shop done been eussin' an' carryin' on 'bout dat Massa Lincoln?  Well, wish
y'all coulda beared 'em today, 'cause he been 'lected Pres'dent.  Dey claim
now he gon' be up dere in de White House 'against de South an' anybody keepin
slaves."

"Well," said Matilda,

"I be primed to hear whatever Massa Murray got to say 'bout it.  He sho' been
steady tellin' missis gwine be big trouble less'n de North an' South git dey
differences settled, one way or not her

"Different things I've beared," Torn went on, "whole lots mo' folks clan we
thinks is 'against slavin'.  Ain't all of 'em up Nawth, neither.  I couldn't
hardly keep my min' on what I was doin' today, I been studyin' on it so hard.
Seem like too much to believe, but it could come a day won't be no mo'
slaves."

"Well, we sho' won't live to see it," said Ashford sourly.

ROOTS 661

"But maybe she will," said Virgil, nodding toward Irene's baby.

"Don't seem likely," said Irene, "much as I like to b'lieve it.  You put
together all de slaves in de South, wid even jes' fiel' hands bringin' eight
an' nine hunnud dollars apiece, dat's mo' money'n God's got!  Plus dat, we
does all de work," She looked at Torn.

"You know white folks ain't gwine give dat up."

"Not widdout a fight," said Ashford.

"An' dey's lots more dem clan us.  So how we gwine win?"

"But if'n you talkin' 'bout de whole country," said Torn, "it might be jes'
many folks 'against slavery as fo' it."

"Trouble is dem what's 'against it ain't here where we is," Virgil said, and
Ashford nodded, agreeing with someone for a change.

"Well, if'n Ashford right 'bout a fight, all dat could change real fast,"
said Torn.

In early December, soon after Massa and Missis Murray returned home in their
buggy from dinner at a neighboring big house one night, Matilda hurried from
the big house to Torn and Irene's cabin.

"What do 'seceded' mean?"  she asked, and when they shrugged their shoulders,
she went on.

"Well, massa says dat's what South Ca'liny jes' done.  Massa sound' like it
mean dey's pullin' out'n de Newnited States."

"How dey gon' pull out de country dey's in?"  Torn said.

"White folks do anythin'," said Irene.

Torn hadn't told them, but throughout the day, he had been listening to his
white customers fuming that they would be "wadin' knee deep in blood" before
they'd give in to the North on something they called "states' rights."  along
with the right to own slaves.

"I ain't wantin' to scare y'all none," he told Matilda and Irene, "but I
really b'leeves it gon' be a war."

"Oh, my Lawd!  Where'bouts it gon' be, Torn?"

"Mammy, ain't no special war grounds, like church or picnic grounds!"

"Well, I sho' hope don't be nowhere roun' here!"

Irene scoffed at them both.

"Don't y'all ax me to b'lieve no white folks gwine git to killin' one not her
over niggers."

But as the days passed, the things Torn overheard at his shop convinced him
that he was right.  Some of it he told his family about, but some not, for he
didn't want to 662 ALEX HALEY

alarm them unnecessarily, and he hadn't decided himself whether he dreaded
the events he saw coming--or hoped for them.  But he could sense the family's
uneasiness increasing anyway, along with the traffic on the main road, as
white riders and buggies raced back and forth past the plantation faster and
faster and in ever-growing numbers.  Almost every day someone would turn into
the driveway and engage Massa Murray in conversation, Matilda employed every
ruse to mop and dust where she could listen in.  And slowly, over the next
few weeks, in the nightly family exchanges, the white people's frightened,
angry talk gradually encouraged all of them to dare to believe that if there
was a war--and the

"Yankees" won-- it was just possible that they might really be set free.

An increasing number of the blacks who delivered blacksmithing jobs to Torn
told him that their mass as and missies were becoming suspicious and
secretive, lowering their voices and even spelling out words when even their
oldest and closest servants entered a room.

"Is dey actin' anyways 'culiar in de big house roun' you, Mammy?"  Torn asked
Matilda.

"Not no whisperin' or spellin' or sich as dat," she said.  "But dey sho' is
done commence to shift off sudden to talking 'bout crops or dinner parties
jes' soon's I come in."

"Bes' thing for us all to do," said Torn, "is act dumb as we can, like we
ain't even heard 'bout what gwine on."

Matilda considered that--but decided against it.  And one evening after she
had served the Murrays their desserts, she came into the dining room and
exclaimed, wringing her hands,

"Lawd, Massa an' Missy, y'all 'scuse me, jes' got to say my chilluns an' me
is hearin' all dis talk going' roun', an' we He's mighty scared o' dem
Yankees, as we sho' hopes you gwine take care of us if'n dey's trouble."
With satisfaction, she noted the swift expressions of approval and relief
crossing their faces.

"Welt, you're right to be scared, for those Yankees are certainly no friends
of yours?"  said Missis Murray.

"But don't you worry," said the massa reassuringly, "there's not going to be
any trouble."

Even Torn had to laugh when Matilda described the scene.  And he shared with
the family another laugh when he told them how he had heard that a stable
hand in Melville Township had handled the ticklish matter.  Asked by his
ROOTS 663

massa whose side he'd be on if a war came, the stable hand had said, "You's
seed two dogs fightin' over a bone, Massa?  Well, us niggers He's dat bone."

Christmas, then New Year's came and went with hardly any thought of festivity
throughout Alamance County.  Every few days Tom's customers would arrive with
news of secessions by still more among the southern states--first
Mississippi, then Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, all during the
month of January 1861, and on the first day of February, Texas.  And all of
them proceeded to join a "Confederacy" of southern states headed by their own
President, a man named Jefferson Davis.

"Dat Massa Davis an' whole pass els of other southern senators, congress mens
an' high mens in de Army," Torn reported to the family, "is resignin' to come
on back home."

"Torn, it's done got closer'n dat to us," exclaimed Matilda.

"A man come today an' tol' massa dat 01' Jedge Ruffin leavin' Haw River
tomorrow to 'tend a big peace conference in dat Washington, D.C.!"

But a few days later, Torn heard his blacksmithing customers saying that
Judge Ruffin had returned sadly reporting the peace conference a failure,
ending in explosive arguments between the younger delegates from the North
and the South.  A black buggy driver then told Torn that he had learned
firsthand from the Alamance County courthouse janitor that a mass meeting of
nearly fourteen hundred local white men had been held--with Massa Murray
among them, Torn knew--and that Massa Holt, Irene's former owner, and others
as important, had shouted that war must be averted and pounded tables calling
anyone who would join the Confederates "traitors."  The janitor also told him
that a Massa Giles Mebane was elected to take to a state secession convention
the four-to-one vote in Alamance County to remain within the Union.

It became hard for the family to keep up with all that was reported each
night either by Torn or Matilda.  On a single day in March, news came that
President Lincoln had been sworn in, that a Confederate flag had been
unveiled at a huge ceremony in Montgomery, Alabama, and that the
Confederacy's President, Jeff Davis, had declared the African slave trade
abolished; feeling as they knew he did about slavery, the family couldn't
understand why.

664 1 ALEX HALEY

Only days later, tension rose to a fever pitch with the announcement that the
North Carolina legislature had called for an immediate twenty thousand
military volunteers.

Early on the Friday morning of April 12, 1861, Massa Murray had driven off to
a meeting in the town of Mebane, and Lewis, James, Ashford, L'il Kizzy, and
Mary were out in the field busily transplanting young tobacco shoots when
they began to notice an unusually large number of white riders passing along
the main road at full gallop.  When one rider briefly slowed, angrily shaking
his fist in their direction and shouting at them something they couldn't
understand, Virgil sent L'il Kizzy racing from the field to tell Torn,
Matilda, and Irene that something big must have happened.

The usually calm Torn lost his temper when Kizzy could tell him no more than
she did.

"Shouted what at y'all?"  *he demanded.  But she could only repeat that the
horseman had been too far away for them to hear clearly.

"I better take de mule an' go fin' out!"  Torn said.

"But you ain't got a travelin' pass!"  shouted Virgil as he went riding down
the driveway.

"Got to take dat chance!"  Torn shouted back.

By the time he reached the main road, it was starting to resemble a
racetrack, and he knew that the riders must be headed for Company Shops,
where the telegraph office received important news over wires strung high
atop poles.  As they raced along, some of the horsemen were exchanging shouts
with each other; but they didn't seem to know much more than he did.  As he
passed poor whites and blacks running on foot, Torn knew the worst had
happened, but his heart clenched anyway when he reached the railroad repair
yard settlement and saw the great, jostling crowd around the telegraph office.

Leaping to the ground and tethering his mule, he ran in a wide-circle around
the edge of the mob of angrily gesturing white men who kept glancing up at
the telegraph wires as if they expected to see something coming over the
wires.  Off to one side, he reached a cluster of blacks and heard what they
were jabbering: "Massa Linkum sho' gon' fight over us now!"  .  .  .

"Look like de Lawd care sump'n 'bout niggers after all!"  .  .  .

"Jes' can't b'lieve it!  .  .  .

"Free, Lawd, free!"  ^ ROOTS 865

Drawing one old man aside, Torn learned what had happened.  South Carolina
troops were firing on the federal Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and
twenty-nine other federal bases in the South had been seized on the orders of
President Davis.  The war had actually begun.

Even after Torn returned home with the news--arriving safely before the massa
got home--the black grapevine was almost choked with bulletins for weeks.
After two days of siege, they learned.  Fort Sumter had surrendered with
fifteen dead on both sides, and over a thousand slaves were sandbagging the
entrances to Charleston Harbor.

After informing President Lincoln that he would get no North Carolina troops,
North Carolina Governor John Ellis had pledged thousands with muskets to the
Confederate Army.  President Davis asked all southern white men between
eighteen and thirty- five to volunteer to fight for up to three years, and
ordered that of each ten male slaves on any plantation, one should be turned
over for unpaid war labor.

General Robert E.  Lee resigned from the Army of the United States to command
the Army of Virginia.  And it was claimed that every government building in
Washington, D.  C.  " was thick with armed soldiers and iron and cement
barricades in fear of southern invasion forces.

White men throughout Alamance County, meanwhile, were lining up by the scores
to sign up and fight.  Torn heard from a black wagon-driver that his massa
had called in his most trusted big-house servant and told him,

"Now, boy, I'm expectin' you to look out after missis and the children till I
get back, you hear?"  And a number of neighboring whites dropped in to shoe
up their horses before assembling at Mebane Township with the rest of the
newly formed "Hawfields Company" of Alamance County to board the train that
waited to take them to a training camp at Charlotte.  A black buggy-driver
who had taken his massa and ^ his missy there to see off their eldest son
described the scene for Torn: the womenfolk bitterly weeping, their boys
leaning from the train's windows, making the air ring with rebel yells, many
of them shouting

"Going' to ship those sonsabitchin' Yankees an' be 'back 'fore breakfast!"
"Young massa," said the buggy-driver, "had on his new gray uniform, an' he
was a-cryin' jes' hard as of' massa and missy was, an' dey commence to
kissin' and huggin' till dey finally 666 ALEX HALEY

jes' kind o' broke apart from one not her jes' standin' in de road clearin'
dey throats an' snifflin'.  Ain't no need me telling no lie, I was a-cryin',
too!  "

CHAPTER 111

Within their lamp lit cabin late that night, now for a second time Torn sat
by the bed with Irene convulsively gripping his hand and when abruptly her
moans of suffering in labor advanced to- a piercing scream, he went bolting
outside to get his mother.  But despite the hour, intuitively Matilda had not
been asleep and also had heard the scream.  He met her already rushing from
her cabin, shouting back over her shoulder at a bug-eyed L'il Kizzy and Mary.
"Bile some kittles o' water an' git it to me quick!"  Within the next few
moments, the other adults of the family had also popped from their cabins,
and Tom's five brothers joined his nervous pacing and wincing while the
sounds of Irene's anguish continued.  In the first streaks of dawn when an
infant's shrill cry was heard, Tom's brothers converged upon him, pounding
his back, wringing his hands --even Ashford--then in a little while a
grinning Matilda stepped through the cabin door, exclaiming,

"Torn, y'all got an udder 1'il of' gal!"

After a while there in the brightening morning, first Torn , then the rest of
the family became a procession trooping in to see the wan but smiling Irene
and the crinkly-faced brown infant.  Matilda had taken the news into the big
house, where she hurriedly cooked breakfast, and right after Massa and Missis
Murray finished eating, they also came to the slave row to see with delight
the new infant born into their ownership.  Torn readily agreed to Irene's
wish to name this second daughter

"Ellen," after Irene's mother.  He was so jubilant that he had become a
father again that he didn't remember until later how much he had wanted a boy.

ROOTS 667

Matilda waited until the next afternoon to drop by the blacksmithing shop.

"Now, Torn, you know what I'm thinkin' 'bout?"  she asked.

Smiling at her, Torn said,

"You late.  Mammy.  I done already tol' eve' body--an' was fixin' to tell
you--to come squeeze in de cabin dis comin' Sadday night an' I'se gwine tell
dis chile de fam'ly story jes' like I done wid Maria, when she born."  As
planned, the family did gather, and Torn continued the tradition that had
been passed down from the late Gran'mammy Kizzy and Chicken George, and there
was much joking afterward that if ever anyone among them should neglect to
relate the family chronicle to any new infant, they could surely expect to
hear from the ghost of Gran'mammy Kizzy.

But even the excitement of Torn and Irene's second child soon diminished as a
war's swiftly paced events gained momentum.  As Torn busily shod horses and
mules and made and repaired tools, he kept his ears strained to hear every
possible scrap of the exchanges of talk among the white customers gathered
before his shop, and he winced with disappointment at their successive
jubilant reports of Confederate triumphs.  Particularly a battle the white
men called "Bull Run" had set the white customers hollering, beating each
other's backs and throwing their hats into the air as they shouted such
things as

"What Yankees wasn't left dead or hurt run for their lives!"  or "Soon's
Yankees hears our boys comin', they shows they asses!"  The jubilance was
repeated over a big Yankee loss at a "Wilson's Creek" in Missouri, then not
long after when at a

"Ball's Bluff" in Virginia, hundreds of Yankees were left dead, including a
bullet-riddled general who had been a close personal friend of President
Lincoln.

"Dem white mens was all jympin' up an' down an' laughin' dat Pres'dent
Lincoln beared it an' commence to cryin' like a baby," Torn told his somber
family.  By the end of 1861--when Alamance County had sent twelve companies
off into the various fighting--he hated to report more than a little of what
he was continuing to hear, for it only deepened his family's gloom, along
with his own.

"Lawd knows sho' don't sound' like we's gwine git free, keep gwine like dis!"
said Matilda, glancing about one late Sunday afternoon's semicircle of
downcast faces.  No one made any comment for a long while; then Lilly Sue
said, as she nursed her 668 ALEX HALEY

sickly son Uriah,

"All dat freedom talk!  I done jes' give up any mo' hope!"

Then a spring 1862 afternoon, when a rider came cantering down the Murray
driveway, wearing the Confederate officer's gray uniform, even from some
distance he seemed vaguely familiar to Torn.  As the rider drew nearer, with
a shock Torn realized that it was the former County Sheriff Cates, the
feed-store owner, whose counsel to Massa Murray had forced Chicken George to
leave the state.  With growing apprehension, Torn saw Cates dismount and
disappear within the big house; then before long Matilda came hurrying to the
blacksmith shop, her brows furrowed with worry.

"Massa want you, Torn.  He talkin' wid dat no-good feed-store Massa Cates.
What you reckon dey wants?"

Tom's mind had been racing with possibilities, including having heard his
customers saying that many planters had taken slaves to battles with them,
and others had volunteered the war services of their slaves who knew trades,
especially such as carpentry, leather working and blacksmithing.  But he said
as calmly as he could,

"Jes' don' know, Mammy.  I go find out is debes thing, I reckon."  Composing
himself, Torn walked heavily toward the big house.

Massa Murray said,

"Torn, you know Major Cates."

"Yassuh."  Torn did not look at Cates, whose gaze he could feel upon him.

"Major Cates tells me he's commanding a new cavalry' unit being trained at
Company Shops, and they need you to do their horse shoeing

Torn swallowed.  He heard his words come with a hollow sound.

"Massa, dat mean I go to de war?"

It was Cates who scornfully answered.

"No niggers will go anywhere I'm fighiing, to fly if they as much as hear a
bullet!  We just need you to shoe horses where we're training."

Torn gulped his relief.

"Yassuh."

"The major and I have discussed it," said Massa Murray.  "You'll work a week
for his cavalry, then a week here for me, for the duration of the war, which
it looks like won't be long."  Massa Murray looked at Major'Cates.  "When
would you want him to start?"

"Tomorrow morning, if that's all right, Mr. Murray."

ROOTS 669

"Why, certainly, it's our duty for the South!"  said Massa Murray briskly,
seeming pleased at his chance to help the war effort.

"I hope the nigger understands his place," said Cates.  "The military is no
soft plantation."

"Torn knows how to conduct himself, I'm sure."  Massa Murray looked his
confidence at Torn.

"Tonight I'll write out a traveling pass and let Torn take one of my mules
and report to you tomorrow morning."

"That's fine!"  Cates said, then he glanced at Torn.  "We've got horseshoes,
but you bring your tools, and I'll tell you now we want good, quick work.
We've got no time to waste!"

"Vassuh."

Carrying a hastily assembled portable horse shoeing kit on the mule's back,
when Torn approached the railroad repair settlement at Company Shops, he saw
the previously lightly wooded surrounding acres now dotted with long, orderly
rows of small tents.  Closer, he heard bugles sounding and the flat cracking
of muskets being fired; then he tensed when he saw a mounted guard galloping
toward him.  "Don't you see this is the Army, nigger?  Where do you think
you're headed?"  the soldier demanded.

"Major Cates done tol' me come here an' shoe bosses," Torn said nervously.

"Well, the cavalry's over yonder" -- the guard pointed.  "Git!  Before you
git shot!"

Booting the mule away, Torn soon came over a small rise and saw four lines of
horsemen executing maneuvers and formations, and behind the officers who were
shouting orders, he distinguished Major Cates wheeling and prancing on his
horse.  He was aware when the major saw him there on the mule and made a
gesture, whereupon another mounted soldier came galloping in his direction.
Torn reined up and waited.

"You the blacksmith nigger?"

"Yassuh."

The guard pointed toward a small cluster of tents.  "You'll stay and work
down by those garbage tents.  Soon as you get set up, we'll be sending
horses."

The horses in dire need of new metal shoes came in an unending procession
across Tom's first week of serving the Confederate cavalry, and from first
dawn until darkness 670 ALEX HALEY

fell, he shod them until the underside of hooves seemed to become a blur in
his mind.  Everything he overheard the young cavalrymen say made it sound
even more certain that the Yankees were being routed in every battle, and it
was a weary, disconsolate Torn who returned home to spend a week serving the
regular customers for Massa Murray.

He found the women of slave row in a great state of upset.  Through the
previous full night and morning, Lilly Sue's sickly son Uriah had been
thought lost.  Only shortly before Tom's return Matilda, while sweeping the
front porch, had heard strange noises, and investigating she had found the
tearful, hungry boy hiding under the big house.  "I was jes' tryin' to hear
what massa an' missy was sayin' 'bout freein' us niggers, but under dere I
couldn't hear nothin' at all Uriah had said, and now both Matilda and Irene
were busily trying to comfort the embarrassed and distraught Lilly Sue, whose
always strange child had caused such a commotion.  Torn helped to calm her,
then described to the family his own week's experience.

"Ain't hardly nolhin' 1 seed or beared make it look no better," he concluded.
Irene tried a futile effort to make them all feel at least" a little better.

"Ain't never been free, so ain't gwine miss it nohow," she said.  But Matilda
said, "Tell y'all de truth, I'se jes' plain scairt somehow us gwine wind up
worse off'n we was befo'."

The same sense of foreboding pervaded Torn as he began his second week of
horse shoeing for the Confederate cavalry.  During the third night, as he lay
awake, thinking, he heard a noise that seemed to be coming from one of the
adjoining garbage tents.  Nervously Torn groped, and his fingers grasped his
blacksmithing hammer.  He tipped out into the faint moonlight to investigate.
He was about to conclude that he had heard some foraging small animal when
he glimpsed the shadowy human figure backing from the garbage tent starting
to eat something in his hands.  Tipping closer, Torn completely surprised a
thin, sallow faced white youth.  In the moonlight for a second, they stared
at each other, before the white youth went bolting away.  But not ten yards
distant, the fleeing figure stumbled over something that made a great clatter
as he recovered himself and disappeared into the night.  Then armed guards
ROOTS 871

who came rushing with muskets and lanterns saw Torn standing there holding
his hammer.

"What you stealin', nigger?"

Torn sensed instantly the trouble he was in.  To directly deny the accusation
would call a white man a liar--even more dangerous than stealing.  Torn all
but babbled in his urgency of knowing that he had to make them believe him.

"Heared sump'n an' come lookin' an' seed a white man in de garbage, Massa,
an' he broke an' run."

Exchanging incredulous expressions, the two guards broke into scornful
laughter.

"We look that dumb to you, nigger?"  demanded one.

"Major Cates said keep special eye on you!  You're going to meet him soon's
he wakes up in the morning, boy!"  Keeping their gazes fixed on Torn, the
guards held a whispered consultation.

The second guard said,

"Boy, drop that hammer!"  Tom's fist instinctively clenched the hammer's
handle.  Advancing a step, the guard leveled his musket at Tom's belly.

"Drop it!"

Tom's fingers loosed and he heard the hammer thud against the ground.

The guards motioned him to march ahead of them for quite a distance before
commanding him to stop in a small clearing before a large tent where another
armed guard stood.

"We're on patrol an' caught this nigger stealin'," said one of the first two
and nodded toward the large tent.

"We'd of took care of him, but the major told us to watch him an' report
anything to him personal.  We'll come back time the major gets up."

The two guards left Torn being scowled at by the new one, who rasped, "Lay
down flat on your back, nigger.  If you move you're dead."  Torn lay down as
directed.  The ground was cold.  He speculated on what might happen, pondered
his chances of escape, then the consequences if he did.  He watched the dawn
come; then the first two guards returned as noises within the tent said that
Major Cates had risen.

One of the guards called out,

"Permission to see you.  Major?"

"What about?"  Torn heard the voice growl from within.

"Last night caught that blacksmith nigger stealing, sirl" There was a pause.

"Where is he now?"

"Prisoner right outside, sir!"

"Coming right out!"

672 ALEX HALEY

After another minute, the tent flap opened and Major Cates stepped outside
and stood eyeing Torn as a cat would a bird.

"Well, highfalutin' nigger, tell me you been stealin'!  You know how we feel
about that in the Army?"

"Massa" -- Passionately Torn told the truth of what had happened, ending,

"He was mighty hungry, Massa, rummaging in de garbage."

"Now you got a white man eating garbage!  You forget we've met before, plus I
know your kind, nigger!  Took care of that no-good free nigger pappy of
yours, but you slipped loose.  Well, this time I got you under the rules of
war."

With incredulous eyes, Tom saw Cates go striding to snatch a horsewhip
hanging from the pommel of his saddle atop a nearby post.

Tom's eyes darted, weighing escape, but all three guards leveled their
muskets at him as Cates advanced; his face contorted, raising the braided
whip, he brought it down lashing like fire across Tom's shoulders, again,
again .  .  .

When Torn went stumbling back in humiliation and fury to where he had been
shoeing the horses, uncaring what might happen if he was challenged, he
seized his kit of tools, sprang onto his mule, and did not stop until he
reached the big house.  Massa Murray listened to what had happened, and he
was reddened with anger as Torn finished, "Don't care what, Massa, I ain't
gwine back."

"You all right now, Torn?"

"I ain't hurt none, 'cept in my mind, if dat's what you means, suh."

"Well, I'm going to give you my word.  If the major shows up wanting trouble,
I'm prepared to go to his commanding general, if necessary.

I'm truly sorry this has happened.  Just go back out to the shop and do your
work.  " Massa Murray hesitated.

"Torn, I know you're not the oldest, but Missis Murray and I regard you as
the head of your family.  And we want you to tell them that we look forward
to us all enjoying the rest of our lives together just as soon as we get
these Yankees whipped.  They're nothing but human devils!"

"Yassuh," Torn said.  He thought that it was impossible for a massa to
perceive that being owned by anyone could never be enjoyable.  As the weeks
advanced into the spring ROOTS 673

of 1862, Irene again became pregnant, and the news that Torn heard daily from
the local white men who were his customers gave him a feeling that Alamance
County seemed within the quiet center of a hurricane of war being fought in
other places.  He heard of a Battle of Shilo where Yankees and Confederates
had killed or injured nearly forty thousand apiece of each other, until
survivors had to pick their way among the dead, and so many wounded needed
amputations that a huge pile of severed human limbs grew in the yard of the
nearest Mississippi hospital.  That one sounded like a draw, but there seemed
no question that the Yankees were losing most of the major battles.

Near the end of August Torn heard jubilant descriptions of how in a.

second Battle of Bull Run, the Yankees had retreated with two generals among
their dead, and thousands of their troops straggling back into Washington, D.
C.  " where civilians were said to be fleeing in panic as clerks barricaded
federal buildings, and both the Treasury's and the banks' money was being
shipped to New York City while a gunboat lay under steam in the Potomac
River, ready to evacuate President Lincoln and his staff.  Then at Harpers
Ferry hardly two weeks later, a Confederate force under General Stonewall
Jackson took eleven thousand Yankee prisoners.

"Torn, I jes' don' want to hear no mo' 'bout dis terrible war," said Irene
one evening in September as they sat staring into their fireplace after he
had told her of two three-mile-long rows of Confederate and Yankee soldiers
having faced and killed each other at a place called Antietam

"I sets here wid my belly full of our third young' un an' it somehow jes'
don' seem right dat all us ever talks 'bout any mo' is jes' fightin' an'
killin'" -- Simultaneously then they both glanced behind them at the cabin
door, having heard a sound so slight that neither of them paid it any further
attention.  But when the sound came again, now clearly a faint knock, Irene,
who sat closer, got up and opened the door, and Tom's brow raised hearing a
white man's pleading voice.

"Begging pardon.

You got anything I can eat?  I'm hungry.  " Turning about, Torn all but fell
from his chair, recognizing the face of the white youth he had surprised
among the garbage cans at the cavalry post.  Quickly controlling himself,
sus674 ALEX HALEY

picious of some trick, Torn sat rigidly, hearing his unsuspecting wife say,

"Well, we ain't got nothin' but some cold cornbread left from supper."

"Sho' would 'predate that, I ain't hardly et in two days."

Deciding that it was only bizarre coincidence, Torn now rose from his chair
and moved to the door.

"Been doin' a 1'il mon jes' beggin', ain't you?"

For halfa moment the youth stared quizzically at Torn, then his eyes flew
wide; he disappeared so fast that Irene stood astounded--and she was even
more so when Torn told her whom she had been about to feed.

The whole of slave row became aware of the incredible occurrence on the next
night when--with both Torn and Irene among the family gathering--Matilda
mentioned that just after breakfast, "some scrawny po' white boy" had
suddenly appeared at the kitchen screen door piteously begging for food; she
had given him a bowl of leftover cold stew for which he had thanked her
profusely before disappearing, then later she had found the cleaned bowl
sitting on the kitchen steps.  After Torn explained who the youth was, he
said,

"Since you feedin' 'im, I 'speck he still hangin' roun'.  Probably jes'
sleepin' somewhere out in de woods.  I don' trust him nohow; first thing we
know, somebody be in trouble."

"Ain't it de truth!"  exclaimed Matilda.

"Well, I tell you one thing, if he show me his face ag'in, I gwine ax him to
wait an' let 'im b'leeve I'se fixin' 'im sump'n while I goes an' tells massa."

The trap was sprung perfectly when the youth reappeared the following
morning.  Alerted by Matilda, Massa Murray hurried through the front door and
around the side of the house as Matilda hastened back to the kitchen in time
to overhear the waiting youth caught by total surprise.

"What are you hanging around here for?"  demanded Massa Murray.  But the
youth neither panicked nor even seemed flustered.

"Mister, Tm just wore out from travelin' an' stayin' hungry.  You can't hold
that 'against no man, an' your niggers been good enough to feed me
something."  Massa Murray hesitated, then said,

"Well, I can sympathize, but you ought to know how hard the times are now, so
we can't be feeding extra mouths.  You just have to move on."  Then Matilda
heard the youth's voice abjectly pleading,

"Mister, please let me stay.  I ain't scared ROOTS 675

of no work.  I just don't want to starve.  I'll do any work you got.  "

Massa Murray said,

"There's nothing for you here to do.  My niggers work the fields."

"I was born and raised in the fields.  I'll work harder'n your niggers,
Mister--to just eat regular," the youth insisted.

"What's your name and where you come here from, boy?"

"George Johnson.  From South Carolina, sir.  The war pretty near tore up
where I lived.  I tried to join up but they said I'm too young.  I'm just
turned sixteen.  War mint our crops an' everything so bad, look like even no
rabbits left.  An' I left, too, figgered somewhere--anywhere else--had to be
better.  But seem like the only somebody even give me the time of day been
your niggers."

Matilda could sense that the youth's story had moved Massa Murray.

Incredulously then she heard,

"Would you know anything at all about being an overseer?"

"Ain't never tried that."  The George Johnson youth sounded startled.

Then he added hesitantly,

"But I told you ain't nothin' I won't try."

Matilda eased yet closer to the edge of the screen door to hear better in her
horror.

"I've always liked the idea of an overseer, even though my niggers do a good
job raising my crops.  I'd be willing to try you out for just bed and board
to start--to see how it works out."

"Mister--sir, what's your name?"

"Murray," the massa said.

"Well, you got yourself an overseer, Mr. Murray."

Matilda heard the massa chuckle.  He said,

"There's an empty shed over behind the barn you can move into.  Where's your
stuff?"

"Sir, all the stuff I've got, I've got on," said George Johnson.

The shocking news spread through the family with a thunderbolt's force.

"Jes* couldn't b'leeve what I was hearin'!"  exclaimed Matilda, ending her
incredible report, and the family's members fairly exploded.

"Massa mus' be going' crazy!"  .  .  .

"Ain't we run his place fine ourselves?"  .  .  .

"Jes' 'cause dey both white, data ll .  .  .

676 ALEX HALEY

" " Speck he gwine see dat po' cracker different time we sees to it 'enough
things go wrong!  "

But as furious as they were, from their first direct confrontation with the
impostor out in the field on the following morning, he immediately made it
difficult for their anger to remain at a fever pitch.  Already out in the
field when they arrived led by Virgil, the scrawny, sallow George Johnson
came walking to meet them.  His thin face was reddened and his Adam's apple
bobbed as he said, "I can't blame y'all none for hatin' me, but I can ask
y'all to wait a little to see if I turn out bad as y'all think.  You the
first niggers I ever had anything to do with, but seem like to me y'all got
black same as I got white, an' I judge anybody by how they act.  I know one
thing, y'all fed me when I was hungry, and it was plenty of white folks
hadn't.  Now seem like Mr. Murray got his mind set on having a overseer, and
I know y'all could help him git rid of me, but I figger you do that, you be
takin' your chances the next one he git might be a whole lot worse."

None of the family seemed to know what to say in response.  There seemed
nothing to do except filter away and set' to work, all' of them covertly
observing George John- son proceeding to work as hard as they, if not
harder--in fact, he seemed obsessed to prove his sincerity.

Tom's and Irene's third daughter--Viney--was born at the end of the
newcomer's first week.  By now out in the field, George Johnson boldly sat
down with the members of the family at lunch times appearing not to notice
how Ashford conspicuously got up, scowling, and moved elsewhere.

"Y'all see I don't know nothin' 'bout overseein', so y'all needs to help me
along," George Johnson told them frankly.

"It would be no good for Mr. Murray to come out here an' figger I ain't doin'
the job like he want."

The idea of training their overseer amused even the usually solemn Torn when
it was discussed in the slave row that night, and all agreed that the
responsibility naturally belonged to Virgil, since he had always run the
field work.

"First thing," he said to George Johnson, "you gon' have to change whole lot
o' yo* ways.

"Co'se, wid all us lookin' all de time, massa ain't likely to git close 'to'
us can give you a signal.  Den you have to hurry up an' git 'way from too
close roun' us.  Reckon you knows white folks ROOTS B77

an' 'specially oberseers ain't s'posed to seem like dey's close wid niggers.
"

"Well, in South Carolina where I come from, seem like the niggers never got
too close to white folks," George Johnson said.

"Well, dem niggers is smart!"  said Virgil.

"De nex' thing, a massa want to feel like his oberseer makin' his niggers
work harder'n dey did befo' de oberseer^come.  You got to learn how to holler,

"Git to work, you niggers!"  an' sich as dat.  An' anytime you's roun' massa
or any mo' white folks, don' never call us by our names de way you does.  You
got to learn how to growl an' cuss an' sound' real mean, to make massa feel
like you ain't too easy an' got us going'.  "

When Massa Murray did next visit his fields, George Johnson made strong
efforts, hollering, cursing, even threatening everyone in the field, from
Virgil, down.

"Well, how they doing?"  asked Massa Murray.

"Pretty fair for niggers been on their own," George Johnson drawled, "but I
'speck another week or two ought to git 'em shaped up awright."

The family rocked with laughter that night, imitating George Johnson, along
with Massa Murray's evident pleasure.  Afterward when the mirth had waned,
George John- son quietly told them how it had been to be dirt-poor for all of
his earlier life, even before his family had been routed with their fields
ruined by the war, until he had sought some new, better life.

"He 'bout de only white man we ever gwine meet dat's jes' plain honest 'bout
his self Virgil expressed their collective appraisal.

"I tell de truth, I 'joys listenin' to 'im talk," said Lilly Sue, and L'il
George scoffed,

"He talk like any other cracker.  What make him different he de firs' one I
ever seen ain't try to act like sump'n he wasn't.  Demos is so shame of what
dey is."  Mary laughed.

"Well, dis one ain't shame, not long as he keep eatin' de way he is."

"Soun' like to me y'all done really taken a likenin' to 01' George,"

said Matilda.  More laughter rose at their homemade overseer's new nickname,
"01' George," since he was so ridiculously young.  And Matilda was correct:
Incredibly enough, they had come to like him genuinely.

CHAPTER 112

The North and the South seemed locked together like stags in mortal combat.
Neither seemed able to mount a successful campaign to put the other away.
Torn began to notice some despondency in his customers' conversations.  It
was a buoy to the hope yet strong in him for freedom.

The family plunged into intense speculation when 01' George Johnson said
mysteriously,

"Mr.  Murray done said I could go 'tend to some business.  I be back jes'
quick as I can."  Then the next morning he was gone.

"What you reckon it is?"

"Way he always talked, wasn't nothin' lef to take care of where he come from."

"Maybe sump'n to do wid his folks" -- "But he ain't mentioned no folks--leas'
ways not par- tic'lar."

"He bound to got some somewhere."

"Maybe he done 'cided to go jine de war."

"Well, I sho' cain't see 01' George wantin to shoot nobody."

" " Speck he jes' finally got his belly full an' we done seen de las' o' him.
"

"Oh, heish up, Ashford!  You ain't never got nothin' good to say 'bout him or
nobody else!"

Nearly a month had passed when one Sunday a whooping and hollering arose--for
01' George was back, grinning shamefacedly, and with him was a painfully shy
creature of a girl as sallow and scrawny as himself, and her eight- months
pregnancy made her seem as if she had swallowed a pumpkin.

"This is my wife.  Miss Martha," 01' George Johnson told them.

"Jes' befo' I left, we'd got married, an' I tol' 'er I'd be back when I found
us somewhere.  How come I hadn't said nothin' 'bout a wife was it was hard
enough ROOTS S79

to find anybody willing to have jes' me.  " He grinned at his Martha.

"Why'n't you say hello to the folks?"

Martha dutifully said hello to them all, and it seemed a long speech for her
when she added,

"George tol' me a lot 'bout y'all."

"Well, I hope whatever he tol' you was good!"  Matilda said brightly, and 01'
George saw her glance a second time at Martha's extreme pregnancy.

"I ain't knowed when I left we had a baby comin'.  I jes' kept havin' a
feelin I better git back.  An' there she was in a family way."

The fragile Martha seemed such a perfect match for 01' George Johnson that
the family felt their hearts going out to the pair of them.

"You mean you ain't even tol' Massa Murray?"  asked Irene.

/ "Naw, I ain't.  Jes' said I had some business same as I tol' y'all.

If he want to run us off, we jes' have to go, that's all.  "

"Well, I know massa ain't gwine feel like dat," said Irene, and Matilda
echoed, " " Co'se he ain't.  Massa ain't dat kind o' man.  "

"Well, tell him I got to see him first chance," said OF George Johnson to
Matilda.

Leaving nothing to chance, Matilda first informed Missis Murray, somewhat
dramatizing the situation.

"Missy, I know he a oberseer an' all dat, but him an' dat po' 1'il wife o'
his'n jes' scairt to death massa gwine make 'em leave 'cause he hadn't
mentioned no wife befo' an' times is so hard an' all.  An' her time ain't far
off, neither."

"Well, of course I can't make my husband's decisions, but I'm sure he'll not
put them out" -- "Yes'm, I knowed y'all wouldn't, 'specially bein's how I
'speck she ain't no mon thirteen or fo'teen years of', Missis, an' lookin'
ready to have dat baby any minute, an' done jes' got here an' don't know
nobody 'ceptin' us--an' y'all."

Missis Murray said,

"Well, as I say, it's not my affair, it's Mr. Murray's decision.  But I do
feel certain they can stay on."

Returning to the slave row, Matilda told a grateful OF George Johnson not to
worry, that Missis Murray had expressed certainty there would be no problem.
Then she 680 ALEX HALEY

hurried to Irene's cabin, where after quick consultation, the two of them
ambled over to the converted small shed behind the barn where the 01' George
Johnsons were.

Irene knocked, and when 01' George Johnson came to the door, she said,

"We worried 'bout yo' wife.  Teller we do y'all's cookin' an' washin', 'cause
she got to save up what strength she got fo' her to have y'all's baby."

"She sleep now.  Sho' 'preciate it," he said.  " " Cause she been throwin' up
a lot ever since we got here.  "

"Ain't no wonder.  She don't look to have hardly de strength of a bird," said
Irene.

"You ain't had no business bringin' her all dat long way right dis time
nohow," Matilda added severely.

"Tried my best to teller that when I went back.  But she wouldn't have it no
other way."

"S'pose sump'n would o' happened.  You don't know nothin' in de worl' " bout
liverin' no baby!  " exclaimed Matilda.

He said,

"I can't hardly believe I'm gon' be no daddy nohow."

"Well, you sho' 'bout to!"  Irene nearly laughed at OF George's worried
expression, then she and Matilda turned and headed back to their cabins.

She and Matilda worried privately.

"De po* gal don look no ways right to me," Matilda muttered in confidence.
"Can nigh see her bones.  An' speck it 'way too late to git her built up
right."

"Feel like she gwine have a mighty hard time," Irene prophesied.

"Lawd!  I sho' ain't never thought I'd end up likin' no po' white folks!"

Less than two more weeks had passed when one midday Martha's pains began.
The whole slave-row family heard her agony from within the shed, as Matilda
and Irene labored with her on through the night until shortly before the next
noon.  Finally when Irene emerged, her face told the haggard 01' George
Johnson even before her mouth could form the words.

"B'leeve Miss Martha gon' pull through.  Yo' baby was a gal but she dead."

CHAPTER 113

The late afternoon of the 1863 New Year's Day, Matilda came almost flying
into the slave row.

"Y'all seen dat white man jes' rid in.

here?  Y'all ain't gon' b'leevef He in dere cussin' to massa it jes' come
over de railroad telegraph wire Pres'dent Lincoln done signed "Mancipation
Proclamation dat set us free!"

The' galvanizing news thrust the black Murrays among the millions more like
them exulting wildly within the privacy of their cabins .  .

but with each passing week the joyous awaiting of the freedom dwindled,
diminished, and finally receded into a new despair the more it became clear
that within the steadily more bloodied, ravaged Confederacy the presidential
order had activated nothing but even more bitter despising of President
Lincoln.

So deep was the despair in the Murray slave row that despite Tom's
intermittent reports of the Yankees winning major battles, including even the
capture of Atlanta, they refused to build up their freedom hopes anymore
until toward the end of 1864, when they had not seen Torn so excited for
almost two years.  He said that his white customers were describing how
untold thousands of murderous, pillaging Yankees, marching five miles abreast
under some insane General Sherman, were laying waste to the state of Georgia.
However often the family's hopes had previously been dashed, they scarcely
could suppress their renewed hope of freedom as Torn brought subsequent
nightly reports.

"Soun' like de Yankees ain't leavin' nothin'!  Dem white mens swears dey's
burnin' de fiel's, de big houses, de barns!  Dey's killin' de mules an'
cookin' de cows an' everythin' else dey can eat!  Whatever dey ain't bumin'
an' eatin' dey's jes' ruinin', plus stealin' anything dey can tote off!  An'
dey says it's niggers all out in de woods an 682 ALEX HALEY

roads thick as ants dat done lef dey mass as an' plantations to follow dem
Yankees 'til dat Gen'l Sherman his self beggin' 'em to go back where dey come
fum!  "

Then not long after the Yankees' triumphal march had reached the sea, Torn
breathlessly reported

"Charleston done fell!"  .  .  .  and next "Gen'l Grant done took Riehmon'!"
.  .  .  and finally in April of 1865, "Gen'l Lee done surrendered de whole

"Federacy Army!  De South done give up!"

The jubilance in the slave row was beyond any measure now as they poured out
across the big-house front yard and up the entry lane to reach the big road
to join the hundreds already there, milling about, leaping and springing up
and down, whooping, shouting, singing, preaching, praying.  "Free, Lawd,
free!"  .  .  .

"Thank Gawd A'mighty, free at las'!"

But then within a few days the spirit of celebration plunged into deep grief
and mourning with the shattering news of the assassination of President
Lincoln.

"Eeeeeeevil!"  shrieked Matilda as the family wept around her, among the
millions like them who had revered the fallen President as their Moses.

Then in May, as it was happening all across the defeated South, Massa Murray
summoned all of his slaves into the front yard that faced the big house.
When they were all assembled in a line, they found it hard to look levelly at
the drawn, shocked faces of the massa, the weeping Missis Murray, and the 01'
George Johnsons, who, too, were white.  In an anguished voice then, Massa
Murray read slowly from the paper in his hand that the South had lost the
war.  Finding it very hard not to choke up before the black family standing
there on the earth before him, he said,

"I guess it means y'all as free as us.  You can go if you want to, stay on if
you want, an' whoever stays, we'll try to pay you something" The black
Murrays began leaping, singing, praying, screaming anew, "We's free!"  .  .  .

"Free at las'!"  .  .  .  "Thank you, Jesus!"  The wild celebration's sounds
carried through the opened door of the small cabin where Lilly Sue's son,
Uriah, now eight years of age, had laid for weeks suffering a delirium of
fever.

"Freedom!  Freedom!"  Hearing it, Uriah came boiling up off his cot, his
nightshirt flapping; he raced first for the pigpen shouting,

"OF pigs ROOTS 683

quit gruntin', you's free!  " He coursed to the barn, " 01' cows, quit givin'
milk, you's free!  " The boy raced to the chickens next, " 01' hens quit
layin', you's free!  --and so's ME!  "

But that night, with their celebration having ended in their sheer
exhaustion, Torn Murray assembled his large family within the barn to discuss
what they should do now that this long-awaited "freedom" had arrived.

"Freedom ain't gwine feed us, it just let us 'cide what we wants to do to
eat," said Torn.

"We ain't got much money, and 'sides me blacksmithin' an' Mammy cookin', de
only workin we knows is in de fiel's," he appraised their dilemma.

Matilda reported that Massa Murray had asked her to urge them all to consider
his offer to parcel out the plantation, and he would go halves with anyone
interested in sharecropping.  There was a heated debate.  Several of the
family's adults wished to leave as quickly as possible.  Matilda protested,

"I wants dis family to stay togedder.

Now 'bout dis talk o' movin', s'pose we did an' y'all's pappy Chicken George
git back, an' nobody couldn't even tell him which away we'd gone!  "

Quiet fell when Torn made it clear he wished to speak,

"Gwine tell y'all how come we can't leave yet--it's 'cause we jes' ain't no
ways ready.  Whenever we git ourselves ready, I'll be de firs' one to want to
go."  Most were finally convinced that Torn talked "good sense,"

and the family meeting broke up.

Taking Irene by the hand, Torn went walking with her in the moonlight toward
the fields.  Vaulting lightly over a fence, he took long strides, made a
right-angle turn, and paced off a square, then striding back toward the rail
fence, he said,

"Irene, that's going to be ours!"  She echoed him, softly.

"Ours."

Within a week, the family's separate units were each working their fields.  A
morning when Torn had left his blacksmith shop to help his brothers, he
recognized a lone rider along the road as the former Cavalry Major Cates, his
uniform tattered and his horse spavined.

Cates also recognized Torn, and riding near the fence, he reined up.

"Hey, nigger, bring me a dipperful of your water!"  he called.  Torn looked
at the nearby water bucket, then he studied Cates' face for a long moment
before moving to the bucket.  He filled the dipper and walked to hand it to
Cates.

"Things 684 ALEX HALEY

is changed now, Mr. Cates," Torn spoke evenly.

"The only reason I brought you this water is because I'd bring any thirsty
man a drink, not because you hollered.  I jes' want you to know that."

Gates banded back the dipper.

"Git me another one, nigger."

Torn took the dipper and dropped it back into the bucket and walked off,
never once looking back.

But when another rider came galloping and hallooing along the road with a
battered black derby distinguishable above a faded green scarf, those out in
the fields erupted into a mass footrace back toward the old slave row.

"Mammy, he's back!  He's back!"  When the horse reached the yard.  Chicken
George's sons hauled him off onto their shoulders and went trooping with him
to the weeping Matilda.

"What you belle ring fo', woman?"  he demanded in mock indignation, hugging
her as if he would never let go, but finally he did, yelling to his family to
assemble and be quiet.

"Tell y'all later 'bout all de places I been an' things I done since we las'
seen one not her

hollered Chicken George.

"But right now I got to 'quaint you wid where we's all gwine togedder!"  In
pin drop quiet and with his born sense of drama, Chicken George told them now
that he had found for them all a western Tennessee settlement whose white
people anxiously awaited their arrival to help build a town.

"Lemme tell y'all sump'n!  De lan' where we going' so black an' rich, you
plant a pig's tail an' a hog'll grow .  .  .  you can't hardly sleep nights
for de watermelons growin' sofas dey cracks open like firecrackers!  I'm
tellin' you it's possums layin' under 'simmon trees too fat to move, wid de
'simmon sugar drippin' down on 'em thick as 'lasses ... 1" The family never
let him finish in their wild excitement.  As some went dashing off to boast
to others on adjacent plantations, Torn began planning that afternoon how to
alter a farm wagon into a covered "Rockaway," of which about ten could move
all of the units of the family to this new place.  But by that sundown a
dozen other heads of newly freed families had come--not asking, but demanding
that their families, too, were going--they were black Holts, Fitzpatricks,
Perms, Taylors, Wrights, Lakes, ROOTS 685

MacGregors, and others, from local Alamance County plantations.

Amid the next two months of feverish activity, the men built the "Rockaways."
The women butchered, cooked, canned, and smoked foodstuffs for travel and
selected what other vital things to take.

Old Chicken George strode about, supervising every activity, loving his hero
role.  Torn Murray was thronged with volunteered assistance from yet more
newly freed families, and with assurances that they would swiftly obtain
their own wagons to become their families' "Rockaways."  Finally he announced
that all who wished could go---but that there must be but one "Rockaway" per
family unit.  When at last twenty-eight wagons were packed and ready to roll
on the following sunup, in a strange calm sense of sadness, the freed people
went about gently touching the familiar things, wash pots the fence posts
knowing that it was for the last time.

For days, the black Murrays had caught only glimpses of the white Murrays.
Matilda wept,

"Lawd, I hates to think what dey's going' through, I swears I does!"

Torn Murray had retired for the night within his wagon when he heard the
light knocking at the tailgate.  Somehow he knew who was there even before he
opened the end flap.  01' George Johnson stood there, his face working with
emotion, his hands wringing his hat.

"Torn --like a word with you, if you got time" -- Climbing down from the
wagon, Torn Murray followed 01' George Johnson off a way in the moonlight.
When finally 01' George stopped, he was so choked with embarrassment and
emotion that he could hardly talk.

"Me and Martha been talkin' .  .  .  jes' seem like y'all the only folks we
got.  Torn, we been wonderin' if y'all let us go along where you going'?"

It was awhile before Torn spoke.

"If it was jes' my family, I could tell you right now.  But it's a lot mo'.
I jes' have to talk it over wid 'em all.  I let you know" -- Torn went to
each other wagon, knocking gently, calling out the men.

Gathering them, he told them what happened.  There was a moment of heavy
quiet.  Torn Murray offered,

"He was 'bout debes oberseer for us I ever heard of 'cause he wasn't no real
oberseer at all, he worked wid us shoulder to shoulder."

There was sharp opposition from some, some of it anti686 ALEX HALEY white.
But after a while someone spoke quietly,

"He can't help it if he white" -- Finally, a vote was taken, and a majority
said that the Johnsons could go.

One day's delay was necessary to build a

"Rockaway" for 01' George and Martha.  Then the next sunup, a singlefile
caravan of twenty-nine covered

"Rockaways" went creaking and groaning off the Murray place into the dawn.
Ahead of the wagons rode the derbied and scar fed sixtyseven-year-old Chicken
George, carrying his old one-eyed fighting rooster atop his horse

"Old Bob."  Behind him, Torn Murray drove the first wagon, with Irene beside
him, and behind them, goggle-eyed in excitement, were their children, the
youngest of them the two-year-old Cynthia.  And after twenty-seven more
wagons whose front seats held black or mulatto men and their wives, finally
the anchor wagon's seat held 01' George and Martha Johnson, who soon were
peering to see clearly through the haze of dust raised by all the hoofs and
wheels moving ahead of them toward what Chicken George had sworn would prove
to be the promised land.

CHAPTER 114

"Dis is it?"  asked Torn.

"De promised lan'?"  asked Matilda.

"Where dem pigs an' watermelons poppin' out'n de groun'?"  asked one of the
children, as Chicken George reined his horse to a halt.

Ahead of them was a clearing in the woods with a few wooden storefronts at
the intersection of the rutted road they were on and another one crossing it
at right angles.  Three white men--one sitting on a nail keg, another in a
rocker, the third propped on the back legs of a stool with his back to a
clapboard wall and his feet on a hitching post --nudged one another and
nodded at the line of dusty wagons and their passengers.  A couple of white
boys rolling ROOTS 687

a hoop stopped in -their tracks and stared, the hoop rolling on beyond them
into the middle of the road, where it twirled a few times and fell.  An
elderly black man sweeping off a stoop looked at them impassively for a long
moment and then broke into a small, slow smile.  A large dog that was
scratching himself beside a rain barrel paused, leg in the air, to cock his
head at them, then went back to scratching.

"I done tol' y'all dis here a new settlement," said Chicken George, talking
fast.

"Dey's only a hundred or so white folks livin' roun' here yet, an' even wid
jes' our fifteen wagons lef after all dem dat dropped off to settle on de way
here, we's jes' 'bout gon' double de pop'lation.  We's git ting in on de
group' flo' of a growin' town."

"Well, ain't nothin' it can do but grow, dat's sho'," said L'il George
without smiling.

"Jes' wait'll y'all sees de prime farmlan' dey got," said his father
brightly, rubbing his hands with anticipation.

"Prob'ly swamp," muttered Ashford, wisely not loud enough for Chicken George
to hear.

But it was prime--rich and loamy, thirty acres of it for every family,
scattered on checkerboard plots from the outskirts of town all the way to the
white-owned farms that already occupied the best land in Lauderdale County,
on the banks of the Hatchie River six miles to the north.  Many of the white
farms were as large as all of their property put together, but thirty acres
was thirty more than any of them had ever owned before, and they had their
hands full with that.

Still living in their cramped wagons, the families began grubbing up stumps
and clearing brush the next morning.  Soon the furrows had been plowed and
their first crops planted--mostly cotton, some corn, with plots for
vegetables and a patch for flowers.  As they set about the next task of
sawing down trees and splitting logs to build their cabins, Chicken George
circulated from one farm to another on his horse, volunteering his advice on
construction and trumpeting how he had changed their lives.  Even among
Henning's white settlers he boasted about how those he had brought with him
were going to help the town grow and prosper, not failing to mention that his
middle son Torn would soon be opening the area's first blacksmith shop.

One day soon afterward, three white men rode up to 688 ALEX HALEY

Tom's plot as he and his sons were mixing a load of mud with hog bristles to
chink the walls of his half-built cabin.

"Which one of you is the blacksmith?"  one called from his horse.

Sure that his first customers had arrived even before he could get set up for
business, Torn stepped out proudly.

"We hear you're figurin' to open a blacksmith shop here in town," one said.

"Yassuh.  Been lookin' fo' debes spot to build it.  Was thinkin' maybe dat
empty lot nex' to de sawmill if'n nobody else got his eye on it."

The three men exchanged glances.

"Well, boy," the second man went on, "no need of wasting time, we'll get
right to the point.  You can blacksmith, that's fine.  But if you want to do
it in this town, you'll have to work for a white man that owns the shop.  Had
you figured on that?"

Such a rage flooded up in Torn that nearly a minute passed before he could
trust himself to speak.

"Nawsuh, I ain't," he said slowly.

"Me an my family's free peoples now, we's jes' lookin' to make our livin's
like anybody else, by workin' hard at what we knows to do."

He looked directly into the men's eyes.

"If I cain't own what I do wid my own hands, den dis ain't no place fo' us."

The third white man said,

"If that's the way you feel, I 'speck you're going to be ridin' a long way in
this state, boy."

"Well, we's used to travelm'," said Torn.

"Ain't wantin' to cause no trouble nowhere, but I got to be a man.  I just
wisht I could o' knowed how y'all felt here so my family wouldn't of troubled
y'all by stoppin' at all

"Well, think about it, boy," said the second white man.  "It's up to you."

"You people got to learn not to let all this freedom talk go to your heads,"
said the first man.

Turning their horses around without another word, they rode off.

When the news went flashing among the farm plots, the heads of each family
came hurrying to see Torn.

"Son," said Chicken George, "you's knowed all yo' life how white folks is.
Cain't you jes' start out dey way?  Den good as you blacksmiths, won't take
hardly no time to git 'em to turn roun'."

ROOTS 689

"All dat travelin' an now pack up an' go again!"  exclaimed Matilda.

"Don't do dat toyo fam'ly, son!"

Irene joined the chorus: "Torn, please!  I'se jes' tired!  Tired!"

But Tom's face was grim.

"Things don't never git better less'n you makes 'em better!"  he said.

"Ain't stayin' nowhere I can't do what a free man got a right to do.  Ain't
axin' nobody else to go wid us, but we packin' our wagon an' leavin'
tomorrow."

"I'm comin', too!"  said Ashford angrily.

That night Torn went out walking by himself, weighed down by guilt at the new
hardship he was imposing upon his family.  He played back in his mind the
ordeal they had all endured in the wagons, rolling for weeks on end .  .  .
and he thought of something Matilda had said often: "You search hard enough
in sump'n bad, you's jes' liable to find sump'n good."

When the idea struck him, he kept walking for another hour, letting the plan
become a picture in his mind.  Then he strode quickly back to the wagon where
his family was sleeping and went to bed.

In the morning, Torn told James and Lewis to build temporary lean-tos for
Irene and the children to sleep in, for he would need the wagon.

As the family stood around watching him in amazement--Ashford with rising
disbelief and fury--he unloaded the heavy anvil with Virgil's help, and
mounted it atop a newly sawed stump.  By noon he had set up a makeshift
forge.  With everyone still staring, he next removed the canvas top of the
wagon, then its wooden sides, leaving the bare flatbed, on which he now went
to work with his heaviest tools.

Gradually they began to perceive the astounding idea that Torn was turning
into a reality.

By the end of that week, Torn drove right through town with his rolling
blacksmith shop, and there wasn't a man, woman, or child who didn't stand
there gaping at the anvil, forge, and cooling tub, with racks holding a neat
array of blacksmithing tools, all mounted sturdily on a wagon bed reinforced
with heavy timbers.

Nodding politely at all the men he met--white and black--Tom asked if they
had blacksmithing jobs he could do at reasonable rates.  Within days, his
services were being 690 ALEX HALEY

requested at more and more farms around the new settlement, for no one could
think of a good reason why a black man shouldn't do business from a wagon.
By the time they realized that he was doing far better with his rolling shop
than he ever could have done with a stationary one, Torn had made himself so
indispensable around town that they couldn't afford to raise any objections
even if they'd wanted to.  But they didn't really want to, because Torn
seemed to them the kind of man who did his job and minded his own business,
and they couldn't help respecting that.  In fact, the whole family soon
established themselves as decent Christian folk who paid their bills and kept
to themselves--and "stayed in their place," as 01' George Johnson said a
group of white men had put it in a conversation he'd overheard down at the
general store.

But 01' George, too, was treated as one of "them" -- shunned socially, kept
waiting in stores till all the other white customers had been taken care of,
even informed once by a merchant that he'd "bought" a hat that he'd tried on
and put back on the shelf when he found it was too small.  He told the family
about it later, perching the hat atop his head for them, and everybody
laughed as hard as he did.

"I'se surprised dat hat don't fit," cracked L'il George, "dumb as you is to
try it 'on in dat sto'."  Ashford, of course, got so angry that he
threatened--emptily--to "go down dere an 'stuff it down dat pecker wood
throat."

However little use the white community had for them --and vice versa--Tom and
the others knew very well that the town's tradesmen could hardly contain
their elation at the brisk increase in business they'd been responsible for.
Though they made most of their own clothes, raised most of their own food,
and cut most of their own lumber, the quantities of nails, corrugated tin,
and barbed wire they bought over the next couple of years testified to the
rate at which their own community was growing.

With all their houses, barns, sheds, and fences built by' 1874, the
family--led by Matilda--turned its attention to an enterprise they considered
no less important to their welfare: the construction of a church to replace
the makeshift bush arbors that had been serving as their place of worship.
It took almost a year, and much of their savings, but when Torn, his
brothers, and their boys had finished building the last pew and Irene's
beautiful white hand ROOTS - 691 woven cloth--emblazoned with a purple
cross--had been draped over the pulpit in front of the $250 stained-glass
window they'd ordered from Sears, Roebuck, everyone agreed that the New Hope
Colored Methodist Episcopal - Church was well worth the time, effort, and
expense it represented.

So many people attended the service that first Sunday-- just about every
black person within twenty miles who could walk or be carried--that the crowd
spilled out the doors and windows and across the lawn surrounding it.  But
nobody had any trouble hearing every word of the ringing sermon delivered by
the Reverend Sylus Henning, a former slave of Dr. D.  C.  Henning, an
Illinois Central Railroad executive with extensive land holdings around town.
In the course of his oration, L'il George Whispered to Virgil that the
Reverend seemed to be under the impression that he was Dr. Henning, but no
one within earshot would have dared to question the fervor of his preaching.

After the last heart-rending chorus of

"The Old Rugged Cross,"

again--led by Matilda, looking more radiant than Chicken George had ever seen
her--the congregation dried their eyes and filed out past the preacher,
pumping his hand and slapping him on the back.

Retrieving their picnic baskets on the porch, they spread sheets on the lawn
and proceeded to relish the fried chicken, pork chop sandwiches, deviled
eggs, potato salad, cole slaw, pickles, cornbread, lemonade, and so many
cakes and pies that even L'il George was gasping for breath when he finished
the last slice.

As they all sat chatting, or strolled around--the men and boys in coat and
tie, the older women all in white, the girls in bright-colored dresses with a
ribbon at the waist-- Matilda watched misty-eyed as her brood of
grandchildren ran about tirelessly playing tag and catch.  Turning finally to
her husband and putting her hand on his, gnarled and scarred with gamecock
scratches, she said quietly, "I won't never forget dis day, George.  We done
come a long way since you first come courtin' me wid dat derby hat o' yours.
Our fam'ly done growed up an' had chilluns of dey own, an' de Lawd seen fit
to keep us all togedder.  De onliest thing I wish is you Mammy Kizzy could be
here to see it wid us."

Eyes brimming.  Chicken George looked back at her.  "She lookin', baby.

She sho' is!  "

CHAPTER 115

Promptly at the noon hour on Monday, during their break from the fields, the
children started filing into church for their first day of school indoors.
For the past two years, ever since she came to town after being one among the
first graduating class from Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, Sister Carrie
White had been teaching out under the bush arbors, and this use of the church
was a great occasion.  The New Hope CME stewards--Chicken George, Torn, and
his brothers--had contributed the money to buy pencils, tablets, and primers
on "readin', writin', an' 'rithmetic."  Since she taught all the children of
school age at the same time, in her six grades Sister Carrie had pupils
ranging from five to fifteen, including Tom's oldest five: Maria Jane, who
was twelve; Ellen; Viney; L'il Matilda; and Elizabeth, who was six.  Young
Torn, next in line, began the year after that, and then Cynthia, the youngest.

By the time Cynthia was graduated in 1883, Maria Jane had dropped out, gotten
married, and given birth to her first child; and Elizabeth, who was the best
student in the family, had taught their father Torn Murray how to write his
name and had even become his blacksmithing bookkeeper.  He needed one, for by
this time he had become so successful with his rolling blacksmith shop that
he had also built a stationary one--without a murmur of objection--and was
among the more prosperous men in town.

About a year after Elizabeth went to work for her father, she fell in love
with John Toland, a newcomer to Henning who had gone to work sharecropping on
the six-hundred- acre farm of a white family out near the Hatchie River.  She
had met him in town one day at the general store and been impressed, she told
her mother Irene, not only by his good looks and muscular build but also by
his dignified ROOTS 693

manner and obvious intelligence.  He could even write a little, she noticed,
when he signed for a receipt.  Over the next several weeks, during the walks
she'd take with him in the woods once or twice each week, she also found out
that he was a young man of fine reputation, a churchgoer, who had ambitions
of saving up enough to start a farm of his own; and that he was as gentle as
he was strong.

It wasn't until they'd seen each other regularly for almost two months--and
had begun to talk secretly about marriage--that Torn Murray, who had known
about them from the start, ordered her to stop skulking around and bring him
home from church the following Sunday.

Elizabeth did as she was told.  John Toland couldn't have been friendlier or
more respectful when he was introduced to Torn Murray, who was even more
taciturn than usual, and excused himself after only a few minutes of painful
pleasantries.  After John Toland left, Elizabeth was called by Torn Murray,
who said sternly: "It's plain to see from de way you act roun' dat boy dat
you's stuck on 'im.  You two got anythin' in mind?"

"What you mean, Pappy?"  she stuttered, flushing hotly.

"Gittin' married!  Dat's on your mind, ain't it?"

She couldn't speak.

"You done tol' me.  Well, I'd like to give you my blessin's, 'cause I wants
you to be happy much as you does.  He seem like a good man--but I can't let
you hitch up wid 'im."

Elizabeth looked at him uncomprehendingly.

"He too high-yaller.  He could nigh 'bout pass fo' white --jes' not quite.
He ain't fish or fowl.  Y'unnerstan' what I'se sayin'?  He too light fo'
black folks, too dark fo' white folks.  He cain't he'p what he look like, but
don't care how hard he try, he never gon' b'long nowhere.  An' you got to
think 'bout what yo' chilluns might look like!  I don't want dat kinda life
fo' you,

"Lizabeth."

"But Pappy, ever' body like John!  If'n we gits 'long wid 01' George Johnson,
why can't we git 'long wid him?"

"Ain't de same!"

"But Pappy!"  she was desperate.

"You talk 'bout people not 'ceptin 'im!  You's de one ain't!"

"Dat's 'enough!  You done said all I'm gon' hear 'bout it.  You ain't got de
sense to keep 'way from dat kinda grief, I gotta do it fo' you.  I don' want
you seem' 'im no mo'."

"But Pappy .  .  ."  She was sobbing.

694 ALEX HALEY

"It's over wid!  Dat's all is to it!"

"If'n I cain't marry John, ain't never gon' marry nobody!"  Elizabeth
screamed.

Torn Murray turned and strode from the room, slamming the door.  In the next
room, he stopped.

"Torn, what do you .  .  ."  Irene began, sitting up rigidly in her rocker.

"Ain't got no mo' to say 'bout it!"  he snapped, marching out the front door.

When Matilda found out about it, she got so angry that Irene had to restrain
her from confronting Torn.

"Dat boy's pappy got white blood in 'im!"  she shouted.  Suddenly wincing,
then clutching at her chest, Matilda lurched against a table.  Irene caught
her as she toppled to the floor.

"0 my God!"  she moaned, her face contorted with pain.  "Sweet Jesus!  0
Lord, no!"  Her eyelids fluttered and closed.

"Grandmammy!"  Irene shouted, seizing her around the shoulders.

"Grandmammy!"  She put her head to her chest and listened.  There was still a
heartbeat.  But two days later it stopped.

Chicken George didn't cry.  But there was something heartbreaking about his
stoniness, the deadness in his eyes.  From that day on, no one could remember
him ever smiling again or saying a civil word to anyone.  He and Matilda had
never seemed really close--but when she died, somehow his own warmth died
with her.  And he began to shrink, dry up, grow old almost overnight--not
turning feeble and weak-minded but hard and mean-tempered.  Refusing to live
anymore in the cabin he had shared with Matilda, he began to roost with one
son or daughter after another until both he and they were fed up, when old
gray-headed Chicken George moved on.  When he wasn't complaining, he'd
usually sit on the porch in the rocker he took along with him and stare
fiercely out across the fields for hours at a time.

He had just turned eighty-three--having cantankerously refused to touch a
bite of the birthday cake that was baked for him--and was sitting late in the
winter of 1890 in front of the fire at his eldest granddaughter Maria Jane's
house.  She had ordered him to sit still and rest his bad leg while she
hurried out to the adjacent field with her husband's lunch.  When she
returned as quickly as she could, she found him lying on the hearth, where
he'd dragged himself ROOTS 695

after falling into the fire.  Maria Jane's screams brought her husband
running.  The derby hat, scarf, and sweater were smoldering, and Chicken
George was burned horribly from his head to his waist.  Late that night he
died.

Nearly everyone black in Henning attended his funeral, dozens of them his
children, grandchildren, or great- grandchildren.  Standing there by the
grave as he was lowered into the ground beside Matilda, his son L'il George
leaned to Virgil and whispered: "Pappy so tough 'speck he wouldn't o' never
died natural."

Virgil turned and looked sadly at his brother.

"I loved 'im," he said quietly.

"You too, an' all us."

"

" Co'se we did," said L'il George.

"Nobody couldn't stan' livin' wid de cockadoodlin' of' rascal, an' look now
at ever' body snufflin' 'cause he gone!"

CHAPTER 116

"Mama!"  Cynthia breathlessly exclaimed to Irene,

"Will Palmer done axed to walk me home from church nex' Sun- day!"

"He ain't 'zackly one to rush into things, is he?  Leas' two years I seen 'im
watchin' you in church every Sunday" -- said Irene.

"Who?"  Torn asked.

"Will Palmer!  Is it awright for him to walk her home?"  After a while Torn
Murray said drily,

"I think 'bout it."  Cynthia went off looking as if she had been stabbed,
leaving Irene studying her husband's face.

"Torn, ain't nobody good 'enough fo' yo' gals?  Anybody in town know dat
young Will jes' 'bout run de lumber company fo' datof' stay- drunk Mr. James.
Folks all over Henning seen 'im unload de lumber off de freight cars his
self sell it an' deliver it his self den write out de bills, colleck de
money, an' 'posit it inde bank his self Even do different 1'il carpenter-in'
de customers needs an' ax nothin' fo' it.  An' wid all dat fo' 698 ALEX HALEY

whatever 1'il he make, he don't never speak a hard word 'against of' Mr.
James.  "

"De way I sees it, doin' his.  job an' mindin' his own business," said Torn
Murray.

"I sees 'im in church, too, half de gals in dere battin' dey eyes at 'im."

"

" Co'se dey is!   " said Irene, " 'cause he be bes' catch in Henning.

But he ain't never yet ax to walk none home.  "

"How 'bout dat Lula Carter he gave dem flowers to?"

Astonished that Torn even knew, Irene said,

"Dat more'n a year ago, Torn, an' if you knows so much, reckon you also know
she carried on like sich a fool after dat, fawnin' roun' 'im like a shadow,
he finally quit talkin' to her at all!"

"He done it once, he could do it ag'in."

"Not to Cynthia, he ain't, not much sense as she got, 'long wid being' pretty
an' well raised.  She done tol' me much as she like Will, she ain't never let
on to 'im how she feel!  Mos' she ever say is howdy an' smile back when he
do.  Don't care how many gals buzzin' after 'im, you see who he buzzin'
after!"

"See you got everythin' worked out," said Torn.

Irene pleaded,

"Aw, Torn, let 'im walk de child home.  Leas' let 'em git togedder.  Dey
stays togedder's up to dem."

"An' me!"  Torn said sternly.  He did not want to seem too easy to any of his
daughters, his wife either.  Above all, he did not want Irene aware that
before now he had seen the potential, had weighed it, and thoroughly approved
of Will Palmer if the time came.  Having watched young Will since he had come
to Henning, Torn privately had often wished that either of his two sons
showed half of young Will's gumption.  In fact, the deviously serious,
ambitious, highly capable Will Palmer reminded Torn of a younger himself.

No one had expected that the courtship would develop so fast.  Ten months
later, in the "company room" of Torn and Irene's new four-room house.  Will
proposed to Cynthia, who barely could restrain her

"Yes!"

until he had finished speaking.  The third Sunday from then, they were
married in the New Hope CME Church in a ceremony attended by well over two
hundred people, about half of whom had come from North Carolina on the wagon
train, and their children--and who now lived on farms scattered throughout
Lauderdale County.

Will with his own hands and tools built their small home ROOTS B97

where, a year later, in 1894, their first child, a son, was born, who died
within a few days.  By now Will Palmer never took off a weekday from work,
the lumber company hard-drinking owner being so far gone into the bottle that
Will practically was running the entire business.  Going over the company's
books one stormy late Friday afternoon.  Will discovered a bank payment
overdue that day at People's Bank.  He rode his horse eight miles through
drenching rains to knock at the bank president's back porch.

"Mr.  Vaughan," he said, "this payment slipped Mr. James' mind, and I know he
wouldn't want to keep you waitin' till Monday."

Invited inside to dry, he said,

"No, thank you, sir, Cynthia'11 be wonderin' where I am."  And wishing the
banker a good night, he rode back off in the rain.

The banker, deeply impressed, told the incident all over town.

In the fall of 1893, someone came and told Will he was wanted at the bank.
Puzzled throughout the few minutes' walk there.  Will found inside, waiting
for him, Henning's ten leading white businessmen, all seeming red-faced and
embarrassed.  Banker Vaughan explained, speaking rapidly, that the lumber
company's owner had declared bankruptcy, with plans to move elsewhere with
his family.

"Henning needs the lumber company," said the banker.

"All of us you see here have been weeks discussing it, and we can't think of
anyone better to run it than you.  Will.  We've agreed to cosign a note to
pay off the company's debts for you to take over as the new owner."

Tears trickling down his cheeks.  Will Palmer walked wordlessly along the
line of white men.  As he double- gripped and squeezed each hand, then that
man hurriedly signed the note and even more quickly left with tears in his
own eyes.  When they had all gone, Will wrung the banker's hand for a long
moment.

"Mr.  Vaughan.  I've got one more favor to ask.  Would you take half of my
savings and make out a check for Mr. James, without his ever knowing where it
came from?"

Within a year.  Will's credo--to provide the best possible goods and service
for the lowest possible price--was drawing customers even from adjoining
towns, and wagon loads of people, mostly black, were coming from as far away
as 698 ALEX HALEY

Memphis--forty-eight miles to the South--to see with their own eyes western
Tennessee's first black-owned business of its kind, where Cynthia had hung
ruffled, starched curtains in the windows and Will had painted the sign on
the front: "W.  E.  PALMER LUMBER COMPANY."

CHAPTER 117

Cynthia's and Will's prayers were answered in 1895 with the birth of the
sound, healthy girl whom they named Bertha George--the

"George" after Will's father.  Cynthia insisted on assembling a houseful of
family before whom she told the gurgling infant the whole story back to the
African, Kunta Kinte, just as Torn Murray had told it to all of his children
at intervals when they had been young.

Will Palmer respected Cynthia's devotion to her ancestors' memory, but it
irritated his own deep pride to be considered as having married into
Cynthia's family rather than the other way around.  It was probably why he
began to monopolize little Bertha even before she could walk.  Every morning
he carried her about before he left for work.  Every night he tucked her into
the little crib that he had made with his hands for her.

By the time Bertha was five, the rest of the family and much of the town's
black community quoted Cynthia and speaking for themselves echoed her opinion,

"Will Palmer jes' spilin' dat gal to pieces!"  He had arranged that she had
credit at every Henning store that sold candy, and he paid the bill each
month, though he made her keep an accounting, which he solemnly checked "to
teach her business."  As her fifteenth-birthday present, when he opened a
Sears, Roebuck mail-order account in her name, the people shook and wagged
their heads in mingled astonishment, dismay--and pride: "All dat young' un
got to do is pick what she like out'n dat pitcher catalogue, an' write off
ROOTS 699

de order blank, an' firs' thing you knows dem Sears, Roebuck white folks way
yonder in Chicago done sent it-- seen it wid dese here eyes .  an' her daddy
pays fo' it .  you hearin' what I'm tellin' you, chile?  Anythin' dat Bertha
want!  "

Later that same year.  Will hired a teacher to come weekly all the way from
Memphis to give Bertha piano lessons.  She was a gifted pupil, and before
long was playing for the choir in the New Hope Colored Methodist Episcopal
Church, of which Will was the senior trustee and Cynthia was the perennial
president of the Stewardess Board.

When Bertha finished the local eighth grade in June of 1909, there was no
question that she would be leaving Henning to attend the CME Church-supported
Lane Institute thirty miles to the east in Jackson, Tennessee, which went
from ninth grade through two years of college.

"Gal, jes' no way you can know .  .  .  what it mean, you being dis fam'ly's
firs' one headin' fo' a college" -- "Maw, if I can ever git you and Paw to
please quit saying such as 'dis' and 'fo'!  I keep telling you they're
pronounced 'this' and 'for'!  Anyway, isn't that why colleges are there?  For
people to go to?"

Cynthia wept when she got alone with her husband.  "Lawd God he'p us wider.
Will, she jes' don't unnerstan'."

"Maybe she best don't," he tried to console.

"I jes' know I'll draw my last breath seem' she have better chance'n us did."

As was only expected of her.  Bertha achieved consistently high
grades--studying pedagogy, to become a teacher --and she both played the
piano and sang in the school choir.  On one of her two weekend visits back
home every month, she persuaded her father to have a sign painted on both
doors of his delivery truck: "Henning 121--Your Lumber Number."  Telephones
recently had come to Henning; it was typical of Bertha's ready wit, which got
quoted often around town.

On later visits.  Bertha began to speak about a young man whom she had met in
the college choir, his name, Simon Alexander Haley, and he was from a town
named Savannah, Tennessee.  Being very poor, she said, he was working at as
many as four odd jobs at the time in order to stay in school, where he was
studying agriculture.  When Bertha 700 ALEX HALEY

continued to talk about him, a year later, in 1913, Will and Cynthia
suggested that she invite him to visit with them in Henning, so they could
appraise him in person.

The New Hope CME Church was packed on the Sunday it had been circulated that

"Bertha's beau from college" would be in attendance.

He arrived under the searching scrutiny not only of Will and Cynthia Palmer,
but also of the total black community.  But he seemed a very self- assured
young man.  After singing a baritone solo,

"In the Garden," accompanied by Bertha at the piano, he talked easily with
all who crowded about him later out in the churchyard, he looked everyone
squarely in the eyes, firmly gripping all of the men's hands, and tipping his
hat to all of the ladies.

Bertha and her Simon Alexander Haley--his full name-- returned to Lane
College together on the bus that evening.  No one had a thing to say against
him--publicly--in the ensuing community discussions.

Privately, though, some queasy uncertainties were expressed concerning his
very nearly high-yaller complexion.  (He had told dark brown Bertha in
confidence that his parents, former slaves, had both told him of having slave
mothers and Irish white fathers, paternally an overseer named Jim Baugh, of
whom little else was known, and maternally a Marion County, Alabama,
plantation scion and later Civil War colonel named James Jackson.  ) But it
was agreed by all that he sang well; that he seemed to have been well raised;
and he showed no signs of trying to put on airs just because he was educated.

Haley landed a summer's work as a Pullman porter, saving every possible penny
to enable his transferring to the four-year AT College in Greensboro, North
Carolina, exchanging weekly letters with Bertha.  When World War I came, he
and all other males in their senior class enlisted en masse in the U.  S.
Army, and before long his letters to Bertha came from France, where in the
Argonne Forest in 1918, he was gassed.  After treatment for several months in
a hospital overseas, he was returned home to convalesce, and in 1919, fully
recovered, he came again to Henning and he and Bertha announced their
engagement.

Their wedding in the New Hope CME Church in the summer of 1920 was Henning's
first social event attended by both black and white--not only since Will
Palmer by ROOTS 701

now was among the town's most prominent citizens, but also because in her own
right the accomplished, irrepressible Bertha was someone whom all in Henning
regarded with pride.  The reception was held on the wide, sloping lawn of the
Palmers' brand-new home of ten rooms, including a music parlor and a library.
A banquet of food was served; more presents were heaped than were normally
seen at an average three weddings; there was even a recital by the full Lane
College Choir--in whose ranks the ecstatic newlyweds had met--which had come
in the bus that Will Palmer had chartered from Jackson.

Late that day, Henning's little railroad depot was overrun as Simon and
Bertha boarded the Illinois Central train that took them through the night to
Chicago, where they changed onto another bound for somewhere called Ithaca,
New York.  Simon was going to study for his master's degree in agriculture at
some

"Cornell University," and Bertha would be enrolling at a nearby

"Ithaca Conservatory of Music."

For about nine months.  Bertha wrote home regularly, reporting their exciting
experiences so far away and telling how happy they were with each other.  But
then, in the early summer of 1921, Bertha's letters began to arrive less and
less often, until finally Cynthia and Will grew deeply concerned that
something was wrong that Bertha wasn't telling them about.  Will gave Cynthia
five hundred dollars to send to Bertha, telling Bertha to use it however they
might need it, without mentioning it to Simon.  But their daughter's letters
came even more seldom, until by late August, Cynthia told Will and their
closest friends that she was going to New York herself to find out what was
the matter.

Two days before Cynthia was due to leave, a midnight knocking at the front
door awakened them in alarm.  Cynthia was first out of bed, snatching on her
robe, with Will close behind.  At their bedroom's doorway, she could see
through the living room's glass-paneled French doors the moonlit silhouettes
of Bertha and Simon on the front porch.  Cynthia went shrieking and bounding
to snatch open the door.

Bertha said calmly,

"Sorry we didn't write.  We wanted to bring you a surprise present" She
handed to Cynthia the blanketed bundle in her arms.  Her heart pounding, and
702 ALEX HALEY

with Will gazing incredulously over her shoulder, Cynthia pulled back the
blanket's top fold--revealing a round brown "face.  .  .  .  The baby boy,
six weeks old, was me.

CHAPTER 118

I used to be told later by Dad, laughing in recalling that night of big
surprise as he loved to do,

"Seemed I'd nearly lost a son a little while there" -- Dad declared Grandpa
Will Palmer walked around and lifted me out of Grandma's arms "and without a
word took you out to the yard and around the rear of the house somewhere.
Why, he must have stayed gone I believe as long as hal fan hour" before
returning, "with Cynthia, Bertha, or me saying not a word to him of it,
either, I guess for one reason just because he was Will Palmer, and the other
thing was all of us knew how badly for many years he'd wanted to have a son
to raise--I guess in your being Bertha's boy, you'd become it."

After a week or so.  Dad went back alone to Ithaca, leaving Mama and me in
Henning; they had decided it would be better while he finished pushing for
his master's degree.  Grandpa and Grandma proceeded to just about adopt me as
their own--especially Grandpa.

Even before I could talk.  Grandma would say years later, he would carry me
in his arms down to the lumber company, where he built a crib to put me in
while he took care of business.  After I had learned to walk, we would go
together downtown, me taking three steps to each of his, my small fist
tightly grasped about his extended left forefinger.  Looming over me like a
black, tall, strong tree.  Grandpa would stop and chat with people we met
along the way.  Grandpa taught me to look anyone right in their eyes, to
speak to them clearly and politely.  Sometimes people exclaimed how well
raised I was and how fine I was grow ROOTS 703 ing up.

"Well, I guess hell do," Grandpa would respond.

Down at the W.  E.  Palmer Lumber Company, he would let me play around among
the big stacks of oak, cedar, pine, and hickory, all in planks of different
lengths and widths, and with their mingling of good smells, and I would
imagine myself involved in all kinds of exciting adventures, almost always in
faraway times or places.  And sometimes Grandpa would let me sit in his
office in his big, high backed swivel chair with his green-visored eye shade
on my head, swiveling around and back and forth until I'd get so dizzy my
head seemed to keep going after I'd stopped.  I enjoyed myself anywhere I
ever went with Grandpa.

Then, when I was going on five, he died.  I was so hysterical that Dr.
Dillard had to give me a glass of some- think milky to make me sleep that
night.  But before I did, I remember drowsily glimpsing many people, black
and white, gathering in a ragged line along the dusty road that ran nearby
the house, all of their heads bowed, the women wearing head scarves the men
holding their hats in their hands.  For the next several days, it seemed to
me as if everybody in the world was crying.

Dad, who had by now nearly completed his master's thesis, came home from
Cornell to take over the lumber mill, as Mama started teaching in our local
school.  Having loved Grandpa so deeply myself, and having seen Grandma's
terrible grief, she and I soon became extremely close, and there weren't many
places she went that she didn't take me along with her.

I suppose it was somehow to try to fill the void of Grandpa's absence that
now during each springtime.  Grandma began to invite various ones among the
Murray family female relatives to spend some, if not all, of the summers with
us.  Averaging in her age range, the late forties and early fifties, they
came from exotic-sounding places to me, such as Dyersburg, Tennessee;
Inkster, Michigan; St.  Louis and Kansas City--and they had names like Aunt
Plus, Aunt Liz, Aunt Till, Aunt Viney, and Cousin Georgia.  With the supper
dishes washed, they all would go out on the front porch and sit in
cane-bottomed rocking chairs, and I would be among them and sort of scrunch
myself down behind the white-painted rocker holding Grandma.  The time would
be just about as the dusk was deepening into the night, with the lightning
bugs flickering 704 ALEX HALEY

on and off around the honeysuckle vines, and every evening I can remember,
unless there was some local priority gossip, always they would talk about the
same things--snatches and patches of what later I'd learn was the long,
cumulative family narrative that had been passed down across the generations.

It was the talk, I knew, that always had generated my only memories of any
open friction between Mama and Grandma.  Grandma would get on that subject
sometimes without her older women summer guests there, and Mama always before
long would abruptly snap something like, "Oh, Maw, I wish you'd stop all that
old-timey slavery stuff, it's entirely embarrassing!"  Grandma would snap
right back,

"If you don't care who and where you come from, well, / does!"  And they
might go around avoiding speaking to each other for a whole day, maybe even
longer.

But anyway, I know I gained my initial impression that whatever Grandma and
the other graying ladies talked about was something that went a very long way
back when one or another of them would be recalling something of girlhood and
suddenly thrusting a finger down toward me say,

"I wasn't any bigger'n this here young' un The very idea that anyone as old
and wrinkled as they had once been my age strained my comprehension.  But as
I say, it was this that caused me to realize that the things they were
discussing must have happened a very long time ago.

Being just a little boy, I couldn't really follow most of what they said.  I
didn't know what an "of' massa" or an "of' missis" was; I didn't know what a
"plantation" was, though it seemed something resembling a farm.  But slowly,
from hearing the stories each passing summer, I began to recognize frequently
repeated names among the people / they talked about and to remember things
they told about those people.  The farthest-back person they ever talked
about was a man they called "the African," whom they always said had been
brought to this country on a ship to some place that they pronounced " "
Naplis.  " They said he was bought off this ship by a

"Massa John Waller," who had a plantation in a place called

"Spotsylvania County, Virginia."  They would tell how the African kept trying
to escape, and how on the fourth effort he had the misfortune to be captured
by two white professional slave catchers, who ROOTS 705

apparently decided to make an example of him.  This African was given the
choice either of being castrated or having a foot cut off, and"--thanks to
Jesus, or we wouldn't be here tellin' it" --the African chose his foot.  I
couldn't figure out why white folks would do anything as mean and low-down as
that.

But this African's life, the old ladies said, had been saved by Massa John's
brother, a Dr. William Waller, who was so mad about the entirely unnecessary
maiming that he bought the African for his own plantation.  Though now the
African was crippled, he could do limited work, and the doctor assigned him
in the vegetable garden.  That was how it happened that this particular
African was kept on one plantation for quite a long time--in a time when
slaves, especially male slaves, were sold back and forth so much that slave
children grew up often without even knowledge of who their parents were.

Grandma and the others said that Africans fresh off slave ships were given
some name by their mass as In this particular African's case the name was

"Toby."  But they said anytime any of the other slaves called him that, he
would strenuously rebuff them, declaring that his name was "Kin-tay."

Hobbling about, doing his gardening work, then later becoming his massa's
buggy-driver,

"Toby" --or

"Kin-tay" -- met and eventually mated with a woman slave there whom Grandma
and the other ladies called "Bell, the big- house cook."  They had a little
girl who was given the name "Kizzy."  When she was around four to five years
old, her African father began to take her by the hand and lead her around,
whenever he got the chance, pointing out different things to her and
repeating to her their names in his own native tongue.  He would point at a
guitar, for example, and say something that sounded like "ko."

Or he would point at the river that ran near the plantation--actually the
Mattaponi River--and say what sounded like

"Kamby Bolongo," along with many more things and sounds.  As Kizzy grew
older, and her African father learned English better, he began telling her
stories about himself, his people, and his homeland--and how he was taken
away from it.  He said that he had been out in the forest not far from his
village, chopping wood to make a drum, when he had 706 ALEX HALEY

been surprised by four men, overwhelmed, and kidnaped into slavery.

When Kizzy was sixteen years old.  Grandma Palmer and the other Murray family
ladies said, she was sold away to a new master named Torn Lea, who owned a
smaller plantation in North Carolina.  And it was on this plantation that
Kizzy gave birth to a boy, whose father was Torn Lea, who gave the boy the
name of George.

When George got around four or five years old, his mother began to tell him
her African father's sounds and stories, until he came to know them well.
Then when George got to be the age of twelve, I learned there on Grandma's
front porch, he was apprenticed to an old "Uncle Mingo," who trained the
master's fighting gamecocks, and by the mid-teens, the youth had earned such
a reputation as a gamecock trainer that he'd been given by others the
nickname he'd take to his grave: "Chicken George."

Chicken George when around eighteen met and mated with a slave girl named
Matilda, who in time bore him eight children.  With each new child's birth,
said Grandma and the others.  Chicken George would gather his family within
their slave cabin, telling them afresh about their African great-grandfather
named

"Kin-tay," who called a guitar a "ko," a river in Virginia

"Kamby Bolongo," and other sounds for other things, and who had said he was
chopping wood to make a drum when he was captured into slavery.

The eight children grew up, took mates, and had their own children.

The fourth son, Torn, was a blacksmith when he was sold along with the rest
of his family to a

"Massa Murray," who owned a tobacco plantation in Alamance County, North
Carolina.  There, Torn met and mated with a half-Indian slave girl named
Irene, who came from the plantation of a

"Massa Holt," who owned a cotton mill.  Irene eventually also bore eight
children, and with each new birth, Torn continued the tradition his father.
Chicken Geofge, had begun, gathering his family around the hearth and telling
them about their African great-great-grandfather and all those descending
from him.

Of that second set of eight children, the youngest was a little girl named
Cynthia, who was two years old when her ROOTS 707

father, Torn, and grandfather.  Chicken George, led a wagon train of recently
freed slaves westward to Henning, Tennessee, where Cynthia met and at the age
of twenty- two married Will Palmer.

When I had been thoroughly immersed in listening to accounts of all those
people unseen who had lived away back yonder, invariably it would astonish me
when the long narrative finally got down to Cynthia .  .  .  and there I sat
looking right at Grandma!  As well as Aunt Viney, Aunt Matilda, and Aunt Liz,
who had ridden right along with Grandma--her older sisters--in the wagon
train.

I was there at Grandma's in Henning until two younger brothers had been born,
George in 1925, then Julius in 1929, Dad sold the lumber company for Grandma,
and moved now into being a professor of agriculture with Mama and we three
boys living wherever he taught, the longest period being at AM College at
Normal, Alabama, where I was in some class a morning in 1931 and someone came
with a message for me to hurry home, and I did, hearing Dad's great wracking
sobs as I burst into the door.  Mama-- who had been sick off and on since we
had left Henning-- lay in their bed, dying.  She was thirty-six.

Every summer, George, Julius, and I spent in Henning with Grandma.

Noticeably something of her old spirit seemed to have gone, along with both
Grandpa and Mama.  People passing would greet her in her white-painted rocker
there on the front porch,

"Sister Cynthy, how's you doin'?"  and she generally would answer them,

"Jes' settin'" -- After two years.  Dad married again, to a colleague
professor who was named Zeona Hatcher, from Columbus, Ohio, where she had
gotten her master's degree at Ohio State University.  She busied herself with
the further raising and training of we three rapidly growing boys, then she
gave us a sister named Lois.

I had finished a second year in college and at seventeen years of age
enlisted into the U.  S.  Coast Guard as a mess- boy when World War II
happened.  On my cargo-ammunition ship plying the Southwest Pacific, I
stumbled ontdt'the long road that has taken me finally to the writing of this
Roots.

At sea sometimes as long as three months, our crew's really most incessant
fighting wasn't of enemy aerial bomb708 ALEX HALEY ers or submarines, but our
fighting of sheer boredom.  At Dad's insistence, I'd learned to type in high
school, and my most precious shipboard possession was my portable typewriter.
I wrote letters to everyone I could think of.  And I read every book in the
ship's small library or that was owned and loaned by shipmates; from boyhood,
I'd loved reading, especially stories of adventure.  Having read everything
on board a third time, I guess simply in frustration I decided I'd try
writing some stories myself.  The idea that one could roll a blank sheet of
paper into a typewriter and write something on it that other people would
care to read challenged, intrigued, exhilarated me--and does to this day.  I
don't know what else motivated and sustained me through trying to write,
every single night, seven nights a week--mailing off my efforts to magazines
and collecting literally hundreds of their rejection slips--across the next
eight years before my first story was bought.

After the war, with one or another editor accepting a story now or then, the
U.  S.  Coast Guard's hierarchy created for me a new ratmg"--journalist."
Writing every hour I could, I got published more; finally in 1959 at age
thirty- seven, I'd been in the service for twenty years, making me eligible
to retire, which I did, determined to try now for a new career as a full-time
writer.

At first I sold some articles to men's adventure magazines, mostly about
historic maritime dramas, because I love the sea.  Then Reader's Digest began
giving me assignments to write mostly biographical stories of people who'd
had dramatic experiences or lived exciting lives.

Then, in 1962, I happened to record a conversation with famous jazz trumpeter
Miles Davis that became the first of the

"Playboy Interviews."  Among my subsequent interview subjects was the then
Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X.  A publisher reading the interview asked
for a book portraying his life.  Malcolm X asked me to work with him as his
collaborator, and I did.  The next year was mostly spent intensively
interviewing him, then the next year in actually writing The Autobiography of
Malcolm X, which, as he had predicted, he hadn't lived to read, for he was
assassinated about two weeks after the manuscript was finished.

Soon, a magazine sent me on an assignment to London.  Between appointments,
utterly fascinated with a wealth of ^ .

ROOTS 709

history everywhere, I missed scarcely a guided tour anywhere within London's
area during the next several days.  Poking about one day in the British
Museum, I found myself looking at something I'd heard of vaguely: the Rosetta
Stone.  I don't know why, it just about entranced me.  I got a book there in
the museum library to learn more about it.

Discovered in the Nile Delta, I learned, the stone's face had chiseled into
it three separate texts: one in known Greek characters, the second in a
then-unknown set of characters, the third in the ancient hieroglyphics, which
it had been assumed no one ever would be able to translate.  But a French
scholar, Jean Champollion, successively matched, character for character,
both the unknown text and the hieroglyphics with the known Greek text, and he
offered a thesis that the texts read the same.  Essentially, he had cracked
the mystery of the previously undeciphered hieroglyphics in which much of
mankind's earliest history was recorded.

The key that had unlocked a door into the past fascinated me.  I seemed to
feel it had some special personal significance, but I couldn't imagine what.
It was on a plane returning to the United States when an idea hit me.  Using
language chiseled into stone, the French scholar had deciphered a historic
unknown by matching it with that which was known.  That presented me a rough
analogy: In the oral history that Grandma, Aunt Liz, Aunt Plus, Cousin
Georgia, and the others had always told on the boyhood Henning front porch, I
had an unknown quotient in those strange words or sounds passed on by the
African.  I got to thinking about them: "Kin-lay," he had said, was his name.

"Kb" he had called a guitar.

"Kamby Bolongo" he had called a river in Virginia.  They were mostly sharp,
angular sounds, with k predominating.  These sounds probably had undergone
some changes across the generations of being passed down, yet unquestionably
they represented phonetic snatches of whatever was the specific tongue spoken
by my African ancestor who was a family legend.  My plane from London was
circling to land at New York with me wondering: What specific African tongue
was it?  Was there any way in the world that maybe I could find out?

CHAPTER 119

Now over thirty years later the sole surviving one of the old ladies who had
talked the family narrative on the Henning front porch was the youngest among
them.  Cousin Georgia Anderson.  Grandma was gone, and all of the others too.
In her eighties now.  Cousin Georgia lived with her son and daughter, Floyd
Anderson and Bea Neely, at 1200 Everett Avenue, Kansas City, Kansas.  I
hadn't seen her since my frequent visits there of a few years before, then to
offer what help I could to my politically oriented brother, George.
Successively out of the U.  S.  Army Air Force, Morehouse College, then the
University of Arkansas.  Law School, George was hotly campaigning to become a
Kansas state senator.  The night of his victory party, laughter nourished
that actually why he'd won was .  .  .  Cousin Georgia.  Having repetitively
heard her campaign director son, Floyd, tell people of George's widely
recognized integrity, our beloved gray, bent, feisty Cousin Georgia had taken
to the local sidewalks.  Rapping her walking cane at people's doors, she had
thrust before their startled faces a picture of her grand nephew candidate,
declaring,

"Dat boy got mo' 'teggity clan you can shake a stick at!"

Now I flew to Kansas City again, to see Cousin Georgia.

I think that I will never quite get over her instant response when I raised
the subject of the family story.  Wrinkled and ailing, she jerked upright in
her bed, her excitement like boyhood front-porch echoes: "Yeah, boy, dat
African say his name was

"Kin-tay'!  .  .  .  He say de guitar a 'ko," de river

"Kamby Bolongo," an' he was chopping' wood to make his self a drum when dey
cotched 'im!  "

Cousin Georgia became so emotionally full of the old family story that Floyd,
Bea, and I had a time trying to calm her down.  I explained to her that I
wanted to try to see if there was any way that I could possibly find where
our "Kin-tay" had come from .  .  .  which could reveal our ancestral tribe.

"You go 'head, boy!"  exclaimed Cousin Georgia.

"Yo' sweet grandma an' all of 'em---dey up dere -watchin' you!"

The thought made me feel something like .  .  .  My God!

CHAPTER 120

Soon after, I went to the National Archives in Washington, D.  C.  " and told
a reading-room desk attendant that I was interested in Alamance County, North
Carolina, census records just after the Civil War.

Rolls of microfilm were delivered.  I began turning film through the machine,
feeling a mounting sense of intrigue while viewing an endless parade of names
recorded 'in that old-fashioned penmanship of different 1800s census takers.
After several of the long microfilm rolls, tiring, suddenly in utter
astonishment I found myself looking down there on: "Torn Murray, black,
blacksmith--," "Irene-Murray, black, housewife" -- .  followed by the names
of Grandma's older sisters--most of whom I'd listened to countless times on
Grandma's front porch.  "Elizabeth, age 6" --nobody in the world but my Great
Aunt Liz!  At the time of that census, Grandma wasn't even born yet!

It wasn't that I hadn't believed the stories of Grandma and the rest of them.
You just didn't not believe my grandma.  It was simply so uncanny sitting
staring at those names actually right there in official U.  S.  Government
records.

Then living in New York, I returned to Washington as often as I could manage
it--searching in the National Archives, in the Library of Congress, in the
Daughters of the American Revolution Library.

Wherever I was, whenever black library attendants perceived the nature of my
search, documents I'd requested would reach me with a miraculous speed.  From
one or another source during 1966, 712 ALEX HALEY

I was able to document at least the highlights of the cherished family story;
I would have given anything to be able to tell Grandma--then I would remember
what Cousin Georgia had said, that she, all of them, were "up there watchin'."

Now the thing was where, what, how could I pursue those strange phonetic
sounds that it was always said our African ancestor had spoken.  It seemed
obvious that I had to reach as wide a range of actual Africans as I possibly
could, simply because so many different tribal tongues are spoken in Africa.
There in New York City, I began doing what seemed logical: I began arriving
at the United Nations around quitting time; the elevators were spilling out
people who were thronging through the lobby on their way home.  It wasn't
hard to spot the Africans, and every one I was able to stop, I'd tell my
sounds to.  Within a couple of weeks, I guess I had stopped about two dozen
Africans, each of whom had given me a quick look, a quick listen, and then
took off.  I can't say I blame them--me trying to communicate some African
sounds in a Tennessee accent.

Increasingly frustrated, I had a long talk with George Sims, with whom I'd
grown up in Henning, and who is a master researcher.  After a few days,
George brought me a list of about a dozen people academically renowned for
their knowledge of African linguistics.  One whose background intrigued me
quickly was a Belgian, Dr. Jan Vansina.  After study at the University of
London's School of African and Oriental Studies, he had done his early work
living in African villages and written a book called La Tradition Orale.  1
telephoned Dr. Vansina where he now taught at the University of Wisconsin,
and he gave me an appointment to see him.  It was a Wednesday morning that I
flew to Madison, Wisconsin, motivated by my intense curiosity about some
strange phonetic sounds .  .  .  and with no dream in this world of what was
about to start happening.  .  .  .

That evening in the Vansinas' living room, I told him every syllable I could
remember of the family narrative heard since little boyhood--recently
buttressed by Cousin Georgia in Kansas City.  Dr. Vansina, after listening
intently throughout, then began asking me questions.  Being an oral
historian, he was particularly interested in the physical transmission of the
narrative down across generations.

We talked so late that he invited me to spend the night, ROOTS 713

and the next morning Dr. Vansina, with a very serious expression on his face,
said,

"I wanted to sleep on it.  The ramifications of phonetic sounds preserved
down across your family's generations can be immense."  He said that he had
been on the phone with a colleague Africanist, Dr. Philip Curtin; they both
felt certain that the sounds I'd conveyed to him were from the

"Mandinka" tongue.  I'd never heard that word; he told me that it was the
language spoken by the Mandingo people.  Then he guess translated certain of
the sounds.  One of them probably meant cow or cattle; another probably meant
the baobab tree, generic in West Africa.  The word ko, he said, could refer
to the kora, one of the Mandingo people's oldest stringed instruments, made
of a halved large dried gourd covered with goatskin, with a long neck, and
twenty-one strings with a bridge.  An enslaved Mandingo might relate the kora
visually to some among the types of stringed instruments that U.  S.  slaves
had.

The most involved sound I had heard and brought was Kamby Bolongo, my
ancestor's sound to his daughter Kizzy as he had pointed to the Mattaponi
River in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.  Dr. Vansina said that without
question, bolongo meant, in the Mandinka tongue, a moving water, as a river;
preceded by

"Kamby," it could indicate the Gambia River.

I'd never heard of it.

An incident happened that would build my feeling--especially as more uncanny
things occurred--that, yes, they were up there watchin' .  .  .

I was asked to speak at a seminar held at Utica College, Utica, New York.
Walking down a hallway with the professor who had invited me, I said I'd just
flown in from Washington and why I'd been there.

"The Gambia?  If I'm not mistaken, someone mentioned recently that an
outstanding student from that country is over at Hamilton."

The old, distinguished Hamilton College was maybe a half hour's drive away,
in Clinton, New York.  Before I could finish asking, a Professor Charles Todd
said,

"You're talking about Ebou Manga."  Consulting a course roster, he told me
where I could find him in an agricultural economics class.  Ebou Manga was
small of build, with careful eyes, a reserved manner, and black as soot.  He
tentatively confirmed my sounds, clearly startled to have heard me utter714
ALEX HALEY ing them.  Was Mandinka his home tongue?

"No, although I am familiar with it."  He was a Wolof, he said.  In his
dormitory room, I told him about my quest.  We left for The Gambia at the end
of the following week.

Arriving in Dakar, Senegal, the next morning, we caught a light plane to
small Yundum Airport in The Gambia.  In a passenger van, we rode into the
capital city of Banjul (then Bathurst).  Ebou and his father, Alhaji
Manga--Gambians are mostly Moslem--assembled a small group of men
knowledgeable in their small country's history, who met with me in the lounge
of the Atlantic Hotel.  As I had told Dr. Vansina in Wisconsin, I told these
men the family narrative that had come down across the generations.  I told
them in a reverse progression, backward from Grandma through Torn, Chicken
George, then Kizzy saying how her African father insisted to other slaves
that his name was "Kin-tay," and repetitively told her phonetic sounds
identifying various things, along with stories such as that he had been
attacked and seized while not far from his village, chopping wood.

When I had finished, they said almost with wry amusement,

"Well, of course

"Kamby Bolongo' would mean Gambia River; anyone would know that."  I told
them hotly that no, a great many people wouldn't know it!  Then they showed a
much greater interest that my 1760s ancestor had insisted his name was

"Kin-tay."

"Our country's oldest villages tend to be named for the families that
settled those villages centuries ago," they said.   Sending for a map,
pointing, they said, "Look, here is the village of KinteKundah.   And not too
far from it, the village of KinteKundah JannehYa."

Then they told me something of which I'd never have dreamed: of very old men,
called griots, still to be found in the older back-country villages, men who
were in effect living, walking archives of oral history.  A senior griot
would be a man usually in his late sixties or early seventies; below him
would be progressively younger griots--and apprenticing boys, so a boy would
be exposed to those griots' particular line of narrative for forty or fifty
years before he could qualify as a senior griot, who told on special
occasions the centuries-old histories of villages, of clans, of families, of
great heroes.

Throughout the whole of black Africa such oral chronicles had been handed
down since ROOTS 715

the time of the ancient forefathers, I was informed, and there were certain
legendary griots who could narrate facets of African history literally for as
long as three days without ever repeating themselves.

Seeing how astounded I was, these Gambian men reminded me that every living
person ancestrally goes back to some time and some place where no writing
existed; and then human memories and mouths and ears were the only ways those
human beings could store and relay information.

They said that we who live in the Western culture are so conditioned to the
"crutch of print" that few among us comprehend what a trained memory is
capable of.

Since my forefather had said his name was

"Kin-lay" -- properly spelled

"Kinte," they said--and since the Kinte clan was old and well known in The
Gambia, they promised to do what they could to find a griot who might be able
to assist my search.

Back in the United States, I began devouring books on African history.  It
grew quickly into some kind of obsession to correct my ignorance concerning
the earth's second- largest continent.  It embarrasses me to this day that up
to then my images about Africa had been largely derived or inferred from
Tarzan movies and my very little authentic knowledge had come from only
occasional leafings through the National Geographic.  All of a sudden now,
after reading all day, I'd sit on the edge of my bed at night studying a map
of Africa, memorizing the different countries' relative positions and the
principal waters where slave ships had operated.

After some weeks, a registered letter came from The Gambia; it suggested that
when possible, I should come back.  But by now I was stony broke--especially
because I'd been investing very little of my time in writing.

Once at a Reader's Digest lawn party, cofounder Mrs. DeWitt Wallace had told
me how much she liked an

"Unforgettable Character" I had written--about a tough old seadog cook who
had once been my boss in the U.  S.  Coast Guard--and before leaving, Mrs.
Wallace volunteered that I should let her know if I ever needed some help.
Now I wrote to Mrs. Wallace a rather embarrassed letter, briefly telling her
the compulsive quest I'd gotten myself into.  She asked some editors to meet
with me and see what they felt, and invited to lunch with them, I talked
about nonstop for 716 ALEX HALEY

nearly three hours.  Shortly afterward, a letter told me that the Reader's
Digest would provide me with a three-hundred-dollar monthly check for one
year, and plus that--my really vital need"--reasonable necessary travel
expenses."

I again visited Cousin Georgia in Kansas City--some- thing had urged me to do
so, and I found her quite ill.  But she was thrilled to hear both what I had
learned and what I hoped to learn.  She wished me Godspeed, and I flew then
to Africa.

The same men with whom I had previously talked told me now in a rather
matter-of-fact manner that they had caused word to be put out in the back
country, and that a griot very knowledgeable of the Kinte clan had indeed
been found--his name, they said, was

"Kebba Kanji Fofana."  I was ready to have a fit.

"Where is he?"  They looked at me oddly: "He's in his village."

I discovered that if I intended to see this griot, I was going to have to do
something I'd never have dreamed I'd ever be doing--organizing what seemed,
at least to me then, a kind of mini safari It took me three days of
negotiating through unaccustomed endless African palaver finally to hire a
launch to get upriver; to rent a lorry and a Land Rover to take supplies by a
roundabout land route; to hire finally a total of fourteen people, including
three interpreters and four musicians, who had told me that the old griots in
the back country wouldn't talk without music in the background.

In the launch Baddibu, vibrating up the wide, swift "Kamby Bolongo,"

I felt queasily, uncomfortably alien.  Did they all have me appraised as
merely another pith helmet?  Finally ahead was James Island, for two
centuries the site of a fort over which England and France waged war back and
forth for the ideal vantage point to trade in slaves.  Asking if we might
land there awhile, I trudged amid the crumbling ruins yet guarded by ghostly
cannon.  Picturing in my mind the kinds of atrocities that would have
happened there, I felt as if I would like to go flailing an ax back through
that facet of black Africa's history.  Without luck I tried to find for
myself some symbol remnant of an ancient chain, but I took a chunk of mortar
and a brick.  In the next minutes before we returned to the Baddibu, I just
gazed up and down that river that my ancestor had named for his daughter far
across the Atlantic Ocean in SpotsyiROOTS 717

vania County, Virginia.  Then we went on, and upon arriving at a little
village called Albreda, we put ashore, our destination now on foot the yet
smaller village of Juffure, where the men had been told that this griot lived.

There is an expression called "the peak experience" -- that which
emotionally, nothing in your life ever transcends.  I've had mine, that first
day in the back country of black West Africa.

When we got within sight of Juffure, the children who were playing outside
gave the alert, and the people came nocking from their huts.

It's a village of only about seventy people.  Like most back-country
villages, it was still very much as it was two hundred years ago, with its
circular mud houses and their conical thatched roofs.  Among the people as
they gathered was a small man wearing an off- white robe, a pillbox hat over
an aquiline-featured black face, and about him was an aura of "somebodiness"
until I knew he was the man we had come to see and hear.

As the three interpreters left our party to converge upon him, the
seventy-odd other villagers gathered closely around me, in a kind of
horseshoe pattern, three or four deep all around; had I stuck out my arms, my
fingers would have touched the nearest ones on either side.

They were all staring at me.  The eyes just raked me.  Their foreheads were
furrowed with their very intensity of staring.  A kind of visceral surging or
a churning sensation started up deep inside me; bewildered, I was wondering
what on earth was this .  .  .  then in a little while it was rather as if
some full- gale force of realization rolled in on me: Many times in my life I
had been among crowds of people, but never where every one was jet black!

Rocked emotionally, my eyes dropped downward as we tend to do when we're
uncertain, insecure, and my glance fell upon my own hands' brown complexion.
This time more quickly than before, and even harder, another gale- force
emotion hit me: I felt myself some variety of a hybrid .  I felt somehow
impure among the pure; it was a terribly shaming feeling.  About then,
abruptly the old man left the interpreters.  The people immediately also left
me now to go crowding about him.

One of my interpreters came up quickly and whispered in my ear,

"They stare at you so much because they have never here seen a black
American."  When I grasped the 718 ALEX HALEY

significance, I believe that hit me harder than what had already happened.
They hadn't been looking at me as an individual, but I represented in their
eyes a symbol of the twenty-five millions of us black people whom they had
never seen, who lived beyond an ocean.

, The people were clustered thickly about the old man, all of them
intermittently flicking glances toward me as they talked animatedly in their
Mandinka tongue.  After a while, the old man turned, walked briskly through
the people, past my three interpreters, and right up to me.  His eyes
piercing into mine, seeming to feel I should understand his Mandinka, he
expressed what they had all decided they felt concerning those unseen
millions of us who lived in those places that had been slave ships'
destinations--and the translation came: "We have been told by the forefathers
that there are many of us from this place who are in exile in that place
called America--andjn other places."

The old man sat down, facing me, as the people hurriedly gathered behind him.
Then he began to recite for me the ancestral history of the Kinte clan, as
it had been passed along orally down across centuries from the forefathers'
time.  It was not merely conversational, but more as if a scroll were being
read; for the still, silent villagers, "it was clearly a formal occasion.
The griot would speak, bending forward from the waist, his body rigid, his
neck cords standing out, his words seeming almost physical objects.  After a
sentence or two, seeming to go limp, he would lean back, listening to an
interpreter's translation.  Spilling from the griot's head came an incredibly
complex Kinte clan lineage that reached back across many generations: who
married whom; who had what children; what children then married whom; then
their offspring.  It was all just unbelievable.  I was struck not only by the
profusion of details, but also by the narrative's biblical style, something
like: " --and so and-so took as a wife so-and-so, and begat .  , .  and begat
.  .  .  and begat .  .  .  " He would next name each begat's eventual
spouse, or spouses, and their averagely numerous offspring, and so on.  To
date things the griot linked them to events, such as " --in the year of the
big water"--a flood " --he slew a water buffalo.  " To determine the calendar
date, you'd have to find out when that particular flood occurred.

Simplifying to its essence the encyclopedic saga that I was ROOTS 719

told, the griot said that the Kinte clan had begun in the country called Old
Mali.  Then the Kinte men traditionally were blacksmiths, "who had conquered
fire," and the women mostly were potters and weavers.  In time, one branch of
the clan moved into the country called Mauretania; and it was from Mauretania
that one son of this clan, whose name was Kairaba Kunta Kinte--a mar about or
holy man of the Moslem faith--journeyed down into the country called The
Gambia.

He went first to a village called Pakali N'Ding, stayed there for a while,
then went to a village called Jiffarong, and then to the village of Juffure.

In Juffure, Kairaba Kunta Kinte took his first wife, a Mandinka maiden whose
name was Sireng.  And by her he begot two sons, whose names were Janneh and
Saloum.  Then he took a second wife; her name was Yaisa.  And by Yaisa, he
begot a son named Omoro.

Those three sons grew up in Juffure until they became of age.  Then the elder
two, Janneh and Saloum, went away and founded a new village called
Kinte-Kundah JannehYa.  The youngest son, Omoro, stayed on in Juffure village
until he had thirty rains--years--of age, then he took as his wife a Mandinka
maiden named Binta Kebba.  And by Binta Kebba, roughly between the years 1750
and 1760, Omoro Kinte begat four sons, whose names were, in the order of
their birth, Kunta, Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi.

The old griot had talked for nearly two hours up to then, and perhaps fifty
times the narrative had included some detail about someone whom he had named.
Now after he had just named those four sons, again he appended a detail, and
the interpreter translated-- "About the time the King's soldiers came"
--another of the griot's time-fixing references"--the oldest of these four
sons, Kunta, went away from his village to chop wood .  .  .  and he was
never seen again.

.  .  " And the griot went on with his narrative.

I sat as if I were carved of stone.  My blood seemed to have congealed.  This
man whose lifetime had been in this back-country African village had no way
in the world to know that he had just echoed what I had heard all through my
boyhood years on my grandma's front porch in Henning, Tennessee .  of an
African who always had insisted that his name was

"Kin-tay" ; who had called a guitar a

"Ao,"

and a river within the state of Virginia, 720 ALEX HALEY

"Kamby Bolongo" ; and who had been kidnaped into slavery while not far from
his village, chopping wood, to make himself a drum.

I managed to fumble from my duffel bag my basic notebook, whose first pages
containing grandma's story I showed to an interpreter.  After briefly
reading, clearly astounded, he spoke rapidly while showing it to the old
griot, who became agitated; he got up, exclaiming to the people, gesturing at
my notebook in the interpreter's hands, and they all got agitated.

I don't remember hearing anyone giving an order, I only recall becoming aware
that those seventy-odd people had formed a wide human ring around me, moving
counterclockwise, chanting softly, loudly, softly; their bodies close
together, they were lifting their knees high, stamping up reddish puffs of
the dust.  .  .  .

The woman who broke from the moving circle was one of about a dozen whose
infant children were within cloth slings across their backs.

Her jet-black face deeply contorting, the woman came charging toward me, her
bare feet slapping the earth, and snatching her baby free, she thrust it at
me almost roughly, the gesture saying.

"Take it!"  .  .

and I did, clasping the baby to me.  Then she snatched away her baby; and
another woman was thrusting her baby, then another, and another .  .  .
until I had embraced probably a dozen babies.  I wouldn't learn until maybe a
year later, from a Harvard University professor, Dr. Jerome Bruner, a scholar
of such matters,

"You didn't know you were participating in one of the oldest ceremonies of
humankind, called

"The laying on of hands'!  In their way, they were telling you

"Through this flesh, which is us, we are you, and you are us!"

" Later the men of Juffure took me into their mosque built of bamboo and
thatch, and they prayed around me in Arabic.   I remember thinking, down on
my knees,

"After I've found out where I came from, I can't understand a word they're
saying."  Later the crux of their prayer was translated for me: "Praise be to
Allah for one long lost from us whom Allah has returned."

Since we had come by the river, I wanted to return by land.  As I sat beside
the wiry young Mandingo driver who was leaving dust pluming behind us on the
hot, rough, pitted, back-country road toward Banjul, there came from ROOTS
721

somewhere into my head a staggering awareness .  .  .  that if any black
American could be so blessed as I had been to know only a few ancestral
clues--could he or she know who was either the paternal or maternal African
ancestor or ancestors, and about where that ancestor lived when taken, and
finally about when the ancestor was taken-then only those few clues might
well see that black Ameri- can able to locate some wizened old black griot
whose narrative could reveal the black American's ancestral clan, perhaps
even the very village.

In my mind's eye, rather as if it were mistily being projected on a screen, I
began envisioning descriptions I had read of how collectively millions of our
ancestors had been enslaved.  Many thousands were individually kidnaped, as
my own forebear Kunta had been, but into the millions had come awake
screaming in the night, dashing out into the bedlam of raided villages, which
were often in flames.  The captured able survivors were linked neck-by- neck
with thongs into processions called "coffles," which were sometimes as much
as a mile in length.  I envisioned the many dying, or left to die when they
were too weak to continue the torturous march toward the coast, and those who
made it to the beach were greased, shaved, probed in every orifice, often
branded with sizzling irons; I envisioned them being lashed and dragged
toward the longboats; their spasms of screaming and clawing with their hands
into the beach, biting up great choking mouthfuls of the sand in their
desperation efforts for one last hold on the Africa that had been their home;
I envisioned them shoved, beaten, jerked down into slave ships' stinking
holds and chained onto shelves, often packed so tightly that they had to lie
on their sides like spoons in a drawer.  My mind reeled with it all as we
approached another, much larger village.  Staring ahead, I realized that word
of what had happened in Juffure must have left there well before I did.  The
driver slowing down, I could see this village's people thronging the road ""
ahead; they were weaving, amid their cacophony of crying out something; I
stood up in the Land-Rover, waving back as they seemed grudging to open a
path for the Land-Rover.

I guess we had moved a third of the way through the village when it suddenly
registered in my brain what they were all crying out.  the wizened, robed
elders and young722 ALEX HALEY er men, the mothers and the naked tar-black
children, they were all waving up at me; their expressions buoyant, beaming,
all were crying out together,

"Meester Kinte!  Meester Kintel" Let me tell you something: I am a man.  A
sob hit me somewhere around my ankles; it came surging upward, and flinging
my hands over my face, I was just bawling, as I hadn't since I was a baby.

"Meester Kinte!"  I just felt like I was weeping for all of history's
incredible atrocities against fellowmen, which seems to be mankind's greatest
flaw.  .  .  .

Flying homeward from Dakar, I decided to write a book.  My own ancestors'
would automatically also be a symbolic saga of all African-descent
people--who are without exception the seeds of someone like Kunta who was
born and grew up in some black African village, someone who was captured and
chained down in one of those slave ships that sailed them across the same
ocean, into some succession of plantations, and since then a struggle for
freedom.

In New York, my waiting telephone messages included that in a Kansas City
Hospital, our eighty-three year-old Cousin Georgia had died.

Later, making a time-zone adjustment, I discovered that she passed away
within the very hour that I had walked into Juffure Village.  I think that as
the last of the old ladies who talked the story on Grandma's front porch, it
had been her job to get me to Africa, then she went to join the others up
there watchin'.

In fact, I see starting from my little boyhood a succession of related
occurrences that finally when they all joined have caused this book to exist.
Grandma and the others drilled the family story into me.

Then, purely by the fluke of circumstances, when I was cooking on U.  S.
Coast Guard ships at sea, I began the long trial-and-error process of
teaching myself to write.  And because I had come to love the sea, my early
writing was about dramatic sea adventures gleaned out of yellowing old
maritime records in.  the U.  S.  Coast Guard's Archives, I couldn't have
acquired a much better preparation to meet the maritime research challenges
that this book would bring.

Always, Grandma and the other old ladies had said that a ship brought the
African to "somewhere called " Naplis.  " I knew they had to have been
referring to Annapolis Maryland.  So I felt now that I had to try to see
ROOTS 723

if I could find what ship had sailed to Annapolis from the Gambia River, with
her human cargo including "the African," who would later insist that

"Kin-lay" was his name, after his massa John Waller had given him the name
"Toby."

I needed to determine a time around which to focus search for this ship.
Months earlier, in the village of Juffure, the griot had timed Kunta Kinte's
capture with "about the time the King's soldiers came."

Returning to London, midway during a second week of searching in records of
movement assignments for British military units during the 1760s, I finally
found that "King's soldiers" had to refer to a unit called

"Colonel O'Hare's forces."  The unit was sent from London in 1767 to guard
the then British-operated Fort James Slave Fort in the Gambia River.  The
griot had been so correct that I felt embarrassed that, in effect, I had been
checking behind him.

I went to Lloyds of London.  In the office of an executive named Mr. R.  C.
E.  Landers, it just poured out of me what I was trying to do.

He got up from behind his desk and he said,

"Young man, Lloyds of London will give you all of the help that we can."  It
was a blessing, for through Lloyds, doors began to be opened for me to search
among myriad old English maritime records.

I can't remember any more exhausting experience than my first six weeks of
seemingly endless, futile, day-after- day searching in an effort to isolate
and then pin down a specific slave ship on a specific voyage, from within
cartons upon cartons, files upon files of old records of thousands of
slave-ship triangular voyages among England, Africa, and America.  Along with
my frustration, the more a rage grew within me the more I perceived to what
degree the slave trade, in its time, was regarded by most of its participants
simply as another major industry, rather like the buying, selling, and
shipment of livestock today.  Many records seemed never to have been opened
after their original.  storage apparently no one had felt occasion to go
through them.

I hadn't found a single ship bound from The Gambia to Annapolis, when in the
seventh week, one afternoon about two-thirty, I was studying the 1,023rd
sheet of slave- ship records, A wide rectangular sheet, it recorded the 724
ALEX HALEY

Gambia River entrances and exits of some thirty ships during the years 1766
and 1767.  Moving down the list, my eyes reached ship No.  18, and
automatically scanned across its various data heading entries.

On July 5, 1767--the year "the King's soldiers came" -- a ship named Lord
Ligonier, her captain, a Thomas E.  Davies, had sailed from the Gambia River,
her destination Annapolis.  .  I don't know why, but oddly my internal
emotional reaction was delayed.  I recall passively writing down the
information, I turned in the records, and walked outside.  Around the corner
was a little tea shop.  I went in and ordered a tea and cruller.  Sitting,
sipping my tea, it suddenly hit me that quite possibly that ship brought
Kunta Kinte!

I still owe the lady for the tea and cruller.  By telephone, Pan American
confirmed their last seat available that day to New York.

There simply wasn't time to go by the hotel where I was staying; I told a
taxi driver,

"Heathrow Airport!"  Sleepless through that night's crossing of the Atlantic
I was seeing in my mind's eye the book in the Library of Congress,
Washington, B.  C.  " that I had to get my hands on again.  It had a little
brown cover, with darker brown letters--Shipping in the Port of Annapolis, by
Vaughan W.  Brown.

From New York, the Eastern Airlines shuttle took me to Washington; I taxied
to the Library of Congress, ordered the book, almost yanked it from the young
man who brought it, and went riming through it.  and there it was,
confirmation!  The Lord Ligonier had cleared Annapolis' customs officials on
September 29, 1767.

Renting a car, speeding to Annapolis, I went to the Mary- land Hall of
Records and asked archivist Mrs. Phebe Jacobsen for copies of any local
newspaper published around the first week of October 1767.  She soon produced
a microfilm roll of the Maryland Gazette.  At the projection machine, I was
halfway through the October 1 issue when I saw the advertisement in the
antique typeface: "JUST IMPORTED, In the ship Lord Ligonier, Capt.  Davies,
from the River Gambia, in Africa, and to be sold by the subscribers, in
Annapolis, for cash, or good bills of exchange on Wednesday the 7th of
October next, A Cargo of CHOICE HEALTHY SLAVES.  The said ship will take
tobacco to London on liberty at 6s.  Sterling per ton."  The ROOTS 725

advertisement was signed by John Ridout and Daniel of St.  Thos.

Jenifer.

On September 29, 1967, I felt I should be nowhere else in the world except
standing on a pier at Annapolis--and I was; it was two hundred years to the
day after the Lord Ligonier had landed.  Staring out to seaward across those
waters over which my great-greatgreatgreat-grandfather had been brought,
again I found myself weeping, The 1766-67 document compiled at James Fort in
the Gambia River had included that the Lord Ligonier had sailed with 140
slaves in her hold.  How many of them had lived through the voyage?  Now on a
second mission in the Maryland Hall of Records, I searched to find a record
of the ship's cargo listed upon her arrival in Annapolis--and found it, the
following inventory, in old-fashioned script: 3,265 "elephants' teeth," as
ivory tusks were called; 3,700 pounds of beeswax; 800 pounds of raw cotton;
32 ounces of Gambian gold; and 98 "Negroes."  Her loss of 42 Africans en
route, or around one third, was average for slaving voyages.

I realized by this time that Grandma, Aunt Liz, Aunt Plus, and Cousin Georgia
also had been griots in their own ways.  My notebooks contained their
centuries-old story that our African had been sold to "Massa John Waller,"
who had given him the name

"Toby."  During his fourth escape effort, when cornered he had wounded with a
rock one of the pair of professional slave-catchers who caught him, and they
had cut his foot off.

"Massa John's brother, Dr. William Waller," had saved the slave's life, then
indignant at the maiming, had bought him from his brother.  I dared to hope
there might actually exist some kind of an actual documenting record.

I went to Richmond, Virginia.  I pored through microfilmed legal deeds filed
with Spotsylvania County, Virginia, after September 1767, when the Lord
Ligonier had landed.  In time, I found a lengthy deed dated September 5,
1768, in which John Waller and his wife Arm transferred to William Waller
land and goods, including 240 acres of farmland .

.  and then on the second page, "and also one Negro man slave named Toby."

My God!

In the twelve years since my visit to the Rosetta Stone, I have traveled
halfa million miles, I suppose, searching, sift726 ALEX HALEY ing, checking,
cross checking finding out more and more about the people whose respective
oral histories had proved not only to be correct, but even to connect on both
sides of the ocean.  Finally I managed to tear away from yet more researching
in order to push myself into actually writing this book.  To develop Kunta
Kinte's boyhood and youth took me a long time, and having come to know him
well, I anguished upon his capture.  When I began trying to write of his, or
all of those Gambians' slave-ship crossing, finally I flew to Africa and
canvassed among shipping lines to obtain passage on the first possible
freighter sailing from any s black African port directly to the United
States.  It turned out to be the Farrell Lines' African Star.  When we put to
sea, I explained what I hoped to do that might help me write of my ancestor's
crossing.  After each late evening's dinner, I climbed down successive metal
ladders into her deep, dark, cold cargo hold.  Stripping to my underwear, I
lay on my back on a wide rough bare dunnage plank and forced myself to stay
there through all ten nights of the crossing, trying to imagine what did he
see, hear, feel, smell, taste--and above all, in knowing Kunta, what things
did he think?  My crossing of course was ludicrously luxurious by any
comparison to the ghastly ordeal endured by Kunta Kinte, his companions, and
all those other millions who lay chained and shackled in terror and their own
filth for an average of eighty to ninety days, at the end of which awaited
new physical and psychic horrors.

But anyway, finally I wrote of the ocean crossing--from the perspective of
the human cargo.

Finally I've woven our whole seven generations into this book that is in your
hands.  In the years of the writing, I have also spoken before many audiences
of how Roots i ( came to be, naturally now and then someone asks,

"How j j much of Roots is fact and how much is fiction?"  To the best of my
knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from
either my African or American families' carefully preserved oral history,
much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents.
Those documents, along with the myriad textural details of what were
contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give
Roots flesh have come from years of intensive research in fifty-odd
libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents.

ROOTS 727

Since I wasn't yet around when most of the story occurred, by far most of the
dialogue and most of the incidents are of necessity a novelized amalgam of
what I know took place together with what my researching led me to plausibly
feel took place.

I think now that not only are Grandma, Cousin Georgia, and those other ladies
"up there watchin'," but so are all of the others: Kunta and Bell; Kizzy;
Chicken George and Matilda; Torn and Irene; Grandpa Will Palmer; Bertha;
Mama--and now, as well, the most recent one to join them.  Dad.  .  .  .

He was eighty-three.  When his children--George, Julius, Lois, and I--had
discussed the funeral arrangements, some one of us expressed that Dad had
lived both a full life and a rich one in the way that he interpreted
richness.  Moreover, he had gone quickly without suffering and knowing Dad as
well as we all did, we agreed that he would not have wanted us going about
crying.  And we agreed that we would not.

I found myself so full of the memories that when the mortician said "the
deceased," it startled me that he meant our dad, around whom things rarely
got dull.  Shortly before the first service that was held for him in a
Washing- ton, D.  C.  " chapel thick with family friends, my brother George
told the Reverend Boyd, who was in charge, that at an appropriate point, we
sons would like to share some memories of Dad with the friends there.

So after brief conventional services, a favorite song of Dad's was sung, then
George got up and stood near the open casket.  He said he vividly recalled
that wherever Dad had taught, our home was always shared with at least one
youth whose rural farmer father Dad had talked into letting his son attend
college; the "no money" protest being solved by Dad's saying,

"He'll live with us."  As a result, George estimated that about the South
were around eighteen county agricultural agents, high school principals, and
teachers who proudly call themselves " " Fessor Haley's boys.  "

George said that among earlier memory was once when we lived in Alabama and
at breakfast Dad said,

"You boys come on, there's a great man I want you to meet."  And just like
that Dad drove us three boys the several hours to Tuskegee, Alabama, where we
visited the mysterious laboratory of the small, dark genius scientist.  Dr.
George 728 ALEX HALEY

Washington Carver, who talked to us about the need to study hard and gave us
each a small flower.  George said that in Dad's later years, he had been
irked that we did not hold annual large family reunions as he would have
liked, and George asked the audience now to join us in feeling that really we
were holding a reunion both for and with our dad.

I got up as George took his seat, and going over, looking at Dad, I said to
the people that being the oldest child, I could remember things farther back
about the gentleman lying there.  For instance, my first distinct boyhood
impression of love was noticing how Dad's and Mama's eyes would look at each
other over the piano top when Mama was playing some little introduction as
Dad stood near waiting to sing in our church.  Another early memory was of
how I could always get a nickel or even a dime from Dad, no matter how tight
people were going around saying things were.  All I had to do was catch him
alone and start begging him to tell me just one more time about how his AEF
92nd Division, 366th Infantry, fought in the Meuse Argonne Forest.

"Why, we were ferocious, son!"  Dad would exclaim.  By the time he gave me
the dime it was clear that whenever things would look really grim to General
Blackjack Pershing, once again he would send a courier to bring Savannah,
Tennessee's, Sergeant Simon A.  Haley (No.  2816106), whereupon the lurking
German spies sped that news to then- highest command, throwing fright into
the Kaiser himself.

But it seemed to me, I told the people, that after Dad's having met Mama at
Lane College, his next most fateful meeting for all of us had been when Dad
had transferred to AT College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and was about to
drop out of school and return home to sharecrop, "Because, boys, working four
odd jobs, I just never had time to study."  But before he left, word came of
his acceptance as a temporary summer-season Pullman porter.  On a night train
from Buffalo to Pittsburgh, at about 2 a.  m.  his buzzer rang, and a
sleepless white man and his wife each wanted a glass of warm milk.  Dad
brought the milk, he said, "and I tried to leave, but the man was just
talkative and seemed surprised that I was a working college student.  He
asked lots of questions, then he tipped well in ^ Pittsburgh."  After saving
every possible cent, when Dad ^88.  3t!  "l... ROOTS 729

returned to college that September of 1916, the college president showed him
correspondence from the man on the train--a retired Curtis Publishing Company
executive named R.  S.  M.  Boyee--who had written asking the cost of one
full year's everything, then had sent his check.

"It was about $503.15 with tuition, dormitory, meals, and books included,"
Dad said, and he scored marks that later saw him with a graduate-study
scholarship that the Comell University School of Agriculture began giving
that year to the top agricultural student at each of the Negro land- grant
colleges.

And that, I told the people, was how our dad got his master's degree at
Cornell, and then was a professor, so that we, his children, grew up amid
those kinds of influences, which when put together with what a lot of other
people on our mama's side also had done, was why we were fortunate enough to
be there seeing Dad oil now with me as an author, George as an assistant
director of the United States Information Agency, Julius as a U.  S.  Navy
Department architect, and Lois as a teacher of music.

We flew Dad's body then to Arkansas, where a second ceremony was thronged
with his friends from Pine Bluff's AM&N University and its area where as the
clean of agriculture, Dad had rounded out his total of forty years of
educating.  As we knew he would have wanted, we drove him through the campus
and twice along the road where the street sign near the agricultural building
said

"S.  A.  Haley Drive,"

as it had been named when he retired.

The Pine Bluff service over, we took Dad to where he had previously told us
he wanted to lie--in the Veterans' Cemetery in Little Rock.

Following his casket as it was taken to Section 16, we stood and watched Dad
lowered into grave No.  1429.  Then we whom he had fathered-- members of the
seventh generation from Kunta Kinte-walked away rapidly, averting our faces
from each other, having agreed we wouldn't cry.

So Dad has joined the others up there.  I feel that they do watch and guide,
and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people
can help alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories
have been written by the winners.

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