Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [100]
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 toubob’s 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 leader 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 very old if he was ever to forget, even a little bit, what the toubob had done to him.
There was yet another fear within Kunta—that the toubob might have the eyes to notice how differently he and 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