Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [105]
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 trailing 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 firesticks 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 shacklemate 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 toubob 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 aisleways, 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 day now the men would be taken