Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [107]
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 dreams of working in the fields back in Juffure, of leafy green farms, of fish leaping from the glassy surface of the bolong, of fat antelope haunches roasting over glowing 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 Mandinka 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