Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [110]
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 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 piteous 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 kintango: “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 wisely—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 these problems would simply have to be met as they came.
As the first streaks of dawn filtered through the barred windows, Kunta dropped fitfully off to sleep. But no sooner had 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