Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [124]
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 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 groundnuts, 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