Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [126]
CHAPTER 46
With the cutting and piling of the cornstalks at last completed, the “oberseer” began assigning different blacks to a variety of tasks after the conch horn blew each dawn. One morning Kunta was given the job of snapping loose from their thick vines and piling onto a “wagon,” as he’d learned they called the rolling boxes, a load of large, heavy vegetables the color of overripe mangoes and somewhat resembling the big gourds that women in Juffure dried out and cut in half to make household bowls. The blacks here called them “punkins.”
Riding with the “punkins” on the wagon to unload them at a large building called the “barn,” Kunta was able to see that some of the black men were sawing a big tree into thick sections and splitting them with axes and wedges into firewood that children were stacking into long rows as high as their heads. In another place, two men were hanging over thin poles the large leaves of what his nose told him was the filthy pagan tobacco; he had smelled it once before on one of the trips he had taken with his father.
As he rode back and forth to the “barn,” he saw that just as it was done in his own village, many things were being dried for later use. Some women were collecting a thick brown “sage-grass,” he heard them call it, and tying it into bundles. And some of the garden’s vegetables were being spread out on cloths to dry. Even moss—which had been gathered by groups of children and plunged into boiling water—was being dried as well; he had no idea why.
It turned his stomach to watch—and listen—as he passed a pen where still more swine were being butchered. Their hair, too, he noticed, was being dried and saved—probably for mortar—but the thing that really sickened him was to see the swines bladders being removed, blown up, tied at the ends, and hung up to dry along a fence; Allah only knew for what unholy purpose.
When he had finished harvesting and storing the “punkins,” Kunta was sent with several others to a grove of trees, the limbs of which they were told to shake vigorously so that the nuts growing in them would fall to the ground, where they were picked up by first-kafo children carrying baskets. Kunta picked up one of the nuts and hid it in his clothes to try later when he was alone; it wasn’t bad.
When the last of these tasks was done, the men were put to work repairing things that needed it. Kunta helped another man fix a fence. And the women seemed to be busy in a general cleaning of the big white house and their own huts. He saw some of them washing things, first boiling them in a large black tub, then rubbing them up and down against a wrinkled piece of tin in soapy water; he wondered why none of them knew how to wash clothing properly by beating it against rocks.
Kunta noticed that the whip of the “oberseer” seemed to strike down upon someone’s back much less often than before. He felt in the atmosphere something similar to the time in Juffure when the harvest had all been put safely into the storehouses. Even before the evening’s conch horn would blow to announce the end of the day’s work, some of the black men would begin cavorting and prancing and singing among themselves. The “oberseer” would wheel his horse around and brandish his whip, but Kunta could tell he didn’t really mean it. And soon the other men would join in, and then the women—singing words that made no sense at all to Kunta. He was so filled with disgust for all of them that he was glad when the conch horn finally signaled for them to return to their huts.
In the evenings, Kunta would sit down sideways just inside the doorway of his hut, heels flat against the packed dirt floor to minimize the iron cuffs’ contact with his festering ankles. If there was any light breeze, he enjoyed feeling it blowing