Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [128]
The next morning, as he joined the others in line for the march to work, Kunta almost caught himself saying, “Mornin’,” as he had heard them greet each other every day. But though he knew enough toubob words by now not only to understand a good deal of what was said to him but also to make himself somewhat understood as well, something made him decide to continue keeping that knowledge to himself.
It occurred to Kunta that these blacks masked their true feelings for the toubob as carefully as he did his changing attitude toward them. He had by now many times witnessed the blacks’ grinning faces turn to bitterness the instant a toubob turned his head away. He had seen them break their working tools on purpose, and then act totally unaware of how it happened as the “oberseer” bitterly cursed them for their clumsiness. And he had seen how blacks in the field, for all their show of rushing about whenever the toubob was nearby, were really taking twice as much time as they needed to do whatever they were doing.
He was beginning to realize, too, that like the Mandinkas’ own secret sira kango language, these blacks shared some kind of communication known only among themselves. Sometimes when they were working out in the field, Kunta’s glance would catch a small, quick gesture or movement of the head. Or one of them would utter some strange, brief exclamation; at unpredictable intervals another, and then another, would repeat it, always just beyond the hearing of the “oberseer” as he rode about on his horse. And sometimes with him right there among them, they would begin singing something that told Kunta—even though he couldn’t understand it—that some message was being passed, just as the women had done for the men on the big canoe.
When darkness had fallen among the huts and the lamp lights no longer glowed from the windows in the big house, Kunta’s sharp ears would detect the swift rustlings of one or two blacks slipping away from “slave row”—and a few hours later, slipping back again. He wondered where they were going and for what—and why they were crazy enough to come back. And the next morning in the fields, he would try to guess which of them had done it. Whoever it was, he thought he just might possibly learn to trust them.
Two huts away from Kunta, the blacks would seat themselves around the small fire of the old cooking woman every evening after “supper,” and the sight would fill Kunta with a melancholy memory of Juffure, except that the women here sat with the men, and some of both sexes were puffing away on pagan tobacco pipes that now and then glowed dully in the gathering darkness. Listening intently from where he sat just inside his doorway, Kunta could hear them talking over the rasping of the crickets and the distant hooting of owls in the forest. Though he couldn’t understand the words, he felt the bitterness in their tone.
Even in the dark, Kunta by now could picture in his mind the face of whichever black was talking. His mind had filed away the voices of each of the dozen adults, along with the name of the tribe he felt that particular one most resembled. He knew which ones among them generally acted more carefree, and which seldom even smiled, a few of them not even around the toubob.
These evening meetings had a general pattern that Kunta had learned. The usual first talker was usually the woman who cooked in the big house. She mimicked things said by both the “massa” and the “missus.” Then he heard the big black one who had captured him imitating the “oberseer,” and he listened with astonishment as the others all but choked trying to stifle their laughter, lest they be heard in the big white house.
But then the laughter would subside and they