Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [133]
CHAPTER 48
When Kunta finally emerged from his hut, again with both of his ankles shackled, most of the other blacks avoided him, rolling their eyes in fear of being near him, and moving quickly elsewhere, as if he were a wild animal of some kind. Only the old cooking woman and the old man who blew the conch horn would look at him directly.
Samson was nowhere to be seen. Kunta had no idea where he had gone, but Kunta was glad. Then, a few days later, he saw the hated black one bearing the unhealed marks of a lash; he was gladder still. But at the slightest excuse, the lash of the toubob “oberseer” fell once again on Kunta’s back as well.
He knew every day that he was being watched as he went through the motions of his work, like the others moving more quickly when the toubob came anywhere near, then slowing down as they left. Unspeaking, Kunta did whatever he was ordered to do. And when the day was over, he carried his melancholy—deep within himself—from the fields back to the dingy little hut where he slept.
In his loneliness, Kunta began talking to himself, most often in imaginary conversations with his family. He would talk to them mostly in his mind, but sometimes aloud. “Fa,” he would say, “these black ones are not like us. Their bones, their blood, their sinews, their hands, their feet are not their own. They live and breathe not for themselves but for the toubob. Nor do they own anything at all, not even their own children. They are fed and nursed and bred for others.”
“Mother,” he would say, “these women wear cloths upon their heads, but they do not know how to tie them; there is little that they cook that does not contain the meat or the greases of the filthy swine, and many of them have lain down with the toubob, for I see their children who are cursed with the sasso-borro half color.”
And he would talk with his brothers Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi, telling them that even the wisest of the elders could never really adequately impress upon them the importance of realizing that the most vicious of the forest animals was not half as dangerous as the toubob.
And so the moons passed in this way, and soon the spikes of “ice” had fallen and melted into water. And before long after that, green grass came peeping through the dark-reddish earth, the trees began to show their buds, and the birds were singing once again. And then came the plowing of the fields and the planting of the endless rows. Finally the sun’s rays upon the soil made it so hot that Kunta was obliged to step quickly, and if he had to stop, to keep his feet moving to prevent them from blistering.
Kunta had bided his time and minded his own business, waiting for his keepers to grow careless and take their eyes off him once again. But he had the feeling that even the other blacks were still keeping an eye on him, even when the “oberseer” and the other toubob weren’t around. He had to find some way not to be so closely watched. Perhaps he could take advantage of the fact that the toubob didn’t look at blacks as people but as things. Since the toubob’s reactions to these black things seemed to depend on how those things acted, he decided to act as inconspicuous as possible.
Though it made him despise himself, Kunta forced himself to start behaving the way the other blacks did whenever the toubob came anywhere near. Hard as he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to grin and shuffle, but he made an effort to appear co-operative, if not friendly, and he made a great show of looking busy. He had also learned a good many more toubob words by now, always keenly listening to everything that was said around him,