Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [145]
The brown one was equally amazed. “Looka here, he can talk! But I’m tellin’ you, boy, you got to forgit all dat African talk. Make white folks mad an’ scare niggers. Yo’ name Toby. Dey calls me Fiddler.” He pointed to himself. “Say dat. Fiddler!” Kunta looked at him blankly, though he understood exactly what he meant. “Fiddler! I’s a fiddler. Understan’—fiddler?” He made a sawing motion across his left arm with the other hand. This time Kunta wasn’t pretending when he looked blank.
Exasperated, the brown one got up and brought from a corner the oddly shaped box that Kunta had seen him arrive with. Opening it, he lifted out an even more oddly shaped light brown wooden thing with a slender black neck and four taut, thin strings running almost its length. It was the same musical instrument he had heard the old man play at the other farm.
“Fiddle!” exclaimed the brown one.
Since they were alone, Kunta decided to say it. He repeated the sound: “Fiddle.”
Looking pleased, the brown one put the fiddle away and closed the case. Then, glancing around, he pointed. “Bucket!” Kunta repeated it, fixing in his head what that thing was. “Now, water!” Kunta repeated it.
After they had gone through a score or more of new words, the brown one pointed silently at the fiddle, the bucket, water, chair, cornshucks, and other objects, his face a question mark for Kunta to repeat the right word for all of them. A few of the names he promptly repeated; he fumbled with a few others and was corrected ; and some sounds he was unable to say at all. The brown one refreshed him on those, then reviewed him on them all. “You ain’t dumb as you looks,” he grunted by suppertime.
The lessons continued through the following days and stretched into weeks. To Kunta’s astonishment, he began to discover that he was becoming able not only to understand but also to make himself understood to the brown one in a rudimentary way. And the main thing he wanted him to understand was why he refused to surrender his name or his heritage, and why he would rather die a free man on the run than live out his life as a slave. He didn’t have the words to tell it as he wished, but he knew the brown one understood, for he frowned and shook his head. One afternoon not long afterward, arriving at the brown one’s hut, Kunta found another visitor already there. It was the old man he’d seen now and then hoeing in the flower garden near the big house. With a glance at the brown one’s affirming nod, Kunta sat down.
The old man began to speak. “Fiddler here tell me you run away four times. You see what it got you. Jes’ hopes you done learned your lesson like I done. ’Cause you ain’t done nothin’ new. My young days, I run off so much dey near ’bout tore my hide off ’fore I got it in my head ain’t nowhere to run to. Run two states away, dey jes’ tell about it in dey papers an’ sooner later you gits cotched an’ nearly kilt, an’ win’ up right back where you come from. Ain’t hardly nobody ain’t thought about runnin’. De grinnin’est niggers thinks about it. But ain’t nobody I ever knowed ever got away. Time you settled down and made de best of things de way dey is,’stead of wastin’ yo’ young years, like I did, plottin’ what cain’t be done. I done got ol’ an’ wore out now. Reckon since you been born I been actin’ like de no-good, lazy, shiftless, head-scratchin’ nigger white folks says us is. Only reason massa keep me here, he know I ain’t got no good auction value, an’ he git more out of me jes’ halfway doin’ de gardenin’. But I hears tell from Bell massa gwine put you to workin’ wid me tomorrow.”
Knowing that Kunta had understood hardly any of what the gardener had said, the fiddler spent the next half hour explaining what the old man had told him—only slowly and more simply, in words Kunta was familiar with. He had mixed feelings about nearly everything the gardener had said. He understood that the old man meant well by his advice—and he was beginning to believe that escape was indeed impossible—but even if he never got away,