Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [148]
The only new duty Kunta really hated was having to carry that basket for Bell every day. Muttering under his breath, he would follow her to the door, thrust it into her hands as rudely as he dared, then turn on his heel and march back to work, as fast as he could go. As much as he detested her, though, his mouth would water when now and then the air would waft to the garden the tantalizing smells of the things that Bell was cooking.
He had dropped the twenty-second pebble into his calendar gourd when—without any outward sign of change—Bell beckoned him on into the house one morning. After a moment’s hesitation, he followed her inside and set the basket on a table there. Trying not to look amazed at the strange things he saw everywhere around him in this room, which they called the “kitchen,” he was turning to leave when she touched him on the arm and handed him a biscuit with what looked like a piece of cold beef between the slices. As he stared at it in puzzlement, she said, “Ain’t you never seed a san’wich befo’? It ain’t gonna bite you. You s’posed to bite it. Now git on outa here.”
As time went on, Bell began to give him more than he could carry in his hand—usually a tin plate piled with something called “cornpone,” a kind of bread he had never tasted before, along with boiled fresh mustard greens in their own delicious potliquor. He had sown the mustard’s tiny seeds himself—in garden soil mixed with rich black dirt dug from the cow pasture—and the tender greens had swiftly, luxuriously sprung up. He loved no less the way she cooked the long, slender field peas that grew on the vines coiling around the sweet corn’s stalks. She never gave him any obvious meat of the pig, though he wasn’t sure how she knew that. But whatever she gave him, he would always wipe off the plate carefully with a rag before returning it. Most often he would find her at her “stove”—a thing of iron that contained fire—but sometimes she would be on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor with oak ashes and a hard-bristled brush. Though at times he wanted to say something to her, he could never muster a better expression of his appreciation than a grunt—which now she returned.
One Sunday after supper, Kunta had gotten up to stretch his legs and was walking around the fiddler’s hut idly patting himself on the belly when the brown one, who had been talking steadily all through the meal, interrupted his monologue to exclaim, “Looka here, you startin’ to fill out!” He was right. Kunta hadn’t looked—or felt—better since he left Juffure.
After months of incessant plaiting to strengthen his fingers, the fiddler, too, felt better than he had in a long time—since his hand was broken—and in the evenings he had begun to play on his instrument again. Holding the peculiar thing in his cupped hand and under his chin, the fiddler raked its strings with his wand—which seemed to be made of long, fine hairs—and the usual evening audience would shout and break into applause when each song had finished. “Dat ain’t nothin’!” he would say disgustedly. “Fingers ain’t nimble yet.”
Later, when they were alone, Kunta asked haltingly, “What is nimble?”
The fiddler flexed and wiggled his fingers. “Nimble! Nimble. Get it?” Kunta nodded.
“You a lucky nigger, what you is,” the fiddler went on. “Jes’ piddlin’’roun’ eve’yday in dat garden. Ain’t hardly nobody got a job dat sof ’ ’cept on plantations whole lot bigger’n dis.”
Kunta thought he understood, and he didn’t like it. “Work hard,” he said. And nodding at the fiddler on his chair, he added, “Harder dan dat.”
The fiddler grinned. “You awright, African!”
CHAPTER 53
The “months,” as they called moons here, were passing more quickly now, and before long