Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [150]
“Looka here, I second fiddled with the best! You ever hear of Sy Gilliat from Richmond?” He hesitated. “Naw, ’course you ain’t! Well, dat’s de fiddlin’est slave nigger in de worl’, and I fiddled wid him. Looka here, he play for nothin’ but big white folks’ balls an’ dances, I mean like the Hoss Racin’ Ball every year, and like dat. You oughta see him wid dat gold-painted fiddle of his an’ him wearin’ court dress wid his brown wig an’ Lawd, dem manners! Nigger name London Briggs behin’ us playin’ flute an’ clarinet! De minuets, de reels, de congos, hornpipes, jigs, even jes’ caperin’’bout—don’t care what it was, we’d have dem white folks dancin’ up a storm!”
The fiddler carried on like this for the next hour—until the alcohol wore off—telling Kunta of the famous singing slaves who worked in Richmond’s tobacco factories; of other widely known slave musicians who played the “harpsichord,” the “pianoforte,” and the “violin”—whatever they were—who had learned to play by listening to toubob musicians from someplace called “Europe,” who had been hired to come to plantations to teach the massas’ children.
The following crispy cold morning saw the starting of new tasks. Kunta watched as the women mixed hot melted tallow with wood-ash lye and water, boiling and stirring, then cooling the thick brown mixture in wooden trays to let it set for four nights and three days before they cut it into oblong cakes of hard, brown soap. To his complete distaste, he saw men fermenting apples, peaches, and persimmons into something foul-smelling that they called “brandy,” which they put into bottles and barrels. Others mixed gluey red clay, water, and dried hog hair to press into cracks that had appeared in their huts. Women stuffed some mattresses with cornshucks like Kunta’s, and some others with the moss he had seen drying; and a new mattress for the massa was filled with goose feathers.
The slave who built things from wood was making new tubs in which clothes would be soaked in soapy water before being boiled and lumped onto a wooden block to be beaten with a stick. The man who made things with leather—horse collars, harnesses, and shoes—was now busily tanning cows’ hides. And women were dyeing into different colors the white cotton cloth the massa had bought to make clothes with. And just as it was in Juffure, all of the nearby vines, bushes, and fences were draped with drying cloths of red, yellow, and blue.
With each passing day, the air became colder and colder, the sky grayer and grayer, until soon the ground was covered once again with snow and ice that Kunta found as unpleasant as it was extraordinary. And before long the other blacks were beginning to talk with great excitement about “Christmas,” which he had heard of before. It seemed to have to do with singing, dancing, eating, and the giving of gifts, which sounded fine—but it also seemed to involve their Allah, so even though Kunta really enjoyed by now the gatherings at the fiddler’s, he decided it would be best to stay to himself until the pagan festivities were safely over. He didn’t even visit the fiddler, who looked curiously at Kunta the next time he saw him, but said nothing about it.
Thence swiftly came another springtime season, and as he knelt planting among his rows, Kunta remembered how lush the fields around Juffure always looked at this time of year. And he recalled as a second-kafo boy how happily he had gone prancing out behind the hungry goats in this green season. Here in this place the black “young’uns” were helping to chase and catch the baaaing, bounding “sheep,” as the animals were called, and then fighting over whose turn was next to sit on the head of a desperately struggling sheep while a man snipped off the thick, dirty wool with a pair of shears. The fiddler explained to Kunta that the wool would be taken off somewhere to be cleaned and “carded into bats,” which then would be returned for the women to spin woolen thread from which they would weave cloth for the making of winter clothes.
The garden’s plowing, planting, and cultivating