Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [161]
“Newport ain’t nowhere to drive, jes’ right up next to Spotsylvania Courthouse,” said the old gardener. “It’s ONE a de ol’ Waller family big houses.”
The fiddler—who by this time had been told of his own new duties as well as Kunta’s—was walking around inspecting him with an expression that revealed transparently both his pleasure and his jealousy. “You a sho’ nuff special nigger now, no two ways’bout it. Jes’ don’t let it git to yo’ head.”
It was unnecessary advice for one who—even after all this time—found no dignity in anything he was made to do for the white man. But whatever small excitement Kunta felt at the prospect of being able to leave his garden behind and widen his horizons—as his uncles Janneh and Saloum had done—was soon forgotten in the heat of his new duties.
Summoned by his patients at any hour of the day or night, Massa Waller would call Kunta rushing from his hut to hitch the horses for breakneck rides to homes sometimes many miles from the plantation down narrow, twisting roads that were hardly smoother than the countryside around them. Lurching and careening over ruts and potholes, laying on the whip until the horses heaved for breath, Massa Waller clinging to his canopied rear seat, Kunta showed a knack for the reins that somehow saw them safely to their destination even in the spring thaw, when the red-clay roads turned into treacherous rivers of mud.
Early one morning, the massa’s brother John came galloping in, frantically reporting that his wife’s labor pains had begun, although it was two months before the birth had been expected. Massa John’s horse was too exhausted to return without rest, and Kunta had driven both of them back to Massa John’s barely in the nick of time. Kunta’s own overheated horses hadn’t cooled down enough for him to give them water when he heard the shrill cries of a newborn baby. It was a five-pound girl, the massa told him on their way home, and they were going to call her Anne.
And so it went. During that same frantic summer and fall, there was a plague of black vomiting that claimed victims all over the county—so many that Massa Waller and Kunta couldn’t keep up with them, and soon drove themselves into fever. Downing copious dosages of quinine to keep them going, they saved more lives than they lost. But Kunta’s own life became a blur of countless big-house kitchens, catnaps on pallets in strange huts or in haymows, and endless hours of sitting in the buggy outside shanties and grand homes listening to the same cries of pain while he waited for the massa to reappear so that they could return home—or more often drive on to the next patient.
But Massa Waller didn’t travel always in the midst of crisis. Sometimes entire weeks would pass without anything more urgent than routine house calls or visits to one of a seemingly inexhaustible assortment of relatives and friends whose plantations were located somewhere within driving distance. On such occasions—particularly in the spring and summer, when the meadows were thick with flowers, wild strawberries, and blackberry thickets, and the fences were trellised with lushly growing vines—the buggy would roll along leisurely behind its finely matched pair of bay horses, Massa Waller sometimes nodding off under the black canopy that shielded him from the sun. Everywhere were quail whirring up, brilliant red cardinals hopping about, meadowlarks and whippoorwills calling out. Now and then a bullsnake sunning on the road, disturbed by the oncoming buggy, would go slithering for safety, or a buzzard would go flapping heavily away from its dead rabbit. But Kunta’s favorite sight was a lonely old oak or cedar in the middle of a field; it would send his mind back to the baobabs of Africa, and to the elders’ saying that wherever one stood alone,