Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [162]
On his social calls, the massa went most often to visit his parents at Enfield, their plantation on the borderline between King William County and King and Queen County. Approaching it—like all the Waller family big houses—the buggy would roll down a long double avenue of huge old trees and stop beneath a massive black walnut tree on the wide front lawn. The house, which was much bigger and richer looking than the massa’s, sat on a slight rise overlooking a narrow, slow-moving river.
During his first few months of driving, the cooks at the various plantations in whose kitchens Kunta was fed—but most especially Hattie Mae, the fat, haughty, shiny-black cook at Enfield—had eyed him critically, as fiercely possessive of their domains as Bell was at Massa Waller’s. Confronted with Kunta’s stiff dignity and reserve, though, none quite ventured to challenge him in any way directly, and he would silently clean his plate of whatever they served him, excepting any pork. Eventually, however, they began to get used to his quiet ways, and after his sixth or seventh visit, even the cook at Enfield apparently decided that he was fit for her to talk to and deigned to speak to him.
“You know where you at?” she asked him suddenly one day in the middle of his meal. He didn’t answer, and she didn’t wait for one.
“Dis here’s de first Newnited States house of de Wallers. Nobody but Wallers lived here for a hunerd an’ fifty years!” She said that when Enfield had been built it was only half its present size, but that later another house had been brought up from near the river and added on. “Our fireplace is bricks brought in boats from England,” she said proudly. Kunta nodded politely as she droned on, but he was unimpressed.
Once in a while, Massa Waller would pay a visit to Newport, Kunta’s first destination as a driver; it seemed impossible to believe that an entire year had passed since then. And old uncle and aunt of the massa’s lived there in a house that looked to Kunta very much like Enfield. While the white folks ate in the dining room, the cook at Newport would feed Kunta in the kitchen, strutting around with a large ring of keys on a thin leather belt around the top of her apron. He had noticed by now that every senior housemaid wore such a key ring. On it, he had learned, in addition to her keys for the pantry, the smokehouse, the cooling cellar, and other food-storage places, were the keys to all the rooms and closets in the big house. Every cook he’d met would walk in a way to make those keys jangle as a badge of how important and trusted she was, but none jangled them louder than this one.
On a recent visit, having decided—like the cook at Enfield—that he might be all right after all, she pressed a finger to her lips and led Kunta on tiptoe to a small room farther within the big house. Making a great show of unlocking the door with one of the keys at her waist, she led him inside and pointed to one wall. On it was a mounted display of what she explained were the Wallers’ coat of arms, their silver seal, a suit of armor, silver pistols, a silver sword, and the prayer book of the original Colonel Waller.
Pleased at the ill-concealed amazement on Kunta’s face, she exclaimed, “Ol’ colonel built dat Enfield, but he buried right here.” And walking outside, she showed him the grave and its lettered tombstone. After a minute, as Kunta stared at it, she asked with a rehearsed casualness, “You wanna know what it say?” Kunta nodded his head, and rapidly she “read” the long since memorized inscription: “Sacred to Memory of Colonel John Waller, Gentleman, third son of John Waller and Mary Key, who settled in Virginia in 1635, from Newport Paganel, Buckinghamshire.”
Several cousins of massa’s, Kunta soon discovered, lived at Prospect Hill, also in Spotsylvania County. Like Enfield, the big house here was one and a half stories high, as were nearly all very old big houses, the cook at Prospect Hill told him, because the king had put an extra tax on two-story houses.