Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [163]
“You ain’t gwine upstairs, but no reason you cain’t know us got four-poster canopy beds up dere so tall dey has to use stepladders, an’ under dem is chillun’s trundle beds. An’ lemme tell you sump’n. Dem beds, de chimney bricks, house beams, hinges on de do’s, ev’eything usn’s got in here was made or did by slave niggers.”
In the backyard, she showed Kunta the first weaving house he had ever seen, and nearby were the slave quarters—which were about the same as theirs—and below them was a pond, and farther beyond was a slaves’ graveyard. “I knows you ain’t want to see dat,” she said, reading his thoughts. He wondered if she also knew how strange and sad he found it to hear her talking—as so many others did—about “usn’s,” and acting as if she owned the plantation she lived on instead of the other way around.
CHAPTER 58
“How come massa been seein’ so much a dat no-good brother a his las’ few months?” asked Bell one evening after Kunta trudged in after arriving home from a visit to Massa John’s plantation. “I thought they was no love los’ ’tween dem two.”
“Look to me like massa jes’ gone crazy ’bout dat l’il ol’ gal baby dey got,” said Kunta wearily.
“She sho is a cute l’il thin’,” said Bell. After a thoughtful pause, she added, “Reckon Missy Anne seem to massa like dat l’il gal of his own he los’.”
That hadn’t occurred to Kunta, who still found it difficult to think of toubob as actual human beings.
“She gon’ be a whole year ol’ dis November, ain’t she?” asked Bell.
Kunta shrugged. All he knew was that all this running back and forth between the two plantations was wearing ruts in the road—and in his rump. Even though he had no use for Massa John’s sour-faced buggy driver Roosby, he told Bell he was grateful for the rest when the massa invited his brother to visit him for a change the week before.
As they were leaving that day, Bell recalled, the massa had looked as happy as his little niece when he tossed her in the air and caught her, squealing and laughing, before handing her up to her mother in the buggy. Kunta hadn’t noticed and he didn’t care—and he couldn’t understand why Bell did.
One afternoon a few days later, on their way home from a house call on one of Massa Waller’s patients at a plantation not far from Newport, the massa called out sharply to Kunta that he had just passed a turn they should have taken. Kunta had been driving without seeing, so shocked was he by what he had just seen at the patient’s big house. Even as he muttered an apology and turned the buggy hastily around, he couldn’t rid his mind of the sight of the heavy, very black, Wolof-looking woman he had seen in the backyard. She had been sitting on a stump, both of her large breasts hanging out, matter-of-factly suckling a white infant at one and a black infant at the other. It was a revolting sight to Kunta, and an astonishing one, but when he told the gardener about it later, the old man said, “Ain’t hardly a massa in Virginia ain’t sucked a black mammy, or leas’ was raised up by one.”
Almost as repulsive to Kunta was something he’d seen all too much of—the kind of demeaning “games” that went on at the plantations he visited between white and black “young’uns” of about the same age. The white children seemed to love nothing more than playing “massa” and pretending to beat the black ones, or playing “hosses” by climbing onto their backs and making them scramble about on all fours. Playing “school,” the white children would “teach” the black to read and write, with many cuffings and shriekings about their “dumbness.” Yet after lunch—which the black children would spend fanning the massa and his family with leafy branches to keep flies away—the white and black children would lie down together and take naps on pallets.
After seeing such things, Kunta would always tell Bell, the fiddler, and the gardener that he’d never