Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [164]
Sometimes, they told him, as the white and black “young’uns” grew up together, they became very attached to one another. Bell recalled two occasions when the massa had been called to attend white girls who had fallen ill when their lifelong black playmates had been sold away for some reason. Their massas and mistresses had been advised that their daughters’ hysterical grief was such that they might well grow weaker and weaker until they died, unless their little girlfriends were quickly found and bought back.
The fiddler said that a lot of black young’uns had learned to play the violin, the harpsichord, or other instruments by listening and observing as their white playmates were taught by music masters whom their rich massas had hired from across the big water. The old gardener said that on his second plantation a white and black boy grew up together until finally the young massa took the black one off with him to William and Mary College. “Ol’ Massa ain’t like it a’tall; but Ol’ Missy say, ‘It’s his nigger if he want to!’ An’ when dis nigger git back later on, he tol’ us in slave row dat dey was heap more young massas dere wid dey niggers as valets, sleepin’ right in de room wid ’em. He say heap of times dey take dey niggers wid ’em to classes, den dey argue later on whose nigger learnt de mos’. Dat nigger from my plantation couldn’t jes’ read an’ write, he could figger, too, an’ ’cite dem poems an’ stuff dey has at colleges. I got sol’ away roun’ den. Wonder whatever become a him?”
“Lucky if he ain’t dead,” the fiddler said. “’Cause white folks is quick to ’spicion a nigger like dat be de first to hatch a uprisin’ or a re-volt somewhere. Don’t pay to know too much, jes’ like I tol’ dis African here when he started drivin’ massa. Mouf shut an’ ears open, dat’s de way you learns de mos’—.”
Kunta found out how true that was soon afterward, when Massa Waller offered a ride to a friend of his from one plantation to another. Talking as if he wasn’t there—and saying things that Kunta would have found extraordinary even if they hadn’t known there was a black sitting right in front of them—they spoke about the frustrating slowness of their slaves’ separation of cotton fibers from the seeds by hand when demands for cotton cloth were rapidly increasing. They discussed how more and more, only the largest planters could afford to buy slaves at the robbery prices being demanded by slave traders and slave-ship agents.
“But even if you can afford it, bigness can create more problems than it solves,” said the massa. “The more slaves you’ve got, the likelier it is that some kind of revolt could be fomented.”
“We should never have let them bear arms against white men during the war,” said his companion. “Now we witness the result!” He went on to tell how, at a large plantation near Fredericksburg, some former slave soldiers had been caught just before a planned revolt, but only because a housemaid had gotten some wind of it and told her mistress in tears. “They had muskets, scythe blades, pitchforks, they had even made spears,” said the massa’s friend. “It’s said their plot was to kill and burn by night and hide by day and keep moving. One of their ringleaders said they expected to die, but not before they had done what the war had showed them they could do to white people.”
“They could have cost many innocent lives,” he heard the massa reply gravely. Massa Waller went on to say that he had read somewhere that over two hundred slave outbreaks had occurred since the first slaveships came. “I’ve been saying for years that our greatest danger is that slaves are coming to outnumber whites.”
“You’re right!” his friend exclaimed. “You don’t know who’s shuffling and grinning and planning to cut your throat. Even the ones right in your house. You simply can’t trust any of them. It’s in their very nature.”
His back as rigid as a board, Kunta heard the massa say, “As a doctor, more