Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [165]
Hardly feeling the reins in his hands, Kunta was unable to comprehend that they could seem so incredibly unaware of him. His mind tumbled with things that he too had heard during the nearly two years now that he had been driving the buggy for the massa. He had heard many a whispering of cooks and maids grinning and bowing as they served food containing some of their own bodily wastes. And he had been told of white folks’ meals containing bits of ground glass, or arsenic, or other poisons. He had even heard stories about white babies going into mysterious fatal comas without any trace of the darning needle that had been thrust by house-maids into their soft heads where the hair was thickest. And a big-house cook had pointed out to him the former hut of an old mammy nurse who had been beaten badly and then sold away after severely injuring a young massa who had hit her.
It seemed to Kunta that black women here were even more defiant and rebellious than the men. But perhaps it only appeared that way because the women were more direct and personal about it; they would usually take revenge against white folks who had wronged them. The men tended to be more secretive and less vengeful. The fiddler had told Kunta about a white overseer who had been hanged from a tree by the father of a black girl he had been caught raping; but violence against whites by black men was most often ignited by news of white atrocities or slave rebellions and the like.
There had never been any uprisings, or even any incidents, at the Waller place, but right there in Spotsylvania County, Kunta had heard about some blacks who had hidden muskets and other weapons and vowed to kill their massas or mistresses, or both, and put their plantations to the torch. And there were some men among those he worked with who would meet in secret to discuss anything good or bad that happened to slaves elsewhere and to consider any action they might take to help; but so far they had only talked.
Kunta had never been invited to join them—probably, he thought, because they felt that his foot would make him useless to them in an actual revolt. Whatever their reasons for leaving him out, he felt it was just as well. Though he wished them luck in whatever they might decide to do, Kunta didn’t believe that a rebellion could ever succeed against such overwhelming odds. Perhaps, as Massa Waller had said, blacks might soon outnumber whites, but they could never overpower them—not with pitchforks, kitchen knives, and stolen muskets against the massed armies of the white nation and its cannons.
But their worst enemy, it seemed to Kunta, was themselves. There were a few young rebels among them, but the vast majority of slaves were the kind that did exactly what was expected of them, usually without even having to be told; the kind white folks could—and did—trust with the lives of their own children, the kind that looked the other way when the white man took their women into haymows. Why, there were some right there on the plantation he was sure the massa could leave unguarded for a year and find them there—still working—when he returned. It certainly wasn’t because they were content; they complained constantly among themselves. But never did more than a handful so much as protest, let alone resist.
Perhaps he was becoming like them, Kunta thought. Or perhaps he was simply growing up. Or was he just growing old? He didn’t know; but he knew that he had lost his taste for fighting and running, and he wanted to be left alone, he wanted to mind his own business. Those who didn’t had a way of winding up dead.
CHAPTER 59
Dozing off in the shade of an oak tree in the backyard of a plantation where the massa was visiting to treat an entire family that had come down with a fever, Kunta woke up with a start when the evening conch horn blew to call the slaves in from the fields. He was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes when they reached the yard. Glancing