Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [166]
“Dey’s what you call indentured white folks,” his friend the cook explained when he expressed his amazement to her a few minutes later. “Been here ’bout two months now. Dey’s a fambly from someplace ’crost de big water. Massa pay dere way here on de boat, so dey gotta pay him back by workin’ seben years as slaves. Den dey free jus’ like any other white folks.”
“Dey live in slave row?” asked Kunta.
“Dey got dey own cabin off a ways from our’n, but it jus’ as tumbledown as de res’. And dey eats de same mess we does. An’ don’t get treated no different out in de fiel’.”
“What dey like?” asked Kunta.
“Dey sticks pretty much to deyselves, but dey awright. Ain’t like us’ns, but does dey job and don’t make no trouble for nobody.”
It seemed to Kunta that these white slaves were better off than most of the free whites he’d seen on the massa’s rounds. With often as many as a dozen grown-ups and children packed on top of each other in one-room hovels on tiny patches of red clay or swampland, they scratched out a living so meager that the blacks laughingly sang a song about them: “Not po’ white, please, O Lawd, fer I’d ruther be a nigger.” Though he had never seen it for himself, Kunta had heard that some of these whites were so poor that they even had to eat dirt. They were certainly skinny enough, and few of them—even the “chilluns”—had any teeth left. And they smelled like they slept with their flea-bitten hounds, which many of them did. Trying to breathe through his mouth as he waited in the buggy outside their shacks while the massa treated one of them for scurvy or pellagra, watching the women and the children plowing and chopping while the menfolk lay under a tree with a brown jug of liquor and their dogs, all scratching, it was easy for Kunta to understand why plantation-owning massas and even their slaves scorned and sneered at them as “lazy, shiftless, no-count white trash.”
In fact, as far as he was concerned, that was a charitable description of heathens so shameless that they managed to commit every conceivable offense against the standards of decency upheld by the most sacrilegious Moslem. On his trips with the massa to neighboring towns, there would always be packs of them idling around the courthouse or the saloon even in the morning—dressed in their sweat-stained, greasy, threadbare castoffs, reeking of the filthy tobacco weed, which they puffed incessantly, swigging “white lightning” from bottles they carried in their pockets, laughing and yelling raucously at one another as they knelt on the ground in alleys playing cards and dice for money.
By midafternoon, they would be making complete fools of themselves: bursting drunkenly into song, cavorting wildly up and down the street, whistling and calling out indecently to women who passed by, arguing and cursing loudly among themselves, and finally starting fights that would begin with a shove or a punch—while huge crowds of others like them would gather round to cheer them on—and end with ear-biting, eye-gouging, kicking of private parts, and bloody wounds that would almost always call for the massa’s urgent attention. Even the wild animals of his homeland, it seemed to Kunta, had more dignity than these creatures.
Bell was always telling stories about poor whites getting flogged for beating their wives and being sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for rape. Almost as often, she told about one of them stabbing or shooting another one to death; for that they might be forced to serve six months as a slave. But as much as they loved violence among themselves, Kunta knew from personal experience that they loved violence against black people even more. It was a crowd of poor whites—male and female—that had hooted and jeered and jabbed with sticks at him and his chain mates when they were taken from the big canoe. It was a poor-white overseer