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By Root 1375 0

who had applied the lash so freely to his back at Massa John’s plantation. It was “cracker white trash” slave catchers who had taken such glee in chopping off his foot. And he had heard about runaways captured by “pattyrollers” who hadn’t given them the choice he’d gotten and sent them back to their plantations torn and broken almost beyond recognition—and divested of their manhood. He had never been able to figure out why poor whites hated blacks so much. Perhaps, as the fiddler had told him, it was because of rich whites, who had everything they didn’t: wealth, power, and property, including slaves who were fed, clothed, and housed while they struggled to stay alive. But he could feel no pity for them, only a deep loathing that had turned icy cold with the passing of the years since the swing of an ax held by one of them had ended forever something more precious to him than his own life: the hope of freedom.

Later that summer of 1786, Kunta was returning to the plantation from the county seat with news that filled him with mixed feelings. White folks had been gathering at every corner waving copies of the Gazette and talking heatedly about a story in it that told of increasing numbers of Quakers who were not only encouraging slaves to escape, as they had been doing for several years, but had now also begun aiding, hiding, and guiding them to safety in the North. Poor whites and massas alike were calling furiously for the tarring and feathering, even hanging, of any known Quakers who might be even suspected of such seditious acts. Kunta didn’t believe the Quakers or anybody else would be able to help more than a few of them escape, and sooner or later they’d get caught themselves. But it couldn’t hurt to have white allies—they’d need them—and anything that got their owners so frightened couldn’t be all bad.

Later that night, after Kunta told everyone in slave row what he had seen and heard, the fiddler said that when he had been playing for a dance across the county the week before, he’d seen “dey moufs fallin’ open” when he cocked an ear close enough to overhear a lawyer there confiding to a group of big plantation owners that the will of a wealthy Quaker named John Pleasant had bequeathed freedom to his more than two hundred slaves. Bell, who arrived late, said that she had just overheard Massa Waller and some dinner guests bitterly discussing the fact that slavery had recently been abolished in a northern state called “Massachusetts,” and reports claimed that other states near there would do the same.

“What ’bolished mean?” asked Kunta.

The old gardener replied, “It mean one dese days all us niggers gon’ be free!”

CHAPTER 60

Even when he didn’t have anything he’d seen or heard in town to tell the others, Kunta had learned to enjoy sitting around the fire with them in front of the fiddler’s hut. But lately he’d found that he was spending less time talking with the fiddler—who had once been his only reason for being there—than with Bell and the old gardener. They hadn’t exactly cooled toward one another, but things just weren’t the same anymore, and that saddened him. It hadn’t brought them closer for the fiddler to get saddled with Kunta’s gardening duties, though he’d finally managed to get over it. But what he couldn’t seem to get used to was the fact that Kunta soon began to replace him as the plantation’s best-informed source of news and gossip from the outside.

No one could have accused the fiddler of becoming tight-lipped, but as time went on, his famous monologues became shorter and shorter and more and more infrequent; and he hardly ever played fiddle for them anymore. After he had acted unusually subdued one evening, Kunta mentioned it to Bell, wondering if he had done or said anything that might have hurt his feelings.

“Don’ flatter yourself,” she told him. “Day an’ night fo’ months now, fiddler been runnin’ back an’ fo’th ’crost de county playin’ fo’ de white folks. He jes’ too wo’ out to run his mouf like he use to, which is fine wid me. An’ he gittin’ dollar an’ a half a night now eve’y time