Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [168]
She glanced up from the stove to see if Kunta was smiling. He wasn’t. But she would have fallen into her soup if he had been. She had seen him smile just once—when he heard about a slave he knew from a nearby plantation who had escaped safely to the North.
“I hears fiddler plannin’ to save up what he earn an’ buy his freedom from de massa,” she went on.
“Time he got enough to do dat,” said Kunta gravely, “he gonna be too ol’ to leave his hut.”
Bell laughed so hard she almost did fall into her soup.
If the fiddler never earned his freedom, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying, Kunta decided, after hearing him play at a party one night not long afterward. He had dropped off the massa and was talking with the other drivers under a tree out on the darkened lawn when the band—led by the fiddler, obviously in rare form tonight—began to play a Virginia reel so lively that even the white folks couldn’t keep their feet still.
From where he sat, Kunta could see the silhouettes of young couples whirling from the great hall out onto the veranda through one door and back in again through another. When the dancing was over, everybody lined up at a long table glowing with candles and loaded with more food than slave row got to see in a year. And when they’d had their fill—the host’s fat daughter came back three times for more—the cook sent out a trayful of leftovers and a pitcher of lemonade for the drivers. Thinking that the massa might be getting ready to leave, Kunta wolfed down a chicken leg and a delicious sticky sweet creamy something or other that one of the other drivers called “a ay-clair.” But the massas, in their white suits, stood around talking quietly for hours, gesturing with hands that held long cigars and sipping now and then from glasses of wine that glinted in the light from the chandelier that hung above them, while their wives, in fine gowns, fluttered their handkerchiefs and simpered behind their fans.
The first time he had taken the massa to one of these “high-falutin’ to-dos,” as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion—but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn’t believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn’t live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it’s possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother’s milk made possible the life of privilege they led.
Kunta had considered sharing these thoughts with Bell or the old gardener, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to find the right words in the toubob tongue. Anyway, both of them had lived here all their lives and couldn’t be expected to see it as he did, with the eyes of an outsider—one who had been born free. So, as it had always been when he thought about such things, he kept it to himself—and found himself wishing that, even after all these years, he didn’t still feel so alone.
About three months later Massa Waller—“’long wid jes’ ’bout ev’eybody who’s anybody in de state a Virginia,” according to the fiddler—was invited to attend the Thanksgiving Ball his parents held each year at Enfield. Arriving late because the massa, as usual, had to stop off and see a patient on the way, Kunta could hear that the party was well under way as they clip-clopped up the tree-lined driveway toward the big house, which was lit up from top to bottom. Pulling up at the front door, he leaped down to stand at attention while the doorman