Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [169]
It was all he could do to stand still until the door closed behind the massa. Then Kunta tossed the reins to the waiting stableboy and raced as fast as his half foot would let him around the side of the house and across the backyard. The sound, which was getting louder and louder, seemed to be coming from the middle of a crowd of blacks stomping and clapping beneath a string of lanterns that the Wallers had allowed the slaves to put up for their own Thanksgiving celebration. Ignoring their indignant exclamations as he pushed his way through them, Kunta burst into the open circle, and there he was: a lean, gray-haired, very black man squatted on the ground pounding on his qua-qua between a mandolin player and two beef-bone clackers. As they flicked glances up at the sudden commotion, Kunta’s eyes met his—and a moment later they all but sprang toward each other, the other blacks gawking, then snickering, as they embraced.
“Ah-salakium-salaam!”
“Malakium-salaam!”
The words came as if neither of them had ever left Africa. Kunta shoved the older man away to arm’s length. “I am’t seed you here befo’,” he exclaimed.
“Jes’ sol’ here from ’nother plantation,” the other said.
“My massa yo’ massa’s young’un,” said Kunta. “I drives his buggy.”
The men around them had begun muttering with impatience for the music to start again, and they were obviously uncomfortable at this open display of Africanness. Both Kunta and the qua-qua player knew they mustn’t aggravate the others any further, or one of them might report to the white folks.
“I be back!” said Kunta.
“Salakium-salaam!” said the qua-qua player, squatting back down.
Kunta stood there for a moment as the music began again, then turned abruptly, through the crowd with his head down—frustrated and embarrassed—and went to wait in the buggy for Massa Waller.
Over the weeks that followed, Kunta’s mind tumbled with questions about the qua-qua player. What was his tribe? Clearly he was not Mandinka, nor of any of the other tribes Kunta had ever seen or heard about either in The Gambia or on the big canoe. His gray hair said that he was much older; Kunta wondered if he had as many rains as Omoro would by now. And how had each of them sensed that the other was a servant of Allah? The qua-qua player’s ease with toubob speech as well as with Islam said that he had been a long time in the white folks’ land, probably for more rains than Kunta had. The qua-qua player said that he had recently been sold to Massa Waller’s father; where in toubob land had he been for all those rains before now?
Kunta reviewed in his mind the other Africans he had chanced to see—most of them, unfortunately, when he was with the massa and couldn’t afford even to nod at them, let alone meet them—in his three rains of driving the massa’s buggy. Among them had even been one or two who were unquestionably Mandinkas. Most of the Africans he had glimpsed as they drove past the Saturday morning slave auctions. But after what had happened one morning about six months before, he had decided never to drive the buggy anywhere near the auctions if he could possibly avoid it without massa suspecting his reason. As they drove by that day, a chained young Jola woman had begun shrieking piteously. Turning to see what was the matter, he saw the wide eyes of the Jola woman fixed on him on the high seat of the buggy, her mouth open in a scream, beseeching him to help her. In bitter, flooding shame, Kunta had lashed his whip down across both horses’ rumps and they all but bucked ahead, jolting the massa backward, terrifying Kunta at what he had done, but the massa had said nothing.
Once Kunta had met an African slave in the county seat while he was waiting for the massa one afternoon, but neither one of them could understand the other’s tribal language,