Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [181]
Bell asked him to sit in a rocking chair that was nearer the fireplace. He did, sitting down carefully; for he had never been in one of these contraptions before, but was trying hard to act casual about the whole visit as Bell seemed to be.
“I been so busy I ain’t even lit de fire,” she said, and Kunta all but leaped up out of the chair, glad to have something he could do with his hands. Striking the flint sharply against the piece of iron, he lighted the fluffy cotton that Bell had already placed under fat pinesticks beneath the oak logs, and quickly they caught fire.
“Don’t know how come I ax you to come here nohow, place in a mess, an’ I ain’t got nothin’ ready,” Bell said, bustling about her pots.
“Ain’t no hurry wid me,” Kunta made himself respond. But her already cooked chicken with dumplings, which she well knew that Kunta loved, was soon bubbling. And when she had served him, she chided him for gobbling so. But Kunta didn’t quit until the third helping, with Bell insisting that there was still a little more in the pot.
“Naw, I’s fit to bus’,” said Kunta truthfully. And after a few more minutes of small talk, he got up and said he had to get on home. Pausing in the doorway, he looked at Bell, and Bell looked at him, and neither of them said anything, and then Bell turned her eyes away, and Kunta cripped on down along slave row to his own cabin.
He awakened more lighthearted than he had felt since leaving Africa—but he told no one why he was acting so uncharacteristically cheerful and outgoing. But he hardly needed to. Word began to get around that Kunta had actually been seen smiling and even laughing in Bell’s kitchen. And at first every week or so, then twice a week, Bell would invite Kunta home for supper. Though he thought that once in a while he should make some excuse, he could never bring himself to say no. And always Bell cooked things Kunta had let her know were also grown in The Gambia, such as black-eyed peas, okra, a stew made of peanuts, or yams baked with butter.
Most of their conversations were still one-sided, but neither one seemed to mind. Her favorite topic, of course, was Massa Waller, and it never ceased to amaze Kunta how much Bell knew that he didn’t about the man he spent so much more time with than she did.
“Massa funny ’bout different, things,” Bell said. “Like he believe in banks, all right enough, but he keep money hid, too; nobody else don’t know where but me. He funny ’bout his niggers, too. He do ’bout anything for ’em, but if one mess up, he’ll sell ’im jes’ like he done Luther.
“’Nother thing massa funny ’bout,” Bell went on. “He won’t have a yaller nigger on his place. You ever notice, ceptin’ fo’ de fiddler, ain’t nothin’ here but black niggers? Massa tell anybody jes’ what he think ’bout it, too. I done heared ’im tellin’ some of de biggest mens in dis county, I mean ones dat got plenty yaller niggers deyselves, dat too many white mens is havin’ slave chilluns, so dey ain’t doin’ nothin’ but buyin’ an’ sellin’ dey own blood, an’ it need to be stopped.”
Though he never showed it, and he kept up a steady drone of “uh-huh’s” when Bell was talking, Kunta would sometimes listen with one ear while he thought about something else. Once when she cooked him a hoe cake, using meal she had made in the mortar and pestle he had carved for her, Kunta was watching her in his mind’s eye beating the couscous for breakfast in some African village while she stood at the stove telling him that hoe cakes got their name from slaves cooking them on the flat edge of a hoe when they were working out in the fields.
Now and then Bell even gave Kunta some special dish to take to the fiddler and the gardener. He wasn’t seeing as much of them as he had, but they seemed to understand, and the time they spent apart even seemed to increase the pleasure of conversation with them whenever they got