Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [189]
Bell could have been reading the thought he was having at that moment about himself, and it hit him like a fist. He was too old to run away again and too beat up. And scared. All the pain and terror of those terrible days and nights of running came back: the blistered feet, the bursting lungs, the bleeding hands, the tearing thorns, the baying of the hounds, the snarling jaws, the gunshots, the sting of the lash, the falling ax. Without even realizing it, Kunta had plunged into a black depression. Knowing that she had aroused it without meaning to, but knowing also that she’d only make it worse by talking about it any further, even to apologize, Bell simply got up and went to bed.
When he finally realized that she was gone, Kunta felt badly that he had cut her out of his thoughts. And it pained him to think how grievously he had underestimated her and the other blacks.
Though they never showed it except to those they loved, and sometimes not even then, he realized at last that they felt—and hated—no less than he the oppressiveness under which they all lived. He wished he could find a way to tell her how sorry he was, how he felt her pain, how grateful he was to feel her love, how strong he felt the bond between them growing deep within himself. Quietly he got up, went into the bedroom, took off his clothes, got into bed, took her in his arms, and made love to her—and she to him—with a kind of desperate intensity.
CHAPTER 68
For several weeks, it seemed to Kunta that Bell had been acting very oddly. For one thing, she was hardly talking, but she wasn’t even in a bad mood. And she was casting what he felt were peculiar looks at him, then sighing loudly when he stared back. And she had begun smiling mysteriously to herself while rocking in her chair, sometimes even humming tunes. Then one night, just after they’d blown out the candle and climbed into bed, she grasped Kunta’s hand and placed it tenderly on her stomach. Something inside her moved beneath his hand. Kunta sprang up fit to split with joy.
Over the next days, he hardly noticed where he was driving. For all he knew, the massa could have been pulling the buggy and the horses sitting on the seat behind him, so filled was his mind’s eye with visions of Bell paddling down the bolong to the rice fields with his man-child bundled snugly on her back. He thought of little else but the myriad significances of this coming firstborn, even as for Binta and Omoro he had been the firstborn. He vowed that just as they and others had done for him in Juffure, he was going to teach this man-child to be a true man, no matter what trials and hazards that might involve here in the land of the toubob. For it was the job of a father to be as a giant tree to his man-child. For where girlchildren simply ate food until they grew big enough to marry and go away—and girlchildren were their mothers’ concerns, in any case—it was the man-child who carried on his family’s name and reputation, and when the time came that his parents were old and tottering, it would be the well-reared man-child who put nothing before taking care of them.
Bell’s pregnancy took Kunta’s mind even farther back to Africa than his encounter with the Ghanaian had done. One night, in fact, he completely forgot Bell was in the cabin while he patiently counted out all the pebbles in his gourd, discovering with astonishment that he hadn’t seen his homeland now for exactly 22½ rains. But most evenings she would be talking almost steadily while he sat there hearing less than usual and gazing off at nothing. “He jes’ go off into his Africanisms,” Bell would tell Aunt Sukey, and after a while Bell would rise unnoticed from her chair, quietly leave the room—muttering