Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [190]
It had been one such night when, about an hour after she’d gone to bed, Kunta was snapped back to the cabin by moans from the bedroom. Was it time? Rushing in, he found her still asleep, but rolling back and forth on the verge of screaming. When he leaned over to touch her cheek, she sat bolt upright there in the darkness, soaked with sweat and breathing hard.
“Lawd, I’m scairt to death for dis baby in my belly!” she said as she put her arms around him. Kunta didn’t understand until she composed herself enough to tell how she had dreamed that at a white folks’ party game, they had announced that the first prize would be the next black baby to be born on that massa’s plantation. Bell was so distraught that Kunta found himself in the unaccustomed role of calming her with assurances that she knew Massa Waller never would do such a thing. He made her agree with that, then climbed into bed alongside her, and finally she went back to sleep.
But Kunta didn’t; he lay thinking for quite sometime of how he had heard of such things being done—of unborn black babies being given as presents, wagered as gambling bets at card tables and cockfights. The fiddler had told him how the dying massa of a pregnant fifteen-year-old black girl named Mary had willed as slaves to each of his five daughters one apiece of her first five babies. He had heard of black children being security for loans, of creditors claiming them while they were yet in their mother’s belly, of debtors selling them in advance to raise cash. At that time in the Spotsylvania County seat slave auctions, he knew the average price that was being asked and paid for a healthy black baby past six months of age—when it was assumed then that it would live—was around two hundred dollars.
None of this was very far from his mind when Bell laughingly told him one evening in the cabin about three months later that during the day the inquisitive Missy Anne had demanded to know why Bell’s belly was growing so big. “I tol’ Missy Anne, ‘I got a l’il biscuit in de oven, honey.’” Kunta was hardly able to keep Bell from seeing his anger at the attention and affection she lavished on that pampered, doll-like child, who was to him but another in the seemingly endless parade of “l’il missies” and “l’il massas” he had seen at so many big houses. Now with Bell about to have a child of her own—and his own—it incensed him to think about the firstborn son of Kunta and Bell Kinte romping in “play” with toubob children who would grow up to become their massas—and sometimes even the fathers of their own children. And Kunta had been to more than a few plantations where one of the slave children was almost the same color as his massas’—in fact, they often looked like twins—because both of them had the same white father. Before Kunta let anything like that happen to Bell, he vowed that he would kill the massa rather than become one of those men he had seen holding their wife’s “high-yaller” baby and living somehow with the knowledge that if he uttered publicly so much as a complaining word, he would certainly get beaten, if not worse.
Kunta thought about how “high-yaller” slave girls brought high prices at the county seat slave auctions. He had seen them being sold, and he had heard many times about the purposes for which they were bought. And he thought of the many stories he had heard about “high-yaller” man-children—about how they were likely to get mysteriously taken away as babies never to be seen again, because of the white fear that otherwise they might grow up into white-looking men and escape to where they weren’t known and mix the blackness in their blood with that of white women. Every time Kunta thought about any aspect of blood mixing, he would thank Allah that he and Bell could share the comfort of knowing that whatever otherwise might prove to be His will, their man-child was going to be black.
It was early one night in September of 1790 when the labor pains began to take hold of Bell. But she wouldn’t yet let Kunta go for the massa, who had said that