Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [191]
It was during one of the brief intervals between the pains that Bell turned her sweating face to Kunta and said, “It’s something I oughta tol’ you ’fore now. I’s already done had two chilluns, long time ago, ’fore I ever come here, ’fore I was sixteen years ol’.” Kunta stood looking down at the anguished Bell, astounded. Had he known this—no, he would have married her anyway—but he felt betrayed that she hadn’t told him before. Making herself gasp out the words between contractions, Bell told him about the two daughters from whom she had been sold away. “Jes’ nothin’ but babies is all dey was.” She began to weep. “One was jes’ startin’ to walk good, an’ de other’n weren’t a year old hardly—.” She started to go on, but a spasm of pain clamped her mouth shut and tightened her grip on his hand. When it finally subsided, her grip didn’t loosen; she looked up at him through her tears and—reading his racing thoughts—said, “Case you wond’rin’, dere daddy weren’t no massa or no oberseer. Was a field nigger ’bout my age. We didn’t know no better.”
The pains came again, much sooner than before, and her nails dug into his palm as her mouth opened wide in a soundless scream. Kunta rushed from the cabin down to Sister Mandy’s hut, where he banged the door and called to her hoarsely, then ran on as fast as he could go to the big house. His knocking and calling finally brought Massa Waller, who needed but one glance at Kunta to say, “I’ll be right there!”
Hearing Bell’s anguished moans rise into shrieks that went ripping through the quiet of slave row pushed from Kunta’s mind any thought of what Bell had revealed to him. As much as he wanted to be by Bell’s side, he was glad Sister Mandy had ordered him outside, where he squatted at the door trying to imagine what must be going on inside. He had never learned much about childbirth in Africa, since that was considered women’s affair, but he had heard that a woman birthed a child while kneeling over cloths spread on the floor, then sat in a pan of water to clean away the blood, and he wondered if that’s what was happening now.
It occurred to Kunta that far away in Juffure, Binta and Omoro were becoming grandparents, and it saddened him to know not only that they would never see his man-child—or he them—but also that they would never know he’d had one.
Hearing the first sharp cries of another voice, Kunta sprang upright. A few minutes later, the massa emerged looking haggard. “She had a hard time. She’s forty-three years old,” he said to Kunta. “But she’ll be fine in a couple of days.” The massa gestured toward the cabin door. “Give Mandy a little while to clean up; then you go on in there and see your baby girl.”
A girlchild! Kunta was still struggling to compose himself when Sister Mandy appeared at the doorway, smiling and beckoning him inside. Cripping through the front room, he pushed aside the curtain at the bedroom door and there they were. As he moved quietly to her side, a floorboard squeaked and Bell opened her eyes, managing a weak smile. Absently, he found her hand and squeezed, but he scarcely felt it, for he couldn’t stop staring at the face of the infant who lay beside her. It was almost as black as his, and the features were unmistakably Mandinka. Though it was a girlchild—which must be the will of Allah—it was nonetheless a child, and he felt a deep pride and serenity in the knowledge that the blood of the Kintes, which had coursed down through the centuries like a mighty river, would continue to flow for still another generation.
Kunta’s next thoughts, standing there at the bedside, were of a fitting name for his child. Though he knew enough not to ask the massa for eight days off from work to spend deciding on it, as a new father would in Africa, he knew that the matter would require long and serious