Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [193]
About noontime, Kunta saw Aunt Sukey taking in to Bell a pot of some food—some kind of soup, probably. It made him hungry to think about it; a few minutes later he went out behind the barn where some recently harvested sweet potatoes had been mounded under straw for curing, picked out four of the smaller ones, and—feeling very sorry for himself—ate them raw to appease his stomach.
Dusk was descending before he could bring himself to go home. When he opened the front door and walked in, there was no sound of response from Bell in the bedroom. She could be asleep, he thought, leaning over to light a candle on the table.
“Dat you?”
He could detect no special harshness in Bell’s tone. Grunting noncommittally, he picked up the candle, pushed aside the curtain, and went into the bedroom. In the ruddy glow, he could see that the expression on her face was as adamant as his own.
“Looka here, Kunta,” she said, wasting no time getting to the point, “it’s some things I knows ’bout our massa better’n you does. You git him mad wid dat African stuff, he sell us all three at de next county seat auction jes’ sho’s we born!”
Containing the anger within him as well as he could, Kunta stumbled for the words that could make Bell understand the absoluteness of his determination that whatever the risks, his child would bear no toubob name, and that moreover she would be given her name in the proper manner.
As deeply as Bell disapproved, she was even more apprehensive of what Kunta might do if she refused. So with deep misgivings, she finally acquiesced. “What kin’ o’ voodoo you got to do?” she asked dubiously. When he said he was simply going to take the baby outdoors for a while, she insisted that he wait until the child awakened and she had nursed her so that she wouldn’t be hungry and crying, and Kunta immediately agreed. Bell reckoned that the baby wouldn’t wake up for at least another two hours, by which time it would be most unlikely that anyone in slave row would still be up to see whatever mumbo jumbo Kunta was going to perform. Though she didn’t show it, Bell was still angry that Kunta prevented her from helping him pick a name for the daughter she had just brought into the world amid such agony; and she dreaded finding out what African-sounding, forbidden name Kunta had come up with, but she was sure that she could deal with the baby’s name later in her own way.
It was near midnight when Kunta emerged from the cabin, carrying his firstborn wrapped snugly in a blanket. He walked until he felt they were far enough from slave row that it couldn’t cast a pall over what was about to take place.
Then, under the moon and the stars, Kunta raised the baby upward, turning the blanketed bundle in his hands so that the baby’s right ear touched against his lips. And then slowly and distinctly, in Mandinka, he whispered three times into the tiny ear, “Your name is Kizzy. Your name is Kizzy. Your name is Kizzy.” It was done, as it had been done with all of the Kinte ancestors, as it had been done with himself, as it would have been done with this infant had she been born in her ancestral homeland. She had become the first person to know who she was.
Kunta felt Africa pumping in his veins—and flowing from him into the child, the flesh of him and Bell—as he walked on a little farther. Then again he stopped, and lifting a small corner of the blanket he bared the infant’s small black face to the heavens, and this time he spoke aloud to her in Mandinka. “Behold, the only thing greater than yourself!”
When Kunta returned with the baby to the cabin, Bell all but snatched her away, her face tight with fear and resentment as she opened the blanket and examined her from head to toe, not knowing what she was looking for and hoping she wouldn’t find it. Satisfied that he hadn’t done anything unspeakable—at least nothing that showed—she put the baby to bed, came back into the front room, sat down in the chair across from him, folded her hands carefully in her lap, and asked,
“Awright, lemme have it.”
“Have what?”
“De