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she told him, white girls grew up into lifetimes of true devotion and even deep loyalties to black childhood playmates. “’Fo’ you commence to drivin’ de buggy,” she said, “dey was a white missis died havin’ a chile—jes’ like his own missis did—only dis time de baby girl lived an’ got suckled by a nigger woman what jes’ had a baby girl o’ her own. Dem l’il gals had growed up near ’bout like sisters when dat massa married again. But dat new missis was so strong ’gainst dem gals bein’ close, she finally ’suaded dat massa to sell away de black gal an’ her mammy both.” But the moment they were gone, she went on, the white girl went into such continuing hysterics that time and again Massa Waller was sent for, until finally he told the father that further weakness and grief would kill his daughter unless the black girl was returned. “Dat massa was’bout ready to whip dat new wife of his’n. He lef’ on his ridin’ hoss an’ ain’t no tellin’ how much he must o’ spent trackin’ down de nigger trader dat took de gal an’ her mammy away, an’ den buyin’ dem back from de new massa de nigger trader had sol’ dem to. But he brung back dat black gal an’ got a lawyer an’ deeded her over to be de property o’ his own gal.” And Bell said that even now, years later, though that white girl had grown to womanhood, she had never entirely regained her health. “De black one still livin’ right wid her an’ takin’ care of her, an’ neither one ain’t never even married!”

As far as Kunta was concerned, if Bell had intended her story as an argument against friendship between black and whites rather than in favor of it, she could hardly have made a more eloquent case.

CHAPTER 70

From about the time Kizzy had been born, both Kunta and the fiddler had returned to the plantation now and then with news about some island across the big water called “Haiti,” where it was said that around thirty-six thousand mostly French whites were outnumbered by about half a million blacks who had been brought there on ships from Africa to slave on huge plantations growing sugar cane, coffee, indigo, and cocoa. One night Bell said she had heard Massa Waller telling his dinner guests that reportedly Haiti’s rich class of whites lived like kings while snubbing the many poorer whites who couldn’t afford slaves of their own.

“’Magin’ dat! Who ever heared o’ such a thing?” said the fiddler sarcastically.

“Hush!” said Bell, laughing, and went on to say that the massa then told his horrified guests that for several generations in Haiti, so much breeding had gone on between white men and slave women that there were now almost twenty-eight thousand mulattoes and high-yallers, commonly called “colored people,” of whom nearly all had been given freedom by their French owners and fathers. According to one of the other guests, said Bell, these “colored people” invariably sought yet lighter-complexioned mates, with their goal being children of entirely white appearance, and those who remained visibly mulatto would bribe officials for documents declaring that their forefathers had been Indians or Spanish or anything but Africans. As astonishing as he found it to believe, and as deeply as he deplored it, Massa Waller had said that through the gift deeds or the last wills of many whites, quite a sizable number of these “coloreds” had come to own at least one fifth of all the Haitian land—and its slaves—that they vacationed in France and schooled their children there just as the rich whites did, and even snubbed poor whites. Bell’s audience was as delighted to hear that as the massa’s had been scandalized.

“You gon’ laugh out o’ de other sides you’ moufs,” the fiddler interrupted, “when you hears what I heared some o’ dem rich massas talkin’ ’bout at one o’ dem so-ciety co-tillyums I played at a while back.” The massas, he said, were nodding their heads as they discussed how those poor whites down in Haiti hated those mulattoes and high-yallers so much that they’d signed petitions until France finally passed laws prohibiting “coloreds” from walking about at night, from sitting alongside whites