Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [199]
For all of Bell’s talk of whites who were against slavery—even though she had read some of it in the massa’s own newspaper—Kunta had never once heard a toubob opinion expressed that was not absolutely the opposite. And during that spring and summer of 1792, the massa shared his buggy with some of the biggest and richest massas, politicians, lawyers, and merchants in the state. Unless something else was more pressing, their ever-ready topic of conversation was the problems created for them by blacks.
Whoever would successfully manage slaves, someone would always say, must first understand that their African pasts of living in jungles with animals gave them a natural inheritance of stupidity, laziness, and unclean habits, and that the Christian duty of those God had blessed with superiority was to teach these creatures some sense of discipline, morality, and respect for work—through example, of course, but also with laws and punishment as needed, although encouragement and rewards should certainly be given to those who proved deserving.
Any laxity on the part of whites, the conversation always continued, would simply invite the kind of dishonesty, tricks, and cunning that came naturally to a lower species, and the bleatings of antislavery societies and others like them could come only from those, particularly in the North, who had never owned any black ones themselves or tried to run a plantation with them; such people couldn’t be expected to realize how one’s patience, heart, spirit, and very soul could be strained to the breaking point by the trials and burdens of owning slaves.
Kunta had been listening to the same outrageous nonsense for so long that it had become like a litany to him, and he hardly paid any attention to it anymore. But sometimes, while he drove along, he couldn’t help asking himself why it was that his countrymen didn’t simply kill every toubob who set foot on African soil. He was never able to give himself an answer that he was able to accept.
CHAPTER 71
It was about the noon hour on a sultry day late in August when Aunt Sukey came waddling as fast as she could out to the fiddler among his tomato plants and—between gasps—told him that she was worried to death about the old gardener. When he didn’t come to her cabin for breakfast, she hadn’t thought anything about it, she said breathlessly, but when he didn’t appear for lunch either, she became concerned, went to his cabin door, knocked, and called as loudly as she could, but got no answer, became alarmed, and thought she’d better come to find out if the fiddler had seen him anywhere. He hadn’t.
“Knowed it somehow or ’nother even ’fore I went in dere,” the fiddler told Kunta that night. And Kunta said that he had been unable to explain an eerie feeling he had himself as he had driven the massa homeward that afternoon. “He was jes’ lyin’ dere in bed real peaceful like,” said the fiddler, “wid a l’il smile on ’is face. Look like he sleepin’. But Aunt Sukey say he awready waked up in heab’m.” He said he had gone to take the sad news out to those working in the fields, and the boss field hand Cato returned with him to help wash the body and place it on a cooling board. Then they had hung the old gardener’s sweat-browned straw hat on the outside of his door in the traditional sign of mourning before the fieldworkers returned and gathered in front of the cabin to pay their last respects, and then Cato and another field hand went to dig a grave.
Kunta returned to his cabin feeling doubly grieved—not only because the gardener was dead, but also because he hadn’t been visiting him as much as he could have ever since Kizzy was born. It had just seemed that there was hardly