Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [200]
Kunta sat a little apart from the others, with the restless Kizzy on his lap during the first hour of prayers and soft singing, and then some hushed conversation was begun by Sister Mandy, asking if anyone there could recall the old man ever having mentioned any living relatives. The fiddler said, “One time ’way back I ’members he said he never knowed his mammy. Dat’s all I ever heared him say of family.” Since the fiddler had been the closest among them to the old man, and he would know if anyone did, it was decided that there was probably no one to whom word should be sent.
Another prayer was said, another song was sung, then Aunt Sukey said, “Seem like he done always belonged to some a’ de Wallers. I’se heared him talk ’bout de massa ridin’ on his shoulders as a boy, so I reckon dat’s why massa bring him here later on when he got his own big house.”
“Massa real sorry, too,” said Bell. “He say for me to tell y’all won’t be no workin’ for half a day tomorra.”
“Well, leas’ he gwine git buried right,” said Ada, the field-hand mother of the boy Noah, who sat impassively beside her. “It’s aplenty o’ massas jes’ ’lows you to quit workin’ long enough to come look at de dead nigger ’fore he git stuck in de ground still warm.”
“Well, all dese Wallers is quality white folks, so wouldn’t none us here have to worry ’bout dat,” said Bell.
Others started talking then about how rich plantation owners sometimes staged very elaborate funerals for usually either longtime big-house cooks or for the old mammies who had suckled and helped to raise two or even three broods of the family’s children. “Dey even gits buried in de white folks’ graveyards, wid flat rocks to mark where dey is.”
What a heartwarming—if somewhat belated—reward for a lifetime of toil, thought Kunta bitterly. He remembered the gardener telling him that he had come to the massa’s big house as a strong young stablehand, which he had remained for many years until he was kicked badly by a horse. He stayed on the job, but gradually he had become more and more disabled, and finally Massa Waller had told him to spend his remaining years doing whatever he felt able to do. With Kunta as his assistant, he had tended the vegetable garden until he was too feeble to do even that, and from then on had spent most of his time weaving cornshucks into hats and straw into chairbottoms and fans, until advancing arthritis had crippled even his fingers. Kunta recalled another old man he had seen now and then at a rich big house across the county. Though he had long since been allowed to retire, he demanded every morning that some younger blacks carry him out to the garden, where he would lie on his side plucking weeds with gnarled hands among the flowerbeds of his equally old and crippled beloved lifetime missis. And these were the lucky ones, Kunta knew. Many old folks began to get beaten when they were no longer able to perform their previous quota of work, and finally they got sold away for perhaps twenty or thirty dollars to some “po’ white trash” farmer—with aspirations of rising into the planter class—who worked them literally to death.
Kunta was snapped out of those thoughts as everyone rose from their seats all around him, said a final prayer, and headed wearily home for a few hours of sleep that were left before daybreak.
Right after breakfast, the fiddler dressed the old man in the worn dark suit the old man had been given many years before by Massa Waller’s daddy. His few other clothes had been burned, since whoever might wear a dead person’s clothes