Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [215]
When the weather was good, they’d go walking—usually along the vine-covered fencerow where he had gone almost nine years before to think of the name “Kizzy” for his new girlchild. Out beyond where anyone would be likely to see them, Kunta would clasp Kizzy’s soft little hand in his own as, feeling no need to speak, they would stroll down to a little stream, and sitting closer together beneath a shade tree they would eat whatever Kizzy had brought along from the kitchen—usually cold buttered biscuits filled with his favorite blackberry preserves. Then they would begin talking.
Mostly he’d talk and she’d interrupt him constantly with questions, most of which would begin, “How come...” But one day Kunta didn’t get to open his mouth before she piped up eagerly, “You wanna hear what Missy Anne learned me yestiddy?”
He didn’t care to hear of anything having to do with that giggling white creature, but not wishing to hurt his Kizzy’s feelings, he said, “I’m listenin’.”
“Peter, Peter, punkin eater,” she recited, “had a wife an’ couldn’ keep ’er, put ’er in a punkin shell, dere he kep’ ’er very well....”
“Dat it?” he asked.
She nodded. “You like it?”
He thought it was just what he would have expected from Missy Anne: completely asinine. “You says it real good,” he hedged.
“Bet you can’t say it good as me,” she said with a twinkle.
“Ain’t tryin’ to!”
“Come on, Pappy, say it fo’ me jes’ once.”
“Git ’way from me wid dat mess!” He sounded more exasperated than he really was. But she kept insisting and finally, feeling a bit foolish that his Kizzy was able to twine him around her finger so easily, he made a stumbling effort to repeat the ridiculous lines—just to make her leave him alone, he told himself.
Before she could urge him to try the rhyme again, the thought flashed to Kunta of reciting something else to her—perhaps a few verses from the Koran, so that she might know how beautiful they could sound—then he realized such verses would make no more sense to her than “Peter, Peter” had to him. So he decided to tell her a story. She had already heard about the crocodile and the little boy, so he tried the one about the lazy turtle who talked the stupid leopard into giving him a ride by pleading that he was too sick to walk.
“Where you hears all dem stories you tells?” Kizzy asked when he was through.
“Heared ’em when I was yo’ age—from a wise ol’ gran’mammy name Nyo Boto.” Suddenly Kunta laughed with delight, remembering. “She was bald-headed as a egg! Didn’t have no teeth, neither, but dat sharp tongue o’ her’n sho’ made up fer it! Loved us young’uns like her own, though.”
“She ain’t had none of ’er own?”
“Had two when she was real young, long time fo’ she come to Juffure. But they got took away in a fight ’tween her village an’’nother tribe. Reckon she never got over it.”
Kunta fell silent, stunned with a thought that had never occurred to him before: The same thing had happened to Bell when she was young. He wished he could tell Kizzy about her two half sisters, but he knew it would only upset her—not to mention Bell, who hadn’t spoken of it since she told him of her lost daughters on the night of Kizzy’s birth. But hadn’t he—hadn’t all of those who had been chained beside him on the slave ship been torn away from their own mothers? Hadn’t all the countless other thousands who had come before—and since?
“Dey brung us here naked!” he heard himself blurting. Kizzy jerked up her head, staring; but he couldn’t stop. “Even took our names away. Dem like you gits borned here don’t even know who dey is! But you jes’ much Kinte as I is! Don’t never fo’git dat! Us’ns fo’fathers was traders, travelers, holy men—all de way back hunnuds o’ rains into dat lan’ call Ol’ Mali! You unnerstan’ what I’m talkin’ ’bout, chile?”
“Yes, Pappy,” she said obediently, but he knew she didn’t. He had an idea. Picking up a stick, smoothing a place in the dirt between them, he scratched some