Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [227]
From that day on, the fiddler was a changed man—certainly no happier than he’d been acting for the past few months, but caring, considerate, and tireless as he drove the massa all about the county day and night, and then came home to help Bell care for Kunta and others on slave row who also had come down with the fever.
Before long, so many people were sick—both on the plantation and off—that the massa pressed Bell into service as his assistant. While he attended the whites, the boy Noah drove her around in the mulecart taking care of the blacks. “Massa got his medicines, I got mine,” she confided to the fiddler. After administering the massa’s drugs, she gave her patients her secret brew of dried, powdered herbs mixed with water from boiled persimmon tree bark—that she swore would work better and faster than any white folks remedy. But what would really cure them, she confided to Sister Mandy and Aunt Sukey, was that always she knelt down at a patient’s bedside and prayed for them. “Whatever He bring on man, He can take away if He want to,” she said. But some of her patients died anyway—as well as Massa Waller’s.
As Kunta’s own condition steadily worsened, despite everything Bell and the massa could do, her prayers became more and more fervent. Kunta’s strange, silent, stubborn ways had been entirely forgotten as, herself too tired to sleep, she sat by his bed each night as he lay sweating heavily, tossing, moaning, or at times babbling in spells of delirium beneath the several quilts she’d piled on him. She would hold his hot, dry hand in hers, desperately afraid that she might never be able to tell him what had taken this, after all these years, for her fully to realize: that he was a man of caliber, of strength, and of character, that she had never known the equal of, and she loved him very deeply.
He had been in a coma for three days when Missy Anne came to visit the massa and found Kizzy in the cabin, with Bell, Sister Mandy, and Aunt Sukey, all of them weeping and praying. Tearful herself, Missy Anne returned to the big house and told the weary Massa Waller that she wanted to read something from the Bible for Kizzy’s pappy. But she said she didn’t know what would be a good place to read from, so would he please show her? The massa’s eyes drank in the wet-eyed earnestness of his beloved niece, and getting up from the couch, he unlocked his bookcase and took out his big Bible. After a thoughtful moment, he turned to a page and pointed out with his forefinger the exact spot where she should begin.
As the word passed in slave row that Missy Anne was going to read something, everyone quickly assembled outside Bell and Kunta’s cabin, and she started to read:
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.” Missy Anne paused, frowning at the page, then went on. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.” She paused again, this time for a deep breath, and looked up uncertainly at the faces watching her.
Deeply moved, Sister Mandy couldn’t stop herself from exclaiming, “Lawd, listen to dat chile! Done growed up an’ learnt to read so good!”
Amid a hubbub of praises from others, Noah’s mother Ada marveled, “Look like jes’ yestiddy she runnin’ roun’ here in diapers! How ol’ she now?”
“Ain’t long turnt fo’teen!” said Bell as proudly as if she were her own. “Please read us a l’il mo’, honey!”
Flushed with their compliments, Missy Anne read the final verse of the Twenty-third Psalm.
Between treatment and prayer, a few days later Kunta showed signs of beginning to rally. Bell knew he was