Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [229]
Over the months that followed, Kizzy and Missy Anne continued to visit one another, mostly on weekends, but not every weekend, and after a while, Kunta began to detect—or wishfully felt that he did—if not exactly a cooling between the two of them, at least some slow, subtle ebbing in their closeness, a gradual growing apart as Missy Anne began to ripen toward young womanhood four years ahead of Kizzy.
Finally the milestone of her long-awaited sixteenth birthday was about to arrive, but three days before the party that was being planned, the willful, hot-headed Missy Anne galloped angrily over to Massa Waller’s house—bareback on their buggy horse—and told him, amid copious tears, that her sickly mother was affecting one of her week-long headaches as an effort to call it off. And with much pouting, eyelash fluttering, and tugging his sleeve, she implored him to let her party be at his house instead. Unable to refuse her anything she’d ever asked, he said yes, of course, and as Roosby rushed all over the county informing the dozens of teenaged guests about the change of address, Bell and Kizzy helped Missy Anne with all of the frantic last-minute preparations. They were completed barely in time for Kizzy to help Missy Anne into her party gown and downstairs to greet her guests.
But then, as Bell told Kunta later, from the moment the first carriage arrived, Missy Anne suddenly had acted as if she didn’t even know the starchly uniformed aproned Kizzy, who kept circulating among the guests bearing trays of refreshments, “till de po’ chile come bustin’ in de kitchen cryin’ her eyes out.” That night in the cabin, Kizzy was still weeping as Bell tried to comfort her. “She jes done growed up into a young missy, now, honey, an’ her mind on dem kind o’ things. Ain’t she think no less o’ you, or really meant no harm. Dis time always come, fo’ any us dat’s growed up real close wid white young’uns, when you jes’ got to go yo’ own way, an dey goes dere’s.”
Kunta sat seething with the same emotions he had felt when he had first seen Missy Anne playing with the infant Kizzy in her basket. Across the twelve rains since then, he had asked Allah many times to end the toubob girl’s closeness to his Kizzy—and though finally his prayers had been answered, still it both hurt and angered him to see her so deeply wounded. But it had been necessary, and surely from this experience she would learn and remember. Moreover, from the tightness that Kunta had seen in Bell’s face as she had been talking to Kizzy, he felt some hope that even Bell might have gotten cured of at least some of her sickening great affection for the obviously treacherous, conniving “young missy.”
Missy Anne still continued to visit at Massa Waller’s, although much less often than before since—as Roosby confided to Bell—young massas had begun to occupy her time. When she visited, she always saw Kizzy; and usually she’d bring along an old dress for Bell to “let out” for Kizzy, who was physically bigger, despite being years younger. But now, as if by some unspoken agreement, the two of them would spend around a half hour together, walking and talking quietly in the backyard near slave row, and then Missy Anne would leave.
Kizzy would always stand looking after her, then very quickly she would walk back into the cabin and bury herself in study, often reading and writing until suppertime. Kunta still didn’t like the idea of her increasing abilities to do either, but he accepted that she must have something to occupy herself with now that she’d lost her lifelong friend. His Kizzy was herself now approaching adolescence, he reflected, which likely was going to present them both with a whole new area of worries.
Just after Christmas of the next year—1803—the winds blew the snow into deep, feathery drifts until in places the roads