Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [230]
Cut off as they were—even from Massa Waller’s Gazette, which had stopped arriving about a month before with the first big snow—the slave-row people were still talking about the last bits of news that had gotten through to them: how pleased the white massas were with the way President Jefferson was “runnin’ the gubmint,” despite the massas’ initial reservations toward his views regarding slaves. Since taking office, President Jefferson had reduced the size of the Army and Navy, lowered the public debt, even abolished the personal property tax—that last act, the fiddler said, particularly having impressed those of the massa class with his greatness.
But Kunta said that when he had made his last trip to the county seat before they had gotten snowed in, white folks had seemed to him even more excited about President Jefferson’s purchase of the huge “Louisiana Territory” for but three cents an acre. “What I likes ’bout it,” he said, “’cordin’ to what I heared, dat Massa Napoleon had to sell it so cheap ’cause he in sich hot water in France over what it cost ’im in money, long wid fifty thousan’ Frenchmans got killed or died fo’ dey beat dat Toussaint in Haiti.”
They were all still warming themselves in the glow of that thought a later afternoon when a black rider arrived amid a snow-storm with an urgently ill patient’s message for the massa—and another of dismal news for the slave row. In a damp dungeon on a remote French mountain where Napoleon had sent him, Haiti’s General Toussaint had died of cold and starvation.
Three days later, Kunta was still feeling stricken and depressed when he trudged back to the cabin one afternoon for a mug of hot soup, and stamping snow from his shoes, then entering pulling off his gloves, he found Kizzy stretched out on her pallet in the front room, her face drawn and frightened. “She feelin’ po’ly,” was the explanation that Bell offered as she strained a cup of her herb tea and ordered Kizzy to sit up and drink it. Kunta sensed that something more was being kept from him; then when he was a few more minutes there in the over-warm, tightly closed, mud-chinked cabin, his nostrils helped him to guess that Kizzy was experiencing her first time of the bloodiness.
He had watched his Kizzy growing and maturing almost every day now for nearly thirteen rains, and he had lately come to accept within himself that her ripening into womanhood would be only a matter of time, yet somehow he felt completely unprepared for this pungent evidence. After another day abed, though, the hardy Kizzy was back up and about in the cabin, then back at work in the big house—and it was as if overnight that Kunta began actually noticing for the first time how his girlchild’s always previously narrow body had budded. With a kind of embarrassed awe, he saw that somehow she had gotten mango-sized breasts and that her buttocks had begun to swell and curve. She even seemed to be walking in a less girlish way. Now, whenever he came through the bedroom separator curtain into the front room where Kizzy slept, he began to avert his eyes, and whenever Kizzy happened not to be clothed fully, he sensed that she felt the same.
In Africa now, he thought—Africa had sometimes seemed so distantly in the past—Bell would be instructing Kizzy in how to make her skin shine using shea-tree butter, and how to fashionably beautifully blacken her mouth, palms, and soles, using the powdered crust from the bottom of cooking pots. And Kizzy would at her present age already be starting to attract men who were seeking for themselves a finely raised, well-trained, virginal young wife. Kunta felt jolted even by the thought of some man’s foto entering Kizzy’s thighs; then he felt better after reassuring himself that this would happen