Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [233]
“You don’ know what you talkm’ ’bout, boy!” he rasped, regretting his words almost as they were uttered. “What I mean to say—it jes’ ain’t dat easy! You know ’bout dem bloodhounds dey uses to cotch you?”
Noah’s right hand slid into his pocket and withdrew a knife. He flicked it open, the blade honed until it gleamed dully. “I figgers dead dogs don’t eat nobody.” Cato had said that Noah feared nothing. “Jes’ can’t let nothin’ stop me,” Noah said, closing the knife and returning it into his pocket.
“Well, if you gwine run, you gwine run,” said Kunta.
“Don’t know ’zactly when,” said Noah. “Jes’ knows I got to go.” Kunta re-emphasized awkwardly, “Jes’ make sho’ Kizzy ain’t in none o’ dis.”
Noah didn’t seem offended. His eyes met Kunta’s squarely. “Naw-suh.” He hesitated. “But when I gits Nawth, I means to work an’ buy her free.” He paused. “You ain’t gon’ tell her none o’ dis, is you?”
Now Kunta hesitated. Then he said, “Dat ’tween you and her.”
“I tell her in good time,” said Noah.
Impulsively, Kunta grasped the young man’s hand between both of his own. “I hopes you makes it.”
“Well, I see you!” said Noah, and he turned to walk back toward slave row.
Sitting that night in the cabin’s front room, staring into the low flames of the hickory log burning in the fireplace, Kunta wore a faraway expression that made both Bell and Kizzy know out of past experiences that it would be futile to make any effort to talk with him. Quietly Bell knitted. Kizzy was as usual hunched over the table practicing her writing. At sunup, Kunta decided he would ask Allah to grant Noah good luck. He thought afresh that if Noah did get away, it would yet again crush utterly Kizzy’s trusting faith that already had been wounded so badly by Missy Anne. He glanced up and watched his precious Kizzy’s face as her lips moved silently, following her finger across a page. The lives of all black people in the toubob land seemed full of suffering, but he wished he could spare her some of it.
CHAPTER 83
It was a week after Kizzy’s sixteenth birthday, the early morning of the first Monday of October, when the slave-row field hands were gathering as usual to leave for their day’s work, when someone asked curiously, “Where Noah at?” Kunta, who happened to be standing nearby talking to Cato, knew immediately that he was gone. He saw heads glancing around, Kizzy’s among them, straining to maintain a mask of casual surprise. Their eyes met—she had to look away.
“Thought he was out here early wid you,” said Noah’s mother Ada to Cato.
“Naw, I was aimin’ to give ’im de debbil fo’ sleepin’ late,” said Cato.
Cato went banging his fist at the closed door of the cabin, once occupied by the old gardener, but which Noah had inherited recently on his eighteenth birthday. Jerking the door open, Cato charged inside, shouting angrily, “Noah!” He came out looking worried. “Am’t like ’im,” he said quietly. Then he ordered everyone to go quickly and search their cabins, the toilet, the storerooms, the fields.
All the others ran off in all directions; Kunta volunteered to search the barn. “NOAH! NOAH!” he called loudly for the benefit of any who might hear, although he knew there was no need of it, as the animals in their stalls stopped chewing their morning hay to look at him oddly. Then, peering from the door and seeing no one coming that way, Kunta hastened back inside to climb quickly to the hayloft, where he prostrated himself and made his second appeal to Allah for Noah’s successful escape.
Cato worriedly dispatched the rest of the field hands off to their work, telling them that he and the fiddler would join them shortly; the fiddler had wisely volunteered to help with the fieldwork ever since his income from playing for dances had fallen off.
“B’lieve he done run,” the fiddler muttered to Kunta as they stood in the backyard.
As Kunta grunted, Bell