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By Root 1525 0

came cripping slowly back up the driveway—when an African remembrance flashed into his mind, and near the front of the house he bent down and started peering around. Determining the clearest prints that Kizzy’s bare feet had left in the dust, scooping up the double handful containing those footprints, he went rushing toward the cabin: The ancient forefathers said that precious dust kept in some safe place would insure Kizzy’s return to where she made the footprints. He burst through the cabin’s open door, his eyes sweeping the room and falling upon his gourd on a shelf containing his pebbles. Springing over there, in the instant before opening his cupped hands to drop in the dirt, suddenly he knew the truth: His Kizzy was gone; she would not return. He would never see his Kizzy again.

His face contorting, Kunta flung his dust toward the cabin’s roof. Tears bursting from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all his strength, and it shattered against the packed-earth floor, his 662 pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting wildly in all directions.

CHAPTER 84

Weak and dazed, Kizzy lay in the darkness, on some burlap sacks, in the cabin where she had been pushed when the mulecart arrived shortly after dusk. She wondered vaguely what time it was; it seemed that night had gone on forever. She began tossing and twisting, trying to force herself to think of something—anything—that didn’t terrify her. Finally, for the hundredth time, she tried to concentrate on figuring out how to get “up Nawth,” where she had heard so often that black people could find freedom if they escaped. If she went the wrong way, she might wind up “deep Souf,” where people said massas and overseers were even worse than Massa Waller. Which was “nawth”? She didn’t know. I’m going to escape anyway, she swore bitterly.

It was as if a pin pricked her spine when she heard the first creaking of the cabin’s door. Springing upright and backward in the dark, she saw the figure entering furtively, with a cupped hand shielding a candle’s flame. Above it she recognized the face of the white man who had purchased her, and she saw that his other hand was holding up a short-handled whip, cocked ready for use. But it was the glazed leer on the white man’s face that froze her where she stood.

“Rather not have to hurt you none,” he said, the smell of his liquored breath nearly suffocating her. She sensed his intent. He wanted to do with her what Pappy did with Mammy when she heard strange sounds from their curtained-off room after they thought she was asleep. He wanted to do what Noah had urged her to do when they had gone walking down along the fencerow, and which she almost had given in to, several times, especially the night before he had left, but he had frightened her too much when he exclaimed hoarsely, “I wants you wid my baby!” She thought that this white man must be insane to think that she was going to permit him to do that with her.

“Ain’t got no time to play with you now!” The white man’s words were slurred. Kizzy’s eyes were judging how to bolt past him to flee into the night—but he seemed to read that impulse, moving a little bit sideways, not taking his gaze off her as he leaned over and tilted the candle to drain its melted wax onto the seat of the cabin’s single broken chair; then the small flame flickered upright. Inching slowly backward, Kizzy felt her shoulders brushing the cabin’s wall. “Ain’t you got sense enough to know I’m your new massa?” He watched her, grimacing some kind of a smile. “You a fair-lookin’wench. Might even set you free, if I like you enough—”

When he sprang, seizing Kizzy, she wrenched loose, shrieking, as with an angry curse he brought the whip cracking down across the back of her neck. “I’ll take the hide off you!” Lunging like a wild woman, Kizzy clawed at his contorted face, but slowly he forced her roughly to the floor. Pushing back upward, she was shoved down again. Then the man was on his knees