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By Root 1417 0

’im singin’ some o’ dem African songs to me when we be ridin’ in de massa’s buggy, an’ I was a l’il gal, right roun’ de age you is now.” Kizzy would find herself smiling as she remembered with what delight she used to sit on the high, narrow buggy seat alongside her pappy as they went rolling along the hot, dusty Spotsylvania County roads; how at other times she and Kunta would walk hand-in-hand along the fencerow that led to the stream where later she would walk hand-in-hand with Noah. She said to George, “Yo’ gran’pappy like to tell me things in de African tongue. Like he call a fiddle a ko, or he call a river Kamby Bolongo, whole lotsa different, funny-soundin’ words like dat.” She thought how much it would please her pappy, wherever he was, for his grandson also to know the African words.

“Ko!” she said sharply. “Can you say dat?”

“Ko,” said George.

“All right, you so smart: ‘Kamby Bolongo’!” George repeated it perfectly the first time. Sensing that she didn’t intend to continue, he demanded, “Say me some mo’, Mammy!” Overwhelmed with love for him, Kizzy promised him more—later on—and then she put him, protesting, to bed.

CHAPTER 88

When George’s sixth year came—meaning that he must start working in the fields—Miss Malizy was heartsick to lose his company in the kitchen, but Kizzy and Sister Sarah rejoiced to be getting him back at last. From George’s first day of fieldwork, he seemed to relish it as a new realm of adventure, and their loving eyes followed him as he ran around picking up rocks that might break the point of Uncle Pompey’s oncoming plow. He scurried about bringing to each of them a bucket of cool drinking water that he had trudged to get from the spring at the other end of the field. He even “helped” them with the corn and cotton planting, dropping at least some of the seeds more or less where they should have gone along the mounded rows. When the three grown-ups laughed at his clumsy but determined efforts to wield a hoe whose handle was longer than he was, George’s own broad smile displayed his characteristic good spirits. They had a further laugh when George insisted to Uncle Pompey that he could plow, and then discovered that he wasn’t tall enough to hold the plowhandles; but he promptly wrapped his arms around the sides and hollered to the mule, “Git up!”

When they finally got back into their cabin in the late evenings, Kizzy immediately began the next chore of cooking them a meal, as hungry as she knew George must be. But one night he proposed that the routine be changed. “Mammy, you done worked hard all day. How come you don’t lay down an’ res’ some fo’ you cooks?” He would even try to order her around if she felt like letting him get away with it. At times it seemed to Kizzy as if her son was trying to fill in for a man whom she felt he sensed was missing in both of their lives. George was so independent and self-sufficient for a small boy that now or then when he got a cold or some small injury, Sister Sarah would insist upon all but smothering him with her herb cures, and Kizzy would finish the job with a plentiful salving of her love. Sometimes, as they both lay before sleeping, he would set Kizzy smiling to herself with the fantasies he’d share with her there in the darkness. “I’se gwine down dis big road,” he whispered one night, “an’ I looks up, an’ I sees dis great big ol’ bear a-runnin’ ... seem like he taller’n a hoss ... an’ I hollers, ‘Mr. Bear! Hey, Mr. Bear! You jes’ well’s to git ready for me to turn you inside out, ’cause you sho’ ain’t gwine hurt my mammy!’” Or sometimes he would urge and urge and finally persuade his tired mammy to join him in singing some of the songs that he had heard Miss Malizy sing when he had spent his days with her in the big-house kitchen. And the little cabin would resound softly with their duets: “Oh, Mary, don’t ’cha weep, don’t ’cha moan! Oh, Mary, don’t ’cha weep, don’t ’cha moan! ’Cause ol’ Pharaoh’s army done got drown-ded! Oh, Mary, don’t ’cha weep!”

Sometimes when nothing else attracted George within the cabin, the restless six-year-old