Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [254]
“You better stay ’way from down dere, boy!” she cautioned. “You know massa don’t ’low nobody but dat ol’ man down dere messin’ wid dem chickens!”
“Uncle Mingo say he gwine ax massa to let me come down dere an’ help ’im feed dem chickens!”
On their way out to the field the next morning, Kizzy told Sister Sarah of George’s latest adventure. Sarah walked on in thoughtful silence. Then she said, “I know you don’t hardly want me tellin’ you no mo’ fortunes, but I’m gwine tell you jes’ a l’il ’bout dat George, anyhow.” She paused. “He ain’t never gwine be what nobody would call no ordinary nigger! He always gwine keep gittin’ into sump’n new an’ different jes’ long as he draw breath.”
CHAPTER 89
“He act like he well-raised, an’ he seem like he handy, Massa,” said Uncle Mingo, concluding his description of the boy who lived up on slave row but whose name he had neglected to ask.
When Massa Lea immediately agreed to give him a tryout, Mingo was greatly pleased—since he had been wanting a helper for several years—but not really surprised. He was well aware that the massa was concerned about his gamecock trainer’s advancing age and uncertain health; for the past five or six months he had fallen prey to increasingly frequent spells of bad coughing. He also knew that the massa’s efforts to buy a promising young slave apprentice trainer had come to nought among the area’s other gamecock owners, who were quite naturally disinclined to help him out. “If I had any boy showing any signs of ability,” the massa told him one had said, “you got to have more sense than to think I’d sell him. With that old Mingo of yours training him, five or ten years from now I’d see him helping you beat me!” But the likeliest reason for Massa Lea’s quick approval, Mingo knew, was that Caswell County’s annual cockfighting season would be opening shortly with the big New Year “main” fight, and if the boys simply fed the younger birds, Mingo would be able to spend that much more time conditioning and training the freshly matured two-year-olds that soon would be brought in from their open rangewalks.
On the morning of George’s first day on the job, Mingo showed him how to feed the scores of cockerels that were kept in several pens, each containing young birds of roughly the same ages and sizes. Seeing that the boy performed that trial task acceptably, the old man next let him feed the more matured “stags,” not quite a year old but already trying to fight each other from their triangular pens within the zigs and zags of a split-rail fence. Through the days that followed, Mingo kept George practically on the run, feeding the birds their cracked corn, giving them clean grit, oyster shell, and charcoal, and changing the sweet spring water in their drinking tins three times daily.
George had never dreamed that he could feel awe for chickens—especially the stags, which were starting to grow spurs and to develop bright feather colors as they strutted fearlessly about with their lustrous eyes flashing defiance. If he was away from Uncle Mingo’s immediate scrutiny, sometimes George would laugh aloud at how some of the stags would suddenly rear back their heads and crow awkwardly and throatily, as if they were trying to compete with the frequent raucous cries of Mingo’s six- or seven-year-old roosters—each bearing the scars of many past battles—that Uncle Mingo called “catchcocks” and always fed himself. George pictured himself as one of the stags and Uncle Mingo as one of the old roosters.
At least once every day, when Massa Lea came riding on his horse down the sandy road into the gamecock training area, George would make himself as inconspicuous as possible, having quickly sensed how much chillier the massa was acting toward him. George had heard Miss Malizy saying that the massa didn’t even permit the missis