Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [259]
One morning the massa arrived with a carton from the big house. George watched as Uncle Mingo measured out quantities of wheatmeal and oatmeal and mixed them into a paste with butter, a bottle of beer, the whites of twelve gamehen eggs, some wood sorrel, ground ivy, and a little licorice. The resulting dough was patted into thin, round cakes, which were baked to crispness in a small earth oven. “Dis bread give ’em strength,” said Uncle Mingo, instructing George to break the cakes into small bits, feed each bird three handfuls daily, and put a little sand in their water-pans each time he refilled them.
“I want ’em exercised down to nothin’ but muscle and bone, Mingo! I don’t want one ounce of fat in that cockpit!” George heard the massa order. “Gwine run dey tails off, Massa!” Starting the next day, George was sprinting back and forth tightly holding under an arm one of Uncle Mingo’s old, catchcocks as it was hotly pursued by one after another of the cocks in training. As Mingo had instructed, George would occasionally let the pursuing cock get close enough to spring up with its beak snapping and legs scissoring at the furiously squawking catchcock.
Catching the panting aggressor, Uncle Mingo would quickly let it hungrily peck up a walnut-sized ball of unsalted butter mixed with beaten herbs. Then he would put the tired bird on some soft straw within a deep basket, piling more straw over the bird, up to the top, then closing the lid. “It gwine sweat good down in dere now,” he explained. After exercising the last of the cocks, George began removing the sweating birds from their baskets. Before he returned them to their pens, Uncle Mingo licked each bird’s head and eyes with his tongue, explaining to George, “Dat git ’em used to it if I has to suck blood clots out’n dey beaks to help ’em keep breathin’ when dey done got bad hurt fightin’.”
By the end of a week, so many sharp, natural cockspurs had nicked George’s hands and forearms that Uncle Mingo grunted, “You gwine git mistook fo’ a gamecocker, you don’t watch out!” Except for George’s brief Christmas-morning visit to slave row, the holiday season passed for him almost unnoticed. Now, as the opening of the cockfighting season approached, the birds’ killer instincts were at such a fever pitch that they crowed and pecked furiously at anything, beating their wings with a loud whumping noise. George found himself thinking how often he heard his mammy, Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah, and Uncle Pompey bemoaning their lot; little did they dream what an exciting life existed just a short walk down the road.
Two days after the New Year, George grasped each gamecock in turn as Massa Lea and Uncle Mingo closely snipped each bird’s head feathers, shortened the neck, wing, and rump feathers, then shaped the tail feathers into short, curving fans. George found it hard to believe how much the trimming accentuated the birds’ slim, compact bodies, snakelike necks, and big, strong-beaked heads with their shining eyes. Some of the birds’ lower beaks had to be trimmed, too, “for when dey has to grab a mouth holt,” explained Uncle Mingo. Finally, their natural spurs were scraped smooth and clean.
At the first light of opening day, Mingo and George were stowing the finally selected twelve birds in square traveling coops woven of hickory strips. Uncle Mingo fed each bird a walnut-sized lump of butter mixed with powdered brown-sugar candy, then Massa Lea arrived in the wagon, carrying a peck of red apples. After George and Mingo loaded the twelve cockcoops, Mingo climbed up on the seat beside the massa, and the wagon began rolling.
Glancing back, Uncle Mingo rasped, “You gwine or not?