Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [265]
“Is missis seed you?”
“Ain’t seed her, Mammy! What’s the matter?”
“Lawd, boy! Massa got word some free nigger over in Charleston, South Ca’liny, name o’ Denmark Vesey, had hunnuds o’ niggers ready to kill no tellin’ how many white folks right tonight, if dey hadn’t o’ got caught. Massa ain’t long lef’ here actin’ like he gone wild, a-wavin’ his shotgun an’ threatenin’ to kill anybody missy see outside dey cabins fo’ he git back from some big organizin’ meetin’!”
Kizzy slid alongside the cabin’s wall until she could look through the cabin’s single window toward the big house. “She ain’t still where she was peepin’ from! Maybe she seen you comin’ an’ went an’ hid!” The absurdity of Missis Lea hiding from him struck some of Kizzy’s alarm into George. “Run back down wid dem chickens, boy. No tellin’ what massa do he catch you up here!”
“I gwine stay here an’ talk to massa, Mammy!” He was thinking that in such an extremity as this, he would even somehow indirectly remind the massa whose father he was, which should curb his anger, at least somewhat.
“You plum crazy? Git outa here!” Kizzy was shoving George toward the cabin door. “G’wan! Git! Mad as he was, he catch you here, jes’ make it wuss on us. Slip through dem bushes behin’ de toilet ’til you’s out’n sight o’ missy!”
Kizzy seemed on the verge of hysteria. The massa must have been worse than he’d ever been before to terrify her so. “Awright, Mammy,” he said finally. “But I ain’t slippin’ through no bushes. I ain’t done nothin’ to nobody. I’se gwine back down de road jes’ same as I come up it.”
“Awright, awright, jes’ go ’head!”
Returning to the gamefowl area, George had barely finished telling Uncle Mingo what he had heard, fearing that he sounded foolish, when they heard a horse galloping up. Within moments Massa Lea sat glowering down at them from his saddle, the reins in one hand, his shotgun in the other, and he directed the cold fury of his words at George. “My wife saw you, so y’all know what happened.”
“Yassuh—” gulped George, staring at the shotgun.
Then, starting to dismount, Massa Lea changed his mind, and staying on his horse, his face mottled with his anger, he told them, “Plenty good white people would be dyin’ tonight if one nigger hadn’t told his massa just in time. Proves you never can trust none of you niggers!” Massa Lea gestured with the shotgun. “Ain’t no tellin’ what’s in y’all’s heads off down here by yourselves! But you just let me half think anything funny, I’ll blow your heads off quick as a rabbit’s!” Glaring balefully at Uncle Mingo and George, Massa Lea wheeled his horse and galloped back up the road.
A few minutes passed before Uncle Mingo even moved. Then he spat viciously and kicked away the hickory strips he had been weaving into a gamecock carrying basket. “Work a thousan’ years for a white man you still any nigger!” he exclaimed bitterly. George didn’t know what to say. Opening his mouth to speak again, then closing it, Mingo went toward his cabin, but turning at the door, he looked back at George. “Hear me, boy! You thinks you’s sump’n special wid massa, but nothin’ don’t make no difference to mad, scared white folks! Don’t you be no fool an’ slip off nowhere till this blow over, you hear me? I mean don’t!”
“Yassuh!”
George picked up the basket Mingo had been working on and sat down on a nearby stump. His fingers began to weave the hickory strips together as he tried to collect his thoughts. Once again Uncle Mingo had managed to divine exactly what was going on inside his head.
George grew angry for permitting himself to believe that Massa Lea would ever act like anything but a massa toward him. He should have known better by now how anguishing—and fruitless—it was to even think about the massa as his pappy. But he wished desperately that he knew someone he felt he could talk with about it. Not Uncle