Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [266]
He couldn’t even raise the agonizing subject with his mammy—not after her fervently remorseful apologies for telling him about it in the first place.
After all these years, George wondered what his mammy really felt about the whole excruciating thing, for by now, as far as he could see, she and the massa acted as if they were no longer aware that the other existed, at least in that way. It shamed George even to think about his mammy having been with the massa as Charity—and more recently Beulah—would be with him on those nights when he slipped away from the plantation.
But then, seeping up from the recesses of his memory, came the recollection of a night long ago, when he was three or four years old and awakened one night feeling that the bed was moving, then lying still and terrified with his eyes staring wide in the darkness, listening to the rustle of the cornshucks and the grunting of the man who lay there beside him jerking up and down on top of his mammy. He had lain there in horror until the man got up; heard the dull plink of a coin on the tabletop, the sound of footfalls, the slam of the cabin door. For a seemingly interminable time, George had fought back scalding tears, keeping his eyes tightly closed, as if to shut out what he had heard and seen. But it would always come back like a wave of nausea whenever he happened to notice on a shelf in his mother’s cabin a glass jar containing maybe an inch of coins. As time passed, the depth of coins increased, until finally he no longer could bring himself to look directly at the jar. Then when he was around ten years old, he noticed one day that the jar was no longer there. His mammy had never suspected that he knew anything about it, and he vowed that she never would.
Though he was too proud ever to mention it, George had once considered talking with Charity about his white father. He thought she might understand. The opposite of Beulah, who was as black as charcoal, Charity was a considerably lighter mulatto than George; in fact, she had the tan skin that very black people liked to call “high yaller.” Not only did Charity seem to harbor no distress whatever about her color, she had laughingly volunteered to George that her pappy was the white overseer on a big South Carolina rice and indigo plantation with over a hundred slaves where she had been born and reared until at eighteen she was sold at auction and bought by Massa Teague to be their big-house maid. On the subject of skin color, about all that Charity had ever expressed any concern about was that in South Carolina she had left behind her mammy and a younger brother who was practically white. She said that black-skinned young’uns had unmercifully teased him until their mammy told him to yell back at his tormentors, “Turkey buzzard laid me! Hot sun hatched me! Gawd gim’me dis color dat ain’t none o’ y’all black niggers’ business!” From that time on, Charity said, her brother had been let alone.
But the problem of George’s own color—and how he got it—was eclipsed for the moment by his frustration at realizing that the near-uprising in faraway Charleston was surely going to delay his following through with an idea he had been developing carefully in his head for a long time. In fact, nearly two years had gone into his finally reaching a decision to try it out on Uncle Mingo. But there was no sense in telling him about it now, since the whole thing would hang on whether or not Massa Lea would approve of the idea, and he knew Massa Lea was going to remain angrily unapproachable about anything for quite a while. Though the massa stopped carrying the shotgun after a week or so, he would inspect the gamefowl