Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [277]
“After that preacher was long gone, that sayin’ stuck in my head. I turned it up and down and sideways tryin’ to figure out what meanin’ it had for me. Everything I saw in my family just translated to beggin’ bread. We didn’t have nothin’, and we wasn’t goin’ go get nothin’. Finally it seemed like that sayin’ meant if I made myself to get righteous—in other words, if I worked hard, and lived the best I knew how—I’d never have to beg for bread when I was old.” The massa looked at Chicken George defiantly.
“Yassuh,” said Chicken George, not knowing what else to say.
“That’s when I left home,” Massa Lea went on. “I was eleven years old. I hit the road, askin’ any and everybody for a job, doing anything, includin’ nigger work. I was ragged. I ate scraps. I saved every cent I got, I mean for years, until I finally bought my first twenty-five woodsland acres, along with my first nigger, name of George. Fact, that’s who I named you for—”
The massa seemed to expect some response. “Uncle Pompey tol’ me ’bout ’im,” said Chicken George.
“Yeah. Pompey came along later, my second nigger. Boy, you hear what I tell you, I worked shoulder to shoulder alongside that George nigger, we slaved from can to can’t, rootin’ up stumps and brush and rocks to plant my first crop. It wasn’t nothin’ but the Lord that made me buy a twenty-five-cent lottery ticket, and that ticket won me my first gamecock. Boy, that was the best bird I ever had! Even when he got cut bad, I’d patch him up and he went on to win more hackfights than anyone ever heard of one rooster doin’.”
He paused. “Don’t know how come I’m sittin’ up here talkin’ this way to a nigger. But I guess a man just need to talk to somebody sometime.”
He paused again. “Can’t do no talkin’ to your wife, much. Seem like once a woman catches a husband to take care of them, they spend the rest of their lives either sick, restin’, or complainin’ about somethin’, with niggers waitin’ on them hand and foot. Or they’re forever pattin’ their faces with powder till they look like ghosts—”
Chicken George couldn’t believe his ears. But the massa couldn’t seem to stop himself. “Or then you can get the other kind, like my family. I’ve wondered a lot of times why none of my nine brothers and sisters didn’t fight to get away like I did. They’re still scufflin’ and starvin’ just the same as the day I left—only now they’ve all got their own families.”
Chicken George decided that he had best not acknowledge with even a “Yassuh” anything the massa was saying about his family, some of whom George had seen briefly talking with the massa when they were at cockfights or in town. Massa Lea’s brothers were dirt-poor crackers of the sort that not only the rich planters but also even their slaves sneered at. Time and again he had seen how embarrassed the massa was to meet any of them. He had overheard their constant whining about hard times and their begging for money, and he had seen the hatred on their faces when the massa gave them the fifty cents or a dollar that he knew they were going to spend on white lightning. Chicken George thought of how many times he had heard Miss Malizy tell how, when the massa used to invite members of his family home for dinner, they would eat and drink enough to glut three times their own number, and the moment he was out of earshot, would heap scorn on him as if he were a dog.
“Any one of them could have done what I did!” Massa Lea exclaimed beside him on the wagon seat. “But they didn’t have the gumption, so the hell with them!” He fell silent again—but not for long.
“One way or another, I’ve got things goin’ along pretty good now—a respectable roof to live under, my hundred or so gamebirds, and eighty-five acres with over half of it in crops, along with the horse, mules, cows, and hogs. And I’ve got you few lazy niggers.”
“Yassuh,” said Chicken George, thinking that it might be reasonably safe to express in a mild way another point of view. “But us niggers works hard for you, too, Massa.