Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [288]
Matilda’s upraised hand silenced him, and her tone was cold. “Reckon de fox give you liquor an’ sprinkled you wid dat rosewater I smells—” Chicken George’s mouth opened. “Naw, George, you listen! Look here, long as I’se yo’ wife, an’ mammy to our chilluns, I be here when you leaves an’ I be here when you ’gits back, ’cause ain’t us much as yo’self you’s doin’ wrong. It right in de Bible: ‘You sows what you reaps’—sow single, you reaps double! An’ Matthew sebenth chapter say, ‘Wid whatsoever measure you metes out to others, dat shall be measured out to you again!’”
He tried to pretend that he was too outraged to speak, but he just couldn’t think of anything to say. Turning, he reeled back out the door and staggered down the road to sleep with the chickens.
But he was back the next day, derby hat in hand, and dutifully spent all but a few nights with his family through the rest of that fall and winter, and those few only when he and the massa were away briefly on some trip. And when Matilda’s next labor pains quickened early one morning in January of 1831, although it was the height of gamecocking season, he persuaded the massa to let him stay home—and to take the ailing Uncle Mingo along with him to that day’s fights.
Anxiously, he paced outside the cabin door, wincing and frowning as he listened to Matilda’s anguished moans and cries. Then, hearing other voices, he tiptoed gingerly close and heard his Mammy Kizzy urging, “Keep pullin’ ’gainst my hand—hard, honey! ... Another breath ... deep! ... dat’s right! ... Hold! ... Hold!” Then Sister Sarah commanded, “Bear down, you hear mel ... Now PUSH! ... PUSH!”
Then, soon: “Here it come ... Yes, Lawd—”
When he heard sharp slaps, then an infant’s shrill cries, Chicken George backed away several steps, dazed by what he had just heard. It wasn’t long before Gran’mammy Kizzy emerged, her face creasing into a grin. “Well, look like all y’all got in you is boys!”
He began leaping and springing about, whooping so boisterously that Miss Malizy came bolting out the back door of the big house. He ran to meet her, scooped her up off her feet, whirled her around and around, and shouted, “Dis one be name after me!”
The next evening, for the third time, he gathered everyone around to listen as he told his family’s newest member about the African great-gran’daddy who called himself Kunta Kinte.
At the end of a routine Caswell County landholders’ meeting late that August, the county courthouse was resounding with the parting calls of the local planters as they began to disperse and head homeward. Massa Lea was driving his wagon—Chicken George squatting in the back with his pocket clasp knife, gutting and scaling the string of hand-sized perch that the massa had just bought from a vendor—when the wagon stopped abruptly. George’s eyes widened as he sat up in time to see Massa Lea already on the ground hurrying along with many other massas toward a white man who had just dismounted from a heaving, lathered horse. He was shouting wildly to his swiftly enlarging crowd. Snatches of his words reached Chicken George and the other blacks, who listened gaping: “Don’t know how many whole families dead” ... “women, babies” ... “sleepin’ in their beds when the murderin’ niggers broke in” ... “axes, swords, clubs” ... “nigger preacher named Nat Turner... ”
The faces of the other blacks mirrored his own dread foreboding as the white men cursed and gestured with flushed, furious faces. His mind flashed back to those terror-filled months after that revolt in Charleston had been foiled with no one hurt. What on earth would happen now? Slit-eyed, the massa returned to the wagon, his face frozen with rage. Never looking back, he drove homeward at a mad gallop with Chicken George hanging on in the wagonbed with both hands.
Reaching the big house, Massa Lea sprang from the wagon, leaving George staring