Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [289]
Ordering everyone on slave row out of their quarters, Massa Lea told them icily what Chicken George had already heard. Knowing that he alone might possibly temper the massa’s wrath, George found his voice. “Please, Massa—” he said, quavering. The shotgun jerked directly toward him.
“Git! Everything out of your cabins! All you niggers, GIT!” For the next hour, carrying, dragging, heaping their meager belongings outside, under the massa’s searching eyes and abusive threats of what he would do to whomever he found concealing any weapons or suspicious objects, they shook out every cloth, opened every container, cut and tore apart every cornshuck mattress—and still his fury seemed beyond any bounds.
With his boot he shattered Sister Sarah’s box of nature remedies, sending her dried roots and herbs flying while he yelled at her, “Get rid of that damn voodoo!” Before other cabins he flung away treasured possessions and smashed others with his fists or his feet. The four women were weeping, old Uncle Pompey seemed paralyzed, the frightened children clutched tearfully about Matilda’s skirts. Chicken George’s own fury boiled as Matilda cried out, almost in pain, when the shotgun’s butt smashed the front paneling of her precious grandfather clock. “Let me find a sharpened nail in there, some nigger’ll die!”
Leaving slave row in a shambles, the massa rode in the wagonbed holding his shotgun as George drove them down to the gamefowl training area.
Faced with the gun and the barked command for all of their belongings to be emptied out, the terrified old Uncle Mingo began blurting, “Ain’t done nothin’, Massa—”
“Trustin’ niggers got whole families dead now!” yelled Massa Lea. Confiscating the ax, the hatchet, the thin wedge, a metal frame, and both of their pocket knives, the massa loaded them all into the wagon as Chicken George and Uncle Mingo stood watching. “In case you niggers try to break in, I’m sleepin’ with this shotgun!” he shouted at them, lashing the horse into a gallop and disappearing up the road in a cloud of dust.
CHAPTER 97
“Hear you’ve got four boysin a rownow!”The massa was getting off his horse in the gamefowl training area. It had taken a full year for the white South’s mingled fear and fury—including Massa Lea’s—to fully subside. Though he had resumed taking Chicken George with him to cockfights a month or two after the revolt, the massa’s obvious coldness had taken the rest of a year to thaw. But for reasons unknown to either man, their relationship had seemed to grow closer than ever before ever since then. Neither one ever mentioned it, but they both hoped fervently that there would be no more black uprisings.
“Yassuh! Big ol’ fat boy borned fo’ daybreak, Massa!” said Chicken George, who was mixing a dozen gamehen egg whites and a pint of beer with oatmeal, cracked wheat, and a variety of crushed herbs to bake a fresh supply of the gamecocks’ special bread. He had learned the “secret” recipe only that morning, grudgingly, from ailing old Uncle Mingo, whom Massa Lea had ordered to rest in his cabin until his unpredictable and increasingly severe coughing spells eased off. In the meanwhile, Chicken George alone was intensely training twenty-odd top-prime gamecocks after almost ruthless cullings from among the seventy-six freshly matured birds recently brought in off the rangewalks.
It was but nine weeks from the day that he and Massa Lea were to leave for New Orleans. His years of local victories, plus no few in statewide competitions, had finally emboldened the massa to pit his topmost dozen birds in that city’s renowned New Year’s Day season-opening “main.” If the Lea birds could win as many as half of their pittings against the caliber of championship fighting cocks assembled there, the massa would not only win a fortune but also find