Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [298]
So when Chicken George felt Virgil had mastered the task of feeding and watering the cockerels and stags in their pens three times daily, he sent him back up to Matilda to begin working with them in the fields—which seemed to suit the boy just fine. Chicken George would never have breathed it to Matilda, Kizzy, or the others, but George had always felt a deep disdain for field work, which he saw as nothing more than a ceaseless drudge of wielding hoes under hot sun, dragging cottonsacks, picking endless tobacco worms, and beating cornstalks down for fodder, in relentless seasonal succession. With a chuckle he remembered Uncle Mingo’s saying, “Gimmme a good corn or cotton field or a good fightin’ bird, I’ll take de bird every time!” It was exhilarating just to think of how anywhere a cockfight had been announced—if it was in a woods, an open cow pasture, or behind some massa’s barn—the very air would become charged as gamecockers began converging on it with their birds raucously crowing in their lust to win or die.
In this summertime off-season, with the gamecocks moulting off their old feathers, there was only routine work to be done, and Chicken George gradually became accustomed to not having anyone around to talk with, except for the chickens—in particular the pinfeathered veteran catchcock that had been practically Uncle Mingo’s pet.
“You could o’ tol’ us how sick he was, you ol’ wall-eyed devil!” he told the old bird one afternoon, at which it cocked its head for a second, as if aware that it was being addressed, and then went on pecking and scratching in its ever-hungry way. “You hears me talkin’ to you!” George said with amiable gruffness. “You must o’ knowed he was real bad off!” For a while he let his eyes idly follow the foraging bird. “Well, I reckon you knows he’s gone now. I wonders if you’s missin’ de ol’ man de way I is.” But the old catchcock, pecking and scratching away, seemed not to be missing anyone, and finally Chicken George sent him squawking off with a tossed pebble.
In another year or so, George reflected, the old bird will probably join Uncle Mingo wherever it is that old gamecockers and their birds go when they die. He wondered what had ever happened to the massa’s very first bird—that twenty-five-cent raffle-ticket gamecock that had gotten him started more than forty years ago. Did it finally catch a fatal gaff? Or did it die an honored catchcock’s death of old age? Why hadn’t he ever asked Uncle Mingo about that? He must remember to ask the massa. Over forty years back! The massa had told him he was only seventeen when he had won the bird. That would make him around fifty-six or fifty-seven now—around thirty years older than Chicken George. Thinking of the massa, and of how he owned people, as well as chickens, all their lives, he found himself pondering what it must be like not to belong to someone. What would it feel like to be “free”? It must not be all that good or Massa Lea, like most whites, wouldn’t hate free blacks so much. But then he remembered what a free black woman who had sold him some white lightning in Greensboro had told him once. “Every one us free show y’all plantation niggers livin’ proof dat jes’ bein’ a nigger don’ mean you have to be no slave. Yo’ massa don’ never want you thinkin’ nothin’ ’bout dat.” During his long solitudes in the gamefowl area, Chicken George began to think about that at length. He decided he was going to strike up conversation with some of the free blacks he always saw but had always ignored when he and the massa went to the cities.
Walking along the split-rail fence, feeding and watering the cockerels and stags, Chicken George enjoyed as always the stags’ immature clucking angrily at him, as if they were rehearsing their coming savagery in the cockpits. He found himself thinking a