Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [311]
Listening grimly, but saying nothing, were Matilda and twenty-two-year-old Tom, who four years before had returned to the plantation and built a blacksmith shop behind the barn, where by now he was serving a thriving trade of customers for Massa Lea. Fit to burst with anger, Matilda had confided to her son how Chicken George had furiously demanded and gotten their own two-thousand-dollar cache of savings, which he was going to turn over to the massa to be bet on the Lea birds. Matilda, too, had screeched and wept in desperate effort to reason with Chicken George, “but he act like he gone crazy!” she had told Tom. “Hollered at me, ‘Woman, I knows every bird we got from when dey was eggs. Three or fo’ ain’t nothin’ wid wings can beat! Ain’t ’bout to pass up dis chance to zackly, double what we got saved no quicker’n it take one our chickens to kill another’n! Two minutes can save us eight, nine mo’ years o’ scrapin’ an’ savin’ to buy us free!’”
“Mammy, I know you tol’ Pappy de savin’ have to start over ag’in if de chicken lose!” Tom had exclaimed.
“Ain’t only tol’ ’im dat! Tried my bes’ to press on ’im he ain’t got no right to gamble wid our freedom! But he got real mad, hollerin’, ‘Ain’t no way we kin lose! You gimme my money, woman!’” And Matilda had done so, she had told Tom, her face stricken.
In the gamefowl area, Chicken George and Massa Lea finished culling seventeen of the best rangewalk birds down to ten of the finest gamecocks either of them had ever seen. Then they began air-training those ten birds, tossing them higher and higher, until finally eight of them flew as much as a dozen yards before their feet touched the ground. “I ’clare look like we’s trainin’ wil’ turkeys, Massa!” chortled Chicken George.
“They’re going to need to be hawks up against Jewett’s and that Englishman’s birds,” said the massa.
When the great cockfight was but a week away, the massa rode off, and late the following day he returned with six pairs of the finest obtainable Swedish steel gaffs, their lengths as sharp as razors tapering to needle points.
After a final critical appraisal two days before the fight, each of the eight birds seemed so perfect that there was simply no way to say which five were best. So the massa decided to take all eight and choose among them at the last minute.
He told Chicken George that they would leave the following midnight in order to arrive early enough for both the gamecocks and themselves to rest from the long ride and be fresh for the big fights. Chicken George knew that the massa was itching as bad as he was just to get there.
The long ride through the darkness was uneventful. As he drove, his gaze idly upon the lantern glowing and bobbing at the end of the wagon’s tongue between the two mules, Chicken George thought with mingled feelings of his and Matilda’s recent emotional altercation about the money. He told himself resentfully that he knew better than she did how many years of patient saving it represented; after all, hadn’t it been his own perennial scores upon scores of hackfights that had earned it? He’d never feel for a moment that Matilda wasn’t as good as wives came, so he regretted he’d had to shout her down, upsetting her so badly, as apparently the massa had also been forced to do within the big house, but on the other hand there were those times when the head of a family simply had to make the important, hard decisions.