Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [320]
“Tom,” she said, “I ’clare seem like massa jes’ win’ up killin’ hisself, he keep on like he goin’, man nigh onto eighty years ol’.”
“You want to know the truth, Miss Malizy,” he replied, “I b’lieve one way or ’nother dat’s what he tryin’ to do.”
Massa Lea returned during the midafternoon, accompanied by another white man on horseback, and from their respective kitchen and blacksmith shop observation posts, both Miss Malizy and Tom saw with surprise that the pair didn’t dismount and enter the big house to freshen up and share a drink, as was always previously done with any guests. Instead, the horses were kept trotting on down the back road toward the gamecock area. Not half an hour later, Tom and Miss Malizy saw the visitor come back riding rapidly alone, holding under one arm a frightened, clucking gamehen, and Tom being outside was able to catch a fairly close glimpse of the man’s furious expression as he rode by.
It was at that night’s usual slave-row gathering when Lewis told what actually had happened. “When I heared de hosses comin’,” he said, “I jes’ made sho’ massa seed me workin’ fo’ I made myself scarce, over behin’ some bushes where I knowed I could see an’ hear.
“Well, after some pretty hot bargainin’, dey come to a hunnud-dollar’greement fo’ dis gamehen settin’ on a clutch o’ eggs. An’ I seen de man count out de money, den massa count it again fo’ puttin’ it in his pocket. Right after den a misunderstandin’ commence’bout de man sayin’ de eggs under de hen went wid de deal. Well, massa commence to cussin’ like he crazy! He run, grab up de hen an’ wid his foot stomped an’ squashed dat nest o’ eggs into one mess! Dem two was nigh fightin’ when all o’ a sudden de odder man snatched de hen an’ jumped on his hoss, yellin’ he’d bus’ massa’s head if he wasn’t so damn ol’!”
The uneasiness of the slave-row family deepened with each passing day, and nights were spent in fitful sleep resultant from worry of whatever might be the next frightful development. Across that 1855 summer and into the fall, with every angry outburst from the massa, with his every departure or arrival, the rest of the family’s eyes involuntarily would turn to the twenty-two-year-old blacksmith Tom, as if appealing for his direction, but Tom offered none. By the crisp November, when there had been a fine harvest from the massa’s roughly sixty-five acres in cotton and tobacco, which they knew he had been able to sell for a good price, one Saturday dusk Matilda watched from her cabin window until she saw Tom’s last blacksmithing customer leave, and she hurried out there, her expression telling him from long experience that something special was on her mind.
“Yas’m, Mammy?” he asked, starting to bank the fire in his forge.
“I been thinkin’, Tom. All six you boys done growed up to be mens now. You ain’t my oldes’, but I’se yo’ mammy an’ knows you’s got de levelest head,” Matilda said. “Plus dat, you’s de blacksmith an’ dey’s fiel’ han’s. So look like you’s got to be de main man o’ dis fam’ly since yo’ daddy gone ’bout eight months now—” Matilda hesitated, then added loyally, “leas’ ways, ’til he git back.”
Tom was frankly startled, for ever since his boyhood he had been his family’s most reserved member. Although he and his brothers had all been born and reared on Massa Lea’s plantation, he had never become very close with any of them, principally because he had been away for years as a blacksmithing apprentice, and since his return as a man, he was at the blacksmith shed, while the rest of his brothers were out in the fields. He had especially little contact anymore with Virgil, Ashford, and L’il George, for differing reasons. Virgil, now twenty-six, spent all his free time over on the adjoining plantation with his wife Lilly Sue and their recently born son, whom they had named Uriah. As for Ashford, twenty-five,