Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [323]
Late that day the rest of them returned from the fields, Tom’s brothers wearing grim, stricken faces amid the women’s copious weeping and wailing. All of them were trying at once to tell how the massa and his visitor also had come out watching them as they worked, with the stranger then moving from one to another asking questions that left no doubt that they were being appraised for sale.
Until into the wee hours, there was no way that the three people within the big house could have missed hearing the rising pandemonium of grief and terror that arose among the seventeen people in the slave row, most of the men eventually reacting as hysterically as the women as they all became seized in the contagion of grabbing and hugging whomever was nearest, screaming that they would soon never see each other again. “Lawd, deliver us from dis eeeeevil!” shrieked Matilda in prayer.
Tom rang the next morning’s wake-up bell with a prescience of doom.
Aged Miss Malizy had passed by him, making her way to the big-house kitchen to prepare breakfast. Not ten minutes later she heavily returned to slave row, her black face taut with fresh shock and glistening with fresh tears: “Massa say don’t nobody go nowhere. He say when he finish breakfas’, he want ever’body ’sembled out here.... ”
Even sick, ancient Uncle Pompey was brought from his cabin in his chair as all of them assembled, terrified.
When Massa Lea and his visitor came around the side of the big house, Massa Lea’s lurching walk told seventeen pairs of eyes that he had been drinking even more heavily than usual, and when the pair of them stopped about four yards before the slave-row people, the massa’s voice was loud, angry, and slurred.
“Y’all niggers keep your noses always stuck in my business, so ain’t no news to you this place goin’ broke. Y’all too much burden for me to carry no more, so I’m doin’ some sellin’ to this gentleman here—”
At the chorus of shrieks and groans, the other man gestured roughly. “Shut up! All this carryin’ on since last night!” He glared up and down the line until they quieted down. “I ain’t no ordinary nigger trader. I represent one of the biggest, finest firms in the business. We got branch offices, and boats delivering niggers to order between Richmond, Charleston, Memphis, and New Orleans—”
Matilda cried out the first anguish in all their minds. “We gwine git sol’ together, Massa?”
“I told you shut up! You’ll find out! I ought not to have to say your massa here’s a true gentleman, same as that fine lady up in that house cryin’ her heart out about your black hides. They could get more to sell y’all apiece, plenty more!” He glanced at the quaking L’il Kizzy and Mary. “You two wenches ready right now to start breedin’ pickaninnies worth four hundred an’ up apiece.” His glance fell on Matilda. “Even if you gittin’ pretty old, you said you know how to cook. Down South a good cook’ll bring twelve to fifteen hundred nowadays.” He looked at Tom. “The way prices up now, reckon a prime stud blacksmith can easy fetch twenty-five hundred, much as three thousand from somebody wants you to take in customers like you doin’ here.” His eyes scanned across Tom’s five brothers between twenty and twenty-eight years of age. “And y’all field-hand bucks ought to be worth nine hundred to a thousan’ apiece—” The slave trader paused for effect. “But y’all one lucky bunch of niggers! Your missis insists y’all got to be sold together, and your massa’s goin’ along with that!”
“Thank you, Missis! Thank you, Jesus!” Gran’mammy Kizzy cried out. “Praise God!” shrieked Matilda.
“SHUT UP!” The slave trader angrily gestured. “I’ve done my best to convince ’em different, but I ain’t been able. And it just happen my firm’s got some customers with a tobacco plantation ain’t too far from here! Right near the North Carolina Railroad Company over in Alamance County. They’re wantin’ a family of niggers that’s been together an’ won’t give no trouble, no runaways or nothin’ like that, an’ with experience to handle everything on their place. Won’t need no auctionin’ you off.