Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [327]
On Saturday noons the workweek ended for the family’s field hands. L’il Kizzy and Mary, now nineteen and seventeen, respectively, quickly bathed, wrapped their short, kinky braids tightly with string, and rubbed their faces to shiny blackness with beeswax. Then donning their best starchily ironed cotton-print dresses, they soon appeared at the blacksmith shop, one bringing a pitcher of water, or sometimes “lemonegg,” with the other carrying a gourd dipper. Once Tom had quenched his thirst, they next offered welcomed gourdfuls among each Saturday afternoon’s invariable small gathering of slave men whose massas had sent them to pick up items that Tom had promised to complete by the weekend. Tom noted, with wry amusement, how his sisters’ lightest, gayest banter was always with the better-looking younger men. One Saturday night he was not surprised to overhear Matilda shrilly voicing chastisement: “I ain’t blin’! Sees y’all down dere flouncin’ yo’ tails ’mongst dem mens!” L’il Kizzy came back defiantly, “Well, Mammy, we’s wimmins! Ain’t met no mens at Massa Lea’s!” Matilda loudly muttered something that Tom couldn’t distinguish, but he suspected that she was privately less disapproving than she was trying to act. It was confirmed when, shortly after, Matilda said to him, “Look like you lettin’ dem two gals go to courtin’ right under yo’ nose. Reckon de leas’ you can do is keep out a eye it ain’t de wrong ones dey hooks up wid!”
To the entire family’s astonishment, not the particularly “flouncy” L’il Kizzy but the much quieter Mary soon quietly announced her wish to “jump de broom” with a stablehand from a plantation near the village of Mebane. She pleaded to Matilda, “I knows you can he’p ’suade massa to sell me reasonable when Nicodemus’ massa ax ’im ’bout it, Mammy, so us can live togedder!” But Matilda only muttered vaguely, sending Mary into tears.
“Lawd, Tom, I jes’ don’t know how to feel!” Matilda said. “’Cose I’se happy fo’ de gal, I see she so happy. But jes’ hates to see any us sol’ off no mo’.”
“You’s wrong, Mammy. You knows you is!” Tom said. “I sho’ wouldn’t want to be married wid nobody livin’ somewhere else. Look what happened to Virgil. Ever since we got sol’, you can see he sick ’bout Lilly Sue lef’ back yonder.”
“Son,” she said, “don’t tell me ’bout bein’ married to somebody you don’ never hardly see! Whole lot o’ times, lookin’ at y’all chilluns he’p me know I got a husban’—” Matilda hesitated. “But gittin’ back to Mary leavin’, ain’t jes’ her on my min’, it’s all y’all. You workin’ so much guess you ain’t paid no ’tention, but on Sundays off nowdays don’ hardly never see yo’ brudders roun’ here no mo’, jes’ you an’ Virgil. De res’ all off co’tin’ heavy—”
“Mammy,” Tom sharply interrupted, “we’s grown mens!”
“Sho’ you is!” retorted Matilda. “Ain’t what I’m gittin’ at! I’se meanin’ it look like dis fam’ly gwine split to de winds fo’ we ever gits it back togedder!”
In a silent moment between them, Tom was trying to think of what comforting thing he might say, sensing that underlying his mother’s recent quick irritability or unaccustomed depressions were the months now passed beyond when his father should have returned. As she had just mentioned, she was again living with his absence.
Tom was shocked when abruptly Matilda glanced at him, “When you gwine git married?”
“Ain’t thinkin’ ’bout dat now—” Embarrassed, he hesitated, and changed the subject. “Thinkin’ ’bout us gittin’ back Gran’mammy, Sister Sarah, an’ Miss Malizy. Mammy, ’bout how much we got saved up now?”
“No ’bout! Tell you ’zactly! Dat two dollars’ an’ fo’ cents you give me las’ Sunday