Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [329]
The massa’s pleasure was showing both in his face and in his tone as he told Tom that Mr. Edwin Holt, who owned the Holt Cotton Mill, had sent him a message that Missis Holt had recently been highly impressed with seeing some of Tom’s delicate ironwork; that she had already sketched a design for decorative window grills that they hoped that Tom could soon make and install at their “Locust Grove” home.
With a traveling pass from Massa Murray, Tom left on a mule early the next morning to see the sketches and measure the windows. Massa Murray had told him not to worry about whatever jobs awaited doing in his shop, and the massa said that the best route was to follow the Haw River Road to the town of Graham, then the Graham Road to Bellemont Church, where after a right turn and about another two miles, the elegant Holt mansion would be impossible to miss.
Arriving and identifying himself to a black gardener, Tom was told to wait near the front steps. Missis Holt herself soon came pleasantly congratulating Tom’s previous work that she had seen, and showing him her sketches, which he carefully studied for an iron window grill having the visual effect of a trellis amply covered with vines and leaves. “B’leeves I can do dem, leas’ I try my bes’, Missis,” he said, but he pointed out that with so many windows needing the grills, each of which would require much patiently tedious work, the completing of the task might take two months. Missis Holt said she would be delighted if it could be done in that time, and handing Tom her sketches to keep and work by, she left him to go about his necessary starting job of carefully measuring the many windows’ dimensions.
By the early afternoon, Tom was working on the upstairs windows opening onto a veranda when his instincts registered someone watching him, and glancing about, he blinked at the striking prettiness of the coppery-complexioned girl holding a dustrag who stood quietly just within the next opened window. Wearing a simple housemaid’s uniform, her straight black hair coiled into a large bun at the back of her head, she was evenly but warmly returning Tom’s stare. Only his lifelong innate reserve enabled him to mask his jolting inner reaction as, collecting himself, and quickly removing his hat, he blurted, “Hidy, miss.”
“Hidy do, suh!” she replied, flashing a bright smile, and with that she disappeared.
Finally riding back to the Murray plantation, Tom was surprised, and unsettled, that he couldn’t rid his mind of her. Lying in his bed that night, it hit him like a bolt that he hadn’t even gotten her name. He guessed her age at nineteen or maybe twenty. At last he slept, fitfully, and awakened torturing himself that her prettiness guaranteed that she was married, or surely was courting with somebody.
Making the basic grill frames, smoothly lap-welding four precut flat iron bars into window-sized rectangles was only a routine job. After six days of doing that, Tom began forcing white-hot rods through his set of successively smaller steel reducing dies until he had long rods no thicker than ivy or honeysuckle vines. After Tom had experimentally heated and variously bent several of these, dissatisfied, he began taking early-morning walks, closely inspecting actual growing vines’ graceful curvings and junctures. Then he had a sense that his efforts to simulate them improved.
The work went along well, with Massa Murray explaining daily to sometimes irate customers that Tom could attend only the most urgent emergency repair jobs until he had finished a major job for Mr. Edwin Holt, which blunted the indignance of most. Massa Murray, then Missis Murray came to the shop to observe, then they brought visiting friends, until sometimes eight or ten of them stood silently watching Tom work. Plying his craft, he thought how blessed he was that all people seemed even to expect being ignored by blacksmiths engrossed in what they were doing. He reflected upon how most slave men who brought him their massas’ repairing jobs usually seemed either morose, or they big-talked among other slaves about