Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [331]
He had to know more, at least her name. He asked her.
“Irene,” she said. “Dey calls me ’Reeny. What your’n?”
“Tom,” he said. As she had said, they had to get back to work.
He had to gamble. “Miss Irene, is—is you keepin’ company wid anybody?”
She looked at him so long, so hard, he knew he had terribly blundered. “I ain’t never been knowed for not speakin’ my mind, Mr. Murray. When I seed befo’ how shy you was, I was scairt you wouldn’t come talk wid me no mo’.”
Tom could have fallen off the veranda.
From then, he had begun asking Massa Murray for an all-day traveling pass each Sunday, along with permission to use the mulecart. He told his family as well that he searched the roadsides for discarded metal objects to freshly supply his blacksmith shop scrap pile. He nearly always did find something useful while driving different routes in the round trip of about two hours each way to see Irene.
Not only she, but the others whom he met at the Holts’ slave row could not have received or treated him more warmly. “You’s so shy, smart as you is, folks jes’ likes you,” Irene candidly told him. They would ride usually to some reasonably private fairly nearby place where Tom would unhitch the mule to let it graze on a long tether as they walked, with Irene doing by far the most talking.
“My pappy a Injun. He name Hillian, my mammy say. Dat’count fo’ de ’culiar color I is,” Irene volunteered matter-of-factly. “Way back, my mammy run off from a real mean massa, an’ in de woods some Injuns cotched her an’ took her to dey village where her an’ my pappy got togedder an’ I got borned. I weren’t much size when some white mens ’tacked de village, an’ ’mongst de killin’ captured my mammy an’ brung us back to her massa. She say he beat her bad an’ sol’ us to some nigger trader, an’ Massa Holt bought us, what was lucky, ’cause dey’s high-quality folks—” Her eyes narrowed. “Well, leas’ mos’ly. Anyhow, Mammy was dey washin’ an’ ironin’ woman, right up ’til she took sick an’ died ’bout fo’ years back, an’ I been here ever since. I’se eighteen now, gwine turn nineteen New Year’s Day—” She looked at Tom in her frank way. “How ol’ is you?”
“Twenty-fo’,” Tom said.
Telling Irene in turn the essential facts about his family, Tom said that as yet they had but little knowledge of this new region of North Carolina into which they had been sold.
“Well,” she said, “I’se picked up a heap ’cause de Holts is mighty’portant folks, so nigh ever’body big comes visitin’, an’ gin’ly I be’s servin’, an’ I got ears.”
“Dey says mos’ dese Alamance County white folks’ great-great-gran’daddies come here from Pennsylvania long fo’ dat Revolution War, when wasn’t much nobody herebouts ’cept Sissipaw Injuns. Some calls ’em Saxapaws. But English white so’jers kilt dem out ’til Saxapaw River de only thing even got dey name now—” Irene grimaced. “My massa say dey’d run from hard times crost de water an’ was crowdin’ Pennsylvania so bad dem Englishmans runnin’ de Colonies ’nounced all de lan’ dey wanted be sellin’ in dis part Nawth Ca’liny fo’ less’n two cents a acre. Well, massa say no end o’ Quakers, Presbyterian Scotch-Irishers, an’ German Lutherans squeezed ever’thin’ dey could in covered wagons an’ crost dem Cumberlan’ an’ Shenando’ valleys. Massa say sump’n like fo’ hundred miles. Dey bought what lan’ dey could an’ commence diggin’, clearin’, an’ farmin’, jes’ mos’ly small farms dey worked deyselves, like mos’ dis county’s white folks herebouts still does. Dat’s how come ain’t many niggers as where it’s great big plantations.”
Irene toured Tom on the following Sunday to her massa’s cotton mill on a bank of Alamance Creek, prideful as if both the mill and the Holt family were her own.
After his hard work attending weekly scores of blacksmithing jobs, Tom coveted each next Sunday when the cart rolled past the miles of split-rail fences enclosing crops of corn, wheat, tobacco, and cotton, with an occasional apple or peach orchard and modest farmhouses. Passing other blacks, who were nearly always afoot, they