Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [335]
“Well, I don’ care what dese white folks says!” declared Matilda. “Massa Lincoln doin’ good fo’ us if he git dem so upset. Fact, mo’ I hear ’bout ’im, soun’ to me he like Moses tryin’ to free us chilluns o’ Israel!”
“Well, he sho’ can’t do it too fas’ to suit me,” said Irene.
Both she and Lilly Sue had been bought by Massa Murray to increase his field workers, as she dutifully did in the beginning. But not many months had passed when Irene asked her doting husband if he would build her a handloom—and she had one in the shortest time that his skilled hands could make it. Then the steady frump frump of her loom could be heard from three cabins away as she worked into the nights until well beyond the rest of the slave-row family’s bedtime. Before very long the visibly proud Tom was somewhat self-consciously wearing a shirt that Irene had cut and sewn from the cloth that she had made herself. “I jes’ loves doin’ what my mammy teached me,” she modestly responded to congratulations. She next carded, spun, wove, and sewed matching ruffled dresses for an ecstatic Lilly Sue and L’il Kizzy—who now approaching the age of twenty was demonstrating absolutely no interest in settling down, seeming to prefer only successive flirtatious courtships, her newest swain, Amos, being a general worker at the North Carolina Railroad Company’s newly completed hotel, ten miles distant at Company Shops.
Irene then made shirts for each of her brothers-in-law—which genuinely moved them, even Ashford—and finally matching aprons, smocks, and bonnets for Matilda and herself. Nor were Missis and next Massa Murray any less openly delighted with the amazingly finely stitched dress and shirt she made for them, from cotton grown right on their own plantation.
“Why, it’s just beautiful!” Missis Murray exclaimed, turning around displaying her dress to a beaming Matilda. “I’ll never figure out why the Holts sold her to us at all, and even at a reasonable price!” Glibly avoiding the truth that Irene had confided, Matilda said, “Bes’ I can reckon, Missis, is dey liked Tom so much.”
Having a great love of colors, Irene avidly collected plants and leaves that she needed for cloth dyeing, and the weekends of 1859’s early autumn saw cloth swatches in red, green, purple, blue, brown, and her favorite yellow hanging out to dry on the rattan clotheslines. Without anyone’s formally deciding or even seeming to much notice it, Irene gradually withdrew from doing further field work. From the massa and missis on down to Virgil’s and Lilly Sue’s peculiar-acting four-year-old Uriah, everyone was far more aware of the increasing ways in which Irene was contributing a new brightness to all of their lives.
“Reckon good part of what made me want Tom so much was’cause I seed we both jes’ loves makin’ things fo’ folks,” she told Matilda, who was rocking comfortably in her chair before her dully glowing fireplace one chilly late October evening. After a pause, Irene looked at her mother-in-law in a sly, under-eyed manner. “Knowin’ Tom,” she said, “ain’t no need me axin’ if he done tol’ you we’s makin’ sump’n else—”
It took a second to register. Shrieking happily, springing up and tightly embracing Irene, Matilda was beside herself with joy. “Make a l’il gal firs’, honey, so I can hug an’ rock ’er jes’ like a doll!”
Irene did an incredible range of things across the winter months as her pregnancy advanced. Her hands seemed all but able to wreak a magic that soon was being enjoyed within the big house as well as in every slave-row cabin. She plaited rugs of cloth scraps; she made both tinted and scented Christmas-New Year holiday season candles; she carved dried cow’s horns into pretty combs, and gourds into water dippers and birds’ nests in fancy designs. She insisted until Matilda let her take over the weekly chore of boiling, washing, and ironing everyone’s clothes. She put some of her fragrant dried-rose leaves or sweet basil between the folded garments, making the black and white Murrays alike smell about as fine as they felt.
That