Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [362]
When the idea struck him, he kept walking for another hour, letting the plan become a picture in his mind. Then he strode quickly back to the wagon where his family was sleeping and went to bed.
In the morning, Tom told James and Lewis to build temporary lean-tos for Irene and the children to sleep in, for he would need the wagon. As the family stood around watching him in amazement—Ashford with rising disbelief and fury—he unloaded the heavy anvil with Virgil’s help, and mounted it atop a newly sawed stump. By noon he had set up a makeshift forge. With everyone still staring, he next removed the canvas top of the wagon, then its wooden sides, leaving the bare flatbed, on which he now went to work with his heaviest tools. Gradually they began to perceive the astounding idea that Tom was turning into a reality.
By the end of that week, Tom drove right through town with his rolling blacksmith shop, and there wasn’t a man, woman, or child who didn’t stand there gaping at the anvil, forge, and cooling tub, with racks holding a neat array of blacksmithing tools, all mounted sturdily on a wagon bed reinforced with heavy timbers.
Nodding politely at all the men he met—white and black—Tom asked if they had blacksmithing jobs he could do at reasonable rates. Within days, his services were being requested at more and more farms around the new settlement, for no one could think of a good reason why a black man shouldn’t do business from a wagon. By the time they realized that he was doing far better with his rolling shop than he ever could have done with a stationary one, Tom had made himself so indispensable around town that they couldn’t afford to raise any objections even if they’d wanted to. But they didn’t really want to, because Tom seemed to them the kind of man who did his job and minded his own business, and they couldn’t help respecting that. In fact, the whole family soon established themselves as decent Christian folk who paid their bills and kept to themselves—and “stayed in their place,” as Ol’ George Johnson said a group of white men had put it in a conversation he’d overheard down at the general store.
But Ol’ George, too, was treated as one of “them”—shunned socially, kept waiting in stores till all the other white customers had been taken care of, even informed once by a merchant that he’d “bought” a hat that he’d tried on and put back on the shelf when he found it was too small. He told the family about it later, perching the hat atop his head for them, and everybody laughed as hard as he did. “I’se surprised dat hat don’t fit,” cracked L’il George, “dumb as you is to try it on in dat sto’.” Ashford, of course, got so angry that he threatened—emptily—to “go down dere an’ stuff it down dat peckerwood’s throat.”
However little use the white community had for them—and vice versa—Tom and the others knew very well that the town’s tradesmen could hardly contain their elation at the brisk increase in business they’d been responsible for. Though they made most of their own clothes, raised most of their own food, and cut most of their own lumber, the quantities of nails, corrugated tin, and barbed wire they bought over the next couple of years testified to the rate at which their own community was growing.
With all their houses, barns, sheds, and fences built by 1874, the family—led by Matilda—turned its attention to an enterprise they considered no less important to their welfare: the construction of a church to replace the makeshift bush arbors that had been serving as their place of worship. It took almost a year, and much of their savings, but when Tom, his brothers, and their boys had finished building the last pew and Irene’s beautiful white handwoven cloth—emblazoned with a purple cross—had been draped over the pulpit in front of the $250 stained-glass window they’d ordered from Sears, Roebuck, everyone agreed that the New Hope Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was well worth the time,