Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [91]
By lying very still and listening to the breathing sounds of the men on either side of him, Kunta had long since learned to tell when either of them was asleep or awake. He concentrated now upon hearing farther away from him. With more and more practice at listening intently to repeated sounds, he discovered that his ears after a while could discern their location almost exactly; it was a peculiar sensation, almost as if his ears were serving for eyes. Now and then, among the groans and curses that filled the darkness, he heard the thump of a man’s head against the planks he lay on. And there was another odd and monotonous noise. It would stop at intervals, then resume after a while; it sounded as if two pieces of metal were being rubbed hard together, and after hearing more of it Kunta figured that someone was trying to wear the links of his chains apart. Kunta often heard, too, brief exclamations and janglings of chains as two men furiously fought, jerking their shackles against each other’s ankles and wrists.
Kunta had lost track of time. The urine, vomit, and feces that reeked everywhere around him had spread into a slick paste covering the hard planking of the long shelves on which they lay. Just when he had begun to think he couldn’t stand it any more, eight toubob came down the hatchway, cursing loudly. Instead of the routine food container, they carried what seemed to be some kind of long-handled hoes and four large tubs. And Kunta noticed with astonishment that they were not wearing any clothes at all.
The naked toubob almost immediately began vomiting worse than any of the others who had come before. In the glow of their lights, they all but sprang along the aisles in teams of two, swiftly thrusting their hoes up onto the shelves and scraping some of the mess into their tubs. As each tub was filled, the toubob would drag it back along the aisle and go bumping it up the steps through the opened hatchway to empty it outside, and then they would return. The toubob were gagging horribly by now, their faces contorted grotesquely, and their hairy, colorless bodies covered with blobs of the mess they were scraping off the shelves But when they finished their job and were gone, there was no difference in the hot, awful, choking stench of the hold.
The next time that more than the usual four toubob descended with their food tubs, Kunta guessed that there must be as many as twenty of them clumping down the hatch steps. He lay frozen. Turning his head this way and that, he could see small groups of toubob posting themselves around the hold, some carrying whips and guns, guarding others with lights upraised at the ends of each shelf of chained men. A knot of fear grew in Kunta’s belly as he began hearing strange clicking sounds, then heavy rattlings. Then his shackled right ankle began jerking; with flashing terror he realized that the toubob were releasing him. Why? What terrible thing was going to happen now? He lay still, his right ankle no longer feeling the familiar weight of the chain, hearing all around the hold more clicking sounds and the rattling of chains being pulled. Then the toubob started shouting and lashing with their whips. Kunta knew that it meant for them to get down off their shelves. His cry of alarm joined a sudden bedlam of shrieks in different tongues as the men reared their bodies upward, heads thudding against the ceiling timbers.
The whips lashed down amid screams of pain as one after another pair of men went thumping down into the aisleways. Kunta and his Wolof shacklemate hugged each other on the shelf as the searing blows jerked them convulsively back and forth. Then hands clamped roughly around their ankles and hauled them across the shelf’s mushy filth and into the tangle of other men in the aisleway, all of them howling under the toubob whips. Wrenching and twisting in vain to escape the pain, he glimpsed shapes moving against the light of the opened hatchway. The toubob were snatching men onto their feet—one pair after another—then beating and shoving them along, stumbling in the