Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [92]
The first open daylight in nearly fifteen days hit Kunta with the force of a hammer between his eyes. He reeled under the bursting pain, flinging his free hand up to cover his eyes. His bare feet told him that whatever they were walking on was moving slightly from side to side. Fumbling blindly ahead, with even his cupped hand and clamped eyelids admitting some tormenting light, trying futilely to breathe through nostrils nearly plugged with snot, he gaped open his cracked lips and took a deep breath of sea air—the first of his life. His lungs convulsed from its rich cleanness, and he crumpled to the deck, vomiting alongside his shacklemate. All about him he heard more vomiting, chains clanking, lashes meeting flesh, and shrieks of pain amid toubob shouts and curses and strange flapping sounds overhead.
When another whip ripped across his back, Kunta shrank to one side, hearing his Wolof partner gasp as the lash hit him. It kept tearing at them both until somehow they stumbled to their feet. He slit his eyes to see if he could escape some of the blows; but new pains stabbed into his head as their tormentor shoved them toward where Kunta could see the blurred forms of other toubob passing a length of chain through the shackles around each man’s ankles. There had been more of them down there in the darkness than he had ever realized—and far more toubob than had ever gone below. In the bright sunlight, they looked even paler and more horrible, their faces pitted with the holes of disease, their peculiar long hair in colors of yellow or black or red, some of them even with hair around their mouths and under their chins. Some were bony, others fat, some had ugly scars from knives, or a hand, eye, or limb missing, and the backs of many were crisscrossed with deep scars. It flashed through Kunta’s mind how his teeth had been counted and inspected, for several of these toubob he saw had but few teeth.
Many of them were spaced along the rails, holding whips, long knives, or some kind of heavy metal stick with a hole in the end, and Kunta could see beyond them an amazing sight—an unbelievable endlessness of rolling blue water. He jerked his head upward toward the slapping sounds above and saw that they came from giant white cloths billowing among huge poles and many ropes. The cloths seemed to be filled up with the wind. Turning about, Kunta saw that a high barricade of bamboo taller than any man extended completely across the width of the huge canoe. Showing through the barricade’s center was the gaping black mouth of a huge, terrible-looking metal thing with a long, thick, hollow shaft, and the tips of more metal sticks like the ones the toubob had been holding at the rail. Both the huge thing and the sticks were pointed toward where he and the other naked men were grouped.
As their ankle shackles were being linked onto the new chain, Kunta got the chance to take a good look at his Wolof shacklemate for the first time. Like himself, the man was crusted from head to foot with filth. He seemed about the rains of Kunta’s father Omoro, and the Wolof had that tribe’s classic facial features, and he was very black of color. The Wolof’s back was bleeding from where the whippings had cut into him, and pus was oozing from where an LL mark had been burned into his back. Kunta realized, as their eyes searched each other, that the Wolof was staring at him with the same astonishment. Amid the commotion, they had time to stare also at the other naked men, most of them gibbering in their terror. From the different facial features, tribal tattoos, and scarification marks, Kunta could tell that some were Foulah, Jola, Serere, and Wolof, like his partner, but most were Mandinkas—and there were some he could not be sure of. With excitement, Kunta saw the one he was sure must have killed the slatee. He was indeed a Foulah; blood from the