Roots (36 page)

Though he often lay awake half the night, restless with such thoughts, Kunta always awoke before the first crowing of the cocks, which always aroused the other fowl. The birds in this place, he noticed, merely twittered and sang—nothings like the deafening squawks of great flocks of green parrots that had opened the mornings in Juffure. There didn’t seem to be any parrots here, or monkeys either, which always began the day at home by chattering angrily in the trees overhead, breaking off sticks and hurling them to the ground at the people underneath. Nor had Kunta seen
any goats here—a fact he found no less incredible than that these people kept swine in pens—“pigs” or “hogs,” they called them—and even
fed
the filthy things.

But the squealing of the swine, it seemed to Kunta, was no uglier than the language of the toubob who so closely resembled them. He would have given anything to hear even a sentence of Mandinka, or any other African tongue. He missed his chain mates from the big canoe—even those who weren’t Moslem—and he wondered what had happened to them. Where had they been taken? To other toubob farms such as this one? Wherever they were, were they longing as he was to hear once again the sweetness of their own tongues—and yet feeling shut out and alone, as he did, because they knew nothing of the toubob language?

Kunta realized that he would have to learn something of this strange speech if he was ever to understand enough about the toubob or his ways to escape from him. Without letting anyone know, he already recognized some words: “pig,” “hog,” “watermelon,” “black-eyed peas,” “oberseer,” “massa,” and especially “yes suh, massa,” which was about the only thing he ever heard the black ones say to them. He had also heard the black ones describe the she toubob who lived with “massa” in the big white house as “the missus.” Once, from a distance, Kunta had glimpsed her, a bony creature the color of a toad’s underbelly, as she walked around cutting off some flowers among the vines and bushes that grew alongside the big house.

Most of the other toubob words that Kunta heard still confused him. But behind his expressionless mask, he tried hard to make sense of them, and slowly he began to associate various sounds with certain objects and actions. But one sound in particular was extremely puzzling to him, though he heard it exclaimed over and over nearly every day by toubob and blacks alike. What, he wondered, was a “nigger”?

W
ith the cutting and piling of the cornstalks at last completed, the “oberseer” began assigning different blacks to a variety of tasks after the conch horn blew each dawn. One morning Kunta was given the job of snapping loose from their thick vines and piling onto a “wagon,” as he’d learned they called the rolling boxes, a load of large, heavy vegetables the color of overripe mangoes and somewhat resembling the big gourds that women in Juffure dried out and cut in half to make household bowls. The blacks here called them “punkins.”

Riding with the “punkins” on the wagon to unload them at a large building called the “barn,” Kunta was able to see that some of the black men were sawing a big tree into thick sections and splitting them with axes and wedges into firewood that children were stacking into long rows as high as their heads. In another place, two men were hanging over thin poles the large leaves of what his nose told him was the filthy pagan tobacco; he had smelled it once before on one of the trips he had taken with his father.

As he rode back and forth to the “barn,” he saw that just as it was done in his own village, many things were being dried for later use. Some women were collecting a thick brown “sage-grass,” he heard them call it, and tying it into bundles. And some of the garden’s vegetables were being spread out on cloths to dry.
Even moss—which had been gathered by groups of children and plunged into boiling water—was being dried as well; he had no idea why.

It turned his stomach to watch—and listen—as he passed a pen where still more swine were being butchered. Their hair, too, he noticed, was being dried and saved—probably for mortar—but the thing that really sickened him was to see the swines bladders being removed, blown up, tied at the ends, and hung up to dry along a fence; Allah only knew for what unholy purpose.

When he had finished harvesting and storing the “punkins,” Kunta was sent with several others to a grove of trees, the limbs of which they were told to shake vigorously so that the nuts growing in them would fall to the ground, where they were picked up by first-kafo children carrying baskets. Kunta picked up one of the nuts and hid it in his clothes to try later when he was alone; it wasn’t bad.

When the last of these tasks was done, the men were put to work repairing things that needed it. Kunta helped another man fix a fence. And the women seemed to be busy in a general cleaning of the big white house and their own huts. He saw some of them washing things, first boiling them in a large black tub, then rubbing them up and down against a wrinkled piece of tin in soapy water; he wondered why none of them knew how to wash clothing properly by beating it against rocks.

Kunta noticed that the whip of the “oberseer” seemed to strike down upon someone’s back much less often than before. He felt in the atmosphere something similar to the time in Juffure when the harvest had all been put safely into the storehouses. Even before the evening’s conch horn would blow to announce the end of the day’s work, some of the black men would begin cavorting and prancing and singing among themselves. The “oberseer” would wheel his horse around and brandish his whip, but Kunta could
tell he didn’t really mean it. And soon the other men would join in, and then the women—singing words that made no sense at all to Kunta. He was so filled with disgust for all of them that he was glad when the conch horn finally signaled for them to return to their huts.

In the evenings, Kunta would sit down sideways just inside the doorway of his hut, heels flat against the packed dirt floor to minimize the iron cuffs’ contact with his festering ankles. If there was any light breeze, he enjoyed feeling it blowing against him, and thinking about the fresh carpet of gold and crimson leaves he would find under the trees the next morning. At such times, his mind would wander back to harvest-season evenings in Juffure, with the mosquitoes and other insects tormenting the people as they sat around the smoky night fires and settled into long conversations that would be punctuated now and then by the distant snarling of leopards and the screaming of hyenas.

One thing he didn’t hear, it occurred to him, and hadn’t heard since he left Africa, was the sound of drums. The toubob probably didn’t allow these black people to have any drums, that had to be the reason. But why? Was it because the toubob knew and feared how the sound of the drums could quicken the blood of everyone in a village, until even the little children and the toothless old ones would dance wildly? Or how the rhythm of the drums would drive wrestlers to their greatest feats of strength? Or how the hypnotic beat could send warriors into a frenzy against their enemies? Or perhaps the toubob were simply afraid to allow a form of communication they couldn’t understand that could travel the distance between one farm and another.

But these heathen blacks wouldn’t understand drumtalk any better than the toubob. Kunta was forced to concede, though—if only with great reluctance—that these pagan blacks might not be totally irredeemable. Ignorant as they were, some of the things
they did were purely African, and he could tell that they were totally unaware of it themselves. For one thing, he had heard all his life the very same sounds of exclamation, accompanied by the very same hand gestures and facial expressions. And the way these blacks moved their bodies was also identical. No less so was the way these blacks laughed when they were among themselves—with their whole bodies, just like the people of Juffure.

And Kunta had been reminded of Africa in the way that black women here wore their hair tied up with strings into very tight plaits—although African women often decorated their plaits with colorful beads. And the women of this place knotted cloth pieces over their heads, although they didn’t tie them correctly. Kunta saw that even some of these black men wore their hair in short plaits, too, as some men did in Africa.

Kunta also saw Africa in the way that black children here were trained to treat their elders with politeness and respect. He saw it in the way that mothers carried their babies with their plump little legs straddling the mothers’ bodies. He noticed even such small customs as how the older ones among these blacks would sit in the evenings rubbing their gums and teeth with the finely crushed end of a twig, which would have been lemongrass root in Juffure. And though he found it difficult to understand how they could do it here in toubob land, Kunta had to admit that these blacks’ great love of singing and dancing was unmistakably African.

But what really began to soften his heart somewhat toward these strange people was the fact that over the past moon, their great showing of distaste for him had continued only when the “oberseer” or the “massa” was around. When Kunta came by anywhere the blacks were among themselves, most of them by now would quickly nod, and he would notice their expressions of concern for the worsening condition of his left ankle. Though he always coldly ignored
them and hobbled on, he would sometimes find himself later almost wishing that he had returned their nods.

One night, when Kunta had fallen asleep but drifted again into wakefulness, as he often did, he lay staring up into the darkness and feeling that Allah had somehow, for some reason,
willed
him to be here in this place amid the lost tribe of a great black family that reached its roots back among the ancient forefathers; but unlike himself, these black ones in this place had no knowledge whatsoever of who they were and where they’d come from.

Feeling around him, in some strange way, the presence of his holy-man grandfather, Kunta reached out into the darkness. There was nothing to be felt but he began speaking aloud to the Alquaran Kairaba Kunta Kinte, imploring him to make known the purpose of his mission here, if there be any. He was startled to hear the sound of his own voice. Up to this moment in the toubob’s land, he had never uttered a sound addressed to anyone but Allah, except for those cries that had been torn from him by a lash.

The next morning, as he joined the others in line for the march to work, Kunta almost caught himself saying, “Mornin’,” as he had heard them greet each other every day. But though he knew enough toubob words by now not only to understand a good deal of what was said to him but also to make himself somewhat understood as well, something made him decide to continue keeping that knowledge to himself.

It occurred to Kunta that these blacks masked their true feelings for the toubob as carefully as he did his changing attitude toward
them.
He had by now many times witnessed the blacks’ grinning faces turn to bitterness the instant a toubob turned his head away. He had seen them break their working tools on purpose, and then act totally unaware of how it happened as the “oberseer” bitterly cursed them for their clumsiness. And he had
seen how blacks in the field, for all their show of rushing about whenever the toubob was nearby, were really taking twice as much time as they needed to do whatever they were doing.

He was beginning to realize, too, that like the Mandinkas’ own secret sira kango language, these blacks shared some kind of communication known only among themselves. Sometimes when they were working out in the field, Kunta’s glance would catch a small, quick gesture or movement of the head. Or one of them would utter some strange, brief exclamation; at unpredictable intervals another, and then another, would repeat it, always just beyond the hearing of the “oberseer” as he rode about on his horse. And sometimes with him right there among them, they would begin singing something that told Kunta—even though he couldn’t understand it—that some message was being passed, just as the women had done for the men on the big canoe.

When darkness had fallen among the huts and the lamp lights no longer glowed from the windows in the big house, Kunta’s sharp ears would detect the swift rustlings of one or two blacks slipping away from “slave row”—and a few hours later, slipping back again. He wondered where they were going and for what—and why they were crazy enough to come back. And the next morning in the fields, he would try to guess which of them had done it. Whoever it was, he thought he just might possibly learn to trust them.

Two huts away from Kunta, the blacks would seat themselves around the small fire of the old cooking woman every evening after “supper,” and the sight would fill Kunta with a melancholy memory of Juffure, except that the women here sat with the men, and some of both sexes were puffing away on pagan tobacco pipes that now and then glowed dully in the gathering darkness. Listening intently from where he sat just inside his doorway, Kunta could hear them talking over the rasping of the crickets and the
distant hooting of owls in the forest. Though he couldn’t understand the words, he felt the bitterness in their tone.

Even in the dark, Kunta by now could picture in his mind the face of whichever black was talking. His mind had filed away the voices of each of the dozen adults, along with the name of the tribe he felt that particular one most resembled. He knew which ones among them generally acted more carefree, and which seldom even smiled, a few of them not even around the toubob.

These evening meetings had a general pattern that Kunta had learned. The usual first talker was usually the woman who cooked in the big house. She mimicked things said by both the “massa” and the “missus.” Then he heard the big black one who had captured him imitating the “oberseer,” and he listened with astonishment as the others all but choked trying to stifle their laughter, lest they be heard in the big white house.

But then the laughter would subside and they would sit around talking among themselves. Kunta heard the helpless, haunted tone of some, and the anger of others, even though he grasped only a little of what they discussed. He had the feeling that they were recalling things that had happened to them earlier in their lives. Some of the women in particular would be talking and then suddenly break into tears. Finally the talking would grow quiet as one of the women began to sing, and the others joined in. Kunta couldn’t understand the words—“No-body knows de troubles I’se seed”—but he felt the sadness in the singing.