Roots (38 page)

The lash began cutting into the flesh across Kunta’s shoulders and back, with the “oberseer” grunting and Kunta shuddering under the force of each blow. After a while Kunta couldn’t stop himself from screaming with the pain, but the beating went on until his sagging body pressed against the tree. His shoulders and back were covered with long, half-opened bleeding welts that in some places exposed the muscles beneath. He couldn’t be sure, but the next thing Kunta knew he had the feeling he was falling. Then he felt the coldness of the snow against him and everything went black.

He came to in his hut, and along with his senses, pain returned—excruciating and enveloping. The slightest movement made him cry out in agony; and he was back in chains. But even worse, his nose informed him that his body was wrapped from feet to chin in a large cloth soaked with grease of the swine. When the old cooking woman came in with food, he tried to spit at her, but succeeded only in throwing up. He thought he saw compassion in her eyes.

Two days later, he was awakened early in the morning by the sounds of festivities. He heard black people outside the big house shouting “Christmas gif’, Massa!,” and he wondered what they could possibly have to celebrate. He wanted to die, so that his soul could join the ancestors; he wanted to be done forever with misery unending in this toubob land, so stifling and stinking that he couldn’t draw a clean breath in it. He boiled with fury that instead of beating him like a man, the toubob had stripped him naked. When he became well, he would take revenge—and he would escape again. Or he would die.

W
hen Kunta finally emerged from his hut, again with both of his ankles shackled, most of the other blacks avoided him, rolling their eyes in fear of being near him, and moving quickly elsewhere, as if he were a wild animal of some kind. Only the old cooking woman and the old man who blew the conch horn would look at him directly.

Samson was nowhere to be seen. Kunta had no idea where he had gone, but Kunta was glad. Then, a few days later, he saw the hated black one bearing the unhealed marks of a lash; he was gladder still. But at the slightest excuse, the lash of the toubob “oberseer” fell once again on Kunta’s back as well.

He knew every day that he was being watched as he went through the motions of his work, like the others moving more quickly when the toubob came anywhere near, then slowing down as they left. Unspeaking, Kunta did whatever he was ordered to do. And when the day was over, he carried his melancholy—deep within himself—from the fields back to the dingy little hut where he slept.

In his loneliness, Kunta began talking to himself, most often in imaginary conversations with his family. He would talk to them mostly in his mind, but sometimes aloud. “Fa,” he would say, “these black ones are not like us. Their bones, their blood, their
sinews, their hands, their feet are not their own. They live and breathe not for themselves but for the toubob. Nor do they own anything at all, not even their own children. They are fed and nursed and bred for others.”

“Mother,” he would say, “these women wear cloths upon their heads, but they do not know how to tie them; there is little that they cook that does not contain the meat or the greases of the filthy swine, and many of them have lain down with the toubob, for I see their children who are cursed with the sasso-borro half color.”

And he would talk with his brothers Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi, telling them that even the wisest of the elders could never really adequately impress upon them the importance of realizing that the most vicious of the forest animals was not half as dangerous as the toubob.

And so the moons passed in this way, and soon the spikes of “ice” had fallen and melted into water. And before long after that, green grass came peeping through the dark-reddish earth, the trees began to show their buds, and the birds were singing once again. And then came the plowing of the fields and the planting of the endless rows. Finally the sun’s rays upon the soil made it so hot that Kunta was obliged to step quickly, and if he had to stop, to keep his feet moving to prevent them from blistering.

Kunta had bided his time and minded his own business, waiting for his keepers to grow careless and take their eyes off him once again. But he had the feeling that even the other blacks were still keeping an eye on him, even when the “oberseer” and the other toubob weren’t around. He had to find some way not to be so closely watched. Perhaps he could take advantage of the fact that the toubob didn’t look at blacks as people but as things. Since the toubob’s reactions to these black things seemed to depend on how those things acted, he decided to act as inconspicuous as possible.

Though it made him despise himself, Kunta forced himself to start behaving the way the other blacks did whenever the toubob came anywhere near. Hard as he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to grin and shuffle, but he made an effort to appear co-operative, if not friendly, and he made a great show of looking busy. He had also learned a good many more toubob words by now, always keenly listening to everything that was said around him, either out in the fields or around the huts at night, and though he still chose not to speak himself, he began to make it clear that he could understand.

Cotton—one of the main crops on the farm—grew quickly here in the toubob’s land. Soon its flowers had turned into hard green bolls and split open, each filled with fluffy balls, until the fields as far as Kunta could see were vast seas of whiteness, dwarfing the fields he had seen around Juffure. It was time to harvest, and the wake-up horn began blowing earlier in the morning, it seemed to Kunta, and the whip of the “oberseer” was cracking in warning even before the “slaves,” as they were called, could tumble from their beds.

By watching others out in the field, Kunta soon learned that a hunched position made his long canvas sack seem to drag less heavily behind him as the endlessly repeated handfuls of cotton from the bolls slowly filled his sack. Then he would drag it to be emptied in the wagon that waited at the end of the rows. Kunta filled his sack twice a day, which was about average, although there were some—hated and envied by the others for bending their backs so hard to please the toubob, and succeeding at it—who could pick cotton so fast that their hands seemed a blur; by the time the horn blew at dusk, their sacks would have been filled and emptied into the wagon at least three times.

When each cotton wagon was filled, it was taken to a storehouse on the farm, but Kunta noticed that the overflowing wagons of tobacco harvested in the larger fields adjoining his were driven away somewhere down the road. Four days passed before it returned
empty—just in time to pass another loaded wagon on its way out. Kunta also began seeing other loaded tobacco wagons, doubtlessly from other farms, rolling along the main road in the distance, drawn sometimes by as many as four mules. Kunta didn’t know where the wagons were going, but he knew they went a long way, for he had seen the utter exhaustion of Samson and other drivers when they had returned from one of their trips.

Perhaps they would go far enough to take him to freedom. Kunta found it hard to get through the next several days in his excitement with this tremendous idea. He ruled out quickly any effort to hide on one of this farm’s wagons; there would be no time without someone’s eyes too near for him to slip unnoticed into a load of tobacco. It must be a wagon moving along the big road from some other farm. Using the pretext of going to the outhouse late that night, Kunta made sure that no one was about, then went to a place where he could see the road in the moonlight. Sure enough—the tobacco wagons were traveling at night. He could see the flickering lights each wagon carried, until finally those small specks of brightness would disappear in the distance.

He planned and schemed every minute, no details of the local tobacco wagons escaping his notice. Picking in the fields, his hands fairly flew; he even made himself grin if the “oberseer” rode anywhere near. And all the time he was thinking how he would be able to leap onto the rear end of a loaded, rolling wagon at night and burrow under the tobacco without being heard by the drivers up front because of the bumping wagon’s noise, and unseen not only because of the darkness but also because of the tall mound of leaves between the drivers and the rear of the wagon. It filled him with revulsion even to think of having to touch and smell the pagan plant he had managed to stay away from all his life, but if that was the only way to get away, he felt sure that Allah would forgive him.

W
aiting one evening soon afterward behind the “outhouse,” as the slaves called the hut where they went to relieve themselves, Kunta killed with a rock one of the rabbits that abounded in the woods nearby. Carefully he sliced it thinly and dried it as he had learned in manhood training, for he would need to take some nourishment along with him. Then, with a smooth rock, he honed the rusted and bent knife blade he had found and straightened, and wired it into a wooden handle that he had carved. But even more important than the food and the knife was the saphie he had made—a cock’s feather to attract the spirits, a horse’s hair for strength, a bird’s wishbone for success—all tightly wrapped and sewn within a small square of gunnysacking with a needle he had made from a thorn. He realized the foolishness of wishing that his saphie might be blessed by a holy man, but any saphie was better than no saphie at all.

He hadn’t slept all night, but far from being tired, it was all Kunta could do not to burst with excitement—to keep from showing any emotion at all—throughout the next day’s working in the fields. For tonight would be the night. Back in his hut after the evening meal, his hands trembled as he pushed into his pocket the knife and the dried slices of rabbit, then tied his saphie tightly around his upper right arm. He could hardly stand hearing the familiar
early-night routine of the other blacks; for each moment, which seemed to be taking forever to pass, might bring some unexpected occurrence that could ruin his plan. But the bone-weary field hands’ mournful singing and praying soon ended. To let them get safely asleep, Kunta waited as much longer as he dared.

Then, grasping his homemade knife, he eased out into the dark night. Sensing no one about, he bent low and ran as fast as he could go, plunging after a while into a small, thick growth of brush just below where the big road curved. He huddled down, breathing hard. Suppose no more wagons were coming tonight? The thought lanced through him. And then a nearly paralyzing, worse fear: Suppose the driver’s helper sits as a rear lookout? But he had to take the chance.

He heard a wagon coming minutes before he saw its flickering light. Teeth clenched, muscles quivering, Kunta felt ready to collapse. The wagon seemed barely crawling. But finally, it was directly across from him and slowly passing. Two dim figures sat on its front seat. Feeling like screaming, he lunged from the growth of brush. Trotting low behind the squeaking, lurching wagon, Kunta awaited the road’s next rough spot; then his outstretched hand clawed over the tailboard, and he was vaulting upward, over the top, and into the mountain of tobacco. He was on board!

Frantically he went burrowing in. The leaves were packed together far more tightly than he had expected, but at last his body was concealed. Even after pawing open an air space to breathe more freely—the stench of the filthy weed almost made him sick—he had to keep moving his back and shoulders a bit this way or that, trying to get comfortable under the pressing weight. But finally he found the right position, and the rocking motion of the wagon, cushioned by the leaves, which were very warm around him, soon made him drowsy.

A loud bump brought him awake with a sickening start, and he began to think about being discovered. Where was the wagon
going, and how long would it take to get there? And when it arrived, would he be able to slip away unseen? Or would he find himself trailed and trapped again? Why had he not thought of this before? A picture flashed into his mind of the dogs, and Samson, and the toubob with their guns, and Kunta shuddered. Considering what they did to him last time, he knew that this time his
life
would depend upon not getting caught.

But the more he thought of it, the stronger his urge grew to leave the wagon now. With his hands, he parted the leaves enough to poke his head out. Out in the moonlight were endless fields and countryside. He couldn’t jump out now. The moon was bright enough to help his pursuers as much as it could help him. And the longer he rode, the less likely it was that the dogs could ever track him. He covered up the hole and tried to calm himself, but every time the wagon lurched, he feared that it was going to stop, and his heart would nearly leap from his chest.

Much later, when he opened the hole again and saw that it was nearing dawn, Kunta made up his mind. He had to leave the wagon right now, before he came any closer to the enemy of open daylight. Praying to Allah, he grasped the handle of his knife and began to wriggle out of his hole. When his entire body was free, he waited again for the wagon to lurch. It seemed to take an eternity, but when it finally did he made a light leap—and was on the road. A moment later he was out of sight in the bushes.

Kunta swung in a wide arc to avoid two toubob farms where he could see the familiar big house with the small, dark huts nearby. The sounds of their wake-up horns floated across the still air to his ears, and as the dawn brightened, he was slashing through underbrush deeper and deeper into what he knew was a wide expanse of forest. It was cool in the dense woods, and the dew that sprinkled onto him felt good, and he swung his knife as if it were weightless, grunting in his pleasure with each swing. During the early afternoon,
he happened upon a small stream of clear water tippling over mossy rocks, and frogs jumped in alarm as he stopped to drink from it with his cupped hands. Looking around and feeling safe enough to rest for a while, he sat down on the bank and reached into his pocket. Taking out a piece of the dried rabbit and swashing it around in the stream, he put it in his mouth and chewed. The earth was springy and soft beneath him, and the only sounds he could hear were made by the toads and the insects and the birds. He listened to them as he ate, and watched sunlight stippling the leafy boughs above him with splashes of gold among the green, and he told himself that he was glad he didn’t have to run as hard or as steadily as he had before, for exhaustion had made him an easy prey.