Roots (45 page)

“What do it mean?” a field hand asked, and the fiddler replied, “Uprise, an’ white folks won’t call no preacher when dey kills you!”

Luther heard that some white folks called “Tories,” and some other kind called “Scotchmen,” were joining with the English. “An’ sheriff’s nigger tol’ me dat Lord Dunmore’s ruinin’ river plantations, burnin’ big houses, an’ tellin’ de niggers he free ’em if’n dey come on an’ jine ’im.” Luther told how in Yorktown and other towns, any blacks caught out at night were being whipped and jailed.

Christmas that year was but a word. Lord Dunmore was reported to have barely outraced a mob onto the safety of his flag-ship. And a week later came the incredible news that Dunmore, with his fleet off Norfolk, had ordered the city emptied within one hour. Then his guns began a bombardment that set raging fires, and much of Norfolk had been reduced to ashes. In what was left, Bell reported, water and food were scarce, and fever had broken out, killing so many that Hampton Roads’ waters were dotted with bloated bodies drifting ashore with the tides. “Say dey’s buryin’ ’em in san’ an’ mud,” said Luther. “An’ lotta niggers near ’bout starvin’ an’ scared to death on dem English boats.”

Mulling over all these terrible events, Kunta felt that in some unfathomable way, all of this suffering must have some meaning, some reason, that Allah must have willed it. Whatever was going to happen next, both to black and white, must be His design.

It was early in 1776 when Kunta and the others heard that a General Cornwallis had come from England with boatfuls of sailors and soldiers trying to cross a big “York River,” but a great storm had scattered the boats. They heard next that another Continental Congress had met, with a group of massas from Virginia moving for complete separation from the English. Then two months of minor news passed before Luther returned from the county seat with the news that after another meeting on July 4,
“All the white folks I seen is jes’ carryin’ on! Somethin’ ’bout some Decoration a Ind’pen’ence. Heared ’em say Massa John Hancock done writ his name real big so the king wouldn’t have to strain none to see it.”

On his next trips to the county seat, Luther returned with accounts he had heard that in Baltimore, a life-sized rag doll “king” had been carted through the streets, then thrown into a bonfire surrounded by white people shouting “Tyrant! Tyrant!” And in Richmond, rifles had been fired in volleys as shouting white people waved their torches and drank toasts to each other. Along the subdued slave row, the old gardener said, “Ain’t nothin’ neither way for niggers to holler ’bout. England or here, dey’s all white folks.”

Later that summer, Bell bustled over to slave row with news from a dinner guest that the House of Burgesses had just recently passed an act that “say dey gon’ take niggers in the Army as drummers, fifers, or pioneers.”

“What’s pioneers?” asked a field hand.

“It mean git stuck up front an’ git kilt!” said the fiddler.

Luther soon brought home an exciting account of a big battle right there in Virginia that had slaves fighting on both sides. Amid a hail of musket balls from hundreds of redcoats and Tories, along with a group of convicts and blacks, a smaller force of white “Colonials” and their blacks were driven across a bridge, but in the rear a slave soldier named Billy Flora had ripped up and hurled away enough planks from the bridge that the English forces had to stop and withdraw, saving the day for the Colonial forces.

“Rip up a bridge! Dat musta been some strong nigger!” the gardener exclaimed.

When the French entered the war on the Colonial side in 1778, Bell relayed reports that one state after another was authorizing the enlisting of slaves with the promise of freedom when the war
was won. “Now ain’t but two states lef’ dat say dey ain’t gon’ never let niggers fight, dat’s South Ca’lina an’ Geo’gia.”

“Dat de only thing good I ever heared ’bout neither one a dem!” said the fiddler.

As much as he hated slavery, it seemed to Kunta that no good could come of the white folks giving guns to blacks. First of all, the whites would always have more guns than the blacks, so any attempt to revolt would end in defeat And he thought about how in his own homeland, guns and bullets had been given by the toubob to evil chiefs and kings, until blacks were fighting blacks, village against village, and selling those they conquered—their own people—into chains.

Once Bell heard the massa say that as many as five thousand blacks, both free and slave, were in the fighting that was going on, and Luther regularly brought stories of blacks fighting and dying alongside their massas. Luther also told of some all-black companies from “up Nawth,” even one all-black battalion called “The Bucks of America.” “Even dey colonel is a nigger,” said Luther. “His name Middleton.” He looked archly at the fiddler. “You won’t never guess what he is!”

“What you mean?” said the fiddler.

“He a fiddler, too! An’ it’s time to do some fiddlin’!”

Then Luther hummed and sang a new song he had heard in the county seat. The catchiness of it was easy to pick up, and soon others were singing it, and still others beating time with sticks. “Yankee Doodle came to town, ridin’ on a pony. . . .” And when the fiddler started playing, the slave row young’uns began to dance and clap their hands.

With May of 1781 came the astounding story that redcoats on horses had ruined Massa Thomas Jefferson’s plantation called Monticello. The crops had been destroyed, the barn burned, the livestock run off, and all the horses and thirty slaves had been
taken. “White folks sayin’ Virginia got to be saved,” Luther reported, and soon after he told of white joy because General Washington’s army was headed there. “An’ niggers a plenty is in it!” October brought reports that the combined forces of Washington and Lafayette had poured shot and shell into Yorktown, attacking England’s Cornwallis. And they soon learned of other battles raging in Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Maryland, and other states. Then in the third week of the month came the news that set even slave row shouting: “Cornwallis done surrendered! War am ober! Freedom am won!”

Luther barely had time to sleep between buggy journeys now, and the massa was even smiling again—for the first time in years, said Bell.

“Ev’ywhere I’s been, de niggers is hollerin’ loud as white folks,” said Luther.

But he said that slaves everywhere had rejoiced most over their special hero, “Ol’ Billy” Flora, who had recently been discharged and carried his faithful musket back to Norfolk.

“Y’all come here!” Bell shouted, summoning the others on slave row not long after. “Massa jes’ tol’ me dey done named that Philadelphia firs’ capital of Newnited States!” But it was Luther who told them later, “Massa Jefferson done put up some kin’ of Manumission Ack. It say massas got de right to free niggers, but tell me dem Quakers an’ antislavery folks an’ free niggers up Nawth is hollerin’ an’ goin’ on ’cause the Ack say massas don’t have to, not less’n dey wants to.”

When General Washington disbanded the army early in November of 1783, formally ending what most people had begun calling “The Seven Years’ War,” Bell told everyone in slave row, “Massa say gon’ be peace now.”

“Ain’t gon’ be no peace, not long as it’s white folks,” said the fiddler sourly, “’cause ain’t nothin’ dey loves better’n killin’.” His
glance flicked among the faces around him. “Jes’ watch what I tell you—it’s gon’ be worse’n it was for us niggers.”

Kunta and the old gardener sat later talking quietly. “You seen aplenty since you been here. How long it’s been, anyhow?” Kunta didn’t know, and that troubled him.

That night, when he was alone, Kunta spent hours carefully arranging into piles of twelve all of the multicolored pebbles that he had dropped faithfully into his gourd with each new moon. He was so stunned by what the stones finally told him that the gardener never learned the answer to his question. Surrounding him there on the dirt floor of his hut were seventeen piles of stones. He was thirty-four rains old! What in the name of Allah had happened to his life? He had been in the white man’s land as long as he had lived in Juffure. Was he still an African, or had he become a “nigger,” as the others called themselves? Was he even a man? He was the same age as his father when he had seen him last, yet he had no sons of his own, no wife, no family, no village, no people, no homeland, almost no past at all that seemed real to him anymore—and no future he could see. It was as if The Gambia had been a dream he’d had once long ago. Or was he still asleep? And if he was, would he ever waken?

K
unta didn’t have long to brood about the future, for a few days later came news that took the plantation by storm. A captured runaway housegirl, reported Bell breathlessly after the sheriff arrived for a hushed meeting with the massa behind closed doors, had admitted under a lashing that her crude escape route had been drawn for her by none other than the massa’s driver, Luther.

Storming out to slave row before Luther could run away, Massa Waller confronted him with the sheriff and demanded angrily to know if it was true. Terrified, Luther admitted that it was. Red-faced with rage, the massa lifted his arm to strike, but when Luther begged for mercy, he lowered it again and stood there staring silently at Luther for a long moment, tears of fury welling in his eyes.

At last he spoke, very quietly: “Sheriff, put this man under arrest and take him to jail. He is to be sold at the next slave auction.” And without another word he turned and walked back to the house, ignoring Luther’s anguished sobs.

Speculation had hardly begun about who would be assigned to replace him as the massa’s driver when Bell came out one night and told Kunta that the massa wanted to see him right away. Everyone watched—but no one was surprised—as he went cripping into the house behind Bell. Though he suspected why he had
been called, Kunta felt a little scared, for he had never spoken to the massa or even been beyond Bell’s kitchen in the big house during all his sixteen years on the plantation.

As Bell led him through the kitchen into a hallway, his eyes goggled at the shining floor and the high, papered walls. She knocked at a huge carved door. He heard the massa say, “Come in!” and Bell went on inside, turning to beckon expressionlessly to Kunta. He couldn’t believe the size of the room; it seemed as big as the inside of the barn. The polished oaken floor was covered with rugs, and the walls were hung with paintings and tapestries. The richly dark, matched furniture was waxed, and long rows of books sat on recessed shelves. Massa Waller sat at a desk reading under an oil lamp with a circular shade of greenish glass, and his finger held his place in his book when, after a moment, he turned around to face Kunta.

“Toby, I need a buggy driver. You’ve grown into a man on this place, and I believe you’re loyal.” His widely set blue eyes seemed to pierce Kunta. “Bell tells me that you never drink. I like that, and I’ve noticed how you conduct yourself.” Massa Waller paused. Bell shot a look at Kunta. “Yassuh, Massa,” he said quickly.

“You know what happened to Luther?” the massa asked. “Yassuh,” said Kunta. The massa’s eyes narrowed, and his voice turned cold and hard. “I’d sell you in a minute,” he said. “I’d sell Bell if you two had no better sense.”

As they stood there silently, the massa reopened his book. “All right, start driving me tomorrow. I’m going to Newport. I’ll show you the way until you learn.” The massa glanced at Bell. “Get him the proper clothes And tell the fiddler that he’ll be replacing Toby in the garden.”

“Yassuh, Massa,” Bell said, as she and Kunta left.

Bell brought him the clothing, but it was the fiddler and the old gardener who supervised Kunta’s dressing early the next morning
in the starched and pressed canvas trousers and cotton hemp shirt. They didn’t look too bad, but that black string tie they helped him put on next, he felt, made him look ridiculous.

“Newport ain’t nowhere to drive, jes’ right up next to Spotsylvania Courthouse,” said the old gardener. “It’s ONE a de ol’ Waller family big houses.”

The fiddler—who by this time had been told of his own new duties as well as Kunta’s—was walking around inspecting him with an expression that revealed transparently both his pleasure and his jealousy. “You a sho’ nuff special nigger now, no two ways’bout it. Jes’ don’t let it git to yo’ head.”

It was unnecessary advice for one who—even after all this time—found no dignity in anything he was made to do for the white man. But whatever small excitement Kunta felt at the prospect of being able to leave his garden behind and widen his horizons—as his uncles Janneh and Saloum had done—was soon forgotten in the heat of his new duties.

Summoned by his patients at any hour of the day or night, Massa Waller would call Kunta rushing from his hut to hitch the horses for breakneck rides to homes sometimes many miles from the plantation down narrow, twisting roads that were hardly smoother than the countryside around them. Lurching and careening over ruts and potholes, laying on the whip until the horses heaved for breath, Massa Waller clinging to his canopied rear seat, Kunta showed a knack for the reins that somehow saw them safely to their destination even in the spring thaw, when the red-clay roads turned into treacherous rivers of mud.

Early one morning, the massa’s brother John came galloping in, frantically reporting that his wife’s labor pains had begun, although it was two months before the birth had been expected. Massa John’s horse was too exhausted to return without rest, and Kunta had driven both of them back to Massa John’s barely in the
nick of time. Kunta’s own overheated horses hadn’t cooled down enough for him to give them water when he heard the shrill cries of a newborn baby. It was a five-pound girl, the massa told him on their way home, and they were going to call her Anne.

And so it went. During that same frantic summer and fall, there was a plague of black vomiting that claimed victims all over the county—so many that Massa Waller and Kunta couldn’t keep up with them, and soon drove themselves into fever. Downing copious dosages of quinine to keep them going, they saved more lives than they lost. But Kunta’s own life became a blur of countless big-house kitchens, catnaps on pallets in strange huts or in haymows, and endless hours of sitting in the buggy outside shanties and grand homes listening to the same cries of pain while he waited for the massa to reappear so that they could return home—or more often drive on to the next patient.