Roots (74 page)

The massa walked hurriedly away from the wagon cradling a bird under his arm. George remembered feeding that bird, exercising it, holding it in his arms; he felt dizzy with pride. Then the massa and his opponent were by the cockpit, weighing-in their birds, then fitting on the steel gaffs amid a clamor of betting cries.

At “
Pit your cocks!
” the two birds smashed head-on, taking to the air, they dropped back to the floor, furiously pecking, feinting, their snakelike necks maneuvering, seeking any opening. Again bursting upward, they beat at each other with their wings—and then they fell with Massa Lea’s bird reeling, obviously gaffed! But within seconds, in the next aerial flurry, the massa’s bird fatally sank his own gaff.

Massa Lea snatched up his bird—which was still crowing in triumph—and came running back to the wagon. Only vaguely George heard, “The winner is Mr. Lea’s”—as Uncle Mingo seized the bleeding bird, his fingers flying over its body to locate the deep slash wound in the rib cage. Clamping his lips over it, Uncle Mingo’s cheeks puckered inward with his force of sucking out the clotted blood. Suddenly thrusting the bird down before George’s
knees, Mingo barked, “Piss on it! Right there!” The thunderstruck George gaped. “
Piss!
Keep it from ’fectin’!” Fumbling, George did so, his strong stream splattering against the wounded bird and Uncle Mingo’s hands. Then Uncle Mingo was packing the bird lightly between soft straw in a deep basket. “B’lieve we save ’im, Massa! What one you fightin’ next?” Massa Lea gestured toward a coop. “Git dat bird out, boy!” George nearly fell over himself complying, and Massa Lea went hurrying back toward the shouting crowd as another fight’s winner was announced. Faintly, beneath the raucous crowing of hundreds of cocks crowing, of men shouting new bets, George could hear the injured bird clucking weakly in his basket. He was sad, exultant, frightened; he had never been so excited. And on that crisp morning, a new gamecocker had been born.

“L
ook at ’im tryin’ to outstrut dem roosters!” exclaimed Kizzy to Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah, and Uncle Pompey. George came striding up the road to spend his Sunday morning with them.

“Hmph!” Sister Sarah snorted with a glance at Kizzy. “Aw, heish up, woman, we’s jes’ proud of ’im as you is!”

As George came on, still well beyond earshot, Miss Malizy told the others that only the previous evening she had overheard Massa Lea declare tipsily to some gamecocker dinner guests that he had a boy who after four years of apprenticeship seemed as “natural born” to become, in time, “the equal of any white or black gamecock trainer in Caswell County.”

“Massa say de ol’ Mingo nigger say dat boy jes’ live an’ breathe chickens! ’Cordin’ to massa, Mingo swear one evenin’ late he was walkin’ roun’ down dere an’ seed George settin’ hunched over kind of funny on a stump. Mingo say he ease up behin’ real slow, an’ he be dog if’n George wasn’t talkin’ to some hens settin’ on dey eggs. He swear dat boy was tellin’ dem hens all ’bout fights gwine be winned by de baby chicks de hens ’bout to hatch.”

“Do Lawd!” said Kizzy, her eyes bathing in the sight of her approaching son. After the usual kissing and hugging with the women and handshaking with Uncle Pompey, they all settled onto stools brought quickly from their cabins. First they told George
the latest white folks’ news that Miss Malizy had managed to overhear during the week. The scant news this time was that more and more strange-talking white folks from across the big water were said to be arriving by the shiploads up North, swelling the numbers of those already fighting to take the jobs previously held by free blacks, and there was also steadily increasing talk of sending the free blacks on ships to Africa. Living as he did in such isolation with that strange old man, they kidded George, he couldn’t be expected to know about any of this, or about anything else that was going on in the rest of the world—“less’n it git told to you by some dem chickens”—and George laughingly agreed.

These weekly visits offered not only the pleasure of seeing his mammy and the others but also of getting some relief from Uncle Mingo’s cooking, which was more suitable for chickens than for people. Miss Malizy and Kizzy knew enough by now to prepare at least two or three platefuls of George’s favorite dishes.

When his conversation began to lag—around noon, as usual—they knew he was getting restless to leave, and after they had exacted his promise to pray regularly, and after another round of huggings and kissings and pumping of hands, George went hurrying back down the road with his basket of food to share with Uncle Mingo.

In the summertime, George often spent the rest of his Sunday afternoon “off” in a grassy pasture where Mingo could see him springing about catching grasshoppers, which he would then feed as tidbits to the penned-up cockerels and stags. But this was early winter, and the two-year-old birds had just been retrieved from the rangewalks for training, and George was trying to salvage one of the several birds that Mingo and the massa felt were probably too wild and man-shy to respond properly to training and were likely to be culled out as discards. Mingo watched with affection and amusement as George forcibly restrained the pecking,
squawking, struggling stag and started crooning to it, blowing gently on its head and neck, rubbing his face against the brilliant feathers, massaging its body, legs, and wings—until it actually began to settle down.

Mingo wished him luck, but he hoped George remembered what he had told him about taking chances with an unreliable bird. A gamecocker’s breeding and development of a fine gameflock could represent a lifetime investment, and it could all be lost in a single emotional gamble. You simply couldn’t risk fighting a bird unless every detectable flaw had been permanently corrected. And if it wasn’t well, George had learned by now to quite calmly wring a gamecock’s neck. He had come to share fully the massa’s and Uncle Mingo’s view that the only worthwhile birds were those whose intense training and conditioning, coupled with instinctive aggressiveness and courage, would drive them to drop dead in a cockpit before they would quit fighting.

George loved it when the massa’s birds killed their opponents swiftly and without injury, sometimes within as little as thirty or forty seconds, but privately—though he never would have breathed this to Mingo or Massa Lea—nothing could match the thrill of watching a bird he had helped raise from a baby chick battle to the death with another equally game champion, each of them staggering, torn and bleeding, beaks lolling open, tongues hanging out, wings dragging on the cockpit floor, bodies and legs trembling, until finally both simply collapsed; then with the referee counting toward ten, the massa’s bird would find somehow one more ounce of strength to struggle up and drive in a fatal spur.

George understood very well Mingo’s deep attachment to the five or six scarred old catchcocks that he treated almost as pets—especially the one he said had won the biggest bet of the massa’s career. “Terriblest fight I ever seed!” said Uncle Mingo, nodding toward that one-eyed veteran. “It was back dere in his prime,
reckon three-four years fo’ you come here. Somehow or ’nother massa had got in dis great big New Year’s main bein’ backed by some real rich massa clear over in Surrey County, Virginia. Dey’nounced no less’n two hunnud cocks was to fight for a ten thousand dollars’ main stake, wid no less’n hunnud-dollar side bets. Well, massa an’ me took twenty birds. You lemme tell you, dem twenty birds was
ready!
We driv days in de wagon to git dere, feedin’, waterin’, an’ massagin’ dem birds in dey coops as we went. Well, gittin’ on near de end o’ de fightin’, we’d winned some, but we’d lost too many to git at dat main purse, an’ massa was plenty mad. Den he foun’ out we was gwine be matched ’gainst what folks claimin’ was de meanest mess o’ feathers in Virginia. You oughta heared de hollerin’ of bets on dat bird!

“Well, now! Massa’d done hit his bottle a couple good licks, an’ got all red in de face as he could git! An’ out’n de birds we had left, he pick dat ol’ buzzard you’s lookin’ at right over dere. Massa stuck dat bird under one arm, an’ commence walkin’ roun’ dat cockpit swearin’ loud he weren’t backin’ off nobody’s bets! He say he started wid nothin’, if he win’ up wid nothin’ again, he sho’ wouldn’t be no stranger to it! Boy, lemme tell you! Dat tough ol’ meat an’ pinfeathers over yonder went in dat cockpit, an’ he come out jes’ barely, but dat other bird was dead! Dem referees ’nounced dey’d been steady tryin’ to kill one ’nother for nigh fo’teen minutes!” Uncle Mingo looked with warm nostalgia across at the old rooster. “So bad cut up an’ bleedin’ he was s’posed to die, but I ain’t slept a wink ’til I saved ’im!”

Uncle Mingo turned toward George. “Fact, boy, dis sump’n I’se got’ to press on you mo’n I’se done—you got to do everything you can to save hurt birds. Even dem dat’s been lucky ’nough to kill quick, an’ standin’ up dere crowin’ big an’ actin’ ready to fight again, well, dey can fool you! Soon’s you git ’im back in yo’ wagon, be sho’ you checks ’im good all over, real close! Maybe he got jes’ some l’il
spur cuts, or nicks, dat can easy git ’fected. Any sich cut, piss on it good. If it’s any bleedin’, put on a spider web compress, or l’il bit o’ de soft belly fur of a rabbit. If you don’t, two-three days later yo’ bird can start lookin’ like it’s shrinkin’ up, like a limp rag, den next thing you know yo’ bird dead. Gamebirds is like I hears racehosses is. Dey’s tough, but same time dey’s mighty delicate critters.”

It seemed to George that Uncle Mingo must have taught him a thousand things, yet thousands more were still in Uncle Mingo’s head. As hard as George had tried to understand, he still couldn’t comprehend how Mingo—and the massa—could seem to
sense
which birds would prove to be the smartest, boldest, and proudest in the cockpit. It wasn’t simply the assets you could see, which by now even George had learned to recognize: the ideal short, broad backs with the full, rounded chests tapering to a fine, straight keel-bone and a small, compact belly. He knew that good, solid, round-boned wings should have hard-quilled, wide, glossy feathers that tended to meet under a median-angled tail; that short, thick, muscular legs should be spaced well apart, with stout spurs evenly spaced above strong feet whose long back toe should spread well backward and flat to the ground.

Uncle Mingo would chide George for becoming so fond of some birds that he seemed to forget their jungle instincts. Now or then some gamecock docilely being petted in George’s lap would glimpse one of Uncle Mingo’s old catchcocks and with a shattering crow burst from George’s grasp in violent pursuit of the old bird, with George racing to stop them before one killed the other. Uncle Mingo also repeatedly cautioned George to control his emotions better when some bird of George’s got killed in the cockpit; on several occasions the big, strapping George had burst into tears. “Nobody can’t speck to win every fight, don’ know how many times I got to tell you dat!” said Mingo.

Mingo also decided to let the boy know that for several months he had been aware that George had been disappearing not long after full darkness fell, then returning very late, recently close to daybreak. Uncle Mingo was sure it had a connection with George’s having once mentioned, with elaborate casualness, that while he had been at the gristmill with Massa Lea one day, he had met a pretty and nearly high-yaller big-house maid named Charity from the adjacent plantation. “All dese years down here, dese of ears an’ eyes o’ mine’s like a cat’s. I knowed de first night you slipped off,” Uncle Mingo said to his astounded apprentice. “Now, I ain’t one to poke in nobody’s business, but I’se gwine tell you sump’n. You jes’ be mighty sho’ you ain’t cotched by some dese po’ white paterollers,’cause if dey don’t beat you half to death deyself, dey’ll bring you back, an’ don’t you think massa won’t lay his whip crost yo’ ass!” Uncle Mingo stared for a while across the grassy pasture before he spoke again. “You notice I ain’t said
quit
slippin’ off?”

“Yassuh,” said George humbly.

During another silence, Mingo sat down on a favorite stump of his, leaned slightly forward, and crossed his legs, with his hands clasped around his knees. “Boy! I ’members back when I first foun’ out what gals was, too—” and a new light crept into Uncle Mingo’s eyes as the aged features softened. “It was dis here long, tall gal, she was still new to de county when her massa bought a place right next to my massa’s.” Uncle Mingo paused, smiling. “Bes’ I can ’scribe ’er, well, de niggers older’n me commence to callin’ ’er ‘Blacksnake’—” Uncle Mingo went on, his smile growing wider and wider the more he remembered—and he remembered plenty. But George was too chagrined at being caught to be embarrassed by anything Mingo was telling him. It was pretty clear though that he had underestimated the old man in more ways than one.

W
alking up the road toward slave row one Sunday morning, George sensed that something was wrong when he saw that neither his mammy nor any of the others were standing around Kizzy’s cabin to greet him, as they had never failed to do before in the four years he’d spent with Uncle Mingo. Quickening his pace, he reached his mammy’s cabin and was about to knock when the door was snatched open and Kizzy practically jerked him inside, quickly shutting the door behind them, her face taut with fear.

“Is missis seed you?”

“Ain’t seed her, Mammy! What’s the
matter?
”

“Lawd, boy! Massa got word some free nigger over in Charleston, South Ca’liny, name o’ Denmark Vesey, had hunnuds o’ niggers ready to kill no tellin’ how many white folks right tonight, if dey hadn’t o’ got caught. Massa ain’t long lef’ here actin’ like he gone wild, a-wavin’ his shotgun an’ threatenin’ to kill anybody missy see outside dey cabins fo’ he git back from some big organizin’ meetin’!”

Kizzy slid alongside the cabin’s wall until she could look through the cabin’s single window toward the big house. “She ain’t still where she was peepin’ from! Maybe she seen you comin’ an’ went an’ hid!” The absurdity of Missis Lea
hiding
from him struck
some of Kizzy’s alarm into George. “Run back down wid dem chickens, boy. No tellin’
what
massa do he catch you up here!”