Roots (93 page)

“Yas’m, sho’ does.” He paused. “Wonder how ol’ was he?”

“Ain’t never heard, leas’ not to my recollection.” A puzzlement grew on her face. “Would ’pend when was you talkin’ ’bout. He’d o’ been one age when Gran’mammy Kizzy was sol’ from him an’ her mammy. Den he’d o’ been ’nother age whenever de Lawd claimed’im—” She hesitated. “Wid Gran’mammy pushin’ seb’nty, you know her pappy got to be long dead’n gone. Her mammy, too. Po’ souls!”

“Yeah—” said Tom, musing. “Sometime I wonders what dey looked like. Done heared so much ’bout ’em.”

Matilda said, “Me, too, son.” She straightened in her chair. “But gittin’ back to yo’ gran’mammy, Sarah, an’ Malizy, every night down on my knees, I jes’ ax de Lawd to be wid ’em an’ I prays any day yo’ pappy git dere wid lump o’ money in ’is pocket an’ buy’em.” She laughed brightly. “One mawnin’ we looks up an’ dere all fo’ be, free as birds!”

“Dat be sho’ one sight to see!” grinned Tom.

A silence fell between them, each in their private thoughts. Tom was pondering that now was as good a time and atmosphere as any to confide in his mother something he had kept carefully guarded from anyone, but which now did seem likely to develop further.

He used as his avenue an earlier query of Matilda’s. “Mammy, while back you ax if ’n I ever think maybe ’bout gittin’ married?”

Matilda jerked upright, her face and eyes alight. “Yeah, son?”

Tom could have kicked himself for ever having brought it up. He all but squirmed seeking how to go on. Then, firmly, “Well, I’se kinda met a gal, an’ we been talkin’ some—”

“Lawd-a-mussy, Tom!
Who?
”

“Ain’t nobody you knows! Her name Irene. Some calls ’er ’Reeny.’ She b’longst to dat Massa Edwin Holt, work in dey big house—”

“De rich Massa Holt massa and missis talks ’bout own dat cotton mill on Alamance Creek?”

“Yas’m—”

“Dey big house where you put up dem pretty window grills?”

“Yas’m—” Tom’s expression was rather like that of a small boy caught taking cookies.

“
Lawd!
” A beaming spread across Matilda’s face. “Somebody cotched ol’ coon at las’!” Springing up, suddenly embracing her embarrassed son, she burbled, “I’se so happy fo’ y’all, Tom,
sho’
is!”

“
Hol’
on! Hol’
on,
Mammy!” Extricating himself, he gestured her back toward her chair. “I jes’ say we been talkin’.”

“Boy, you’s my close-mouthdes’ young’un since you first drawed breath! If you ’mits you’s much as
seed
a gal, I know it mo’ to it dan dat!”

He all but glared at her. “Don’ want no whisperin’ to
nobody,
you hear me?”

“I
know
massa buy ’er fo’
you,
boy! Tell me mo’ ’bout ’er, Tom!” So much was tumbling in Matilda’s head that it poured out together... across the back of her mind flashed a vision of the wedding cakes she would bake...

“Gittin’ late, got to go—” But she beat him to the door. “So glad somebody be catchin’ all y’all young’uns fo’ long! You’s jes’ my bes’!” Matilda’s laughter was the happiest Tom had seen her in a long time. “Gittin’ older, guess I’se same as Gran’mammy Kizzy, wantin’ mo’ gran’chilluns!” Tom brushed past, hearing her as he strode outside, “I live long ’nough, might even see some great-gran’chilluns!”

A
Sunday several months before, Massa and Missis Murray had returned home from church, and the massa almost immediately rang the bell for Matilda, whom he told to have Tom come around to the front porch.

The massa’s pleasure was showing both in his face and in his tone as he told Tom that Mr. Edwin Holt, who owned the Holt Cotton Mill, had sent him a message that Missis Holt had recently been highly impressed with seeing some of Tom’s delicate ironwork; that she had already sketched a design for decorative window grills that they hoped that Tom could soon make and install at their “Locust Grove” home.

With a traveling pass from Massa Murray, Tom left on a mule early the next morning to see the sketches and measure the windows. Massa Murray had told him not to worry about whatever jobs awaited doing in his shop, and the massa said that the best route was to follow the Haw River Road to the town of Graham, then the Graham Road to Bellemont Church, where after a right turn and about another two miles, the elegant Holt mansion would be impossible to miss.

Arriving and identifying himself to a black gardener, Tom was told to wait near the front steps. Missis Holt herself soon came pleasantly congratulating Tom’s previous work that she had seen,
and showing him her sketches, which he carefully studied for an iron window grill having the visual effect of a trellis amply covered with vines and leaves. “B’leeves I can do dem, leas’ I try my bes’, Missis,” he said, but he pointed out that with so many windows needing the grills, each of which would require much patiently tedious work, the completing of the task might take two months. Missis Holt said she would be delighted if it could be done in that time, and handing Tom her sketches to keep and work by, she left him to go about his necessary starting job of carefully measuring the many windows’ dimensions.

By the early afternoon, Tom was working on the upstairs windows opening onto a veranda when his instincts registered someone watching him, and glancing about, he blinked at the striking prettiness of the coppery-complexioned girl holding a dustrag who stood quietly just within the next opened window. Wearing a simple housemaid’s uniform, her straight black hair coiled into a large bun at the back of her head, she was evenly but warmly returning Tom’s stare. Only his lifelong innate reserve enabled him to mask his jolting inner reaction as, collecting himself, and quickly removing his hat, he blurted, “Hidy, miss.”

“Hidy do, suh!” she replied, flashing a bright smile, and with that she disappeared.

Finally riding back to the Murray plantation, Tom was surprised, and unsettled, that he couldn’t rid his mind of her. Lying in his bed that night, it hit him like a bolt that he hadn’t even gotten her name. He guessed her age at nineteen or maybe twenty. At last he slept, fitfully, and awakened torturing himself that her prettiness guaranteed that she was married, or surely was courting with somebody.

Making the basic grill frames, smoothly lap-welding four precut flat iron bars into window-sized rectangles was only a routine job. After six days of doing that, Tom began forcing white-hot rods through his set of successively smaller steel reducing dies until he
had long rods no thicker than ivy or honeysuckle vines. After Tom had experimentally heated and variously bent several of these, dissatisfied, he began taking early-morning walks, closely inspecting actual growing vines’ graceful curvings and junctures. Then he had a sense that his efforts to simulate them improved.

The work went along well, with Massa Murray explaining daily to sometimes irate customers that Tom could attend only the most urgent emergency repair jobs until he had finished a major job for Mr. Edwin Holt, which blunted the indignance of most. Massa Murray, then Missis Murray came to the shop to observe, then they brought visiting friends, until sometimes eight or ten of them stood silently watching Tom work. Plying his craft, he thought how blessed he was that all people seemed even to expect being ignored by blacksmiths engrossed in what they were doing. He reflected upon how most slave men who brought him their massas’ repairing jobs usually seemed either morose, or they big-talked among other slaves about the shop. But if any white people appeared, in the instant, all of the slaves grinned, shuffled, and otherwise began acting the clown, as in fact Tom often previously had felt embarrassed to conclude privately of his own derby-wearing, bombastic-talking father, Chicken George.

Tom felt further blessed with how sincerely he enjoyed feeling immersed, to a degree even isolated, within his world of blacksmithing. As he worked on the window grills from the daylights until he could no longer see, his private random musings would occupy his mind sometimes for hours before he again caught himself thinking of the pretty housemaid he had met.

Making the leaves for the window grills would be his toughest test, he had realized from when Missis Holt first showed him her sketches. Again Tom walked, now intently studying nature’s leaves. Heating and reheating inch-square iron pieces, beating them with his heavy, square-faced hammer into delicately thin
sheets, with his trimming shears he cut out eventually scores of oversized heart-shaped patterns. Since such thin metal could quickly burn and ruin if a forge was too hot, he pumped his homemade bellows with utmost care, hastily tonging each red-hot thin sheet onto his anvil and deftly shaping it into leafy contours with quick tappings of his lightest ball-point hammer.

With intricate welding, Tom delicately veined his leaves, and next stemmed them onto the vines. He felt it good that no two looked exactly the same, as he had observed in nature. Finally in his seventh intensive week, Tom spot-welded his leafy vines onto their waiting window-grill frames.

“Tom, I ’clare look like dey jes’ growin’ somewheres!” Matilda exclaimed it, staring in awe at her son’s craftsmanship. Scarcely less demonstrative was L’il Kizzy, who by now was flirting openly with three local young slave swains. Even Tom’s brothers and their wives—only Ashford and Tom were single now—cast glances that mirrored their further heightened respect for him. Massa and Missis Murray could hardly contain the extent of their pleasure, as well as their pride, that they owned such a blacksmith.

In the wagon laden with window grills, Tom drove alone to the Holt big house to install them. When he held up one for Missis Holt to inspect, exclaiming and clapping her hands, ecstatic with pleasure, she called outside her teen-aged daughter and several grown young sons who happened to be there, and all of them joined instantly in congratulating Tom.

Right away, he began the installations. After two hours, the downstairs window grills were in place, being further admired by the Holt family members, as well as several of their slaves; he guessed that their grapevine must have sped word of their missis’ delight and they had come running to see for themselves. Where
was
she? Tom was tense from wondering it as one of the Holt sons directed him through the polished downstairs foyer to mount the
curving stairs to install the remaining grills at the second-floor veranda windows.

It was the very area where she had been before. How, whom, might he query, without seeming more than curiously interested, as to who she was, where she was, and what was her status? In his frustration, Tom went at his work even faster; he must finish quickly and leave, he told himself.

He was installing the third upstairs window grill when after a rush of footsteps there she was, flushed, nearly breathless from hurrying. He stood just tongue-tied.

“Hidy, Mr. Murray!” It jolted him to realize she wouldn’t know of “Lea,” only that a Massa Murray owned him now. He fumbled off his straw hat.

“Hidy, Miss Holt....”

“Was down in de smokehouse smokin’ meat, jes’ heared you was here—” Her gaze swept to the last window grill he had fixed into place. “Ooh, it jes’ beautiful!’ she breathed. “Passed Missis Emily downstairs jes’ havin’ a fit ’bout what you done.”

His glance flicked her field-hand headrag. “I thought you was a housemaid—” It sounded such an inane thing to say.

“I loves doin’ different things, an’ dey lets me,” she said, glancing about. “I jes’ run up here a minute. Better git back to workin’, an’ you, too—”

He had to know more, at least her name. He asked her.

“Irene,” she said. “Dey calls me ’Reeny. What your’n?”

“Tom,” he said. As she had said, they had to get back to work.

He had to gamble. “Miss Irene, is—is you keepin’ company wid anybody?”

She looked at him so long, so hard, he knew he had terribly blundered. “I ain’t never been knowed for not speakin’ my mind, Mr. Murray. When I seed befo’ how shy you was, I was scairt you wouldn’t come talk wid me no mo’.”

Tom could have fallen off the veranda.

From then, he had begun asking Massa Murray for an all-day traveling pass each Sunday, along with permission to use the mulecart. He told his family as well that he searched the roadsides for discarded metal objects to freshly supply his blacksmith shop scrap pile. He nearly always did find something useful while driving different routes in the round trip of about two hours each way to see Irene.

Not only she, but the others whom he met at the Holts’ slave row could not have received or treated him more warmly. “You’s so shy, smart as you is, folks jes’ likes you,” Irene candidly told him. They would ride usually to some reasonably private fairly nearby place where Tom would unhitch the mule to let it graze on a long tether as they walked, with Irene doing by far the most talking.

“My pappy a Injun. He name Hillian, my mammy say. Dat’count fo’ de ’culiar color I is,” Irene volunteered matter-of-factly. “Way back, my mammy run off from a real mean massa, an’ in de woods some Injuns cotched her an’ took her to dey village where her an’ my pappy got togedder an’ I got borned. I weren’t much size when some white mens ’tacked de village, an’ ’mongst de killin’ captured my mammy an’ brung us back to her massa. She say he beat her bad an’ sol’ us to some nigger trader, an’ Massa Holt bought us, what was lucky, ’cause dey’s high-quality folks—” Her eyes narrowed. “Well, leas’ mos’ly. Anyhow, Mammy was dey washin’ an’ ironin’ woman, right up ’til she took sick an’ died ’bout fo’ years back, an’ I been here ever since. I’se eighteen now, gwine turn nineteen New Year’s Day—” She looked at Tom in her frank way. “How ol’ is you?”

“Twenty-fo’,” Tom said.

Telling Irene in turn the essential facts about his family, Tom said that as yet they had but little knowledge of this new region of North Carolina into which they had been sold.

“Well,” she said, “I’se picked up a heap ’cause de Holts is mighty’portant folks, so nigh ever’body big comes visitin’, an’ gin’ly I be’s servin’, an’ I got ears.”