by Alex Haley
He paused in his monologue, as if expecting some kind of reaction, but Kunta just sat there watching and listening impassively and fingering his saphie charm.
“See what I means? You got to put away all dat stuff,” said the brown one, pointing to the charm. “Give it up. You ain’t goin’ nowheres, so you might’s well face facks an’ start fittin’ in, Toby, you hear?”
Kunta’s face flashed with anger. “Kunta Kinte!” he blurted, astonished at himself.
The brown one was equally amazed. “Looka here, he can talk! But I’m tellin’ you, boy, you got to forgit all dat African talk. Make white folks mad an’ scare niggers. Yo’ name Toby. Dey calls me Fiddler.” He pointed to himself. “Say dat. Fiddler!” Kunta looked at him blankly, though he understood exactly what he meant. “Fiddler! I’s a fiddler. Understan’—fiddler?” He made a sawing motion across his left arm with the other hand. This time Kunta wasn’t pretending when he looked blank.
Exasperated, the brown one got up and brought from a corner the oddly shaped box that Kunta had seen him arrive with. Opening it, he lifted out an even more oddly shaped light brown wooden thing with a slender black neck and four taut, thin strings running almost its length. It was the same musical instrument he had heard the old man play at the other farm.
“Fiddle!” exclaimed the brown one.
Since they were alone, Kunta decided to say it. He repeated the sound: “Fiddle.”
Looking pleased, the brown one put the fiddle away and closed the case. Then, glancing around, he pointed. “Bucket!” Kunta repeated it, fixing in his head what that thing was. “Now, water!” Kunta repeated it.
After they had gone through a score or more of new words, the brown one pointed silently at the fiddle, the bucket, water, chair, cornshucks, and other objects, his face a question mark for Kunta to repeat the right word for all of them. A few of the names he promptly repeated; he fumbled with a few others and was corrected ; and some sounds he was unable to say at all. The brown one refreshed him on those, then reviewed him on them all. “You ain’t dumb as you looks,” he grunted by suppertime.
The lessons continued through the following days and stretched into weeks. To Kunta’s astonishment, he began to discover that he was becoming able not only to understand but also to make himself understood to the brown one in a rudimentary way. And the main thing he wanted him to understand was why he refused to surrender his name or his heritage, and why he would rather die a free man on the run than live out his life as a slave. He didn’t have the words to tell it as he wished, but he knew the brown one understood, for he frowned and shook his head. One afternoon not long afterward, arriving at the brown one’s hut, Kunta found another visitor already there. It was the old man he’d seen now and then hoeing in the flower garden near the big house. With a glance at the brown one’s affirming nod, Kunta sat down.
The old man began to speak. “Fiddler here tell me you run away four times. You see what it got you. Jes’ hopes you done learned your lesson like I done. ’Cause you ain’t done nothin’ new. My young days, I run off so much dey near ’bout tore my hide off ’fore I got it in my head ain’t nowhere to run to. Run two states away, dey jes’ tell about it in dey papers an’ sooner later you gits cotched an’ nearly kilt, an’ win’ up right back where you come from. Ain’t hardly nobody ain’t thought about runnin’. De grinnin’est niggers thinks about it. But ain’t nobody I ever knowed ever got away. Time you settled down and made de best of things de way dey is,’stead of wastin’ yo’ young years, like I did, plottin’ what cain’t be done. I done got ol’ an’ wore out now. Reckon since you been born I been actin’ like de no-good, lazy, shiftless, head-scratchin’ nigger white folks says us is. Only reason massa keep me here, he know I ain’t got no good auction value, an’ he git more out of me jes’ halfway doin’ de gardenin’. But I hears tell from Bell massa gwine put you to workin’ wid me tomorrow.”
Knowing that Kunta had understood hardly any of what the gardener had said, the fiddler spent the next half hour explaining what the old man had told him—only slowly and more simply, in words Kunta was familiar with. He had mixed feelings about nearly everything the gardener had said. He understood that the old man meant well by his advice—and he was beginning to believe that escape was indeed impossible—but even if he never got away, he could never pay the price of giving up who and what he had been born in order to live out his years without another beating. And the thought of spending them as a crippled gardener filled him with rage and humiliation. But perhaps just for a while, until he got his strength back. And it might be good to get his mind off himself and his hands in the soil again—even if it wasn’t his own.
The next day, the old gardener showed Kunta what to do. As he chopped away at the weeds that seemed to spring up daily among the vegetables, so did Kunta. As he plucked tomato worms and potato bugs from the plants and squashed them underfoot, so did Kunta. They got along well, but apart from working side by side, they didn’t communicate much, either. Usually the old man would only make grunts and gestures whenever Kunta needed to be shown how to do some new task, and Kunta, without responding, simply did as he was told. He didn’t mind the silence; as a matter of fact, his ears needed a few hours’ rest each day between conversations with the fiddler, who ran his mouth every minute they were together.
That night after the evening meal, Kunta was sitting in the doorway of his hut when the man called Gildon—who made the horse and mule collars and also shod the black people—walked up to him and held out a pair of shoes. At the orders of the “massa,” he said he had made them especially for Kunta. Taking them and nodding his thanks, Kunta turned them over and over in his hands before deciding to try them on. It felt strange to have such things on his feet, but they fit perfectly—even though the front half of the right shoe was stuffed with cotton. The shoemaker bent down to tie the lacings, then suggested that Kunta get up and walk around in them to see how they felt. The left shoe was fine, but he felt tiny stinging sensations in his right foot as he walked awkwardly and gingerly around outside his hut without the crutches. Seeing his discomfort, the shoemaker said that was because of the stump, not the shoe, and he would get used to it.
Later that day, Kunta walked a bit farther, testing, but the right foot was still uncomfortable, so he removed a little of the cotton stuffing and put it back on. It felt better, and finally he dared to put his full weight on that foot, and there wasn’t any undue pain. Every now and then he would continue to experience the phantom pain of his right toes aching, as he had nearly every day since he started walking around, and he would glance downward—always with surprise—to find that he didn’t have any. But he kept practicing walking around, and feeling better than he let his face show; he had been afraid that he would always have to walk with crutches.
That same week the massa’s buggy returned from a trip, and the black driver, Luther, hurried to Kunta’s hut, beckoning him down to the fiddler’s, where Kunta watched him say something, grinning broadly. Then with gestures toward the big house and with selected key words, the fiddler made Kunta nod in understanding that Massa William Waller, the toubob who lived in the big house, now owned Kunta. “Luther say he just got a deed to you from his brother who had you at first, so you his now.” As usual, Kunta did not let his face show his feelings. He was angry and ashamed that anyone could “own” him, but he was also deeply relieved, for he had feared that one day he would be taken back to that other “plantation,” as he now knew the toubob farms were called. The fiddler waited until Luther had left before he spoke again—partly to Kunta and partly to himself. “Niggers here say Massa William a good master, an’ I seen worse. But ain’t none of’em no good. Dey all lives off us niggers. Niggers is the biggest thing dey got.”
CHAPTER 52
Almost every day now, when work was done, Kunta would return to his hut and after his evening prayer would scratch up the dirt in a littler square on his floor and draw Arabic characters in it with a stick, then
sit looking for a long time at what he had written, often until supper. Then he would rub out what he had written, and it would be time to go down and sit among the others as the fiddler talked. Somehow his praying and his studying made it all right to mix with them. That way, it seemed to him he could remain himself without having to remain by himself. Anyway, if they had been in Africa, there would have been someone like the fiddler to go to, only he would have been a wandering musician and griot traveling from one village to the next and singing as he played his kora or his balafon in between the telling of fascinating stories drawn from his adventures.
Just as it had been done in Africa, Kunta had also begun to keep track of the passing of time by dropping a small pebble into a gourd on the morning after each new moon. First he had dropped into the gourd 12 rounded, multicolored stones for the 12 moons he guessed he’d spent on the first toubob farm; then he had dropped in six more for the time he’d been here on this new farm; and then he had carefully counted out 204 stones for the 17 rains he’d reached when he was taken from Juffure, and dropped them into the gourd. Adding them all up, he figured that he was now into his nineteenth rain.
So as old as he felt, he was still a young man. Would he spend the rest of his life here, as the gardener had, watching hope and pride slip away along with the years, until there was nothing left to live for and time had finally run out? The thought filled him with dread—and determination not to end up the way the old man had, doddering around in his plot, uncertain which foot to put before the other. The poor man was worn out long before the midday meal, and through the afternoons he was only able to pretend that he was working at all, and Kunta had to shoulder almost all the load.
Every morning, as Kunta bent over his rows, Bell would come with her basket—Kunta had learned that she was the cook in the big house—to pick the vegetables she wanted to fix for the massa that day. But the whole time she was there, she never so much as looked at Kunta, even when she walked right past him. It puzzled and irritated him, remembering how she had attended him daily when he lay fighting to survive, and how she would nod at him during the evenings at the fiddler’s. He decided that he hated her, that the only reason she had acted as his nurse back then was because the massa had ordered her to do it. Kunta wished that he could hear whatever the fiddler might have to say about this matter, but he knew that his limited command of words wouldn’t allow him to express it right—apart from the fact that even asking would be too embarrassing.
One morning not long afterward, the old man didn’t come to the garden, and Kunta guessed that he must be sick. He had seemed even more feeble than usual for the past few days. Rather than going right away to the old man’s hut to check on him, Kunta went straight to work watering and weeding, for he knew that Bell was due at any moment, and he didn’t think it would be fitting for her to find no one there when she arrived.
A few minutes later she showed up and, still without looking at Kunta, went about her business, filling her basket with vegetables as Kunta stood holding his hoe and watching her. Then, as she started to leave, Bell hesitated, looked around, set the basket on the ground, and—throwing a quick, hard glance at Kunta—marched off. Her message was clear that he should bring her basket to the back door of the big house, as the old man had always done. Kunta all but exploded with rage, his mind flashing an image of dozens of Juffure women bearing their headloads in a line past the bantaba tree where Juffure’s men always rested. Slamming down his hoe, he was about to stamp away when he remembered how close she was to the massa. Gritting his teeth, he bent over, seized the basket, and followed silently after Bell. At the door, she turned around and took the basket as if she didn’t even see him. He returned to the garden seething.
From that day on, Kunta more or less became the gardener. The old man, who was very sick, came only now and then, whenever he was strong enough to walk. He would do a little something for as long as he felt able, which wasn’t very long, and then hobble back to his hut. He reminded Kunta of the old people back in Juffure who, ashamed of their weakness, continued to totter about making the motions of working until they were forced to retreat to their pallets, and finally were rarely seen out any more at all.
The only new duty Kunta really hated was having to carry that basket for Bell every day. Muttering under his breath, he would follow her to the door, thrust it into her hands as rudely as he dared, then turn on his heel and march back to work, as fast as he could go. As much as he detested her, though, his mouth would water when now and then the air would waft to the garden the tantalizing smells of the things that Bell was cooking.
He had dropped the twenty-second pebble into his calendar gourd when—without any outward sign of change—Bell beckoned him on into the house one morning. After a moment’s hesitation, he followed her inside and set the basket on a table there. Trying not to look amazed at the strange things he saw everywhere around him in this room, which they called the “kitchen,” he was turning to leave when she touched him on the arm and handed him a biscuit with what looked like a piece of cold beef between the slices. As he stared at it in puzzlement, she said, “Ain’t you never seed a san’wich befo’? It ain’t gonna bite you. You s’posed to bite it. Now git on outa here.”
As time went on, Bell began to give him more than he could carry in his hand—usually a tin plate piled with something called “cornpone,” a kind of bread he had never tasted before, along with boiled fresh mustard greens in their own delicious potliquor. He had sown the mustard’s tiny seeds himself—in garden soil mixed with rich black dirt dug from the cow pasture—and the tender greens had swiftly, luxuriously sprung up. He loved no less the way she cooked the long, slender field peas that grew on the vines coiling around the sweet corn’s stalks. She never gave him any obvious meat of the pig, though he wasn’t sure how she knew that. But whatever she gave him, he would always wipe off the plate carefully with a rag before returning it. Most often he would find her at her “stove”—a thing of iron that contained fire—but sometimes she would be on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor with oak ashes and a hard-bristled brush. Though at times he wanted to say something to her, he could never muster a better expression of his appreciation than a grunt—which now she returned.
One Sunday after supper, Kunta had gotten up to stretch his legs and was walking around the fiddler’s hut idly patting himself on the belly when the brown one, who had been talking steadily all through the meal, interrupted his monologue to exclaim, “Looka here, you startin’ to fill out!” He was right. Kunta hadn’t looked—or felt—better since he left Juffure.
After months of incessant plaiting to strengthen his fingers, the fiddler, too, felt better than he had in a long time—since his hand was broken—and in the evenings he had begun to play on his instrument again. Holding the peculiar thing in his cupped hand and under his chin, the fiddler raked its strings with his wand—which seemed to be made of long, fine hairs—and the usual evening audience would shout and break into applause when each song had finished. “Dat ain’t nothin’!” he would say disgustedly. “Fingers ain’t nimble yet.”
Later, when they were alone, Kunta asked haltingly, “What is nimble?”
The fiddler flexed and wiggled his fingers. “Nimble! Nimble. Get it?” Kunta nodded.
“You a lucky nigger, what you is,” the fiddler went on. “Jes’ piddlin’’roun’ eve’yday in dat garden. Ain’t hardly nobody got a job dat sof ’ ’cept on plantations whole lot bigger’n dis.”
Kunta thought he understood, and he didn’t like it. “Work hard,” he said. And nodding at the fiddler on his chair, he added, “Harder dan dat.”
The fiddler grinned. “You awright, African!”
CHAPTER 53
The “months,” as they called moons here, were passing more quickly now, and before long the hot season known as “summer” was over and harvest time had begun along with a great many more duties for Kunta and the others. While the rest of the blacks—even Bell—were busy with
the heavy work out in the fields, he was expected to tend the chickens, the livestock, and the pigs in addition to his garden. And at the height of the cotton picking, he was called upon to drive the wagon along the rows. Except for having to feed the filthy swine, which almost made him ill, Kunta didn’t mind the extra work, for it made him feel less of a cripple. But it was seldom that he got back to his hut before dark—so tired out that he sometimes even forgot to eat his supper. Taking off nothing but his frayed straw hat and his shoes—to relieve the aching of his half foot—he would flop down on his cornshuck mattress, pulling his quilt of cotton-stuffed burlap up over him, and within moments he would be sound asleep, in clothes still wet with sweat.
Soon the wagons were piled high with cotton, then with plump ears of corn, and the golden tobacco leaves were hanging up to dry. The hogs had been killed, cut into pieces, and hung over slowly burning hickory, and the smoky air was turning cold when everyone on the plantation began preparing for the “harvest dance,” an occasion so important that even the massa would be there. Such was their excitement that when Kunta found out that the black people’s Allah didn’t seem to be involved, he decided to attend himself—but just to watch.
By the time he got up the courage to join the party, it was well under way. The fiddler, whose fingers were finally nimble again, was sawing away at his strings, and another man was clacking two beef bones together to keep time as someone shouted, “Cakewalk!” Dancers coupled off and hurried out before the fiddler. Each woman put her foot on the man’s knee while he tied her shoestring; then the fiddler sang out, “Change partners!” and when they did, he began to play madly, and Kunta saw that the dancers’ footsteps and body motions were imitating their planting of the crops, the chopping of wood, the picking of cotton, the swinging of scythes, the pulling of corn, the pitchforking of hay into wagons. It was all so much like the harvest dancing back in Juffure that Kunta’s good foot was soon tapping away on the ground—until he realized what he was doing and looked around, embarrassed, to see if anyone had noticed.