Queen (24 page)

sure what he felt, and guilty that he did not feel any special sense of

loss. He thought that he should mourn his father as the man who had given

him life, but that was all his father had done. How could he love a father

who had disinherited him? True to his word, his father had left James

nothing in his will.

    Of one thing James was certain. His sons would never feel toward him the

    way he felt to his dead father, He called A.J. to him, and sat his son

    on his knee. He told him stories of Ireland, of shanachies and

    leprechauns and rainbows. He promised the lad that he loved him, and that

    he would create the finest estate in the South for A.J. to inherit.

A.J. nodded his head gravely, and thanked his father, but

    BLOODLINES 139

then begged for more stories about leprechauns. James laughed, and

remembered some.

    But when A.J. had gone to bed, James had several glasses of port, and got

    drunk, and tried to remember a father who never told him tales of

    leprechauns.

"You will never amount to anything."

    "You will see, Father," James said to his empty glass. "You will see."

When Alabama was admitted into the Union, James allowed himself to be

persuaded to stand as a state senator in the next election. He received

petitioners gladly, and dispensed patronage. He was sought out by

politicians from Washington and Montgomery, the new state capital, and his

mansion was admired as one of the finest houses in the South. He bought

racehorses for his stable, and Monkey Simon, from Nashville, as his master

jockey, to train the younger men.

    Determined that his staff, his slaves, would be of the first quality, he

    traveled with Cap'n Jack through Georgia and South Carolina, attending, for

    the first time in his life, slave auctions.

    Cap'n Jack could hardly bear to watch as James inspected the slaves as

    carefully as he examined his pedigree horses, checking their bones, teeth,

    and physiques, and inquiring, as far as was possible, into their

    bloodlines. Then Cap'n Jack steeled himself. He had sworn that he would

    never give James cause to back out of his promise of freedom, and so,

    however unwillingly, he helped his Massa choose the slaves. James purchased

    several excellent field hands, and then found a splendid, superbly trained

    butler, who came with the highest credentials and who had the odd name of

    Parson Dick.

It was Cap'n Jack who found Annie.

    When he saw the beautiful woman with skin the color of coffee, who was said

    to have expert talent as a weaver, James's vanity was tickled. He would

    acquire her and build a weaving house, and all the cloth that was needed at

    The Forks of Cypress, for the slaves' clothing and blankets, would be woven

    on his estate. Only the very rich could afford to do that.

It thus happened that he bought the woman called Annie,

140 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

whose previous Massa had sold her away because he believed she was

cursed with ill fortune.

    Perhaps he was fight, for Annie had bewitched Cap'n Jack already.

    17

Annie was a child of rape. Her mammy never told her this, but Annie knew

it was true. Every time she asked about her pappy, Mammy's eyes got angry,

and she would smack her, and tell her never to ask about him again. Then

her mammy would cry, and tell her that her pappy was a white man who

didn't want anything to do with her, but Mammy would look after her

always.

    Annie loved her mammy. Mammy had been bom to an African mother and a

    Cherokee father, back in the old days when some white Massas had Indians

    as slaves, and not just black folk. Mammy's father could not bear his

    enslavement, and had simply curled up and died. Mammy's mother, from

    Africa, knew all sorts of things about magic, and taught them to her

    daughter, so Mammy knew lots of ways to heal people who were sick, to put

    a blessing on those who wanted a baby, or put a curse on bad people.

    Mammy taught all this to Annie, and some other things as well, learned

    from her Cherokee father. Mystical things that were also about the spirit

    people, and the power that existed in simple things, the trees and the

    animals and the birds, and the sky, and the very land itself.

    Their Massa made Mammy work very hard, and she got sick. Annie tried to

    cure her with charms and spells and herbs, but she was very young, and

    didn't have the proper power yet. Massa came to see Mammy one day, and

    threatened to sell her away if she didn't get better. Then he saw Annie,

    whom he had never really noticed before; she'd always been just one of

    the pickaninnies. Now she was a beautiful young girl in her

    BLOODLINES 141

early teens, with a developing figure. The Massa told her to take off her

clothes.

    Mammy cried out and tried to stop him, but she was too weak. The Massa

    beat Annie when she didn't strip fast enough for him, and when she was

    naked he used his whip to prod her small breasts, and pushed it between

    her legs.

    Annie was crying, but Massa didn't care. He told her to lie down on the

    floor, then he unbuckled his belt and pushed down his pants. He got on

    top of Annie and pushed himself inside her, suddenly, violently. Annie

    screamed in pain, but he wouldn't stop. He kept pumping into her, and the

    more she cried, the more he pushed and pumped. When he was finished, he

    got up and saw that there was a little blood on his thing. He laughed,

    and said now he was sure that Annie had been a virgin. He hit her again,

    to remind her that he was the Massa, and told Mammy to fix it so she

    didn't have a baby.

    Annie lay on the floor after he was gone, until the pain went away, and

    then she got up and went to Mammy, who was crying.

    "Don't cry, Mammy," she said. "It don't make no never mind. "

But she was lying, and Mammy knew it.

    Mammy never got better and seemed to lose the will to live. She died soon

    after that, and Annie cried bitterly, because now she was all alone. That

    night she lay in her bunk, and tried to remember all the spells that

    Mammy had taught her to put a curse on the Massa.

    Perhaps they worked, because Massa didn't seem very interested in her

    after that. He came to her a few times and did what he wanted, but he

    said it wasn't the same because she wasn't a virgin anymore, and he hit

    her, because she wasn't a virgin.

    A lot of very unlucky things happened to Massa, and Annie believed they

    were because of her curse. He broke his leg when his horse reared at a

    snake. His favorite hunting dog was gored by a wild pig. His best

    fighting cock was killed in the pit. His newborn baby died. He had two

    bad seasons with his cotton and had to sell some of his slaves. Annie was

    one of them.

She was bought by an old man who had a big building with

142 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

some looms in it, where other slave women made cloth that was sold at the

market. Annie only helped them at first, but one of the women taught her

the craft, and she became an excellent weaver. She liked the other women,

and they were kind to her, but she was always sad, because she missed her

mammy.

    She'd been there about six months when her new Massa called her into his

    office one day. He told her to take off her dress, and he took off his

    pants and he did what her first Massa had done, only he wasn't so rough

    and it was all over very quickly. He made her swear never to tell anyone

    else about it, and he called her to his office every few days after that,

    and did it to her again.

    The other women knew because he'd done it to all of them as well, and

    they told the ways to get rid of a baby if one came along. But Annie

    didn't listen to them, because she wasn't going to have a baby by a white

    Massa. She hated them all too much, and she knew what herbs and grasses

    to eat that would keep a baby away.

    She also put a curse on her new Massa, but it didn't seem to work at

    first. Then one night there was a fire in the warehouse and most of the

    cloth was burned, and some of the looms. She was sold away again, this

    time to a big plantation where they needed someone to do the weaving.

    This Massa was quite good to her, and the overseer, because she was good

    at her job, and kept herself to herself, and didn't make trouble. She

    never became friends with any of the other slave women because they were

    a little scared of her. They knew she could make magic because she cured

    a baby boy who was sick with a cough. She built a special fire of

    strange-smelling herbs in his shack and made him smell the smoke, and he

    got better.

    After that the young girls came to her when they needed cures, or a

    potion or a spell to make someone love them, but she would never put a

    curse on anyone for them, because that was her special gift, and she

    reserved it for herself.

    She was indescribably lonely. She longed for some company, some contact

    with another human being, and for a while she had an affair with a field

    hand, but he was suspicious of her power, and married someone else. Her

    reputation for being gifted spread throughout the plantation, until

    eventually even

    BLOODLINES 143

the overseer and the Massa heard about it, and they made jokes about her,

and teased her to do magic for them.

    The Massa's wife, the Missy, didn't tease her though. When her daughter was

    sick with the whooping cough, she came to Annie, and begged her to make the

    child well. Annie built her fire of special herbs and sticks, and made the

    child smell the smoke, and slowly, over the next two weeks, she got better.

    After that the Missy came to Annie whenever any of her children were sick.

    Sometimes Annie could help and sometimes she couldn't, but she was always

    honest with the Missy, because she knew the limit of her own knowledge and

    power.

    She might have been happy at that plantation, except that people, white or

    black, came to her only when they wanted some healing. Otherwise, they

    seemed frightened of her, and left her alone.

    The young Massa, the Massa's son, was a boy when Annie first came to the

    plantation, but he had grown up, and was a young man now. He started

    spending time with Annie, and even though he laughed about her skills, she

    thought him kind. Then one night he came to her and ordered her to get un-

    dressed, and he raped her. She knew she was his first woman, and so she was

    inclined to forgive him, but then he started laughing at her, and telling

    everyone how he had been broken in with the witch.

    So she put a curse on him. Two months later, he was bitten by a cottonmouth

    when he was swimming naked in the river. Everyone knew he died from the

    snakebite, but no one believed it was natural, because she was a witch.

    Young Massa had said so. 01' Massa got very angry, and ordered the overseer

    to beat her, but not to mark her skin. He stripped her naked and hit her

    with a wooden bat. She had livid bruises for weeks afterward, but he was

    clever and did not break the skin. When she was healed, ol' Massa called

    for the auctioneer and sent her to the block.

They took her by cart to a big city, and to some long, low brick buildings,

where a hundred other slaves were locked in iron cages. They put her in a

cage and gave her bread and cornmeal to eat. Some of the other slaves tried

to be friendly to her, but she didn't talk to them because she was scared of

144 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

other people. She heard that there was to be an auction soon, and over the

next few days lots of Massas came to inspect what was being offered. A lot

of the Massas were interested in her, because she was very beautiful, but

she made a chant, to stop anyone buying her.

    On the day before the sale, a black man came in, very fashionably

    dressed, a house nigger, she guessed. He looked at all the slaves, and

    then he came to her pen, and looked at her for a very long time, without

    saying anything, and she felt an odd feeling, for the first time in her

    life, that this man would never hurt her. He tried to talk to her, and

    she didn't say very much in case she was wrong, but she didn't make her

    chant.

    The man went away and came back a little while later with his Massa. They

    talked about her and asked her some questions, and she gave them honest

    answers. They asked about her weaving, and she pointed to her simple

    skirt, which was of her own cloth. They felt the texture of the material

    and inspected the weave. They made her turn round and take off her