Roots (32 page)

As the first streaks of dawn filtered through the barred windows, Kunta dropped fitfully off to sleep. But no sooner had he closed his eyes, it seemed, than he was awakened by the strange black one bringing containers of water and food. Kunta’s stomach was clenched with hunger, but the food smelled sickening, and he turned away. His tongue felt foul and swollen. He tried to swallow the slime that was in his mouth, and his throat hurt with the effort.

He looked dully about him at his mates from the big canoe; they all seemed unseeing, unhearing—drawn within themselves. Kunta turned his head to study the five who were in the room when they arrived. They wore ragged toubob clothing. Two of them were of the light brown sasso borro skin color that the elders had said resulted from some toubob taking a black woman. Then Kunta looked at the newcomer who had been brought in during the night; he sat slumped forward, with dried blood caked in his hair and staining the toubob garment he wore, and one of his arms hung in an awkward way that told Kunta it had been broken.

More time passed, and finally Kunta fell asleep again—only to be awakened once more, this time much later, by the arrival of another meal. It was some kind of steaming gruel, and it smelled even worse than the last thing they’d set in front of him. He shut his eyes not to see it, but when nearly all of his mates snatched up the containers and began wolfing the stuff down, he figured it might not be so bad after all. If he was ever going to escape from this place, thought Kunta, he would need strength. He would force himself to eat a little bit—but just a little. Seizing the bowl, he brought it to his open mouth and gulped and swallowed until the gruel was gone. Disgusted with himself, he banged the bowl back down and began to gag, but he forced it down again. He had to keep the food inside him if he was going to live.

From that day on, three times a day, Kunta forced himself to eat the hated food. The black one who brought it came once each day
with a bucket, hoe, and a shovel to clean up after them. And once each afternoon, two toubob came to paint more of the stinging black liquid over the men’s worst open sores, and sprinkled the yellow powder over the smaller sores. Kunta despised himself for the weakness that made him jerk and moan from the pain along with the others.

Through the barred window, Kunta counted finally six daylights and five nights. The first four nights, he had heard faintly from somewhere, not far away, the screams of women whom he recognized from the big canoe. He and his mates had had to sit there, burning with humiliation at being helpless to defend their women, let alone themselves. But it was even worse tonight, for there were no cries from the women. What new horror had been visited upon them?

Nearly every day, one or more of the strange black men in toubob clothes would be shoved stumbling into the room and chained. Slumped against the wall behind them, or curled down on the floor, they always showed signs of recent beatings, seeming not to know where they were or to care what might happen to them next. Then, usually before another day had passed, some important-acting toubob would enter the room holding a rag over his nose, and always one of those recent prisoners would start shrieking with terror—as that toubob kicked and shouted at him; then that black one would be taken away.

Whenever he felt that each bellyful of food had settled, Kunta would try to make his mind stop thinking in an effort to sleep. Even a few minutes of rest would blot out for that long a time this seemingly unending horror, which for whatever reason was the divine will of Allah. When Kunta couldn’t sleep, which was most of the time, he would try to force his mind onto things other than his family or his village, for when he thought of them he would soon be sobbing.

J
ust after the seventh morning gruel, two toubob entered the barred room with an armload of clothes. One frightened man after another was unchained and shown how to put them on. One garment covered the waist and legs, a second the upper body. When Kunta put them on, his sores—which had begun to show signs of healing—immediately started itching.

In a little while, he began to hear the sound of voices outside; quickly it grew louder and louder. Many toubob were gathering—talking, laughing—not far beyond the barred window. Kunta and his mates sat in their toubob clothes gripped with terror at what was about to happen—whatever it might be.

When the two toubob returned, they quickly unchained and marched from the room three of the five black ones who had originally been there. All of them acted somehow as if this had happened to them enough times before that it no longer mattered. Then, within moments, there was a change in the toubob sounds from outside; it grew much quieter, and then one toubob began to shout. Struggling vainly to understand what was being said, Kunta listened uncomprehendingly to the strange cries: “Fit as a fiddle! Plenty of spirit in this buck!” And at brief intervals other toubob would interrupt with loud exclamations: “Three hundred and
fifty!” “Four hundred!” “Five!” And the first toubob would shout: “Let’s hear six! Look at him! Works like a mule!”

Kunta shuddered with fear, his face running with sweat, breath tight in his throat. When four toubob came into the room—the first two plus two others—Kunta felt paralyzed. The new pair of toubob stood just within the doorway holding short clubs in one hand and small metal objects in the other. The other two moved along Kunta’s side of the wall unlocking the iron cuffs. When anyone cried out or scuffled, he was struck with a short, thick, leather strap. Even so, when Kunta felt himself touched, he came up snarling with rage and terror. A blow against his head made it seem to explode; he felt only dimly a jerking at the chain on his cuffs. When his head began to clear, he was the first of a chained line of six men stumbling through a wide doorway out into the daylight.

“Just picked out of the trees!” The shouting one was standing on a low wooden platform with hundreds of other toubobs massed before him. As they gaped and gestured, Kunta’s nose recoiled from the thickness of their stink. He glimpsed a few black ones among the toubob, but their faces seemed to be seeing nothing. Two of them were holding in chains two of the black ones who had just been brought from the barred room. Now the shouting one began striding rapidly down the line of Kunta and his companions, his eyes appraising them from head to foot. Then he walked back up the line, thrusting the butt of his whip against their chests and bellies, all the while making his strange cries: “Bright as monkeys! Can be trained for anything!” Then back at the end of the line, he prodded Kunta roughly toward the raised platform. But Kunta couldn’t move, except to tremble; it was as if his senses had deserted him. The whip’s butt seared across the scabbing crust of his ulcerated buttocks; nearly collapsing under the pain, Kunta stumbled forward, and the toubob clicked the free end of his chain into an iron thing.

“Top prime—young and supple!” the toubob shouted. Kunta was already so numb with terror that he hardly noticed as the toubob crowd moved in more closely around him. Then, with short sticks and whip butts, they were pushing apart his compressed lips to expose his clenched teeth, and with their bare hands prodding him all over—under his armpits, on his back, his chest, his genitals. Then some of those who had been inspecting Kunta began to step back and make strange cries.

“Three hundred dollars! . . . three fifty!” The shouting toubob laughed scornfully. “Five hundred! . . . six!” He sounded angry. “This is a choice young nigger! Do I hear seven fifty?”

“Seven fifty!” came a shout.

He repeated the cry several times, then shouted “Eight!” until someone in the crowd shouted it back. And then, before he had a chance to speak again, someone else shouted, “Eight fifty!”

No other calls came. The shouting toubob unlocked Kunta’s chain and jerked him toward a toubob who came stepping forward. Kunta felt an impulse to make his move right then, but he knew he would never make it—and anyway, he couldn’t seem to move his legs.

He saw a black one moving forward behind the toubob to whom the shouter had handed his chain. Kunta’s eyes entreated this black one, who had distinctly Wolof features,
My Brother, you come from my country.
. . . But the black one seemed not even to see Kunta as, jerking hard on the chain so that Kunta came stumbling after him, they began moving through the crowd. Some of the younger toubob laughed, jeered, and poked at Kunta with sticks as they passed, but finally they left them behind and the black one stopped at a large box sitting up off the ground on four wheels behind one of those enormous donkeylike animals he had seen on his way here from the big canoe.

With an angry sound, the black one grasped Kunta around the hips and boosted him up over the side and onto the floor of the
box, where he crumpled into a heap, hearing the free end of his chain click again into something beneath a raised seat at the front end of the box behind the animal.

Two large sacks of what smelled like some kind of grain were piled near where Kunta lay. His eyes were shut tight; he felt as if he never wanted to see anything again—especially this hated black slatee.

After what seemed a very long time, Kunta’s nose told him that the toubob had returned. The toubob said something, and then he and the black one climbed onto the front seat, which squeaked under their weight. The black one made a quick sound and flicked a leather thong across the animal’s back; instantly it began pulling the rolling box ahead.

Kunta was so dazed that for a while he didn’t even hear the chain locked to his ankle cuff rattling against the floor of the box. He had no idea how far they had traveled when his next clear thought came, and he slit his eyes open far enough to study the chain at close range. Yes, it was smaller than the one that had bound him on the big canoe; if he collected his strength and sprang, would this one tear loose from the box?

Kunta raised his eyes carefully to see the backs of the pair who sat ahead, the toubob sitting stiffly at one end of the plank seat, the black one slouched at the other end. They both sat staring ahead as if they were unaware that they were sharing the same seat. Beneath it—somewhere in shadow—the chain seemed to be securely fastened; he decided that it was not yet time to jump.

The odor of the grain sacks alongside him was overpowering, but he could also smell the toubob and his black driver—and soon he smelled some other black people, quite nearby. Without making a sound, Kunta inched his aching body upward against the rough side of the box, but he was afraid to lift his head over the side, and didn’t see them.

As he lay back down, the toubob turned his head around, and their eyes met. Kunta felt frozen and weak with fear, but the toubob showed no expression and turned his back again a moment later. Emboldened by the toubob’s indifference, he sat up again—this time a little farther—when he heard a singing sound in the distance gradually growing louder. Not far ahead of them he saw a toubob seated on the back of another animal like the one pulling the rolling box. The toubob held a coiled whip, and a chain from the animal was linked to the wrist cuffs of about twenty blacks—or most of them were black, some brown—walking in a line ahead of him.

Kunta blinked and squinted to see better. Except for two fully clothed women, they were all men and all bare from the waist up, and they were singing with deep mournfulness. He listened very carefully to the words, but they made no sense whatever to him. As the rolling box slowly passed them, neither the blacks nor the toubob so much as glanced in their direction, though they were close enough to touch. Most of their backs, Kunta saw, were crisscrossed with whip scars, some of them fresh, and he guessed at some of their tribes: Foulah, Yoruba, Mauretanian, Wolof, Mandinka. Of those he was more certain than of the others, most of whom had had the misfortune to have toubob for fathers.

Beyond the blacks, as far as Kunta’s runny eyes would let him see, there stretched vast fields of crops growing in different colors. Alongside the road was a field planted with what he recognized as maize. Just as it was back in Juffure after the harvest, the stalks were brown and stripped of ears.

Soon afterward, the toubob leaned over, took some bread and some kind of meat out of a sack beneath the seat, broke off a piece of each, and set them on the seat between him and the black one, who picked it up with a tip of his hat and began to eat. After a few moments the black one turned in his seat, took a long look at
Kunta, who was watching intently, and offered him a chunk of bread. He could smell it from where he lay, and the fragrance made his mouth water, but he turned his head away. The black one shrugged and popped it into his own mouth.

Trying not to think about his hunger, Kunta looked out over the side of the box and saw, at the far end of a field, what appeared to be a small cluster of people bent over, seemingly at work. He thought they must be black, but they were too far away to be sure. He sniffed the air, trying to pick up their scent, but couldn’t.

As the sun was setting, the box passed another like it, going in the opposite direction, with a toubob at the reins and three first-kafo black children riding behind him. Trudging in chains behind the box were seven adult blacks, four men wearing ragged clothes and three women in coarse gowns. Kunta wondered why these were not also singing; then he saw the deep despair on their faces as they flashed past. He wondered where toubob was taking them.

As the dusk deepened, small black bats began squeaking and darting jerkily here and there, just as they did in Africa. Kunta heard the toubob say something to the black one, and before much longer the box turned off onto a small road. Kunta sat up and soon, in the distance, saw a large white house through the trees. His stomach clutched up: What in the name of Allah was to happen now? Was it here that he was going to be eaten? He slumped back down in the box and lay as if he were lifeless.