Roots (46 page)

But Massa Waller didn’t travel always in the midst of crisis. Sometimes entire weeks would pass without anything more urgent than routine house calls or visits to one of a seemingly inexhaustible assortment of relatives and friends whose plantations were located somewhere within driving distance. On such occasions—particularly in the spring and summer, when the meadows were thick with flowers, wild strawberries, and blackberry thickets, and the fences were trellised with lushly growing vines—the buggy would roll along leisurely behind its finely matched pair of bay horses, Massa Waller sometimes nodding off under the black canopy that shielded him from the sun. Everywhere were quail whirring up, brilliant red cardinals hopping about, meadowlarks and whippoorwills calling out. Now and then a bullsnake sunning on the road, disturbed by the oncoming buggy, would go slithering for safety, or a buzzard would go flapping heavily away from its dead rabbit. But Kunta’s favorite sight was a lonely old oak or cedar in the middle of a field; it would send his mind back to the baobabs of Africa, and to the
elders’ saying that wherever one stood alone, there had once been a village. At such times he would think of Juffure.

On his social calls, the massa went most often to visit his parents at Enfield, their plantation on the borderline between King William County and King and Queen County. Approaching it—like all the Waller family big houses—the buggy would roll down a long double avenue of huge old trees and stop beneath a massive black walnut tree on the wide front lawn. The house, which was much bigger and richer looking than the massa’s, sat on a slight rise overlooking a narrow, slow-moving river.

During his first few months of driving, the cooks at the various plantations in whose kitchens Kunta was fed—but most especially Hattie Mae, the fat, haughty, shiny-black cook at Enfield—had eyed him critically, as fiercely possessive of their domains as Bell was at Massa Waller’s. Confronted with Kunta’s stiff dignity and reserve, though, none quite ventured to challenge him in any way directly, and he would silently clean his plate of whatever they served him, excepting any pork. Eventually, however, they began to get used to his quiet ways, and after his sixth or seventh visit, even the cook at Enfield apparently decided that he was fit for her to talk to and deigned to speak to him.

“You know where you at?” she asked him suddenly one day in the middle of his meal. He didn’t answer, and she didn’t wait for one.

“Dis here’s de first Newnited States house of de Wallers. Nobody but Wallers lived here for a hunerd an’ fifty years!” She said that when Enfield had been built it was only half its present size, but that later another house had been brought up from near the river and added on. “Our fireplace is bricks brought in boats from England,” she said proudly. Kunta nodded politely as she droned on, but he was unimpressed.

Once in a while, Massa Waller would pay a visit to Newport, Kunta’s first destination as a driver; it seemed impossible to believe
that an entire year had passed since then. And old uncle and aunt of the massa’s lived there in a house that looked to Kunta very much like Enfield. While the white folks ate in the dining room, the cook at Newport would feed Kunta in the kitchen, strutting around with a large ring of keys on a thin leather belt around the top of her apron. He had noticed by now that every senior housemaid wore such a key ring. On it, he had learned, in addition to her keys for the pantry, the smokehouse, the cooling cellar, and other food-storage places, were the keys to all the rooms and closets in the big house. Every cook he’d met would walk in a way to make those keys jangle as a badge of how important and trusted she was, but none jangled them louder than this one.

On a recent visit, having decided—like the cook at Enfield—that he might be all right after all, she pressed a finger to her lips and led Kunta on tiptoe to a small room farther within the big house. Making a great show of unlocking the door with one of the keys at her waist, she led him inside and pointed to one wall. On it was a mounted display of what she explained were the Wallers’ coat of arms, their silver seal, a suit of armor, silver pistols, a silver sword, and the prayer book of the original Colonel Waller.

Pleased at the ill-concealed amazement on Kunta’s face, she exclaimed, “Ol’ colonel built dat Enfield, but he buried right here.” And walking outside, she showed him the grave and its lettered tombstone. After a minute, as Kunta stared at it, she asked with a rehearsed casualness, “You wanna know what it say?” Kunta nodded his head, and rapidly she “read” the long since memorized inscription: “Sacred to Memory of Colonel John Waller, Gentleman, third son of John Waller and Mary Key, who settled in Virginia in 1635, from Newport Paganel, Buckinghamshire.”

Several cousins of massa’s, Kunta soon discovered, lived at Prospect Hill, also in Spotsylvania County. Like Enfield, the big
house here was one and a half stories high, as were nearly all very old big houses, the cook at Prospect Hill told him, because the king had put an extra tax on two-story houses. Unlike Enfield, Prospect Hill was rather small—smaller than the other Waller family houses—but none, she informed him, whether or not he cared to listen, had as wide an entrance hall or as steep a circular stairway.

“You ain’t gwine upstairs, but no reason you cain’t know us got four-poster canopy beds up dere so tall dey has to use stepladders, an’ under dem is chillun’s trundle beds. An’ lemme tell you sump’n. Dem beds, de chimney bricks, house beams, hinges on de do’s, ev’eything usn’s got in here was made or did by slave niggers.”

In the backyard, she showed Kunta the first weaving house he had ever seen, and nearby were the slave quarters—which were about the same as theirs—and below them was a pond, and farther beyond was a slaves’ graveyard. “I knows you ain’t want to see dat,” she said, reading his thoughts. He wondered if she also knew how strange and sad he found it to hear her talking—as so many others did—about “usn’s,” and acting as if she owned the plantation she lived on instead of the other way around.

“H
ow come massa been seein’ so much a dat no-good brother a his las’ few months?” asked Bell one evening after Kunta trudged in after arriving home from a visit to Massa John’s plantation. “I thought they was no love los’ ’tween dem two.”

“Look to me like massa jes’ gone crazy ’bout dat l’il ol’ gal baby dey got,” said Kunta wearily.

“She sho is a cute l’il thin’,” said Bell. After a thoughtful pause, she added, “Reckon Missy Anne seem to massa like dat l’il gal of his own he los’.”

That hadn’t occurred to Kunta, who still found it difficult to think of toubob as actual human beings.

“She gon’ be a whole year ol’ dis November, ain’t she?” asked Bell.

Kunta shrugged. All he knew was that all this running back and forth between the two plantations was wearing ruts in the road—and in his rump. Even though he had no use for Massa John’s sour-faced buggy driver Roosby, he told Bell he was grateful for the rest when the massa invited his brother to visit him for a change the week before.

As they were leaving that day, Bell recalled, the massa had looked as happy as his little niece when he tossed her in the air and caught her, squealing and laughing, before handing her up to her
mother in the buggy. Kunta hadn’t noticed and he didn’t care—and he couldn’t understand why Bell
did.

One afternoon a few days later, on their way home from a house call on one of Massa Waller’s patients at a plantation not far from Newport, the massa called out sharply to Kunta that he had just passed a turn they should have taken. Kunta had been driving without seeing, so shocked was he by what he had just seen at the patient’s big house. Even as he muttered an apology and turned the buggy hastily around, he couldn’t rid his mind of the sight of the heavy, very black, Wolof-looking woman he had seen in the backyard. She had been sitting on a stump, both of her large breasts hanging out, matter-of-factly suckling a white infant at one and a black infant at the other. It was a revolting sight to Kunta, and an astonishing one, but when he told the gardener about it later, the old man said, “Ain’t hardly a massa in Virginia ain’t sucked a black mammy, or leas’ was raised up by one.”

Almost as repulsive to Kunta was something he’d seen all too much of—the kind of demeaning “games” that went on at the plantations he visited between white and black “young’uns” of about the same age. The white children seemed to love nothing more than playing “massa” and pretending to beat the black ones, or playing “hosses” by climbing onto their backs and making them scramble about on all fours. Playing “school,” the white children would “teach” the black to read and write, with many cuffings and shriekings about their “dumbness.” Yet after lunch—which the black children would spend fanning the massa and his family with leafy branches to keep flies away—the white and black children would lie down together and take naps on pallets.

After seeing such things, Kunta would always tell Bell, the fiddler, and the gardener that he’d never understand the toubob if he lived to a hundred rains. And they would always laugh and tell him that they’d seen this sort of thing—and more—all of their lives.

Sometimes, they told him, as the white and black “young’uns” grew up together, they became very attached to one another. Bell recalled two occasions when the massa had been called to attend white girls who had fallen ill when their lifelong black playmates had been sold away for some reason. Their massas and mistresses had been advised that their daughters’ hysterical grief was such that they might well grow weaker and weaker until they died, unless their little girlfriends were quickly found and bought back.

The fiddler said that a lot of black young’uns had learned to play the violin, the harpsichord, or other instruments by listening and observing as their white playmates were taught by music masters whom their rich massas had hired from across the big water. The old gardener said that on his second plantation a white and black boy grew up together until finally the young massa took the black one off with him to William and Mary College. “Ol’ Massa ain’t like it a’tall; but Ol’ Missy say, ‘It’s his nigger if he want to!’ An’ when dis nigger git back later on, he tol’ us in slave row dat dey was heap more young massas dere wid dey niggers as valets, sleepin’ right in de room wid ’em. He say heap of times dey take dey niggers wid ’em to classes, den dey argue later on whose nigger learnt de mos’. Dat nigger from my plantation couldn’t jes’ read an’ write, he could figger, too, an’ ’cite dem poems an’ stuff dey has at colleges. I got sol’ away roun’ den. Wonder whatever become a him?”

“Lucky if he ain’t dead,” the fiddler said. “’Cause white folks is quick to ’spicion a nigger like dat be de first to hatch a uprisin’ or a re-volt somewhere. Don’t pay to know too much, jes’ like I tol’ dis African here when he started drivin’ massa. Mouf shut an’ ears open, dat’s de way you learns de mos’—.”

Kunta found out how true that was soon afterward, when Massa Waller offered a ride to a friend of his from one plantation to another. Talking as if he wasn’t there—and saying things that Kunta would have found extraordinary even if they hadn’t known
there was a black sitting right in front of them—they spoke about the frustrating slowness of their slaves’ separation of cotton fibers from the seeds by hand when demands for cotton cloth were rapidly increasing. They discussed how more and more, only the largest planters could afford to buy slaves at the robbery prices being demanded by slave traders and slave-ship agents.

“But even if you can afford it, bigness can create more problems than it solves,” said the massa. “The more slaves you’ve got, the likelier it is that some kind of revolt could be fomented.”

“We should never have let them bear arms against white men during the war,” said his companion. “Now we witness the result!” He went on to tell how, at a large plantation near Fredericksburg, some former slave soldiers had been caught just before a planned revolt, but only because a housemaid had gotten some wind of it and told her mistress in tears. “They had muskets, scythe blades, pitchforks, they had even made spears,” said the massa’s friend. “It’s said their plot was to kill and burn by night and hide by day and keep moving. One of their ringleaders said they expected to die, but not before they had done what the war had showed them they could do to white people.”

“They could have cost many innocent lives,” he heard the massa reply gravely. Massa Waller went on to say that he had read somewhere that over two hundred slave outbreaks had occurred since the first slaveships came. “I’ve been saying for years that our greatest danger is that slaves are coming to outnumber whites.”

“You’re right!” his friend exclaimed. “You don’t know who’s shuffling and grinning and planning to cut your throat. Even the ones right in your house. You simply can’t trust any of them. It’s in their very nature.”

His back as rigid as a board, Kunta heard the massa say, “As a doctor, more than once I’ve seen white deaths that—well, I’ll not go into details, but let’s just say I’ve thought some of them suspicious.”

Hardly feeling the reins in his hands, Kunta was unable to comprehend that they could seem so incredibly unaware of him. His mind tumbled with things that he too had heard during the nearly two years now that he had been driving the buggy for the massa. He had heard many a whispering of cooks and maids grinning and bowing as they served food containing some of their own bodily wastes. And he had been told of white folks’ meals containing bits of ground glass, or arsenic, or other poisons. He had even heard stories about white babies going into mysterious fatal comas without any trace of the darning needle that had been thrust by house-maids into their soft heads where the hair was thickest. And a big-house cook had pointed out to him the former hut of an old mammy nurse who had been beaten badly and then sold away after severely injuring a young massa who had hit her.

It seemed to Kunta that black women here were even more defiant and rebellious than the men. But perhaps it only appeared that way because the women were more direct and personal about it; they would usually take revenge against white folks who had wronged them. The men tended to be more secretive and less vengeful. The fiddler had told Kunta about a white overseer who had been hanged from a tree by the father of a black girl he had been caught raping; but violence against whites by black men was most often ignited by news of white atrocities or slave rebellions and the like.