Roots (51 page)

Kunta knew the farm instantly. He could see the pond in his mind, and the surrounding fields. “But dey business dealin’s don’t make no difference, ’cause all dem Wallers is very close,” Bell continued. “Dey’s ’mongst de oldes’ families in Virginia. Fact, dey was ol’ family in dat England even fo’ day come crost de water to here. Was all kinds of ‘Sirs’ an’ stuff, all b’longin’ to de Church of England. Was one of dem what writ poems, name of Massa Edmund Waller. His younger brother Massa John Waller was de one what comes here first. He weren’t but eighteen, I’s heared massa say, when some King Charles de Secon’ give him a big lan’ grant over where Kent County is now.”

Their pace had become much slower as Bell talked, and Kunta couldn’t have been more pleased with Bell’s steady talking, although he had already heard from some other Waller family cooks at least some of the things she was saying, though he never would have told her that.

“Anyhow, dis John Waller married a Miss Mary Key, an’ dey built de Enfield big house where you takes massa to see his folks. An’ dey had three boys, ’specially John de Secon’, de younges’, who come to be a whole heap of things—read de law while he was a sheriff, den was in de House of Burgesses, an’ he helped to found Fredericksburg an’ to put together Spotsylvania County. It was him an’ his Missis Dorothy what built Newport, an’ dey had six young’uns. An’ co’se out of all dem, it commence to be Waller chilluns spreadin’ all over, an’ growin’ on up, an’ havin’ young’uns of dey own. Our massa an’ de other Wallers what lives roun’ here ain’t but a han’ful of ’em all. Dey’s all pretty much high-respected peoples, too, sheriffs an’ preachers, county clerks, House of Burgesses, doctors like massa; whole heap of ’em fought in de Revolution, an’ I don’t know what all.”

Kunta had become so absorbed in what Bell was saying that he was startled when she stopped walking. “We better git on back,”
she said. “Traipsin’ out here till all hours ’mongst dese weeds, be oversleepin’ in de mornin’.” They turned around, and when Bell was quiet for a minute, and Kunta didn’t say anything, she realized that he wasn’t going to tell her whatever he had on his mind, so she went on chattering about whatever came into her mind until they got back to her cabin, where she turned to face him and fell silent. He stood there looking at her for a long, agonizing moment, and then finally he spoke: “Well, it gettin’ late like you said. So I see you tomorra.” As he walked away, still carrying the harnesses, Bell realized that he hadn’t told her whatever it was that he wanted to talk to her about. Well, she told herself—afraid to think that it might be what she thought it was—he’ll get around to it in his own time.

It was just as well that she wasn’t in a hurry, for though Kunta began to spend a lot of time in Bell’s kitchen as she went about her work, she found herself, as usual, doing most of the talking. But she liked having him there to listen. “I foun’ out,” she told him one day, “dat massa done writ out a will that if he die an’ ain’t got married, his slaves gon’ go to little Missy Anne. But de will say if he do marry, den he wife would git us slaves when he die.” Even so, Bell didn’t seem to be unduly disturbed. “Sho’ is a plenty of ’em roun’ here would love to grab de massa, but he ain’t never married no mo’.” She paused. “Jes’ de same as I ain’t.”

Kunta almost dropped the fork from his hand. He was positive that he had heard Bell correctly, and he was jolted to know that Bell had been married before, for it was unthinkable that a desirable wife should not be a virgin. Kunta soon was out of the kitchen and gone into his own cabin. He knew that he must think hard upon this matter.

Two weeks of silence had passed before Bell casually invited Kunta to eat supper with her in her cabin that night. He was so astounded that he didn’t know what to say. He had never been alone
in a hut with a woman other than his own mother or grandmother. It wouldn’t be right. But when he couldn’t find the words to speak, she told him what time to show up, and that was that.

He scrubbed himself in a tin tub from head to foot, using a rough cloth and a bar of brown lye soap. Then he scrubbed himself again, and yet a third time. Then he dried himself, and while he was putting on his clothes, he found himself singing softly a song from his village,
“Mandumbe, your long neck is very beautiful—.”
Bell didn’t have a long neck, nor was she beautiful, but he had to admit to himself that when he was around her, he had a good feeling. And he knew that she felt the same.

Bell’s cabin was the biggest one on the plantation, and the one nearest to the big house, with a small bed of flowers growing before it. Knowing her kitchen, her cabin’s immaculate neatness was no more than Kunta would expect. The room he entered when she opened the door had a feeling of cozy comfort, with its wall of mud-chinked logs and a chimney of homemade bricks that widened down from the roof to her large fireplace, alongside which hung her shining cooking utensils. And Kunta noticed that instead of the usual one room with one window, such as he had, Bell’s cabin had two rooms and two windows, both covered with shutters that she could pull down in case of rain, or when it grew cold. The curtained rear room was obviously where she slept, and Kunta kept his eyes averted from that doorway. On her oblong table in the center of the room he was in, there were knives and forks and spoons standing in ajar, and some flowers from her garden in another, and two lighted candles were sitting in squat clay holders, and at either end of the table was a high-backed, cane-bottomed chair.

Bell asked him to sit in a rocking chair that was nearer the fireplace. He did, sitting down carefully; for he had never been in one of these contraptions before, but was trying hard to act casual about the whole visit as Bell seemed to be.

“I been so busy I ain’t even lit de fire,” she said, and Kunta all but leaped up out of the chair, glad to have something he could do with his hands. Striking the flint sharply against the piece of iron, he lighted the fluffy cotton that Bell had already placed under fat pinesticks beneath the oak logs, and quickly they caught fire.

“Don’t know how come I ax you to come here nohow, place in a mess, an’ I ain’t got nothin’ ready,” Bell said, bustling about her pots.

“Ain’t no hurry wid me,” Kunta made himself respond. But her already cooked chicken with dumplings, which she well knew that Kunta loved, was soon bubbling. And when she had served him, she chided him for gobbling so. But Kunta didn’t quit until the third helping, with Bell insisting that there was still a little more in the pot.

“Naw, I’s fit to bus’,” said Kunta truthfully. And after a few more minutes of small talk, he got up and said he had to get on home. Pausing in the doorway, he looked at Bell, and Bell looked at him, and neither of them said anything, and then Bell turned her eyes away, and Kunta cripped on down along slave row to his own cabin.

He awakened more lighthearted than he had felt since leaving Africa—but he told no one why he was acting so uncharacteristically cheerful and outgoing. But he hardly needed to. Word began to get around that Kunta had actually been seen smiling and even laughing in Bell’s kitchen. And at first every week or so, then twice a week, Bell would invite Kunta home for supper. Though he thought that once in a while he should make some excuse, he could never bring himself to say no. And always Bell cooked things Kunta had let her know were also grown in The Gambia, such as black-eyed peas, okra, a stew made of peanuts, or yams baked with butter.

Most of their conversations were still one-sided, but neither one seemed to mind. Her favorite topic, of course, was Massa Waller, and it never ceased to amaze Kunta how much Bell knew
that he didn’t about the man he spent so much more time with than she did.

“Massa funny ’bout different, things,” Bell said. “Like he believe in banks, all right enough, but he keep money hid, too; nobody else don’t know where but me. He funny ’bout his niggers, too. He do ’bout anything for ’em, but if one mess up, he’ll sell ’im jes’ like he done Luther.

“’Nother thing massa funny ’bout,” Bell went on. “He won’t have a yaller nigger on his place. You ever notice, ceptin’ fo’ de fiddler, ain’t nothin’ here but black niggers? Massa tell anybody jes’ what he think ’bout it, too. I done heared ’im tellin’ some of de biggest mens in dis county, I mean ones dat got plenty yaller niggers deyselves, dat too many white mens is havin’ slave chilluns, so dey ain’t doin’ nothin’ but buyin’ an’ sellin’ dey own blood, an’ it need to be stopped.”

Though he never showed it, and he kept up a steady drone of “uh-huh’s” when Bell was talking, Kunta would sometimes listen with one ear while he thought about something else. Once when she cooked him a hoe cake, using meal she had made in the mortar and pestle he had carved for her, Kunta was watching her in his mind’s eye beating the couscous for breakfast in some African village while she stood at the stove telling him that hoe cakes got their name from slaves cooking them on the flat edge of a hoe when they were working out in the fields.

Now and then Bell even gave Kunta some special dish to take to the fiddler and the gardener. He wasn’t seeing as much of them as he had, but they seemed to understand, and the time they spent apart even seemed to increase the pleasure of conversation with them whenever they got together. Though he never discussed Bell with them—and they never brought her up—it was clear from their expressions that they knew she and he were courtin’ as well as if their meetings took place on the front lawn. Kunta found this
vaguely embarrassing, but there seemed to be nothing he could do about it—not that he particularly cared to.

He was more concerned that there remained some serious matters he wanted to take up with Bell, but he never could quite seem to get around to them. Among them was the fact that she kept on her front-room wall a large, framed picture of the yellow-haired “Jesus,” who seemed to be a relative of their heathen “O Lawd.” But finally he did manage to mention it, and Bell promptly said, “Ain’t but two places everybody’s headin’ for, heab’n or hell, and where you goin’, dat’s yo’ business!” And she would say no more about it. Her reply discomfited him every time he thought of it, but finally he decided that she had a right to her beliefs, however misguided; just as he had a right to his. Unshaken, he had been born with Allah and he was going to die with Allah—although he hadn’t been praying to Him regularly again ever since he started seeing a lot of Bell. He resolved to correct that and hoped that Allah would forgive him.

Anyway, he couldn’t feel too harshly about someone, even a pagan Christian, who was so good to one of another faith, even someone as worthy as he was. She was so nice to him, in fact, that Kunta wanted to do something special for her—something at least as special as the mortar and pestle. So one day when he was on his way over to Massa John’s to pick up Missy Anne for a weekend visit with Massa Waller, Kunta stopped off by a fine patch of bulrushes he had often noticed, and picked some of the best he could find. With the rushes split into fine pieces, and with some selected, soft inner white cornshucks, over the next several days he plaited an intricate mat with a bold Mandinka design in its center. It came out even better than he had expected, and he presented it to Bell the next time she had him over for supper. She looked upward from the mat to Kunta. “Ain’t
nobody
gon’ put dey feets on dat!” she exclaimed, turning and disappearing into her bedroom.
Back a few moments later with a hand behind her, she said, “Dis was gonna be for yo’ Christmas, but I make you somethin’ else.”

She held out her hand. It was a pair of finely knitted woolen socks—one of them with a half foot, the front part filled with soft woolen cushion. Neither he nor Bell seemed to know what to say.

He could smell the aroma of the food she had been simmering, ready to be served, but a strange feeling was sweeping over him as they kept on looking at each other. Bell’s hand suddenly grasped his, and with a single motion she blew out both of the candles and swiftly with Kunta feeling as if he were a leaf being borne by a rushing stream, they went together through the curtained doorway into the other room and lay down facing one another on the bed. Looking deeply into his eyes, she reached out to him, they drew together, and for the first time in the thirty-nine rains of his life, he held a woman in his arms.

“M
assa ain’t want to believe me when I tol’ ’im,” Bell said toto Kunta. “But he finally say he feel us ought to think on it for a spell yet, ’cause peoples gittin’ married is sacred in de eyes of Jesus.” To Kunta, however, Massa Waller said not a word about it during the next few weeks. Then one night Bell came running out to Kunta’s cabin and reported breathlessly, “I done tol’ ’im we still wants to marry, an’ he say, well, den, he reckon it’s awright!”

The news coursed swiftly through slave row. Kunta was embarrassed as different ones offered their congratulations. He could have choked Bell for telling even Missy Anne when she came next to visit her uncle, for the first thing she did after finding out was race about screaming, “Bell gon’ git married! Bell gon’ git married!” Yet at the same time, deep inside himself, Kunta felt that it was improper for him to feel any displeasure at such an announcement, since the Mandinka people considered marriage to be the most important thing after birth itself.

Bell somehow managed to get the massa’s promise not to use the buggy—or Kunta—for the entire Sunday before Christmas, when everyone would be off work and therefore available to attend the wedding. “I knows you don’t want no marriage in de big house,” she told Kunta, “like we could of had if I’d of asked massa. And I knows he don’t really want dat neither, so at leas’ y’all togedder
on dat.” She arranged for it to be held in the front yard alongside the oval flower garden.

Everybody on slave row was there in their Sunday best, and standing together on across from them were Massa Waller with little Missy Anne and her parents. But as far as Kunta was concerned, the guest of honor—and, in a very real sense, the one responsible for the whole thing—was his friend the Ghanaian, who had hitched a ride all the way from Enfield just to be there. As Kunta walked with Bell out into the center of the yard, he turned his head toward the qua-qua player, and they exchanged a long look before Bell’s main praying and singing friend, Aunt Sukey, the plantation’s laundress, stepped forward to conduct the ceremony. After calling for all present to stand closer together, she said, “Now, I ax everybody here to pray for dis union dat God’bout to make. I wants y’all to pray dat dis here couple is gwine a stay togedder—” she hesitated “—an’ dat nothin’ don’t happen to cause ’em to git sol’ away from one ’nother. And pray dat dey has good, healthy young’uns.” And then very solemnly, Aunt Sukey placed a broomstick on the close-cropped grass just in front of Kunta and Bell, whom she now motioned to link their arms.