Roots (75 page)

“I gwine stay here an’ talk to massa, Mammy!” He was thinking that in such an extremity as this, he would even somehow indirectly remind the massa whose father he was, which should curb his anger, at least somewhat.

“You plum crazy? Git outa here!” Kizzy was shoving George toward the cabin door. “
G’wan! Git!
Mad as he was, he catch you here, jes’ make it wuss on us. Slip through dem bushes behin’ de toilet ’til you’s out’n sight o’ missy!”

Kizzy seemed on the verge of hysteria. The massa must have been worse than he’d ever been before to terrify her so. “Awright, Mammy,” he said finally. “But I ain’t slippin’ through no bushes. I ain’t done nothin’ to nobody. I’se gwine back down de road jes’ same as I come up it.”

“Awright, awright, jes’ go ’
head!”

Returning to the gamefowl area, George had barely finished telling Uncle Mingo what he had heard, fearing that he sounded foolish, when they heard a horse galloping up. Within moments Massa Lea sat glowering down at them from his saddle, the reins in one hand, his shotgun in the other, and he directed the cold fury of his words at George. “My wife saw you, so y’all know what happened.”

“Yassuh—” gulped George, staring at the shotgun.

Then, starting to dismount, Massa Lea changed his mind, and staying on his horse, his face mottled with his anger, he told them, “Plenty good white people would be dyin’ tonight if one nigger hadn’t told his massa just in time. Proves you never can trust none of you niggers!” Massa Lea gestured with the shotgun. “Ain’t no tellin’ what’s in y’all’s heads off down here by yourselves! But you just let me
half
think anything funny, I’ll blow your heads off quick as a rabbit’s!” Glaring balefully at Uncle Mingo and George, Massa Lea wheeled his horse and galloped back up the road.

A few minutes passed before Uncle Mingo even moved. Then he spat viciously and kicked away the hickory strips he had been weaving into a gamecock carrying basket. “Work a thousan’ years for a white man you still any nigger!” he exclaimed bitterly. George didn’t know what to say. Opening his mouth to speak again, then closing it, Mingo went toward his cabin, but turning at the door, he looked back at George. “Hear me, boy! You thinks you’s sump’n special wid massa, but nothin’ don’t make no difference to mad, scared white folks! Don’t you be no fool an’ slip off nowhere till this blow over, you hear me? I mean
don’t!”

“Yassuh!”

George picked up the basket Mingo had been working on and sat down on a nearby stump. His fingers began to weave the hickory strips together as he tried to collect his thoughts. Once again Uncle Mingo had managed to divine exactly what was going on inside his head.

George grew angry for permitting himself to believe that Massa Lea would ever act like anything but a massa toward him. He should have known better by now how anguishing—and fruitless—it was to even
think
about the massa as his pappy. But he wished desperately that he knew someone he felt he could talk with about it. Not Uncle Mingo—for that would involve admitting to Uncle Mingo that he knew the massa was his pappy. For the same reason, he could never talk to Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah, or Uncle Pompey. He wasn’t sure if they knew about the massa and his mammy, but if one did, then they all would, because whatever anyone knew got told, even when it was about each other, behind each other’s backs, and he and Kizzy would be no exception.

He couldn’t even raise the agonizing subject with his mammy—not after her fervently remorseful apologies for telling him about it in the first place.

After all these years, George wondered what his mammy really felt about the whole excruciating thing, for by now, as far as he could see, she and the massa acted as if they were no longer aware that the other existed, at least in that way. It shamed George even to think about his mammy having been with the massa as Charity—and more recently Beulah—would be with him on those nights when he slipped away from the plantation.

But then, seeping up from the recesses of his memory, came the recollection of a night long ago, when he was three or four years old and awakened one night feeling that the bed was moving, then lying still and terrified with his eyes staring wide in the darkness, listening to the rustle of the cornshucks and the grunting of the man who lay there beside him jerking up and down on top of his mammy. He had lain there in horror until the man got up; heard the dull
plink
of a coin on the tabletop, the sound of footfalls, the slam of the cabin door. For a seemingly interminable time, George had fought back scalding tears, keeping his eyes tightly closed, as if to shut out what he had heard and seen. But it would always come back like a wave of nausea whenever he happened to notice on a shelf in his mother’s cabin a glass jar containing maybe an inch of coins. As time passed, the depth of coins increased, until finally he no longer could bring himself to look directly at the jar. Then when he was around ten years old, he noticed one day that the jar was no longer there. His mammy had never suspected that he knew anything about it, and he vowed that she never would.

Though he was too proud ever to mention it, George had once considered talking with Charity about his white father. He thought she might understand. The opposite of Beulah, who was as black as charcoal, Charity was a considerably lighter mulatto than George; in fact, she had the tan skin that very black people liked to call “high yaller.” Not only did Charity seem to harbor no distress whatever about her color, she had laughingly volunteered
to George that her pappy was the white overseer on a big South Carolina rice and indigo plantation with over a hundred slaves where she had been born and reared until at eighteen she was sold at auction and bought by Massa Teague to be their big-house maid. On the subject of skin color, about all that Charity had ever expressed any concern about was that in South Carolina she had left behind her mammy and a younger brother who was practically white. She said that black-skinned young’uns had unmercifully teased him until their mammy told him to yell back at his tormentors, “Turkey buzzard laid me! Hot sun hatched me! Gawd gim’me dis color dat ain’t none o’ y’all black niggers’ business!” From that time on, Charity said, her brother had been let alone.

But the problem of George’s own color—and how he got it—was eclipsed for the moment by his frustration at realizing that the near-uprising in faraway Charleston was surely going to delay his following through with an idea he had been developing carefully in his head for a long time. In fact, nearly two years had gone into his finally reaching a decision to try it out on Uncle Mingo. But there was no sense in telling him about it now, since the whole thing would hang on whether or not Massa Lea would approve of the idea, and he knew Massa Lea was going to remain angrily unapproachable about anything for quite a while. Though the massa stopped carrying the shotgun after a week or so, he would inspect the gamefowl only briefly every day, and after terse instructions to Uncle Mingo, would ride off as grim-faced as he had come.

George didn’t really realize the full gravity of what had almost happened in Charleston until, after another two weeks—despite Uncle Mingo’s warning—he found himself unable to resist any longer the temptation to slip out for a visit with one of his girl-friends. Impulsively, he decided to favor Charity this time, swayed by memories of what a tigress she always was with him. After
waiting to hear Uncle Mingo’s snoring, he went loping for nearly an hour across the fields until he reached the concealing pecan grove from which he always whistled his whippoorwill call to her. When he’d whistled four times without seeing the familiar “come ahead” signal of a lighted candle waved briefly in Charity’s window, he began to worry. Just when he was about to leave his hiding place and sneak on in anyway, he saw movement in the trees ahead of him. It was Charity. George rushed forward to embrace her, but she permitted him only the briefest hug and kiss before pushing him away.

“What’sa
matter,
baby?” he demanded, so aroused by her musky body aroma that he hardly heard the quavering in her voice.

“You de bigges’ fool, slippin’ roun’ now, many niggers as gittin’ shot by paterollers!”

“Well, le’s git on in yo’ cabin, den!” said George, throwing an arm around her waist. But she moved away again.

“You act like you ain’t even heared ’bout no uprisin’!”

“I know was one, dat’s all—”

“I tell you ’bout it, den” and Charity said she overheard her massa and missis saying that the ringleader, a Bible-reading free black Charleston carpenter named Denmark Vesey, had spent years in planning before confiding in four close friends who helped him to recruit and organize hundreds of the city’s free and slave blacks. Four heavily armed groups of them had only awaited the signal to seize arsenals and other key buildings, while others would burn all they could of the city and kill every white they saw. Even a horse company of black drivers would go dashing wildly about in drays, carts, and wagons to confuse and obstruct white people from assembling. “But dat Sunday mornin’ some scairt nigger tol’ his massa what s’posed to happen dat midnight, den white mens was all over, catchin’, beatin’, an’ torturin’ niggers to tell who was de uprisers. Dey’s done hung over thirty of ’em by now, an’
ever’where dey’s throwin’ de fear o’ Gawd into niggers, jes’ like dey’s doin’ roun’ here now, but ’specially in South Ca’liny. Done run out Charleston’s free niggers an ’burnt dey houses, de nigger preachers, too, an’ locked up dey churches, claimin’ dat ’stid o’ preachin’, dey’s been teachin’ niggers to read an’ write—”

George had renewed his efforts to start her moving toward the cabin. “Ain’t you been listenin’ to me?” she said, highly agitated. “You git home fo’ you’s seed an’ shot by some dese paterollers!”

George protested that inside her cabin was safety from any paterollers, as well as relief of his passion for her, which had caused him to risk being shot already.

“Done tol’ you, NAW!”

Exasperated, George finally shoved her roughly backward. “Well,
g’wan,
den!” And bitterly he went loping back the way he had come, wishing furiously that he had gone to Beulah’s instead, because it was too late to go there now.

In the morning, George said to Mingo, “Went up to see my mammy las’ night, an’ Miss Malizy was tellin’ me what she been hearin’ massa tellin’ missis ’bout dat uprisin’—” Unsure if Mingo would believe that story, he went on anyway, telling what Charity had said, and the old man listened intently. Finishing, George asked, “How come niggers herebouts gittin’ shot at ’bout sump’n clear in South Ca’liny, Uncle Mingo?”

Uncle Mingo thought awhile before he said, “All white folks scairt us niggers sometime gwine organize an’ rise up together—” He snorted derisively. “But niggers ain’t gwine never do
nothin
’ together.” He reflected for another moment. “But dis here shootin’ an’ killin’ you talk ’bout gwine ease up like it always do, soon’s dey’s kilt an’ scairt niggers enough, an’ soon’s dey makes whole passel o’ new laws, an’ soon’s dey gits sick of payin’ whole bunch o’ pecker-wood paterollers.”

“How long all dat take?” asked George, realizing as soon as he had said it what a foolish question it was, and Uncle Mingo’s quick look at him affirmed the opinion.

“Well, I sho’ ain’t got no answer to dat!” George fell silent, deciding not to tell Uncle Mingo his idea until things had returned to normal with Massa Lea.

In the course of the next couple of months, Massa Lea gradually did begin to act more or less like his old self—surly, most of the time, but not dangerous. And one day soon afterward George decided that the time was right.

“Uncle Mingo, I been studyin’ a long time on sump’n—” he began. “I b’lieves I got a idea might help massa’s birds win mo’ fights dan dey does.” Mingo looked as if some special form of insanity had struck his strapping seventeen-year-old assistant, who continued talking. “I been five years gwine to de big chicken fights wid y’all. Reckon two seasons back, I commence noticin’ sump’n I been watchin’ real close every since. Seem like every different gamecocker massa’s set o’ birds got dey own fightin’ style—” Scuffing the toe of one brogan against the other, George avoided looking at the man who had been training gamefowl since long before he was born. “We trains massa’s birds to be real strong, wid real long wind, to win a lot dey fights jes’ by outlastin’ de other birds. But I done kept a count—de mos’ times we loses is when some bird flies up over massa’s bird an’ gaffs ’im from de top, gin’ly in de head. Uncle Mingo, I b’lieves if ’n massa’s birds got stronger wings, like I b’lieves we could give ’em wid whole lot o’ special wing exercise, I b’lieves dey’d gin’ly fly higher’n other birds, an’ kill even mo’ dan dey does now.”

Beneath his wrinkled brow; Mingo’s deep-set eyes searched the grass between George’s and his own shoes. It was awhile before he spoke. “I sees what you means. I b’lieves you needs to tell massa.”

“If you feels so, cain’t you tell him?”

“Naw. You thunk it up. Massa hear it from you good as me.”

George felt an immense sense of relief that at least Uncle Mingo didn’t laugh at the idea, but lying awake on his narrow cornshuck mattress that night, George felt uneasy and afraid about telling Massa Lea.

Bracing himself on Monday morning when the massa appeared, George took a deep breath and repeated almost calmly what he had said to Uncle Mingo, and he added more detail about different gameflocks’ characteristic fighting styles “—An’ when you notices, Massa, dem birds o’ Massa Graham’s fights in a fast, feisty way. But Massa MacGregor’s birds fights real cautious an’ wary-like. Or Cap’n Peabody’s strikes wid dey feets an’ spurs close together, but Massa Howaid’s scissors wid dey legs pretty wide apart. Dat rich Massa Jewett’s birds, dey gin’ly fights low in de air, an’ dey pecks hard when dey’s on de groun’, an’ any bird dey catches a good beakhold o’ jes’ liable to git gaffed right dere—” Avoiding the massa’s face, George missed his intensely attentive expression. “Reckon what I’se trying’ to say, Massa, if you ’grees wid me an’ Uncle Mingo givin’ yo’ birds some whole lotsa strong wing exercisin’ dat we oughta be able to figger out, seem like dat help ’em to fly up higher’n de res’ to gaff ’em from on top, an’ speck nobody wouldn’t quick catch on.”