Roots (76 page)

Massa Lea was staring at George as if he had never seen him before.

In the months that remained before the next cockfighting season, Massa Lea spent more time than ever before in the gamefowl training area, observing and sometimes even joining Uncle Mingo and George as they tossed gamecocks higher and higher into the air. Descending with a frantic flapping of their wings, trying to support their five-to-six-pound weights, their wings grew steadily stronger.

As George had prophesied, the 1823 cockfighting season opened and progressed through one after another “main” contest, with no one seeming to detect how-or-why the Lea birds were managing to win an even higher percentage of their fights than the year before. Their steel gaffs had sunk fatally into thirty-nine of their fifty-two opponents by the end of the season.

One morning about a week later, Massa Lea arrived—in high spirits—to check on the recovery of the half dozen of his prime birds that had been injured seriously during the season.

“Don’t b’lieve dis’n gwine pull through, Massa,” said Uncle Mingo, indicating one so drooping and battered that Massa Lea’s head quickly shook in agreement. “But I speck dese in dese next two cages gwine heal up so good you be fightin’ ’em again next season.” Mingo gestured next at the last three convalescing birds. “Dese here ain’t gwine never be perfect enough fo’ de big main fights no mo’, but we can use ’em as catchcocks if you wants to, Massa, or dey be good cull birds anyhow.” Massa Lea expressed his satisfaction with the prognosis and had started toward his horse when, turning, he spoke casually to George. “These nights you slip out of here tomcattin’, you’d better be mighty careful about that bad nigger that’s sweet on the same gal—”

George was so dumfounded it took a full second before anger flared within him at Uncle Mingo’s obvious treachery. But then he saw that Uncle Mingo’s face was no less astounded, as the massa continued. “Missis Teague told my wife at their quilting club meeting she couldn’t figure out what had come over her yaller house-maid until lately some of the other niggers told her the gal’s wore out from two-timing you and some bad buck older nigger—” Massa Lea chuckled. “Reckon the two of y’all sure must be tearin’ up that gal!”

Charity!
Two
-timing! As George recalled furiously with what insistence she had blocked him from her cabin that night, he
forced himself to smile and laugh nervously; Uncle Mingo joined in just as hollowly. George felt stricken. Now that the massa had discovered that he had been slipping off nights, what was he going to do to him?

Having paused to let George expect his anger, Massa Lea said instead—in an incredible, almost man-to-man way—“Hell, long as you do your work, go on and chase you some tail. Just don’t let some buck slice you to pieces—and don’t get caught out on that road where the patrol is shootin’ people’s niggers.”

“
Nawsuh!
Sho’
ain’t—”
George was so confused he didn’t know what to say. “Sho’ ’preciates, Massa—”

Massa Lea climbed on his horse, a discernible shaking of his shoulders suggesting to his gamecock trainers that he was laughing to himself as he cantered on up the road.

Finally alone in his shack that night, after enduring Uncle Mingo’s frostiness through the rest of the day, free at last to vent his outrage at Charity, George cursed her—and vowed that he would turn his attentions, which she obviously didn’t deserve, to the surely more faithful, if less hotly passionate, Beulah. He also remembered that tall, cinnamon-colored girl who had given him the eye at a secret frolic he had stumbled on in the woods while hurrying homeward one night. The only reason he hadn’t tried her then and there was he got so drunk on the white lightning she offered him that he was barely able to stagger home by dawn. But he remembered she said her name was Ophelia and that she belonged to the very rich Massa Jewett, who owned over a thousand gamefowl, or so it was said, and whose family had huge plantations in Georgia and South Carolina as well as the one there in Caswell County. It was a long way to walk, but first chance he got, George decided he was going to get better acquainted with that tasty-looking field girl Massa Jewett probably didn’t even know he owned.

O
ne Sunday morning George had left for his weekly visit on slave row by the time Massa Lea showed up for daily inspection of the flock. It was the perfect moment. After walking about and talking of gamecocking for a while, Uncle Mingo said, as if it had just occurred to him, “Massa, you knows how every season we culls out dese fifteen or twenty good birds dat’s better’n a whole lots o’ folks fights wid. I b’lieves you can make good side money if’n you lets dat boy fight yo’ culls in hackfights.”

Uncle Mingo knew well that the name of Tom Lea, throughout the length and breadth of Caswell County, symbolized the rise of a poor white man to eminence and a major gamecocker who started out as a hackfighter with one good bird. Many a time he had told Uncle Mingo how fondly he looked back upon those early, hungry days, declaring that their excitements were at least the equal of those he had enjoyed in all of the major “mains” he had competed in ever since. The only significant differences, Massa Lea said, were that the big “main” fights involved a better class of people as well as of gamecocks, and much higher amounts of money were wagered; one might see really rich gamecockers winning—and losing—fortunes in the course of a single fight. Hackfights were for those who were able to fight only one or two or three usually second- or third-rate birds—the poor whites, free
blacks, or slaves whose pocketbooks could afford bets ranging from twenty-five cents to a dollar, with as much as perhaps twenty dollars being bet only when some hackfighter went out of his head and put on the line everything he had in the world.

“What makes you think he can handle birds in a cockpit?” asked Massa Lea.

Uncle Mingo was relieved to hear no objections to his proposal. “Well, suh, close as you know dat boy watch fights, reckon he ain’t missed a move you made in de cockpits for five, six years, Massa. An’ put dat togedder wid jes’ how na’chel born he is wid roosters, I sho’ b’lieves he’d need no mo’n a little teachin’. Even fights he’d lose be jes’ cull birds we has roun’ here dat you don’t never hardly use nohow, suh.”

“Uh-huh,” the massa murmured, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Well, I don’t see nothin’ wrong with it. Why don’t you buff the spurs of some culls and help him practice fights across the summer? If he looks any good by next season, yeah, I’ll stake him a little for some bets.”

“Sho will, yassuh!” Uncle Mingo was exultant, since for months now in the gamefowl area’s woodsy privacy, he and George had been mock-fighting culled birds, their spurs harmlessly covered with a light leather pouch Uncle Mingo had devised. Being the cautious man he was, the old man hadn’t ventured his suggestion to the massa without first ascertaining for himself that his able apprentice showed genuine potential to develop into a really good fight handler. With enough hackfighting experience, he thought privately that George might someday become as expert as Massa Lea at handling birds at a cockpit. As Uncle Mingo had said, even the culls from a flock as good as the massa’s were superior to the ones usually pitted in the many hackfights that were staged each season in various impromptu and informal settings around the
county. All in all, it seemed to Uncle Mingo that there was practically no way George would miss.

“Well, boy, you jes’ gwine stand dere wid yo’ mouth open?” asked Uncle Mingo when he broke the news that afternoon.

“Don’t know what to say.”

“Never thought I’d live to see de day when you ain’t got nothin’ to say.”

“I ... jes’ don’ know how to thank you.”

“Wid all dem teeth showin’, you don’ need to. Le’s get to work.”

Every day that summer, he and Uncle Mingo spent at least an hour in the late afternoons squatting on opposite sides of a make-shift cockpit, smaller in diameter and shallower than the regular size, but still sufficient for training. After several weeks, the massa came down to observe one of the sessions. Impressed with the pit-side agility and keen reflexes George showed in handling his bird, he gave him a few cockfight pointers of his own.

“You want your bird to get the jump. Now watch me—” Taking over Mingo’s bird, he said, “Okay, your referee’s already hollered ‘Get ready!’ You’re down here holding your bird—but don’t watch it! Keep your eyes on that referee’s lips! You want to tell the split second he’s going to say ‘Pit!’ It ’s when his lips press together tight—” Massa Lea compressed his own lips. “Right
then
snatch up your hands—you’ll hear ‘Pit ’ just as your bird gets out there first!”

Some afternoons, after their training session was done and the cull birds they had used had been put back in their pens, Uncle Mingo would sit and tell George about the glory and the money that could be earned in hackfights. “Jes’ like de po’ peckerwoods hollers for massa to win, I’se seed niggers dat gits hollered for at de big hackfights. An’ it’s much as ten, twelve, even mo’ dollars can be winned in one fight, boy!”

“Ain’t never
had
a dollar, Uncle Mingo! Don’t hardly know what a dollar look like!”

“I aint never had many neither. Fact, ain’t got no use for none no mo’. But massa say he gwine stake you some bettin’ money, an’ if you wins any, he jes’ might let you have some of it—”

“You reckon he do dat?”

“I specks, ’cause I know he got to be feelin’ pretty good ’bout dat wing-strengthenin’ idea of your’n what done put good money in his pocket. Thing is if he do, is you gwine have sense enough to save up what you git?”

“Sho’ do dat! I sho’ would!”

“I’se even heared o’ niggers winnin’ an’ savin’ enough from hackfightin’ to buy deyselves free from dey massas.”

“Buy me an’ my mammy both!”

Immediately Uncle Mingo rose from the stump he had been sitting on; the lancing of jealousy that he had just experienced had not only come entirely unexpectedly, but it was also so unsettling deep within him that he found it hard to make any reply. Then he heard himself snapping, “Well—reckon ain’t nothin’ impossible!” Wanting suddenly to get away from a feeling that his own sense of sharing a truly close affection wasn’t being equally reciprocated, he walked quickly off toward his cabin, leaving George staring after him, puzzled.

At a big cockfight main with Massa Lea early during the 1824 season, Uncle Mingo heard from an old trainer he had known for years that a hackfight was due to be held that coming Saturday afternoon behind the large barn of a local plantation. “Reckon he’bout ready as he ever gwine be, Massa,” Mingo told the massa later. On Saturday morning, as he had promised, Massa Lea came down and counted out twenty dollars in small bills and coins to Uncle Mingo. “Now, you know my policy,” he said to both of them. “Don’t get in there fightin’ a bird if you’re afraid to bet on
him! If you bet nothin’ you’ll never win nothin’! I’m willin’ to lose whatever you lose, but I’m puttin’ up the money and you’re fightin’ my chickens, so I want half of any winnin’s, you understand that? And if I even
think
there’s any messin’ around with my money, I’ll take it out of
both
your black hides!” But they could clearly see that he was only putting on a gruff act when he was really in a good humor as they chorused, “Yassuh, Massa!”

Rounding the corner of the large gray-painted barn, trying not to show how excited he was, George saw about twenty black hackfighters moving around, laughing and talking on one side of a wide, shallow cockpit. Recognizing about half of them from the big fights they’d attended with their massas, as he had, he waved and smiled his greetings, exchanging nods with others whose colorful dress and cockily independent air made him guess that they must be free blacks. Flicking glances at about an equal number of poor whites just across the cockpit, he was surprised to find that he knew some of them, too, and pridefully, he overheard one telling another, “Them two’s Tom Lea’s niggers.” Both the black and white hackfighters soon began untying their hay-filled crocus bags, withdrawing their crowing, clucking birds and starting to limber them up as Uncle Mingo stepped around the cockpit and said something to the stout, ruddy-faced referee, who nodded with a glance across at George.

The boy was diligently massaging his stag when Mingo returned and began working on the other bird they’d brought along. George felt vaguely uneasy at being physically closer than ever before to poor whites, who generally meant nothing but trouble for blacks, but he reminded himself that Uncle Mingo had told him on their way over here that hackfighting was the only thing he knew of that poor whites and blacks did together. The rule was that only two whites or two blacks fought their birds against each other, but anyone freely could bet on or against any bird in any fight.

With his bird well massaged and limbered up and nestled back in its sack, George drank in more of the surrounding hubbub, and he saw yet more hackfighters with filled sacks hurrying toward the barn when the referee began waving his arms.

“All right, all right now! Let’s get started fightin’ these birds! Jim Carter! Ben Spence! Get over here and heel ’em up!”

Two gaunt, shabbily dressed white men came forward, weighed-in their birds, then fitted on the steel gaffs amid sporadic shouted bets of twenty-five and fifty cents. As far as George was concerned, neither bird looked any better than mediocre compared to the two culls from the massa’s flock in his and Uncle Mingo’s sacks.

At the cry “
Pit!
” the birds rushed out, burst into the air, and dropped back down, flurrying and feinting—fighting conventionally, George felt, and without the quality of drama he always sensed with Uncle Mingo and the massa at the big fights. When at last one bird hung a gaff that badly wounded the other in the neck, it took minutes more to finish the kill that George knew would have taken a top-class bird only seconds. He watched the losing owner stalk off bitterly cursing his bad luck and holding his dead bird by the legs. In a second fight, then in a third, neither the winning nor losing birds showed George the fight fire and style he was used to seeing, so diminishing his nervousness that as the fourth fight wore on, he all but cockily anticipated his own turn in the cockpit. But when it came, his heart immediately started pounding faster.