Roots (90 page)

Massa Lea stood there, his face blanched.

For seconds cooped gamecocks’ cluckings and crowings were the only sounds heard as thronged men tried to comprehend the potential of two gamecocks battling with eighty thousand dollars at stake, winner take all....

Heads had swiveled toward Massa Lea. He seemed bewildered, uncertain. For one split second his glance brushed Chicken George, working feverishly on the injured bird. Chicken George was as startled as others to hear his own voice, “Yo’ birds whup anything wid feathers, Massa!” The sea of white faces swiveled toward him.

“I’ve heard that your faithful darky is among the best trainers, but I wouldn’t rely too much on his advice. I also have other very good birds.”

The words had come as if the rich Englishman regarded his previous loss about as he might have a game of marbles, as if he were taunting Massa Lea.

Then Massa Lea sounded elaborately formal: “Yes, sir. As you propose, I’ll take pleasure in letting the sum ride on another fight.”

The next several minutes of preparatory activities passed almost as a blur for Chicken George. Not a sound came from the surrounding crowd. There had never been anything like this. All of Chicken George’s instincts approved when Massa Lea indicated with a forefinger the coop containing the bird that Chicken George had previously given a nickname. “De Hawk, yassuh,” he breathed, knowing precisely that bird’s tendency for seizing and holding an enemy with its beak while slashing with its spurs. It would be the countermeasure for birds trained to feint expertly, as the previous contest had suggested was characteristic within the Englishman’s flock.

Cradling “De Hawk” in his arm, Massa Lea went out to where the Englishman held a solid dark gray bird. The birds weighed in at six pounds even.

When “
Pit!
” came, bringing the anticipated rushing impact, somehow instead of either bird taking to the air, they exchanged furious wing blows and Chicken George could hear “De Hawk’s” beak snapping after a proper hold ... when somehow amid mutual
buffeting an English spur struck in savagely. The massa’s bird stumbled and its head dropped limply for an instant before it collapsed, its opened mouth streaming blood.

“O Lawd! O Lawd! O Lawd!” Chicken George went bolting, knocking aside men in his lunge into the circular cockpit. Bellowing like a baby, scooping up the obviously mortally wounded “Hawk,” he sucked clotting blood from its beak as it weakly fluttered, dying in his hands. He struggled to his feet with the nearest men drawing back from his bawling anguish as he stumbled back through the crowd and toward the wagon cradling the dead bird.

Back about the pit a gathering of planters were wildly back-slapping and congratulating the Englishman and Massa Jewett. All of their backs were turned to the stricken, solitary figure of Massa Lea, who stood rooted, staring down with a glazed look at the bloodstains in the cockpit.

Turning finally, Sir C. Eric Russell walked over to where Massa Lea was, and Massa Lea slowly raised his eyes.

“What’d you say?” he mumbled.

“I said, sir, it just wasn’t your lucky day.”

Massa Lea managed a trace of a smile.

Sir C. Eric Russell said, “Concerning the wager. Of course, no one carries about such sums in his pocket. Why don’t we settle up tomorrow? Say, sometime in the afternoon—” He paused. “
After
the tea hour, at Mr. Jewett’s home.”

Numbly, Massa Lea nodded. “Yes, sir.”

The trip home took two hours. Neither the massa nor Chicken George spoke a word. It was the longest ride Chicken George had ever taken. But it had not been long enough, as the wagon pulled into the driveway ...

When Massa Lea returned from Massa Jewett’s during the next day’s dusk, he found Chicken George mixing meal for the
cockerels in the supply hut, where he had spent most of the hours since Matilda’s screams, wails, and shouting during the previous night had finally driven him from their cabin.

“George,” the massa said, “I got somethin’ hard to tell you.” He paused, groping for words. “Don’t know how to say it hardly. But you already know I ain’t had nowhere near the money folks thinks I did. Fact is, ’cept for a few thousand, ’bout all I own is the house, this land, and you few niggers.”

He’s going to sell us,
George sensed.

“Trouble is,” the massa went on, “even all that ain’t but roun’ half what I owe that goddamned sonofabitch. But he’s offered me a break—” The massa hesitated again. “You heard him say what he’d heard about you. And he said today he could see how good you train in both the birds fought—”

The massa took a deep breath. George held his. “Well, seems like he needs to replace a trainer he lost over in England awhile back, and he thinks bringing back a nigger trainer would be fun.” The massa couldn’t look into George’s disbelieving eyes and became more abrupt. “Not to drag out this mess, he’ll call us square for all I’ve got in cash, a first and second mortgage on the house, and using you over in England long enough to train somebody else. He says no more’n a couple of years.”

The massa forced himself to look Chicken George in the face. “Can’t tell you how bad I feel about this, George.... I ain’t got no choice. He’s lettin’ me off light. If I don’t do it, I’m ruint, everything I ever worked for.”

George couldn’t find words. What
could
he say? After all, he was the massa’s slave.

“Now, I know you’re wiped out, too, and I mean to make it up to you. So I pledge you my word right here and now while you’re gone I’ll take care of your woman and young’uns. And the day you get home—”

Massa Lea paused, sliding a hand into his pocket, withdrawing it, and holding a folded paper that he unfolded and thrust before Chicken George.

“Know what that is? Sat down an’ wrote it out last night. You’re looking right at your legal freedom paper, boy! I’m gonna keep it in my strongbox to hand you the day you come back!”

But after momentarily staring at the mysterious writing that covered most of the square, white sheet of paper, Chicken George continued struggling to control his fury. “Massa,” he said quietly, “I was gwine
buy
us all free! Now all I had gone, an’ you sendin’
me
off crost de water somewheres ’way from my wife an’ chilluns besides. How come you can’t leas’ free
dem
now, den me when I gits back?”

Massa Lea’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t need you tellin’ me what to do, boy! Ain’t my fault you lost that money! I’m offerin’ to do too much for you anyhow, that’s the trouble with niggers! You better be careful of your mouth!” The massa’s face was reddening. “If it wasn’t for you bein’ all your life here, I’d just go ahead an’ sell your ass!”

George looked at him, then shook his head. “If all my life mean anythin’ to you, Massa, how come you’s jes’ messin’ it up mo’?”

The massa’s face set into hardness. “Pack whatever you intend to take with you! You leave for England Saturday.”

W
ith Chicken George gone, his luck gone, and perhaps his nerve gone as well, the fortunes of Massa Lea continued to decline. At first, he ordered L’il George into full-time daily care of the chickens, but toward the end of only a third day, the massa found some of the cockerel pens’ waterpans empty and the chubby, slow L’il George was sent fleeing with dire threats. The youngest boy, Lewis, nineteen, was next transferred from field work to take on the job. In preparation for the season’s several remaining game-cocking matches, Massa Lea now was forced to take over most of the prefight training and conditioning chores himself, since Lewis as yet simply did not know how. He accompanied the massa to the various local contests, and each of those days, the rest of the family gathering in the evenings awaited the return of Lewis to tell them whatever had happened.

The massa’s birds had lost more fights than they won, Lewis always said, and after a while that he had overheard men openly talking that Tom Lea was trying to borrow money to make bets. “Ain’t many seem like dey wants to talk wid massa. Dey jes’ speaks or waves quick an’ keeps goin’ like he got de plague.”

“Yeah, de plague o’ dem knowin’ now he po’,” said Matilda. “Po’ cracker’s all he
ever
been!” Sister Sarah snapped.

It became slave row’s common knowledge that Massa Lea had taken to drinking heavily, almost every day, between his shouting matches with Missis Lea.

“Dat ol’ man ain’t never been
dis
evil!” Miss Malizy told her grimly listening audience one night. “He hit de house actin’ jes’ like a snake, hollerin’ an’ cussin if’ n missy even look at ’im. An’ all day long when he gone, she in dere cryin’ she don’t even never want to
hear
no more ’bout no chickens!”

Matilda listened, emotionally drained from her own weeping and praying since her Chicken George had been gone. Briefly her glances reviewed their teen-aged daughters and six strong grown sons, three of them now with mates and children. Then her eyes came back to rest upon her blacksmith son, Tom, as if she wished he would say something. But who spoke instead was Lilly Sue, Virgil’s pregnant mate, who was briefly visiting from the nearby Curry plantation where she lived, and fear was thick in her tone. “I don’ know y’all’s massa good as you do, but I jes’
feels
he gwine do somethin’ terrible, sho’s we born.” A silence fell among them, no one being willing to express their own guess, at least not aloud.

After the next morning’s breakfast, Miss Malizy waddled hurriedly from the kitchen down to the blacksmith shop. “Massa say tell you saddle his hoss and git it roun’ to de front porch, Tom,” she urged, her large eyes visibly moist. “Lawd, please hurry up, ’cause de things he been sayin’ to po’ ol’ missis jes’ ain’t hardly fittin’.” Without a word Tom soon tied the saddled horse to a gatepost, and he had just started back around the side of the big house when Massa Lea came lurching through the front door. Already red-faced from drinking, he struggled up onto the horse’s back and galloped away, weaving in the saddle.

Through a half-opened window, Tom could overhear Missis Lea weeping as if her heart would break. Feeling embarrassment for her, he continued across the backyard to the blacksmith shed
where he was just starting to beat a dulled plow point into sharpness when Miss Malizy came again.

“Tom,” she said, “I ’clare seem like massa jes’ win’ up killin’ hisself, he keep on like he goin’, man nigh onto eighty years ol’.”

“You want to know the truth, Miss Malizy,” he replied, “I b’lieve one way or ’nother dat’s what he tryin’ to do.”

Massa Lea returned during the midafternoon, accompanied by another white man on horseback, and from their respective kitchen and blacksmith shop observation posts, both Miss Malizy and Tom saw with surprise that the pair didn’t dismount and enter the big house to freshen up and share a drink, as was always previously done with any guests. Instead, the horses were kept trotting on down the back road toward the gamecock area. Not half an hour later, Tom and Miss Malizy saw the visitor come back riding rapidly alone, holding under one arm a frightened, clucking gamehen, and Tom being outside was able to catch a fairly close glimpse of the man’s furious expression as he rode by.

It was at that night’s usual slave-row gathering when Lewis told what actually had happened. “When I heared de hosses comin’,” he said, “I jes’ made sho’ massa seed me workin’ fo’ I made myself scarce, over behin’ some bushes where I knowed I could see an’ hear.

“Well, after some pretty hot bargainin’, dey come to a hunnud-dollar’greement fo’ dis gamehen settin’ on a clutch o’ eggs. An’ I seen de man count out de money, den massa count it again fo’ puttin’ it in his pocket. Right after den a misunderstandin’ commence’bout de man sayin’ de eggs under de hen went wid de deal. Well, massa commence to cussin’ like he crazy! He run, grab up de hen an’ wid his foot stomped an’ squashed dat nest o’ eggs into one mess! Dem two was nigh fightin’ when all o’ a sudden de odder man snatched de hen an’ jumped on his hoss, yellin’ he’d bus’ massa’s head if he wasn’t so damn ol’!”

The uneasiness of the slave-row family deepened with each passing day, and nights were spent in fitful sleep resultant from worry of whatever might be the next frightful development. Across that 1855 summer and into the fall, with every angry outburst from the massa, with his every departure or arrival, the rest of the family’s eyes involuntarily would turn to the twenty-two-year-old blacksmith Tom, as if appealing for his direction, but Tom offered none. By the crisp November, when there had been a fine harvest from the massa’s roughly sixty-five acres in cotton and tobacco, which they knew he had been able to sell for a good price, one Saturday dusk Matilda watched from her cabin window until she saw Tom’s last blacksmithing customer leave, and she hurried out there, her expression telling him from long experience that something special was on her mind.

“Yas’m, Mammy?” he asked, starting to bank the fire in his forge.

“I been thinkin’, Tom. All six you boys done growed up to be mens now. You ain’t my oldes’, but I’se yo’ mammy an’ knows you’s got de levelest head,” Matilda said. “Plus dat, you’s de blacksmith an’ dey’s fiel’ han’s. So look like you’s got to be de main man o’ dis fam’ly since yo’ daddy gone ’bout eight months now—” Matilda hesitated, then added loyally, “leas’ ways, ’til he git back.”

Tom was frankly startled, for ever since his boyhood he had been his family’s most reserved member. Although he and his brothers had all been born and reared on Massa Lea’s plantation, he had never become very close with any of them, principally because he had been away for years as a blacksmithing apprentice, and since his return as a man, he was at the blacksmith shed, while the rest of his brothers were out in the fields. He had especially little contact anymore with Virgil, Ashford, and L’il George, for differing reasons. Virgil, now twenty-six, spent all his free time over on the adjoining plantation with his wife Lilly Sue and their recently
born son, whom they had named Uriah. As for Ashford, twenty-five, he and Tom had always disliked and avoided each other, and Ashford had become more bitter at the world than ever since a girl he desperately wanted to marry had a massa who refused to let them jump the broom, calling Ashford an “uppity nigger.” And the twenty-four-year-old L’il George, now just plain fat, was also deep in courtship with an adjoining plantation’s cook, twice his age, which evoked wry family comments that he would woo anyone who would fill his stomach.