But Kunta didn’t; he lay thinking for quite sometime of how he had heard of such things being done—of unborn black babies being given as presents, wagered as gambling bets at card tables and cockfights. The fiddler had told him how the dying massa of a pregnant fifteen-year-old black girl named Mary had willed as slaves to each of his five daughters one apiece of her first five babies. He had heard of black children being security for loans, of creditors claiming them while they were yet in their mother’s belly, of debtors selling them in advance to raise cash. At that time in the Spotsylvania
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