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And Kunta had been reminded of Africa in the way that black women here wore their hair tied up with strings into very tight plaits—although African women often decorated their plaits with colorful beads. And the women of this place knotted cloth pieces over their heads, although they didn’t tie them ...
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Kunta also saw Africa in the way that black children here were trained to treat their elders with politeness and respect. He saw it in the way that mothers carried their babies with their plump little legs straddling the mothers’ bodies. He noticed even such small customs as how the older ones among these blacks would sit in the evenings rubbing their gums and teeth with the finely crushed end of a twig, which would have been lemongrass root in Juffure. And though he found it difficult to understand how they could do it here in toubob land, Kunta had to admit that these blacks’ great love of
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One night, when Kunta had fallen asleep but drifted again into wakefulness, as he often did, he lay staring up into the darkness and feeling that Allah had somehow, for some reason, willed him to be here in this place amid the lost tribe of a great black family that reached its roots back among the ancient forefathers; but unlike himself, these black ones in this place had no knowledge whatsoever of who they
were and where they’d come from.
He had by now many times witnessed the blacks’ grinning faces turn to bitterness the instant a toubob turned his head away.
And he had seen how blacks in the field, for all their show of rushing about whenever the toubob was nearby, were really taking twice as much time as they needed to do whatever they were doing.
He was beginning to realize, too, that like the Mandinkas’ own secret sira kango language, these blacks shared some kind of communication known only among themselves.
it—that some message was being passed, just as the women had done for the men on the big canoe.
“Allah knows every language.”
length—it reminded Kunta of the ancient kora from his own homeland—and
Back in his hut later that night reflecting upon what he had seen, it occurred to Kunta that in some strong, strange, and very deep way, the blacks and the toubob had some need for each other. Not only during the dancing in the barn, but also on many other occasions, it had seemed to him that the toubob were at their happiest when they were close around the black ones—even when they were beating them.
poleaxed.
In his loneliness, Kunta began talking to himself, most often in imaginary conversations with his family. He would talk to them mostly in his mind, but sometimes aloud. “Fa,” he would say, “these black ones are not like us. Their bones, their blood, their sinews, their hands, their feet are not their own. They live and breathe not for themselves but for the toubob. Nor do they own anything at all, not even their own children. They are fed and nursed and bred for others.”
Perhaps he could take advantage of the fact that the toubob didn’t look at blacks as people but as things. Since the toubob’s reactions to these black things seemed to depend on how those things acted, he decided to act as inconspicuous as possible.
saphie he had made—a cock’s feather to attract the spirits, a horse’s hair for strength, a bird’s wishbone for success—all tightly wrapped and sewn within a small square of gunnysacking with a needle he had made from a thorn. He realized the foolishness of wishing that his saphie might be blessed by a holy man, but any saphie was better than no saphie at all.
During the early afternoon, he happened upon a small stream of clear water tippling over mossy rocks, and frogs jumped in alarm as he stopped to drink from it with his cupped hands.
On Bell’s next visit, she looked down with deep concern into Kunta’s bloodshot and yellowing eyes, which had sunken farther into his fevered face. He lay steadily shuddering, groaning, even thinner than when he had been brought here the week before. She went back outside, but within an hour was back with thick cloths, two steaming pots, and a pair of folded quilts. Moving quickly and—for some reason—furtively, she covered Kunta’s bared chest with a thick, steaming poultice of boiled leaves mixed and mashed with something acrid. The poultice was so blistering hot that Kunta moaned and tried to
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dirt floor in rivulets. With a corner of her apron, Bell dabbed at the sweat that trickled into his closed eyes, and finally he lay entirely limp. Only when she felt the chest cloths and found them barely warm did she remove them. Then, wiping his chest clean of all traces of the poultice, she covered him with the quilts and left.
He lay wondering where that woman had learned to do what she had done. It was like Binta’s medicines from his childhood, the herbs of Allah’s earth passed down from the ancestors. And
Kunta’s mind played back to him, as well, the black woman’s secretive manner, making him realize that it had not been toubob medicine. Not only was he sure that the toubob were unaware of it, he knew that the toubob should never know of it. And Kunta found himself studying the black woman’s face in his mind. What was it the toubob had called her? “Bell.”
As the days passed, he began to see that although these black ones lived better than those on the previous toubob farm, they seemed to have no more realization than the others that they were a lost tribe, that any kind of respect or appreciation for themselves had been squeezed out of them so thoroughly that they seemed to feel that their lives were as they should be. All they seemed to be concerned about was not getting beaten, having enough to eat and
somewhere to sleep. There weren’t many nights that Kunta finally managed to fall asleep before lying awake burning with fury at the misery of his people. But they didn’t even seem to know that they were miserable.
After a while more of reflective silence, the brown one began speaking: “I been hearin’ ’bout you so mad. You lucky dey ain’t kilt you. Dey could of, an’ been inside de law. Jes’ like when dat white man broke my hand ’cause I got tired of fiddlin’. Law say anybody catch you ’scapin’ can kill you and no punishment for him. Dat law gits read out again eve’y six months in white folks’ churches. Looka here, don’t start me on white folks’ laws. Startin’ up a new
settlement, dey firs’ builds a courthouse, fo’ passin’ more laws; nex’ buildin’s a church to prove dey’s Christians. I b’lieve all dat Virginia’s House of Burgess do is pass more laws ’gainst niggers. It’s a law niggers can’t carry no gun, even no stick that look like a club. Law say twenty lashes you get caught widdout a travelin’ pass, ten lashes if’n you looks white folks in dey eyes, thirty lashes if’n you raises your hand ’gainst a white Christian. Law say no nigger preachin’ lessen a white man dere to listen; law say can’t be no nigger funeral if dey think it’s a meetin’. Law say cut
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“’Bout your foot, looka here, it ain’t jes’ foots and arms but dicks an’ nuts gits cut off. I seen plenty ruined niggers like dat still workin’. Seen niggers beat till meat cut off dey bones. Nigger women’s full of baby gits beat layin’ face down over a hole dug for dey bellies. Niggers gits scraped raw, den covered with turpentine or salt, den rubbed wid straw. Niggers caught talkin’ ’bout revolt made to dance on hot embers ’til dey falls. Ain’t hardly nothin’ ain’t done to niggers, an’ if dey die ’cause of it, ain’t no crime long as dey’s owned by whoever done it, or had it done. Dat’s de
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“When you clench your fist, no one can put anything in your hand, nor can your hand pick up anything.”
Time you settled down and made de best of things de way dey is, ’stead of wastin’ yo’ young years, like I did, plottin’ what cain’t be done. I done got ol’ an’ wore out now. Reckon since you been born I been actin’ like de no-good, lazy, shiftless, head-scratchin’ nigger white folks says us is.
He was angry and ashamed that anyone could “own” him, but he was also deeply relieved, for he had feared that one day he would be taken back to that other “plantation,” as he now knew the toubob farms were called.
“Niggers here say Massa William a good master, an’ I seen worse. But ain’t none of ’em no good. Dey all lives off us niggers. Niggers is the biggest thing dey got.”
Anyway, if they had been in Africa, there would have been someone like the fiddler to go to, only he would have been a wandering musician and griot traveling from one village to the next and singing as he played his kora or his balafon in between the telling of fascinating stories drawn from his adventures.
Just as it had been done in Africa, Kunta had also begun to keep track of the passing of time by dropping a small pebble into a gourd on the morning after each new moon. First he had dropped into the gourd 12 rounded,
multicolored stones for the 12 moons he guessed he’d spent on the first toubob farm; then he had dropped in six more for the time he’d been here on this new farm; and then he had carefully counted out 204 stones for the 17 rains he’d reached when he was taken from Juffure, and dropped them into the ...
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Sy Gilliat
And there was a lot of exclaiming about some Massa Patrick Henry having cried out, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Kunta liked that, but he couldn’t understand how somebody white could say it; white folks looked pretty free to him.
the House of Burgesses had just recently passed an act that “say dey gon’ take niggers in the Army as drummers, fifers, or pioneers.”
Billy Flora
French entered the war on the Colonial side in 1778,
dey ain’t gon’ never let niggers fight, dat’s South Ca’lina an’ Geo’gia.”
in his own homeland, guns and bullets had been given by the toubob to evil chiefs and kings, until blacks were fighting blacks, village against village, and selling those they conquered—their own people—into chains.
Luther also told of some all-black companies from “up Nawth,” even one all-black battalion called “The Bucks of America.”
“Yankee Doodle came to town, ridin’ on a pony. . . .”
With May of 1781 came the astounding story that redcoats on horses had ruined Massa Thomas Jefferson’s plantation called Monticello.
General Washington’s army was headed there. “An’ niggers a plenty is in it!”
“Cornwallis done surrendered! War am ober! Freedom am won!”
Philadelphia firs’ capital of Newnited States!”
Manumission Ack. It say massas got de right to free niggers, but tell me dem Quakers an’ antislavery folks an’ free niggers up Nawth is hollerin’ an’ goin’ on ’cause the Ack say massas don’t have to, not less’n dey wants to.”
When General Washington disbanded the army early in November of 1783, formally ending what most people had begun calling “The Seven Years’ War,” Bell told everyone...
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Kunta had been driving without seeing, so shocked was he by what he had just seen at the patient’s big house. Even as he muttered an apology and turned the buggy hastily around, he couldn’t rid his mind of the sight of the heavy, very black, Wolof-looking woman he had seen in the backyard. She had been sitting on a stump, both of her large breasts hanging out, matter-of-factly suckling a white infant at one and a black infant at the other. It was a revolting sight to Kunta, and an astonishing one, but when he told the gardener about it later, the old
man said, “Ain’t hardly a massa in Virginia ain’t sucked a black mammy, or leas’ was raised up by one.”
The white children seemed to love nothing more than playing “massa” and pretending to beat the black ones, or playing “hosses” by climbing onto their backs and making them scramble about on all fours. Playing “school,” the white children would “teach” the black to read and write, with many cuffings and shriekings about their “dumbness.” Yet after lunch—which the black children would spend fanning the massa and his family with leafy branches to keep flies away—the white and black children would lie down together and take naps on pallets.
