Roots: The Saga of an American Family

by Alex Haley

  His general manner now more careful, the sheriff said, “You told me he was born on your place and never traveled much?”

  “I’d guess he wouldn’t have any idea how to get even to Richmond, let alone North,” said the massa.

  “Niggers exchange a lot of information, though,” the sheriff said. “We’ve picked up some and beat it out of them that they practically had maps in their heads of where they’d been told to run and where to hide. A lot of this can be traced to nigger-loving white people like the Quakers and Methodists. But since he ain’t never been nowhere, ain’t never tried runnin’ before, and ain’t never give you no other trouble to now, sounds like to me a good bet a couple more nights in the woods might bring him back, scared to death and half starved. A nigger’s powerfully moved by a hungry belly. And that’ll save you spending to advertise in the Gazette or hiring some of these nigger catchers with their dogs to track him. He just don’t sound to my experience like one of them hard, outlaw niggers that’s slipping around in and out of the swamps and woods right now, killing people’s cattle and hogs like they would rabbits.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Massa Waller, “but whatever the case, he’s broken my rules by leaving without permission to begin with, so I’ll be selling him South immediately.” Kunta’s fists squeezed the reins so tightly that his nails dug into his palms. “Then that’s a good twelve to fifteen hundred dollars you’ve got runnin’ around loose somewhere,” said the sheriff. “You’ve written me his description, I’ll sure get it to the county road patrollers, and if we pick ’im up—or we hear anything—I’ll let you know right away.”

  Saturday morning after breakfast, Kunta was currycombing a horse outside the barn when he thought he heard Cato’s whip-poor-will whistle. Cocking his head, he heard it again. He tied the horse quickly to a nearby post and cripped rapidly up the path to the cabin. From its front window he could see almost from where the main road intersected with the big-house driveway. Inside the big house, he knew that Cato’s call had also alerted Bell and Kizzy.

  Then he saw the wagon rolling down the driveway—and with surging alarm recognized the sheriff at the reins. Merciful Allah, had Noah been caught? As he watched the sheriff dismount, Kunta’s long-trained instincts tugged at him to hasten out and provide the visitor’s winded horse with water and a rubdown, but it was as if he were paralyzed where he stood, staring, from the cabin window, as the sheriff hurried up the big-house front steps two at a time.

  Only a few minutes passed before Kunta saw Bell almost stumbling out the back door. She started running—and Kunta was seized with a horrible premonition the instant before she nearly snatched their cabin door off its hinges.

  Her face was twisted, tear-streaked. “Sheriff an’ massa talkin’ to Kizzy!” she squealed.

  The words numbed him. For a moment he just stared disbelievingly at her, but then violently seizing and shaking her, he demanded, “What he want?”

  Her voice rising, choking, breaking, she managed to tell him that the sheriff was scarcely in the house before the massa had yelled for Kizzy to come from tidying his room upstairs. “When I heared him holler at her from de kitchen, I flew to git in de drawin’ room hallway where I always listens from, but I couldn’t make out nothin’ clear ’cept he was mighty mad—” Bell gasped and swallowed. “Den heared massa ringin’ my bell, an’ I run back to look like I was comin’ from de cookhouse. But massa was a-waitin’ in de do’way, wid his han’ holdin’ de knob behin’ him. Ain’t never seed ’im look like he did at me. He tol’ me col’ as ice to git out’n de house an’ stay out ’til I’m sent for!” Bell moved to the small window, staring at the big house, unable to believe that what she had just said had really happened. “Lawd Gawd, what in de worl’ sheriff want wid my chile?” she asked incredulously.

  Kunta’s mind was clawing desperately for something to do. Could he rush out to the fields, at lease to alert those who were chopping there? But his instincts said that anything could happen with him gone.

  As Bell went through the curtains, into their bedroom, beseeching Jesus at the top of her lungs, he could barely restrain himself from raging in and yelling that she must see now what he had been trying to tell her for nearly forty rains about being so gullible, deluded, and deceived about the goodness of the massa—or any other toubob.

  “Gwine back in dere!” cried Bell suddenly. She came charging through the curtain and out the door.

  Kunta watched as she disappeared inside the kitchen. What was she going to do? He ran out after her and peered in through the screen door. The kitchen was empty and the inside door was swinging shut. He went inside, silencing the screen door as it closed, and tiptoed across the kitchen. Standing there with one hand on the door, the other clenched, he strained his ears for the slightest sound—but all he could hear was his own labored breathing.

  Then he heard: “Massa?” Bell had called softly. There was no answer.

  “Massa?” she called again, louder, sharply.

  He heard the drawing room dooor open.

  “Where my Kizzy, Massa?”

  “She’s in my safekeeping,” he said stonily. “We’re not having another one running off.”

  “I jes’ don’t understan’ you, Massa.” Bell spoke so softly that Kunta could hardly hear her. “De chile ain’t been out’n yo’ yard, hardly.”

  The massa started to say something, then stopped. “It’s possible you really don’t know what she’s done,” he said. “The boy Noah has been captured, but not before severely knifing the two road patrolmen who challenged a false traveling pass he was carrying. After being subdued by force, he finally confessed that the pass had been written not by me but by your daughter. She has admitted it to the sheriff.”

  There was silence for a long, agonizing moment, then Kunta heard a scream and running footsteps. As he whipped open the door, Bell came bolting past him—shoving him aside with the force of a man—and out the back door. The hall was empty, the drawing room door shut. He ran out after her, catching up with her at the cabin door.

  “Massa gon’ sell Kizzy, I knows it!” Bell started screaming, and inside him something snapped. “Gwine git ’er!” he choked out, cripping back toward the big house and into the kitchen as fast as he could go, with Bell not far behind. Wild with fury, he snatched open the inside door and went changing down the unspeakably forbidden hallway.

  The massa and the sheriff spun with disbelieving faces as the drawing room door came jerking open. Kunta halted there abruptly, his eyes burning with murder. Bell screamed from behind him, “Where our baby at? We come to git ’er!”

  Kunta saw the sheriff’s right hand sliding toward his holstered gun as the massa seethed, “Get out!”

  “You niggers can’t hear?” The sheriff’s hand was withdrawing the pistol, and Kunta was tensed to plunge for it—just as Bell’s voice trembled behind him “Yassa”—and he felt her desperately pulling his arm. Then his feet were moving backward throught the doorway—and suddenly the door was slammed behind them, a key clicking sharply in the lock.

  As Kunta crouched with his wife in the hall, drowning in his shame, they heard some tense, muted conversation between the massa and the sheriff ... then the sound of feet moving, scuffling faintly ... then Kizzy’s crying, and the sound of the front door slamming shut.

  “Kizzy! Kizzy chile! Lawd Gawd, don’t let ’em sell my Kizzy!” As she burst out the back door with Kunta behind her, Bell’s screams reached away out to where the field hands were, who came racing. Cato arrived in time to see Bell screeching insanely, springing up and down with Kunta bearhugging her to the ground. Massa Waller was descending the front steps ahead of the sheriff, who was hauling Kizzy after him—weeping and jerking herself backward—at the end of a chain.

  “Mammy! Maaaaaaamy!” Kizzy screamed.

  Bell and Kunta leaped up from the ground and went raging around the side of the house like two charging lions. The sheriff drew his gun and pointed it straight at Bell: She
stopped in her tracks. She stared at Kizzy. Bell tore the question from her throat: “You done dis thing deys says?” They all watched Kizzy’s agony as her reddened, weeping eyes gave her answer in a mute way—darting imploringly from Bell and Kunta to the sheriff and the massa—but she said nothing.

  “O my Lawd Gawd!” Bell shrieked. “Massa, please have mercy! She ain’t meant to do it! She ain’t knowed what she was doin’! Missy Anne de one teached ’er to write!”

  Massa Waller spoke glacially. “The law is the law. She’s broken my rules. She’s committed a felony. She may have aided in a murder. I’m told one of those white men may die.”

  “Ain’t her cut de man, Massa! Massa, she worked for you ever since she big ’nough to carry your slopjar! An’ I done cooked an’ waited on you han’ an’ foot over forty years, an’ he ...” gesturing at Kunta, she stuttered, “he done driv you eve’ywhere you been for near ’bout dat long. Massa, don’ all dat count for sump’n?”

  Massa Waller would not look directly at her. “You were doing your jobs. She’s going to be sold—that’s all there is to it.”

  “Jes’ cheap, low-class white folks splits up families!” shouted Bell. “You ain’t dat kin’!”

  Angrily, Massa Waller gestured to the sheriff, who began to wrench Kizzy roughly toward the wagon.

  Bell blocked their path. “Den sell me an’ ’er pappy wid ’er! Don’ split us up!”

  “Get out of the way!” barked the sheriff, roughly shoving her aside.

  Bellowing, Kunta sprang forward like a leopard, pummeling the sheriff to the ground with his fists.

  “Save me, Fa!” Kizzy screamed. He grabbed her around the waist and began pulling frantically at her chain.

  When the sheriff’s pistol butt crashed above his ear, Kunta’s head seemed to explode as he crumpled to his knees. Bell lunged toward the sheriff, but his outflung arm threw her off balance, falling heavily as he dumped Kizzy into the back of his wagon and snapped a lock on her chain. Leaping nimbly onto the seat, the sheriff lashed the horse, whose forward jerk sent the wagon lurching as Kunta clambered up. Dazed, head pounding, ignoring the pistol, he went scrambling after the wagon as it gathered speed.

  “Missy Anne! ... Missy Annnnnnnnnnnne!” Kizzy was screeching it at the top of her voice. “Missy Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnne!” Again and again, the screams came; they seemed to hang in the air behind the wagon swiftly rolling toward the main road.

  When Kunta began stumbling, gasping for breath, the wagon was a half mile away; when he halted, for a long time he stood looking after it until the dust had settled and the road stretched empty as far as he could see.

  The massa turned and walked very quickly with his head down back into the house, past Bell huddled sobbing by the bottom step. As if Kunta were sleepwalking, he came cripping slowly back up the driveway—when an African remembrance flashed into his mind, and near the front of the house he bent down and started peering around. Determining the clearest prints that Kizzy’s bare feet had left in the dust, scooping up the double handful containing those footprints, he went rushing toward the cabin: The ancient forefathers said that precious dust kept in some safe place would insure Kizzy’s return to where she made the footprints. He burst through the cabin’s open door, his eyes sweeping the room and falling upon his gourd on a shelf containing his pebbles. Springing over there, in the instant before opening his cupped hands to drop in the dirt, suddenly he knew the truth: His Kizzy was gone; she would not return. He would never see his Kizzy again.

  His face contorting, Kunta flung his dust toward the cabin’s roof. Tears bursting from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all his strength, and it shattered against the packed-earth floor, his 662 pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting wildly in all directions.

  CHAPTER 84

  Weak and dazed, Kizzy lay in the darkness, on some burlap sacks, in the cabin where she had been pushed when the mulecart arrived shortly after dusk. She wondered vaguely what time it was; it seemed that night had gone on forever. She began tossing and twisting, trying to force herself to think of something—anything—that didn’t terrify her. Finally, for the hundredth time, she tried to concentrate on figuring out how to get “up Nawth,” where she had heard so often that black people could find freedom if they escaped. If she went the wrong way, she might wind up “deep Souf,” where people said massas and overseers were even worse than Massa Waller. Which was “nawth”? She didn’t know. I’m going to escape anyway, she swore bitterly.

  It was as if a pin pricked her spine when she heard the first creaking of the cabin’s door. Springing upright and backward in the dark, she saw the figure entering furtively, with a cupped hand shielding a candle’s flame. Above it she recognized the face of the white man who had purchased her, and she saw that his other hand was holding up a short-handled whip, cocked ready for use. But it was the glazed leer on the white man’s face that froze her where she stood.

  “Rather not have to hurt you none,” he said, the smell of his liquored breath nearly suffocating her. She sensed his intent. He wanted to do with her what Pappy did with Mammy when she heard strange sounds from their curtained-off room after they thought she was asleep. He wanted to do what Noah had urged her to do when they had gone walking down along the fencerow, and which she almost had given in to, several times, especially the night before he had left, but he had frightened her too much when he exclaimed hoarsely, “I wants you wid my baby!” She thought that this white man must be insane to think that she was going to permit him to do that with her.

  “Ain’t got no time to play with you now!” The white man’s words were slurred. Kizzy’s eyes were judging how to bolt past him to flee into the night—but he seemed to read that impulse, moving a little bit sideways, not taking his gaze off her as he leaned over and tilted the candle to drain its melted wax onto the seat of the cabin’s single broken chair; then the small flame flickered upright. Inching slowly backward, Kizzy felt her shoulders brushing the cabin’s wall. “Ain’t you got sense enough to know I’m your new massa?” He watched her, grimacing some kind of a smile. “You a fair-lookin’wench. Might even set you free, if I like you enough—”

  When he sprang, seizing Kizzy, she wrenched loose, shrieking, as with an angry curse he brought the whip cracking down across the back of her neck. “I’ll take the hide off you!” Lunging like a wild woman, Kizzy clawed at his contorted face, but slowly he forced her roughly to the floor. Pushing back upward, she was shoved down again. Then the man was on his knees beside her, one of his hands choking back her screams—“Please, Massa, please!”—the other stuffing dirty burlap sacking into her mouth until she gagged. As she flailed her arms in agony and arched her back to shake him off, he banged her head against the floor, again, again, again, then began slapping her—more and more excitedly—until Kizzy felt her dress being snatched upward, her undergarments being ripped. Frantically thrashing, the sack in her mouth muffling her cries, she felt his hands fumbling upward between her thighs, finding, fingering her private parts, squeezing and spreading them. Striking her another numbing blow, the man jerked down his suspenders, made motions at his trousers’ front. Then came the searing pain as he forced his way into her, and Kizzy’s senses seemed to explode. On and on it went, until finally she lost consciousness.

  In the early dawn, Kizzy blinked her eyes open. She was engulfed in shame to find a young black woman bending over her and sponging her private parts gently with a rag and warm, soapy water. When Kizzy’s nose told her that she had also soiled herself, she shut her eyes in embarrassment, soon feeling the woman cleaning her there as well. When Kizzy slitted her eyes open again, she saw that the woman’s face seemed as expressionless as if she were washing clothes, as if this were but another of the many tasks she had been called upon to perform in her life. Finally laying a clean towel over Kizzy’s loins, she glanced up at Kizzy’s face. “Reckon
you ain’t feel like talkin’ none now,” the woman said quietly, gathering up the dirty rags and her waterpail, preparing to leave. Clutching these things in the crook of one arm, she bent again and used her free hand to draw up a burlap sack to cover most of Kizzy’s body. “’Fore long, I bring you sump’n to eat—” she said, and went on out of the cabin door.

  Kizzy lay there feeling as if she were suspended in midair. She tried to deny to herself that the unspeakable, unthinkable thing had really happened, but the lancing pains of her torn privates reminded her that it had. She felt a deep uncleanness, a disgrace that could never be erased. She tried shifting her position, but the pains seemed to spread. Holding her body still, she clutched the sack tightly about her, as if somehow to cocoon herself against any more outrage, but the pains grew worse.

  Kizzy’s mind raced back across the past four days and nights. She could still see her parents’ terrified faces, still hear their helpless cries as she was rushed away. She could still feel herself struggling to escape from the white trader whom the Spotsylvania County sheriff had turned her over to; she had nearly slipped free after pleading that she had to relieve herself. Finally they had reached some small town where—after long, bitterly angry haggling—the trader at last had sold her to this new massa, who had awaited the nightfall to violate her. Mammy! Pappy! If only screaming for them could reach them—but they didn’t even know where she was. And who knows what might have happened to them? She knew that Massa Waller would never sell anyone he owned “less’n dey breaks his rules.” But in trying to stop the massa from selling her, they must have broken a dozen of those rules.

  And Noah, what of Noah? Somewhere beaten to death? Again, it came back to Kizzy vividly, Noah demanding angrily that to prove her love, she must use her writing ability to forge a traveling pass for him to show if he should be seen, stopped, and questioned by patrollers or any other suspicious whites. She remembered the grim determination etched on his face as he pledged to her that once he got up North, with just a little money saved from a job he would quickly find, “Gwine steal back here an’ slip you Nawth, too, fo’ de res’ our days togedder.” She sobbed anew. She knew she would never see him again. Or her parents. Unless ...