Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley

Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley

Author:Alex Haley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Kinte family, Haley family, Alex, Social Science, African Americans, African American families, Haley, African American Studies, Alex - Family, Fiction, Romance, Biography & Autobiography, Ethnic Studies, General, Cultural Heritage, Biography
ISBN: 9781593154493
Publisher: Vanguard Books
Published: 2007-05-21T10:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 71

It was about the noon hour on a sultry day late in August when Aunt Sukey came waddling as fast as she could out to the fiddler among his tomato plants and—between gasps—told him that she was worried to death about the old gardener. When he didn’t come to her cabin for breakfast, she hadn’t thought anything about it, she said breathlessly, but when he didn’t appear for lunch either, she became concerned, went to his cabin door, knocked, and called as loudly as she could, but got no answer, became alarmed, and thought she’d better come to find out if the fiddler had seen him anywhere. He hadn’t.

“Knowed it somehow or ’nother even ’fore I went in dere,” the fiddler told Kunta that night. And Kunta said that he had been unable to explain an eerie feeling he had himself as he had driven the massa homeward that afternoon. “He was jes’ lyin’ dere in bed real peaceful like,” said the fiddler, “wid a l’il smile on ’is face. Look like he sleepin’. But Aunt Sukey say he awready waked up in heab’m.” He said he had gone to take the sad news out to those working in the fields, and the boss field hand Cato returned with him to help wash the body and place it on a cooling board. Then they had hung the old gardener’s sweat-browned straw hat on the outside of his door in the traditional sign of mourning before the fieldworkers returned and gathered in front of the cabin to pay their last respects, and then Cato and another field hand went to dig a grave.

Kunta returned to his cabin feeling doubly grieved—not only because the gardener was dead, but also because he hadn’t been visiting him as much as he could have ever since Kizzy was born. It had just seemed that there was hardly ever enough time anymore; and now it was too late. He arrived to find Bell in tears, which he expected, but he was taken aback at the reason she gave for crying. “Jes’ always seem like to me he was de daddy I ain’t never seed,” she sobbed. “Don’t know how come I didn’t never let him know, but it ain’t gon’ never seem de same widout him bein’ roun’ here.” She and Kunta ate their supper in silence before taking Kizzy with them—bundled against the cool autumn night—to join the others “settin’ wid de dead” until late into the night.

Kunta sat a little apart from the others, with the restless Kizzy on his lap during the first hour of prayers and soft singing, and then some hushed conversation was begun by Sister Mandy, asking if anyone there could recall the old man ever having mentioned any living relatives. The fiddler said, “One time ’way back I ’members he said he never knowed his mammy. Dat’s all I ever heared him say of family.” Since the fiddler had been the closest among them to the old man,



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