Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

That evening before dinner, a shaken Massa and Missis Holt agreed that it was clearly in the best interests of the immediate family circle to be sold to Massa Murray and quickly.

Still, because Missis and Massa Holt genuinely liked Irene, and highly approved of her choice of Tom for a mate, they insisted that Massa and Missis Murray let them host the wedding and reception dinner. All members of both the white and black Holt and Murray families would attend in the Holt big-house front yard, with their minister performing the ceremony and Massa Holt himself giving away the bride.

But amid the lovely, moving occasion, the outstanding sensation was the delicately hand-wrought perfect long-stemmed rose of iron that the groom Tom withdrew from inside his coat pocket and tenderly presented to his radiant bride. Amid the “ oohs ” and “ ahhs ” of the rest of the wedding assembly, Irene embraced it with her eyes, then pressing it to her breast she breathed, “Tom, it’s jes’ too beautiful! Ain’t gwine never be far from dis rose—or you neither!”

During the lavish reception dinner there in the yard after the beaming white families had retired to their meal served within the big house, after Matilda’s third glass of the fine wine, she burbled to Irene, “You’s mo’n jes’ a pretty daughter! You’s done saved me from worryin’ if Tom too shy ever to ax a gal to git married—” Irene loudly and promptly responded, “He didn’t!” And the guests within earshot joined them in uproarious laughter.

After the first week back at the Murray place, Tom’s family soon joked among themselves that ever since the wedding, his hammer had seemed to start singing against his anvil. Certainly no one had ever seen him talk so much, or smile at so many people as often, or work as hard as he had since Irene came. Her treasured rose of iron graced the mantelpiece in their new cabin, which he left at dawn and went out to kindle his forge, whereafter the sounds of his tools shaping metals seldom went interrupted until that dusk’s final red-hot object was plunged into the stale water of his slake tub to hiss and bubble as it cooled. Customers who came for some minor repair or merely to get a tool sharpened, he would usually ask if they could wait. Some slaves liked to sit on foot-high sections of logs off to one side, though most preferred shifting about in a loose group exchanging talk of common interest. On the opposite side, the waiting white customers generally sat on the split-log benches that Tom had set up for them, positioned carefully just within his earshot, though far enough away that the whites didn’t suspect that as Tom worked, he was monitoring their conversations. Smoking and whittling and now or then taking nips from their pocket flasks as they talked, they had come to regard Tom’s shop as a locally popular meeting place, supplying him now with a daily flow of small talk and sometimes with fresh, important news that he told to his Irene, his mother Matilda, and the rest of his slave-row family after their suppertimes.

Tom told his family what deep bitterness the white men expressed about northern Abolitionists’ mounting campaign against slavery. “Dey’s sayin’ dat Pres’dent Buchanan better keep ’way from dat no-good bunch o’ nigger lovers if he ’speck any backin’ here in de South.” But his white customers vented their worst hatred, he said, “’gainst Massa Abraham Lincoln what been talkin’ ’bout freein’ us slaves—”

“Sho’ is de truth,” said Irene. “Reckon leas’ a year I been hearin’ how if he don’ shut up, gwine git de Nawth an’ de South in a war!”

“Y’all ought to of heared my ol’ massa, rantin’ an’ cussin’!” exclaimed Lilly Sue. “He say dis Massa Lincoln got sich gangly legs an’ arms an’ a long, ugly, hairy face can’t nobody hardly tell if he look de mos’ like a ape or gorilla! Say he borned an’ growed up dirt po’ in some log cabin, an’ cotched bears an’ polecats to git anythin’ to eat, twixt splittin’ logs into fencerails like a nigger.”

“Tom, ain’t you tol’ us Massa Lincoln a lawyer nowdays?” asked L’il Kizzy, and Tom affirmatively grunted and nodded.

“Well, I don’ care what dese white folks says!” declared Matilda. “Massa Lincoln doin’ good fo’ us if he git dem so upset. Fact, mo’ I hear ’bout ’im, soun’ to me he like Moses tryin’ to free us chilluns o’ Israel!”

“Well, he sho’ can’t do it too fas’ to suit me,” said Irene.

Both she and Lilly Sue had been bought by Massa Murray to increase his field workers, as she dutifully did in the beginning. But not many months had passed when Irene asked her doting husband if he would build her a handloom—and she had one in the shortest time that his skilled hands could make it. Then the steady frump frump of her loom could be heard from three cabins away as she worked into the nights until well beyond the rest of the slave-row family’s bedtime. Before very long the visibly proud Tom was somewhat self-consciously wearing a shirt that Irene had cut and sewn from the cloth that she had made herself. “I jes’ loves doin’ what my mammy teached me,” she modestly responded to congratulations. She next carded, spun, wove, and sewed matching ruffled dresses for an ecstatic Lilly Sue and L’il Kizzy—who now approaching the age of twenty was demonstrating absolutely no interest in settling down, seeming to prefer only successive flirtatious courtships, her newest swain, Amos, being a general worker at the North Carolina Railroad Company’s newly completed hotel, ten miles distant at Company Shops.

Irene then made shirts for each of her brothers-in-law—which genuinely moved them, even Ashford—and finally matching aprons, smocks, and bonnets for Matilda and herself. Nor were Missis and next Massa Murray any less openly delighted with the amazingly finely stitched dress and shirt she made for them, from cotton grown right on their own plantation.

“Why, it’s just beautiful!” Missis Murray exclaimed, turning around displaying her dress to a beaming Matilda. “I’ll never figure out why the Holts sold her to us at all, and even at a reasonable price!” Glibly avoiding the truth that Irene had confided, Matilda said, “Bes’ I can reckon, Missis, is dey liked Tom so much.”

Having a great love of colors, Irene avidly collected plants and leaves that she needed for cloth dyeing, and the weekends of 1859’s early autumn saw cloth swatches in red, green, purple, blue, brown, and her favorite yellow hanging out to dry on the rattan clotheslines. Without anyone’s formally deciding or even seeming to much notice it, Irene gradually withdrew from doing further field work. From the massa and missis on down to Virgil’s and Lilly Sue’s peculiar-acting four-year-old Uriah, everyone was far more aware of the increasing ways in which Irene was contributing a new brightness to all of their lives.

“Reckon good part of what made me want Tom so much was’cause I seed we both jes’ loves makin’ things fo’ folks,” she told Matilda, who was rocking comfortably in her chair before her dully glowing fireplace one chilly late October evening. After a pause, Irene looked at her mother-in-law in a sly, under-eyed manner. “Knowin’ Tom,” she said, “ain’t no need me axin’ if he done tol’ you we’s makin’ sump’n else—”

It took a second to register. Shrieking happily, springing up and tightly embracing Irene, Matilda was beside herself with joy. “Make a l’il gal firs’, honey, so I can hug an’ rock ’er jes’ like a doll!”

Irene did an incredible range of things across the winter months as her pregnancy advanced. Her hands seemed all but able to wreak a magic that soon was being enjoyed within the big house as well as in every slave-row cabin. She plaited rugs of cloth scraps; she made both tinted and scented Christmas-New Year holiday season candles; she carved dried cow’s horns into pretty combs, and gourds into water dippers and birds’ nests in fancy designs. She insisted until Matilda let her take over the weekly chore of boiling, washing, and ironing everyone’s clothes. She put some of her fragrant dried-rose leaves or sweet basil between the folded garments, making the black and white Murrays alike smell about as fine as they felt.