Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

“Dat Massa Davis an’ whole passels of other southern senators, congressmens, an’ high mens in de Army,” Tom reported to the family, “is resignin’ to come on back home.”

“Tom, it’s done got closer’n dat to us,” exclaimed Matilda. “A man come today an’ tol’ massa dat Ol’ Jedge Ruffin leavin’ Haw River tomorrow to ’tend a big peace conference in dat Washington, D.C.!”

But a few days later, Tom heard his blacksmithing customers saying that Judge Ruffin had returned sadly reporting the peace conference a failure, ending in explosive arguments between the younger delegates from the North and the South. A black buggy driver then told Tom that he had learned firsthand from the Alamance County courthouse janitor that a mass meeting of nearly fourteen hundred local white men had been held—with Massa Murray among them, Tom knew—and that Massa Holt, Irene’s former owner, and others as important, had shouted that war must be averted and pounded tables calling anyone who would join the Confederates “traitors.” The janitor also told him that a Massa Giles Mebane was elected to take to a state secession convention the four-to-one vote in Alamance County to remain within the Union.

It became hard for the family to keep up with all that was reported each night either by Tom or Matilda. On a single day in March, news came that President Lincoln had been sworn in, that a Confederate flag had been unveiled at a huge ceremony in Montgomery, Alabama, and that the Confederacy’s President, Jeff Davis, had declared the African slave trade abolished; feeling as they knew he did about slavery, the family couldn’t understand why. Only days later, tension rose to a fever pitch with the announcement that the North Carolina legislature had called for an immediate twenty thousand military volunteers.

Early on the Friday morning of April 12, 1861, Massa Murray had driven off to a meeting in the town of Mebane, and Lewis, James, Ashford, L’il Kizzy, and Mary were out in the field busily transplanting young tobacco shoots when they began to notice an unusually large number of white riders passing along the main road at full gallop. When one rider briefly slowed, angrily shaking his fist in their direction and shouting at them something they couldn’t understand, Virgil sent L’il Kizzy racing from the field to tell Tom, Matilda, and Irene that something big must have happened.

The usually calm Tom lost his temper when Kizzy could tell him no more than she did. “Shouted what at y’all?” he demanded. But she could only repeat that the horseman had been too far away for them to hear clearly.

“I better take de mule an’ go fin’ out!” Tom said.

“But you ain’t got a travelin’ pass!” shouted Virgil as he went riding down the driveway.

“Got to take dat chance!” Tom shouted back.

By the time he reached the main road, it was starting to resemble a racetrack, and he knew that the riders must be headed for Company Shops, where the telegraph office received important news over wires strung high atop poles. As they raced along, some of the horsemen were exchanging shouts with each other, but they didn’t seem to know much more than he did. As he passed poor whites and blacks running on foot, Tom knew the worst had happened, but his heart clenched anyway when he reached the railroad repair yard settlement and saw the great, jostling crowd around the telegraph office.

Leaping to the ground and tethering his mule, he ran in a wide circle around the edge of the mob of angrily gesturing white men who kept glancing up at the telegraph wires as if they expected to see something coming over the wires. Off to one side, he reached a cluster of blacks and heard what they were jabbering: “Massa Linkum sho’ gon’ fight over us now!” . . . “Look like de Lawd care sump’n ’bout niggers after all!” . . . “Jes’ can’t b’lieve it!” ... “Free, Lawd, free!”

Drawing one old man aside, Tom learned what had happened. South Carolina troops were firing on the federal Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and twenty-nine other federal bases in the South had been seized on the orders of President Davis. The war had actually begun. Even after Tom returned home with the news—arriving safely before the massa got home—the black grapevine was almost choked with bulletins for weeks. After two days of siege, they learned, Fort Sumter had surrendered with fifteen dead on both sides, and over a thousand slaves were sandbagging the entrances to Charleston Harbor. After informing President Lincoln that he would get no North Carolina troops, North Carolina Governor John Ellis had pledged thousands with muskets to the Confederate Army. President Davis asked all southern white men between eighteen and thirty-five to volunteer to fight for up to three years, and ordered that of each ten male slaves on any plantation, one should be turned over for unpaid war labor. General Robert E. Lee resigned from the Army of the United States to command the Army of Virginia. And it was claimed that every government building in Washington, D.C., was thick with armed soldiers and iron and cement barricades in fear of southern invasion forces.

White men throughout Alamance County, meanwhile, were lining up by the scores to sign up and fight. Tom heard from a black wagon-driver that his massa had called in his most trusted big-house servant and told him, “Now, boy, I’m expectin’ you to look out after missis and the children till I get back, you hear?” And a number of neighboring whites dropped in to shoe up their horses before assembling at Mebane Township with the rest of the newly formed “Hawfields Company” of Alamance County to board the train that waited to take them to a training camp at Charlotte. A black buggy-driver who had taken his massa and his missy there to see off their eldest son described the scene for Tom: the womenfolk bitterly weeping, their boys leaning from the train’s windows, making the air ring with rebel yells, many of them shouting “Goin’ to ship those sonsabitchin’ Yankees an’ be back’fore breakfast!” “Young massa,” said the buggy-driver, “had on his new gray uniform, an’ he was a-cryin’ jes’ hard as ol’ massa and missy was, an’ dey commence to kissin’ and huggin’ till dey finally jes’ kind o’ broke apart from one ’nother, jes’ standin’ in de road clearin’ dey throats an’ sniflin’. Ain’t no need me telling no lie, I was acryin’, too!”

Within their lamplit cabin late that night, now for a second time Tom sat by the bed with Irene convulsively gripping his hand and when abruptly her moans of suffering in labor advanced to a piercing scream, he went bolting outside to get his mother. But despite the hour, intuitively Matilda had not been asleep and also had heard the scream. He met her already rushing from her cabin, shouting back over her shoulder at a bug-eyed L’il Kizzy and Mary. “Bile some kittles o’ water an’ git it to me quick!” Within the next few moments, the other adults of the family had also popped from their cabins, and Tom’s five brothers joined his nervous pacing and wincing while the sounds of Irene’s anguish continued. In the first streaks of dawn when an infant’s shrill cry was heard, Tom’s brothers converged upon him, pounding his back, wringing his hands—even Ashford—then in a little while a grinning Matilda stepped through the cabin door, exclaiming, “Tom, y’all got anudder l’il ol’ gal!”

After a while there in the brightening morning, first Tom, then the rest of the family became a procession trooping in to see the wan but smiling Irene and the crinkly faced brown infant. Matilda had taken the news into the big house, where she hurriedly cooked breakfast, and right after Massa and Missis Murray finished eating, they also came to the slave row to see with delight the new infant born into their ownership. Tom readily agreed to Irene’s wish to name this second daughter “Ellen,” after Irene’s mother. He was so jubilant that he had become a father again that he didn’t remember until later how much he had wanted a boy.