Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

“All dat travelin’ an’ now pack up an’ go again!” exclaimed Matilda. “Don’t do dat to yo’ fam’ly, son!”

Irene joined the chorus: “Tom, please! I’se jes’ tired! Tired!”

But Tom’s face was grim. “Things don’t never git better less’n you makes ’em better!” he said. “Ain’t stayin’ nowhere I can’t do what a free man got a right to do. Ain’t axin’ nobody else to go wid us, but we packin’ our wagon an’ leavin’ tomorrow.”

“I’m comin’, too!” said Ashford angrily.

That night Tom went out walking by himself, weighed down by guilt at the new hardship he was imposing upon his family. He played back in his mind the ordeal they had all endured in the wagons, rolling for weeks on end . . . and he thought of something Matilda had said often: “You search hard enough in sump’n bad, you’s jes’ liable to find sump’n good.”

When the idea struck him, he kept walking for another hour, letting the plan become a picture in his mind. Then he strode quickly back to the wagon where his family was sleeping and went to bed.

In the morning, Tom told James and Lewis to build temporary lean-tos for Irene and the children to sleep in, for he would need the wagon. As the family stood around watching him in amazement—Ashford with rising disbelief and fury—he unloaded the heavy anvil with Virgil’s help, and mounted it atop a newly sawed stump. By noon he had set up a makeshift forge. With everyone still staring, he next removed the canvas top of the wagon, then its wooden sides, leaving the bare flatbed, on which he now went to work with his heaviest tools. Gradually they began to perceive the astounding idea that Tom was turning into a reality.

By the end of that week, Tom drove right through town with his rolling blacksmith shop, and there wasn’t a man, woman, or child who didn’t stand there gaping at the anvil, forge, and cooling tub, with racks holding a neat array of blacksmithing tools, all mounted sturdily on a wagon bed reinforced with heavy timbers.

Nodding politely at all the men he met—white and black—Tom asked if they had blacksmithing jobs he could do at reasonable rates. Within days, his services were being requested at more and more farms around the new settlement, for no one could think of a good reason why a black man shouldn’t do business from a wagon. By the time they realized that he was doing far better with his rolling shop than he ever could have done with a stationary one, Tom had made himself so indispensable around town that they couldn’t afford to raise any objections even if they’d wanted to. But they didn’t really want to, because Tom seemed to them the kind of man who did his job and minded his own business, and they couldn’t help respecting that. In fact, the whole family soon established themselves as decent Christian folk who paid their bills and kept to themselves—and “stayed in their place,” as Ol’ George Johnson said a group of white men had put it in a conversation he’d overheard down at the general store.

But Ol’ George, too, was treated as one of “them”—shunned socially, kept waiting in stores till all the other white customers had been taken care of, even informed once by a merchant that he’d “bought” a hat that he’d tried on and put back on the shelf when he found it was too small. He told the family about it later, perching the hat atop his head for them, and everybody laughed as hard as he did. “I’se surprised dat hat don’t fit,” cracked L’il George, “dumb as you is to try it on in dat sto’.” Ashford, of course, got so angry that he threatened—emptily—to “go down dere an’ stuff it down dat peckerwood’s throat.”

However little use the white community had for them—and vice versa—Tom and the others knew very well that the town’s tradesmen could hardly contain their elation at the brisk increase in business they’d been responsible for. Though they made most of their own clothes, raised most of their own food, and cut most of their own lumber, the quantities of nails, corrugated tin, and barbed wire they bought over the next couple of years testified to the rate at which their own community was growing.

With all their houses, barns, sheds, and fences built by 1874, the family—led by Matilda—turned its attention to an enterprise they considered no less important to their welfare: the construction of a church to replace the makeshift bush arbors that had been serving as their place of worship. It took almost a year, and much of their savings, but when Tom, his brothers, and their boys had finished building the last pew and Irene’s beautiful white handwoven cloth—emblazoned with a purple cross—had been draped over the pulpit in front of the $250 stained-glass window they’d ordered from Sears, Roebuck, everyone agreed that the New Hope Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was well worth the time, effort, and expense it represented.

So many people attended the service that first Sunday—just about every black person within twenty miles who could walk or be carried—that the crowd spilled out the doors and windows and across the lawn surrounding it. But nobody had any trouble hearing every word of the ringing sermon delivered by the Reverend Sylus Henning, a former slave of Dr. D. C. Henning, an Illinois Central Railroad executive with extensive land holdings around town. In the course of his oration, L’il George whispered to Virgil that the Reverend seemed to be under the impression that he was Dr. Henning, but no one within earshot would have dared to question the fervor of his preaching.

After the last heartrending chorus of “The Old Rugged Cross,” again—led by Matilda, looking more radiant than Chicken George had ever seen her—the congregation dried their eyes and filed out past the preacher, pumping his hand and slapping him on the back. Retrieving their picnic baskets on the porch, they spread sheets on the lawn and proceeded to relish the fried chicken, pork chop sandwiches, deviled eggs, potato salad, cole slaw, pickles, cornbread, lemonade, and so many cakes and pickles that even L’il George was gasping for breath when he finished the last slice.

As they all sat chatting, or strolled around—the men and boys in coat and tie, the older women all in white, the girls in bright-colored dresses with a ribbon at the waist—Matilda watched misty-eyed as her brood of grandchildren ran about tirelessly playing tag and catch. Turning finally to her husband and putting her hand on his, gnarled and scarred with gamecock scratches, she said quietly, “I won’t never forget dis day, George. We done come a long way since you first come courtin’ me wid dat derby hat o’ yours. Our fam’ly done growed up an’ had chilluns of dey own, an’ de Lawd seen fit to keep us all togedder. De onliest thing I wish is you Mammy Kizzy could be here to see it wid us.”

Eyes brimming, Chicken George looked back at her. “She lookin’, baby. She sho’ is!”

Promptly at the noon hour on Monday, during their break from the fields, the children started filing into church for their first day of school indoors. For the past two years, ever since she came to town after being one among the first graduating class from Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, Sister Carrie White had been teaching out under the bush arbors, and this use of the church was a great occasion. The New Hope CME stewards—Chicken George, Tom, and his brothers—had contributed the money to buy pencils, tablets, and primers on “readin’, writin’, an’ ’rithmetic.” Since she taught all the children of school age at the same time, in her six grades Sister Carrie had pupils ranging from five to fifteen, including Tom’s oldest five: Maria Jane, who was twelve; Ellen; Viney; L’il Matilda; and Elizabeth, who was six. Young Tom, next in line, began the year after that, and then Cynthia, the youngest.