Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

Kunta struggled and howled with fury as the slatees grabbed him again, wrestling him to a seated position with his back arched. Eyes wide with terror, he watched as a toubob withdrew from the fire a long, thin iron that the white-haired one had brought with him. Kunta was already thrashing and screaming as the iron exploded pain between his shoulders. The bamboo grove echoed with the screams of the others, one by one. Then red palm oil was rubbed over the peculiar LL shape Kunta saw on their backs.

Within the hour, they were hobbling in a line of clanking chains, with the slatees’ ready whips flailing down on anyone who balked or stumbled. Kunta’s back and shoulders were ribboned with bleeding cuts when late that night they reached two canoes hidden under thick, overhanging mangroves at the river’s banks. Split into two groups, they were rowed through darkness by the slatees, with the toubob lashing out at any sign of struggle.

When Kunta saw a vast dark shape looming up ahead in the night, he sensed that this was his last chance. Springing and lunging amid shouts and screams around him, he almost upset the canoe in his struggle to leap overboard; but he was bound to the others and couldn’t make it over the side. He almost didn’t feel the blows of the whips and clubs against his ribs, his back, his face, his belly, his head—as the canoe bumped against the side of the great dark thing. Through the pain, he could feel the warm blood pouring down his face, and he heard above him the exclamations of many toubob. Then ropes were being looped around him, and he was helpless to resist. After being half pushed and half pulled up some strange rope ladder, he had enough strength left to twist his body wildly in another break for freedom; again he was lashed with whips, and hands were grabbing him amid an overwhelming toubob smell and the sound of women shrieking and loud toubob cursing.

Through swollen lids, Kunta saw a thicket of legs and feet all around him, and managing an upward glance while trying to shield his bleeding face with his forearm, he saw the short toubob with the white hair standing calmly making marks in a small book with a stubby pencil. Then he felt himself being snatched upright and shoved roughly across a flat space. He caught a glimpse of tall poles with thick wrappings of coarse white cloth. Then he was being guided, stumbling weakly down some kind of narrow steps, into a place of pitch blackness; at the same instant, his nose was assaulted by an unbelievable stink, and his ears by cries of anguish.

Kunta began vomiting as the toubob—holding dim yellowish flames that burned within metal frames carried by a ring—shackled his wrists and ankles, then shoved him backward, close between two other moaning men. Even in his terror, he sensed that lights bobbing in other directions meant that the toubob were taking those who had come with him to be shackled elsewhere. Then he felt his thoughts slipping, he thought he must be dreaming. And then, mercifully, he was.

Only the rasping sound of the deck hatch being opened told Kunta if it was day or night. Hearing the latch click, he would jerk his head up—the only free movement that his chains and shackles would allow—and four shadowy toubob figures would descend, two of them with bobbing lights and whips guarding the other pair as they all moved along the narrow aisleways pushing a tub of food. They would thrust tin pans of the stuff up onto the filth between each two shacklemates. So far, each time the food had come, Kunta had clamped his jaws shut, preferring to starve to death, until the aching of his empty stomach had begun to make his hunger almost as terrible as the pains from his beatings. When those on Kunta’s level had been fed, the lights showed the toubob descending farther below with the rest of the food.

Less often than the feeding times, and usually when it was night outside, the toubob would bring down into the hold some new captives, screaming and whimpering in terror as they were shoved and lashed along to wherever they were to be chained into empty spaces along the rows of hard plank shelves.

One day, shortly after a feeding time, Kunta’s ears picked up a strange, muted sound that seemed to vibrate through the ceiling over his head. Some of the other men heard it too, and their moaning ended abruptly. Kunta lay listening intently; it sounded as if many feet were dashing about overhead. Then—much nearer to them in the darkness—came a new sound, as of some very heavy object being creaked very slowly upward.

Kunta’s naked back felt an odd vibration from the hard, rough planking he lay on. He felt a tightening, a swelling within his chest, and he lay frozenly. About him he heard thudding sounds that he knew were men lunging upward, straining against their chains. It felt as if all of his blood had rushed into his pounding head. And then terror went clawing into his vitals as he sensed in some way that this place was moving, taking them away. Men started shouting all around him, screaming to Allah and His spirits, banging their heads against the planking, thrashing wildly against their rattling shackles. “Allah, I will never pray to you less than five times daily!” Kunta shrieked into the bedlam, “Hear me! Help me!”

The anguished cries, weeping, and prayers continued, subsiding only as one after another exhausted man went limp and lay gasping for breath in the stinking blackness. Kunta knew that he would never see Africa again. He could feel clearly now, through his body against the planks, a slow, rocking motion, sometimes enough that his shoulders or arms or hips would press against the brief warmth of one of the men he was chained between. He had shouted so hard that he had no voice left, so his mind screamed it instead: “Kill toubob—and their traitor black helpers!”

He was sobbing quietly when the hatch opened and the four toubob came bumping down with their tub of food. Again he clamped his jaws against his spasms of hunger, but then he thought of something the kintango had once said—that warriors and hunters must eat well to have greater strength than other men. Starving himself meant that weakness would prevent him from killing toubob. So this time, when the pan was thrust onto the boards between him and the man next to him, Kunta’s fingers also clawed into the thick mush. It tasted like ground maize boiled with palm oil. Each gulping swallow pained his throat in the spot where he had been choked for not eating before, but he swallowed until the pan was empty. He could feel the food like a lump in his belly, and soon it was rising up his throat. He couldn’t stop it, and a moment later the gruel was back on the planking. He could hear, over the sound of his own retching, that of others doing the same thing.

As the lights approached the end of the long shelf of planks on which Kunta lay, suddenly he heard chains rattling, a head bumping, and then a man screaming hysterically in a curious mixture of Mandinka and what sounded like some toubob words. An uproarious burst of laughter came from the toubob with the feeding tub, then their whips lashing down, until the man’s cries lapsed, into babbling and whimpering. Could it be? Had he heard an African speaking toubob? Was there a slatee down there among them? Kunta had heard that toubob would often betray their black traitor helpers and throw them into chains.

After the toubob had gone on down to the level below, scarcely a sound was heard on Kunta’s level until they reappeared with their emptied tub and climbed back up outside, closing the hatch behind them. At that instant, an angry buzzing began in different tongues, like bees swarming. Then, down the shelf from where Kunta lay, there was a heavy chain-rattling blow, a howl of pain and bitter cursing in the same hysterical Mandinka. Kunta heard the man shriek, “You think I am toubob?” There were more violent, rapid blows and desperate screams. Then the blows stopped, and in the blackness of the hold came a high squealing—and then an awful gurgling sound, as of a man whose breath was being choked off. Another rattling of chains, a tattoo of bare heels kicking at the planks, then quiet.