Alex Haley Read Free

and let go a stream of snuff juice. The champion spitter was Liz. “There in the gathering darkness, she would knock a lightning bug on the fly.” At first Palmer did not understand the stories the women told on the porch. What was an “Old Massa” and a plantation? “Early I gathered that white folks had done lots of bad things to our folks, things I couldn’t figure out why.” He began to imagine scenes in the stories, just as he visualized “Noah and his ark, Jesus feeding that big multitude with nothing but five loaves and two fishes.” The great protagonist of the women’s stories was the one remembered as “the African.” They told how he was kidnapped and brought in chains to “Naplis,” where he was bought by a planter named Waller and taken to a plantation in Virginia. The African tried so often to escape that a slave catcher finally cut off part of his foot.
    Palmer did not understand why people were so mean to the African. The women exclaimed against the cruelty, and Cousin Georgia sprang from her chair, “her small eyes flashing,” as she enacted how the African walked with only the rear half of his foot. Palmer said the women practically stood “my hair on end” as they whispered that slave nurses stuck “darning needles into the heads of their massa’s infants.” The planter’s brother, a doctor, saved the African by buying him. He named the African Toby, and that angered the African, who insisted he should be called “Kin-tay.” Eventually the African “jumped over the broom” with a cook named Bell, and they had a girl named Kizzy, whom Kin-tay taught African words. He called a banjo “ko” and a river “Kamby Bolongo.” Kizzy was sold away to a white man who “vi-lated” her. She handed down the information about the African to her son, George, who was the source of endless fascination to the ladies on the porch for his clever tongue, quick mind, and insatiable appetite for female flesh. George was the father of Tom Murray, who migrated to Henning in 1874 and was the father of Cynthia and her sisters.
    For Palmer, the story became “nearly as fixed in my head as in Grandma’s.” Palmer took the family story with him when he went to play with Arthur and George Sims, Fred Montgomery, and various white boys in Henning. “What a happy crew we were! . . . racing down by the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad,” waving and shouting at the passengers. They played baseball and hide-and-seek and shot marbles. When it rained, the boys—fifteen or twenty of them, most of them black but with six or so white boys, too—gathered in a barn or in the crawl space under a church. When Palmer told his family story, his playmates began to pay him special attention. That was his “first time in life to be ‘somebody,’” and he liked the feeling. He told how the masters and overseers were “all the time beating on the slaves until sometimes the slaves ran blood, or sometimes died of beating right on the spot.” Then Palmer told the boys about the time the white master hit the African’s daughter, Kizzy, and she grabbed him and shouted: “You sucked your baby milk from my black titties! I’ll whip you to death.”
    Eventually the father of one of the white Henning boys appeared at Cynthia Palmer’s door demanding an explanation for Palmer’s stories. They were the truth as her family knew it, Cynthia answered. After that, none of the white boys came around. Good stories, Palmer discovered, told of conflict and violence, had heroes and villains, and inspired awe in some and discomfort in others.
    Most of Palmer’s childhood memories were from the time he spent at his grandmother’s side. The two of them were often together in her kitchen—she cooked, and he sampled her culinary art. Cynthia constantly touched and