Roots: The Saga of an American Family

by Alex Haley

  With the older boys observing, he and his mates somehow managed to hoist their headloads and to begin more or less following the wuolo dogs and the goats, who knew the homeward trail better than their new herdsmen did. Amid the older boys’ scornful laughter, Kunta and the others kept grabbing at their headloads to keep them from falling off. The sight of the village had never been prettier to Kunta, who was bone-weary by now, but no sooner had they stepped inside the village gates when the older boys set up a terrific racket, yelling out warnings and instructions and jumping around so that all of the adults within view and hearing would know that they were doing their job and that their day of training these clumsy younger boys had been a most trying experience for them. Kunta’s headload somehow safely reached the yard of Brima Cesay, the arafang, whose education of Kunta and his new kafo would begin the next morning.

  Just after breakfast, the new herdsmen—each, with pride, carrying a cottonwood writing slate, a quill, and a section of bamboo cane containing soot to mix with water for ink—trooped anxiously into the schoolyard. Treating them as if they were even more stupid than their goats, the arafang ordered the boys to sit down. Hardly had he uttered the words when he began laying about among them with his limber stick, sending them scrambling— their first obedience to his command not having come as quickly as he wanted. Scowling, he further warned them that for as long as they would attend his classes, anyone who made so much as a sound, unless asked to speak, would get more of the rod—he brandished it fiercely at them—and be sent home to his parents. And the same would be dealt out to any boy who was ever late for his classes, which would be held after breakfast and again just after their return with the goats.

  “You are no longer children, and you have responsibilities now,” said the arafang. “See to it that you fulfill them.” With these disciplines established, he announced that they would begin that evening’s class with his reading certain verses of the Koran, which they would be expected to memorize and recite before proceeding to other things. Then he excused them, as his older students, the former goatherds, began arriving. They looked even more nervous than Kunta’s kafo, for this was the day for their final examinations in Koranic recitations and in the writing of Arabic, the results of which would bear heavily upon their being formally advanced into the status of third kafo.

  That day, all on their own for the first time in their lives, Kunta’s kafo managed to get the goats unpenned and trotting in a ragged line along the trail out to the grazing area. For a good while to come, the goats probably got less to eat than usual, as Kunta and his mates chased and yelled at them every time they took a few steps to a new clump of grass. But Kunta felt even more hounded than his herd. Every time he sat down to sort out the meaning of these changes in his life, there seemed to be something he had to do, someplace he had to go. What with the goats all day, the arafang after breakfast and after herding, and then whatever slingshot practice he could fit in before darkness, he could never seem to find the time for any serious thinking any more.

  CHAPTER 11

  The harvesting of groundnuts and couscous was complete, and the women’s rice came next. No men helped their wives; even boys like Sitafa and Kunta didn’t help their mothers, for rice was women’s work alone. The first light of dawn found Binta with Jankay Touray and the other women bending in their ripe fields and chopping off the long golden stalks, which were left to dry for a few days on the walkway before being loaded into canoes and taken to the village, where the women and their daughters would stack their neat bundles in each family’s storehouse. But there was no rest for the women even when the rice harvesting was done, for then they had to help the men to pick the cotton, which had been left until last so that it would dry as long as possible under the hot sun and thus make better thread for the women’s sewing.

  With everyone looking forward to Juffure’s annual seven-day harvest festival, the women hurried now to make new clothes for their families. Though Kunta knew better than to show his irritation, he was forced for several evenings to tend his talky, pesty little brother Lamin while Binta spun her cotton. But Kunta was happy again when she took him with her to the village weaver, Dembo Dibba, whom Kunta watched in fascination as her rickety hand-and-foot loom wove the spindles of thread into strips of cotton cloth. Back at home, Binta let Kunta trickle water through wood ashes to make the strong lye into which she mixed finely pounded indigo leaves to dye her cloth deep blue. All of Juffure’s women were doing the same, and soon their cloth was spread across low bushes to dry, festooning the village with splashes of rich color—red, green, and yellow as well as blue.

  While the women spun and sewed, the men worked equally hard to finish their own appointed tasks before the harvest festival—and before the hot season made heavy work impossible. The village’s tall bamboo fence was patched where it was sagging or broken from the back-scratching of the goats and bullocks. Repairs were made on mud huts that had been damanged by the big rains, and new thatching replaced the old and worn. Some couples, soon to marry, required new homes, and Kunta got the chance to join the other children in stomping water-soaked dirt into the thick, smooth mud that the men used to mold walls for the new huts.

  Since some muddy water had begun to appear in the buckets that were pulled up from the well, one of the men climbed down and found that the small fish that was kept in the well to eat insects had died in the murky water. So it was decided that a new well must be dug. Kunta was watching as the men reached shoulder depth in the new hole, and passed upward several egg-sized lumps of a greenish-white clay. They were taken immediately to those women of the village whose bellies were big, and eaten eagerly. That clay, Binta told him, would give a baby stronger bones.

  Left to themselves, Kunta, Sitafa, and their mates spent most of their free hours racing about the village playing hunter with their new slingshots. Shooting at nearly everything—and fortunately hitting almost nothing—the boys made enough noise to scare off a forest of animals. Even the smaller children of Lamin’s kafo romped almost unattended, for no one in Juffure was busier than the old grandmothers, who worked often now until late at night to supply the demands of the village’s unmarried girls for hairpieces to wear at the harvest festival. Buns, plaits, and full wigs were woven of long fibers picked carefully from rotting sisal leaves or from the soaked bark of the baobab tree. The coarser sisal hairpieces cost much less than those made from the softer, silkier fiber of the baobab whose weaving took so much longer that a full wig might cost as much as three goats. But the customers always haggled long and loudly, knowing that the grandmothers charged less if they enjoyed an hour or so of good, tongue-clacking bargaining before each sale.

  Along with her wigs, which were especially well made, old Nyo Boto pleased every woman in the village with her noisy defiance of the ancient tradition that decreed women should always show men the utmost of respect. Every morning found her squatted comfortably before her hut, stripped to the waist, enjoying the sun’s heat upon her tough old hide and busily weaving hairpieces—but never so busily that she failed to notice every passing man. “Hah!” she would call out, “Look at that! They call themselves men! Now, in my day, men were men!” And the men who passed—expecting what always came—would all but run to escape her tongue, until finally Nyo Boto fell asleep in the afternoon, with her weaving in her lap and the toddlers in her care laughing at her loud snoring.

  The second-kafo girls, meanwhile, were helping their mothers and big sisters to collect bamboo baskets full of ripe medicinal roots and cooking spices, which they spread under the sun to dry. When grains were being pounded, the girls brushed away the husks and chaff. They helped also with the family washing, beating against rocks the soiled clothing that had been lathered with the rough, reddish soap the mothers had made from lye and palm oil.

  The men’s main work done—only a few days before the new moon that would open the harvest festival in all of The Gambia’s villages—the sounds of musical instruments began to be h
eard here and there in Juffure. As the village musicians practiced on their twenty-four-stringed koras, their drums, and their balafons—melodious instruments made of gourds tied beneath wooden blocks of various lengths that were struck with mallets—little crowds would gather around them to clap and listen. While they played, Kunta and Sitafa and their mates, back from their goatherding, would troop about blowing bamboo flutes, ringing bells, and rattling dried gourds.

  Most men relaxed now, talking and squatting about in the shade of the baobab. Those of Omoro’s age and younger kept respectfully apart from the Council of Elders, who were making their annual prefestival decisions on important village business. Occasionally two or three of the younger men would rise, stretch themselves, and go ambling about the village with their small fingers linked loosely in the age-old yayo manner of African men.

  But a few of the men spent long hours alone, patiently carving on pieces of wood of different sizes and shapes. Kunta and his friends would sometimes even put aside their slings just to stand watching as the carvers created terrifying and mysterious expressions on masks soon to be worn by festival dancers. Others carved human or animal figures with the arms and legs very close to the body, the feet flat, and the heads erect.

  Binta and the other women snatched what little relaxation they could around the village’s new well, where they came every day for a cool drink and a few minutes of gossip. But with the festival now upon them, they still had much to do. Clothing had to be finished, huts to be cleaned, dried foods to be soaked, goats to be slaughtered for roasting. And above all, the women had to make themselves look their very best for the festival.

  Kunta thought that the big tomboyish girls he had so often seen scampering up trees looked foolish now, the way they went about acting coy and fluttery. They couldn’t even walk right. And he couldn’t see why the men would turn around to watch them—clumsy creatures who couldn’t even shoot a bow and arrow if they tried.

  Some of these girls’ mouths, he noticed, were swelled up to the size of a fist, where the inner lips had been pricked with thorns and rubbed black with soot. Even Binta, along with every other female in the village over twelve rains old, was nightly boiling and then cooling a broth of freshly pounded fudano leaves in which she soaked her feet—and the pale palms of her hands—to an inky blackness. When Kunta asked his mother why, she told him to run along. So he asked his father, who told him, “The more blackness a woman has, the more beautiful she is.”

  “But why?” asked Kunta.

  “Someday,” said Omoro, “you will understand.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Kunta leaped up when the tobalo sounded at dawn. Then he, Sitafa, and their mates were running among grown-ups to the silk-cotton tree, where the village drummers were already pounding on the drums, barking and shouting at them as if they were live things, their hands a blur against the taut goatskins. The gathering crowd of costumed villagers, one by one, soon began to respond with slow movements of their arms, legs, and bodies, then faster and faster, until almost everyone had joined the dancing.

  Kunta had seen such ceremonies for many plantings and harvests, for men leaving to hunt, for weddings, births, and deaths, but the dancing had never moved him—in a way he neither understood nor was able to resist—as it did now. Every adult in the village seemed to be saying with his body something that was in his or her mind alone. Among the whirling, leaping, writhing people, some of them wearing masks, Kunta could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw tough old Nyo Boto suddenly shrieking wildly, jerking both of her hands before her face, then lurching backward in fear at some unseen terror. Snatching up an imaginary burden, she thrashed and kicked the air until she crumpled down.

  Kunta turned this way and that, staring at different people he knew among the dancers. Under one of the horrifying masks, Kunta recognized the alimamo, flinging and winding himself again and again like some serpent around a tree trunk. He saw that some of those he had heard were even older than Nyo Boto had left their huts, stumbling out on spindly legs, their wrinkled arms flapping, their rheumy eyes squinting in the sun, to dance a few unsteady steps. Then Kunta’s eyes widened as he caught sight of his own father. Omoro’s knees were churning high, his feet stomping up dust. With ripping cries, he reared backward, muscles trembling, then lunged forward, hammering at his chest, and went leaping and twisting in the air, landing with heavy grunts.

  The pounding heartbeat of the drums seemed to throb not only in Kunta’s ears but also in his limbs. Almost without his knowing it, as if it were a dream, he felt his body begin to quiver and his arms to flail, and soon he was springing and shouting along with the others, whom he had ceased to notice. Finally he stumbled and fell, exhausted.

  He picked himself up and walked with weak knees to the sidelines—feeling a deep strangeness that he had never known before. Dazed, frightened, and excited, he saw not only Sitafa but also others of their kafo out there dancing among the grown-ups, and Kunta danced again. From the very young to the very old, the villagers danced on through the entire day, they and the drummers stopping for neither food nor drink but only to catch fresh breath. But the drums were still beating when Kunta collapsed into sleep that night.

  The festival’s second day began with a parade for the people of honor just after the noon sun. At the head of the parade were the arafang, the alimamo, the senior elders, the hunters, the wrestlers, and those others whom the Council of Elders had names for their important deeds in Juffure since the last harvest festival. Everyone else came trailing behind, singing and applauding, as the musicians led them out in a snaking line beyond the village. And when they made a turn around the travelers’ tree, Kunta and his kafo dashed ahead, formed their own parade, and then trooped back and forth past the marching adults, exchanging bows and smiles as they went, stepping briskly in time with their flutes, bells, and rattles. The parading boys took turns at being the honored person; when it was Kunta’s turn, he pranced about, lifting his knees high, feeling very important indeed. In passing the grown-ups, he caught both Omoro’s and Binta’s eyes and knew they were proud of their son.

  The kitchen of every woman in the village offered a variety of food in open invitation to anyone who passed by and wished to stop a moment and enjoy a plateful. Kunta and his kafo gorged themselves from many calabashes of delicious stews and rice. Even roasted meats—goats and game from the forest—were in abundance; and it was the young girls’ special duty to keep bamboo baskets filled with every available fruit.

  When they weren’t stuffing their bellies, the boys darted out to the travelers’ tree to meet the exciting strangers who now entered the village. Some stayed overnight, but most tarried only a few hours before moving on to the next village’s festival. The visiting Senegalese set up colorful displays with bolts of decorated cloth. Others arrived with heavy sacks of the very best-quality Nigerian kola nuts, the grade and size of each determining the price. Traders came up the bolong in boats laden with salt bars to exchange for indigo, hides, beeswax, and honey. Nyo Boto was herself now busily selling—for a cowrie shell apiece—small bundles of cleaned and trimmed lemongrass roots, whose regular rubbing against the teeth kept the breath sweet and the mouth fresh.

  Pagan traders hurried on past Juffure, not even stopping, for their wares of tobacco and snuff and mead beer were for infidels only, since the Moslem Mandinkas never drank nor smoked. Others who seldom stopped, bound as they were for bigger villages, were numerous footloose young men from other villages—as some young men had also left Juffure during the harvest season. Spotting them as they passed on the path beyond the village, Kunta and his mates would run alongside them for a while trying to see what they carried in their small bamboo headbaskets. Usually it was clothing and small gifts for new friends whom they expected to meet in their wanderings, before returning to their home villages by the next planting season.

  Every morning the village slept and awakened to the sound of drums. And every day brought different traveling musicians—
experts on the Koran, the balafon, and the drums. And if they were flattered enough by the gifts that were pressed upon them, along with the dancing and the cheers and clapping of the crowds, they would stop and play for a while before moving on to the next village.

  When the story-telling griots came, a quick hush would fall among the villagers as they sat around the baobab to hear of ancient kings and family clans, of warriors; of great battles, and of legends of the past. Or a religious griot would shout prophecies and warnings that Almighty Allah must be appeased, and then offer to conduct the necessary—and by now, to Kunta, familiar—ceremonies in return for a small gift. In his high voice, a singing griot sang endless verses about the past splendors of the kingdoms of Ghana, Songhai, and Old Mali, and when he finished, some people of the village would often privately pay him to sing the praises of their own aged parents at their huts. And the people would applaud when the old ones came to their doorways and stood blinking in the bright sunshine with wide, toothless grins. His good deeds done, the singing griot reminded everyone that a drumtalk message—and a modest offering—would quickly bring him to Juffure any time to sing anyone’s praises at funerals, weddings, or other special occasions. And then he hurried on to the next village.

  It was during the harvest festival’s sixth afternoon when suddenly the sound of a strange drum cut through Juffure. Hearing the insulting words spoken by the drum, Kunta hurried outside and joined the other villagers as they gathered angrily beside the baobab. The drum, obviously quite nearby, had warned of oncoming wrestlers so mighty that any so-called wrestlers in Juffure should hide. Within minutes, the people of Juffure cheered as their own drum sharply replied that such foolhardy strangers were asking to get crippled, if not worse.

  The villagers rushed now to the wrestling place. As Juffure’s wrestlers slipped into their brief dalas with the rolled-cloth handholds on the sides and buttocks, and smeared themselves with a slippery paste of pounded baobab leaves and wood ashes, they heard the shouts that meant that their challengers had arrived. These powerfully built strangers never glanced at the jeering crowd. Trotting behind their drummer, they went directly to the wrestling area, clad already in their dalas, and began rubbing one another with their own slippery paste. When Juffure’s wrestlers appeared behind the village drummers, the crowd’s shouting and jostling became so unruly that both drummers had to implore them to remain calm.