Roots (15 page)

“What was the profession of your forefathers, Kunta Kinte?” he asked.

“Hundreds of rains ago in the land of Mali,” Kunta confidently replied, “the Kinte men were blacksmiths, and their women were makers of pots and weavers of cloth.” With each pupil’s correct answer, all those assembled made loud sounds of pleasure.

Then the arafang asked a mathematical question: “If a baboon has seven wives, each wife has seven children, and each child eats seven groundnuts for seven days, how many nuts did the baboon steal from some man’s farm?” After much frantic figuring with grass-quill pens on their cottonwood slates, the first to yelp out the right answer was Sitafa Silla, and the crowd’s shouting of praise drowned out the groans of the other boys.

Next the boys wrote their names in Arabic, as they had been taught. And one by one, the arafang held up the slates for all the parents and other spectators to see for themselves what education had achieved. Like the other boys, Kunta had found the marks that talk even harder to read than they were to write. Many mornings and evenings, with the arafang rapping their knuckles, they had all wished that writing was as easy to understand as the talking drum, which even those of Lamin’s age could read as if someone standing beyond sight were calling out the words.

One by one now, the arafang asked each graduate to stand. Finally came Kunta’s turn. “Kunta Kinte!” With all eyes upon him, Kunta felt the great pride of his family in the front row, even of his ancestors in the burying ground beyond the village—most especially of his beloved Grandma Yaisa. Standing up, he read aloud a verse from the Koran’s last page; finishing, he pressed it to his forehead and said, “Amen!” When the readings were done, the teacher shook each boy’s hand and announced loudly that as their education was complete, these boys were now of the third kafo, and everyone broke out into a loud cheering. Binta and the other mothers quickly removed the covers from the bowls and calabashes they had brought, heaped with delicious foods, and the graduation ceremony ended in a feast that soon emptied both.

Omoro was waiting the next morning when Kunta came to take the family’s goats out for the day’s grazing. Pointing to a fine young male and female, Omoro said, “These two are your school-finishing present.” Almost before Kunta could stammer out his thanks, Omoro walked away without another word—as if he gave away a pair of goats every day—and Kunta tried very hard not to seem excited. But the moment his father was out of sight, Kunta whooped so loud that his new charges jumped and started running—with all the others in hot pursuit. By the time he caught up with them and herded them out to the fields, the rest of his mates
were already there—showing off their
own
new goats. Treating them like sacred animals, the boys steered their charges to only the most tender grasses, already picturing the strong young kids they would soon produce, and the kids would have soon after, until each boy had a herd as large and valuable as his father’s.

Before the next new moon appeared, Omoro and Binta were among the parents who gave away a third goat—this one to the arafang as an expression of gratitude for their son’s education. If they had been more prosperous, they would have been glad to give even a cow, but they knew he understood that this was beyond their means, as it was beyond the means of everyone in Juffure, which was a humble village. Indeed, some parents—new slaves with nothing saved—had little to offer but their own backs, and their grateful gift of a moon’s farm work for the arafang was graciously accepted.

The passing moons soon flowed into seasons until yet another rain had passed and Kunta’s kafo had taught Lamin’s kafo how to be goatherds. A time long awaited now drew steadily nearer. Not a day passed that Kunta and his mates didn’t feel both anxiety and joy at the approach of the next harvest festival, which would end with the taking away of the third kafo—those boys between ten and fifteen rains in age—to a place far away from Juffure, to which they would return, after four moons, as men.

Kunta and the others tried to act as if none of them were really giving the matter any particular thought or concern. But they thought of little else, and they watched and listened for the slightest sign or word from a grown-up that had anything at all to do with manhood training. And early in the dry season, after several of their fathers quietly left Juffure for two or three days and just as quietly returned, the boys whispered tensely among themselves, especially after Kalilu Conteh overheard his uncle say that much-needed repairs had been made on the jujuo, the manhood-training
village that had gone unused and exposed to weather and animals for almost five rains since the last training had been completed there. Even more excited whispering followed talk among their fathers about which elder might be selected by the Council of Elders to be the kintango, the man in charge of manhood training. Kunta and all of his mates had many times heard their fathers, uncles, and older brothers speaking reverently of the kintangos who had supervised their own manhood training many rains before.

It was just before the harvest season when all of the third-kafo boys reported to one another in a fever of excitement how their mothers had silently measured each of them with a sewing tape around his head and down to his shoulders. Kunta did his best to hide the vivid memory of that morning five rains before when, as brand-new little goatherds, he and his mates had been scared nearly out of their wits as they watched screaming boys under white hoods being kicked and jeered from the village by a band of terrifyingly masked, shrieking, spear-carrying kankurang dancers.

The tobalo soon boomed out the beginning of the new harvest, and Kunta joined the rest of the villagers in the fields. He welcomed the long days of hard work, for they kept him too busy and too tired to give much thought to what lay ahead. But when the harvesting was done and the festival began, he found himself unable to enjoy the music and the dancing and the feasting as the others did—as he himself had done for as long as he could remember. The louder the merriment, in fact, the unhappier he became until finally he spent most of the last two days of the festival sitting by himself on the banks of the bolong skipping stones across the water.

On the night before the last day of the festival, Kunta was in Binta’s hut silently finishing his evening meal of groundnut stew with rice when Omoro walked in behind him. From the corner of his eye, Kunta glimpsed his father raising something white, and
before he had a chance to turn around, Omoro had pulled a long hood down firmly over his head. The terror that shot through Kunta all but numbed him. He felt his father’s hand gripping his upper arm and urging him to stand up, then to move backward until he was pushed down onto a low stool. Kunta was grateful to sit, for his legs felt like water and his head felt light. He listened to himself breathing in short gasps, knowing that if he tried to move, he would fall off the stool. So he sat very still, trying to accustom himself to the darkness. Terrified as he was, it seemed almost a double darkness. As his upper lip felt the moist warmth of his breath inside the hood, it flashed through Kunta’s mind that surely once such a hood had been thrust in the same way over his father’s head. Could Omoro have been so frightened? Kunta couldn’t even imagine that, and he felt ashamed to be such a disgrace to the Kinte clan.

It was very quiet in the hut. Wrestling the fear that knotted the pit of his stomach, Kunta closed his eyes and focused his very pores on trying to hear something, anything at all. He thought he heard Binta moving about, but he couldn’t be sure. He wondered where Lamin was, and Suwadu, who surely would be making noise. He knew only one thing for sure: Neither Binta nor anyone else was going to speak to him, let alone lift that hood off his head. And then Kunta thought how awful it would be if his hood
did
get lifted, for everyone would see how scared he really was, and perhaps therefore a boy unworthy of joining his kafo mates in manhood training.

Even boys the size of Lamin knew—since Kunta had told him—what would happen to anyone who showed himself too weak or cowardly to endure the training that turned boys into hunters, into warriors, into men—all within a period of twelve moons. Suppose he should fail? He began gulping down his fear, remembering how he had been told that any boy who failed the
manhood training would be treated as a child for the rest of his life, even though he might look like a grown man. He would be avoided, and his village would never permit him to marry, lest he father others like himself. These sad cases, Kunta had heard, usually slipped away from their villages sooner or later, never to return, and even their own fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters would never mention them again. Kunta saw himself slinking away from Juffure like some mangy hyena, scorned by everyone; it was too horrible to think of.

After a time, Kunta realized that he was faintly hearing the drumbeats and the shouting of dancers in the distance. More time passed. What hour was it, he wondered. He guessed it must be near the sutoba hour, halfway between dusk and dawn, but after a few moments he heard the alimamo’s high-pitched wailing for the village’s safo prayer, two hours before midnight. The music ceased and Kunta knew that the villagers had stopped their celebrating and the men were hastening to the mosque.

Kunta sat until he knew the prayers must have been over, but the music didn’t resume. He listened hard, but could hear only silence. Finally he nodded off, awakening with a start only a few moments later. It was still quiet—and darker under the hood than a moonless night. Finally, faintly, he was certain that he could hear the early yippings of hyenas. He knew that hyenas always yipped for a while before settling down to steady howling, which they would continue until early daybreak, sounding eerily far away.

During the harvest festival week, at the first streaks of daybreak, Kunta knew the tobalo would boom. He sat waiting for that to happen—for
anything
to happen. He felt his anger building, expecting the tobalo to sound at any moment—but nothing happened. He grated his teeth and waited some more. And then, at last, after jerking awake a few times, he dozed off into a fitful sleep. He all but leaped from his skin when the tobalo finally did
boom. Under the hood, his cheeks were hot with embarrassment that he had fallen asleep.

Having become accustomed to the hood’s darkness, Kunta could all but see the morning’s activities from the sounds his ears picked up—the crowing of the cocks, the barking of the wuolo dogs, the wailing of the alimamo, the bumping of the women’s pestles as they beat the breakfast couscous. This morning’s prayer to Allah, he knew, would be for the success of the manhood training that was about to begin. He heard movement in the hut, and he sensed that it was Binta. It was strange how he couldn’t see her, but he knew it was his mother. Kunta wondered about Sitafa and his other mates. It surprised him to realize that throughout the night, he hadn’t once thought about them until now. He told himself that they must surely have had as long a night as he had.

When the music of koras and balafons began playing outside the hut, Kunta heard the sound of people walking and talking, louder and louder. Then drums joined the din, their rhythm sharp and cutting. A moment later, his heart seemed to stop as he sensed the sudden movement of someone rushing into the hut. Before he could even brace himself, his wrists were grabbed, and roughly he was snatched up from the stool and jerked out through the hut door into the all but deafening noise of staccato drums and screeching people.

Hands knocked him and feet kicked him. Kunta thought desperately of bolting away somehow, but just as he was about to try, a firm yet gentle hand grasped one of his. Breathing hoarsely under his hood, Kunta realized that he was no longer being hit and kicked and that the screaming of the crowd was suddenly no longer nearby. The people, he guessed, had moved along to some other boy’s hut, and the guiding hand that held his must belong to the slave Omoro would have hired, as every father did, to lead his hooded son to the jujuo.

The crowd’s shouting rose to a frenzied pitch every time another boy was dragged from a hut, and Kunta was glad he couldn’t see the kankurang dancers, who were making bloodcurdling whoops as they sprang high into the air brandishing their spears. Big drums and small drums—every drum in the village, it seemed—were pounding as the slave guided Kunta faster and faster between rows of people shouting on either side of him, crying out things like “Four moons!” and “They will become men!” Kunta wanted to burst into tears. He wished wildly that he could reach out and touch Omoro, Binta, Lamin—even the sniveling Suwadu—for it felt too much to bear that four long moons were going to pass before he would see again those he loved even more than he had ever realized until now. Kunta’s ears told him that he and his guide had joined a moving line of marchers, all stepping to the swift rhythm of the drums. As they passed through the village gates—he could tell because the noise of the crowd began to fade—he felt hot tears well up and run down his cheeks. He closed his eyes tight, as if to hide the tears even from himself.

As he had felt Binta’s presence in the hut, now he felt, almost as if it were a smell, the fear of his kafo mates ahead and behind him in the line, and he knew that theirs was as great as his. Somehow that made him feel less ashamed. As he trudged on in the white blindness of his hood, he knew that he was leaving behind more than his father and his mother and his brothers and the village of his birth, and this filled him with sadness as much as terror. But he knew it must be done, as it had been done by his father before him and would some day be done by his son. He would return, but only as a man.

T
hey must be approaching—within a stone’s throw, Kunta sensed—a recently cut bamboo grove. Through his hood, he could smell the rich fragrance of bamboo freshly chopped. They marched closer, the smell became stronger and stronger; they were at the barrier, then through it, but they were still outdoors. Of course—it was a bamboo fence. Suddenly the drums stopped and the marchers halted. For several minutes, Kunta and the others stood still and silent. He listened for the slightest sound that might tell him when they had stopped or where they were, but all he could hear was the screeching of parrots and the scolding of monkeys overhead