Roots (5 page)

Adults passing anywhere near the children would solemnly pretend not to see nor hear as Sitafa, Kunta, and the rest of their kafo growled and roared like lions, trumpeted like elephants, and grunted like wild pigs, or as the girls—cooking and tending their dolls and beating their couscous—played mothers and wives among themselves. But however hard they were playing, the children never failed to pay every adult the respect their mothers had taught them to show always toward their elders. Politely looking the adults in the eyes, the children would ask, “
Kerabe?”
(Do you have peace?) And the adults would reply, “
Kera dorong.”
(Peace only.) And if an adult offered his hand, each child in turn would
clasp it with both hands, then stand with palms folded over his chest until that adult passed by.

Kunta’s home-training had been so strict that, it seemed to him, his every move drew Binta’s irritated finger—snapping—if, indeed, he wasn’t grabbed and soundly whipped. When he was eating, he would get a cuff on the head if Binta caught his eyes on anything except his own food. And unless he washed off every bit of dirt when he came into the hut from a hard day’s play, Binta would snatch up her scratchy sponge of dried plant stems and her bar of homemade soap and make Kunta think she was going to scrape off his very hide.

For him ever to stare at her, or at his father, or at any other adult, would earn him a slap as quickly as when he committed the equally serious offense of interrupting the conversation of any grown-up. And for him ever to speak anything but truth would have been unthinkable. Since there never seemed any reason for him to lie, he never did.

Though Binta didn’t seem to think so, Kunta tried his best to be a good boy, and soon began to practice his home-training lessons with the other children. When disagreements occurred among them, as they often did—sometime fanning into exchanges of harsh words and finger-snapping—Kunta would always turn and walk away, thus displaying the dignity and self-command that his mother had taught him were the proudest traits of the Mandinka tribe.

But almost every night, Kunta got spanked for doing something bad to his baby brother—usually for frightening him by snarling fiercely, or by dropping on all fours like a baboon, rolling his eyes, and stomping his fists like forepaws upon the ground. “I will bring the toubob!” Binta would yell at Kunta when he had tried her patience to the breaking point, scaring Kunta most thoroughly, for the old grandmothers spoke often of the hairy, red-faced, strange-looking white men whose big canoes stole people away from their homes.

T
hough Kunta and his mates were tired and hungry from play by the time of each day’s setting sun, they would still race one another to climb small trees and point at the sinking crimson ball. “He will be even lovelier tomorrow!” they would shout. And even Juffure’s adults ate dinner quickly so that they might congregate outside in the deepening dusk to shout and clap and pound on drums at the rising of the crescent moon, symbolic of Allah.

But when clouds shrouded that new moon, as they did this night, the people dispersed, alarmed, and the men entered the mosque to pray for forgiveness, since a shrouded new moon meant that the heavenly spirits were displeased with the people of Juffure. After praying, the men led their frightened families to the baobab, where already on this night the jaliba squatted by a small fire, heating to its utmost tautness the goatskin head of his talking drum.

Rubbing at his eyes, which smarted from the smoke of the fire, Kunta remembered the times that drums talking at night from different villages had troubled his sleep. Awakening, he would lie there, listening hard; the sounds and rhythms were so like those of speech that he would finally understand some of the words, telling of a famine or a plague, or of the raiding and burning of some village, with its people killed or stolen away.

Hanging on a branch of the baobab, beside the jaliba, was a goatskin inscribed with the marks that talk, written there in Arabic by the arafang. In the flickering firelight, Kunta watched as the jaliba began to beat the knobby elbows of his crooked sticks very rapidly and sharply against different spots on the drumhead. It was an urgent message for the nearest magic man to come to Juffure and drive out evil spirits.

Not daring to look up at the moon, the people hurried home and fearfully went to bed. But at intervals through the night, the talk of distant drums echoed the appeal of Juffure for a magic man in other villages as well. Shivering beneath his cowskin, Kunta guessed that their new moon was shrouded, too.

The next day, the men of Omoro’s age had to help the younger men of the village to guard their nearly ripened fields against the seasonal plague of hungry baboons and birds. The second-kafo boys were told to be especially vigilant as they grazed the goats, and the mothers and grandmothers hovered closer than they normally would over the toddlers and the babies. The first kafo’s biggest children, those the size of Kunta and Sitafa, were instructed to play a little way out past the village’s tall fence, where they could keep a sharp lookout for any stranger approaching the travelers’ tree, not far distant. They did, but none came that day.

He appeared on the second morning—a very old man, walking with the help of a wooden staff and bearing a large bundle on his bald head. Spotting him, the children raced shouting back through the village gate. Leaping up, old Nyo Boto hobbled over and began to beat on the big tobalo drum that brought the men rushing back to the village from their fields a moment before the magic man reached the gate and entered Juffure.

As the villagers gathered around him, he walked over to the baobab and set down his bundle carefully on the ground. Abruptly squatting, he then shook from a wrinkled goatskin bag a heap of
dried objects—a small snake, a hyena’s jawbone, a monkey’s teeth, a pelican’s wingbone, various fowls’ feet, and strange roots. Glancing about, he gestured impatiently for the hushed crowd to give him more room; and the people moved back as he began to quiver all over—clearly being attacked by Juffure’s evil spirits.

The magic man’s body writhed, his face contorted, his eyes rolled wildly, as his trembling hands struggled to force his resisting wand into contact with the heap of mysterious objects. When the wand’s tip, with a supreme effort, finally touched, he fell over backward and lay as if struck by lightning. The people gasped. But then he slowly began to revive. The evil spirts had been driven out. As he struggled weakly to his knees, Juffure’s adults—exhausted but relieved—went running off to their huts and soon returned with gifts to press upon him. The magic man added these to his bundle, which was already large and heavy with gifts from previous villages, and soon he was on his way to answer the next call. In his mercy, Allah had seen fit to spare Juffure once again.

T
welve moons had passed, and with the big rains ended once again, The Gambia’s season for travelers had begun. Along the network of walking paths between its villages came enough visitors—passing by or stopping off in Juffure—to keep Kunta and his playmates on the lookout almost every day. After alerting the village when a stranger appeared, they would rush back out to meet each visitor as he approached the travelers’ tree. Trooping boldly alongside him, they would chatter away inquisitively as their sharp eyes hunted for any signs of his mission or profession. If they found any, they would abruptly abandon the visitor and race back ahead to tell the grown-ups in that day’s hospitality hut. In accordance with ancient tradition, a different family in each village would be chosen every day to offer food and shelter to arriving visitors at no cost for as long as they wished to stay before continuing their journey.

Having been entrusted with the responsibility of serving as the village lookouts, Kunta, Sitafa, and their kafo mates began to feel and act older than their rains. Now after breakfast each morning, they would gather by the arafang’s schoolyard and kneel quietly to listen as he taught the older boys—those of the second kafo, just beyond Kunta’s age, five to nine rains old—how to read their Koranic verses and to write with grass-quill pens dipped in the black
ink of bitter-orange juice mixed with powdered crust from the bottom of cooking pots.

When the schoolboys finished their lessons and ran off—with the tails of their cotton dundikos flapping behind them—to herd the village’s goats out into the brushlands for the day’s grazing, Kunta and his mates tried to act very unconcerned, but the truth was that they envied the older boys’ long shirts as much as they did their important jobs. Though he said nothing, Kunta was not alone in feeling that he was too grown up to be treated like a child and made to go naked any longer. They avoided suckling babies like Lamin as if they were diseased, and the toddlers they regarded as even more unworthy of notice, unless it was to give them a good whack when no adults were watching. Shunning even the attentions of the old grandmothers who had taken care of them for as long as they could remember, Kunta, Sitafa, and the others began to hang around grown-ups of their parents’ age in hopes of being seen underfoot and perhaps sent off on an errand.

It was just before the harvest came that Omoro told Kunta very casually, one night after dinner, that he wanted him up early the next day to help guard the crops. Kunta was so excited he could hardly sleep. After gulping down his breakfast in the morning, he almost burst with joy when Omoro handed him the hoe to carry when they set out for the fields. Kunta and his mates fairly flew up and down the ripe rows, yelling and waving sticks at the wild pigs and baboons that came grunting from the brush to root or snatch up groundnuts. With dirt clods and shouts, they routed whistling flocks of blackbirds as they wheeled low over the couscous, for the grandmothers’ stories had told of ripened fields ruined as quickly by hungry birds as by any animal. Collecting the handfuls of couscous and groundnuts that their fathers had cut or pulled up to test for ripeness, and carrying gourds of cool water for the men to
drink, they worked all through the day with a swiftness equaled only by their pride.

Six days later, Allah decreed that the harvest should begin. After the dawn’s suba prayer, the farmers and their sons—some chosen few carrying small tan-tang and souraba drums—went out to the fields and waited with heads cocked, listening. Finally, the village’s great tobalo drum boomed and the farmers leaped to the harvesting. As the jaliba and the other drummers walked among them, beating out a rhythm to match their movements, everyone began to sing. In exhilaration now and then, a farmer would fling his hoe, whirling up on one drumbeat and catch it on the next.

Kunta’s kafo sweated alongside their fathers, shaking the groundnut bushes free of dirt. Halfway through the morning came the first rest—and then, at midday, happy shouts of relief as the women and girls arrived with lunch. Walking in single file, also singing harvest songs, they took the pots from their heads, ladled the contents into calabashes, and served them to the drummers and harvesters, who ate and then napped until the tobalo sounded once again.

Piles of the harvest dotted the fields at the end of that first day. Streaming sweat and mud, the farmers trudged wearily to the nearest stream, where they took off their clothes and leaped into the water, laughing and splashing to cool and clean themselves. Then they headed home, swatting at the biting flies that buzzed around their glistening bodies. The closer they came to the smoke that drifted toward them from the women’s kitchens, the more tantalizing were the smells of the roasted meats that would be served three times daily for however long it took to finish the harvest.

After stuffing himself that night, Kunta noticed—as he had for several nights—that his mother was sewing something. She said nothing about it, nor did Kunta ask. But the next morning, as he
picked up his hoe and began to walk out the door, she looked at him and said gruffly, “Why don’t you put on your clothes?”

Kunta jerked around. There, hanging from a peg, was a brand-new dundiko. Struggling to conceal his excitement, he matter-of-factly put it on and sauntered out the door—where he burst into a run. Others of his kafo were already outside—all of them, like him, dressed for the first time in their lives, all of them leaping, shouting, and laughing because their nakedness was covered at last. They were now officially of the second kafo. They were becoming men.

B
y the time Kunta sauntered back into his mother’s hut that night, he had made sure that everyone in Juffure had seen him in his dundiko. Though he hadn’t stopped working all day, he wasn’t a bit tired, and he knew he’d never be able to go to sleep at his regular bedtime. Perhaps now that he was a grown-up, Binta would let him stay up later. But soon after Lamin was asleep, the same as always, she sent him to bed—with a reminder to hang up his dundiko.

As he turned to go, sulking as conspicuously as he thought he could get away with, Binta called him back—probably to reprimand him for sulking, Kunta thought, or maybe she’d taken pity on him and changed her mind. “Your Fa wants to see you in the morning,” she said casually. Kunta knew better than to ask why, so just said, “Yes, Mama,” and wished her good night. It was just as well he wasn’t tired, because he couldn’t sleep now anyway, lying under his cowhide coverlet wondering what he had done now that was wrong, as it seemed he did so often. But racking his brain, he couldn’t think of a single thing, especially nothing so bad that Binta herself wouldn’t have whacked him for it, since a father would involve himself only with something pretty terrible. Finally he gave up worrying and drifted off to sleep.

At breakfast the next morning, Kunta was so subdued that he almost forgot the joy of his dundiko, until naked little Lamin
happened to brush up against it. Kunta’s hand jerked up to shove him away, but a flashing look from Binta prevented that. After eating, Kunta hung around for a while hoping that something more might be said by Binta, but when she acted as if she hadn’t even told him anything, he reluctantly left the hut and made his way with slow steps to Omoro’s hut, where he stood outside with folded hands.