Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  He would have continued to think about them, and about the toubob, also somewhere in the area, but his aching legs wouldn’t let him. By that night, he would have ignored twenty lions if they had been feeding at the place Omoro chose for them to spend the night. Kunta had barely lain down on his bed of soft branches before he was into a deep sleep—and it seemed only minutes before his father was shaking him awake in the early dawn. Though he felt as if he hadn’t slept at all, Kunta watched with unconcealed admiration how swiftly Omoro skinned, cleaned, and roasted their morning meal of two hares, which he had caught in night snares. As Kunta squatted and ate the tasty meat, he thought how he and his goatherding mates used up hours of catching and cooking game, and he wondered how his father and other men ever found time to ever learn so much—about everything there was to know, it seemed.

  His blistered feet, and his legs, and his back, and his neck all began to hurt again this third day on the trail—in fact, his whole body seemed to be one dull ache—but he pretended that manhood training had already begun and that he would be the last boy in his kafo to betray his pain. When he stepped on a sharp thorn just before midday, Kunta bravely bit his lip to avoid crying out, but he began to limp and fall so far behind that Omoro decided to let him rest for a few minutes beside the path while they ate their afternoon meal. The soothing paste his father rubbed into the wound made it feel better, but soon after they began walking again, it began to hurt—and bleed—in earnest. Before long, however, the wound was filled with dirt, so the bleeding stopped, and the constant walking numbed the pain enough to let him keep up with his father. Kunta couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to him that Omoro had slowed down a tiny bit. The area around the wound was ugly and swollen by the time they stopped that night, but his father applied another poultice, and in the morning it looked and felt good enough to bear his weight without too much pain.

  Kunta noticed with relief, as they set out the next day, that they had left behind the thorn and cactus land they had been traveling through and were moving into bush country more like Juffure’s, with even more trees and thickly flowering plants, and more chattering monkeys and multicolored landbirds than he had ever seen before. Breathing in the fragrant air made Kunta remember times when he had taken his little brother to catch crabs down along the banks of the bolong, where he and Lamin would wait to wave at their mother and the other women rowing homeward after work in their rice fields.

  Omoro took the bypass fork at every travelers’ tree, but each village’s first-kafo children always raced out to meet them and to tell the strangers whatever happened to be the most exciting of the local news. In one such village, the little couriers rushed out yelling, “Mumbo jumbo! Mumbo jumbo!,” and considering their job done, fled back inside the village gate. The bypassing trail went near enough for Omoro and Kunta to see the townspeople watching a masked and costumed figure brandishing a rod over the bare back of a screaming woman whom several other women held. All of the women spectators were shrieking with each blow of the rod. From discussions with his fellow goatherds, Kunta knew how a husband, if enough annoyed by a quarrelsome, troublemaking wife, could go quietly to another village and hire a mumbo jumbo to come to his village and shout fearsomely at intervals from concealment, then appear and publicly discipline that wife, after which all of the village’s women were apt to act better for a time.

  At one travelers’ tree, no children came out to meet the Kintes. In fact, there was no one to be seen at all, and not a sound was to be heard in the silent village, except for the birds and monkeys. Kunta wondered if slave takers had come here, too. He waited in vain for Omoro to explain the mystery, but it was the chattering children of the next village who did so. Pointing back down the trail, they said that village’s chief had kept on doing things his people disliked until one night not long ago, as he slept, everyone had quietly gone away with all their possessions to the homes of friends and families in other places—leaving behind an “empty chief,” the children said, who was now going about promising to act better if only his people would return.

  Since nighttime was near, Omoro decided to enter this village, and the crowd under the baobab was abuzz with this exciting gossip: Most felt certain that their new neighbors would return home after they had taught their chief his lesson for a few more days. While Kunta stuffed his stomach with groundnut stew over steamed rice, Omoro went to the village jaliba and arranged for a talking-drum message to his brothers. He told them to expect him by the next sundown and that traveling with him was his first son.

  Kunta had sometimes daydreamed about hearing his name drum-sounding across the land, and now it had happened. It wouldn’t leave his ears. Later, on the hospitality hut’s bamboo bed, bone-weary as he was, Kunta thought of the other jalibas hunched over their drums pounding out his name in every village along their route to the village of Janneh and Saloum.

  At every travelers’ tree now, since the drums had spoken, were not only the usual naked children but also some elders and musicians. And Omoro couldn’t refuse a senior elder’s request to grant his village the honor of at least a brief visit. As the Kintes freshened themselves in each hospitality hut and then sat down to share food and drink in the shade of the baobab and silk-cotton trees, the adults gathered eagerly to hear Omoro’s answers to their questions, and the first, second, and third kafos clustered about Kunta.

  While the first kafo stared at him in silent awe, those of Kunta’s rains and older, painfully jealous, asked him respectful questions about his home village and his destination. He answered them gravely with, he hoped, the same dignity as his father did their fathers’ questions. By the time they left, he was sure the villagers felt they had seen a young man who had spent most of his life traveling with his father along The Gambia’s long trails.

  CHAPTER 20

  They had tarried so long at the last village that they would have to walk faster and harder to reach their destination by sundown, as Omoro had promised his brothers. Though he sweated and ached, Kunta found it easier than before to keep his headload balanced, and he felt a new spurt of strength with each of the drumtalk messages that now filled the air with word of the arrival of griots, jahbas, senior elders, and other important people in the town ahead, each representing such distant home villages as Karantaba, Kootacunda, Pisania, and Jonkakonda, most of which Kunta had never heard of: A griot from the Kingdom of Wooli was there, said the drums, and even a prince sent by his father, the King of Barra. As Kunta’s cracked feet padded quickly along the hot, dusty trail, he was amazed at how famous and popular his uncles were. Soon he was all but running, not only to keep close behind the ever more rapidly striding Omoro, but also because these past few hours seemed to be taking forever.

  Finally, just as the sun began to turn crimson on the western horizon, Kunta spotted smoke rising from a village not far ahead. The wide, circular pattern of the smoke told Kunta that dried baobab hulls were being burned to drive away mosquitoes. That means the village was entertaining important visitors. He felt like cheering. They had arrived! Soon he began to hear the thunder of a big ceremonial tobalo drum—being pounded, he guessed, as each new personage entered between the village gates. Intermingling was the throb of smaller tan-tang drums and the shriekings of dancers. Then the trail made a turn, and there under the rising smoke was the village. And alongside a bushy growth they saw a man who caught sight of them at the same instant and began to point and wave as if he had been posted there to await an oncoming man with a boy. Omoro waved back at the man, who immediately squatted over his drum and announced on it: “Omoro Kinte and first son—”

  Kunta’s feet scarcely felt the ground. The travelers’ tree, soon in sight, was festooned with cloth strips, and the original single-file trail had already been widened by many feet—evidence of an already popular and busy village. The pounding of the tan-tangs grew louder and louder, and suddenly the dancers appeared, grunting and shouting in their leaf-and-bark costumes, leaping and whirling and stamping out th
rough the village gate ahead of everyone else, all of them rushing to meet the distinguished visitors. The village’s deep-voiced tobalo began to boom as two figures came running through the crowd. Ahead of Kunta, Omoro’s headbundle dropped suddenly to the ground, and Omoro was running toward them. Before he knew it, Kunta’s own headbundle had dropped and he was running too.

  The two men and his father were hugging and pounding each other. “And this is our nephew?” Both men yanked Kunta off his feet and embraced him amid exclamations of joy. Sweeping them on to the village, the huge welcoming party cried out their greetings all around them, but Kunta saw and heard no one but his uncles. They certainly resembled Omoro, but he noticed that they were both somewhat shorter, stockier, and more muscular than his father. The older uncle Janneh’s eyes had a squinting way of seeming to look a long distance, and both men moved with an almost animal quickness. They also talked much more rapidly than his father as they plied him with questions about Juffure and about Binta.

  Finally, Saloum thumped his fist on Kunta’s head. “Not since he got his name have we been together. And now look at him! How many rains have you, Kunta?”

  “Eight, sir,” he answered politely.

  “Nearly ready for manhood training!” exclaimed his uncle.

  All around the village’s tall bamboo fence, dry thornbushes were piled up, and concealed among them were sharp-pointed stakes to cripple any marauding animal or human. But Kunta wasn’t noticing such things, and the few others of around his age who were there he saw only out of the corners of his eyes. He scarcely heard the racket of the parrots and monkeys above their heads, or the barking of the wuolo dogs underfoot, as the uncles took them on a tour of their beautiful new village. Every hut had its own private yard, said Saloum, and every woman’s dry-foods storehouse was mounted directly over her cooking fire, so the smoke would keep her rice, couscous, and millet free of bugs.

  Kunta almost got dizzy jerking his head toward this or that exciting sight, smell, or sound. It was both fascinating and confusing to overhear people speaking in Mandinka dialects that he couldn’t understand beyond an occasional word. Like the rest of the Mandinkas—except for those as learned as the arafang—Kunta knew next to nothing of the languages of other tribes, even of those who lived nearby. But he had spent enough time around the travelers’ tree to know which tribes were which. The Fulas had oval faces, longer hair, thinner lips, and sharper features, with vertical scars on their temples. The Wolof were extremely black and very reserved, the Serahuli lighter-skinned and small in stature. And the Jolas—there was no mistaking them—scarred their entire bodies, and their faces always seemed to wear a ferocious expression.

  Kunta recognized people from all of these tribes here in the new village, but there were even more he didn’t recognize. Some were haggling loudly with traders as they hawked their wares. Older women clamored over tanned hides, and younger women bargained for hairpieces made from sisal and baobab. The cry “Kola! Fine purple kola!” drew a cluster of those whose few remaining teeth were already orange-stained from chewing the nuts.

  Amid friendly elbowing and pushing, Omoro was introduced to an endless stream of villagers and important persons from exciting places. Kunta marveled at his uncles’ fluent talking in the strange tongues they spoke. Letting himself drift into the shifting throng, knowing that he could find his father and uncles whenever he wanted to, Kunta soon found himself among the musicians who were playing for all who felt like dancing. Next he sampled the roast antelope and beef and the groundnut stew that the village women kept bountifully supplied on tables in the baobabs’ shade for anyone who wanted it. It was all right as food went, Kunta thought, but not as tasty as the succulent harvest-festival dishes prepared by the mothers of Juffure.

  Seeing some women over by the well talking excitedly about something, Kunta sidled over, his ears as wide as his eyes, and heard that a very great marabout was reported to be only about half a day’s travel away on the trail, journeying with his party to honor the new village, since it had been founded by sons of the late holy man Kairaba Kunta Kinte. Kunta was thrilled anew to hear his own grandfather spoken of so reverently. Unrecognized by any of the women, he heard them chatter next about his uncles. It was time they traveled less and settled down to have wives and sons, one woman said. “The only trouble they will have,” said another, “is so many maidens eager to be their wives.”

  It was almost dark when Kunta, feeling very awkward, finally approached some boys of around his own age. But they didn’t seem to mind that he had hung around the grown-ups until now. Mostly, they seemed anxious to tell Kunta how their new village had come to be. “All of our families became your uncles’ friends somewhere during their travels,” said one boy. All of them had been dissatisfied with their lives where they were, for one reason or another. “My grandfather didn’t have enough space for all his family and his children’s families to be close to him,” a boy said. “Our bolong wouldn’t grow good rice,” said another.

  His uncles, Kunta heard, began telling friends they knew an ideal place where they were thinking of building a village. And the families of Janneh and Saloum’s friends were soon on the trail with their goats, chickens, pets, prayer rugs, and other possessions.

  Soon it was dark and Kunta watched as the fires of the new village were lit with the sticks and branches that his new friends had collected earlier in the day. Because it was a time of celebration, they told him all the villagers and visitors would sit together around several fires, instead of the usual custom, which dictated that the men and the women and children would sit at separate fires. The alimamo would bless the gathering, they said, and then Janneh and Saloum would walk inside the circle to tell stories about their travels and adventures. In the circle with them would be the oldest visitor to the village, a senior elder from the distant upper-river of Fulladu. It was whispered that he had over a hundred rains, and would share his wisdom with all who had ears to hear.

  Kunta ran to join his father at the fireside just in time to hear the alimamo’s prayer. After it, no one said anything for a few minutes. Crickets rasped loudly, and the smoky fires cast dancing shadows upon the wide circle of faces. Finally, the leathery old elder spoke: “Hundreds of rains before even my earliest memories, talk reached across the big waters of an African mountain of gold. This is what first brought toubob to Africa!” There was no gold mountain, he said, but gold beyond description had been found in streams and mined from deep shafts first in northern Guinea, then later in the forests of Ghana. “Toubob was never told where gold came from,” said the old man, “for what one toubob knows, soon they all know.”

  Then Janneh spoke. Nearly as precious as gold in many places, he said, was salt. He and Saloum had personally seen salt and gold exchanged in equal weights. Salt was found in thick slabs under certain distant sands, and certain waters elsewhere would dry into a salty mush, which was shaped into blocks after sitting in the sun.

  “There was once a city of salt,” said the old man. “The city of Taghaza, whose people built their houses and mosques of blocks of salt.”

  “Tell of the strange humpbacked animals you have spoken of before now,” demanded an ancient-looking old woman, daring to interrupt. She reminded Kunta of Grandmother Nyo Boto.

  A hyena howled somewhere in the night as people leaned forward in the flickering light. It was Saloum’s turn to speak. “Those animals that are called camels live in a place of endless sand. They find their way across it from the sun, the stars, and the wind. Janneh and I have ridden these animals for as long as three moons with few stops for water.”

  “But many stops to fight off the bandits!” said Janneh.

  “Once we were part of a caravan of twelve thousand camels,” Saloum continued. “Actually, it was many smaller caravans traveling together to protect ourselves against bandits.”

  Kunta saw that as Saloum spoke, Janneh was unrolling a large piece of tanned hide. The elder made an impatient gesture to two young men
who sprang to throw onto the fire some dry branches. In the flaring light, Kunta and the others could follow Janneh’s finger as it moved across a strange-looking drawing. “This is Africa,” he said. The finger traced what he told them was “the big water” to the west, and then “the great sand desert,” a place larger by many times than all of The Gambia—which he pointed out in the lower left of the drawing.

  “To the north coast of Africa, the toubob ships bring porcelain, spices, cloth, horses, and countless things made by men,” said Saloum. “Then, camels and donkeys bear those goods inland to places like Sijilmasa, Ghadames, and Marrakech.” The moving finger of Janneh showed where those cities were. “And as we sit here tonight,” said Saloum, “there are many men with heavy headloads crossing deep forests taking our own African goods—ivory, skins, olives, dates, kola nuts, cotton, copper, precious stones—back to the toubob’s ships.”

  Kunta’s mind reeled at what he heard, and he vowed silently that someday he too would venture to such exciting places.

  “The marabout!” From far out on the trail, the lookout drummer beat out the news. Quickly a formal greeting party was lined up—Janneh and Saloum as the village’s founders; then the Council of Elders, the alimamo, the arafang; then the honored representatives of other villages, including Omoro; and Kunta was placed with those of his height among the village’s young ones. Musicians led them all out toward the travelers’ tree, timing their approach to meet the holy man as he arrived. Kunta stared hard at the white-bearded, very black old man at the head of his long and tired party. Men, women, and children were heavily loaded with large head-bundles, except for a few men herding cattle and, Kunta judged, more than a hundred goats.

  With quick gestures, the holy man blessed the welcoming party and bade them rise from their knees. Then Janneh and Saloum were specially blessed, and Omoro was introduced by Janneh, and Saloum beckoned to Kunta, who went dashing up alongside them. “This is my first son,” said Omoro, “who bears his holy grandfather’s name.”