Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  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.

  CHAPTER 23

  They 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

  Then, suddenly, Kunta’s hood was lifted. He stood blinking in the bright sun of midafternoon, trying to adjust his eyes to the light. He was afraid even to turn his head enough to see his kafo mates, for directly before them stood stern, wrinkled senior elder Silla Ba Dibba. Like all the other boys, Kunta knew him and his family well. But Silla Ba Dibba acted as if he had never seen any of them before—indeed, as if he would rather not see them now; his eyes scanned their faces as he would have looked at crawling maggots. Kunta knew that this surely was their kintango. Standing on either side of him were two younger men, Ali Sise and Soru Tura, whom Kunta also knew well; Soru was a special friend of Omoro’s. Kunta was grateful that neither of them was Omoro, to see his son so scared.

  As they had been taught, the entire kafo—all twenty-three boys—crossed their palms over their hearts and greeted their elders in the traditional way: “Peace!” “Peace only!” replied the old kintango and his assistants. Widening his gaze for a moment—careful not to move his head—Kunta saw that they stood in a compound dotted with several small, mud-walled, thatch-roofed huts and surrounded by the tall new bamboo fence. He could see where the huts had been patched, undoubtedly by the fathers who had disappeared from Juffure for a few days. All this he saw without moving a muscle. But the next moment he nearly jumped out of his skin.

  “Children left Juffure village,” said the kintango suddenly in a loud voice. “If men are to return, your fears must be erased, for a fearful person is a weak person, and a weak person is a danger to his family, to his village, and to his tribe.” He glared at them as if he had never seen such a sorry lot, and then turned away. As he did so, his two assistants sprang forward and began to lay about among the boys with limber sticks, pummeling their shoulders and backsides smartly as they herded them like so many goats, a few boys apiece, into the small mud huts
.

  Huddled in their bare hut, Kunta and his four mates were too terrified to feel the lingering sting of the blows they had received, and too ashamed to raise their heads even enough to look at one another. After a few minutes, when it seemed that they would be spared from further abuse for a little while, Kunta began to sneak looks at his companions. He wished that he and Sitafa were in the same hut. He knew these others, of course, but none as well as his yayo brother, and his heart sank. But perhaps that’s no accident, he reasoned. They probably don’t want us to have even that small comfort. Maybe they’re not even going to feed us, he began to think, when his stomach started to growl with hunger.

  Just after sunset, the kintango’s assistants burst into the hut. “Move!” A stick caught him sharply across the shoulders, and the scrambling boys were hissed at as they rushed outside into the dusk, bumping into boys from other huts, and under the flying sticks were herded with gruff orders into a ragged line, each boy grasping the hand of the boy ahead. When they were all in place, the kintango fixed them with a dark scowl and announced that they were about to undertake a night journey deep into the surrounding forest.

  At the order to march, the long line of boys set out along the path in clumsy disarray, and the sticks fell steadily among them. “You walk like buffalo!” Kunta heard close to his ear. A boy cried out as he was hit, and both assistants shouted loudly in the darkness, “Who was that?,” and their sticks rained down even harder. After that no boy uttered a sound.

  Kunta’s legs soon began to hurt—but not as soon or as badly as they would have done if he hadn’t learned the manner of loose striding taught him by his father on their trip to the village of Janneh and Saloum. It pleased him to think that the other boys’ legs were surely hurting worse than his, for they wouldn’t yet know how to walk. But nothing he had learned did anything to help Kunta’s hunger and thirst. His stomach felt tied in knots, and he was starting to feel light-headed when at last a stop was called near a small stream. The reflection of the bright moon in its surface was soon set to rippling as the boys fell to their knees and began to scoop up and gulp down handfuls of water. A moment later the kintango’s assistants commanded them away from the stream with orders not to drink too much at once, then opened their headpacks and passed out some chunks of dried meat. The boys tore away at the morsels like hyenas; Kunta chewed and swallowed so fast that he barely tasted the four bites he managed to wrest away for himself.

  Every boy’s feet had big, raw blisters on them, Kunta’s as bad as any of the rest; but it felt so good to have food and water in his stomach that he hardly noticed. As they sat by the stream, he and his kafo mates began to look around in the moonlight at one another, this time too tired rather than too afraid to speak. Kunta and Sitafa exchanged long glances, but neither could tell in the dim light if his friend looked as miserable as he felt himself.

  Kunta hardly had a chance to cool his burning feet in the stream before the kintango’s assistants ordered them back into formation for the long walk back to the jujuo. His legs and head were numb when they finally came within sight of the bamboo gates shortly before dawn. Feeling ready to die, he trudged to his hut, bumped into another boy already inside, lost his footing, stumbled to the dirt floor—and fell deep asleep right where he lay.

  On every night for the next six nights came another march, each one longer than the last. The pain of his blistered feet was terrible, but Kunta found by the fourth night that he somehow didn’t mind the pain as much, and he began to feel a welcome new emotion: pride. By the sixth march, he and the other boys discovered that though the night was very dark, they no longer needed to hold the next boy’s hand in order to maintain a straight marching line.

  On the seventh night came the kintango’s first personal lesson for the boys: showing them how men deep in the forest used the stars to guide them, so that they would never be lost. Within the first half moon, every boy of the kafo had learned how to lead the marching line by the stars, back toward the jujuo. One night when Kunta was the leader, he almost stepped on a bush rat before it noticed him and scurried for cover. Kunta was almost as proud as he was startled, for this meant that the marchers had been walking too silently to be heard even by an animal.

  But animals, the kintango told them, were the best teachers of the art of hunting, which was one of the most important things for any Mandinka to learn. When the kintango was satisfied that they had mastered the techniques of marching, he took the kafo, for the next half moon, deep into the bush far from the jujuo, where they built lean-to shelters to sleep in between countless lessons in the secrets of becoming a simbon. Kunta’s eyes never seemed to have been closed before one of the kintango’s assistants was shouting them awake for some training session.

  The kintango’s assistants pointed out where lions had recently crouched in wait, then sprung out to kill passing antelope, then where the lions had gone after their meal and laid down to sleep for the rest of the night. The tracks of the antelope herd were followed backward until they almost painted a picture for the boys of what those antelope had done through the day before they met the lions. The kafo inspected the wide cracks in rocks where wolves and hyenas hid. And they began to learn many tricks of hunting that they had never dreamed about. They had never realized, for example, that the first secret of the master simbon was never moving abruptly. The old kintango himself told the boys a story about a foolish hunter who finally starved to death in an area thick with game, because he was so clumsy and made so much noise, darting here and there, that all about him animals of every sort swiftly and silently slipped away without his even realizing that any had been near.

  The boys felt like that clumsy hunter during their lessons in imitating the sounds of animals and birds. The air was rent with their grunts and whistles, yet no birds or animals came near. Then they would be told to lie very quietly in hiding places while the kintango and his assistants made what seemed to them the same sounds, and soon animals and birds would come into sight, cocking their heads and looking for the others who had called to them.

  When the boys were practicing bird calls one afternoon, suddenly a large-bodied, heavy-beaked bird landed with a great squawking in a nearby bush. “Look!” one boy shouted with a loud laugh—and every other boy’s heart leaped into his throat, knowing that once again that boy’s big mouth was going to get them all punished together. No few times before had he shown his habit of acting before thinking—but now the kintango surprised them. He walked over to the boy and said to him very sternly, “Bring that bird to me—alive!” Kunta and his mates held their breaths as they watched the boy hunch down and creep toward the bush where the heavy bird sat stupidly, turning its head this way and that. But when the boy sprang, the bird managed to escape his clutching hands, frantically beating its stubby wings just enough to raise its big body over the brushtops—and the boy went leaping after it in hot pursuit, soon disappearing from sight.

  Kunta and the others were thunderstruck. There was clearly no limit to what the kintango might order them to do. For the next three days and two nights, as the boys went about their training sessions, they cast long glances at each other and then the nearby bush, all of them wondering and worrying about what had befallen their missing mate. As much as he had annoyed them before by getting them all beaten for things he’d done, he seemed never more one of them now that he was gone.

  The boys were just getting up on the morning of the fourth day when the jujuo lookout signaled that someone was approaching the village. A moment later came the drum message: It was he. They rushed out to meet him, whooping as if their own brother had returned from a trek to Marrakech. Thin and dirty and covered with cuts and bruises, he swayed slightly as they ran up and slapped him on the back. But he managed a weak smile—and well he should: Under his arm, its wings and feet and beak bound with a length of vine, he held the bird. It looked even worse than he did, but it was still alive.

  The kintango came out, and though speaking to that boy, h
e made it clear that he was really speaking to them all: “This taught you two important things—to do as you are told, and to keep your mouth shut. These are among the makings of men.” Then Kunta and his mates saw that boy receive the first clearly approving look cast upon anyone by the old kintango, who had known that the boy would sooner or later be able to catch a bird so heavy that it could make only short, low hops through the bush.

  The big bird was quickly roasted and eaten with great relish by everyone except his captor, who was so tired that he couldn’t stay awake long enough for it to cook. He was permitted to sleep through the day and also through the night, which Kunta and the others had to spend out in the bush on a hunting lesson. The next day, during the first rest period, the boy told his hushed mates what a torturous chase he had led, until finally, after two days and a night, he had laid a trap that the bird walked into. After trussing it up—including the snapping beak—he had somehow kept himself awake for another day and night, and by following the stars as they had been taught, had found his way back to the jujuo. For a while after that, the other boys had very little to say to him. Kunta told himself that he wasn’t really jealous, it was just that the boy seemed to think that his exploit—and the kintango’s approval of it—had made him more important than his kafo mates. And the very next time the kintango’s assistants ordered an afternoon of wrestling practice, Kunta seized the chance to grab that boy and throw him roughly to the ground.

  By the second moon of manhood training, Kunta’s kafo had become almost as skilled at survival in the forest as they would have been in their own village. They could now both detect and follow the all but invisible signs of animals, and now they were learning the secret rituals and prayers of the forefathers that could make a very great simbon himself invisible to animals. Every bite of meat they ate now was either trapped by the boys or shot by their slings and arrows. They could skin an animal twice as fast as they could before, and cook the meat over the nearly smokeless fires they had learned to build by striking flint close to dry moss under light, dry sticks. Their meals of roasted game—sometimes small bush rats—were usually topped off with insects toasted crispy in the coals.