Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  After attending Council sessions for a number of moons, Kunta guessed that most problems for the senior elders came from married people—especially from men with two, three, or four wives. Adultery was the most frequent charge by such men, and unpleasant things happened to an offending man if a husband’s accusation was backed up with convincing outside testimony or other strong evidence. If a wronged husband was poor and the offending man well off, the Council might order the offender to deliver his possessions to the husband, one at a time, until the husband said “I have enough,” which might not be until the adulterer had only his bare hut left. But with both men poor, which was usually the case, the Council might order the offender to work as the husband’s slave for a period of time considered worth the wrongful use of his wife. And Kunta flinched for one repeated offender when the elders set a date and time for him to receive a public flogging of thirty-nine lashes across his bare back by his most recently wronged husband, according to the ancient Moslem rule of “forty, save one.”

  Kunta’s own thoughts about getting married cooled somewhat as he watched and listened to the angry testimony of injured wives and husbands before the Council. Men charged that their wives failed to respect them, were unduly lazy, were unwilling to make love when their turn came, or were just generally impossible to live with. Unless an accused wife presented a strong counterargument, with some witnesses to bear her out, the senior elders usually told the husband to go that day and set any three possessions of his wife’s outside her hut and then utter toward those possessions, three times, with witnesses present, the words, “I divorce you!”

  A wife’s most serious charge—certain to bring out every woman in the village if it was suspected in advance—was to claim that her husband was not a man, meaning that he was inadequate with her in bed. The elders would appoint three old persons, one from the family of the defiant wife, another from the family of the husband, and the third from among the elders themselves. A date and time would be set for them to observe the wife and husband together in his bed. If two of the three voted that the wife was right, she won her divorce, and her family kept the dowry goats; but if two observers voted that the husband performed well, he not only got the goats back but also could beat the wife and divorce her if he wished to.

  In the rains since Kunta had returned from manhood training, no case that had been considered by the Council filled him and his mates with as much anticipation as the one that began with gossip and whispering about two older members of their own kafo and a pair of Juffre’s most eligible widows. On the day the matter finally came before the Council, nearly everyone in the village gathered early to assure themselves of the best possible seats. A number of routine old people’s problems were settled first, and then came the case of Dembo Dabo and Kadi Tamba, who had been granted a divorce more than a rain before but now were back before the Council grinning widely and holding hands and asking permission to remarry. They stopped grinning when the senior elder told them sternly: “You insisted on divorce, therefore you may not remarry—until each of you has had another wife and husband in between.”

  The gasps from those in the rear were hushed by the drumtalk announcement of the next names to be called: “Tuda Tamba and Kalilu Conteh! Fanta Bedeng and Sefo Kela!” The two members of Kunta’s kafo and the two widows stood up. The taller widow, Fanta Bedeng, spoke for all of them, sounding as if she had carefully practiced what to say; but nervousness still gripped her. “Tuda Tamba with her thirty-two rains and I with my thirty-three have small chance of catching more husbands,” she said, and proceeded to ask the Council to approve of teriya friendships for her and Tuda Tamba to cook for and sleep with Sefo Kela and Kalilu Conteh, respectively.

  Different elders asked a few questions of all four—the widows responding confidently, Kunta’s friends uncertainly, in sharp contrast to their usual boldness of manner. And then the elders turned around, murmuring among themselves. The audience was so tense and quiet that a dropped groundnut could have been heard as the elders finally turned back around. The senior elder spoke: “Allah would approve! You widows will have a man to use, and you new men will get valuable experience for when you marry later.”

  The senior elder rapped his stick twice hard against the edge of the talking drum and glared at the buzzing women in the rear. Only when they fell silent was the next name called: “Jankeh Jallon!” Having but fifteen rains, she was thus the last to be heard. All of Juffure had danced and feasted when she found her way home after escaping from some toubob who had kidnaped her. Then, a few moons later, she became big with child, although unmarried, which caused much gossip. Young and strong, she might still have found some old man’s acceptance as a third or fourth junior wife. But then the child was born: He was a strange pale tan color like a cured hide, and had very odd hair—and wherever Jankeh Jallon would appear thereafter, people would look at the ground and hurry elsewhere. Her eyes glistening with tears, she stood up now and asked the Council: What was she to do? The elders didn’t turn around to confer; the senior elder said they would have to weigh the matter—which was a most serious and difficult one—until the next moon’s Council meeting. And with that, he and the five other elders rose and left.

  Troubled, and somehow unsatisfied, by the way the session had ended, Kunta remained seated for a few moments after most of his mates and the rest of the audenice had gotten up—chattering among themselves—and headed back toward their huts. His head was still full of thoughts when Binta brought his evening meal, and he said not a word to her as he ate, nor she to him. Later, as he picked up his spear and his bow and arrow and ran with his wuolo dog to his sentry post—for this was his night to stand guard outside the village—Kunta was still thinking: about the tan baby with the strange hair, about his no doubt even stranger father, and about whether this toubob would have eaten Jankeh Jallon if she had not escaped from him.

  CHAPTER 32

  In the moonlit expanse of ripening fields of groundnuts, Kunta climbed the notched pole and sat down crosslegged on the lookout platform that was built into its sturdy fork, high above the ground. Placing his weapons beside him—along with the ax with which he planned the next morning, at last, to chop the wood for his drum frame—he watched as his wuolo dog went trotting and sniffing this way and that in the fields below. During Kunta’s first few moons on sentry duty, rains ago, he remembered snatching at his spear if so much as a rat went rustling through the grass. Every shadow seemed a monkey, every monkey a panther, and every panther a toubob, until his eyes and ears became seasoned to his task. In time, he found he could tell the difference between the snarl of a lion and that of a leopard. It took longer, however, for him to learn how to remain vigilant through these long nights. When his thoughts began to turn inward, as they always did, he often forgot where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. But finally he learned to keep alert with half of his mind and yet still explore his private thoughts with the other.

  Tonight, he was thinking about the teriya friendships that had been approved for his two friends by the Council of Elders. For several moons, they had been telling Kunta and his mates that they were going to take their case before the Council, but no one had really believed them. And now it was done. Perhaps at this very moment, he thought, they might be performing the teriya act in bed with their two widows. Kunta suddenly sat upright trying to picture what it must be like.

  It was chiefly from his kafo’s gossip that Kunta knew what little he did about under women’s clothes. In marriage negotiations, he knew, girls’ fathers had to guarantee them as virgins to get the best bride price. And a lot of bloodiness was connected with women, he knew that. Every moon they had blood; and whenever they had babies; and the night when they got married. Everyone knew how the next morning, the newlyweds’ two mothers went to the hut to put into a woven basket the white pagne cloth the couple had slept on, taking its bloodiness as proof of the girl’s virginity to the alimamo, who only then walked around the village drumtalking A
llah’s blessings on that marriage. If that white cloth wasn’t bloodied, Kunta knew, the new husband would angrily leave the hut with the two mothers as his witnesses and shout loudly, “I divorce you!” three times for all to hear.

  But teriya involved none of that—only new men sleeping with a willing widow and eating her cooking. Kunta thought for a little while about how Jinna M’Baki had looked at him, making no secret of her designs, amid the previous day’s jostling crowd as the Council session ended. Almost without realizing, he squeezed his hard foto, but he forced back the strong urge to stroke it because that would seem as if he was giving in to what that widow wanted, which was embarrassing even to think about. He didn’t really want the stickiness with her, he told himself; but now that he was a man, he had every right, if he pleased, to think about teriya, which the senior elders themselves had shown was nothing for a man to be ashamed of.

  Kunta’s mind returned to the memory of some girls he and Lamin had passed in one village when returning from their gold-hunting trip. There had been about ten of them, he guessed, all beautifully black, in tight dresses, colorful beads, and bracelets, with high breasts and little hair plaits sticking up. They had acted so strangely as he went by that it had taken Kunta a moment to realize that the show they made of looking away whenever he looked at them meant not that they weren’t interested in him but that they wanted him to be interested in them.

  Females were so confusing, he thought. Girls of their age in Juffure never paid enough attention to him even to look away. Was it because they knew what he was really like? Or was it because they knew he was far younger than he looked—too young to be worthy of their interest? Probably the girls in that village believed no traveling man leading a boy could have less than twenty or twenty-five rains, let alone his seventeen. They would have scoffed if they had known. Yet he was being sought after by a widow who knew very well how young he was. Perhaps he was lucky not to be older, Kunta thought. If he was, the girls of Juffure would be carrying on over him the way the girls of that village had, and he knew they all had just one thing on their minds: marriage. At least Jinna M’Baki was too old to be looking for anything more than a teriya friendship. Why would a man want to marry when he could get a woman to cook for him and sleep with him without getting married? There must be some reason. Perhaps it was because it was only through marrying that a man could have sons. That was a good thing. But what would he have to teach those sons until he had lived long enough to learn something about the world—not just from his father, and from the arafang, and from the kintango, but also by exploring it for himself, as his uncles had done?

  His uncles weren’t married even yet, though they were older than his father, and most men of their rains had already taken second wives by now. Was Omoro considering taking a second wife? Kunta was so startled at the thought that he sat up straight. And how would his mother feel about it? Well, at least Binta, as the senior wife, would be able to tell the second wife her duties, and make certain she worked hard and set her sleeping turns with Omoro. Would there be trouble between the two women? No, he was sure Binta wouldn’t be like the kintango’s senior wife, whom it was commonly known shouted so much abuse at his junior wives, keeping them in such a turmoil, that he rarely got any peace.

  Kunta shifted the position of his legs to let them hang for a while over the edge of his small perch, to keep the muscles from cramping. His wuolo dog was curled on the ground below him, its smooth brown fur shining in the moonlight, but he knew that the dog only seemed to be dozing, and that his nose and ears were alertly twitching for the night air’s slightest smell or sound of warning to bound up racing and barking after the baboons that had lately been raiding the groundnut fields almost every night. During each long lookout duty, few things pleased Kunta more than when, maybe a dozen times in the course of a night, he would be jerked from his thoughts by sudden distant snarlings as a baboon was sprung upon in the brush by a big cat—especially if the baboon’s growling turned into a scream quickly hushed, which meant that it had not escaped.

  But it all was quiet now as Kunta sat on the edge of his platform and looked out across the fields. The only sign of life, in fact, beyond the tall grass, was the bobbing yellow light of a Fulani herdsman in the distance as he waved his grass torch to frighten away some animal, probably a hyena, that was roaming too close to his cows. So good were the Fulani attending cattle that people claimed they could actually talk with their animals. And Omoro had told Kunta that each day, as part of their pay for herding, the Fulani would siphon a little blood from the cows’ necks, which they mixed with milk and drank. What a strange people, thought Kunta. Yet though they were not Mandinka, they were from The Gambia, like him. How much stranger must be the people—and the customs—one would find beyond the borders of his land.

  Within a moon after he returned from gold hunting with Lamin, Kunta had been restless to get on the road once again—this time for a real trip. Other young men of his kafo, he knew, were planning to travel somewhere as soon as the groundnuts and couscous got harvested, but none was going to venture far. Kunta, however, meant to put his eyes and feet upon that distant place called Mali, where, some three or four hundred rains before, according to Omoro and his uncles, the Kinte clan had begun. These forefather Kintes, he remembered, had won fame as blacksmiths, men who had conquered fire to make iron weapons that won wars and iron tools that made farming less hard. And from this original Kinte family, all of their descendants and all of the people who worked for them had taken the Kinte name. And some of that clan had moved to Mauretania, the birthplace of Kunta’s holy-man grandfather.

  So that no one else, even Omoro, would know about his plan until he wanted it known, Kunta had consulted in the strictest confidence with the arafang about the best route to Mali. Drawing a rough map in the dust, then tracing his finger along it, he had told Kunta that by following the banks of the Kamby Bolongo about six days in the direction of one’s prayers to Allah, a traveler would reach Samo Island. Beyond there, the river narrowed and curved sharply to the left and began a serpent’s twists and turns, with many confusing bolongs leading off as wide as the river, whose swampy banks couldn’t be seen in some areas for the thickness of the mangroves growing sometimes as high as ten men. Where one could see the riverbanks, the schoolmaster told him, they abounded with monkeys, hippopotamus, giant crocodiles, and herds of as many as five hundred baboons.

  But two to three days of that difficult traveling should bring Kunta to a second large island, where the low, muddy banks would rise into small cliffs matted with shrubs and small trees. The trail, which twisted alongside the river, would take him past villages of Bansang, Karantaba, and Diabugu. Soon afterward he would cross the eastern border of The Gambia and enter the Kingdom of Fulladu, and half day’s walking from there, he would arrive at the village of Fatoto. Out of his bag, Kunta took the scrap of cured hide the arafang had given him. On it was the name of a colleague in Fatoto who he said would give Kunta directions for the next twelve to fourteen days, which would take him across a land called Senegal. Beyond that, said the arafang, lay Mali and Kunta’s destination, Ka-ba, that land’s main place. To go there and return, the arafang figured, would take about a moon—not counting whatever time Kunta chose to spend in Mali.

  So many times had Kunta drawn and studied the route on his hut’s dirt floor—erasing it before Binta brought his meals—that he could almost see it before him as he sat on his perch in the groundnut fields. Thinking about the adventures that awaited him along that trail—and in Mali—he could hardly contain his eagerness to be off. He was almost as eager to tell Lamin of his plans, not only because he wanted to share his secret, but also because he had decided to take his little brother along. He knew how much Lamin had boasted about that earlier trip with his brother. Since then, Lamin had also been through manhood training and would be a more experienced and trustworthy traveling companion. But Kunta’s deepest reason for deciding to take him, he had to admit, was simply th
at he wanted company.

  For a moment, Kunta sat in the dark smiling to himself, thinking of Lamin’s face when the time would come for him to know. Kunta planned, of course, to drop the news in a very offhand way, as if he had just happened to think of it. But before then he must speak about it with Omoro, whom he knew now would feel no undue concern. In fact, he was sure that Omoro would be deeply pleased, and that even Binta, though she would worry, would be less upset than before. Kunta wondered what he might bring to Binta from Mali that she would treasure even more than her quills of gold. Perhaps some fine molded pots, or a bolt of beautiful cloth; Omoro and his uncles had said that the ancient Kinte women in Mali had been famed for the pots they made and for the brilliant patterns of cloth they wove, so maybe the Kinte women there still did those things.

  When he returned from Mali, it occurred to Kunta, he might plan still another trip for a later rain. He might even journey to that distant place beyond endless sands where his uncles had told of the long caravans of strange animals with water stored in two humps on their backs. Kalilu Conteh and Sefo Kela could have their old, ugly teriya widows, he, Kunta Kinte, would make a pilgrimage to Mecca itself. Happening at that moment to be staring in the direction of that holy city, Kunta became aware of a tiny, steady yellow light far across the fields. The Fulani herdsman over there, he realized, was cooking his breakfast. Kunta hadn’t even noticed the first faint streaks of dawn in the east.

  Reaching down to pick up his weapons and head home, he saw his ax and remembered the wood for his drum frame. But he was tired, he thought, maybe he’d chop the wood tomorrow. No, he was already halfway to the forest, and if he didn’t do it now, he knew he would probably let it go until his next sentry duty, which was twelve days later. Besides, it wouldn’t be manly to give in to his weariness. Moving his legs to test for any cramps and feeling none, he climbed down the notched pole to the ground, where his wuolo dog waited, making happy little barks and wagging his tail. After kneeling for his suba prayer, Kunta got up, stretched, took a deep breath of the cool morning air, and set off toward the bolong at a lope.