Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  Abruptly the black one began jabbing at Kunta’s chest with his finger, then exclaiming, “You—you Toby!” Kunta didn’t understand, and his face showed it, so the black one kept jabbing him and saying the same thing over and over. Slowly it dawned on Kunta that the black one was attempting to make him understand something he was saying in the strange toubob tongue.

  When Kunta continued to stare at him dumbly, the black one began jabbing at his own chest. “Me Samson!” he exclaimed. “Samson!” He moved his jabbing finger again to Kunta. “You To-by! Toby. Massa say you name Toby!”

  When what he meant began to sink in, it took all of Kunta’s self-control to grip his flooding rage without any facial sign of the slightest understanding. He wanted to shout “I am Kunta Kinte, first son of Omoro, who is the son of the holy man Kairaba Kunta Kinte!”

  Losing patience with Kunta’s apparent stupidity, the black one cursed, shrugged his shoulders, and led him hobbling into another hut, where he gestured for Kunta to wash himself in a large, wide tin tub that held some water. The black one threw into the water a rag and a brown chunk of what Kunta’s nose told him was something like the soap that Juffure women made of hot melted fat mixed with the lye of water dripped through wood ashes. The black one watched, scowling, as Kunta took advantage of the opportunity to wash himself. When he was through, the black one tossed to him some different toubob garments to cover his chest and legs, then a frayed hat of yellowish straw such as the others wore. How would these pagans fare under the heat of Africa’s sun, Kunta wondered.

  The black one led him next to still another hut. Inside, an old woman irritably banged down before Kunta a flat tin of food. He gulped down the thick gruel, and a bread resembling munko cake, and washed it down with some hot brown beefy-tasting broth from a gourd cup. Next they went to a narrow, cramped hut whose smell told of its use in advance. Pretending to pull down his lower garment, the black one hunched over a large hole cut into a plank seat and grunted heavily as if he were relieving himself. A small pile of corncobs lay in one corner, and Kunta didn’t know what to make of them. But he guessed that the black one’s purpose was to demonstrate the toubob’s ways—of which he wished to learn all that he could, the better to escape.

  As the black one led him past the next few huts, they went by an old man seated in some strange chair; it was rocking slowly back and forth as he wove dried cornshucks into what Kunta guessed was a broom. Without looking up, the old man cast toward him a not unkindly glance, but Kunta ignored it coldly.

  Picking up one of the long, stout knives that Kunta had seen the others carrying, the black one motioned with his head toward the distant field, grunting and gesturing for Kunta to follow him. Hobbling along in the iron cuffs—which were chafing his ankles—Kunta could see in the field ahead that the females and the younger blacks were bending up and down, gathering and piling dried cornstalks behind the older men in front of them, who slashed down the stalks with swishing blows of their long knives.

  Most of the men’s backs were bared and glistening with sweat. His eyes searched for any of the branding-iron marks such as his back bore—but he saw only the scars that had been left by whips. The toubob rode up on his “hoss,” exchanged words briefly with the black one, then fixed a threatening stare on Kunta as the black one gestured for his attention.

  Slashing down about a dozen cornstalks, the black one turned, bent, and made motions for Kunta to pick them up and pile them as the others were doing. The toubob jerked his horse closer alongside Kunta, his whip cocked and the scowl on his face making his intent clear if Kunta should refuse to obey. Enraged at his helplessness, Kunta bent down and picked up two of the cornstalks. Hesitating, he heard the black one’s knife swishing ahead. Bending over again, he picked up two more cornstalks, and two more. He could feel the stares of other black ones upon him from adjacent rows, and could see the feet of the toubob’s horse. He could feel the relief of the other blacks, and at last the horse’s feet moved away.

  Without raising his head, Kunta saw that the toubob rode this way or that to wherever he saw someone who wasn’t working swiftly enough to please him, and then with an angry shout, his lash would go cracking down across a back.

  Off in the distance, Kunta saw that there was a road. On it, a few times during the hot afternoon, through the sweat pouring down his forehead and stinging in his eyes, he caught glances of a lone rider on a horse, and twice he saw a wagon being drawn. Turning his head the other way, he could see the edge of the forest into which he had tried to escape. And from where he was piling the cornstalks now, he could see the forest’s narrowness, which had helped him to get caught, because he had not realized that narrowness before. After a while, Kunta had to stop glancing in that direction, for the urge to spring up and bound toward those trees was almost irresistible. Each step he took, in any case, reminded him that he would never get five steps across the field wearing those iron hobbles. As he worked through the afternoon, Kunta decided that before he tried his next escape, he must find some kind of weapon to fight dogs and men with. No servant of Allah should ever fail to fight if he is attacked, he reminded himself. If it was dogs or men, wounded buffalo or hungry lions, no son of Omoro Kinte would ever entertain the thought of giving up.

  It was after sundown when the horn sounded once again—this time in the distance. As Kunta watched the other blacks hurrying into a line, he wished he could stop thinking of them as belonging to the tribes they resembled, for they were but unworthy pagans not fit to mingle with those who had come with him on the big canoe.

  But how stupid the toubob must be to have those of Fulani blood—even such poor specimens as these—picking up cornstalks instead of tending cattle; anyone knew that the Fulani were born to tend cattle, that indeed Fulani and cattle talked together. This thought was interrupted as the toubob on his “hoss” cracked the whip to direct Kunta to the end of the line. As he obeyed, the squat, heavy woman at the end of the line took several quick forward steps, trying to get as far as possible from Kunta. He felt like spitting on her. As they began to march—each hobbling step chafing at his ankles, which had been rubbed raw and were beginning to seep blood—Kunta heard some hounds barking far away. He shivered, remembering those that had tracked him and attacked him. Then his mind flashed a memory of how his own wuolo had died fighting the men who had captured him in Africa.

  Back in his hut, Kunta kneeled and touched his forehead to the hard dirt floor in the direction in which he knew the next sun would rise. He prayed for a long time to make up for the two prayers he had been unable to perform out in the field, which would certainly have been interrupted by a lash across his back from the toubob who rode the “hoss.”

  After finishing his prayer, Kunta sat bolt upright and spoke softly for a while in the secret sira kango tongue, asking his ancestors to help him endure. Then—pressing between his fingers a pair of cock’s feathers he had managed to pick up without being noticed while “Samson” had led him around that morning—he wondered when he would get the chance to steal a fresh egg. With the feathers of the cock and some finely crushed fresh eggshell, he would be able to prepare a powerful fetish to the spirits, whom he would ask to bless the dust where his last footsteps had touched in his village. If that dust was blessed, his footprints would one day reappear in Juffure, where every man’s footprints were recognizable to his neighbors, and they would rejoice at this sign that Kunta Kinte was still alive and that he would return safely to his village. Someday.

  For the thousandth time, he relived the nightmare of his capture. If only the cracking twig that alerted him had snapped a single footstep earlier, he could have leaped and snatched up his spear. Tears of rage came welling up into Kunta’s eyes. It seemed to him that for moons without end, all that he had known was being tracked and attacked and captured and chained.

  No! He would not allow himself to act this way. After all, he was a man now, seventeen rains of age, too old to weep and wallow in self-pity. Wiping away the tears
, he crawled onto his thin, lumpy mattress of dried cornshucks and tried to go to sleep—but all he could think of was the name “To-by” he had been given, and rage rose in him once more. Furiously, he kicked his legs in frustration—but the movement only gouged the iron cuffs deeper into his ankles, which made him cry again.

  Would he ever grow up to be a man like Omoro? He wondered if his father still thought of him, and if his mother had given to Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi the love that had been taken away from her when he was stolen. He thought of all of Juffure, and of how he had never realized more than now how very deeply he loved his village. As it had often been on the big canoe, Kunta lay for half the night with scenes of Juffure flashing through his mind, until he made himself shut his eyes and finally sleep came.

  CHAPTER 45

  With each passing day, the hobbles on his ankles made it more and more difficult and painful for Kunta to get around. But he kept on telling himself that the chances of gaining freedom depended upon continuing to force himself to do whatever was wanted of him, all behind a mask of complete blankness and stupidity. As he did so, his eyes, ears, and nose would miss nothing—no weapon he might use, no toubob weakness he might exploit—until finally his captors were lulled into removing the cuffs. Then he would run away again.

  Soon after the conch horn blew each morning, Kunta would limp outside to watch as the strange black ones emerged from their huts, the sleepiness still in their faces, and splashed themselves with water from buckets drawn up in the well nearby. Missing the sound of the village women’s pestles thumping the couscous for their families’ morning meals, he would enter the hut of the old cooking woman and bolt down whatever she gave him—except for any filthy pork.

  As he ate each morning, his eyes would search the hut for a possible weapon he might take without being detected. But apart from the black utensils that hung on hooks above her fireplace, there were only the round, flat tin things upon which she gave him what he ate with his fingers. He had seen her eating with a slender metal object that had three or four closely spaced points to stab the food with. He wondered what it was, and thought that although it was small it might be useful—if he could ever catch her eyes averted for a moment when the shiny object was within reach.

  One morning, as he was eating his gruel, watching as the cooking woman cut a piece of meat with a knife he hadn’t seen before and plotting what he would do with it if it were in his hands instead of hers, he heard a piercing squeal of agony from outside the hut. It was so close to his thoughts that he nearly jumped from his seat. Hobbling outside, he found the others already lined up for work—many of them still chewing the last bites of “breakfast,” lest they get a lashing for being late—while there on the ground beside them lay a swine thrashing about with blood pulsing from its cut throat as two black men lifted it into a steaming pot of water, then withdrew it and scraped off the hair. The swine’s skin was the color of a toubob, he noticed, as they suspended it by the heels, slit open its belly, and pulled out its insides. Kunta’s nose stifled at the spreading smell of guts, and as he marched off with the others toward the fields, he had to suppress a shudder of revulsion at the thought of having to live among these pagan eaters of such a filthy animal.

  There was frost on the cornstalks every morning now, and a haziness hung low over the fields until the heat of the climbing sun would burn it away. Allah’s powers never ceased to amaze Kunta—that even in a place as distant as this toubob land was across the big water, Allah’s sun and moon still rose and crossed the sky, though the sun was not so hot nor the moon so beautiful as in Juffure. It was only the people in this accursed place who seemed not of Allah’s doing. The toubob were inhuman, and as for the blacks, it was simply senseless to try to understand them.

  When the sun reached the middle of the sky, again the conch horn blew, signaling another lineup for the arrival of a wooden sled pulled by an animal similar to a horse, but more resembling a huge donkey, which Kunta had overheard being spoken of as a “mule.” Walking beside the sled was the old cooking woman, who proceeded to pass out flat cakes of bread and a gourdful of some kind of stew to each person in the line, who either stood or sat and gulped it down, then drank some water dipped from a barrel that was also on the sled. Every day, Kunta warily smelled the stew before tasting it, to make sure he didn’t put any swine meat into his mouth, but it usually contained only vegetables and no meat that he could see or smell at all. He felt better about eating the bread, for he had seen some of the black women making corn into meal by beating it in a mortar with a pestle of stone, about as it was done in Africa, although Binta’s pestle was made of wood.

  Some days they served foods Kunta knew of from his home, such as groundnuts, and kanjo—which was called “okra”—and so-so, which was called “black-eyed peas.” And he saw how much these black ones loved the large fruit that he heard here being called “watermelon.” But he saw that Allah appeared to have denied these people the mangoes, the hearts of palm, the breadfruits, and so many of the other delicacies that grew almost anywhere one cared to look on the vines and trees and bushes in Africa.

  Every now and then the toubob who had brought Kunta to this place—the one they called “massa”—rode out into the fields when they were working. In his whitish straw hat, as he spoke to the toubob field boss, he gestured with a long, slender, plaited leather switch, and Kunta noticed that the toubob “oberseer” grinned and shuffled almost as much as the blacks whenever he was around.

  Many such strange things happened each day, and Kunta would sit thinking about them back in his hut while he waited to find sleep. These black ones seemed to have no concern in their lives beyond pleasing the toubob with his lashing whip. It sickened him to think how these black ones jumped about their work whenever they saw a toubob, and how, if that toubob spoke a word to them, they rushed to do whatever he told them to. Kunta couldn’t fathom what had happened to so destroy their minds that they acted like goats and monkeys. Perhaps it was because they had been born in this place rather than in Africa, because the only home they had ever known were the toubob’s huts of logs glued together with mud and swine bristles. These black ones had never known what it meant to sweat under the sun not for toubob masters but for themselves and their own people.

  But no matter how long he stayed among them, Kunta vowed never to become like them, and each night his mind would go exploring again into ways to escape from this despised land. He couldn’t keep from reviling himself almost nightly for his previous failure to get away. Playing back in his mind what it had been like among the thorn bushes and the slavering dogs, he knew that he must have a better plan for the next time. First he had to make himself a saphie charm to insure safety and success. Then he must either find or make some kind of weapon. Even a sharpened stick could have speared through those dogs’ bellies, he thought, and he could have been away again before the black one and the toubob had been able to cut their way through the underbrush to where they had found him fighting off the dogs. Finally, he must acquaint himself with the surrounding countryside so that when he escaped again, he would know where to look for better hiding places.

  Though he often lay awake half the night, restless with such thoughts, Kunta always awoke before the first crowing of the cocks, which always aroused the other fowl. The birds in this place, he noticed, merely twittered and sang—nothings like the deafening squawks of great flocks of green parrots that had opened the mornings in Juffure. There didn’t seem to be any parrots here, or monkeys either, which always began the day at home by chattering angrily in the trees overhead, breaking off sticks and hurling them to the ground at the people underneath. Nor had Kunta seen any goats here—a fact he found no less incredible than that these people kept swine in pens—“pigs” or “hogs,” they called them—and even fed the filthy things.

  But the squealing of the swine, it seemed to Kunta, was no uglier than the language of the toubob who so closely resembled them. He would have given anything to hear even
a sentence of Mandinka, or any other African tongue. He missed his chain mates from the big canoe—even those who weren’t Moslem—and he wondered what had happened to them. Where had they been taken? To other toubob farms such as this one? Wherever they were, were they longing as he was to hear once again the sweetness of their own tongues—and yet feeling shut out and alone, as he did, because they knew nothing of the toubob language?

  Kunta realized that he would have to learn something of this strange speech if he was ever to understand enough about the toubob or his ways to escape from him. Without letting anyone know, he already recognized some words: “pig,” “hog,” “watermelon,” “black-eyed peas,” “oberseer,” “massa,” and especially “yes suh, massa,” which was about the only thing he ever heard the black ones say to them. He had also heard the black ones describe the she toubob who lived with “massa” in the big white house as “the missus.” Once, from a distance, Kunta had glimpsed her, a bony creature the color of a toad’s underbelly, as she walked around cutting off some flowers among the vines and bushes that grew alongside the big house.

  Most of the other toubob words that Kunta heard still confused him. But behind his expressionless mask, he tried hard to make sense of them, and slowly he began to associate various sounds with certain objects and actions. But one sound in particular was extremely puzzling to him, though he heard it exclaimed over and over nearly every day by toubob and blacks alike. What, he wondered, was a “nigger”?

  CHAPTER 46

  With the cutting and piling of the cornstalks at last completed, the “oberseer” began assigning different blacks to a variety of tasks after the conch horn blew each dawn. One morning Kunta was given the job of snapping loose from their thick vines and piling onto a “wagon,” as he’d learned they called the rolling boxes, a load of large, heavy vegetables the color of overripe mangoes and somewhat resembling the big gourds that women in Juffure dried out and cut in half to make household bowls. The blacks here called them “punkins.”