Then both drums spoke: “Ready!” The rival teams paired off, each two wrestlers crouching and glaring, face to face. “Take hold! Take hold!” the drums ordered, and each pair of wrestlers began a catlike circling. Both of the drummers now went darting here and there among the stalking men; each drummer was pounding out the names of that village’s ancestral champion wrestlers, whose spirits were looking on.
With lightning feints, one after another pair finally seized hold and began to grapple. Soon both teams struggled amid the dust clouds, their feet kicked up, nearly hiding them from the wildly yelling spectators. Dogfalls or slips didn’t count; a victory came only when one wrestler pulled another off balance, thrust him bodily upward, and hurled him to the ground. Each time there came a fall—first one of Juffure’s champions, then one of the challengers—the crowd jumped and screamed, and a drummer pounded out that winner’s name. Just beyond the excited crowd, of course, Kunta and his mates were wrestling among themselves.
At last it was over, and Juffure’s team had won by a single fall. They were awarded the horns and hooves of a freshly slaughtered bullock. Big chunks of the meat were put to roast over a fire, and the brave challengers were invited warmly to join the feasting. The people congratulated the visitors on their strength, and unmarried maidens tied small bells around all of the wrestlers’ ankles and upper arms. And during the feasting that followed, Juffure’s third-kafo boys swept and brushed to smoothness the wrestling area’s reddish dust to prepare it for a seoruba.
The hot sun had just begun to sink when the people again assembled around the wrestling area, now all dressed in their best. Against a low background of drums, both wrestling teams leaped into the ring and began to crouch and spring about, their muscles rippling and their little bells tinkling as the onlookers admired their might and grace. The drums suddenly pounded hard; now the maidens ran out into the ring, weaving coyly among the wrestlers as the people clapped. Then the drummers began to beat their hardest and fastest rhythm—and the maidens’ feet kept pace.
One girl after another, sweating and exhausted, finally stumbled from the ring, flinging to the dust her colorfully dyed tiko headwrap. All eyes watched eagerly to see if the marriageable man would pick up that tiko, thus showing his special appreciation of that maiden’s dance—for it could mean he meant soon to consult her father about her bridal price in goats and cows. Kunta and his mates, who were too young to understand such things, thought the excitement was over and ran off to play with their slingshots. But it had just begun, for a moment later, everyone gasped as a tiko was picked up by one of the visiting wrestlers. This was a major event—and a happy one—but the lucky maiden would not be the first who was lost through marriage to another village.
CHAPTER 13
On the final morning of the festival, Kunta was awakened by the sound of screams. Pulling on his dundiko, he went dashing out, and his stomach knotted with fright. Before several of the nearby huts, springing up and down, shrieking wildly and brandishing spears, were half a dozen men in fierce masks, tall head-dresses, and costumes of leaf and bark. Kunta watched in terror as one man entered each hut with a roar and emerged jerking roughly by the arm a trembling boy of the third kafo.
Joined by a cluster of his own equally terrified second-kafo mates, Kunta peered with wide eyes around the corner of a hut. A heavy white cotton hood was over the head of each third-kafo boy. Spying Kunta, Sitafa, and their group of little boys, one of the masked men dashed toward them waving his spear and shouting fearfully. Though he stopped short and turned back to his hooded charge, the boys scattered, squealing in horror. And when all of the village’s third-kafo boys had been collected, they were turned over to slaves, who took them by the hand and led them, one by one, out the village gate.
Kunta had heard that these older boys were going to be taken away from Juffure for their manhood training, but he had no idea that it would happen like this. The departure of the third-kafo boys, along with the men who would conduct their manhood training, cast a shadow of sadness upon the entire village. In the days that followed, Kunta and his mates could talk of nothing but the terrifying things they had seen, and of the even more terrifying things they had overheard about the mysterious manhood training. In the mornings, the arafang rapped their heads for their lack of interest in memorizing the Koranic verses. And after school, trooping along behind their goats out into the bush, Kunta and his mates each tried not to think about what each could not forget—that he would be among Juffure’s next group of hooded boys jerked and kicked out through the village gate.
They all had heard that a full twelve moons would pass before those third-kafo boys would return to the village—but then as men. Kunta said that someone had told him that the boys in manhood training got beatings daily. A boy named Karamo said they were made to hunt wild animals for food; and Sitafa said they were sent out alone at night into the deep forest, to find their own way back. But the worst thing, which none of them mentioned, although it made Kunta nervous each time he had to relieve himself, was that during the manhood training a part of his foto would be cut off. After a while, the more they talked, the idea of manhood training became so frightening that the boys stopped talking about it, and each of them tried to conceal his fears within himself, not wanting to show that he wasn’t brave.
Kunta and his mates had gotten much better at goatherding since their first anxious days out in the bush. But they still had much to learn. Their job, they were beginning to discover, was hardest in the mornings, when swarms of biting flies kept the goats bolting this way and that, quivering their skins and switching their stubby tails as the boys and the dogs rushed about trying to herd them together again. But before noon, when the sun grew so hot that even the flies sought cooler places, the tired goats settled down to serious grazing, and the boys could finally enjoy themselves.
By now they were crack shots with their slingshots—and also with the new bows and arrows their fathers had given them on graduating to the second kafo—and they spent an hour or so killing every small creature they could find: hares, ground squirrels, bush rats, lizards, and one day a tricky spurfowl that tried to decoy Kunta away from her nest by dragging a wing as if it had been injured. In the early afternoon, the boys skinned and cleaned the day’s game, rubbing the insides with the salt they always carried, and then, building a fire, roasted themselves a feast.
Each day out in the bush seemed to be hotter than the day before. Earlier and earlier, the insects stopped biting the goats to look for shade, and the goats bent down on their knees to get at the short grass that remained green beneath the parched taller grass. But Kunta and his mates hardly noticed the heat. Glistening with sweat, they played as if each day were the most exciting one in their lives. With their bellies tight after the afternoon meal, they wrestled or raced or sometimes just yelled and made faces at one another, taking turns at keeping a wary eye on the grazing goats. Playing at war, the boys clubbed and speared each other with thick-rooted weeds until someone held up a handful of grass as a sign of peace. Then they cooled off their warrior spirits by rubbing their feet with the contents of the stomach of a slaughtered rabbit; they had heard in the grandmothers’ stories that real warriors used the stomach of a lamb.
Sometimes Kunta and his mates romped with their faithful wuolo dogs, which Mandinkas had kept for centuries, for they were known as one of the very finest breeds of hunting and guard dogs in all of Africa. No man could count the goats and cattle that had been saved on dark nights from killer hyenas by the howling of the wuolos. But hyenas weren’t the game stalked by Kunta and his mates when they played at being huntsmen. In their imaginations, as they crept about in the tall, sun-baked grass of the savanna, their quarry were rhinoceros, elephant, leopard, and the mighty lion.
Sometimes, as a boy followed his goats around in their search for grass and shade, he would find himself separated from his mates. The first few times it happened to him, Kunta herded up his goats as quickly as he could and he
aded back to be near Sitafa. But soon he began to like these moments of solitude, for they gave him the chance to stalk some great beast by himself. It was no ordinary antelope, leopard, or even lion that he sought in his daydreaming; it was that most feared and dangerous of all beasts—a maddened buffalo.
The one he tracked had spread so much terror throughout the land that many hunters had been sent to kill the savage animal, but they had managed only to wound it, and one after another, it had gored them with its wicked horns. Even more bloodthirsty than before with its painful wound, the buffalo had then charged and killed several farmers from Juffure who had been working on their fields outside the village. The famed simbon Kunta Kinte had been deep in the forest, smoking out a bee’s nest to sustain his energy with rich honey, when he heard the distant drumtalk begging him to save the people of the village of his birth. He could not refuse.
Not even a blade of the dry grass crackled under his feet, so silently did he stalk for signs of the buffalo’s trail, using the sixth sense that told master simbons which way animals would travel. And soon he found the tracks he sought; they were larger than any he had ever seen. Now trotting silently, he drew deeply into his nostrils the foul smell that led him to giant, fresh buffalo dung. And maneuvering now with all the craft and skill at his command, simbon Kinte finally spotted the huge bulk of the beast himself—it would have been concealed from ordinary eyes—hiding in the dense, high grass.
Straining back his bow, Kinte took careful aim—and sent the arrow thudding home. The buffalo was badly wounded now, but more dangerous than ever. Springing suddenly from side to side, Kinte evaded the beast’s desperate, stricken charge and braced himself as it wheeled to charge again. He fired his second arrow only when he had to leap aside at the last instant—and the huge buffalo crashed down dead.
Kinte’s piercing whistle brought from hiding, awed and trembling, those previous hunters who had failed where he had gloriously succeeded. He ordered them to remove the huge hide and horns and to summon still more men to help drag the carcass all the way back to Juffure. The joyously shouting people had laid down a pathway of hides within the village gate so that Kinte would not get dust upon his feet. “Simbon Kinte!” the talking drum beat out. “Simbon Kinte!” the children shouted, waving leafy branches above their heads. Everyone was pushing and shoving and trying to touch the mighty hunter so that some of his prowess might rub off on them. Small boys danced around the huge carcass, reenacting the kill with wild cries and long sticks.
And now, walking toward him from amid the crowd, came the strongest, most graceful, and most beautifully black of all the maidens in Juffure—indeed, in all of The Gambia—and kneeling before him, she offered a calabash of cool water; but Kinte, not thirsty, merely wet his fingers, to favor her, whereupon she drank that water with happy tears, thus showing to everyone the fullness of her love.
The clamoring crowd was spreading—making way for aged, wrinkled, gray-headed Omoro and Binta, who came tottering against their canes. The simbon permitted his old mother to embrace him while Omoro looked on, eyes filled with pride. And the people of Juffure chanted “Kinte! Kinte!” Even the dogs were barking their acclaim.
Was that his own wuolo dog barking? “Kinte! Kinte!” Was that Sitafa yelling frantically? Kunta snapped out of it just in time to see his forgotten goats bounding toward someone’s farm. Sitafa and his other mates and their dogs helped to herd them up again before any damage was done, but Kunta was so ashamed that a whole moon went by before he drifted off into any more such daydreams.
CHAPTER 14
As hot as the sun already was, the five long moons of the dry A season had only begun. The heat devils shimmered, making objects larger in the distance, and the people sweated in their huts almost as much as they did in the fields. Before Kunta left home each morning for his goatherding, Binta saw that he protected his feet well with red palm oil, but each afternoon, when he returned to the village from the open bush, his lips were parched and the soles of his feet were dry and cracked by the baking earth beneath them. Some of the boys came home with bleeding feet, but out they would go again each morning—uncomplaining, like their fathers—into the fierce heat of the dry grazing land, which was even worse than in the village.
By the time the sun reached its zenith, the boys and their dogs and the goats all lay panting in the shade of scrub trees, the boys too tired to hunt and roast the small game that had been their daily sport. Mostly, they just sat and chatted as cheerfully as they could, but somehow by this time the adventure of goatherding had lost some of its excitement.
It didn’t seem possible that the sticks they gathered every day would be needed to keep them warm at night, but once the sun set, the air turned as cold as it had been hot. And after their evening meal, the people of Juffure huddled around their crackling fires. Men of Omoro’s age sat talking around one fire, and a little distance away was the fire of the elders. Around still another sat the women and the unmarried girls, apart from the old grandmothers, who told their nightly stories to the little first-kafo children around a fourth fire.
Kunta and the other second-kafo boys were too proud to sit with the naked first kafo of Lamin and his mates, so they squatted far enough away not to seem part of that noisy, giggling group—yet near enough to hear the old grandmother’s stories, which still thrilled them as much as ever. Sometimes Kunta and his mates eavesdropped on those at other fires; but the conversations were mostly about the heat. Kunta heard the old men recalling times when the sun had killed plants and burned crops; how it had made the well go stale, or dry, of times when the heat had dried the people out like husks. This hot season was bad, they said, but not as bad as many they could remember. It seemed to Kunta that older people always could remember something worse.
Then, abruptly one day, breathing the air was like breathing flames, and that night the people shivered beneath their blankets with the cold creeping into their bones. Again the next morning, they were mopping their faces and trying to draw a full breath. That afternoon the harmattan wind began. It wasn’t a hard wind, nor even a gusty wind, either of which would have helped. Instead it blew softly and steadily, dusty and dry, day and night, for nearly half a moon. As it did each time it came, the constant blowing of the harmattan wore away slowly at the nerves of the people of Juffure. And soon parents were yelling more often than usual at their children, and whipping them for no good reason. And though bickering was unusual among the Mandinkas, hardly a daytime hour passed without loud shoutings between some adults, especially between younger husbands and wives like Omoro and Binta. Suddenly then nearby doorways would fill with people watching as the couple’s mothers went rushing into that hut. A moment later the shouting would grow louder, and next a rain of sewing baskets, cooking pots, calabashes, stools, and clothes would be hurled out the door. Then, bursting out themselves, the wife and her mother would snatch up the possessions and go storming off to the mother’s hut.
After about two moons, just as it had begun, the harmattan suddenly stopped. In less than a day, the air became still, the sky clear. Within one night, a parade of wives slipped back in with their husbands, and their mothers-in-law were exchanging small gifts and patching up arguments all over the village. But the five long moons of the dry season were only half over. Though food was still plentiful in the storehouses, the mothers only cooked small quantities, for no one, not even the usually greedy children, felt like eating much. Everyone was sapped of strength by the sun’s heat, and the people talked less and went about doing only the things they had to do.
The hides of the gaunt cattle in the village were broken by lumpy sores where biting flies had laid their eggs. A quietness had come upon the scrawny chickens that normally ran squawking around the village, and they lay in the dust on their sides, with their wings fanned out and their beaks open. Even the monkeys now were seldom seen or heard, for most of them had gone into the forest for more shade. And the goats, Kunta noticed, grazing less and less in the hea
t, had grown nervous and thin.
For some reason—perhaps it was the heat, or perhaps simply because they were growing older—Kunta and his goatherding mates, who had spent every day together out in the bush for almost six moons, now began to drift off alone with their own small herds. It had happened for several days before Kunta realized that he had never before been completely away from other people for any real length of time. He looked across at other boys and their goats in the distance, scattered across the silence of the sunbaked bush. Beyond them lay the fields where the farmers were chopping the weeds that had grown in the moons since the last harvest. The tall piles of weeds they raked to dry under the sun seemed to wave and shimmer in the heat.
Wiping the sweat from his brow, it seemed to Kunta that his people were always enduring one hardship or another—something uncomfortable or difficult, or frightening, or threatening to life itself. He thought about the burning, hot days and the cold nights that followed them. And he thought about the rains that would come next, turning the village into a mudhole and finally submerging the walking paths until the people had to travel in their canoes from place to place where usually they walked. They needed the rain as they needed the sun, but there always seemed to be too much or too little. Even when the goats were fat and the trees were heavy with fruit and blossoms, he knew that would be the time when the last rain’s harvest would run out in the family storehouses and that this would bring the hungry season, with people starving and some even dying, like his own dearly remembered Grandma Yaisa.