Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  The harvest season was a happy one—and after that, the harvest festival—but it was over so soon, and then the long, hot dry season would come again, with its awful harmattan, when Binta kept shouting at him and beating on Lamin—until he almost felt sorry for his pest of a small brother. As he herded his goats back toward the village, Kunta remembered the stories he had heard so many times when he was as young as Lamin, about how the forefathers had always lived through great fears and dangers. As far back as time went, Kunta guessed, the lives of the people had been hard. Perhaps they always would be.

  Each evening in the village now, the alimamo led the prayers for Allah to send the rains. And then one day, excitement filled Juffure when some gentle winds stirred up the dust—for those winds meant that the rains were soon to come. And the next morning, the people of the village gathered out in the fields, where the farmers set afire the tall piles of weeds they had raked up, and thick smoke coiled up over the fields. The heat was nearly unbearable, but the sweating people danced and cheered, and the first-kafo children went racing and whooping about, each trying to catch good-luck pieces of drifting, feathery flakes of ashes.

  The next day’s light winds began to sift the loose ashes over the fields, enriching the soil to grow yet another crop. The farmers now began chopping busily with their hoes, preparing the long rows to receive the seeds—in this seventh planting time through which Kunta had lived in the endless cycle of the seasons.

  CHAPTER 15

  Two rains had passed, and Binta’s belly was big again, and her temper was even shorter than usual. So quick was she to whack both her sons, in fact, that Kunta was grateful each morning when goatherding let him escape her for a few hours, and when he returned in the afternoon, he couldn’t help feeling sorry for Lamin, who was only old enough to get into mischief and get beaten but not old enough to get out of the house alone. So one day when he came home and found his little brother in tears, he asked Binta—not without some misgivings—if Lamin could join him on an errand, and she snapped “Yes!” Naked little Lamin could hardly contain his happiness over this amazing act of kindness, but Kunta was so disgusted with his own impulsiveness that he gave him a good kick and a cuffing as soon as they got beyond Binta’s earshot. Lamin hollered—and then followed his brother like a puppy.

  Every afternoon after that, Kunta found Lamin waiting anxiously at the door in hopes that his big brother would take him out again. Kunta did, nearly every day—but not because he wanted to. Binta would profess such great relief at getting some rest from both of them that Kunta now feared a beating if he didn’t take Lamin along. It seemed as if a bad dream had attached his naked little brother to Kunta’s back like some giant leech from the bolong. But soon Kunta began to notice that some of the kafo mates also had small brothers tagging along behind them. Though they would play off to one side or dart about nearby, they always kept a sharp eye on their big brothers, who did their best to ignore them. Sometimes the big boys would dash off suddenly, jeering back at the young ones as they scrambled to catch up with them. When Kunta and his mates climbed trees, their little brothers, trying to follow, usually tumbled back to the ground, and the older boys would laugh loudly at their clumsiness. It began to be fun having them around.

  Alone with Lamin, as he sometimes was, Kunta might pay his brother a bit more attention. Pinching a tiny seed between his fingers, he would explain that Juffure’s giant silk-cotton tree grew from a thing that small. Catching a honeybee, Kunta would hold it carefully for Lamin to see the stinger; then, turning the bee around, he would explain how bees sucked the sweetness from flowers and used it to make honey in their nests in the tallest trees. And Lamin began to ask Kunta a lot of questions, most of which he would patiently answer. There was something nice about Lamin’s feeling that Kunta knew everything. It made Kunta feel older than his eight rains. In spite of himself, he began to regard his little brother as something more than a pest.

  Kunta took great pains not to show it, of course, but returning homeward now each afternoon with his goats, he really looked forward to Lamin’s eager reception. Once Kunta thought that he even saw Binta smile as he and Lamin left the hut. In fact, Binta would often snap at her younger son, “Have your brother’s manners!” The next moment, she might whack Kunta for something, but not as often as she used to. Binta would also tell Lamin that if he didn’t act properly, he couldn’t go with Kunta, and Lamin would be very good for the rest of the day.

  He and Lamin would always leave the hut now walking very politely, hand in hand, but once outside, Kunta went dashing and whooping—with Lamin racing behind him—to join the other second- and first-kafo boys. During one afternoon’s romping, when a fellow goatherd of Kunta’s happened to run into Lamin, knocking him on his back, Kunta was instantly there, shoving that boy roughly aside and exclaiming hotly, “That’s my brother!” The boy protested and they were ready to exchange blows when the others grabbed their arms. Kunta snatched the crying Lamin by the hand and jerked him away from their staring playmates. Kunta was both deeply embarrassed and astonished at himself for acting as he had toward his own kafo mate—and especially over such a thing as a sniffling little brother. But after that day, Lamin began openly trying to imitate whatever he saw Kunta do, sometimes even with Binta or Omoro looking on. Though he pretended not to like it, Kunta couldn’t help feeling just a little proud.

  When Lamin fell from a low tree he was trying to climb one afternoon, Kunta showed him how to do it right. At one time or another, he taught his little brother how to wrestle (so that Lamin could win the respect of a boy who had humiliated him in front of his kafo mates); how to whistle through his fingers (though Lamin’s best whistle was nowhere near as piercing as Kunta’s); and he showed him the kind of berry leaves from which their mother liked to make tea. And he cautioned Lamin to take the big, shiny dung beetles they always saw crawling in the hut and set them gently outside on the ground, for it was very bad luck to harm them. To touch a rooster’s spur, he told him, was even worse luck. But however hard he tried, Kunta couldn’t make Lamin understand how to tell the time of day by the position of the sun. “You’re just too little, but you’ll learn.” Kunta would still shout at him sometimes, if Lamin seemed too slow in learning something simple; or he would give him a slap if he was too much of a pest. But he would always feel so badly about it that he might even let the naked Lamin wear his dundiko for a while.

  As he grew closer to his brother, Kunta began to feel less deeply something that had often bothered him before—the gulf between his eight rains and the older boys and men of Juffure. Indeed, scarcely a day of his life that he could remember had ever passed without something to remind him that he was still of the second kafo—one who yet slept in the hut of his mother. The older boys who were away now at manhood training had always had nothing but sneers and cuffings for those of Kunta’s age. And the grown men, such as Omoro and the other fathers, acted as if a second-kafo boy were something merely to be tolerated. As for the mothers, well, often when Kunta was out in the bush, he would think angrily that whenever he got to be a man, he certainly intended to put Binta in her place as a woman—although he did intend to show her kindness and forgiveness, since after all, she was his mother.

  Most irritating of all to Kunta and his mates, though, was how the second-kafo girls with whom they had grown up were now so quick to remind them that they were thinking already of becoming wives. It rankled Kunta that girls married at fourteen rains or even younger, while boys didn’t get married until they were men of thirty rains or more. In general, being of the second kafo had always been an embarrassment to Kunta and his mates, except for their afternoons off by themselves in the bush, and in Kunta’s case, his new relationship with Lamin.

  Every time he and his brother would be walking somewhere by themselves, Kunta would imagine that he was taking Lamin on some journey, as men sometimes did with their sons. Now, somehow, Kunta felt a special responsibility to act older, with Lamin looking up to him
as a source of knowledge. Walking alongside, Lamin would ply Kunta with a steady stream of questions.

  “What’s the world like?”

  “Well,” said Kunta, “no man or canoes ever journeyed so far. And no one knows all there is to know about it.”

  “What do you learn from the arafang?”

  Kunta recited the first verses of the Koran in Arabic and then said, “Now you try.” But when Lamin tried, he got badly confused—as Kunta had known he would—and Kunta said paternally, “It takes time.”

  “Why does no one harm owls?”

  “Because all our dead ancestors’ spirits are in owls.” Then he told Lamin something of their late Grandma Yaisa. “You were just a baby, and cannot remember her.”

  “What’s that bird in the tree?”

  “A hawk.”

  “What does he eat?”

  “Mice and other birds and things.”

  “Oh.”

  Kunta had never realized how much he knew—but now and then Lamin asked something of which Kunta knew nothing at all

  “Is the sun on fire?” Or: “Why doesn’t our father sleep with us?”

  At such times, Kunta would usually grunt, then stop talking—as Omoro did when he tired of so many of Kunta’s questions. Then Lamin would say no more, since Mandinka home, training taught that one never talked to another who did not want to talk. Sometimes Kunta would act as if he had gone into deep private thought. Lamin would sit silently nearby, and when Kunta rose, so would he. And sometimes, when Kunta didn’t know the answer to a question, he would quickly do something to change the subject.

  Always, at his next chance, Kunta would wait until Lamin was out of the hut and then ask Binta or Omoro the answer he needed for Lamin. He never told them why he asked them both so many questions, but it seemed as if they knew. In fact, they seemed to act as if they had begun to regard Kunta as an older person, since he had taken on more responsibility with his little brother. Before long, Kunta was speaking sharply to Lamin in Binta’s presence about things done wrongly. “You must talk clearly!” he might say with a snap of his fingers. Or he might whack Lamin for not jumping swiftly enough to do anything his mother had ordered him to do. Binta acted as if she neither saw nor heard.

  So Lamin made few moves now without either his mother’s or his brother’s sharp eyes upon him. And Kunta now had only to ask Binta or Omoro any questions of Lamin’s and they immediately told him the answer.

  “Why is father’s bullock’s hide mat of that red color? A bullock isn’t red.”

  “I dyed the hide of the bullock with lye and crushed millet,” replied Binta.

  “Where does Allah live?”

  “Allah lives where the sun comes from,” said Omoro.

  CHAPTER 16

  “What are slaves?” Lamin asked Kunta one afternoon. Kunta grunted and fell silent. Walking on, seemingly lost in thought, he was wondering what Lamin had overheard to prompt that question. Kunta knew that those who were taken by toubob became slaves, and he had overheard grown-ups talking about slaves who were owned by people in Juffure. But the fact was that he really didn’t know what slaves were. As had happened so many other times, Lamin’s question embarrassed him into finding out more.

  The next day, when Omoro was getting ready to go out after some palm wood to build Binta a new food storehouse, Kunta asked to join his father; he loved to go off anywhere with Omoro. But neither spoke this day until they had almost reached the dark, cool palm grove.

  Then Kunta asked abruptly, “Fa, what are slaves?”

  Omoro just grunted at first, saying nothing, and for several minutes moved about, in the grove, inspecting the trunks of different palms.

  “Slaves aren’t always easy to tell from those who aren’t slaves,” he said finally. Between blows of his bush ax against the palm he had selected, he told Kunta that slaves’ huts were roofed with nyantang jongo and free people’s huts with nyantang foro, which Kunta knew was the best quality of thatching grass.

  “But one should never speak of slaves in the presence of slaves,” said Omoro, looking very stern. Kunta didn’t understand why, but he nodded as if he did.

  When the palm tree fell, Omoro began chopping away its thick, tough fronds. As Kunta plucked off for himself some of the ripened fruits, he sensed his father’s mood of willingness to talk today. He thought happily how now he would be able to explain to Lamin all about slaves.

  “Why are some people slaves and others not?” he asked.

  Omoro said that people became slaves in different ways. Some were born of slave mothers—and he named a few of those who lived in Juffure, people whom Kunta knew well. Some of them were the parents of some of his own kafo mates. Others, said Omoro, had once faced starvation during their home villages’ hungry season, and they had come to Juffure and begged to become the slaves of someone who agreed to feed and provide for them. Still others—and he named some of Juffure’s older people—had once been enemies and been captured as prisoners. “They become slaves, being not brave enough to die rather than be taken,” said Omoro.

  He had begun chopping the trunk of the palm into sections of a size that a strong man could carry. Though all he had named were slaves, he said, they were all respected people, as Kunta well knew. “Their rights are guaranteed by the laws of our forefathers,” said Omoro, and he explained that all masters had to provide their slaves with food, clothing, a house, a farm plot to work on half shares, and also a wife or husband.

  “Only those who permit themselves to be are despised,” he told Kunta—those who had been made slaves because they were convicted murderers, thieves, or other criminals. These were the only slaves whom a master could beat or otherwise punish, as he felt they deserved.

  “Do slaves have to remain slaves always?” asked Kunta.

  “No, many slaves buy their freedom with what they save from farming on half share with their masters.” Omoro named some in Juffure who had done this. He named others who had won their freedom by marrying into the family that owned them.

  To help him carry the heavy sections of palm, Omoro made a stout sling out of green vines, and as he worked, he said that some slaves, in fact, prospered beyond their masters. Some had even taken slaves for themselves, and some had become very famous persons.

  “Sundiata was one!” exclaimed Kunta. Many times, he had heard the grandmothers and the griots speaking of the great fore-father slave general whose army had conquered so many enemies.

  Omoro grunted and nodded, clearly pleased that Kunta knew this, for Omoro also had learned much of Sundiata when he was Kunta’s age. Testing his son, Omoro asked, “And who was Sundiata’s mother?”

  “Sogolon, the Buffalo Woman!” said Kunta proudly.

  Omoro smiled, and hoisting onto his strong shoulders two heavy sections of the palm pole within the vine sling, he began walking. Eating his palm fruits, Kunta followed, and nearly all the way back to the village, Omoro told him how the great Mandinka Empire had been won by the crippled, brilliant slave general whose army had begun with runaway slaves found in swamps and other hiding places.

  “You will learn much more of him when you are in manhood training,” said Omoro—and the very thought of that time sent a fear through Kunta, but also a thrill of anticipation.

  Omoro said that Sundiata had run away from his hated master, as most slaves did who didn’t like their masters. He said that except for convicted criminals, no slaves could be sold unless the slaves approved of the intended master.

  “Grandmother Nyo Boto also is a slave,” said Omoro, and Kunta almost swallowed a mouthful of palm fruit. He couldn’t comprehend this. Pictures flashed across his mind of beloved old Nyo Boto squatting before the door of her hut, tending the village’s twelve or fifteen naked babies while weaving baskets of wigs, and giving the sharp side of her tongue to any passing adult—even the elders, if she felt like it. “That one is nobody’s slave,” he thought.

  The next afternoon, after he had delivered his goats to the
ir pens, Kunta took Lamin home by a way that avoided their usual playmates, and soon they squatted silently before the hut of Nyo Boto. Within a few moments the old lady appeared in her doorway, having sensed that she had visitors. And with but a glance at Kunta, who had always been one of her very favorite children, she knew that something special was on his mind. Inviting the boys inside her hut, she set about the brewing of some hot herb tea for them.

  “How are your papa and mama?” she asked.

  “Fine. Thank you for asking,” said Kunta politely. “And you are well, Grandmother?”

  “I’m quite fine, indeed,” she replied.

  Kunta’s next words didn’t come until the tea had been set before him. Then he blurted, “Why are you a slave, Grandmother?”

  Nyo Boto looked sharply at Kunta and Lamin. Now it was she who didn’t speak for a few moments. “I will tell you,” she said finally.

  “In my home village one night, very far from here and many rains ago, when I was a young woman and wife,” Nyo Boto said, she had awakened in terror as flaming grass roofs came crashing down among her screaming neighbors. Snatching up her own two babies, a boy and a girl, whose father had recently died in a tribal war, she rushed out among the others—and awaiting them were armed white slave raiders with their black slatee helpers. In a furious battle, all who didn’t escape were roughly herded together, and those who were too badly injured or too old or too young to travel were murdered before the others’ eyes, Nyo Boto began to sob, “—including my own two babies and my aged mother.”

  As Lamin and Kunta clutched each other’s hands, she told them how the terrified prisoners, bound neck-to-neck with thongs, were beaten and driven across the hot, hard inland country for many days. And every day, more and more of the prisoners’ fell beneath the whips that lashed their backs to make them walk faster. After a few days, yet more began to fall of hunger and exhaustion. Some struggled on, but those who couldn’t were left for the wild animals to get. The long line of prisoners passed other villages that had been burned and ruined, where the skulls and bones of people and animals lay among the burned-out shells of thatch and mud that had once been family huts. Fewer than half of those who had begun the trip reached the village of Juffure, four days from the nearest place on the Kamby Bolongo where slaves were sold.