Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

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 headed 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.

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.