Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

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 heat, 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.

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.

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.