Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

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.