Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

Omoro took the bypass fork at every travelers’ tree, but each village’s first-kafo children always raced out to meet them and to tell the strangers whatever happened to be the most exciting of the local news. In one such village, the little couriers rushed out yelling, “Mumbo jumbo! Mumbo jumbo!,” and considering their job done, fled back inside the village gate. The bypassing trail went near enough for Omoro and Kunta to see the townspeople watching a masked and costumed figure brandishing a rod over the bare back of a screaming woman whom several other women held. All of the women spectators were shrieking with each blow of the rod. From discussions with his fellow goatherds, Kunta knew how a husband, if enough annoyed by a quarrelsome, troublemaking wife, could go quietly to another village and hire a mumbo jumbo to come to his village and shout fearsomely at intervals from concealment, then appear and publicly discipline that wife, after which all of the village’s women were apt to act better for a time.

At one travelers’ tree, no children came out to meet the Kintes. In fact, there was no one to be seen at all, and not a sound was to be heard in the silent village, except for the birds and monkeys. Kunta wondered if slave takers had come here, too. He waited in vain for Omoro to explain the mystery, but it was the chattering children of the next village who did so. Pointing back down the trail, they said that village’s chief had kept on doing things his people disliked until one night not long ago, as he slept, everyone had quietly gone away with all their possessions to the homes of friends and families in other places—leaving behind an “empty chief,” the children said, who was now going about promising to act better if only his people would return.

Since nighttime was near, Omoro decided to enter this village, and the crowd under the baobab was abuzz with this exciting gossip: Most felt certain that their new neighbors would return home after they had taught their chief his lesson for a few more days. While Kunta stuffed his stomach with groundnut stew over steamed rice, Omoro went to the village jaliba and arranged for a talking-drum message to his brothers. He told them to expect him by the next sundown and that traveling with him was his first son.

Kunta had sometimes daydreamed about hearing his name drum-sounding across the land, and now it had happened. It wouldn’t leave his ears. Later, on the hospitality hut’s bamboo bed, bone-weary as he was, Kunta thought of the other jalibas hunched over their drums pounding out his name in every village along their route to the village of Janneh and Saloum.

At every travelers’ tree now, since the drums had spoken, were not only the usual naked children but also some elders and musicians. And Omoro couldn’t refuse a senior elder’s request to grant his village the honor of at least a brief visit. As the Kintes freshened themselves in each hospitality hut and then sat down to share food and drink in the shade of the baobab and silk-cotton trees, the adults gathered eagerly to hear Omoro’s answers to their questions, and the first, second, and third kafos clustered about Kunta.

While the first kafo stared at him in silent awe, those of Kunta’s rains and older, painfully jealous, asked him respectful questions about his home village and his destination. He answered them gravely with, he hoped, the same dignity as his father did their fathers’ questions. By the time they left, he was sure the villagers felt they had seen a young man who had spent most of his life traveling with his father along The Gambia’s long trails.

They had tarried so long at the last village that they would have to walk faster and harder to reach their destination by sundown, as Omoro had promised his brothers. Though he sweated and ached, Kunta found it easier than before to keep his headload balanced, and he felt a new spurt of strength with each of the drumtalk messages that now filled the air with word of the arrival of griots, jahbas, senior elders, and other important people in the town ahead, each representing such distant home villages as Karantaba, Kootacunda, Pisania, and Jonkakonda, most of which Kunta had never heard of: A griot from the Kingdom of Wooli was there, said the drums, and even a prince sent by his father, the King of Barra. As Kunta’s cracked feet padded quickly along the hot, dusty trail, he was amazed at how famous and popular his uncles were. Soon he was all but running, not only to keep close behind the ever more rapidly striding Omoro, but also because these past few hours seemed to be taking forever.

Finally, just as the sun began to turn crimson on the western horizon, Kunta spotted smoke rising from a village not far ahead. The wide, circular pattern of the smoke told Kunta that dried baobab hulls were being burned to drive away mosquitoes. That means the village was entertaining important visitors. He felt like cheering. They had arrived! Soon he began to hear the thunder of a big ceremonial tobalo drum—being pounded, he guessed, as each new personage entered between the village gates. Intermingling was the throb of smaller tan-tang drums and the shriekings of dancers. Then the trail made a turn, and there under the rising smoke was the village. And alongside a bushy growth they saw a man who caught sight of them at the same instant and began to point and wave as if he had been posted there to await an oncoming man with a boy. Omoro waved back at the man, who immediately squatted over his drum and announced on it: “Omoro Kinte and first son—”

Kunta’s feet scarcely felt the ground. The travelers’ tree, soon in sight, was festooned with cloth strips, and the original single-file trail had already been widened by many feet—evidence of an already popular and busy village. The pounding of the tan-tangs grew louder and louder, and suddenly the dancers appeared, grunting and shouting in their leaf-and-bark costumes, leaping and whirling and stamping out through the village gate ahead of everyone else, all of them rushing to meet the distinguished visitors. The village’s deep-voiced tobalo began to boom as two figures came running through the crowd. Ahead of Kunta, Omoro’s headbundle dropped suddenly to the ground, and Omoro was running toward them. Before he knew it, Kunta’s own headbundle had dropped and he was running too.

The two men and his father were hugging and pounding each other. “And this is our nephew?” Both men yanked Kunta off his feet and embraced him amid exclamations of joy. Sweeping them on to the village, the huge welcoming party cried out their greetings all around them, but Kunta saw and heard no one but his uncles. They certainly resembled Omoro, but he noticed that they were both somewhat shorter, stockier, and more muscular than his father. The older uncle Janneh’s eyes had a squinting way of seeming to look a long distance, and both men moved with an almost animal quickness. They also talked much more rapidly than his father as they plied him with questions about Juffure and about Binta.

Finally, Saloum thumped his fist on Kunta’s head. “Not since he got his name have we been together. And now look at him! How many rains have you, Kunta?”

“Eight, sir,” he answered politely.

“Nearly ready for manhood training!” exclaimed his uncle.

All around the village’s tall bamboo fence, dry thornbushes were piled up, and concealed among them were sharp-pointed stakes to cripple any marauding animal or human. But Kunta wasn’t noticing such things, and the few others of around his age who were there he saw only out of the corners of his eyes. He scarcely heard the racket of the parrots and monkeys above their heads, or the barking of the wuolo dogs underfoot, as the uncles took them on a tour of their beautiful new village. Every hut had its own private yard, said Saloum, and every woman’s dry-foods storehouse was mounted directly over her cooking fire, so the smoke would keep her rice, couscous, and millet free of bugs.