Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

With quick gestures, the holy man blessed the welcoming party and bade them rise from their knees. Then Janneh and Saloum were specially blessed, and Omoro was introduced by Janneh, and Saloum beckoned to Kunta, who went dashing up alongside them. “This is my first son,” said Omoro, “who bears his holy grandfather’s name.”

Kunta heard the marabout speak words in Arabic over him—which he couldn’t understand, except for his grandfather’s name—and he felt the holy man’s fingers touching his head as lightly as a butterfly’s wing, and then he went dashing back among those of his own age as the marabout went to meet the others in the welcoming party, conversing with them as if he were an ordinary man. The young ones in Kunta’s group began to trail away and stare at the long line of wives, children, students, and slaves who brought up the rear of the procession.

The marabout’s wives and children quickly retired into guest huts. The students, taking seats on the ground and opening their headbundles, withdrew books and manuscripts—the property of their teacher, the holy man—and began reading aloud to those who gathered around each of them to listen. The slaves, Kunta noticed, didn’t enter the village with the others. Remaining outside the fence, the slaves squatted down near where they had tethered the cattle and penned the goats. They were the first slaves Kunta had ever seen who kept away from other people.

The holy man could scarcely move for all the people on their knees around him. Villagers and distinguished visitors alike pressed their foreheads to the dirt and wailed for him to hear their plaints, some of the nearest presuming to touch his garment. Some begged him to visit their villages and conduct long-neglected religious services. Some asked for legal decisions, since law and religion were companions under Islam. Fathers asked to be given meaningful names for new babies. People from villages without an arafang asked if their children might be taught by one of the holy man’s students.

These students were now busily selling small squares of cured goathide, which many hands then thrust toward the holy man for him to make his mark on. A holy-marked piece of goatskin, sewn into a treasured saphie charm such as Kunta wore around his upper arm, would insure the wearer’s constant nearness to Allah. For the two cowrie shells he had brought with him from Juffure, Kunta purchased a square of goathide and joined the jostling crowd that pressed in upon the marabout.

It ran through Kunta’s mind that his grandfather must have been like this holy man, who had the power, through Allah, to bring the rain to save a starving village, as Kairaba Kunta Kinte had once saved Juffure. So his beloved grandmas Yaisa and Nyo Boto had told him since he was old enough to understand. But only now, for the first time, did he truly understand the greatness of his grandfather—and of Islam. Only one person, thought Kunta, was going to be told why he had decided to spend his precious two cowries and now stood holding his own small square of cured goatskin waiting his turn for a holy mark. He was going to take the blessed goatskin back home and turn it over to Nyo Boto, and ask her to keep it for him until the time came to sew it into a precious saphie chaim for the arm of his own first son.

Kunta’s kafo, galled with envy of his trip, and expecting that he would return to Juffure all puffed up with himself, had decided—without any of them actually saying so—to show no interest whatever in him or his travels when he returned. And so they did, thinking nothing of how heartsick it made Kunta feel to arrive home and find his lifelong mates not only acting as if he hadn’t been away, but actually ending conversations if he came near, his dearest friend Sitafa acting even colder than the others. Kunta was so upset that he hardly even thought about his new infant brother, Suwadu, who had been born while he was away with Omoro.

One noon, as the goats grazed, Kunta finally decided to overlook his mates’ unkindness and try to patch things up. Walking over to the other boys, who were sitting apart from him eating their lunches, he sat down among them and simply began talking. “I wish you could have been with me,” he said quietly, and without waiting for their reaction, began to tell them about the trip.

He told how hard the days of walking had been, how his muscles had ached, about his fright in passing the lions. And he described the different villages he had passed through and the people who lived there. While he spoke, one of the boys jumped up to regroup his goats, and when he returned—without seeming to notice—sat down closer to Kunta. Soon Kunta’s words were being accompanied by grunts and exclamations from the others, and before they knew it, just at that point in his story when he reached his uncles’ new village, the time had come to drive the goats homeward.

The next morning in the schoolyard, all of the boys had to strain not to let the arafang suspect their impatience to leave. Finally out again with their goats, they huddled around Kunta, and he began to tell them about the different tribes and languages all intermingled in his uncles’ village. He was in the middle of one of the tales of faraway places that Janneh and Saloum had told around the campfire—the boys hanging raptly on every word—when the stillness of the fields was broken by the ferocious barking of a wuolo dog and the shrill, terrified bleating of a goat.

Springing upright, they saw over the edge of the tall grass a great, tawny panther dropping a goat from his jaws and lunging at two of their wuolo dogs. The boys were still standing there, too shocked and scared to move, when one of the dogs was flung aside by the panther’s sweeping paw—as the other dog leaped wildly back and forth, the panther crouched to spring, their horrible snarlings drowning out the frantic barking of the other dogs and the cries of the other goats, which were bounding off in all directions.

Then the boys fanned out, shouting and running, most trying to head off the goats. But Kunta bolted blindly toward his father’s fallen goat. “Stop, Kunta! No! ” screamed Sitafa as he tried to stop him from running between the dogs and the panther. He couldn’t catch him, but when the panther saw the two yelling boys rushing at him, he backed off a few feet, then turned and raced back toward the forest with the enraged dogs at his heels.

The panther stink and the mangled nanny goat made Kunta sick—blood was running darkly down her twisted neck, her tongue lolled out; her eyes were rolled back up in her head and— most horribly—her belly was ripped wide open and Kunta could see her unborn kid inside, still slowly pulsing. Nearby was the first wuolo dog, whining in pain from its gashed side and trying to crawl toward Kunta. Vomiting where he stood, Kunta turned, ashen, and looked at Sitafa’s anguished face.

Dimly, through his tears, Kunta sensed some of the other boys around him, staring at the hurt dog and the dead goat. Then slowly they all drew back—all but Sitafa, who put his arms around Kunta. None of them spoke, but the question hung in the air: How is he going to tell his father? Somehow Kunta found his voice. “Can you care for my goats?” he asked Sitafa. “I must take this hide to my father.”

Sitafa went over and talked with the other boys, and two of them quickly picked up and carried off the whimpering dog. Kunta then motioned Sitafa to go away with the others. Kneeling by the dead nanny goat with his knife, Kunta cut and pulled, and cut again, as he had seen his father do it, until finally he rose with the wet hide in his hands. Pulling weeds, he covered over the nanny’s carcass and the unborn kid, and started back toward the village. Once before he had forgotten his goats while herding, and he had vowed never to let it happen again. But it had happened again, and this time a nanny goat had been killed.