Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

As he had felt Binta’s presence in the hut, now he felt, almost as if it were a smell, the fear of his kafo mates ahead and behind him in the line, and he knew that theirs was as great as his. Somehow that made him feel less ashamed. As he trudged on in the white blindness of his hood, he knew that he was leaving behind more than his father and his mother and his brothers and the village of his birth, and this filled him with sadness as much as terror. But he knew it must be done, as it had been done by his father before him and would some day be done by his son. He would return, but only as a man.

They must be approaching—within a stone’s throw, Kunta sensed—a recently cut bamboo grove. Through his hood, he could smell the rich fragrance of bamboo freshly chopped. They marched closer, the smell became stronger and stronger; they were at the barrier, then through it, but they were still outdoors. Of course—it was a bamboo fence. Suddenly the drums stopped and the marchers halted. For several minutes, Kunta and the others stood still and silent. He listened for the slightest sound that might tell him when they had stopped or where they were, but all he could hear was the screeching of parrots and the scolding of monkeys overhead

Then, suddenly, Kunta’s hood was lifted. He stood blinking in the bright sun of midafternoon, trying to adjust his eyes to the light. He was afraid even to turn his head enough to see his kafo mates, for directly before them stood stern, wrinkled senior elder Silla Ba Dibba. Like all the other boys, Kunta knew him and his family well. But Silla Ba Dibba acted as if he had never seen any of them before—indeed, as if he would rather not see them now; his eyes scanned their faces as he would have looked at crawling maggots. Kunta knew that this surely was their kintango. Standing on either side of him were two younger men, Ali Sise and Soru Tura, whom Kunta also knew well; Soru was a special friend of Omoro’s. Kunta was grateful that neither of them was Omoro, to see his son so scared.

As they had been taught, the entire kafo—all twenty-three boys—crossed their palms over their hearts and greeted their elders in the traditional way: “Peace!” “Peace only!” replied the old kintango and his assistants. Widening his gaze for a moment—careful not to move his head—Kunta saw that they stood in a compound dotted with several small, mud-walled, thatch-roofed huts and surrounded by the tall new bamboo fence. He could see where the huts had been patched, undoubtedly by the fathers who had disappeared from Juffure for a few days. All this he saw without moving a muscle. But the next moment he nearly jumped out of his skin.

“Children left Juffure village,” said the kintango suddenly in a loud voice. “If men are to return, your fears must be erased, for a fearful person is a weak person, and a weak person is a danger to his family, to his village, and to his tribe.” He glared at them as if he had never seen such a sorry lot, and then turned away. As he did so, his two assistants sprang forward and began to lay about among the boys with limber sticks, pummeling their shoulders and backsides smartly as they herded them like so many goats, a few boys apiece, into the small mud huts.

Huddled in their bare hut, Kunta and his four mates were too terrified to feel the lingering sting of the blows they had received, and too ashamed to raise their heads even enough to look at one another. After a few minutes, when it seemed that they would be spared from further abuse for a little while, Kunta began to sneak looks at his companions. He wished that he and Sitafa were in the same hut. He knew these others, of course, but none as well as his yayo brother, and his heart sank. But perhaps that’s no accident, he reasoned. They probably don’t want us to have even that small comfort. Maybe they’re not even going to feed us, he began to think, when his stomach started to growl with hunger.

Just after sunset, the kintango’s assistants burst into the hut. “ Move!” A stick caught him sharply across the shoulders, and the scrambling boys were hissed at as they rushed outside into the dusk, bumping into boys from other huts, and under the flying sticks were herded with gruff orders into a ragged line, each boy grasping the hand of the boy ahead. When they were all in place, the kintango fixed them with a dark scowl and announced that they were about to undertake a night journey deep into the surrounding forest.

At the order to march, the long line of boys set out along the path in clumsy disarray, and the sticks fell steadily among them. “You walk like buffalo!” Kunta heard close to his ear. A boy cried out as he was hit, and both assistants shouted loudly in the darkness, “Who was that?,” and their sticks rained down even harder. After that no boy uttered a sound.

Kunta’s legs soon began to hurt—but not as soon or as badly as they would have done if he hadn’t learned the manner of loose striding taught him by his father on their trip to the village of Janneh and Saloum. It pleased him to think that the other boys’ legs were surely hurting worse than his, for they wouldn’t yet know how to walk. But nothing he had learned did anything to help Kunta’s hunger and thirst. His stomach felt tied in knots, and he was starting to feel light-headed when at last a stop was called near a small stream. The reflection of the bright moon in its surface was soon set to rippling as the boys fell to their knees and began to scoop up and gulp down handfuls of water. A moment later the kintango’s assistants commanded them away from the stream with orders not to drink too much at once, then opened their headpacks and passed out some chunks of dried meat. The boys tore away at the morsels like hyenas; Kunta chewed and swallowed so fast that he barely tasted the four bites he managed to wrest away for himself.

Every boy’s feet had big, raw blisters on them, Kunta’s as bad as any of the rest; but it felt so good to have food and water in his stomach that he hardly noticed. As they sat by the stream, he and his kafo mates began to look around in the moonlight at one another, this time too tired rather than too afraid to speak. Kunta and Sitafa exchanged long glances, but neither could tell in the dim light if his friend looked as miserable as he felt himself.

Kunta hardly had a chance to cool his burning feet in the stream before the kintango’s assistants ordered them back into formation for the long walk back to the jujuo. His legs and head were numb when they finally came within sight of the bamboo gates shortly before dawn. Feeling ready to die, he trudged to his hut, bumped into another boy already inside, lost his footing, stumbled to the dirt floor—and fell deep asleep right where he lay.

On every night for the next six nights came another march, each one longer than the last. The pain of his blistered feet was terrible, but Kunta found by the fourth night that he somehow didn’t mind the pain as much, and he began to feel a welcome new emotion: pride. By the sixth march, he and the other boys discovered that though the night was very dark, they no longer needed to hold the next boy’s hand in order to maintain a straight marching line.

On the seventh night came the kintango’s first personal lesson for the boys: showing them how men deep in the forest used the stars to guide them, so that they would never be lost. Within the first half moon, every boy of the kafo had learned how to lead the marching line by the stars, back toward the jujuo. One night when Kunta was the leader, he almost stepped on a bush rat before it noticed him and scurried for cover. Kunta was almost as proud as he was startled, for this meant that the marchers had been walking too silently to be heard even by an animal.