Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

But still hardly a day would pass without something new to make Kunta and his mates feel awkward and ignorant all over again. It amazed them to learn, for example, that a rag folded and hung in certain ways near a man’s hut would inform other Mandinka men when he planned to return, or that sandals crossed in certain ways outside a hut told many things that only other men would understand. But the secret Kunta found the most remarkable of all was sira kango, a kind of men’s talk in which sounds of Mandinka words were changed in such a way that no women or children or non-Mandinkas were permitted to learn. Kunta remembered times when he had heard his father say something very rapidly to another man that Kunta had not understood nor dared to ask explained. Now that he had learned it himself, he and his mates soon spoke nearly everything they said in the secret talk of men.

In every hut as each moon went by, the boys added a new rock to a bowl to mark how long they had been gone from Juffure. Within days after the third rock was dropped in the bowl, the boys were wrestling in the compound one afternoon when suddenly they looked toward the gate of the jujuo, and there stood a group of twenty-five or thirty men. A loud gasp rose from the boys as they recognized their fathers, uncles, and older brothers. Kunta sprang up, unable to believe his eyes, as a bolt of joy shot through him at the first sight of Omoro for three moons. But it was as if some unseen hand held him back and stifled a cry of gladness—even before he saw in his father’s face no sign that he recognized his son.

Only one boy rushed forward, calling out his father’s name, and without a word that father reached for the stick of the nearest kintango’s assistant and beat his son with it, shouting at him harshly for betraying his emotions, for showing that he was still a boy. He added, unnecessarily, as he gave him the last licks, that his son should expect no favors from his father. Then the kintango himself barked a command for the entire kafo to lie on their bellies in a row, and all of the visiting men walked along the row and flailed the upturned backsides with their walking sticks. Kunta’s emotions were in a turmoil; the blows he didn’t mind at all, knowing them to be merely another of the rigors of manhood training, but it pained him not to be able to hug his father or even hear his voice, and it shamed him to know that it wasn’t manly even to wish for such indulgences.

The beating over, the kintango ordered the boys to race, to jump, to dance, to wrestle, to pray as they had been taught, and the fathers, uncles, and older brothers watched it all silently, and then departed with warm compliments to the kintango and his assistants, but not so much as a backward look at the boys, who stood with downcast faces. Within the hour, they got another beating for sulking about the preparation of their evening meal. It hurt all the more because the kintango and his assistants acted as if the visitors had never even been there. But early that night, while the boys were wrestling before bedtime—only halfheartedly now—one of the kintango’s assistants passed by Kunta and said brusquely to him, under his breath, “You have a new brother, and he is named Madi.”

Four of us now, thought Kunta, lying awake later that night. Four brothers—four sons for his mother and father. He thought how that would sound in the Kinte family history when it was told by griots for hundreds of rains in the future. After Omoro, thought Kunta, he would be the first man of the family when he returned to Juffure. Not only was he learning to be a man, but he was also learning many, many things he would be able to teach Lamin, as already he had taught him so many of the things of boyhood. At least he would teach him that which was permissible for boys to know, and then Lamin would teach Suwadu, and Suwadu would teach this new one whom Kunta had not even seen, whose name was Madi. And some day, Kunta thought as he drifted off to sleep, when he was as old as Omoro, he would have sons of his own, and it would all begin again.

“You are ceasing to be children.You are experiencing rebirth as men,” the kintango said one morning to the assembled kafo. This was the first time the kintango had used the word “men” except to tell them what they weren’t. After moons of learning together, working together, being beaten together, he told them, each of them was finally beginning to discover that he had two selves—one within him, and the other, larger self in all those whose blood and lives he shared. Not until they learned that lesson could they undertake the next phase of manhood training: how to be warriors. “You know already that Mandinkas fight only if others are warlike,” said the kintango. “But we are the finest warriors if driven to fight.”

For the next half moon, Kunta and his mates learned how to make war. Famous Mandinka battle strategies were drawn in the dust by the kintango or his assistants, and then the boys were told to re-enact the strategies in mock battles. “Never completely encircle your enemy,” counseled the kintango. “Leave him some escape, for he will fight even more desperately if trapped.” The boys learned also that battles should start in late afternoon, so that any enemy, seeing defeat, could save face by retreating in the darkness. And they were taught that during any wars, neither enemy should ever do harm to any traveling marabouts, griots, or blacksmiths, for an angered marabout could bring down the displeasure of Allah; an angered griot could use his eloquent tongue to stir the enemy army to greater savagery; and an angered blacksmith could make or repair weapons for the enemy.

Under the direction of the kintango’s assistants, Kunta and the others carved out barbed spears and made barbed arrows of the kind used only in battle, and practiced with them on smaller and smaller targets. When a boy could hit a bamboo cane twenty-five steps away, he was cheered and praised. Tramping into the woods, the boys found some koona shrub, whose leaves they picked to be boiled back at the jujuo. Into the resulting thick, black juice they would dip a cotton thread, and they were shown how that thread, wound around an arrow’s barbs, would seep a deadly poison into whatever wound the arrow made.

At the end of the war-training period, the kintango told them more than they had ever known before—and told them more excitingly than they had ever heard it—about that greatest of all Mandinka wars and warriors—the time when the army of the fabled ex-slave general Sundiata, son of Sogolon, the Buffalo Woman, conquered the forces of the Boure country’s King Soumaoro, a king so cruel that he wore human-skin robes and adorned his palace walls with enemy’s bleached skulls.

Kunta and his mates held their breaths, hearing how both armies suffered thousands of wounded or dead. But the archers of the Mandinkas closed in on Soumaoro’s forces like a giant trap, raining down arrows from both sides and moving in steadily until Soumaoro’s terrified army finally fled in rout. For days and nights, said the kintango—and it was the first time the boys ever had seen him smile—the talking drums of every village followed the marching progress of the victorious Mandinka forces, laden with enemy booty and driving thousands of captives before them. In every village, happy crowds jeered and kicked the prisoners, whose shaved heads were bowed and whose hands were tied behind their backs. Finally General Sundiata called a huge meeting of the people, and he brought before them the chiefs of all the villages he had defeated and gave them back their spears of chiefhood’s rank, and then he established among those chiefs the bonds of peace, which would last among them for the next one hundred rains. Kunta and his mates went dreamily to their beds, never prouder to be Mandinkas.