Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

In his hut, along with several saphies he had acquired in exchange for crops from his farm plot, he kept a number of other potent spiritual safeguards: the perfumed extracts of certain plants and barks which, like every other Mandinka man, Kunta rubbed onto his forehead, upper arms, and thighs each night before going to bed. It was believed that this magical essence would protect a man from possession by evil spirits while he slept. It would also make him smell good—a thing that, along with his appearance, Kunta had begun to think about.

He and the rest of his kafo were becoming increasingly exasperated about a matter that had been rankling their manly pride for many moons. When they went off to manhood training, they had left behind a group of skinny, giggling, silly little girls who played almost as hard as the boys. Then, after only four moons away, they had returned—as new men—to find these same girls, with whom they had grown up, flouncing about wherever one looked, poking out their mango-sized breasts, tossing their heads and arms, showing off their jangly new earrings, beads, and bracelets. What irritated Kunta and the others wasn’t so much that the girls were behaving so absurdly, but that they seemed to be doing so exclusively for the benefit of men at least ten rains older than themselves. For new men like Kunta, these maidens of marriageable age—fourteen and fifteen—had scarcely a glance except to sneer or laugh. He and his mates finally grew so disgusted with these airs and antics that they resolved to pay no further attention either to the girls or to the all-too-willing older men they sought to entice with such fluttery coyness.

But Kunta’s foto would be as hard as his thumb some mornings when he waked. Of course, it had been hard many times before, even when he was Lamin’s age; but now it was much different in the feeling, very deep and strong. And Kunta couldn’t help putting his hand down under his bedcover and tightly squeezing it. He also couldn’t help thinking about things he and his mates had overheard—about fotos being put into women.

One night dreaming—for ever since he was a small boy, Kunta had dreamed a great deal, even when he was awake, Binta liked to say—he found himself watching a harvest-festival seoruba, when the loveliest, longest-necked, sootiest-black maiden there chose to fling down her headwrap for him to pick up. When he did so, she rushed home shouting, “Kunta likes me!,” and after careful consideration, her parents gave permission for them to marry. Omoro and Binta also agreed, and both fathers bargained for the bride price. “She is beautiful,” said Omoro, “but my concerns are of her true value as my son’s wife. Is she a strong, hard worker? Is she of pleasant disposition in the home? Can she cook well and care for children? And above all, is she guaranteed a virgin?” The answers were all yes, so a price was decided and a date set for the wedding.

Kunta built a fine new mud house, and both mothers cooked bountiful delicacies, to give guests the best impression. And on the wedding day, the adults, children, goats, chickens, dogs, parrots, and monkeys all but drowned out the musicians they had hired. When the bride’s party arrived, the praise singer shouted of the fine families being joined together. Yet louder shouts rose when the bride’s best girlfriends roughly shoved her inside Kunta’s new house. Grinning and waving to everyone, Kunta followed her and drew the curtain across the door. When she had seated herself on his bed, he sang to her a famous ancestral song of love: “Mandumbe, your long neck is very beautiful....” Then they lay down on soft cured hides and she kissed him tenderly, and they clung together very tightly. And then the thing happened, as Kunta had come to imagine it from the ways it had been described to him. It was even greater than he had been told, and the feeling grew and grew—until finally he burst .

Jerking suddenly awake, Kunta lay very still for a long moment, trying to figure out what had happened. Then, moving his hand down between his legs, he felt the warm wetness on himself—and on his bed. Frightened and alarmed, he leaped up, felt for a cloth, and wiped himself off, and the bed, too. Then, sitting there in the darkness, his fear was slowly overtaken by embarrassment, his embarrassment by shame, his shame by pleasure, and his pleasure, finally, by a kind of pride. Had this ever happened to any of his mates? he wondered. Though he hoped it had, he also hoped it hadn’t, for perhaps this is what happens when one really becomes a man, he thought; and he wanted to be the first. But Kunta knew that he would never know, for this experience and even these thoughts weren’t the kind he could ever share with anyone. Finally, exhausted and exhilarated, he lay down again and soon fell into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

Kunta knew every man, woman, child, dog, and goat in Juffure, he told himself one afternoon while he sat eating lunch beside his plot of groundnuts, and in the course of his new duties, he either saw or spoke with almost all of them nearly every day. Why, then, did he feel so alone? Was he an orphan? Did he not have a father who treated him as one man should another? Did he not have a mother who tended dutifully to his needs? Did he not have brothers to look up to him? As a new man, was he not their idol? Did he not have the friendship of those with whom he had played in the mud as children, herded goats as boys, returned to Juffure as men? Had he not earned the respect of his elders—and the envy of his kafo mates—for husbanding his farm plot into seven goats, three chickens, and a splendidly furnished hut before reaching his sixteenth birthday? He couldn’t deny it.

And yet he was lonely. Omoro was too busy to spend even as much time with Kunta as he had when he had only one son and fewer responsibilities in the village. Binta was busy too, taking care of Kunta’s younger brothers, but his mother and he had little to say to one another anyway. Even he and Lamin were no longer close; while he had been away at the jujuo, Suwadu had become Lamin’s adoring shadow as Lamin had once been Kunta’s, and Kunta watched with mixed emotions while Lamin’s attitude toward his little brother warmed from irritation to toleration to affection. Soon they were inseparable, and this had left as little room for Kunta as it had for Madi, who was too young yet to join them but old enough to whine because they wouldn’t let him. On days when the two older boys couldn’t get out of their mother’s hut fast enough, of course, Binta would often order them to take Madi along, so that she could get him out from underfoot, and Kunta would have to smile in spite of himself at the sight of his three brothers marching around the village, one behind the other, in the order of their births, with the two in front staring glumly ahead while the little one, smiling happily, brought up the rear, almost running to keep up.

No one walked behind Kunta any longer, and not often did anyone choose to walk beside him either, for his kafo mates were occupied almost every waking hour with their new duties and—perhaps, like him—with their own broodings about what had so far proved to be the dubious rewards of manhood. True, they had been given their own farm plots and were beginning to collect goats and other possessions. But the plots were small, the work hard, and their possessions were embarrassingly few in comparison to those of older men. They had also been made the eyes and ears of the village, but the cooking pots were kept clean without their supervision, and nothing ever trespassed in the fields except occasional baboon families or dense flocks of birds. Their elders, it soon became clear, got to do all the really important jobs, and as if to rub it in, gave the new men only what they felt was the appearance of respect, as they had been given only the appearance of responsibility. Indeed, when they paid any attention at all to the younger men, the elders seemed to have as much difficulty as the young girls of the village in restraining themselves from laughter, even when one of them performed the most challenging task without a mistake. Well, someday he would be one of those older men, Kunta told himself, and he would wear the mantle of manhood not only with more dignity but also with more compassion and understanding toward younger men than he and his mates received now.