Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

Feeling restless—and a little sorry for himself—that evening, Kunta left his hut to take a solitary walk. Though he had no destination in mind, his feet drew him toward the circle of rapt children’s faces glowing in the light of the campfire around which the old grandmothers were telling their nightly stories to the first kafo of the village. Stopping close enough to listen—but not close enough to be noticed listening—Kunta squatted down on his haunches and pretended to be inspecting a rock at his feet while one of the wrinkled old women waved her skinny arms and jumped around the clearing in front of the children as she acted out her story of the four thousand brave warriors of the King of Kasoon who had been driven into battle by the thunder of five hundred great war drums and the trumpeting of five hundred elephant-tusk horns. It was a story he had heard many times around the fires as a child, and as he looked at the wide-eyed faces of his Madi in the front row, and Suwadu in the back row, it somehow made him feel sad to hear it again.

With a sigh, he rose and walked slowly away—his departure as unnoticed as his arrival had been. At the fire where Lamin sat with other boys his age chanting their Koranic verses, and the fire where Binta sat with other mothers gossiping about husbands, households, children, cooking, sewing, makeup, and hairdos, he felt equally unwelcome. Passing them by, he found himself finally beneath the spreading branches of the baobab where the men of Juffure sat around the fourth fire discussing village business and other matters of gravity. As he had felt too old to be wanted around the first fire, he felt too young to be wanted around this one. But he had no place else to go, so Kunta seated himself among those in the outer circle—beyond those of Omoro’s age, who sat closer to the fire, and those of the kintango’s age, who sat closest, among the Council of Elders. As he did so, he heard one of them ask:

“Can anyone say how many of us are getting stolen?”

They were discussing slave taking, which had been the main subject around the men’s fire for the more than one hundred rains that toubob had been stealing people and shipping them in chains to the kingdom of white cannibals across the sea.

There was silence for a little while, and then the alimamo said, “We can only thank Allah that it’s less now than it was.”

“There are fewer of us left to steal!” said an angry elder.

“I listen to the drums and count the lost,” said the kintango.

“Fifty to sixty each new moon just from along our part of the bolong would be my guess.” No one said anything to that, and he added, “There is no way, of course, to count the losses farther inland, and farther up the river.”

“Why do we count only those taken away by the toubob?” asked the arafang. “We must count also the burned baobabs where villages once stood. He has killed more in fires and in fighting him than he has ever taken away!”

The men stared at the fire for a long time, and then another elder broke the silence: “Toubob could never do this without help from our own people. Mandinkas, Fulas, Wolofs, Jolas—none of The Gambia’s tribes is without its slatee traitors. As a child I saw these slatees beating those like themselves to walk faster for the toubob!”

“For toubob money, we turn against our own kind,” said Juffure’s senior elder. “Greed and treason—these are the things toubob has given us in exchange for those he has stolen away.”

No one talked again for a while, and the fire sputtered quietly. Then the kintango spoke again: “Even worse than toubob’s money is that he lies for nothing and he cheats with method, as naturally as he breathes. That’s what gives him the advantage over us.”

A few moments passed, and then a young man of the kafo ahead of Kunta’s asked, “Will toubob never change?”

“That will be,” said one of the elders, “when the river flows backward!”

Soon the fire was a pile of smoking embers, and the men began to get up, stretch themselves, wish one another good night, and head home to their huts. But five young men of the third kafo stayed behind—one to cover with dust the warm ashes of all the fires, and the rest, including Kunta, to take the late shift as village lookouts beyond each corner of Juffure’s high bamboo fence. After such alarming talk around the fire, Kunta knew he would have no trouble staying awake, but he didn’t look forward to spending this particular night beyond the safety of the village.

Ambling through Juffure and out the gate with what he hoped was nonchalance, Kunta waved to his fellow guards and made his way along the outside of the fence—past the sharp-thorned bushes piled thickly against it, and the pointed stakes concealed beneath them—to a leafy hiding place that afforded him a silvery view of the surrounding countryside on this moonlit night. Getting as comfortable as he could, he slung his spear across his lap, drew up his knees, clasped his arms around them for warmth, and settled in for the night. Scanning the bush with straining eyes for any sign of movement, he listened to the shrilling of crickets, the eerie whistling of nightbirds, the distant howling of hyenas, and the shrieks of unwary animals taken by surprise, and he thought about the things the men had said around the fire. When dawn came without an incident, he was almost as surprised that he hadn’t been set upon by slave stealers as he was to realize that for the first time in a moon, he hadn’t spent a moment worrying about his personal problems.

Nearly every day, it seemed to Kunta, Binta would irritate him about something. It wasn’t anything she would do or say, but in other ways—little looks, certain tones of voice—Kunta could tell she disapproved of something about him. It was worst when Kunta added to his possessions new things that Binta hadn’t obtained for him herself. One morning, arriving to serve his breakfast, Binta nearly dropped the steaming couscous upon Kunta when she saw he was wearing his first dundiko not sewn with her own hands. Feeling guilty for having traded a cured hyena hide to get it, Kunta angrily offered her no explanation, though he could feel that his mother was deeply hurt.

From that morning on, he knew that Binta never brought his meals without her eyes raking every item in his hut to see if there was anything else—a stool, a mat, a bucket, a plate, or a pot—that she’d had nothing to do with. If something new had appeared, Binta’s sharp eyes would never miss it. Kunta would sit there fuming while she put on that look of not caring and not noticing that he had seen her wear so many times around Omoro, who knew as well as Kunta did that Binta could hardly wait to get to the village well among her women friends so that she could loudly bemoan her troubles—which was what all Mandinka women did when they disagreed with their husbands.

One day, before his mother arrived with the morning meal, Kunta picked up a beautifully woven basket that Jinna M’Baki, one of Juffure’s several widows, had given him as a gift, and he set it just inside the door of his hut, where his mother would be sure to all but stumble over it. The widow was actually a little younger than Binta, it occurred to him. While Kunta was still a second-kafo goatherd, her husband had gone away to hunt and never returned. She lived quite near Nyo Boto, whom Kunta often visited, and that was how he and the widow had seen each other and come to speak to each other as Kunta had grown older. It had annoyed Kunta when the widow’s gift caused some of Kunta’s friends to tease him about her reason for giving him a valuable bamboo basket. When Binta arrived at his hut and saw it—recognizing the widow’s style of weaving—she flinched as if the basket were a scorpion before managing to compose herself.