Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

Near dusk, as Lamin began to grab more and more often at his headload, Kunta saw ahead a flock of large bushfowl circling down to land. Abruptly he stopped, concealing himself, as Lamin sank onto his knees behind a bush nearby. Kunta pursed his lips, making the male bushfowl mating call, and shortly several fat, fine hens came flapping and waddling over. They were cocking their heads and looking around when Kunta’s arrow went straight through one. Jerking its head off, he let the blood drain out, and while the bird roasted he built a rough bush shelter, then prayed. He also roasted some ears of wild corn that he had plucked along the way before awakening Lamin, who had fallen asleep again the moment they put their headloads down. Hardly had Lamin wolfed down his meal before he flopped back down onto the soft moss under a slanting roof of leafy boughs and went back to sleep without a murmur.

Kunta sat hugging his knees in the night’s still air. Not far away, hyenas began yipping. For some time, he diverted himself by identifying the other sounds of the forest. Then three times he faintly heard a melodious horn. He knew it was the next village’s final prayer call, blown by their alimamo through a hollowed elephant’s tooth. He wished that Lamin had been awake to hear its haunting cry, which was almost like a human voice, but then he smiled, for his brother was beyond caring what anything sounded like. Then himself praying, Kunta also slept.

Soon after sunrise, they were passing that village and hearing the drumming rhythm of the women’s pestles pounding couscous for breakfast porridge. Kunta could almost taste it; but they didn’t stop. Not far beyond, down the trail, was another village, and as they went by, the men were leaving their mosque and the women were bustling around their cooking fires. Still farther on, Kunta saw ahead of them an old man sitting beside the trail. He was bent nearly double over a number of cowrie shells, which he was shuffling and reshuffling on a plaited bamboo mat while mumbling to himself. Not to interrupt him, Kunta was about to pass by when the old man looked up and hailed them over to where he sat.

“I come from the village of Kootacunda, which is in the kingdom of Wooli, where the sun rises over the Simbani forest,” he said in a high, cracking voice. “And where may you be from?” Kunta told him the village of Juffure, and the old man nodded. “I have heard of it.” He was consulting his cowries, he said, to learn their next message about his journey to the city of Timbuktu, “which I want to see before I die,” and he wondered if the travelers would care to be of any help to him. “We are poor, but happy to share whatever we have with you, Grandfather,” said Kunta, easing off his headload, reaching within it and withdrawing some dried meat, which he gave the old man, who thanked him and put the food in his lap.

Peering at them both, he asked, “You are brothers traveling?”

“We are, Grandfather,” Kunta replied.

“That is good!” the old man said, and picked up two of his cowries. “Add this to those on your hunting bag, and it will bring you a fine profit,” he said to Kunta, handing him one of the cowries. “And you, young man,” he said to Lamin, giving him the other, “keep this for when you become a man with a bag of your own.” They both thanked him, and he wished them Allah’s blessings.

They had walked on for quite a while when Kunta decided that the time was ripe to break his silence with Lamin. Without stopping or turning, he began to speak: “There is a legend, little brother, that it was traveling Mandinkas who named the place where that old man is bound. They found there a kind of insect they had never seen before and named the place ‘Tumbo Kutu,’ which means ‘new insect.’” When there was no response from Lamin, Kunta turned his head; Lamin was well behind, bent down over his headload—which had fallen open on the ground—and struggling to tie it back together. As Kunta trotted back, he realized that Lamin’s grabbing at his headload had finally caused it to work its bindings loose and that he had somehow eased it off his head without making any noise, not wanting to break the rule of silence by asking Kunta to stop. While Kunta was retying the headload, he saw that Lamin’s feet were bleeding, but this was to be expected, so he said nothing of it. The tears shone in Lamin’s eyes as he got the load back on his head, and they went on. Kunta upbraided himself that he hadn’t missed Lamin’s presence and might have left him behind.

They hadn’t walked much farther when Lamin let out a choked scream. Thinking he had stepped on a thorn, Kunta turned—and saw his brother staring upward at a big panther flattened on the limb they would have walked under in another moment. The panther went sssss , then seemed to flow almost lazily into the branches of a tree and was gone from sight. Shaken, Kunta resumed walking, alarmed and angry and embarrassed at himself. Why had he not seen that panther? The odds were that it was only wishing to remain unseen and wouldn’t have sprung down upon them, for unless the big cats were extremely hungry, they rarely attacked even their animal prey during the daylight, and humans seldom at any time, unless they were cornered, provoked, or wounded. Still, a picture flashed through Kunta’s memory of the panther-mangled nanny goat from his goat-herding days. He could almost hear the kintango’s stern warning: “The hunter’s senses must be fine. He must hear what others cannot, smell what others cannot. He must see through the darkness.” But while he had been walking along with his own thoughts wandering, it was Lamin who had seen the panther. Most of his bad troubles had come from that habit, which he absolutely must correct, he thought. Bending quickly without breaking pace, Kunta picked up a small stone, spit on it three times, and hurled it far back down the trail, the stone having thus carried behind them the spirits of misfortune.

They walked on with the sun burning down upon them as the country gradually changed from green forest to oil palms and muddy, dozing creeks, taking them past hot, dusty villages where—just as in Juffure—first-kafo children ran and screamed around in packs, where men lounged under the baobab and women gossiped beside the well. But Kunta wondered why they let their goats wander around these villages, along with the dogs and chickens, rather than keep them either out grazing or penned up, as in Juffure. He decided that they must be an odd, different kind of people.

They pushed on over grassless, sandy soil sprinkled with the burst dry fruit of weirdly shaped baobabs. When the time came to pray, they rested and ate lightly, and Kunta would check Lamin’s headbundle and his feet, whose bleeding was not so bad any more. And the crossroads kept unfolding like a picture, until finally there was the huge old shell of a baobab that the young men from Barra had described. It must have been hundreds of rains old to be dying at last, he thought, and he told Lamin what one of the young men had told him: “A griot rests inside there,” adding from his own knowledge that griots were always buried not as other people were but within the shells of ancient baobabs, since both the trees and the histories in the heads of griots were timeless. “We’re close now,” Kunta said, and he wished he had the drum he was going to make, so that he could signal ahead to his friends. With the sinking of the sun, they finally reached the clay pits—and there were the three young men.

“We felt you would come!” they shouted, happy to see him. They merely ignored Lamin as if he were their own second-kafo brother. Amid brisk talk, the three young men proudly showed the tiny grains of gold they had collected. By the next morning’s first light, Kunta and Lamin had joined in, chopping up chunks of sticky clay, which they dropped into large calabashes of water. After whirling the calabash, then slowly pouring off most of the muddy water, they carefully felt with their fingers to see if any gold grains had sunk to the bottom. Now and then there was a grain as tiny as a millet seed, or maybe a little larger.