Alex Haley: Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Finally the hot skies clouded, the light breezes became brisk winds and, abruptly as always, the little rains began, falling warmly and gently as the farmers hoed the softened earth into long, straight rows in readiness for the seeds. They knew the planting must be done before the big rains came.

The next few mornings, after breakfast, instead of canoeing to their rice fields, the farmers’ wives dressed in the traditional fertility costumes of large fresh leaves, symbolizing the green of growing things, and set out for the furrowed fields of the men. Their voices would be heard rising and falling even before they appeared as they chanted ancestral prayers that the couscous and groundnuts and other seeds in the earthen bowls balanced on their heads would take strong roots and grow.

With their bare feet moving in step, the line of women walked and sang three times around every farmer’s field. Then they separated, and each woman fell in behind a farmer as he moved along each row, punching a hole in the earth every few inches with his big toe. Into each hole a woman dropped a seed, covered it over with her own big toe, and then moved on. The women worked even harder than the men, for they not only had to help their husbands but also tend both the rice fields and the vegetable gardens they cultivated near their kitchens.

While Binta planted her onions, yams, gourds, cassava, and bitter tomatoes, little Kunta spent his days romping under the watchful eyes of the several old grandmothers who took care of all the children of Juffure who belonged to the first kafo, which included those under five rains in age. The boys and girls alike scampered about as naked as young animals—some of them just beginning to say their first words. All, like Kunta, were growing fast, laughing and squealing as they ran after each other around the giant trunk of the village baobab, played hide-and-seek, and scattered the dogs and chickens into masses of fur and feathers.

But all the children—even those as small as Kunta—would quickly scramble to sit still and quiet when the telling of a story was promised by one of the old grandmothers. Though unable yet to understand many of the words, Kunta would watch with wide eyes as the old women acted out their stories with such gestures and noises that they really seemed to be happening.

As little as he was, Kunta was already familiar with some of the stories that his own Grandma Yaisa had told to him alone when he had been visiting in her hut. But along with his first-kafo playmates, he felt that the best storyteller of all was the beloved, mysterious, and peculiar old Nyo Boto. Bald-headed, deeply wrinkled, as black as the bottom of a cooking pot, with her long lemongrass-root chewstick sticking out like an insect’s feeler between the few teeth she had left—which were deep orange from the countless kola nuts she had gnawed on—old Nyo Boto would settle herself with much grunting on her low stool. Though she acted gruff, the children knew that she loved them as if they were her own, which she claimed they all were.

Surrounded by them, she would growl, “Let me tell a story ... ”

“Please!” the children would chorus, wriggling in anticipation.

And she would begin in the way that all Mandinka storytellers began: “At this certain time, in this certain village, lived this certain person.” It was a small boy, she said, of about their rains, who walked to the riverbank one day and found a crocodile trapped in a net.

“Help me!” the crocodile cried out.

“You’ll kill me!” cried the boy.

“No! Come nearer!” said the crocodile.

So the boy went up to the crocodile—and instantly was seized by the teeth in that long mouth.

“Is this how you repay my goodness—with badness?” cried the boy.

“Of course,” said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth. “That is the way of the world.”

The boy refused to believe that, so the crocodile agreed not to swallow him without getting an opinion from the first three witnesses to pass by. First was an old donkey.

When the boy asked his opinion, the donkey said, “Now that I’m old and can no longer work, my master has driven me out for the leopards to get me!”

“See?” said the crocodile. Next to pass by was an old horse, who had the same opinion.

“See?” said the crocodile. Then along came a plump rabbit who said, “Well, I can’t give a good opinion without seeing this matter as it happened from the beginning.”

Grumbling, the crocodile opened his mouth to tell him—and the boy jumped out to safety on the riverbank.

“Do you like crocodile meat?” asked the rabbit. The boy said yes. “And do your parents?” He said yes again. “Then here is a crocodile ready for the pot.”

The boy ran off and returned with the men of the village, who helped him to kill the crocodile. But they brought with them a wuolo dog, which chased and caught and killed the rabbit, too.

“So the crocodile was right,” said Nyo Boto. “It is the way of the world that goodness is often repaid with badness. This is what I have told you as a story.”

“May you be blessed, have strength and prosper!” said the children gratefully.

Then the other grandmothers would pass among the children with bowls of freshly toasted beetles and grasshoppers. These would have been only tasty tidbits at another time of year, but now, on the eve of the big rains, with the hungry season already beginning, the toasted insects had to serve as a noon meal, for only a few handfuls of couscous and rice remained in most families’ storehouses.

Fresh, brief showers fell almost every morning now, and between the showers Kunta and his playmates would dash about excitedly outside. “Mine! Mine!” they would shout at the pretty rainbows that would arc down to the earth, seeming never very far away. But the showers also brought swarms of flying insects whose vicious stinging and biting soon drove the children back indoors.

Then, suddenly, late one night, the big rains began, and the people huddled inside their cold huts listening to the water pound on their thatch roofs, watching the lightning flash and comforting their children as the frightening thunder rumbled through the night. Between cloudbursts, they heard only the barking of the jackals, the howling of the hyenas, and the croaking of the frogs.

The rains came again the next night, and the next—and the next—and only at night—flooding the lowlands near the river, turning their fields into a swamp and their village into a mudhole. Yet each morning before breakfast, all the farmers struggled through the mud to Juffure’s little mosque and implored Allah to send still more rain, for life itself depended upon enough water to soak deeply into the earth before the hot suns arrived, which would wither those crops whose roots could not find enough water to survive.

In the damp nursery hut, dimly lighted and poorly heated by the burning dry sticks and cattle-dung patties in the earthen floor’s shallow firehole, old Nyo Boto told Kunta and the other children of the terrible time she remembered when there were not enough big rains. No matter how bad anything was, Nyo Boto would always remember a time when it was worse. After two days of big rain, she told them, the burning suns had come. Although the people prayed very hard to Allah, and danced the ancestral rain dance, and sacrificed two goats and a bullock every day, still everything growing in the ground began to parch and die. Even the forest’s waterholes dried up, said Nyo Boto, and first wild fowl, and then the forest’s animals, sick from thirst, began to appear at the village well. In crystal-clear skies each night, thousands of bright stars shone, and a cold wind blew, and more and more people grew ill. Clearly, evil spirits were abroad in Juffure.