Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

At later sessions, Kunta saw people frequently charged with breaking or losing something borrowed from an irate lender who claimed that the articles had been both valuable and brand-new. Unless the borrower had witnesses to disprove that, he was usually ordered to pay for or replace the article at the value of a new one. Kunta also saw furious people accusing others of inflicting bad fortune on them through evil magic. One man testified that another had touched him with a cock’s spur, making him violently ill. A young wife declared that her new mother-in-law had hidden some bourein shrub in the wife’s kitchen, causing whatever was cooked there to turn out badly. And a widow claimed that an old man whose advances she had spurned had sprinkled powdered eggshells in her path, making her walk into a long succession of troubles, which she proceeded to describe. If presented with enough impressive evidence of evil magic’s motives and results, the Council would command immediate corrective magic to be done by the nearest traveling magic man, whom a drumtalk message would summon to Juffure at the expense of the evildoer.

Kunta saw debtors ordered to pay up, even if they had to sell their possessions, or with nothing to sell, to work off the amount as the lender’s slave. He saw slaves charging their masters with cruelty, or with providing unsuitable food or lodgings, or with taking more than their half share of what the slaves’ work had produced. Masters, in turn, accused slaves of cheating by hiding some of their produce, or of insufficient work, or of deliberately breaking farm tools. Kunta saw the Council weigh carefully the evidence in these cases, along with each person’s past record in the village, and it was not uncommon for some slaves’ reputations to be better than their masters’!

But sometimes there was no dispute between a master and his slave. Indeed, Kunta saw them coming together asking permission for the slave to marry into the master’s family. But any couple intending to marry, first had to obtain the Council’s permission. Couples judged by the Council to be too close of kinship were refused out of hand, but for those not thus disqualified, there was a waiting period of one moon between the request and the reply, during which the villagers were expected to pay quiet visits to any senior elder and reveal any private information, either good or bad, about the couple in question. Since childhood, had each of them always demonstrated a good home training? Had either of them ever caused undue trouble to anyone, including their own families? Had either of them ever displayed any undesirable tendencies of any kind, such as cheating or telling less than the full truth? Was the girl known for being irritable and argumentative? Was the man known for beating goats unmercifully? If so, the marriage was refused, for it was believed that such a person might pass these traits along to his or her children. But as Kunta knew even before he began attending the Council sessions, most couples won approval for marriage, because both sets of parents involved had already learned the answers to these questions, and found them satisfactory, before granting their own permission.

At the Council sessions, however, Kunta learned that sometimes parents hadn’t been told things that people did tell the senior elders. Kunta saw one marriage permission flatly refused when a witness came forth to testify that the young man of the planned marriage, as a young goatherd, had once stolen a basket from him, thinking he hadn’t been seen. The crime hadn’t been reported then, out of compassion for the fact that he was still a boy; if it had been reported, the law would have dictated that his right hand be cut off. Kunta sat riveted as the young thief, exposed at last, burst into tears, blurting out his guilt before his horrified parents and the girl he was asking to many, who began screaming. Soon afterward, he disappeared from Juffure and was never seen or heard of again.

After attending Council sessions for a number of moons, Kunta guessed that most problems for the senior elders came from married people—especially from men with two, three, or four wives. Adultery was the most frequent charge by such men, and unpleasant things happened to an offending man if a husband’s accusation was backed up with convincing outside testimony or other strong evidence. If a wronged husband was poor and the offending man well off, the Council might order the offender to deliver his possessions to the husband, one at a time, until the husband said “I have enough,” which might not be until the adulterer had only his bare hut left. But with both men poor, which was usually the case, the Council might order the offender to work as the husband’s slave for a period of time considered worth the wrongful use of his wife. And Kunta flinched for one repeated offender when the elders set a date and time for him to receive a public flogging of thirty-nine lashes across his bare back by his most recently wronged husband, according to the ancient Moslem rule of “forty, save one.”

Kunta’s own thoughts about getting married cooled somewhat as he watched and listened to the angry testimony of injured wives and husbands before the Council. Men charged that their wives failed to respect them, were unduly lazy, were unwilling to make love when their turn came, or were just generally impossible to live with. Unless an accused wife presented a strong counterargument, with some witnesses to bear her out, the senior elders usually told the husband to go that day and set any three possessions of his wife’s outside her hut and then utter toward those possessions, three times, with witnesses present, the words, “I divorce you!”

A wife’s most serious charge—certain to bring out every woman in the village if it was suspected in advance—was to claim that her husband was not a man, meaning that he was inadequate with her in bed. The elders would appoint three old persons, one from the family of the defiant wife, another from the family of the husband, and the third from among the elders themselves. A date and time would be set for them to observe the wife and husband together in his bed. If two of the three voted that the wife was right, she won her divorce, and her family kept the dowry goats; but if two observers voted that the husband performed well, he not only got the goats back but also could beat the wife and divorce her if he wished to.

In the rains since Kunta had returned from manhood training, no case that had been considered by the Council filled him and his mates with as much anticipation as the one that began with gossip and whispering about two older members of their own kafo and a pair of Juffre’s most eligible widows. On the day the matter finally came before the Council, nearly everyone in the village gathered early to assure themselves of the best possible seats. A number of routine old people’s problems were settled first, and then came the case of Dembo Dabo and Kadi Tamba, who had been granted a divorce more than a rain before but now were back before the Council grinning widely and holding hands and asking permission to remarry. They stopped grinning when the senior elder told them sternly: “You insisted on divorce, therefore you may not remarry—until each of you has had another wife and husband in between.”

The gasps from those in the rear were hushed by the drumtalk announcement of the next names to be called: “Tuda Tamba and Kalilu Conteh! Fanta Bedeng and Sefo Kela!” The two members of Kunta’s kafo and the two widows stood up. The taller widow, Fanta Bedeng, spoke for all of them, sounding as if she had carefully practiced what to say; but nervousness still gripped her. “Tuda Tamba with her thirty-two rains and I with my thirty-three have small chance of catching more husbands,” she said, and proceeded to ask the Council to approve of teriya friendships for her and Tuda Tamba to cook for and sleep with Sefo Kela and Kalilu Conteh, respectively.