Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

Different elders asked a few questions of all four—the widows responding confidently, Kunta’s friends uncertainly, in sharp contrast to their usual boldness of manner. And then the elders turned around, murmuring among themselves. The audience was so tense and quiet that a dropped groundnut could have been heard as the elders finally turned back around. The senior elder spoke: “Allah would approve! You widows will have a man to use, and you new men will get valuable experience for when you marry later.”

The senior elder rapped his stick twice hard against the edge of the talking drum and glared at the buzzing women in the rear. Only when they fell silent was the next name called: “Jankeh Jallon!” Having but fifteen rains, she was thus the last to be heard. All of Juffure had danced and feasted when she found her way home after escaping from some toubob who had kidnaped her. Then, a few moons later, she became big with child, although unmarried, which caused much gossip. Young and strong, she might still have found some old man’s acceptance as a third or fourth junior wife. But then the child was born: He was a strange pale tan color like a cured hide, and had very odd hair—and wherever Jankeh Jallon would appear thereafter, people would look at the ground and hurry elsewhere. Her eyes glistening with tears, she stood up now and asked the Council: What was she to do? The elders didn’t turn around to confer; the senior elder said they would have to weigh the matter—which was a most serious and difficult one—until the next moon’s Council meeting. And with that, he and the five other elders rose and left.

Troubled, and somehow unsatisfied, by the way the session had ended, Kunta remained seated for a few moments after most of his mates and the rest of the audenice had gotten up—chattering among themselves—and headed back toward their huts. His head was still full of thoughts when Binta brought his evening meal, and he said not a word to her as he ate, nor she to him. Later, as he picked up his spear and his bow and arrow and ran with his wuolo dog to his sentry post—for this was his night to stand guard outside the village—Kunta was still thinking: about the tan baby with the strange hair, about his no doubt even stranger father, and about whether this toubob would have eaten Jankeh Jallon if she had not escaped from him.

In the moonlit expanse of ripening fields of groundnuts, Kunta climbed the notched pole and sat down crosslegged on the lookout platform that was built into its sturdy fork, high above the ground. Placing his weapons beside him—along with the ax with which he planned the next morning, at last, to chop the wood for his drum frame—he watched as his wuolo dog went trotting and sniffing this way and that in the fields below. During Kunta’s first few moons on sentry duty, rains ago, he remembered snatching at his spear if so much as a rat went rustling through the grass. Every shadow seemed a monkey, every monkey a panther, and every panther a toubob, until his eyes and ears became seasoned to his task. In time, he found he could tell the difference between the snarl of a lion and that of a leopard. It took longer, however, for him to learn how to remain vigilant through these long nights. When his thoughts began to turn inward, as they always did, he often forgot where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. But finally he learned to keep alert with half of his mind and yet still explore his private thoughts with the other.

Tonight, he was thinking about the teriya friendships that had been approved for his two friends by the Council of Elders. For several moons, they had been telling Kunta and his mates that they were going to take their case before the Council, but no one had really believed them. And now it was done. Perhaps at this very moment, he thought, they might be performing the teriya act in bed with their two widows. Kunta suddenly sat upright trying to picture what it must be like.

It was chiefly from his kafo’s gossip that Kunta knew what little he did about under women’s clothes. In marriage negotiations, he knew, girls’ fathers had to guarantee them as virgins to get the best bride price. And a lot of bloodiness was connected with women, he knew that. Every moon they had blood; and whenever they had babies; and the night when they got married. Everyone knew how the next morning, the newlyweds’ two mothers went to the hut to put into a woven basket the white pagne cloth the couple had slept on, taking its bloodiness as proof of the girl’s virginity to the alimamo, who only then walked around the village drumtalking Allah’s blessings on that marriage. If that white cloth wasn’t bloodied, Kunta knew, the new husband would angrily leave the hut with the two mothers as his witnesses and shout loudly, “I divorce you!” three times for all to hear.

But teriya involved none of that—only new men sleeping with a willing widow and eating her cooking. Kunta thought for a little while about how Jinna M’Baki had looked at him, making no secret of her designs, amid the previous day’s jostling crowd as the Council session ended. Almost without realizing, he squeezed his hard foto, but he forced back the strong urge to stroke it because that would seem as if he was giving in to what that widow wanted, which was embarrassing even to think about. He didn’t really want the stickiness with her, he told himself; but now that he was a man, he had every right, if he pleased, to think about teriya, which the senior elders themselves had shown was nothing for a man to be ashamed of.

Kunta’s mind returned to the memory of some girls he and Lamin had passed in one village when returning from their gold-hunting trip. There had been about ten of them, he guessed, all beautifully black, in tight dresses, colorful beads, and bracelets, with high breasts and little hair plaits sticking up. They had acted so strangely as he went by that it had taken Kunta a moment to realize that the show they made of looking away whenever he looked at them meant not that they weren’t interested in him but that they wanted him to be interested in them.

Females were so confusing, he thought. Girls of their age in Juffure never paid enough attention to him even to look away. Was it because they knew what he was really like? Or was it because they knew he was far younger than he looked—too young to be worthy of their interest? Probably the girls in that village believed no traveling man leading a boy could have less than twenty or twenty-five rains, let alone his seventeen. They would have scoffed if they had known. Yet he was being sought after by a widow who knew very well how young he was. Perhaps he was lucky not to be older, Kunta thought. If he was, the girls of Juffure would be carrying on over him the way the girls of that village had, and he knew they all had just one thing on their minds: marriage. At least Jinna M’Baki was too old to be looking for anything more than a teriya friendship. Why would a man want to marry when he could get a woman to cook for him and sleep with him without getting married? There must be some reason. Perhaps it was because it was only through marrying that a man could have sons. That was a good thing. But what would he have to teach those sons until he had lived long enough to learn something about the world—not just from his father, and from the arafang, and from the kintango, but also by exploring it for himself, as his uncles had done?

His uncles weren’t married even yet, though they were older than his father, and most men of their rains had already taken second wives by now. Was Omoro considering taking a second wife? Kunta was so startled at the thought that he sat up straight. And how would his mother feel about it? Well, at least Binta, as the senior wife, would be able to tell the second wife her duties, and make certain she worked hard and set her sleeping turns with Omoro. Would there be trouble between the two women? No, he was sure Binta wouldn’t be like the kintango’s senior wife, whom it was commonly known shouted so much abuse at his junior wives, keeping them in such a turmoil, that he rarely got any peace.