Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

Kunta shifted the position of his legs to let them hang for a while over the edge of his small perch, to keep the muscles from cramping. His wuolo dog was curled on the ground below him, its smooth brown fur shining in the moonlight, but he knew that the dog only seemed to be dozing, and that his nose and ears were alertly twitching for the night air’s slightest smell or sound of warning to bound up racing and barking after the baboons that had lately been raiding the groundnut fields almost every night. During each long lookout duty, few things pleased Kunta more than when, maybe a dozen times in the course of a night, he would be jerked from his thoughts by sudden distant snarlings as a baboon was sprung upon in the brush by a big cat—especially if the baboon’s growling turned into a scream quickly hushed, which meant that it had not escaped.

But it all was quiet now as Kunta sat on the edge of his platform and looked out across the fields. The only sign of life, in fact, beyond the tall grass, was the bobbing yellow light of a Fulani herdsman in the distance as he waved his grass torch to frighten away some animal, probably a hyena, that was roaming too close to his cows. So good were the Fulani attending cattle that people claimed they could actually talk with their animals. And Omoro had told Kunta that each day, as part of their pay for herding, the Fulani would siphon a little blood from the cows’ necks, which they mixed with milk and drank. What a strange people, thought Kunta. Yet though they were not Mandinka, they were from The Gambia, like him. How much stranger must be the people—and the customs—one would find beyond the borders of his land.

Within a moon after he returned from gold hunting with Lamin, Kunta had been restless to get on the road once again—this time for a real trip. Other young men of his kafo, he knew, were planning to travel somewhere as soon as the groundnuts and couscous got harvested, but none was going to venture far. Kunta, however, meant to put his eyes and feet upon that distant place called Mali, where, some three or four hundred rains before, according to Omoro and his uncles, the Kinte clan had begun. These forefather Kintes, he remembered, had won fame as blacksmiths, men who had conquered fire to make iron weapons that won wars and iron tools that made farming less hard. And from this original Kinte family, all of their descendants and all of the people who worked for them had taken the Kinte name. And some of that clan had moved to Mauretania, the birthplace of Kunta’s holy-man grandfather.

So that no one else, even Omoro, would know about his plan until he wanted it known, Kunta had consulted in the strictest confidence with the arafang about the best route to Mali. Drawing a rough map in the dust, then tracing his finger along it, he had told Kunta that by following the banks of the Kamby Bolongo about six days in the direction of one’s prayers to Allah, a traveler would reach Samo Island. Beyond there, the river narrowed and curved sharply to the left and began a serpent’s twists and turns, with many confusing bolongs leading off as wide as the river, whose swampy banks couldn’t be seen in some areas for the thickness of the mangroves growing sometimes as high as ten men. Where one could see the riverbanks, the schoolmaster told him, they abounded with monkeys, hippopotamus, giant crocodiles, and herds of as many as five hundred baboons.

But two to three days of that difficult traveling should bring Kunta to a second large island, where the low, muddy banks would rise into small cliffs matted with shrubs and small trees. The trail, which twisted alongside the river, would take him past villages of Bansang, Karantaba, and Diabugu. Soon afterward he would cross the eastern border of The Gambia and enter the Kingdom of Fulladu, and half day’s walking from there, he would arrive at the village of Fatoto. Out of his bag, Kunta took the scrap of cured hide the arafang had given him. On it was the name of a colleague in Fatoto who he said would give Kunta directions for the next twelve to fourteen days, which would take him across a land called Senegal. Beyond that, said the arafang, lay Mali and Kunta’s destination, Ka-ba, that land’s main place. To go there and return, the arafang figured, would take about a moon—not counting whatever time Kunta chose to spend in Mali.

So many times had Kunta drawn and studied the route on his hut’s dirt floor—erasing it before Binta brought his meals—that he could almost see it before him as he sat on his perch in the groundnut fields. Thinking about the adventures that awaited him along that trail—and in Mali—he could hardly contain his eagerness to be off. He was almost as eager to tell Lamin of his plans, not only because he wanted to share his secret, but also because he had decided to take his little brother along. He knew how much Lamin had boasted about that earlier trip with his brother. Since then, Lamin had also been through manhood training and would be a more experienced and trustworthy traveling companion. But Kunta’s deepest reason for deciding to take him, he had to admit, was simply that he wanted company.

For a moment, Kunta sat in the dark smiling to himself, thinking of Lamin’s face when the time would come for him to know. Kunta planned, of course, to drop the news in a very offhand way, as if he had just happened to think of it. But before then he must speak about it with Omoro, whom he knew now would feel no undue concern. In fact, he was sure that Omoro would be deeply pleased, and that even Binta, though she would worry, would be less upset than before. Kunta wondered what he might bring to Binta from Mali that she would treasure even more than her quills of gold. Perhaps some fine molded pots, or a bolt of beautiful cloth; Omoro and his uncles had said that the ancient Kinte women in Mali had been famed for the pots they made and for the brilliant patterns of cloth they wove, so maybe the Kinte women there still did those things.

When he returned from Mali, it occurred to Kunta, he might plan still another trip for a later rain. He might even journey to that distant place beyond endless sands where his uncles had told of the long caravans of strange animals with water stored in two humps on their backs. Kalilu Conteh and Sefo Kela could have their old, ugly teriya widows, he, Kunta Kinte, would make a pilgrimage to Mecca itself. Happening at that moment to be staring in the direction of that holy city, Kunta became aware of a tiny, steady yellow light far across the fields. The Fulani herdsman over there, he realized, was cooking his breakfast. Kunta hadn’t even noticed the first faint streaks of dawn in the east.

Reaching down to pick up his weapons and head home, he saw his ax and remembered the wood for his drum frame. But he was tired, he thought, maybe he’d chop the wood tomorrow. No, he was already halfway to the forest, and if he didn’t do it now, he knew he would probably let it go until his next sentry duty, which was twelve days later. Besides, it wouldn’t be manly to give in to his weariness. Moving his legs to test for any cramps and feeling none, he climbed down the notched pole to the ground, where his wuolo dog waited, making happy little barks and wagging his tail. After kneeling for his suba prayer, Kunta got up, stretched, took a deep breath of the cool morning air, and set off toward the bolong at a lope.

The familiar perfumes of wild flowers filled Kunta’s nostrils as he ran, wetting his legs, through grass glistening with dew in the first rays of sunshine. Hawks circled overhead looking for prey, and the ditches beside the fields were alive with the croaking of frogs. He veered away from a tree to avoid disturbing a flock of blackbirds that filled its branches like shiny black leaves. But he might have saved himself the trouble, for no sooner had he passed by than an angry, raucous cawing made him turn his head in time to see hundreds of crows bullying the blackbirds from their roost.