Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

Breathing deeply as he ran, but still not out of breath, he began to smell the musky aroma of the mangroves as he neared the low, thick underbrush that extended far back from the banks of the bolong. At the first sight of him, a sudden snorting spread among the wild pigs, which in turn set off a barking and snarling among the baboons, whose big males quickly pushed their females and babies behind them. When he was younger, he would have stopped to imitate them, grunting and jumping up and down, since this never failed to annoy the baboons, who would always shake their fists and sometimes throw rocks. But he was no longer a boy, and he had learned to treat all of Allah’s creatures as he himself wished to be treated: with respect.

Fluttering white waves of egrets, cranes, storks, and pelicans rose from their sleeping places as he picked his way through the tangled mangrove down to the bolong. Kunta’s wuolo dog raced ahead chasing watersnakes and big brown turtles down their mud-slides into the water, where they left not even a ripple.

As he always did whenever he felt some need to come here after a night’s lookout duty, Kunta stood awhile at the edge of the bolong, today watching a gray heron trailing its long, thin legs as it flew at about a spear’s height above the pale green water, rippling the surface with each downbeat of its wings. Though the heron was looking for smaller game, he knew that this was the best spot along the bolong for kujalo, a big, powerful fish that Kunta loved to catch for Binta, who would stew it for him with onions, rice, and bitter tomatoes. With his stomach already rumbling for breakfast, it made him hungry just to think of it.

A little farther downstream, Kunta turned away from the water’s edge along a path he himself had made to an ancient mangrove tree that he thought must know him, after countless visits, as well as he knew it. Pulling himself up into the lowest branch, he climbed all the way to his favorite perch near the top. From here, in the clear morning, with the sun warm on his back, he could see all the way to the next bend in the bolong, still carpeted with sleeping water-fowl, and beyond them to the women’s rice plots, dotted with their bamboo shelters for nursing babies. In which one of them, he wondered, had his mother put him when he was little? This place in the early morning would always fill Kunta with a greater sense of calm, and wonder, than anywhere else he knew of. Even more than in the village mosque, he felt here how totally were everyone and everything in the hands of Allah, and how everything he could see and hear and smell from the top of this tree had been here for longer than men’s memories, and would be here long after he and his sons and his sons’ sons had joined their ancestors.

Trotting away from the bolong toward the sun for a little while, Kunta finally reached the head-high grass surrounding the grove where he was going to pick out and chop a section of tree trunk just the right size for the body of his drum. If the green wood started drying and curing today, he figured it would be ready to hollow out and work on in a moon and a half, about the time he and Lamin would be returning from their trip to Mali. As he stepped into the grove, Kunta saw a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye. It was a hare, and the wuolo dog was after it in a flash as it raced for cover in the tall grass. He was obviously chasing it for sport rather than for food, since he was barking furiously; Kunta knew that a hunting wuolo never made noise if he was really hungry. The two of them were soon out of earshot, but Kunta knew that his dog would come back when he lost interest in the chase.

Kunta headed forward to the center of the grove, where he would find more trees from which to choose a trunk of the size, smoothness, and roundness that he wanted. The soft, mossy earth felt good under his feet as he walked deeper into the dark grove, but the air here was damp and cold, he noticed, the sun not being high enough or hot enough yet to penetrate the thick foliage overhead. Leaning his weapons and ax against a warped tree, he wandered here and there, occasionally stooping, his eyes and fingers examining for just the right trunk, one just a little bit larger—to allow for drying shrinkage—than he wanted his drum to be.

He was bending over a likely prospect when he heard the sharp crack of a twig, followed quickly by the squawk of a parrot overhead. It was probably the dog returning, he thought in the back of his mind. But no grown dog ever cracked a twig, he flashed, whirling in the same instant. In a blur, rushing at him, he saw a white face, a club upraised, heard heavy footfalls behind him. Toubob! His foot lashed up and caught the man in the belly—it was soft and he heard a grunt—just as something hard and heavy grazed the back of Kunta’s head and landed like a treetrunk on his shoulder. Sagging under the pain, Kunta spun—turning his back on the man who lay doubled over on the ground at his feet—and pounded with his fists on the faces of two black men who were lunging at him with a big sack, and at another toubob swinging a short, thick club, which missed him this time as he sprang aside.

His brain screaming for any weapon, Kunta leaped into them—clawing, butting, kneeing, gouging—hardly feeling the club that was pounding against his back. As three of them went down with him, sinking to the ground under their combined weight, a knee smashed into Kunta’s lower back, rocking him with such pain that he gasped. His open mouth meeting flesh, his teeth clamped, cut, tore. His numb fingers finding a face, he clawed deeply into an eye, hearing its owner howl as again the heavy club met Kunta’s head.

Dazed, he heard a dog’s snarling, a toubob screaming, then a sudden piteous yelp. Scrambling to his feet, wildly twisting, dodging, ducking to escape more clubbing, with blood streaming from his split head, he saw one black cupping his eye, one of the toubob holding a bloody arm, standing over the body of the dog, and the remaining pair circling him with raised clubs. Screaming his rage, Kunta went for the second toubob, his fists meeting and breaking the force of the descending club. Almost choking with the awful toubob stink, he tried desperately to wrench away the club. Why had he not heard them, sensed them, smelled them?

Just then the black’s club smashed into Kunta once again, staggering him to his knees, and the toubob sprang loose. His head ready to explode, his body reeling, raging at his own weakness, Kunta reared up and roared, flailing blindly at the air, everything blurred with tears and blood and sweat. He was fighting for more than his life now. Omoro! Binta! Lamin! Suwadu! Madi! The toubob’s heavy club crashed against his temple. And all went black.

Kunta wondered if he had gone mad. Naked, chained, shackled, he awoke on his back between two other men in a pitch darkness full of steamy heat and sickening stink and a nightmarish bedlam of shrieking, weeping, praying, and vomiting. He could feel and smell his own vomit on his chest and belly. His whole body was one spasm of pain from the beatings he had received in the four days since his capture. But the place where the hot iron had been put between his shoulders hurt the worst.

A rat’s thick, furry body brushed his cheek, its whiskered nose sniffing at his mouth. Quivering with revulsion, Kunta snapped his teeth together desperately, and the rat ran away. In rage, Kunta snatched and kicked against the shackles that bound his wrists and ankles. Instantly, angry exclamations and jerking came back from whomever he was shackled to. The shock and pain adding to his fury, Kunta lunged upward, his head bumping hard against wood—right on the spot where he had been clubbed by the toubob back in the woods. Gasping and snarling, he and the unseen man next to him battered their iron cuffs at each other until both slumped back in exhaustion. Kunta felt himself starting to vomit again, and he tried to force it back, but couldn’t. His already emptied belly squeezed up a thin, sour fluid that drained from the side of his mouth as he lay wishing that he might die.