Roots (10 page)

He had begun chopping the trunk of the palm into sections of a size that a strong man could carry. Though all he had named were slaves, he said, they were all respected people, as Kunta well knew. “Their rights are guaranteed by the laws of our forefathers,” said Omoro, and he explained that all masters had to provide their slaves with food, clothing, a house, a farm plot to work on half shares, and also a wife or husband.

“Only those who permit themselves to be are despised,” he told Kunta—those who had been made slaves because they were convicted murderers, thieves, or other criminals. These were the only slaves whom a master could beat or otherwise punish, as he felt they deserved.

“Do slaves have to remain slaves always?” asked Kunta.

“No, many slaves buy their freedom with what they save from farming on half share with their masters.” Omoro named some in Juffure who had done this. He named others who had won their freedom by marrying into the family that owned them.

To help him carry the heavy sections of palm, Omoro made a stout sling out of green vines, and as he worked, he said that some slaves, in fact, prospered beyond their masters. Some had even taken slaves for themselves, and some had become very famous persons.

“Sundiata was one!” exclaimed Kunta. Many times, he had heard the grandmothers and the griots speaking of the great fore-father slave general whose army had conquered so many enemies.

Omoro grunted and nodded, clearly pleased that Kunta knew this, for Omoro also had learned much of Sundiata when he was Kunta’s age. Testing his son, Omoro asked, “And who was Sundiata’s mother?”

“Sogolon, the Buffalo Woman!” said Kunta proudly.

Omoro smiled, and hoisting onto his strong shoulders two heavy sections of the palm pole within the vine sling, he began walking. Eating his palm fruits, Kunta followed, and nearly all the way back to the village, Omoro told him how the great Mandinka Empire had been won by the crippled, brilliant slave general whose army had begun with runaway slaves found in swamps and other hiding places.

“You will learn much more of him when you are in manhood training,” said Omoro—and the very thought of that time sent a fear through Kunta, but also a thrill of anticipation.

Omoro said that Sundiata had run away from his hated master, as most slaves did who didn’t like their masters. He said that except for convicted criminals, no slaves could be sold unless the slaves approved of the intended master.

“Grandmother Nyo Boto also is a slave,” said Omoro, and Kunta almost swallowed a mouthful of palm fruit. He couldn’t comprehend this. Pictures flashed across his mind of beloved old Nyo Boto squatting before the door of her hut, tending the village’s twelve or fifteen naked babies while weaving baskets of wigs, and giving the sharp side of her tongue to any passing adult—even the elders, if she felt like it. “That one is nobody’s slave,” he thought.

The next afternoon, after he had delivered his goats to their pens, Kunta took Lamin home by a way that avoided their usual playmates, and soon they squatted silently before the hut of Nyo Boto. Within a few moments the old lady appeared in her doorway, having sensed that she had visitors. And with but a glance at Kunta, who had always been one of her very favorite children, she knew that something special was on his mind. Inviting the boys inside her hut, she set about the brewing of some hot herb tea for them.

“How are your papa and mama?” she asked.

“Fine. Thank you for asking,” said Kunta politely. “And you are well, Grandmother?”

“I’m quite fine, indeed,” she replied.

Kunta’s next words didn’t come until the tea had been set before him. Then he blurted, “Why are you a slave, Grandmother?”

Nyo Boto looked sharply at Kunta and Lamin. Now it was she who didn’t speak for a few moments. “I will tell you,” she said finally.

“In my home village one night, very far from here and many rains ago, when I was a young woman and wife,” Nyo Boto said, she had awakened in terror as flaming grass roofs came crashing down among her screaming neighbors. Snatching up her own two babies, a boy and a girl, whose father had recently died in a tribal war, she rushed out among the others—and awaiting them were armed white slave raiders with their black slatee helpers. In
a furious battle, all who didn’t escape were roughly herded together, and those who were too badly injured or too old or too young to travel were murdered before the others’ eyes, Nyo Boto began to sob, “—including my own two babies and my aged mother.”

As Lamin and Kunta clutched each other’s hands, she told them how the terrified prisoners, bound neck-to-neck with thongs, were beaten and driven across the hot, hard inland country for many days. And every day, more and more of the prisoners’ fell beneath the whips that lashed their backs to make them walk faster. After a few days, yet more began to fall of hunger and exhaustion. Some struggled on, but those who couldn’t were left for the wild animals to get. The long line of prisoners passed other villages that had been burned and ruined, where the skulls and bones of people and animals lay among the burned-out shells of thatch and mud that had once been family huts. Fewer than half of those who had begun the trip reached the village of Juffure, four days from the nearest place on the Kamby Bolongo where slaves were sold.

“It was here that one young prisoner was sold for a bag of corn,” said the old woman. “That was me. And this was how I came to be called Nyo Boto,” which Kunta knew meant “bag of corn.” The man who bought her for his own slave died before very long, she said, “and I have lived here ever since.”

Lamin was wriggling in excitement at the story, and Kunta felt somehow even greater love and appreciation than he had felt before for old Nyo Boto, who now sat smiling tenderly at the two boys, whose father and mother, like them, she had once dandled on her knee.

“Omoro, your papa, was of the first kafo when I came to Juffure,” said Nyo Boto, looking directly at Kunta. “Yaisa, his mother, who was your grandmother, was my very good friend. Do you remember her?” Kunta said that he did and added proudly that he had told his little brother all about their grandma.

“That is good!” said Nyo Boto. “Now I must get back to work. Run along, now.”

Thanking her for the tea, Kunta and Lamin left and walked slowly back to Binta’s hut, each deep in his own private thoughts.

The next afternoon, when Kunta returned from his goatherding, he found Lamin filled with questions about Nyo Boto’s story. Had any such fire ever burned in Juffure? he wanted to know. Well, he had never heard of any, said Kunta, and the village showed no signs of it. Had Kunta ever seen one of those white people? “Of course not!” he exclaimed. But he said that their father had spoken of a time when he and his brothers had seen the toubob and their ships at a point along the river.

Kunta quickly changed the subject, for he knew very little about toubob, and he wanted to think about them for himself. He wished that he could
see
one of them—from a safe distance, of course, since everything he’d ever heard about them made it plain that people were better off who never got too close to them.

Only recently a girl out gathering herbs—and before her two grown men out hunting—had disappeared, and everyone was certain that toubob had stolen them away. He remembered, of course, how when drums of other villages warned that toubob had either taken somebody or was known to be near, the men would arm themselves and mount a double guard while the frightened women quickly gathered all of the children and hid in the bush far from the village—sometimes for several days—until the toubob was felt to be gone.

Kunta recalled once when he was out with his goats in the quiet of the bush, sitting under his favorite shade tree. He had happened to look upward and there, to his astonishment, in the tree overhead, were twenty or thirty monkeys huddled along the thickly leaved branches as still as statues, with their long tails hanging down. Kunta had always thought of monkeys rushing noisily
about, and he couldn’t forget how quietly they had been watching his every move. He wished that now
he
might sit in a tree and watch some toubob on the ground below him.

The goats were being driven homeward the afternoon after Lamin had asked him about toubob when Kunta raised the subject among his fellow goatherds—and in no time they were telling about the things they had heard. One boy, Demba Conteh, said that a very brave uncle had once gone close enough to
smell
some toubob, and they had a peculiar stink. All of the boys had heard that toubob took people away to eat them. But some had heard that the toubob claimed the stolen people were not eaten, only put to work on huge farms. Sitafa Silla spat out his grandfather’s answer to that: “White man’s lie!”

The next chance he had, Kunta asked Omoro, “Papa, will you tell me how you and your brothers saw the toubob at the river?” Quickly, he added, “The matter needs to be told correctly to Lamin.” It seemed to Kunta that his father nearly smiled, but Omoro only grunted, evidently not feeling like talking at that moment. But a few days later, Omoro casually invited both Kunta and Lamin to go with him out beyond the village to collect some roots he needed. It was the naked Lamin’s first walk anywhere with his father, and he was overjoyed. Knowing that Kunta’s influence had brought this about, he held tightly onto the tail of his big brother’s dundiko.

Omoro told his sons that after their manhood training, his two older brothers Janneh and Saloum had left Juffure, and the passing of time brought news of them as well-known travelers in strange and distant places. Their first return home came when drumtalk all the way from Juffure told them of the birth of Omoro’s first son. They spent sleepless days and nights on the trail to attend the naming ceremony. And gone from home so long, the brothers joyously embraced some of their kafo mates of boyhood. But those
few sadly told of others gone and lost—some in burned villages, some killed by fearsome firesticks, some kidnaped, some missing while farming, hunting, or traveling—and all because of toubob.

Omoro said that his brothers had then angrily asked him to join them on a trip to see what the toubob were doing, to see what might be done. So the three brothers trekked for three days along the banks of the Kamby Bolongo, keeping carefully concealed in the bush, until they found what they were looking for. About twenty great toubob canoes were moored in the river, each big enough that its insides might hold all the people of Juffure, each with a huge white cloth tied by ropes to a treelike pole as tall as ten men. Nearby was an island, and on the island was a fortress.

Many toubob were moving about, and black helpers were with them, both on the fortress and in small canoes. The small canoes were taking such things as dried indigo, cotton, beeswax, and hides to the big canoes. More terrible than he could describe, however, said Omoro, were the beatings and other cruelties they saw being dealt out to those who had been captured for the toubob to take away.

For several moments, Omoro was quiet, and Kunta sensed that he was pondering something else to tell him. Finally he spoke: “Not as many of our people are being taken away now as then.” When Kunta was a baby, he said, the King of Barra, who ruled this part of The Gambia, had ordered that there would be no more burning of villages with the capturing or killing of all their people. And soon it did stop, after the soldiers of some angry kings had burned the big canoes down to the water, killing all the toubob on board.

“Now,” said Omoro, “nineteen guns are fired in salute to the King of Barra by every toubob canoe entering the Kamby Bolongo.” He said that the king’s personal agents now supplied most of the people whom the toubob took away—usually criminals or
debtors, or anyone convicted for suspicion of plotting against the king—often for little more than whispering. More people seemed to get convicted of crimes, said Omoro, whenever toubob ships sailed in the Kamby Bolongo looking for slaves to buy.

“But even a king cannot stop the stealings of some people from their villages,” Omoro continued. “You have known some of those lost from our village, three from among us just within the past few moons, as you know, and you have heard the drumtalk from other villages.” He looked hard at his sons, and spoke slowly. “The things I’m going to tell you now, you must hear with more than your ears—for not to do what I say can mean your being stolen away forever!” Kunta and Lamin listened with rising fright. “Never be alone when you can help it,” said Omoro. “Never be out at night when you can help it. And day or night, when you’re alone, keep away from any high weeds or bush if you can avoid it.”

For the rest of their lives, “even when you have come to be men,” said their father, they must be on guard for toubob. “He often shoots his firesticks, which can be heard far off. And wherever you see much smoke away from any villages, it is probably his cooking fires, which are too big. You should closely inspect his signs to learn which way the toubob went. Having much heavier footsteps than we do, he leaves signs you will recognize as not ours: He breaks twigs and grasses. And when you get close where he has been, you will find that his scent remains there. It’s like a wet chicken smells. And many say a toubob sends forth a nervousness that we can feel. If you feel that, become quiet, for often he can be detected at some distance.”

But it’s not enough to know the toubob, said Omoro. “Many of our own people work for him. They are slatee traitors. But without knowing them, there is no way to recognize them. In the bush, therefore, trust
no
one you don’t know.”

Kunta and Lamin sat frozen with fear. “You cannot be told these things strongly enough,” said their father. “You must know what your uncles and I saw happening to those who had been stolen. It is the difference between slaves among ourselves and those whom toubob takes away to be slaves for him.” He said that they saw stolen people chained inside long, stout, heavily guarded bamboo pens along the shore of the river. When small canoes brought important-acting toubob from the big canoes, the stolen people were dragged outside their pens onto the sand.