Roots (14 page)

Then Janneh spoke. Nearly as precious as gold in many places, he said, was salt. He and Saloum had personally seen salt and gold exchanged in equal weights. Salt was found in thick slabs under certain distant sands, and certain waters elsewhere would dry into a salty mush, which was shaped into blocks after sitting in the sun.

“There was once a
city
of salt,” said the old man. “The city of Taghaza, whose people built their houses and mosques of blocks of salt.”

“Tell of the strange humpbacked animals you have spoken of before now,” demanded an ancient-looking old woman, daring to interrupt. She reminded Kunta of Grandmother Nyo Boto.

A hyena howled somewhere in the night as people leaned forward in the flickering light. It was Saloum’s turn to speak. “Those animals that are called camels live in a place of endless sand. They find their way across it from the sun, the stars, and the wind. Janneh and I have ridden these animals for as long as three moons with few stops for water.”

“But many stops to fight off the bandits!” said Janneh.

“Once we were part of a caravan of twelve thousand camels,” Saloum continued. “Actually, it was many smaller caravans traveling together to protect ourselves against bandits.”

Kunta saw that as Saloum spoke, Janneh was unrolling a large piece of tanned hide. The elder made an impatient gesture to two young men who sprang to throw onto the fire some dry branches. In the flaring light, Kunta and the others could follow Janneh’s finger as it moved across a strange-looking drawing. “This is Africa,” he said. The finger traced what he told them was “the big
water” to the west, and then “the great sand desert,” a place larger by many times than all of The Gambia—which he pointed out in the lower left of the drawing.

“To the north coast of Africa, the toubob ships bring porcelain, spices, cloth, horses, and countless things made by men,” said Saloum. “Then, camels and donkeys bear those goods inland to places like Sijilmasa, Ghadames, and Marrakech.” The moving finger of Janneh showed where those cities were. “And as we sit here tonight,” said Saloum, “there are many men with heavy headloads crossing deep forests taking our own African goods—ivory, skins, olives, dates, kola nuts, cotton, copper, precious stones—back to the toubob’s ships.”

Kunta’s mind reeled at what he heard, and he vowed silently that someday he too would venture to such exciting places.

“The marabout!” From far out on the trail, the lookout drummer beat out the news. Quickly a formal greeting party was lined up—Janneh and Saloum as the village’s founders; then the Council of Elders, the alimamo, the arafang; then the honored representatives of other villages, including Omoro; and Kunta was placed with those of his height among the village’s young ones. Musicians led them all out toward the travelers’ tree, timing their approach to meet the holy man as he arrived. Kunta stared hard at the white-bearded, very black old man at the head of his long and tired party. Men, women, and children were heavily loaded with large head-bundles, except for a few men herding cattle and, Kunta judged, more than a hundred goats.

With quick gestures, the holy man blessed the welcoming party and bade them rise from their knees. Then Janneh and Saloum were specially blessed, and Omoro was introduced by Janneh, and Saloum beckoned to Kunta, who went dashing up alongside them. “This is my first son,” said Omoro, “who bears his holy grandfather’s name.”

Kunta heard the marabout speak words in Arabic over him—which he couldn’t understand, except for his grandfather’s name—and he felt the holy man’s fingers touching his head as lightly as a butterfly’s wing, and then he went dashing back among those of his own age as the marabout went to meet the others in the welcoming party, conversing with them as if he were an ordinary man. The young ones in Kunta’s group began to trail away and stare at the long line of wives, children, students, and slaves who brought up the rear of the procession.

The marabout’s wives and children quickly retired into guest huts. The students, taking seats on the ground and opening their headbundles, withdrew books and manuscripts—the property of their teacher, the holy man—and began reading aloud to those who gathered around each of them to listen. The slaves, Kunta noticed, didn’t enter the village with the others. Remaining outside the fence, the slaves squatted down near where they had tethered the cattle and penned the goats. They were the first slaves Kunta had ever seen who kept away from other people.

The holy man could scarcely move for all the people on their knees around him. Villagers and distinguished visitors alike pressed their foreheads to the dirt and wailed for him to hear their plaints, some of the nearest presuming to touch his garment. Some begged him to visit their villages and conduct long-neglected religious services. Some asked for legal decisions, since law and religion were companions under Islam. Fathers asked to be given meaningful names for new babies. People from villages without an arafang asked if their children might be taught by one of the holy man’s students.

These students were now busily selling small squares of cured goathide, which many hands then thrust toward the holy man for him to make his mark on. A holy-marked piece of goatskin, sewn into a treasured saphie charm such as Kunta wore around his
upper arm, would insure the wearer’s constant nearness to Allah. For the two cowrie shells he had brought with him from Juffure, Kunta purchased a square of goathide and joined the jostling crowd that pressed in upon the marabout.

It ran through Kunta’s mind that his grandfather must have been like this holy man, who had the power, through Allah, to bring the rain to save a starving village, as Kairaba Kunta Kinte had once saved Juffure. So his beloved grandmas Yaisa and Nyo Boto had told him since he was old enough to understand. But only now, for the first time, did he truly understand the greatness of his grandfather—and of Islam. Only one person, thought Kunta, was going to be told why he had decided to spend his precious two cowries and now stood holding his own small square of cured goatskin waiting his turn for a holy mark. He was going to take the blessed goatskin back home and turn it over to Nyo Boto, and ask her to keep it for him until the time came to sew it into a precious saphie chaim for the arm of his own first son.

K
unta’s kafo, galled with envy of his trip, and expecting that he would return to Juffure all puffed up with himself, had decided—without any of them actually saying so—to show no interest whatever in him or his travels when he returned. And so they did, thinking nothing of how heartsick it made Kunta feel to arrive home and find his lifelong mates not only acting as if he hadn’t been away, but actually ending conversations if he came near, his dearest friend Sitafa acting even colder than the others. Kunta was so upset that he hardly even thought about his new infant brother, Suwadu, who had been born while he was away with Omoro.

One noon, as the goats grazed, Kunta finally decided to overlook his mates’ unkindness and try to patch things up. Walking over to the other boys, who were sitting apart from him eating their lunches, he sat down among them and simply began talking. “I wish you could have been with me,” he said quietly, and without waiting for their reaction, began to tell them about the trip.

He told how hard the days of walking had been, how his muscles had ached, about his fright in passing the lions. And he described the different villages he had passed through and the people who lived there. While he spoke, one of the boys jumped up to regroup his goats, and when he returned—without seeming to notice—sat down closer to Kunta. Soon Kunta’s words were being
accompanied by grunts and exclamations from the others, and before they knew it, just at that point in his story when he reached his uncles’ new village, the time had come to drive the goats homeward.

The next morning in the schoolyard, all of the boys had to strain not to let the arafang suspect their impatience to leave. Finally out again with their goats, they huddled around Kunta, and he began to tell them about the different tribes and languages all intermingled in his uncles’ village. He was in the middle of one of the tales of faraway places that Janneh and Saloum had told around the campfire—the boys hanging raptly on every word—when the stillness of the fields was broken by the ferocious barking of a wuolo dog and the shrill, terrified bleating of a goat.

Springing upright, they saw over the edge of the tall grass a great, tawny panther dropping a goat from his jaws and lunging at two of their wuolo dogs. The boys were still standing there, too shocked and scared to move, when one of the dogs was flung aside by the panther’s sweeping paw—as the other dog leaped wildly back and forth, the panther crouched to spring, their horrible snarlings drowning out the frantic barking of the other dogs and the cries of the other goats, which were bounding off in all directions.

Then the boys fanned out, shouting and running, most trying to head off the goats. But Kunta bolted blindly toward his father’s fallen goat. “Stop, Kunta!
No!
” screamed Sitafa as he tried to stop him from running between the dogs and the panther. He couldn’t catch him, but when the panther saw the two yelling boys rushing at him, he backed off a few feet, then turned and raced back toward the forest with the enraged dogs at his heels.

The panther stink and the mangled nanny goat made Kunta sick—blood was running darkly down her twisted neck, her tongue lolled out; her eyes were rolled back up in her head and—
most horribly—her belly was ripped wide open and Kunta could see her unborn kid inside, still slowly pulsing. Nearby was the first wuolo dog, whining in pain from its gashed side and trying to crawl toward Kunta. Vomiting where he stood, Kunta turned, ashen, and looked at Sitafa’s anguished face.

Dimly, through his tears, Kunta sensed some of the other boys around him, staring at the hurt dog and the dead goat. Then slowly they all drew back—all but Sitafa, who put his arms around Kunta. None of them spoke, but the question hung in the air: How is he going to tell his father? Somehow Kunta found his voice. “Can you care for my goats?” he asked Sitafa. “I must take this hide to my father.”

Sitafa went over and talked with the other boys, and two of them quickly picked up and carried off the whimpering dog. Kunta then motioned Sitafa to go away with the others. Kneeling by the dead nanny goat with his knife, Kunta cut and pulled, and cut again, as he had seen his father do it, until finally he rose with the wet hide in his hands. Pulling weeds, he covered over the nanny’s carcass and the unborn kid, and started back toward the village. Once before he had forgotten his goats while herding, and he had vowed never to let it happen again. But it
had
happened again, and this time a nanny goat had been killed.

Desperately, he hoped it was a nightmare and that he’d awaken now, but the wet hide was in his hands. He wished death upon himself, but he knew his disgrace would be taken among the ancestors. Allah must be punishing him for boasting, Kunta thought with shame. He stopped to kneel toward the way the sun rose and prayed for forgiveness.

Rising, he saw that his kafo had all the goats herded back together and were getting ready to leave the grazing area, lifting their headloads of firewood. One boy was carrying the injured dog, and two of the other dogs were limping badly. Sitafa, seeing
Kunta looking toward them, put his headload down and started toward Kunta, but quickly Kunta waved him away again to go on with the rest.

Each footstep along the worn goat trail seemed to take Kunta closer to the end—the end of everything. Guilt and terror and numbness washed over him in waves. He would be sent away. He would miss Binta, Lamin, and old Nyo Boto. He would even miss the arafang’s class. He thought of his late Grandma Yaisa, of his holy man grandfather whose name he bore, now disgraced, of his famous traveling uncles, who had built a village. He remembered that he had no headload of firewood. He thought of the nanny goat, whom he remembered well, always skittish and given to trotting off from the rest. And he thought of the kid not yet born. And while he thought of all these things, he could think of nothing but what he most feared to think of: his father.

His mind lurched, and he stopped, rooted, not breathing, staring ahead of him down the path. It was Omoro, running toward him. No boy would have dared tell him; how had he known?

“Are you all right?” his father asked.

Kunta’s tongue seemed cleaved to the roof of his mouth. “Yes, Fa,” he said finally. But by then Omoro’s hand was exploring Kunta’s belly, discovering that the blood soaking his dundiko wasn’t Kunta’s.

Straightening, Omoro took the hide and laid it on the grass. “Sit down!” he ordered, and Kunta did, trembling as Omoro sat across from him.

“There is something you need to know,” said Omoro. “All men make mistakes. I lost a goat to a lion when I was of your rains.”

Pulling at his tunic, Omoro bared his left hip. The pale, deeply scarred place there shocked Kunta. “I learned, and you must learn.
Never
run toward any dangerous animal.” His eyes searched Kunta’s face. “Do you
hear
me?”

“Yes, Fa.”

Omoro got up, took the goat’s hide, and flung it far off into the brush. “Then that is all that needs to be said.”

Kunta’s head reeled as he walked back to the village behind Omoro. Greater even than his guilt, and his relief, was the love he felt for his father at this moment.

K
unta had reached his tenth rain, and the second-kafo boys his age were about to complete the schooling they had received twice daily since they were five rains old. When the day of graduation came, the parents of Kunta and his mates seated themselves in the arafang’s schoolyard beaming with pride in the very front rows, even ahead of the village elders. While Kunta and the others squatted before the arafang, the village alimamo prayed. Then the arafang stood and began looking around at his pupils as they waved their hands to be asked a question. Kunta was the first boy he chose.