Roots (20 page)

Jerking suddenly awake, Kunta lay very still for a long moment, trying to figure out what had happened. Then, moving his hand down between his legs, he felt the warm wetness on himself—and on his bed. Frightened and alarmed, he leaped up, felt for a cloth, and wiped himself off, and the bed, too. Then, sitting there in the darkness, his fear was slowly overtaken by embarrassment, his embarrassment by shame, his shame by pleasure, and his pleasure, finally, by a kind of pride. Had this ever happened to any of his mates? he wondered. Though he hoped it had, he also hoped it hadn’t, for perhaps this is what happens when one really becomes a man, he thought; and he wanted to be the first. But Kunta knew that he would never know, for this experience and even these thoughts weren’t the kind he could ever share with anyone. Finally, exhausted and exhilarated, he lay down again and soon fell into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

K
unta knew every man, woman, child, dog, and goat in Juffure, he told himself one afternoon while he sat eating lunch beside his plot of groundnuts, and in the course of his new duties, he either saw or spoke with almost all of them nearly every day. Why, then, did he feel so alone? Was he an orphan? Did he not have a father who treated him as one man should another? Did he not have a mother who tended dutifully to his needs? Did he not have brothers to look up to him? As a new man, was he not their idol? Did he not have the friendship of those with whom he had played in the mud as children, herded goats as boys, returned to Juffure as men? Had he not earned the respect of his elders—and the envy of his kafo mates—for husbanding his farm plot into seven goats, three chickens, and a splendidly furnished hut before reaching his sixteenth birthday? He couldn’t deny it.

And yet he was lonely. Omoro was too busy to spend even as much time with Kunta as he had when he had only one son and fewer responsibilities in the village. Binta was busy too, taking care of Kunta’s younger brothers, but his mother and he had little to say to one another anyway. Even he and Lamin were no longer close; while he had been away at the jujuo, Suwadu had become Lamin’s adoring shadow as Lamin had once been Kunta’s, and Kunta watched with mixed emotions while Lamin’s attitude toward his little
brother warmed from irritation to toleration to affection. Soon they were inseparable, and this had left as little room for Kunta as it had for Madi, who was too young yet to join them but old enough to whine because they wouldn’t let him. On days when the two older boys couldn’t get out of their mother’s hut fast enough, of course, Binta would often order them to take Madi along, so that she could get him out from underfoot, and Kunta would have to smile in spite of himself at the sight of his three brothers marching around the village, one behind the other, in the order of their births, with the two in front staring glumly ahead while the little one, smiling happily, brought up the rear, almost running to keep up.

No one walked behind Kunta any longer, and not often did anyone choose to walk beside him either, for his kafo mates were occupied almost every waking hour with their new duties and—perhaps, like him—with their own broodings about what had so far proved to be the dubious rewards of manhood. True, they had been given their own farm plots and were beginning to collect goats and other possessions. But the plots were small, the work hard, and their possessions were embarrassingly few in comparison to those of older men. They had also been made the eyes and ears of the village, but the cooking pots were kept clean without their supervision, and nothing ever trespassed in the fields except occasional baboon families or dense flocks of birds. Their elders, it soon became clear, got to do all the really important jobs, and as if to rub it in, gave the new men only what they felt was the appearance of respect, as they had been given only the appearance of responsibility. Indeed, when they paid any attention at all to the younger men, the elders seemed to have as much difficulty as the young girls of the village in restraining themselves from laughter, even when one of them performed the most challenging task without a mistake. Well, someday he would be one of those older men, Kunta told himself, and he would wear the mantle of manhood not only with
more dignity but also with more compassion and understanding toward younger men than he and his mates received now.

Feeling restless—and a little sorry for himself—that evening, Kunta left his hut to take a solitary walk. Though he had no destination in mind, his feet drew him toward the circle of rapt children’s faces glowing in the light of the campfire around which the old grandmothers were telling their nightly stories to the first kafo of the village. Stopping close enough to listen—but not close enough to be noticed listening—Kunta squatted down on his haunches and pretended to be inspecting a rock at his feet while one of the wrinkled old women waved her skinny arms and jumped around the clearing in front of the children as she acted out her story of the four thousand brave warriors of the King of Kasoon who had been driven into battle by the thunder of five hundred great war drums and the trumpeting of five hundred elephant-tusk horns. It was a story he had heard many times around the fires as a child, and as he looked at the wide-eyed faces of his Madi in the front row, and Suwadu in the back row, it somehow made him feel sad to hear it again.

With a sigh, he rose and walked slowly away—his departure as unnoticed as his arrival had been. At the fire where Lamin sat with other boys his age chanting their Koranic verses, and the fire where Binta sat with other mothers gossiping about husbands, households, children, cooking, sewing, makeup, and hairdos, he felt equally unwelcome. Passing them by, he found himself finally beneath the spreading branches of the baobab where the men of Juffure sat around the fourth fire discussing village business and other matters of gravity. As he had felt too old to be wanted around the first fire, he felt too young to be wanted around this one. But he had no place else to go, so Kunta seated himself among those in the outer circle—beyond those of Omoro’s age, who sat closer to the fire, and those of the kintango’s age, who sat
closest, among the Council of Elders. As he did so, he heard one of them ask:

“Can anyone say how many of us are getting stolen?”

They were discussing slave taking, which had been the main subject around the men’s fire for the more than one hundred rains that toubob had been stealing people and shipping them in chains to the kingdom of white cannibals across the sea.

There was silence for a little while, and then the alimamo said, “We can only thank Allah that it’s less now than it was.”

“There are fewer of us left to steal!” said an angry elder.

“I listen to the drums and count the lost,” said the kintango.

“Fifty to sixty each new moon just from along our part of the bolong would be my guess.” No one said anything to that, and he added, “There is no way, of course, to count the losses farther inland, and farther up the river.”

“Why do we count only those
taken away
by the toubob?” asked the arafang. “We must count also the burned baobabs where villages once stood. He has killed more in fires and in fighting him than he has ever taken away!”

The men stared at the fire for a long time, and then another elder broke the silence: “Toubob could never do this without help from our own people. Mandinkas, Fulas, Wolofs, Jolas—none of The Gambia’s tribes is without its slatee traitors. As a child I saw these slatees beating those like themselves to walk faster for the toubob!”

“For toubob money, we turn against our own kind,” said Juffure’s senior elder. “Greed and treason—these are the things toubob has given us in exchange for those he has stolen away.”

No one talked again for a while, and the fire sputtered quietly. Then the kintango spoke again: “Even worse than toubob’s money is that he lies for nothing and he cheats with method, as naturally as he breathes. That’s what gives him the advantage over us.”

A few moments passed, and then a young man of the kafo ahead of Kunta’s asked, “Will toubob never change?”

“That will be,” said one of the elders, “when the river flows backward!”

Soon the fire was a pile of smoking embers, and the men began to get up, stretch themselves, wish one another good night, and head home to their huts. But five young men of the third kafo stayed behind—one to cover with dust the warm ashes of all the fires, and the rest, including Kunta, to take the late shift as village lookouts beyond each corner of Juffure’s high bamboo fence. After such alarming talk around the fire, Kunta knew he would have no trouble staying awake, but he didn’t look forward to spending this particular night beyond the safety of the village.

Ambling through Juffure and out the gate with what he hoped was nonchalance, Kunta waved to his fellow guards and made his way along the outside of the fence—past the sharp-thorned bushes piled thickly against it, and the pointed stakes concealed beneath them—to a leafy hiding place that afforded him a silvery view of the surrounding countryside on this moonlit night. Getting as comfortable as he could, he slung his spear across his lap, drew up his knees, clasped his arms around them for warmth, and settled in for the night. Scanning the bush with straining eyes for any sign of movement, he listened to the shrilling of crickets, the eerie whistling of nightbirds, the distant howling of hyenas, and the shrieks of unwary animals taken by surprise, and he thought about the things the men had said around the fire. When dawn came without an incident, he was almost as surprised that he hadn’t been set upon by slave stealers as he was to realize that for the first time in a moon, he hadn’t spent a moment worrying about his personal problems.

N
early every day, it seemed to Kunta, Binta would irritate him about something. It wasn’t anything she would do or say, but in other ways—little looks, certain tones of voice—Kunta could tell she disapproved of something about him. It was worst when Kunta added to his possessions new things that Binta hadn’t obtained for him herself. One morning, arriving to serve his breakfast, Binta nearly dropped the steaming couscous upon Kunta when she saw he was wearing his first dundiko not sewn with her own hands. Feeling guilty for having traded a cured hyena hide to get it, Kunta angrily offered her no explanation, though he could feel that his mother was deeply hurt.

From that morning on, he knew that Binta never brought his meals without her eyes raking every item in his hut to see if there was anything else—a stool, a mat, a bucket, a plate, or a pot—that she’d had nothing to do with. If something new had appeared, Binta’s sharp eyes would never miss it. Kunta would sit there fuming while she put on that look of not caring and not noticing that he had seen her wear so many times around Omoro, who knew as well as Kunta did that Binta could hardly wait to get to the village well among her women friends so that she could loudly bemoan her troubles—which was what all Mandinka women did when they disagreed with their husbands.

One day, before his mother arrived with the morning meal, Kunta picked up a beautifully woven basket that Jinna M’Baki, one of Juffure’s several widows, had given him as a gift, and he set it just inside the door of his hut, where his mother would be sure to all but stumble over it. The widow was actually a little younger than Binta, it occurred to him. While Kunta was still a second-kafo goatherd, her husband had gone away to hunt and never returned. She lived quite near Nyo Boto, whom Kunta often visited, and that was how he and the widow had seen each other and come to speak to each other as Kunta had grown older. It had annoyed Kunta when the widow’s gift caused some of Kunta’s friends to tease him about her reason for giving him a valuable bamboo basket. When Binta arrived at his hut and saw it—recognizing the widow’s style of weaving—she flinched as if the basket were a scorpion before managing to compose herself.

She didn’t say a word about it, of course, but Kunta knew he had made his point. He was no longer a boy, and it was time for her to stop acting like his mother. He felt it was his own responsibility to change her in that regard. It wasn’t something to speak to Omoro about, for Kunta knew he couldn’t put himself into the ridiculous position of asking Omoro’s advice on how to make Binta respect her son the same as she did her husband. Kunta thought about discussing his problem with Nyo Boto, but changed his mind when he recalled how peculiarly she had acted toward him upon his return from manhood training.

So Kunta kept his own counsel, and before long he decided not to go any more into Binta’s hut, where he had lived most of his life. And when Binta brought his meals, he would sit stiffly silent while she set his food on the mat before him and left without speaking or even looking at him. Kunta finally began thinking seriously of seeking out some new eating arrangement. Most of the other new young men still ate from their mothers’ kitchens, but
some were cooked for by an older sister or a sister-in-law. If Binta got any worse, Kunta told himself, he was going to find some other woman to cook for him—perhaps the widow who had given him the woven basket. He knew without asking that she would gladly cook for him—and yet Kunta didn’t want to let her know that he was even considering such a thing. In the meantime, he and his mother continued to meet at mealtimes—and to act as if they didn’t even see each other.

Early one morning, returning from a night of sentry duty out in the groundnut fields, Kunta saw hurrying along the trail some distance ahead of him three young men whom he could tell were about his own age, and whom he knew had to be travelers from somewhere else. Shouting until they turned around, he went running to meet and greet them. They told Kunta they were from the village of Barra, a day and a night of walking from Juffure, and they were on their way to hunt for gold. They were of the Feloop tribe, which was a branch of Mandinka, but he had to listen carefully to understand them, as they did to understand him. It made Kunta remember his visit with his father to his uncle’s new village, where he couldn’t understand what some people were saying, although they lived only two or three days away from Juffure.