Roots (16 page)

Then, suddenly, Kunta’s hood was lifted. He stood blinking in the bright sun of midafternoon, trying to adjust his eyes to the light. He was afraid even to turn his head enough to see his kafo mates, for directly before them stood stern, wrinkled senior elder Silla Ba Dibba. Like all the other boys, Kunta knew him and his family well. But Silla Ba Dibba acted as if he had never seen any of them before—indeed, as if he would rather not see them now; his eyes scanned their faces as he would have looked at crawling maggots. Kunta knew that this surely was their kintango. Standing on either side of him were two younger men, Ali Sise and Soru Tura, whom Kunta also knew well; Soru was a special friend of
Omoro’s. Kunta was grateful that neither of them
was
Omoro, to see his son so scared.

As they had been taught, the entire kafo—all twenty-three boys—crossed their palms over their hearts and greeted their elders in the traditional way: “Peace!” “Peace only!” replied the old kintango and his assistants. Widening his gaze for a moment—careful not to move his head—Kunta saw that they stood in a compound dotted with several small, mud-walled, thatch-roofed huts and surrounded by the tall new bamboo fence. He could see where the huts had been patched, undoubtedly by the fathers who had disappeared from Juffure for a few days. All this he saw without moving a muscle. But the next moment he nearly jumped out of his skin.

“Children left Juffure village,” said the kintango suddenly in a loud voice. “If men are to return, your fears must be erased, for a fearful person is a weak person, and a weak person is a danger to his family, to his village, and to his tribe.” He glared at them as if he had never seen such a sorry lot, and then turned away. As he did so, his two assistants sprang forward and began to lay about among the boys with limber sticks, pummeling their shoulders and backsides smartly as they herded them like so many goats, a few boys apiece, into the small mud huts.

Huddled in their bare hut, Kunta and his four mates were too terrified to feel the lingering sting of the blows they had received, and too ashamed to raise their heads even enough to look at one another. After a few minutes, when it seemed that they would be spared from further abuse for a little while, Kunta began to sneak looks at his companions. He wished that he and Sitafa were in the same hut. He knew these others, of course, but none as well as his yayo brother, and his heart sank. But perhaps that’s no accident, he reasoned. They probably don’t want us to have even that small comfort. Maybe they’re not even going to feed us, he began to think, when his stomach started to growl with hunger.

Just after sunset, the kintango’s assistants burst into the hut. “
Move!”
A stick caught him sharply across the shoulders, and the scrambling boys were hissed at as they rushed outside into the dusk, bumping into boys from other huts, and under the flying sticks were herded with gruff orders into a ragged line, each boy grasping the hand of the boy ahead. When they were all in place, the kintango fixed them with a dark scowl and announced that they were about to undertake a night journey deep into the surrounding forest.

At the order to march, the long line of boys set out along the path in clumsy disarray, and the sticks fell steadily among them. “You walk like buffalo!” Kunta heard close to his ear. A boy cried out as he was hit, and both assistants shouted loudly in the darkness, “Who was that?,” and their sticks rained down even harder. After that no boy uttered a sound.

Kunta’s legs soon began to hurt—but not as soon or as badly as they would have done if he hadn’t learned the manner of loose striding taught him by his father on their trip to the village of Janneh and Saloum. It pleased him to think that the other boys’ legs were surely hurting worse than his, for they wouldn’t yet know how to walk. But nothing he had learned did anything to help Kunta’s hunger and thirst. His stomach felt tied in knots, and he was starting to feel light-headed when at last a stop was called near a small stream. The reflection of the bright moon in its surface was soon set to rippling as the boys fell to their knees and began to scoop up and gulp down handfuls of water. A moment later the kintango’s assistants commanded them away from the stream with orders not to drink too much at once, then opened their headpacks and passed out some chunks of dried meat. The boys tore away at the morsels like hyenas; Kunta chewed and swallowed so fast that he barely tasted the four bites he managed to wrest away for himself.

Every boy’s feet had big, raw blisters on them, Kunta’s as bad as any of the rest; but it felt so good to have food and water in his stomach that he hardly noticed. As they sat by the stream, he and his kafo mates began to look around in the moonlight at one another, this time too tired rather than too afraid to speak. Kunta and Sitafa exchanged long glances, but neither could tell in the dim light if his friend looked as miserable as he felt himself.

Kunta hardly had a chance to cool his burning feet in the stream before the kintango’s assistants ordered them back into formation for the long walk back to the jujuo. His legs and head were numb when they finally came within sight of the bamboo gates shortly before dawn. Feeling ready to die, he trudged to his hut, bumped into another boy already inside, lost his footing, stumbled to the dirt floor—and fell deep asleep right where he lay.

On every night for the next six nights came another march, each one longer than the last. The pain of his blistered feet was terrible, but Kunta found by the fourth night that he somehow didn’t
mind
the pain as much, and he began to feel a welcome new emotion: pride. By the sixth march, he and the other boys discovered that though the night was very dark, they no longer needed to hold the next boy’s hand in order to maintain a straight marching line.

On the seventh night came the kintango’s first personal lesson for the boys: showing them how men deep in the forest used the stars to guide them, so that they would never be lost. Within the first half moon, every boy of the kafo had learned how to lead the marching line by the stars, back toward the jujuo. One night when Kunta was the leader, he almost stepped on a bush rat before it noticed him and scurried for cover. Kunta was almost as proud as he was startled, for this meant that the marchers had been walking too silently to be heard even by an animal.

But animals, the kintango told them, were the best teachers of the art of hunting, which was one of the most important things for
any Mandinka to learn. When the kintango was satisfied that they had mastered the techniques of marching, he took the kafo, for the next half moon, deep into the bush far from the jujuo, where they built lean-to shelters to sleep in between countless lessons in the secrets of becoming a simbon. Kunta’s eyes never seemed to have been closed before one of the kintango’s assistants was shouting them awake for some training session.

The kintango’s assistants pointed out where lions had recently crouched in wait, then sprung out to kill passing antelope, then where the lions had gone after their meal and laid down to sleep for the rest of the night. The tracks of the antelope herd were followed backward until they almost painted a picture for the boys of what those antelope had done through the day before they met the lions. The kafo inspected the wide cracks in rocks where wolves and hyenas hid. And they began to learn many tricks of hunting that they had never dreamed about. They had never realized, for example, that the first secret of the master simbon was never moving abruptly. The old kintango himself told the boys a story about a foolish hunter who finally starved to death in an area thick with game, because he was so clumsy and made so much noise, darting here and there, that all about him animals of every sort swiftly and silently slipped away without his even realizing that any had been near.

The boys felt like that clumsy hunter during their lessons in imitating the sounds of animals and birds. The air was rent with their grunts and whistles, yet no birds or animals came near. Then they would be told to lie very quietly in hiding places while the kintango and his assistants made what seemed to them the same sounds, and soon animals and birds would come into sight, cocking their heads and looking for the others who had called to them.

When the boys were practicing bird calls one afternoon, suddenly a large-bodied, heavy-beaked bird landed with a great squawking in a nearby bush. “Look!” one boy shouted with a loud
laugh—and every other boy’s heart leaped into his throat, knowing that once again that boy’s big mouth was going to get them all punished together. No few times before had he shown his habit of acting before thinking—but now the kintango surprised them. He walked over to the boy and said to him very sternly, “Bring that bird to me—alive!” Kunta and his mates held their breaths as they watched the boy hunch down and creep toward the bush where the heavy bird sat stupidly, turning its head this way and that. But when the boy sprang, the bird managed to escape his clutching hands, frantically beating its stubby wings just enough to raise its big body over the brushtops—and the boy went leaping after it in hot pursuit, soon disappearing from sight.

Kunta and the others were thunderstruck. There was clearly no limit to what the kintango might order them to do. For the next three days and two nights, as the boys went about their training sessions, they cast long glances at each other and then the nearby bush, all of them wondering and worrying about what had befallen their missing mate. As much as he had annoyed them before by getting them all beaten for things he’d done, he seemed never more one of them now that he was gone.

The boys were just getting up on the morning of the fourth day when the jujuo lookout signaled that someone was approaching the village. A moment later came the drum message: It was he. They rushed out to meet him, whooping as if their own brother had returned from a trek to Marrakech. Thin and dirty and covered with cuts and bruises, he swayed slightly as they ran up and slapped him on the back. But he managed a weak smile—and well he should: Under his arm, its wings and feet and beak bound with a length of vine, he held the bird. It looked even worse than he did, but it was still alive.

The kintango came out, and though speaking to that boy, he made it clear that he was really speaking to them all: “This taught
you two important things—to do as you are told, and to keep your mouth shut. These are among the makings of men.” Then Kunta and his mates saw that boy receive the first clearly approving look cast upon anyone by the old kintango, who had known that the boy would sooner or later be able to catch a bird so heavy that it could make only short, low hops through the bush.

The big bird was quickly roasted and eaten with great relish by everyone except his captor, who was so tired that he couldn’t stay awake long enough for it to cook. He was permitted to sleep through the day and also through the night, which Kunta and the others had to spend out in the bush on a hunting lesson. The next day, during the first rest period, the boy told his hushed mates what a torturous chase he had led, until finally, after two days and a night, he had laid a trap that the bird walked into. After trussing it up—including the snapping beak—he had somehow kept himself awake for another day and night, and by following the stars as they had been taught, had found his way back to the jujuo. For a while after that, the other boys had very little to say to him. Kunta told himself that he wasn’t really jealous, it was just that the boy seemed to think that his exploit—and the kintango’s approval of it—had made him more important than his kafo mates. And the very next time the kintango’s assistants ordered an afternoon of wrestling practice, Kunta seized the chance to grab that boy and throw him roughly to the ground.

By the second moon of manhood training, Kunta’s kafo had become almost as skilled at survival in the forest as they would have been in their own village. They could now both detect and follow the all but invisible signs of animals, and now they were learning the secret rituals and prayers of the forefathers that could make a very great simbon himself invisible to animals. Every bite of meat they ate now was either trapped by the boys or shot by their slings and arrows. They could skin an animal twice as fast as they could
before, and cook the meat over the nearly smokeless fires they had learned to build by striking flint close to dry moss under light, dry sticks. Their meals of roasted game—sometimes small bush rats—were usually topped off with insects toasted crispy in the coals.

Some of the most valuable lessons they learned weren’t even planned. One day, during a rest period, when a boy was testing his bow and one careless arrow happened to strike a nest of kurburungo bees high in a tree, a cloud of angry bees swarmed down—and once again all the boys suffered for the mistake of one. Not even the fastest runner among them escaped the painful stings.

“The simbon never shoots an arrow without knowing what it will hit,” the kintango told them later. Ordering the boys to rub one another’s puffed and hurting places with shea tree butter, he said, “Tonight, you will deal with those bees in the proper manner.” By nightfall, the boys had piled dry moss beneath the tree that held the nest. After one of the kintango’s assistants set it afire, the other one threw into the flames a quantity of leaves from a certain bush. Thick, choking smoke rose into the tree’s upper limbs, and soon dead bees were dropping around the boys by the thousands, as harmlessly as rain. In the morning, Kunta and his kafo were shown how to melt down the honeycombs—skimming off the rest of the dead bees—so that they could eat their fill of honey. Kunta could almost feel himself tingle with that extra strength it was said honey would give to great hunters when they were in need of quick nourishment deep in the forest.

But no matter what they went through, no matter how much they added to their knowledge and abilities, the old kintango was never satisfied. His demands and his discipline remained so strict that the boys were torn between fear and anger most of the time—when they weren’t too weary to feel either. Any command to one boy that wasn’t instantly and perfectly performed still brought a beating to the entire kafo. And when they weren’t being beaten, it
seemed to Kunta, they were being wakened roughly in the middle of the night for a long march—always as a punishment for some boy’s wrongdoing. The only thing that kept Kunta and the others from giving that boy a beating of their own was the certain knowledge that they would be beaten for fighting, among the first lessons they had learned in life—long before coming to the jujuo—having been that Mandinkas must never fight among themselves. Finally the boys began to understand that the welfare of the group depended on each of them—just as the welfare of their
tribe
would depend on each of them one day. Violations of the rule’s slowly dwindled to an occasional lapse, and with the decline in beatings, the fear they felt for the kintango was slowly replaced by a respect they had felt before only for their fathers.