Roots (19 page)

Kunta wondered where Omoro was, and where Lamin was—remembering abruptly that his little brother would be away grazing the goats. He had sat down inside Binta’s hut before he noticed that one of the bigger first-kafo children had followed them inside and now stood staring at him and clinging to Binta’s skirt. “Hello, Kunta,” said the little boy. It was Suwadu! Kunta couldn’t believe it. When he had left for manhood training, Suwadu was just something underfoot, too small to take notice of except when he was annoying Kunta with his eternal whining. Now, within the space of four moons, he seemed to have grown taller, and he was beginning to talk; he had become a
person
. Giving the baby back to Binta, he picked up Suwadu and swung him high up to the roof of Binta’s hut, until his little brother yelped with delight.

When he finished visiting with Suwadu, who ran outside to see some of the other new men, the hut fell silent. Brimming over with joy and pride, Binta felt no need to speak. Kunta did. He wanted to tell her how much he had missed her and how it gladdened him to be home. But he couldn’t find the words. And he knew it wasn’t the sort of thing a man should say to a woman—even to his mother.

“Where is my father?” he asked finally.

“He’s cutting thatch grass for your hut,” said Binta. In his excitement, Kunta had nearly forgotten that, as a man, he would now have his own private hut. He walked outside and hurried to the place where his father had always told him one could cut the best quality of roofing thatch.

Omoro saw him coming, and Kunta’s heart raced as he saw his father begin walking to meet him. They shook hands in the manner of men, each looking deeply into the other’s eyes, seeing the other for the first time as man to man. Kunta felt almost weak with emotion, and they were silent for a moment. Then Omoro said, as if he were commenting on the weather, that he had acquired for Kunta a hut whose previous owner had married and built a new house. Would he like to inspect the hut now? Kunta said softly that he would, and they walked along together, with Omoro doing most of the talking, since Kunta was still having trouble finding words.

The hut’s mud walls needed as many repairs as the thatching. But Kunta hardly noticed or cared, for this was his own private hut, and it was all the way across the village from his mother’s. He didn’t allow himself to show his satisfaction, of course, let alone to speak of it. Instead, he told Omoro only that he would make the repairs himself. Kunta could fix the walls, said Omoro, but he would like to finish the roof repairs he had already begun. Without another word, he turned and headed back to the thatch-grass field—leaving Kunta standing there, grateful for the everyday manner with which his father had begun their new relationship as men.

Kunta spent most of the afternoon covering every corner of Juffure, filling his eyes with the sight of all the dearly remembered faces, familiar huts and haunts—the village well, the schoolyard, the baobab and silk-cotton trees. He hadn’t realized how homesick he had been until he began to bask in the greetings of everyone he passed. He wished it was time for Lamin to return with the goats, and found himself missing one other very special person, even if she was a woman. Finally—not caring whether it was something a man should properly do—he headed for the small, weathered hut of old Nyo Boto.

“Grandmother!” he called at the door.

“Who is it?” came the reply in a high, cracked, irritable tone.

“Guess, Grandmother!” said Kunta, and he went inside the hut.

It took his eyes a few moments to see her better in the dim light. Squatting beside a bucket and plucking long fibers from a slab of baobab bark that she had been soaking with water from the bucket, she peered sharply at him for a while before speaking. “Kunta!”

“It’s so good to see you, Grandmother!” he exclaimed.

Nyo Boto returned to her plucking of the fibers. “Is your mother well?” she asked, and Kunta assured her that Binta was.

He was a little taken aback, for her manner was almost as if he hadn’t even been away anywhere, as if she hadn’t noticed that he had become a man.

“I thought of you often while I was away—each time I touched the saphie charm you put on my arm.”

She only grunted, not even looking up from her work.

He apologized for interrupting her and quickly left, deeply hurt and terribly confused. He wouldn’t understand until much later that her rebuff had hurt Nyo Boto even more than it did him; she had acted as she knew a woman must toward one who could no longer seek comfort at her skirts.

Still troubled, Kunta was walking slowly back toward his new hut when he heard a familiar commotion: bleating goats, barking dogs, and shouting boys. It was the second kafo returning from their afternoon’s work in the bush. Lamin would be among them. Kunta began to search their faces anxiously as the boys approached. Then Lamin saw him, shouted his name, and came dashing, wreathed in smiles. But he stopped short a few feet away when he saw his brother’s cool expression, and they stood looking at each other. It was finally Kunta who spoke.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Kunta.”

Then they looked at each other some more. Pride shone in Lamin’s eyes, but Kunta saw also the same hurt he had just felt in the
hut of Nyo Boto, and uncertainty about just what to make of his new big brother. Kunta was thinking that the way they were both acting wasn’t as he would have had it be, but it was necessary that a man be regarded with a certain amount of respect, even by his own brother.

Lamin was the first to speak again: “Your two goats are both big with kids.” Kunta was delighted; that meant he would soon own four, maybe even five goats, if one of those nannies was big with twins. But he didn’t smile or act surprised. “That’s good news,” he said, with even less enthusiasm than he wanted to show. Not knowing what else to say, Lamin dashed away without another word, hollering for his wuolo dogs to reassemble his goats, which had begun to wander.

Binta’s face kept a set, tight expression as she assisted Kunta in moving to his own hut. His old clothes were all outgrown, she said, and with her tone properly respectful, added that whenever he had time for her to measure him between the important things he had to do, she would sew him some new clothes. Since he owned not much more than his bow and arrows and his slingshot, Binta kept murmuring, “You’ll need this” and “You’ll need that,” until she had provided him with such household essentials as a pallet, some bowls, a stool, and a prayer rug she had woven while he was away. With each new thing, as he had always heard his father do, Kunta would grunt, as if he could think of no objection to having it in his house. When she noticed him scratching his head, she offered to inspect his scalp for ticks, and he bluntly told her “No!,” ignoring the grumbling sounds she made afterward.

It was nearly midnight when Kunta finally slept, for much was on his mind. And it seemed to him that his eyes had hardly closed before the crowing cocks had waked him, and then came the singsong call of the alimamo to the mosque, for what would be the first morning prayer that he and his mates would be allowed to attend with the other men of Juffure. Dressing quickly, Kunta took
his new prayer rug and fell in among his kafo as, with heads bowed and rolled prayer rugs under their arms—as if they had done it all their lives—they entered the sacred mosque behind the other men of the village. Inside, Kunta and the others watched and copied every act and utterance of the older men, being especially careful to be neither too soft nor too loud in their reciting of the prayers.

After prayers, Binta brought breakfast to her new man’s hut. Setting the bowl of steaming couscous before Kunta—who just grunted again, not letting his face say anything—Binta left quickly, and Kunta ate without pleasure, irritated by a suspicion that she had seemed to be suppressing something like mirth.

After breakfast, he joined his mates in undertaking their duties as the eyes and ears of the village with a diligence their elders found equally amusing. The women could hardly turn around without finding one of the new men demanding to inspect their cooking pots for insects. And rummaging around outside peoples’ huts and all around the village fence, they found hundreds of spots where the state of repair failed to measure up to their exacting standards. Fully a dozen of them drew up buckets of well water, tasting carefully from the gourd dipper in hopes of detecting a saltiness or a muddiness or something else unhealthy. They were disappointed, but the fish and turtle that were kept in the well to eat insects were removed anyway and replaced with fresh ones.

The new men, in short, were everywhere. “They are thick as fleas!” old Nyo Boto snorted as Kunta approached a stream where she was pounding laundry on a rock, and he all but sprinted off in another direction. He also took special care to stay clear of any known place where Binta might be, telling himself that although she was his mother, he would show her no special favors; that, indeed, he would deal firmly with her if she ever made it necessary. After all, she was a woman.

J
uffure was so small, and its kafo of diligent new men so numerous, it soon seemed to Kunta, that nearly every roof, wall, calabash, and cooking pot in the village had been inspected, cleaned, repaired, or replaced moments before he got to it. But he was more pleased than disappointed, for it gave him more time to spend farming the small plot assigned to his use by the Council of Elders. All new men grew their own couscous or groundnuts, some to live on and the rest to trade—with those who grew too little to feed their families—for things they needed more than food. A young man who tended his crops well, made good trades, and managed his goats wisely—perhaps swapping a dozen goats for a female calf that would grow up and have other calves—could move ahead in the world and become a man of substance by the time he reached twenty-five or thirty rains and began to think about taking a wife and raising sons of his own.

Within a few moons after his return, Kunta had grown so much more than he could eat himself, and made such shrewd trades for this or that household possession to adorn his hut, that Binta began to grumble about it within his hearing. He had so many stools, wicker mats, food bowls, gourds, and sundry other objects in his hut, she would mutter, that there was hardly any room left inside for Kunta. But he charitably chose to ignore her impertinence,
since he slept now upon a fine bed of woven reeds over a springy bamboo mattress that she had spent half a moon making for him.

In his hut, along with several saphies he had acquired in exchange for crops from his farm plot, he kept a number of other potent spiritual safeguards: the perfumed extracts of certain plants and barks which, like every other Mandinka man, Kunta rubbed onto his forehead, upper arms, and thighs each night before going to bed. It was believed that this magical essence would protect a man from possession by evil spirits while he slept. It would also make him smell good—a thing that, along with his appearance, Kunta had begun to think about.

He and the rest of his kafo were becoming increasingly exasperated about a matter that had been rankling their manly pride for many moons. When they went off to manhood training, they had left behind a group of skinny, giggling, silly little girls who played almost as hard as the boys. Then, after only four moons away, they had returned—as new men—to find these same girls, with whom they had grown up, flouncing about wherever one looked, poking out their mango-sized breasts, tossing their heads and arms, showing off their jangly new earrings, beads, and bracelets. What irritated Kunta and the others wasn’t so much that the girls were behaving so absurdly, but that they seemed to be doing so exclusively for the benefit of men at least ten rains older than themselves. For new men like Kunta, these maidens of marriageable age—fourteen and fifteen—had scarcely a glance except to sneer or laugh. He and his mates finally grew so disgusted with these airs and antics that they resolved to pay no further attention either to the girls or to the all-too-willing older men they sought to entice with such fluttery coyness.

But Kunta’s foto would be as hard as his thumb some mornings when he waked. Of course, it had been hard many times before,
even when he was Lamin’s age; but now it was much different in the feeling, very deep and strong. And Kunta couldn’t help putting his hand down under his bedcover and tightly squeezing it. He also couldn’t help thinking about things he and his mates had overheard—about fotos being put into women.

One night dreaming—for ever since he was a small boy, Kunta had dreamed a great deal, even when he was awake, Binta liked to say—he found himself watching a harvest-festival seoruba, when the loveliest, longest-necked, sootiest-black maiden there chose to fling down her headwrap for him to pick up. When he did so, she rushed home shouting, “Kunta likes me!,” and after careful consideration, her parents gave permission for them to marry. Omoro and Binta also agreed, and both fathers bargained for the bride price. “She is beautiful,” said Omoro, “but my concerns are of her true value as my son’s wife. Is she a strong, hard worker? Is she of pleasant disposition in the home? Can she cook well and care for children? And above all, is she guaranteed a virgin?” The answers were all yes, so a price was decided and a date set for the wedding.

Kunta built a fine new mud house, and both mothers cooked bountiful delicacies, to give guests the best impression. And on the wedding day, the adults, children, goats, chickens, dogs, parrots, and monkeys all but drowned out the musicians they had hired. When the bride’s party arrived, the praise singer shouted of the fine families being joined together. Yet louder shouts rose when the bride’s best girlfriends roughly shoved her inside Kunta’s new house. Grinning and waving to everyone, Kunta followed her and drew the curtain across the door. When she had seated herself on his bed, he sang to her a famous ancestral song of love: “Mandumbe, your long neck is very beautiful....” Then they lay down on soft cured hides and she kissed him tenderly, and they clung together very tightly. And then the thing happened, as Kunta had come to imagine it from the ways it had been described to him. It
was even greater than he had been told, and the feeling grew and grew—until finally he
burst
.