Roots (22 page)

Soon after sunrise, they were passing that village and hearing the drumming rhythm of the women’s pestles pounding couscous for breakfast porridge. Kunta could almost taste it; but they didn’t stop. Not far beyond, down the trail, was another village, and as they went by, the men were leaving their mosque and the women were bustling around their cooking fires. Still farther on, Kunta saw ahead of them an old man sitting beside the trail. He was bent nearly double over a number of cowrie shells, which he was shuffling and reshuffling on a plaited bamboo mat while mumbling to himself. Not to interrupt him, Kunta was about to
pass by when the old man looked up and hailed them over to where he sat.

“I come from the village of Kootacunda, which is in the kingdom of Wooli, where the sun rises over the Simbani forest,” he said in a high, cracking voice. “And where may you be from?” Kunta told him the village of Juffure, and the old man nodded. “I have heard of it.” He was consulting his cowries, he said, to learn their next message about his journey to the city of Timbuktu, “which I want to see before I die,” and he wondered if the travelers would care to be of any help to him. “We are poor, but happy to share whatever we have with you, Grandfather,” said Kunta, easing off his headload, reaching within it and withdrawing some dried meat, which he gave the old man, who thanked him and put the food in his lap.

Peering at them both, he asked, “You are brothers traveling?”

“We are, Grandfather,” Kunta replied.

“That is good!” the old man said, and picked up two of his cowries. “Add this to those on your hunting bag, and it will bring you a fine profit,” he said to Kunta, handing him one of the cowries. “And you, young man,” he said to Lamin, giving him the other, “keep this for when you become a man with a bag of your own.” They both thanked him, and he wished them Allah’s blessings.

They had walked on for quite a while when Kunta decided that the time was ripe to break his silence with Lamin. Without stopping or turning, he began to speak: “There is a legend, little brother, that it was traveling Mandinkas who named the place where that old man is bound. They found there a kind of insect they had never seen before and named the place ‘Tumbo Kutu,’ which means ‘new insect.’” When there was no response from Lamin, Kunta turned his head; Lamin was well behind, bent down over his headload—which had fallen open on the ground—and struggling to tie it back together. As Kunta trotted back, he realized
that Lamin’s grabbing at his headload had finally caused it to work its bindings loose and that he had somehow eased it off his head without making any noise, not wanting to break the rule of silence by asking Kunta to stop. While Kunta was retying the headload, he saw that Lamin’s feet were bleeding, but this was to be expected, so he said nothing of it. The tears shone in Lamin’s eyes as he got the load back on his head, and they went on. Kunta upbraided himself that he hadn’t missed Lamin’s presence and might have left him behind.

They hadn’t walked much farther when Lamin let out a choked scream. Thinking he had stepped on a thorn, Kunta turned—and saw his brother staring upward at a big panther flattened on the limb they would have walked under in another moment. The panther went sssss
,
then seemed to flow almost lazily into the branches of a tree and was gone from sight. Shaken, Kunta resumed walking, alarmed and angry and embarrassed at himself. Why had he not seen that panther? The odds were that it was only wishing to remain unseen and wouldn’t have sprung down upon them, for unless the big cats were extremely hungry, they rarely attacked even their animal prey during the daylight, and humans seldom at any time, unless they were cornered, provoked, or wounded. Still, a picture flashed through Kunta’s memory of the panther-mangled nanny goat from his goat-herding days. He could almost hear the kintango’s stern warning: “The hunter’s senses must be fine. He must hear what others cannot, smell what others cannot. He must see through the darkness.” But while he had been walking along with his own thoughts wandering, it was Lamin who had seen the panther. Most of his bad troubles had come from that habit, which he absolutely must correct, he thought. Bending quickly without breaking pace, Kunta picked up a small stone, spit on it three times, and hurled it far back down the trail, the stone having thus carried behind them the spirits of misfortune.

They walked on with the sun burning down upon them as the country gradually changed from green forest to oil palms and muddy, dozing creeks, taking them past hot, dusty villages where—just as in Juffure—first-kafo children ran and screamed around in packs, where men lounged under the baobab and women gossiped beside the well. But Kunta wondered why they let their goats wander around these villages, along with the dogs and chickens, rather than keep them either out grazing or penned up, as in Juffure. He decided that they must be an odd, different kind of people.

They pushed on over grassless, sandy soil sprinkled with the burst dry fruit of weirdly shaped baobabs. When the time came to pray, they rested and ate lightly, and Kunta would check Lamin’s headbundle and his feet, whose bleeding was not so bad any more. And the crossroads kept unfolding like a picture, until finally there was the huge old shell of a baobab that the young men from Barra had described. It must have been hundreds of rains old to be dying at last, he thought, and he told Lamin what one of the young men had told him: “A griot rests inside there,” adding from his own knowledge that griots were always buried not as other people were but within the shells of ancient baobabs, since both the trees and the histories in the heads of griots were timeless. “We’re close now,” Kunta said, and he wished he had the drum he was going to make, so that he could signal ahead to his friends. With the sinking of the sun, they finally reached the clay pits—and there were the three young men.

“We felt you would come!” they shouted, happy to see him. They merely ignored Lamin as if he were their own second-kafo brother. Amid brisk talk, the three young men proudly showed the tiny grains of gold they had collected. By the next morning’s first light, Kunta and Lamin had joined in, chopping up chunks of sticky clay, which they dropped into large calabashes of water.
After whirling the calabash, then slowly pouring off most of the muddy water, they carefully felt with their fingers to see if any gold grains had sunk to the bottom. Now and then there was a grain as tiny as a millet seed, or maybe a little larger.

They worked so feverishly that there was no time for talk. Lamin seemed even to forget his aching muscles in the search for gold. And each precious grain went carefully into the hollow of the largest quills from bush pigeons’ wings, stoppered with a bit of cotton. Kunta and Lamin had six quills full when the three young men said they’d collected enough. Now, they said, they’d like to go farther up the trail, deeper into the interior of the country, to hunt elephants’ teeth. They said they had been told where old elephants sometimes broke off their teeth in trying to uproot small trees and thick brush while feeding. They had heard also that if one could ever find the secret graveyards of the elephants, a fortune in teeth would be there. Would Kunta join them? He was sorely tempted; this sounded even more exciting than hunting for gold. But he couldn’t go—not with Lamin. Sadly he thanked them for the invitation and said he must return home with his brother. So warm farewells were exchanged, but not before Kunta had made the young men accept his invitation to stop for hospitality in Juffure on their way home to Barra.

The trip back seemed shorter to Kunta. Lamin’s feet bled worse, but he walked faster when Kunta handed him the quills to carry, saying “Your mother should enjoy these.” Lamin’s happiness was no greater than his own at having taken his brother traveling, just as their father had done for him—just as Lamin would one day take Suwadu, and Suwadu would take Madi. They were approaching Juffure’s travelers’ tree when Kunta heard Lamin’s headload fall off again. Kunta whirled angrily, but then he saw his brother’s pleading expression. “All right, get it later!” he snapped. Without a word, his aching muscles and his bleeding feet forgotten, Lamin bolted past
Kunta for the village, his thin legs racing faster than they’d ever taken him.

By the time Kunta entered the village gate, excited women and children were clustered around Binta, who was sticking the six quills of gold into her hair, clearly bursting with relief and happiness. A moment later, Binta’s and Kunta’s faces exchanged a look of tenderness and warmth far beyond the usual greetings that passed between mother and her grown-up son home from traveling. The women’s clacking tongues soon let everyone in Juffure know what the two oldest Kinte sons had brought home with them. “There’s a cow on Binta’s head!” shouted an old grandmother—there was enough gold in the quills to buy a cow—and the rest of the women took up that cry.

“You did well,” said Omoro simply when Kunta met him. But the feeling they shared without further words was even greater than with Binta. In the days that followed, elders seeing Kunta around the village began to speak to him and smile in a special way, and he solemnly replied with his respects. Even Suwadu’s little second-kafo mates greeted Kunta as a grown-up, saying “Peace!” and then standing with palms folded over their chests until he passed by. Kunta even chanced to overhear Binta one day gossiping about “the two men I feed,” and he was filled with pride that his mother had finally realized he was a man.

It was all right with Kunta now not only for Binta to feed him, but even to do such things as searching on Kunta’s head for ticks, as she had been resenting not doing. And Kunta felt it all right now also to visit her hut again now and then. As for Binta, she bustled about all smiles, even humming to herself as she cooked. In an offhand manner, Kunta would ask if she needed him to do anything, she would say so if she did, and he did whatever it was as soon as he could. If he but glanced at Lamin or Suwadu, when they were playing too loudly, for example, they were instantly still
and quiet. And Kunta liked tossing Madi into the air, catching him as he fell, and Madi liked it even more. As for Lamin, he clearly regarded his man-brother as ranking second only to Allah. He cared for Kunta’s seven goats—which were multiplying well—as if they were goats of gold, and he eagerly helped Kunta to raise his small farm plot of couscous and groundnuts.

Whenever Binta needed to get some work done around the hut, Kunta would take all three children off her hands, and she would stand smiling in her doorway as he marched off with Madi on his shoulder, Lamin following—strutting like a rooster—and Suwadu jealously tagging along behind. It was nice, thought Kunta—so nice that he caught himself wishing that he might have a family of his own like this someday. But not until the time comes, of course, he told himself, and that’s a long way off.

A
s new men were permitted to do whenever there was no conflict with their duties, Kunta and others of his kafo would sit at the outermost edges of the formal sessions of the Council of Elders, which were held once each moon under Juffure’s ancient baobab. Sitting beneath it on cured hides very close together, the six senior elders seemed almost as old as the tree, Kunta thought, and to have been carved from the same wood, except that they were as black as ebony against the white of their long robes and round skullcaps. Seated facing them were those with troubles or disputes to be resolved. Behind the petitioners, in rows, according to their ages, sat junior elders such as Omoro, and behind them sat the new men of Kunta’s kafo. And behind
them
the village women could sit, though they rarely attended except when someone in their immediate family was involved in a matter to be heard. Once in a long while,
all
the women would be present—but only if a case held the promise of some juicy gossip.

No women at all attended when the Council met to discuss purely administrative affairs, such as Juffure’s relationship with other villages. On the day for matters of the people, however, the audience was large and noisy—but all settled quickly into silence when the most senior of the elders raised his stick, sewn with bright-colored beads, to strike out on the talking drum before him the name of the first person
to be heard. This was done according to their ages, to serve the needs of the oldest first. Whoever it was would stand, stating his case, the senior elders all staring at the ground, listening until he finished and sat down. At this point, any of the elders might ask him questions.

If the matter involved a dispute, the second person now presented his side, followed by more questions, whereupon the elders turned around to present their backs as they huddled to discuss the matter, which could take a long time. One or more might turn with further questions. But all finally turned back around toward the front, one motioning the person or persons being heard to stand again, and the senior elder then spoke their decision, after which the next name was drumtalked.

Even for new men like Kunta, most of these hearings were routine matters. People with babies recently born asked for a bigger farm plot for the husband and an additional rice plot for the wife—requests that were almost always quickly granted, as were the first farming-land requests of unmarried men like Kunta and his mates. During man-training, the kintango had directed them never to miss any Council of Elders sessions unless they had to, as the witnessing of its decisions would broaden a man’s knowledge as his own rains increased until he too would be a senior elder. Attending his first session, Kunta had looked at Omoro seated ahead of him, wondering how many hundreds of decisions his father must have in his head, though he wasn’t even a senior elder yet.

At his first session, Kunta witnessed a land matter involving a dispute. Two men both claimed the fruit of some trees originally planted by the first man on land to which the second man now had the farming rights, since the first man’s family had decreased. The Council of Elders awarded the fruit to the first man, saying, “If he hadn’t planted the trees, that fruit wouldn’t be there.”