Roots (6 page)

When Omoro emerged and silently handed his son a small new slingshot, Kunta’s breath all but stopped. He stood looking down at it, then up at his father, not knowing what to say. “This is yours as one of the second kafo. Be sure you don’t shoot the wrong thing, and that you hit what you shoot at.”

Kunta just said, “Yes, Fa,” still tongue-tied beyond that.

“Also, as you are now second kafo,” Omoro went on, “it means you will begin tending goats and going to school. You go goat-herding today with Toumani Touray. He and the other older boys will teach you. Heed them well. And tomorrow morning you will go to the schoolyard.” Omoro went back into his hut, and Kunta dashed away to the goat pens, where he found his friend Sitafa and the rest of his kafo, all in their new dundikos and clutching their new slingshots—uncles or older brothers having made them for boys whose fathers were dead.

The older boys were opening the pens and the bleating goats were bounding forth, hungry for the day’s grazing. Seeing Toumani, who was the first son of the couple who were Omoro’s and Binta’s best friends, Kunta tried to get near him, but Toumani and his mates were all herding the goats to bump into the smaller boys, who were trying to scramble out of the way. But soon the laughing older boys and the wuolo dogs had the goats hurrying down the dusty path with Kunta’s kafo running uncertainly behind, clutching their slingshots and trying to brush the dirtied spots off their dundikos.

As familiar with goats as Kunta was, he had never realized how fast they ran. Except for a few walks with his father, he had never
been so far beyond the village as the goats were leading them—to a wide grazing area of low brush and grass with the forest on one side and the fields of village farmers on the other. The older boys each nonchalantly set their own herds to grazing in separate grassy spots, while the wuolo dogs walked about or lay down near the goats.

Toumani finally decided to take notice of Kunta tagging along behind him, but he acted as if the smaller boy was some kind of insect. “Do you know the value of a goat?” he asked, and before Kunta could admit he wasn’t sure, he said, “Well, if you lose one, your father will let you know!” And Toumani launched into a lecture of warnings about goatherding. Foremost was that if any boy’s attention or laziness let any goat stray away from its herd, no end of horrible things could happen. Pointing toward the forest, Toumani said that, for one thing, living just over there, and often creeping on their bellies through the high grass, were lions and panthers, which, with but a single spring from the grass, could tear a goat apart. “But if a boy is close enough,” said Toumani, “he is tastier than a goat!”

Noting Kunta’s wide eyes with satisfaction, Toumani went on: Even a worse danger than lions and panthers were toubob and their black slatee helpers, who would crawl through the tall grass to grab people and take them off to a distant place where they were eaten. In his own five rains of goatherding, he said, nine boys from Juffure had been taken, and many more from neighboring villages. Kunta hadn’t known any of the boys who had been lost from Juffure, but he remembered being so scared when he heard about them that for a few days he wouldn’t venture more than a stone’s throw from his mother’s hut.

“But you’re not safe even inside the village gates,” said Toumani, seeming to read his thoughts. A man he knew from Juffure, he told Kunta, deprived of everything he owned when a pride of lions killed his entire herd of goats, had been caught with toubob
money soon after the disappearance of two third-kafo boys from their own huts one night. He claimed that he had found the money in the forest, but the day before his trial by the Council of Elders, he himself had disappeared. “You would have been too young to remember this,” said Toumani. “But such things still happen. So never get out of sight of somebody you trust. And when you’re out here with your goats, never let them go where you might have to chase them into deep bush, or your family may never see you again.”

As Kunta stood quaking with fear, Toumani added that even if a big cat or a toubob didn’t get him, he could still get into serious trouble if a goat got away from the herd, because a boy could never catch a dodging goat once it got onto someone’s nearby farm of couscous and groundnuts. And once the boy and his dog were both gone after it, the remaining flock might start running after the strayed one, and hungry goats could ruin a farmer’s field quicker even than baboons, antelopes, or wild pigs.

By noontime, when Toumani shared the lunch his mother had packed for him and Kunta, the entire new second kafo had gained a far greater respect for the goats they had been around all of their lives. After eating, some of Toumani’s kafo lounged under small trees nearby, and the rest walked around shooting birds with their students’ untried slingshots. While Kunta and his mates struggled to look after the goats, the older boys yelled out cautions and insults and held their sides with laughter at the younger boys’ frantic shoutings and dashings toward any goat that as much as raised its head to look around. When Kunta wasn’t running after the goats, he was casting nervous glances toward the forest in case anything was lurking there to eat him.

In the midafternoon, with the goats nearing their fill of grass, Toumani called Kunta over to him and said sternly, “Do you intend me to collect your wood for you?” Only then did Kunta remember
how many times he had seen the goatherds returning in the evening, each of them bearing a headload of light wood for the night fires of the village. With the goats and the forest to keep an eye on, it was all Kunta and his mates could do to run around looking for and picking up light brush and small fallen limbs that had become dry enough to burn well. Kunta piled his wood up into a bundle as large as he thought his head could carry, but Toumani scoffed and threw on a few more sticks. Then Kunta tied a slender green liana vine about the wood, doubtful that he could get it onto his head, let alone all the distance to the village.

With the older boys observing, he and his mates somehow managed to hoist their headloads and to begin more or less following the wuolo dogs and the goats, who knew the homeward trail better than their new herdsmen did. Amid the older boys’ scornful laughter, Kunta and the others kept grabbing at their headloads to keep them from falling off. The sight of the village had never been prettier to Kunta, who was bone-weary by now, but no sooner had they stepped inside the village gates when the older boys set up a terrific racket, yelling out warnings and instructions and jumping around so that all of the adults within view and hearing would know that they were doing their job and that their day of training these clumsy younger boys had been a most trying experience for them. Kunta’s headload somehow safely reached the yard of Brima Cesay, the arafang, whose education of Kunta and his new kafo would begin the next morning.

Just after breakfast, the new herdsmen—each, with pride, carrying a cottonwood writing slate, a quill, and a section of bamboo cane containing soot to mix with water for ink—trooped anxiously into the schoolyard. Treating them as if they were even more stupid than their goats, the arafang ordered the boys to sit down. Hardly had he uttered the words when he began laying about among them with his limber stick, sending them scrambling—
their first obedience to his command not having come as quickly as he wanted. Scowling, he further warned them that for as long as they would attend his classes, anyone who made so much as a sound, unless asked to speak, would get more of the rod—he brandished it fiercely at them—and be sent home to his parents. And the same would be dealt out to any boy who was ever late for his classes, which would be held after breakfast and again just after their return with the goats.

“You are no longer children, and you have responsibilities now,” said the arafang. “See to it that you fulfill them.” With these disciplines established, he announced that they would begin that evening’s class with his reading certain verses of the Koran, which they would be expected to memorize and recite before proceeding to other things. Then he excused them, as his older students, the former goatherds, began arriving. They looked even more nervous than Kunta’s kafo, for this was the day for their final examinations in Koranic recitations and in the writing of Arabic, the results of which would bear heavily upon their being formally advanced into the status of third kafo.

That day, all on their own for the first time in their lives, Kunta’s kafo managed to get the goats unpenned and trotting in a ragged line along the trail out to the grazing area. For a good while to come, the goats probably got less to eat than usual, as Kunta and his mates chased and yelled at them every time they took a few steps to a new clump of grass. But Kunta felt even more hounded than his herd. Every time he sat down to sort out the meaning of these changes in his life, there seemed to be something he had to do, someplace he had to go. What with the goats all day, the arafang after breakfast and after herding, and then whatever slingshot practice he could fit in before darkness, he could never seem to find the time for any serious thinking any more.

T
he harvesting of groundnuts and couscous was complete, and the women’s rice came next. No men helped their wives; even boys like Sitafa and Kunta didn’t help their mothers, for rice was women’s work alone. The first light of dawn found Binta with Jankay Touray and the other women bending in their ripe fields and chopping off the long golden stalks, which were left to dry for a few days on the walkway before being loaded into canoes and taken to the village, where the women and their daughters would stack their neat bundles in each family’s storehouse. But there was no rest for the women even when the rice harvesting was done, for then they had to help the men to pick the cotton, which had been left until last so that it would dry as long as possible under the hot sun and thus make better thread for the women’s sewing.

With everyone looking forward to Juffure’s annual seven-day harvest festival, the women hurried now to make new clothes for their families. Though Kunta knew better than to show his irritation, he was forced for several evenings to tend his talky, pesty little brother Lamin while Binta spun her cotton. But Kunta was happy again when she took him with her to the village weaver, Dembo Dibba, whom Kunta watched in fascination as her rickety hand-and-foot loom wove the spindles of thread into strips of cotton cloth. Back at home, Binta let Kunta trickle water through
wood ashes to make the strong lye into which she mixed finely pounded indigo leaves to dye her cloth deep blue. All of Juffure’s women were doing the same, and soon their cloth was spread across low bushes to dry, festooning the village with splashes of rich color—red, green, and yellow as well as blue.

While the women spun and sewed, the men worked equally hard to finish their own appointed tasks before the harvest festival—and before the hot season made heavy work impossible. The village’s tall bamboo fence was patched where it was sagging or broken from the back-scratching of the goats and bullocks. Repairs were made on mud huts that had been damanged by the big rains, and new thatching replaced the old and worn. Some couples, soon to marry, required new homes, and Kunta got the chance to join the other children in stomping water-soaked dirt into the thick, smooth mud that the men used to mold walls for the new huts.

Since some muddy water had begun to appear in the buckets that were pulled up from the well, one of the men climbed down and found that the small fish that was kept in the well to eat insects had died in the murky water. So it was decided that a new well must be dug. Kunta was watching as the men reached shoulder depth in the new hole, and passed upward several egg-sized lumps of a greenish-white clay. They were taken immediately to those women of the village whose bellies were big, and eaten eagerly. That clay, Binta told him, would give a baby stronger bones.

Left to themselves, Kunta, Sitafa, and their mates spent most of their free hours racing about the village playing hunter with their new slingshots. Shooting at nearly everything—and fortunately hitting almost nothing—the boys made enough noise to scare off a forest of animals. Even the smaller children of Lamin’s kafo romped almost unattended, for no one in Juffure was busier than the old grandmothers, who worked often now until late at night to
supply the demands of the village’s unmarried girls for hairpieces to wear at the harvest festival. Buns, plaits, and full wigs were woven of long fibers picked carefully from rotting sisal leaves or from the soaked bark of the baobab tree. The coarser sisal hairpieces cost much less than those made from the softer, silkier fiber of the baobab whose weaving took so much longer that a full wig might cost as much as three goats. But the customers always haggled long and loudly, knowing that the grandmothers charged less if they enjoyed an hour or so of good, tongue-clacking bargaining before each sale.

Along with her wigs, which were especially well made, old Nyo Boto pleased every woman in the village with her noisy defiance of the ancient tradition that decreed women should always show men the utmost of respect. Every morning found her squatted comfortably before her hut, stripped to the waist, enjoying the sun’s heat upon her tough old hide and busily weaving hairpieces—but never so busily that she failed to notice every passing man. “Hah!” she would call out, “Look at that! They call themselves men! Now, in
my
day, men were
men!
” And the men who passed—expecting what always came—would all but run to escape her tongue, until finally Nyo Boto fell asleep in the afternoon, with her weaving in her lap and the toddlers in her care laughing at her loud snoring.

The second-kafo girls, meanwhile, were helping their mothers and big sisters to collect bamboo baskets full of ripe medicinal roots and cooking spices, which they spread under the sun to dry. When grains were being pounded, the girls brushed away the husks and chaff. They helped also with the family washing, beating against rocks the soiled clothing that had been lathered with the rough, reddish soap the mothers had made from lye and palm oil.