by Alex Haley
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.
CHAPTER 27
Juffure 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 w
aving 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.
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.
CHAPTER 28
Kunta 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 sput
tered 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.