But almost every night, Kunta got spanked for doing something bad to his baby brother—usually for frightening him by snarling fiercely, or by dropping on all fours like a baboon, rolling his eyes, and stomping his fists like forepaws upon the ground. “I will bring the toubob!” Binta would yell at Kunta when he had tried her patience to the breaking point, scaring Kunta most thoroughly, for the old grandmothers spoke often of the hairy, red-faced, strange-looking white men whose big canoes stole people away from their homes.
CHAPTER 8
Though Kunta and his mates were tired and hungry from play by the time of each day’s setting sun, they would still race one another to climb small trees and point at the sinking crimson ball. “He will be even lovelier tomorrow!” they would shout. And even Juffure’s adults ate dinner quickly so that they might congregate outside in the deepening dusk to shout and clap and pound on drums at the rising of the crescent moon, symbolic of Allah.
But when clouds shrouded that new moon, as they did this night, the people dispersed, alarmed, and the men entered the mosque to pray for forgiveness, since a shrouded new moon meant that the heavenly spirits were displeased with the people of Juffure. After praying, the men led their frightened families to the baobab, where already on this night the jaliba squatted by a small fire, heating to its utmost tautness the goatskin head of his talking drum.
Rubbing at his eyes, which smarted from the smoke of the fire, Kunta remembered the times that drums talking at night from different villages had troubled his sleep. Awakening, he would lie there, listening hard; the sounds and rhythms were so like those of speech that he would finally understand some of the words, telling of a famine or a plague, or of the raiding and burning of some village, with its people killed or stolen away.
Hanging on a branch of the baobab, beside the jaliba, was a goatskin inscribed with the marks that talk, written there in Arabic by the arafang. In the flickering firelight, Kunta watched as the jaliba began to beat the knobby elbows of his crooked sticks very rapidly and sharply against different spots on the drumhead. It was an urgent message for the nearest magic man to come to Juffure and drive out evil spirits.
Not daring to look up at the moon, the people hurried home and fearfully went to bed. But at intervals through the night, the talk of distant drums echoed the appeal of Juffure for a magic man in other villages as well. Shivering beneath his cowskin, Kunta guessed that their new moon was shrouded, too.
The next day, the men of Omoro’s age had to help the younger men of the village to guard their nearly ripened fields against the seasonal plague of hungry baboons and birds. The second-kafo boys were told to be especially vigilant as they grazed the goats, and the mothers and grandmothers hovered closer than they normally would over the toddlers and the babies. The first kafo’s biggest children, those the size of Kunta and Sitafa, were instructed to play a little way out past the village’s tall fence, where they could keep a sharp lookout for any stranger approaching the travelers’ tree, not far distant. They did, but none came that day.
He appeared on the second morning—a very old man, walking with the help of a wooden staff and bearing a large bundle on his bald head. Spotting him, the children raced shouting back through the village gate. Leaping up, old Nyo Boto hobbled over and began to beat on the big tobalo drum that brought the men rushing back to the village from their fields a moment before the magic man reached the gate and entered Juffure.
As the villagers gathered around him, he walked over to the baobab and set down his bundle carefully on the ground. Abruptly squatting, he then shook from a wrinkled goatskin bag a heap of dried objects—a small snake, a hyena’s jawbone, a monkey’s teeth, a pelican’s wingbone, various fowls’ feet, and strange roots. Glancing about, he gestured impatiently for the hushed crowd to give him more room; and the people moved back as he began to quiver all over—clearly being attacked by Juffure’s evil spirits.
The magic man’s body writhed, his face contorted, his eyes rolled wildly, as his trembling hands struggled to force his resisting wand into contact with the heap of mysterious objects. When the wand’s tip, with a supreme effort, finally touched, he fell over backward and lay as if struck by lightning. The people gasped. But then he slowly began to revive. The evil spirts had been driven out. As he struggled weakly to his knees, Juffure’s adults—exhausted but relieved—went running off to their huts and soon returned with gifts to press upon him. The magic man added these to his bundle, which was already large and heavy with gifts from previous villages, and soon he was on his way to answer the next call. In his mercy, Allah had seen fit to spare Juffure once again.
CHAPTER 9
Twelve moons had passed, and with the big rains ended once again, The Gambia’s season for travelers had begun. Along the network of walking paths between its villages came enough visitors—passing by or stopping off in Juffure—to keep Kunta and his playmates on the lookout almost every day. After alerting the village when a stranger appeared, they would rush back out to meet each visitor as he approached the travelers’ tree. Trooping boldly alongside him, they would chatter away inquisitively as their sharp eyes hunted for any signs of his mission or profession. If they found any, they would abruptly abandon the visitor and race back ahead to tell the grown-ups in that day’s hospitality hut. In accordance with ancient tradition, a different family in each village would be chosen every day to offer food and shelter to arriving visitors at no cost for as long as they wished to stay before continuing their journey.
Having been entrusted with the responsibility of serving as the village lookouts, Kunta, Sitafa, and their kafo mates began to feel and act older than their rains. Now after breakfast each morning, they would gather by the arafang’s schoolyard and kneel quietly to listen as he taught the older boys—those of the second kafo, just beyond Kunta’s age, five to nine rains old—how to read their Koranic verses and to write with grass-quill pens dipped in the black ink of bitter-orange juice mixed with powdered crust from the bottom of cooking pots.
When the schoolboys finished their lessons and ran off—with the tails of their cotton dundikos flapping behind them—to herd the village’s goats out into the brushlands for the day’s grazing, Kunta and his mates tried to act very unconcerned, but the truth was that they envied the older boys’ long shirts as much as they did their important jobs. Though he said nothing, Kunta was not alone in feeling that he was too grown up to be treated like a child and made to go naked any longer. They avoided suckling babies like Lamin as if they were diseased, and the toddlers they regarded as even more unworthy of notice, unless it was to give them a good whack when no adults were watching. Shunning even the attentions of the old grandmothers who had taken care of them for as long as they could remember, Kunta, Sitafa, and the others began to hang around grown-ups of their parents’ age in hopes of being seen underfoot and perhaps sent off on an errand.
It was just before the harvest came that Omoro told Kunta very casually, one night after dinner, that he wanted him up early the next day to help guard the crops. Kunta was so excited he could hardly sleep. After gulping down his breakfast in the morning, he almost burst with joy when Omoro handed him the hoe to carry when they set out for the fields. Kunta and his mates fairly flew up and down the ripe rows, yelling and waving sticks at the wild pigs and baboons that came grunting from the brush to root or snatch up groundnuts. With dirt clods and shouts, they routed whistling flocks of blackbirds as they wheeled low over the couscous, for the grandmothers’ stories had told of ripened fields ruined as quickly by hungry birds as by any animal. Collecting the handfuls of couscous and groundnuts that their fathers had cut or pulled up to test for ripeness, and carrying gourds of cool water for the men to drink, they worked all through the day with a swiftness equaled only by their pride.
Six days later, Allah decreed that the harvest should begin. After the dawn’s suba prayer, the farmers and their sons—some chosen few carrying small tan-tang and souraba drums—went out to the fields an
d waited with heads cocked, listening. Finally, the village’s great tobalo drum boomed and the farmers leaped to the harvesting. As the jaliba and the other drummers walked among them, beating out a rhythm to match their movements, everyone began to sing. In exhilaration now and then, a farmer would fling his hoe, whirling up on one drumbeat and catch it on the next.
Kunta’s kafo sweated alongside their fathers, shaking the groundnut bushes free of dirt. Halfway through the morning came the first rest—and then, at midday, happy shouts of relief as the women and girls arrived with lunch. Walking in single file, also singing harvest songs, they took the pots from their heads, ladled the contents into calabashes, and served them to the drummers and harvesters, who ate and then napped until the tobalo sounded once again.
Piles of the harvest dotted the fields at the end of that first day. Streaming sweat and mud, the farmers trudged wearily to the nearest stream, where they took off their clothes and leaped into the water, laughing and splashing to cool and clean themselves. Then they headed home, swatting at the biting flies that buzzed around their glistening bodies. The closer they came to the smoke that drifted toward them from the women’s kitchens, the more tantalizing were the smells of the roasted meats that would be served three times daily for however long it took to finish the harvest.
After stuffing himself that night, Kunta noticed—as he had for several nights—that his mother was sewing something. She said nothing about it, nor did Kunta ask. But the next morning, as he picked up his hoe and began to walk out the door, she looked at him and said gruffly, “Why don’t you put on your clothes?”
Kunta jerked around. There, hanging from a peg, was a brand-new dundiko. Struggling to conceal his excitement, he matter-of-factly put it on and sauntered out the door—where he burst into a run. Others of his kafo were already outside—all of them, like him, dressed for the first time in their lives, all of them leaping, shouting, and laughing because their nakedness was covered at last. They were now officially of the second kafo. They were becoming men.
CHAPTER 10
By the time Kunta sauntered back into his mother’s hut that night, he had made sure that everyone in Juffure had seen him in his dundiko. Though he hadn’t stopped working all day, he wasn’t a bit tired, and he knew he’d never be able to go to sleep at his regular bedtime. Perhaps now that he was a grown-up, Binta would let him stay up later. But soon after Lamin was asleep, the same as always, she sent him to bed—with a reminder to hang up his dundiko.
As he turned to go, sulking as conspicuously as he thought he could get away with, Binta called him back—probably to reprimand him for sulking, Kunta thought, or maybe she’d taken pity on him and changed her mind. “Your Fa wants to see you in the morning,” she said casually. Kunta knew better than to ask why, so just said, “Yes, Mama,” and wished her good night. It was just as well he wasn’t tired, because he couldn’t sleep now anyway, lying under his cowhide coverlet wondering what he had done now that was wrong, as it seemed he did so often. But racking his brain, he couldn’t think of a single thing, especially nothing so bad that Binta herself wouldn’t have whacked him for it, since a father would involve himself only with something pretty terrible. Finally he gave up worrying and drifted off to sleep.
At breakfast the next morning, Kunta was so subdued that he almost forgot the joy of his dundiko, until naked little Lamin happened to brush up against it. Kunta’s hand jerked up to shove him away, but a flashing look from Binta prevented that. After eating, Kunta hung around for a while hoping that something more might be said by Binta, but when she acted as if she hadn’t even told him anything, he reluctantly left the hut and made his way with slow steps to Omoro’s hut, where he stood outside with folded hands.
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, an
d 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.