Roots Read Free Page A

pride.
But always I will remember you thus.
    However much Binta loved her baby and her husband, she also felt a very real anxiety, for Moslem husbands, by ancient custom, would often select and marry a second wife during that time when their first wives had babies still nursing. As yet Omoro had taken no other wife; and since Binta didn’t want him tempted, she felt that the sooner little Kunta was able to walk alone, the better, for that was when the nursing would end.
    So Binta was quick to help him as soon as Kunta, at about thirteen moons, tried his first unsteady steps. And before long, he was able to toddle about with an assisting hand. Binta was as relieved as Omoro was proud, and when Kunta cried for his next feeding, Binta gave her son not a breast but a sound spanking and a gourd of cow’s milk.

CHAPTER 3
    T hree rains had passed, and it was that lean season when the village’s store of grain and other dried foods from the last harvest was almost gone. The men had hunted, but they had returned with only a few small antelopes and gazelle and some clumsy bushfowl, for in this season of burning sun, so many of the savanna’s waterholes had dried into mud that the bigger and better game had moved into deep forest—at the very time when the people of Juffure needed all their strength to plant crops for the new harvest. Already, the wives were stretching their staple meals of couscous and rice with the tasteless seeds of bamboo cane and with the bad-tasting dried leaves of the baobab tree. The days of hunger had begun so early that five goats and two bullocks—more than last time—were sacrificed to strengthen everyone’s prayers that Allah might spare the village from starvation.
    Finally the hot skies clouded, the light breezes became brisk winds and, abruptly as always, the little rains began, falling warmly and gently as the farmers hoed the softened earth into long, straight rows in readiness for the seeds. They knew the planting must be done before the big rains came.
    The next few mornings, after breakfast, instead of canoeing to their rice fields, the farmers’ wives dressed in the traditional fertility costumes of large fresh leaves, symbolizing the green of growing
things, and set out for the furrowed fields of the men. Their voices would be heard rising and falling even before they appeared as they chanted ancestral prayers that the couscous and groundnuts and other seeds in the earthen bowls balanced on their heads would take strong roots and grow.
    With their bare feet moving in step, the line of women walked and sang three times around every farmer’s field. Then they separated, and each woman fell in behind a farmer as he moved along each row, punching a hole in the earth every few inches with his big toe. Into each hole a woman dropped a seed, covered it over with her own big toe, and then moved on. The women worked even harder than the men, for they not only had to help their husbands but also tend both the rice fields and the vegetable gardens they cultivated near their kitchens.
    While Binta planted her onions, yams, gourds, cassava, and bitter tomatoes, little Kunta spent his days romping under the watchful eyes of the several old grandmothers who took care of all the children of Juffure who belonged to the first kafo, which included those under five rains in age. The boys and girls alike scampered about as naked as young animals—some of them just beginning to say their first words. All, like Kunta, were growing fast, laughing and squealing as they ran after each other around the giant trunk of the village baobab, played hide-and-seek, and scattered the dogs and chickens into masses of fur and feathers.
    But all the children—even those as small as Kunta—would quickly scramble to sit still and quiet when the telling of a story was promised by one of the old grandmothers. Though unable yet to understand many of the words, Kunta would watch with wide eyes as the old women acted out their