Roots (7 page)

The men’s main work done—only a few days before the new moon that would open the harvest festival in all of The Gambia’s
villages—the sounds of musical instruments began to be heard here and there in Juffure. As the village musicians practiced on their twenty-four-stringed koras, their drums, and their balafons—melodious instruments made of gourds tied beneath wooden blocks of various lengths that were struck with mallets—little crowds would gather around them to clap and listen. While they played, Kunta and Sitafa and their mates, back from their goatherding, would troop about blowing bamboo flutes, ringing bells, and rattling dried gourds.

Most men relaxed now, talking and squatting about in the shade of the baobab. Those of Omoro’s age and younger kept respectfully apart from the Council of Elders, who were making their annual prefestival decisions on important village business. Occasionally two or three of the younger men would rise, stretch themselves, and go ambling about the village with their small fingers linked loosely in the age-old yayo manner of African men.

But a few of the men spent long hours alone, patiently carving on pieces of wood of different sizes and shapes. Kunta and his friends would sometimes even put aside their slings just to stand watching as the carvers created terrifying and mysterious expressions on masks soon to be worn by festival dancers. Others carved human or animal figures with the arms and legs very close to the body, the feet flat, and the heads erect.

Binta and the other women snatched what little relaxation they could around the village’s new well, where they came every day for a cool drink and a few minutes of gossip. But with the festival now upon them, they still had much to do. Clothing had to be finished, huts to be cleaned, dried foods to be soaked, goats to be slaughtered for roasting. And above all, the women had to make themselves look their very best for the festival.

Kunta thought that the big tomboyish girls he had so often seen scampering up trees looked foolish now, the way they went
about acting coy and fluttery. They couldn’t even walk right. And he couldn’t see why the men would turn around to watch them—clumsy creatures who couldn’t even shoot a bow and arrow if they tried.

Some of these girls’ mouths, he noticed, were swelled up to the size of a fist, where the inner lips had been pricked with thorns and rubbed black with soot. Even Binta, along with every other female in the village over twelve rains old, was nightly boiling and then cooling a broth of freshly pounded fudano leaves in which she soaked her feet—and the pale palms of her hands—to an inky blackness. When Kunta asked his mother why, she told him to run along. So he asked his father, who told him, “The more blackness a woman has, the more beautiful she is.”

“But why?” asked Kunta.

“Someday,” said Omoro, “you will understand.”

K
unta leaped up when the tobalo sounded at dawn. Then he, Sitafa, and their mates were running among grown-ups to the silk-cotton tree, where the village drummers were already pounding on the drums, barking and shouting at them as if they were live things, their hands a blur against the taut goatskins. The gathering crowd of costumed villagers, one by one, soon began to respond with slow movements of their arms, legs, and bodies, then faster and faster, until almost everyone had joined the dancing.

Kunta had seen such ceremonies for many plantings and harvests, for men leaving to hunt, for weddings, births, and deaths, but the dancing had never moved him—in a way he neither understood nor was able to resist—as it did now. Every adult in the village seemed to be saying with his body something that was in his or her mind alone. Among the whirling, leaping, writhing people, some of them wearing masks, Kunta could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw tough old Nyo Boto suddenly shrieking wildly, jerking both of her hands before her face, then lurching backward in fear at some unseen terror. Snatching up an imaginary burden, she thrashed and kicked the air until she crumpled down.

Kunta turned this way and that, staring at different people he knew among the dancers. Under one of the horrifying masks, Kunta recognized the alimamo, flinging and winding himself
again and again like some serpent around a tree trunk. He saw that some of those he had heard were even older than Nyo Boto had left their huts, stumbling out on spindly legs, their wrinkled arms flapping, their rheumy eyes squinting in the sun, to dance a few unsteady steps. Then Kunta’s eyes widened as he caught sight of his own father. Omoro’s knees were churning high, his feet stomping up dust. With ripping cries, he reared backward, muscles trembling, then lunged forward, hammering at his chest, and went leaping and twisting in the air, landing with heavy grunts.

The pounding heartbeat of the drums seemed to throb not only in Kunta’s ears but also in his limbs. Almost without his knowing it, as if it were a dream, he felt his body begin to quiver and his arms to flail, and soon he was springing and shouting along with the others, whom he had ceased to notice. Finally he stumbled and fell, exhausted.

He picked himself up and walked with weak knees to the sidelines—feeling a deep strangeness that he had never known before. Dazed, frightened, and excited, he saw not only Sitafa but also others of their kafo out there dancing among the grown-ups, and Kunta danced again. From the very young to the very old, the villagers danced on through the entire day, they and the drummers stopping for neither food nor drink but only to catch fresh breath. But the drums were still beating when Kunta collapsed into sleep that night.

The festival’s second day began with a parade for the people of honor just after the noon sun. At the head of the parade were the arafang, the alimamo, the senior elders, the hunters, the wrestlers, and those others whom the Council of Elders had names for their important deeds in Juffure since the last harvest festival. Everyone else came trailing behind, singing and applauding, as the musicians led them out in a snaking line beyond the village. And when they made a turn around the travelers’ tree, Kunta and his kafo dashed ahead, formed their own parade, and then trooped back and forth
past the marching adults, exchanging bows and smiles as they went, stepping briskly in time with their flutes, bells, and rattles. The parading boys took turns at being the honored person; when it was Kunta’s turn, he pranced about, lifting his knees high, feeling very important indeed. In passing the grown-ups, he caught both Omoro’s and Binta’s eyes and knew they were proud of their son.

The kitchen of every woman in the village offered a variety of food in open invitation to anyone who passed by and wished to stop a moment and enjoy a plateful. Kunta and his kafo gorged themselves from many calabashes of delicious stews and rice. Even roasted meats—goats and game from the forest—were in abundance; and it was the young girls’ special duty to keep bamboo baskets filled with every available fruit.

When they weren’t stuffing their bellies, the boys darted out to the travelers’ tree to meet the exciting strangers who now entered the village. Some stayed overnight, but most tarried only a few hours before moving on to the next village’s festival. The visiting Senegalese set up colorful displays with bolts of decorated cloth. Others arrived with heavy sacks of the very best-quality Nigerian kola nuts, the grade and size of each determining the price. Traders came up the bolong in boats laden with salt bars to exchange for indigo, hides, beeswax, and honey. Nyo Boto was herself now busily selling—for a cowrie shell apiece—small bundles of cleaned and trimmed lemongrass roots, whose regular rubbing against the teeth kept the breath sweet and the mouth fresh.

Pagan traders hurried on past Juffure, not even stopping, for their wares of tobacco and snuff and mead beer were for infidels only, since the Moslem Mandinkas never drank nor smoked. Others who seldom stopped, bound as they were for bigger villages, were numerous footloose young men from other villages—as some young men had also left Juffure during the harvest season. Spotting them as they passed on the path beyond the village, Kunta
and his mates would run alongside them for a while trying to see what they carried in their small bamboo headbaskets. Usually it was clothing and small gifts for new friends whom they expected to meet in their wanderings, before returning to their home villages by the next planting season.

Every morning the village slept and awakened to the sound of drums. And every day brought different traveling musicians—experts on the Koran, the balafon, and the drums. And if they were flattered enough by the gifts that were pressed upon them, along with the dancing and the cheers and clapping of the crowds, they would stop and play for a while before moving on to the next village.

When the story-telling griots came, a quick hush would fall among the villagers as they sat around the baobab to hear of ancient kings and family clans, of warriors; of great battles, and of legends of the past. Or a religious griot would shout prophecies and warnings that Almighty Allah must be appeased, and then offer to conduct the necessary—and by now, to Kunta, familiar—ceremonies in return for a small gift. In his high voice, a singing griot sang endless verses about the past splendors of the kingdoms of Ghana, Songhai, and Old Mali, and when he finished, some people of the village would often privately pay him to sing the praises of their own aged parents at their huts. And the people would applaud when the old ones came to their doorways and stood blinking in the bright sunshine with wide, toothless grins. His good deeds done, the singing griot reminded everyone that a drumtalk message—and a modest offering—would quickly bring him to Juffure any time to sing anyone’s praises at funerals, weddings, or other special occasions. And then he hurried on to the next village.

It was during the harvest festival’s sixth afternoon when suddenly the sound of a strange drum cut through Juffure. Hearing the insulting words spoken by the drum, Kunta hurried outside and joined the other villagers as they gathered angrily beside the baobab. The drum,
obviously quite nearby, had warned of oncoming wrestlers so mighty that any so-called wrestlers in Juffure should hide. Within minutes, the people of Juffure cheered as their own drum sharply replied that such foolhardy strangers were asking to get crippled, if not worse.

The villagers rushed now to the wrestling place. As Juffure’s wrestlers slipped into their brief dalas with the rolled-cloth handholds on the sides and buttocks, and smeared themselves with a slippery paste of pounded baobab leaves and wood ashes, they heard the shouts that meant that their challengers had arrived. These powerfully built strangers never glanced at the jeering crowd. Trotting behind their drummer, they went directly to the wrestling area, clad already in their dalas, and began rubbing one another with their own slippery paste. When Juffure’s wrestlers appeared behind the village drummers, the crowd’s shouting and jostling became so unruly that both drummers had to implore them to remain calm.

Then both drums spoke: “Ready!” The rival teams paired off, each two wrestlers crouching and glaring, face to face. “Take hold! Take hold!” the drums ordered, and each pair of wrestlers began a catlike circling. Both of the drummers now went darting here and there among the stalking men; each drummer was pounding out the names of that village’s ancestral champion wrestlers, whose spirits were looking on.

With lightning feints, one after another pair finally seized hold and began to grapple. Soon both teams struggled amid the dust clouds, their feet kicked up, nearly hiding them from the wildly yelling spectators. Dogfalls or slips didn’t count; a victory came only when one wrestler pulled another off balance, thrust him bodily upward, and hurled him to the ground. Each time there came a fall—first one of Juffure’s champions, then one of the challengers—the crowd jumped and screamed, and a drummer pounded out that winner’s name. Just beyond the excited crowd, of course, Kunta and his mates were wrestling among themselves.

At last it was over, and Juffure’s team had won by a single fall. They were awarded the horns and hooves of a freshly slaughtered bullock. Big chunks of the meat were put to roast over a fire, and the brave challengers were invited warmly to join the feasting. The people congratulated the visitors on their strength, and unmarried maidens tied small bells around all of the wrestlers’ ankles and upper arms. And during the feasting that followed, Juffure’s third-kafo boys swept and brushed to smoothness the wrestling area’s reddish dust to prepare it for a seoruba.

The hot sun had just begun to sink when the people again assembled around the wrestling area, now all dressed in their best. Against a low background of drums, both wrestling teams leaped into the ring and began to crouch and spring about, their muscles rippling and their little bells tinkling as the onlookers admired their might and grace. The drums suddenly pounded hard; now the maidens ran out into the ring, weaving coyly among the wrestlers as the people clapped. Then the drummers began to beat their hardest and fastest rhythm—and the maidens’ feet kept pace.

One girl after another, sweating and exhausted, finally stumbled from the ring, flinging to the dust her colorfully dyed tiko headwrap. All eyes watched eagerly to see if the marriageable man would pick up that tiko, thus showing his special appreciation of that maiden’s dance—for it could mean he meant soon to consult her father about her bridal price in goats and cows. Kunta and his mates, who were too young to understand such things, thought the excitement was over and ran off to play with their slingshots. But it had just begun, for a moment later, everyone gasped as a tiko was picked up by one of the visiting wrestlers. This was a major event—and a happy one—but the lucky maiden would not be the first who was lost through marriage to another village.

O
n the final morning of the festival, Kunta was awakened by the sound of screams. Pulling on his dundiko, he went dashing out, and his stomach knotted with fright. Before several of the nearby huts, springing up and down, shrieking wildly and brandishing spears, were half a dozen men in fierce masks, tall head-dresses, and costumes of leaf and bark. Kunta watched in terror as one man entered each hut with a roar and emerged jerking roughly by the arm a trembling boy of the third kafo.