Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [13]
Kunta’s home-training had been so strict that, it seemed to him, his every move drew Binta’s irritated finger—snapping—if, indeed, he wasn’t grabbed and soundly whipped. When he was eating, he would get a cuff on the head if Binta caught his eyes on anything except his own food. And unless he washed off every bit of dirt when he came into the hut from a hard day’s play, Binta would snatch up her scratchy sponge of dried plant stems and her bar of homemade soap and make Kunta think she was going to scrape off his very hide.
For him ever to stare at her, or at his father, or at any other adult, would earn him a slap as quickly as when he committed the equally serious offense of interrupting the conversation of any grown-up. And for him ever to speak anything but truth would have been unthinkable. Since there never seemed any reason for him to lie, he never did.
Though Binta didn’t seem to think so, Kunta tried his best to be a good boy, and soon began to practice his home-training lessons with the other children. When disagreements occurred among them, as they often did—sometime fanning into exchanges of harsh words and finger-snapping—Kunta would always turn and walk away, thus displaying the dignity and self-command that his mother had taught him were the proudest traits of the Mandinka tribe.
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