Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [19]
With everyone looking forward to Juffure’s annual seven-day harvest festival, the women hurried now to make new clothes for their families. Though Kunta knew better than to show his irritation, he was forced for several evenings to tend his talky, pesty little brother Lamin while Binta spun her cotton. But Kunta was happy again when she took him with her to the village weaver, Dembo Dibba, whom Kunta watched in fascination as her rickety hand-and-foot loom wove the spindles of thread into strips of cotton cloth. Back at home, Binta let Kunta trickle water through wood ashes to make the strong lye into which she mixed finely pounded indigo leaves to dye her cloth deep blue. All of Juffure’s women were doing the same, and soon their cloth was spread across low bushes to dry, festooning the village with splashes of rich color—red, green, and yellow as well as blue.
While the women spun and sewed, the men worked equally hard to finish their own appointed tasks before the harvest festival—and before the hot season made heavy work impossible. The village’s tall bamboo fence was patched where it was sagging or broken from the back-scratching of the goats and bullocks. Repairs were made on mud huts that had been damanged by the big rains, and new thatching replaced the old and worn. Some couples, soon to marry, required new homes, and Kunta got the chance to join the other children in stomping water-soaked dirt into the thick, smooth mud that the men used to mold walls for the new huts.
Since some muddy water had begun to appear in the buckets that were pulled up from the well, one of the men climbed down and found that the small fish that was kept in the well to eat insects had died in the murky water. So it was decided that a new well must be dug. Kunta was watching as the men reached shoulder depth in the new hole, and passed upward several egg-sized lumps of a greenish-white clay. They were taken immediately to those women of the village whose bellies were big, and eaten eagerly. That clay, Binta told him, would give a baby stronger bones.
Left to themselves, Kunta, Sitafa, and their mates spent most of their free hours racing about the village playing hunter with their new slingshots. Shooting at nearly everything—and fortunately hitting almost nothing—the boys made enough noise to scare off a forest of animals. Even the smaller children of Lamin’s kafo romped almost unattended, for no one in Juffure was busier than the old grandmothers, who worked often now until late at night to supply the demands of the village’s unmarried girls for hairpieces to wear at the harvest festival. Buns, plaits, and full wigs were woven of long fibers picked carefully from rotting sisal leaves or from the soaked bark of the baobab tree. The coarser sisal hairpieces cost much less than those made from the softer, silkier fiber of the baobab whose weaving took so much longer that a full wig might cost as much as three goats. But the customers always haggled long and loudly, knowing that the grandmothers charged less if they enjoyed an hour or so of good, tongue-clacking bargaining before each sale.
Along with her wigs, which were especially well made, old Nyo Boto pleased every woman in the village with her noisy defiance of the ancient tradition that decreed women should always show men the utmost of respect. Every morning found her squatted comfortably before her hut, stripped to the waist, enjoying the sun’s heat upon her tough old hide and busily weaving hairpieces—but never so busily that she failed to notice every passing man. “Hah!” she would call out, “Look at that! They call themselves men! Now, in my day, men were men!” And the men who passed—expecting what always came—would all but run to escape her tongue,