Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [211]
Pointing to a sluggish small river they were passing a little later, Kunta said “Dat a bolongo.” He told her that in his homeland he had lived near a river called the “Kamby Bolongo.” That evening, when on the way back home, passing by it again, Kizzy pointed, and shouted, “Kamby Bolongo!” Of course, she didn’t understand when he tried to explain that this was the Mattaponi River, not the Gambia River, but he was so delighted that she had remembered the name at all that it didn’t seem to matter. The Kamby Bolongo, he said, was much bigger, swifter, and more powerful than this puny specimen. He wanted to tell her how the life-giving river was revered by his people as a symbol of fertility, but he couldn’t find a way to say it, so he told her about the fish that teemed in it—including the powerful, succulent kujalo, which sometimes leaped right into a canoe—and about the vast living carpet of birds that floated on it until some young boy like himself would jump growling from the brush on the banks so that he could watch them rise up and fill the sky like some feathery snow-storm. Kunta said that reminded him of a time his Grandmother Yaisa had told him about when Allah sent The Gambia a plague of locusts so terrible that they darkened the sun and devoured everything green until the wind shifted and carried them out to sea, where they finally fell and were eaten by the fish.
“Do I got a gran’ma?” asked Kizzy.
“You got two—my mammy and yo’ mammy’s mammy.”
“How come dey ain’t wid us?”
“Dey don’ know where we is,” said Kunta. “Does you know where we is?” he asked her a moment later.
“We’s in de buggy,” Kizzy said.
“I means where does we live.”
“At Massa Waller’s.”
“An where dat is?”
“Dat way,” she said, pointing down the road. Disinterested in their subject, she said, “Tell me some more ’bout dem bugs an’ things where you come from.”
“Well, dey’s big red ants knows how to cross rivers on leafs, dat fights wars an’ marches like a army, an’ builds hills dey lives in dat’s taller dan a man.”
“Dey soun’ scary. You step on ’em?”
“Not less’n you has to. Every critter got a right to be here same as you. Even de grass is live an’ got a soul jes’ like peoples does.”
“Won’t walk on de grass no mo’, den. I stay in de buggy.”
Kunta smiled. “Wasn’t no buggies where I come from. Walked wherever we was goin’. One time I walked four days wid my pappy all de way from Juffure to my uncles’ new village.”
“What Joo-fah-ray?”
“Done tol’ you don’ know how many times, dat where I come from.”
“I thought you was from Africa. Dat Gambia you talks about in Africa?”
“Gambia a country in Africa. Juffure a village in Gambia.”
“Well, where dey at, Pappy?”
“’Crost de big water.”
“How big dat big water?”
“So big it take near ’bout four moons to get crost it.”
“Four what?”
“Moons. Like you say ‘months.’”
“How come you don’t say months?”
“’Cause moons my word for it.”
“What you call a ‘year’?”
“A rain.”
Kizzy mused briefly.
“How you get ’crost dat big water?”
“In a big boat.”
“Bigger dan dat rowboat we seen dem fo’ mens fishin’ in?”
“Big ’nough to hol’ a hunnud mens.”
“How come it don’ sink?”
“I use to wish it would of.”
“How come?”
“’Cause we all so sick seem like we gon’ die anyhow.”
“How you get sick?”
“Got sick from layin’ in our own mess prac’ly on top each other.”
“Whyn’t you go de toilet?”
“De toubob had us chained up.”
“Who ‘toubob’?”
“White folks.”
“How come you chained up? You done sump’n wrong?”
“Was jes’ out in de woods near where I live—Juffure—lookin’ fer a piece o’ wood to make