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By Root 1270 0

to climb one afternoon, Kunta showed him how to do it right. At one time or another, he taught his little brother how to wrestle (so that Lamin could win the respect of a boy who had humiliated him in front of his kafo mates); how to whistle through his fingers (though Lamin’s best whistle was nowhere near as piercing as Kunta’s); and he showed him the kind of berry leaves from which their mother liked to make tea. And he cautioned Lamin to take the big, shiny dung beetles they always saw crawling in the hut and set them gently outside on the ground, for it was very bad luck to harm them. To touch a rooster’s spur, he told him, was even worse luck. But however hard he tried, Kunta couldn’t make Lamin understand how to tell the time of day by the position of the sun. “You’re just too little, but you’ll learn.” Kunta would still shout at him sometimes, if Lamin seemed too slow in learning something simple; or he would give him a slap if he was too much of a pest. But he would always feel so badly about it that he might even let the naked Lamin wear his dundiko for a while.

As he grew closer to his brother, Kunta began to feel less deeply something that had often bothered him before—the gulf between his eight rains and the older boys and men of Juffure. Indeed, scarcely a day of his life that he could remember had ever passed without something to remind him that he was still of the second kafo—one who yet slept in the hut of his mother. The older boys who were away now at manhood training had always had nothing but sneers and cuffings for those of Kunta’s age. And the grown men, such as Omoro and the other fathers, acted as if a second-kafo boy were something merely to be tolerated. As for the mothers, well, often when Kunta was out in the bush, he would think angrily that whenever he got to be a man, he certainly intended to put Binta in her place as a woman—although he did intend to show her kindness and forgiveness, since after all, she was his mother.

Most irritating of all to Kunta and his mates, though, was how the second-kafo girls with whom they had grown up were now so quick to remind them that they were thinking already of becoming wives. It rankled Kunta that girls married at fourteen rains or even younger, while boys didn’t get married until they were men of thirty rains or more. In general, being of the second kafo had always been an embarrassment to Kunta and his mates, except for their afternoons off by themselves in the bush, and in Kunta’s case, his new relationship with Lamin.

Every time he and his brother would be walking somewhere by themselves, Kunta would imagine that he was taking Lamin on some journey, as men sometimes did with their sons. Now, somehow, Kunta felt a special responsibility to act older, with Lamin looking up to him as a source of knowledge. Walking alongside, Lamin would ply Kunta with a steady stream of questions.

“What’s the world like?”

“Well,” said Kunta, “no man or canoes ever journeyed so far. And no one knows all there is to know about it.”

“What do you learn from the arafang?”

Kunta recited the first verses of the Koran in Arabic and then said, “Now you try.” But when Lamin tried, he got badly confused—as Kunta had known he would—and Kunta said paternally, “It takes time.”

“Why does no one harm owls?”

“Because all our dead ancestors’ spirits are in owls.” Then he told Lamin something of their late Grandma Yaisa. “You were just a baby, and cannot remember her.”

“What’s that bird in the tree?”

“A hawk.”

“What does he eat?”

“Mice and other birds and things.”

“Oh.”

Kunta had never realized how much he knew—but now and then Lamin asked something of which Kunta knew nothing at all

“Is the sun on fire?” Or: “Why doesn’t our father sleep with us?”

At such times, Kunta would usually grunt, then stop talking—as Omoro did when he tired of so many of Kunta’s questions. Then Lamin would say no more, since Mandinka home, training taught that one never talked to another who did not want to talk. Sometimes Kunta would act as if he had gone into deep private thought. Lamin would