Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [32]
As Lamin and Kunta clutched each other’s hands, she told them how the terrified prisoners, bound neck-to-neck with thongs, were beaten and driven across the hot, hard inland country for many days. And every day, more and more of the prisoners’ fell beneath the whips that lashed their backs to make them walk faster. After a few days, yet more began to fall of hunger and exhaustion. Some struggled on, but those who couldn’t were left for the wild animals to get. The long line of prisoners passed other villages that had been burned and ruined, where the skulls and bones of people and animals lay among the burned-out shells of thatch and mud that had once been family huts. Fewer than half of those who had begun the trip reached the village of Juffure, four days from the nearest place on the Kamby Bolongo where slaves were sold.
“It was here that one young prisoner was sold for a bag of corn,” said the old woman. “That was me. And this was how I came to be called Nyo Boto,” which Kunta knew meant “bag of corn.” The man who bought her for his own slave died before very long, she said, “and I have lived here ever since.”
Lamin was wriggling in excitement at the story, and Kunta felt somehow even greater love and appreciation than he had felt before for old Nyo Boto, who now sat smiling tenderly at the two boys, whose father and mother, like them, she had once dandled on her knee.
“Omoro, your papa, was of the first kafo when I came to Juffure,” said Nyo Boto, looking directly at Kunta. “Yaisa, his mother, who was your grandmother, was my very good friend. Do you remember her?” Kunta said that he did and added proudly that he had told his little brother all about their grandma.
“That is good!” said Nyo Boto. “Now I must get back to work. Run along, now.”
Thanking her for the tea, Kunta and Lamin left and walked slowly back to Binta’s hut, each deep in his own private thoughts.
The next afternoon, when Kunta returned from his goatherding, he found Lamin filled with questions about Nyo Boto’s story. Had any such fire ever burned in Juffure? he wanted to know. Well, he had never heard of any, said Kunta, and the village showed no signs of it. Had Kunta ever seen one of those white people? “Of course not!” he exclaimed. But he said that their father had spoken of a time when he and his brothers had seen the toubob and their ships at a point along the river.
Kunta quickly changed the subject, for he knew very little about toubob, and he wanted to think about them for himself. He wished that he could see one of them—from a safe distance, of course, since everything he’d ever heard about them made it plain that people were better off who never got too close to them.
Only recently a girl out gathering herbs—and before her two grown men out hunting—had disappeared, and everyone was certain that toubob had stolen them away. He remembered, of course, how when drums of other villages warned that toubob had either taken somebody or was known to be near, the men would arm themselves and mount a double guard while the frightened women quickly gathered all of the children and hid in the bush far from the village—sometimes for several days—until the toubob was felt to be gone.
Kunta recalled once when he was out with his goats in the quiet of the bush, sitting under his favorite shade tree. He had happened to look upward and there, to his astonishment, in the tree overhead, were twenty or thirty monkeys huddled along the thickly leaved branches as still as statues, with their long tails hanging down. Kunta had always thought of monkeys rushing noisily about, and he couldn’t forget how quietly they had been watching his every move. He wished that now he might sit in a tree and watch some toubob on the ground below him.
The goats were being driven homeward the afternoon after Lamin had asked him about toubob when Kunta raised the subject among his fellow goatherds—and in no time they were telling about the things they had heard. One boy, Demba Conteh,