Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [37]
On his way homeward, with many things he wanted to do around the village before leaving, Kunta felt a strange pull to visit old Nyo Boto before doing anything else. After delivering his goats, he escaped from Binta’s hut as quickly as he could and went to squat before Nyo Boto’s. Shortly she appeared in her doorway. “I have expected you,” she said, inviting him inside. As usual, whenever Kunta visited her alone, the two of them just sat quietly for a while. He had always liked and looked forward to that feeling. Although he was very young and she was very old, they still felt very close to each other, just sitting there in the dim hut, each of them thinking private thoughts.
“I have something for you,” said Nyo Boto finally. Moving to the dark pouch of cured bullock’s hide that hung from the wall by her bed, she withdrew a dark saphie charm of the kind that encircled one’s upper arm. “Your grandfather blessed this charm when your father went to manhood training,” said Nyo Boto. “It was blessed for the manhood training of Omoro’s first son—yourself. Your Grandma Yaisa left it with me for when your manhood training would start. And that is really this journey with your fa.” Kunta looked with love at the dear old grandmother, but he couldn’t think of a right way to say how the saphie charm would make him feel that she was with him no matter how far away he went.
The next morning, returning from prayers at the mosque, Omoro stood waiting impatiently as Binta took her time completing the adjustment of Kunta’s headload. When Kunta had laid awake too filled with excitement to sleep through the night, he had heard her sobbing. Then suddenly she was hugging Kunta so hard that he could feel her body trembling, and he knew, more than ever before in his life, how much his mother really loved him.
With his friend Sitafa, Kunta had carefully reviewed and practiced what he and his father now did: First Omoro and then Kunta made two steps out into the dust beyond the doorway of his hut. Then, stopping and turning and bending down, they scraped up the dust of their first footprints and put it into their hunters’ bags, thus insuring that their footprints would return to that place.
Binta watched, weeping, from her hut’s doorway, pressing Lamin against her big belly, as Omoro and Kunta walked away. Kunta started to turn for a last look—but seeing that his father didn’t, kept his eyes front and marched on, remembering that it wasn’t proper for a man to show his emotions. As they walked through the village, the people they passed spoke to them and smiled, and Kunta waved at his kafo mates, who had delayed their rounding up of the goats in order to see him off. He knew they understood that he didn’t return their spoken greetings because any talking now was taboo for him. Reaching the travelers’ tree, they stopped, and Omoro added two more narrow cloth strips to the weather-tattered hundreds already hanging from the lower limbs, each strip representing the prayer of a traveler that his journey would be safe and blessed.
Kunta couldn’t believe it was really happening. It was the first time in his life he would spend a night away from his mother’s hut, the first time he would ever go farther from the gates of Juffure than one of his goats had strayed, the first time—for so many things. While Kunta was thus preoccupied, Omoro had turned and without a word or a backward glance, started walking very fast down the path into the forest. Almost dropping his headload, Kunta raced to catch up with him.
CHAPTER 18