Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [42]
Omoro took the bypass fork at every travelers’ tree, but each village’s first-kafo children always raced out to meet them and to tell the strangers whatever happened to be the most exciting of the local news. In one such village, the little couriers rushed out yelling, “Mumbo jumbo! Mumbo jumbo!,” and considering their job done, fled back inside the village gate. The bypassing trail went near enough for Omoro and Kunta to see the townspeople watching a masked and costumed figure brandishing a rod over the bare back of a screaming woman whom several other women held. All of the women spectators were shrieking with each blow of the rod. From discussions with his fellow goatherds, Kunta knew how a husband, if enough annoyed by a quarrelsome, troublemaking wife, could go quietly to another village and hire a mumbo jumbo to come to his village and shout fearsomely at intervals from concealment, then appear and publicly discipline that wife, after which all of the village’s women were apt to act better for a time.
At one travelers’ tree, no children came out to meet the Kintes. In fact, there was no one to be seen at all, and not a sound was to be heard in the silent village, except for the birds and monkeys. Kunta wondered if slave takers had come here, too. He waited in vain for Omoro to explain the mystery, but it was the chattering children of the next village who did so. Pointing back down the trail, they said that village’s chief had kept on doing things his people disliked until one night not long ago, as he slept, everyone had quietly gone away with all their possessions to the homes of friends and families in other places—leaving behind an “empty chief,” the children said, who was now going about promising to act better if only his people would return.
Since nighttime was near, Omoro decided to enter this village, and the crowd under the baobab was abuzz with this exciting gossip: Most felt certain that their new neighbors would return home after they had taught their chief his lesson for a few more days. While Kunta stuffed his stomach with groundnut stew over steamed rice, Omoro went to the village jaliba and arranged for a talking-drum message to his brothers. He told them to expect him by the next sundown and that traveling with him was his first son.
Kunta had sometimes daydreamed about hearing his name drum-sounding across the land, and now it had happened. It wouldn’t leave his ears. Later, on the hospitality hut’s bamboo bed, bone-weary as he was, Kunta thought of the other jalibas hunched over their drums pounding out his name in every village along their route to the village of Janneh and Saloum.
At every travelers’ tree now, since the drums had spoken, were not only the usual naked children but also some elders and musicians. And Omoro couldn’t refuse a senior elder’s request to grant his village the honor of at least a brief visit. As the Kintes freshened themselves in each hospitality hut and then sat down to share food and drink in the shade of the baobab and silk-cotton trees, the adults gathered eagerly to hear Omoro’s answers to their questions, and the first, second, and third kafos clustered about Kunta.
While the first kafo stared at him in silent awe, those of Kunta’s rains and older, painfully jealous, asked him respectful questions about his home village and his destination. He answered them gravely with, he hoped, the same dignity as his father did their fathers’ questions. By the time they left, he was sure the villagers felt they had seen a young man who had spent most of his life traveling with his father along The Gambia’s long trails.
CHAPTER 20
They had tarried so long at the last village that they would have to walk faster and harder to reach their destination by sundown, as Omoro had promised his brothers. Though he sweated and ached, Kunta found it easier than before to keep his headload balanced, and he felt a new spurt of strength with each of the drumtalk messages that now filled the air with word of the arrival of griots, jahbas, senior elders, and other