Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [48]
Rising, he saw that his kafo had all the goats herded back together and were getting ready to leave the grazing area, lifting their headloads of firewood. One boy was carrying the injured dog, and two of the other dogs were limping badly. Sitafa, seeing Kunta looking toward them, put his headload down and started toward Kunta, but quickly Kunta waved him away again to go on with the rest.
Each footstep along the worn goat trail seemed to take Kunta closer to the end—the end of everything. Guilt and terror and numbness washed over him in waves. He would be sent away. He would miss Binta, Lamin, and old Nyo Boto. He would even miss the arafang’s class. He thought of his late Grandma Yaisa, of his holy man grandfather whose name he bore, now disgraced, of his famous traveling uncles, who had built a village. He remembered that he had no headload of firewood. He thought of the nanny goat, whom he remembered well, always skittish and given to trotting off from the rest. And he thought of the kid not yet born. And while he thought of all these things, he could think of nothing but what he most feared to think of: his father.
His mind lurched, and he stopped, rooted, not breathing, staring ahead of him down the path. It was Omoro, running toward him. No boy would have dared tell him; how had he known?
“Are you all right?” his father asked.
Kunta’s tongue seemed cleaved to the roof of his mouth. “Yes, Fa,” he said finally. But by then Omoro’s hand was exploring Kunta’s belly, discovering that the blood soaking his dundiko wasn’t Kunta’s.
Straightening, Omoro took the hide and laid it on the grass. “Sit down!” he ordered, and Kunta did, trembling as Omoro sat across from him.
“There is something you need to know,” said Omoro. “All men make mistakes. I lost a goat to a lion when I was of your rains.”
Pulling at his tunic, Omoro bared his left hip. The pale, deeply scarred place there shocked Kunta. “I learned, and you must learn. Never run toward any dangerous animal.” His eyes searched Kunta’s face. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Fa.”
Omoro got up, took the goat’s hide, and flung it far off into the brush. “Then that is all that needs to be said.”
Kunta’s head reeled as he walked back to the village behind Omoro. Greater even than his guilt, and his relief, was the love he felt for his father at this moment.
CHAPTER 22
Kunta had reached his tenth rain, and the second-kafo boys his age were about to complete the schooling they had received twice daily since they were five rains old. When the day of graduation came, the parents of Kunta and his mates seated themselves in the arafang’s schoolyard beaming with pride in the very front rows, even ahead of the village elders. While Kunta and the others squatted before the arafang, the village alimamo prayed. Then the arafang stood and began looking around at his pupils as they waved their hands to be asked a question. Kunta was the first boy he chose.
“What was the profession of your forefathers, Kunta Kinte?” he asked.
“Hundreds of rains ago in the land of Mali,” Kunta confidently replied, “the Kinte men were blacksmiths, and their women were makers of pots and weavers of cloth.” With each pupil’s correct answer, all those assembled made loud sounds of pleasure.
Then the arafang asked a mathematical question: “If a baboon has seven wives, each wife has seven children, and each child eats seven groundnuts for seven days, how many nuts did the baboon steal from some man’s farm?” After much frantic figuring with grass-quill pens on their cottonwood slates, the first to yelp out the right answer was Sitafa Silla, and the crowd’s shouting of praise drowned out the groans of the other boys.
Next the boys wrote their names in Arabic, as they had been taught. And one by one, the arafang held up the slates for all the parents and other spectators to see for themselves what education had achieved. Like the other boys, Kunta had found the marks that talk even harder to read than they were to write.