Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [5]
Since the size of each woman’s plot was decided each year by Juffure’s Council of Elders, according to how many mouths each woman had to feed with rice, Binta’s plot was still a small one. Balancing herself carefully as she stepped from the canoe with her new baby, Binta took a few steps and then stopped short, looking with surprise and delight at a tiny thatch-roofed bamboo hut on stilts. While she was in labor, Omoro had come here and built it as a shelter for their son. Typical of men, he had said nothing about it.
Nursing the baby, then nestling him inside his shelter, Binta changed into the working clothes she had brought in the bundle on her head, and waded out to work. Bending nearly double in the water, she pulled up by the roots the young weeds that, left alone, would outgrow and choke the rice crop. And whenever Kunta cried, Binta waded out, dripping water, to nurse him again in the shadow of his shelter.
Little Kunta basked thus every day in his mother’s tenderness. Back in her hut each evening, after cooking and serving Omoro’s dinner, Binta would soften her baby’s skin by greasing him from head to toe with shea tree butter, and then—more often than not—she would carry him proudly across the village to the hut of Grandma Yaisa, who would bestow upon the baby still more cluckings and kissings. And both of them would set little Kunta to whimpering in irritation with their repeated pressings of his little head, nose, ears, and lips, to shape them correctly.
Sometimes Omoro would take his son away from the women and carry the blanketed bundle to his own hut—husbands always resided separately from their wives—where he would let the child’s eyes and fingers explore such attractive objects as the saphie charms at the head of Omoro’s bed, placed there to ward off evil spirits. Anything colorful intrigued little Kunta—especially his father’s leather huntsman’s bag, nearly covered by now with cowrie shells, each for an animal that Omoro had personally brought in as food for the village. And Kunta cooed over the long, curved bow and quiver of arrows hanging nearby. Omoro smiled when a tiny hand reached out and grasped the dark, slender spear whose shaft was polished from so much use. He let Kunta touch everything except the prayer rug, which was sacred to its owner. And alone together in his hut, Omoro would talk to Kunta of the fine and brave deeds his son would do when he grew up.
Finally he would return Kunta to Binta’s hut for the next nursing. Wherever he was, Kunta was happy most of the time, and he always fell asleep either with Binta rocking him on her lap or bending over him on her bed, singing softly such a lullaby as,
My smiling child,
Named for a noble ancestor.
Great hunter or warrior
You will be one day,
Which will give your papa pride.
But always I will remember you thus.
However much Binta loved her baby and her husband, she also felt a very real anxiety, for Moslem husbands, by ancient custom, would often select and marry a second wife during that time when their first wives had babies still nursing. As yet Omoro had taken no other wife; and since Binta didn’t want him tempted, she felt that the sooner little Kunta was able to walk alone, the better, for that was when the nursing would end.
So Binta was quick to help him as soon as Kunta, at about thirteen moons, tried his first unsteady steps. And before long, he was able to toddle about with an assisting hand. Binta was as relieved as Omoro was proud, and when Kunta cried for his next feeding, Binta gave her son not a breast but a sound spanking and a gourd of cow’s milk.
CHAPTER 3
Three rains had passed, and it was that lean season when the village’s store of grain and other dried foods from the last harvest was almost gone. The men had hunted, but they had returned with only a few small antelopes