Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [50]
It was just before the harvest season when all of the third-kafo boys reported to one another in a fever of excitement how their mothers had silently measured each of them with a sewing tape around his head and down to his shoulders. Kunta did his best to hide the vivid memory of that morning five rains before when, as brand-new little goatherds, he and his mates had been scared nearly out of their wits as they watched screaming boys under white hoods being kicked and jeered from the village by a band of terrifyingly masked, shrieking, spear-carrying kankurang dancers.
The tobalo soon boomed out the beginning of the new harvest, and Kunta joined the rest of the villagers in the fields. He welcomed the long days of hard work, for they kept him too busy and too tired to give much thought to what lay ahead. But when the harvesting was done and the festival began, he found himself unable to enjoy the music and the dancing and the feasting as the others did—as he himself had done for as long as he could remember. The louder the merriment, in fact, the unhappier he became until finally he spent most of the last two days of the festival sitting by himself on the banks of the bolong skipping stones across the water.
On the night before the last day of the festival, Kunta was in Binta’s hut silently finishing his evening meal of groundnut stew with rice when Omoro walked in behind him. From the corner of his eye, Kunta glimpsed his father raising something white, and before he had a chance to turn around, Omoro had pulled a long hood down firmly over his head. The terror that shot through Kunta all but numbed him. He felt his father’s hand gripping his upper arm and urging him to stand up, then to move backward until he was pushed down onto a low stool. Kunta was grateful to sit, for his legs felt like water and his head felt light. He listened to himself breathing in short gasps, knowing that if he tried to move, he would fall off the stool. So he sat very still, trying to accustom himself to the darkness. Terrified as he was, it seemed almost a double darkness. As his upper lip felt the moist warmth of his breath inside the hood, it flashed through Kunta’s mind that surely once such a hood had been thrust in the same way over his father’s head. Could Omoro have been so frightened? Kunta couldn’t even imagine that, and he felt ashamed to be such a disgrace to the Kinte clan.
It was very quiet in the hut. Wrestling the fear that knotted the pit of his stomach, Kunta closed his eyes and focused his very pores on trying to hear something, anything at all. He thought he heard Binta moving about, but he couldn’t be sure. He wondered where Lamin was, and Suwadu, who surely would be making noise. He knew only one thing for sure: Neither Binta nor anyone else was going to speak to him, let alone lift that hood off his head. And then Kunta thought how awful it would be if his hood did get lifted, for everyone would see how scared he really was, and perhaps therefore a boy unworthy of joining his kafo mates in manhood training.
Even boys the size of Lamin knew—since Kunta had told him—what would happen to anyone who showed himself too weak or cowardly to endure the training that turned boys into hunters, into warriors, into men—all within a period of twelve moons. Suppose he should fail? He began gulping down his fear, remembering how he had been told that any boy who failed the manhood training would be treated as a child for the rest of his life, even though he might look like a grown man. He would be avoided, and his village would never permit him to marry, lest he father others like himself. These sad cases, Kunta had heard, usually slipped away from their villages sooner or later, never to return, and even their own fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters would never mention them again. Kunta saw himself slinking away from Juffure like some mangy hyena, scorned by everyone; it was too horrible to think of.
After a time,