Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [51]
Kunta sat until he knew the prayers must have been over, but the music didn’t resume. He listened hard, but could hear only silence. Finally he nodded off, awakening with a start only a few moments later. It was still quiet—and darker under the hood than a moonless night. Finally, faintly, he was certain that he could hear the early yippings of hyenas. He knew that hyenas always yipped for a while before settling down to steady howling, which they would continue until early daybreak, sounding eerily far away.
During the harvest festival week, at the first streaks of daybreak, Kunta knew the tobalo would boom. He sat waiting for that to happen—for anything to happen. He felt his anger building, expecting the tobalo to sound at any moment—but nothing happened. He grated his teeth and waited some more. And then, at last, after jerking awake a few times, he dozed off into a fitful sleep. He all but leaped from his skin when the tobalo finally did boom. Under the hood, his cheeks were hot with embarrassment that he had fallen asleep.
Having become accustomed to the hood’s darkness, Kunta could all but see the morning’s activities from the sounds his ears picked up—the crowing of the cocks, the barking of the wuolo dogs, the wailing of the alimamo, the bumping of the women’s pestles as they beat the breakfast couscous. This morning’s prayer to Allah, he knew, would be for the success of the manhood training that was about to begin. He heard movement in the hut, and he sensed that it was Binta. It was strange how he couldn’t see her, but he knew it was his mother. Kunta wondered about Sitafa and his other mates. It surprised him to realize that throughout the night, he hadn’t once thought about them until now. He told himself that they must surely have had as long a night as he had.
When the music of koras and balafons began playing outside the hut, Kunta heard the sound of people walking and talking, louder and louder. Then drums joined the din, their rhythm sharp and cutting. A moment later, his heart seemed to stop as he sensed the sudden movement of someone rushing into the hut. Before he could even brace himself, his wrists were grabbed, and roughly he was snatched up from the stool and jerked out through the hut door into the all but deafening noise of staccato drums and screeching people.
Hands knocked him and feet kicked him. Kunta thought desperately of bolting away somehow, but just as he was about to try, a firm yet gentle hand grasped one of his. Breathing hoarsely under his hood, Kunta realized that he was no longer being hit and kicked and that the screaming of the crowd was suddenly no longer nearby. The people, he guessed, had moved along to some other boy’s hut, and the guiding hand that held his must belong to the slave Omoro would have hired, as every father did, to lead his hooded son to the jujuo.
The crowd’s shouting rose to a frenzied pitch every time another boy was dragged from a hut, and Kunta was glad he couldn’t see the kankurang dancers, who were making bloodcurdling whoops as they sprang high into the air brandishing their spears. Big drums and small drums—every drum in the village, it seemed—were pounding as the slave guided Kunta faster and faster between rows of people shouting on either side of him, crying out things like “Four moons!” and “They will become men!” Kunta wanted to burst into tears. He wished wildly that he could reach out and touch Omoro, Binta, Lamin—even the sniveling Suwadu—for it felt too much to bear that four long moons were going to pass before he would see again those he loved even more than he had ever