Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [65]
It was nearly midnight when Kunta finally slept, for much was on his mind. And it seemed to him that his eyes had hardly closed before the crowing cocks had waked him, and then came the singsong call of the alimamo to the mosque, for what would be the first morning prayer that he and his mates would be allowed to attend with the other men of Juffure. Dressing quickly, Kunta took his new prayer rug and fell in among his kafo as, with heads bowed and rolled prayer rugs under their arms—as if they had done it all their lives—they entered the sacred mosque behind the other men of the village. Inside, Kunta and the others watched and copied every act and utterance of the older men, being especially careful to be neither too soft nor too loud in their reciting of the prayers.
After prayers, Binta brought breakfast to her new man’s hut. Setting the bowl of steaming couscous before Kunta—who just grunted again, not letting his face say anything—Binta left quickly, and Kunta ate without pleasure, irritated by a suspicion that she had seemed to be suppressing something like mirth.
After breakfast, he joined his mates in undertaking their duties as the eyes and ears of the village with a diligence their elders found equally amusing. The women could hardly turn around without finding one of the new men demanding to inspect their cooking pots for insects. And rummaging around outside peoples’ huts and all around the village fence, they found hundreds of spots where the state of repair failed to measure up to their exacting standards. Fully a dozen of them drew up buckets of well water, tasting carefully from the gourd dipper in hopes of detecting a saltiness or a muddiness or something else unhealthy. They were disappointed, but the fish and turtle that were kept in the well to eat insects were removed anyway and replaced with fresh ones.
The new men, in short, were everywhere. “They are thick as fleas!” old Nyo Boto snorted as Kunta approached a stream where she was pounding laundry on a rock, and he all but sprinted off in another direction. He also took special care to stay clear of any known place where Binta might be, telling himself that although she was his mother, he would show her no special favors; that, indeed, he would deal firmly with her if she ever made it necessary. After all, she was a woman.
CHAPTER 27
Juffure was so small, and its kafo of diligent new men so numerous, it soon seemed to Kunta, that nearly every roof, wall, calabash, and cooking pot in the village had been inspected, cleaned, repaired, or replaced moments before he got to it. But he was more pleased than disappointed, for it gave him more time to spend farming the small plot assigned to his use by the Council of Elders. All new men grew their own couscous or groundnuts, some to live on and the rest to trade—with those who grew too little to feed their families—for things they needed more than food. A young man who tended his crops well, made good trades, and managed his goats wisely—perhaps swapping a dozen goats for a female calf that would grow up and have other calves—could move ahead in the world and become a man of substance by the time he reached twenty-five or thirty rains and began to think about taking a wife