Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [8]
Those who were able continued their prayers and their dances, and finally the last goat and bullock had been sacrificed. It was as if Allah had turned His back on Juffure. Some—the old and the weak and the sick—began to die. Others left town, seeking another village to beg someone who had food to accept them as slaves, just to get something into their bellies, and those who stayed behind lost their spirit and lay down in their huts. It was then, said Nyo Boto, that Allah had guided the steps of marabout Kairaba Kunta Kinte into the starving village of Juffure. Seeing the people’s plight, he kneeled down and prayed to Allah—almost without sleep and taking only a few sips of water as nourishment—for the next five days. And on the evening of the fifth day came a great rain, which fell like a flood, and saved Juffure.
When she finished her story, the other children looked with new respect at Kunta, who bore the name of that distinguished grandfather, husband of Kunta’s Grandma Yaisa. Even before now, Kunta had seen how the parents of the other children acted toward Yaisa, and he had sensed that she was an important woman, just as old Nyo Boto surely was.
The big rains continued to fall every night until Kunta and the other children began to see grown-ups wading across the village in mud up to their ankles and even to their knees, and even using canoes to paddle from place to place. Kunta had heard Binta tell Omoro that the rice fields were flooded in the bolong’s high waters. Cold and hungry, the children’s fathers sacrificed precious goats and bullocks to Allah almost every day, patched leaking roofs, shored up sagging huts—and prayed that their disappearing stock of rice and couscous would last until the harvest.
But Kunta and the others, being yet little children, paid less attention to the hunger pangs in their bellies than to playing in the mud, wrestling each other and sliding on their naked bottoms. Yet in their longing to see the sun again, they would wave up at the slate-colored sky and shout—as they had seen their parents do—“Shine, sun, and I will kill you a goat!”
The life-giving rain had made every growing thing fresh and luxuriant. Birds sang everywhere. The trees and plants were explosions of fragrant blossoms. The reddish-brown, clinging mud underfoot was newly carpeted each morning, with the bright-colored petals and green leaves beaten loose by the rain of the night before. But amid all the lushness of nature, sickness spread steadily among the people of Juffure, for none of the richly growing crops was ripe enough to eat. The adults and children alike would stare hungrily at the thousands of plump mangoes and monkey apples hanging heavy on the trees, but the green fruits were as hard as rocks, and those who bit into them fell ill and vomited.
“Nothing but skin and bones!” Grandma Yaisa would exclaim, making a loud clicking noise with her tongue every time she saw Kunta. But in fact his grandma was almost as thin as he; for every storehouse in Juffure was now completely empty. What few of the village’s cattle and goats and chickens had not been eaten or sacrificed had to be kept alive—and fed—if there was to be a next year’s crop of kids and calves and baby chicks. So the people began to eat rodents, roots, and leaves foraged from in and around the village on searchings that began when the sun rose and ended when it set.
If the men had gone to the forests to hunt wild game, as they frequently did at other times of the year, they wouldn’t have had the strength to drag it back to the village. Tribal taboos forbade the Mandinkas to eat the abounding monkeys and baboons; nor would they touch the many hens’ eggs that lay about, or the millions of big green bullfrogs that Mandinkas regarded as poisonous. And as devout Moslems, they would rather have died than eat the