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By Root 1318 0

hard against the edge of the talking drum and glared at the buzzing women in the rear. Only when they fell silent was the next name called: “Jankeh Jallon!” Having but fifteen rains, she was thus the last to be heard. All of Juffure had danced and feasted when she found her way home after escaping from some toubob who had kidnaped her. Then, a few moons later, she became big with child, although unmarried, which caused much gossip. Young and strong, she might still have found some old man’s acceptance as a third or fourth junior wife. But then the child was born: He was a strange pale tan color like a cured hide, and had very odd hair—and wherever Jankeh Jallon would appear thereafter, people would look at the ground and hurry elsewhere. Her eyes glistening with tears, she stood up now and asked the Council: What was she to do? The elders didn’t turn around to confer; the senior elder said they would have to weigh the matter—which was a most serious and difficult one—until the next moon’s Council meeting. And with that, he and the five other elders rose and left.

Troubled, and somehow unsatisfied, by the way the session had ended, Kunta remained seated for a few moments after most of his mates and the rest of the audenice had gotten up—chattering among themselves—and headed back toward their huts. His head was still full of thoughts when Binta brought his evening meal, and he said not a word to her as he ate, nor she to him. Later, as he picked up his spear and his bow and arrow and ran with his wuolo dog to his sentry post—for this was his night to stand guard outside the village—Kunta was still thinking: about the tan baby with the strange hair, about his no doubt even stranger father, and about whether this toubob would have eaten Jankeh Jallon if she had not escaped from him.

CHAPTER 32

In the moonlit expanse of ripening fields of groundnuts, Kunta climbed the notched pole and sat down crosslegged on the lookout platform that was built into its sturdy fork, high above the ground. Placing his weapons beside him—along with the ax with which he planned the next morning, at last, to chop the wood for his drum frame—he watched as his wuolo dog went trotting and sniffing this way and that in the fields below. During Kunta’s first few moons on sentry duty, rains ago, he remembered snatching at his spear if so much as a rat went rustling through the grass. Every shadow seemed a monkey, every monkey a panther, and every panther a toubob, until his eyes and ears became seasoned to his task. In time, he found he could tell the difference between the snarl of a lion and that of a leopard. It took longer, however, for him to learn how to remain vigilant through these long nights. When his thoughts began to turn inward, as they always did, he often forgot where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. But finally he learned to keep alert with half of his mind and yet still explore his private thoughts with the other.

Tonight, he was thinking about the teriya friendships that had been approved for his two friends by the Council of Elders. For several moons, they had been telling Kunta and his mates that they were going to take their case before the Council, but no one had really believed them. And now it was done. Perhaps at this very moment, he thought, they might be performing the teriya act in bed with their two widows. Kunta suddenly sat upright trying to picture what it must be like.

It was chiefly from his kafo’s gossip that Kunta knew what little he did about under women’s clothes. In marriage negotiations, he knew, girls’ fathers had to guarantee them as virgins to get the best bride price. And a lot of bloodiness was connected with women, he knew that. Every moon they had blood; and whenever they had babies; and the night when they got married. Everyone knew how the next morning, the newlyweds’ two mothers went to the hut to put into a woven basket the white pagne cloth the couple had slept on, taking its bloodiness as proof of the girl’s virginity to the alimamo, who only then walked around the village drumtalking