Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [81]
But teriya involved none of that—only new men sleeping with a willing widow and eating her cooking. Kunta thought for a little while about how Jinna M’Baki had looked at him, making no secret of her designs, amid the previous day’s jostling crowd as the Council session ended. Almost without realizing, he squeezed his hard foto, but he forced back the strong urge to stroke it because that would seem as if he was giving in to what that widow wanted, which was embarrassing even to think about. He didn’t really want the stickiness with her, he told himself; but now that he was a man, he had every right, if he pleased, to think about teriya, which the senior elders themselves had shown was nothing for a man to be ashamed of.
Kunta’s mind returned to the memory of some girls he and Lamin had passed in one village when returning from their gold-hunting trip. There had been about ten of them, he guessed, all beautifully black, in tight dresses, colorful beads, and bracelets, with high breasts and little hair plaits sticking up. They had acted so strangely as he went by that it had taken Kunta a moment to realize that the show they made of looking away whenever he looked at them meant not that they weren’t interested in him but that they wanted him to be interested in them.
Females were so confusing, he thought. Girls of their age in Juffure never paid enough attention to him even to look away. Was it because they knew what he was really like? Or was it because they knew he was far younger than he looked—too young to be worthy of their interest? Probably the girls in that village believed no traveling man leading a boy could have less than twenty or twenty-five rains, let alone his seventeen. They would have scoffed if they had known. Yet he was being sought after by a widow who knew very well how young he was. Perhaps he was lucky not to be older, Kunta thought. If he was, the girls of Juffure would be carrying on over him the way the girls of that village had, and he knew they all had just one thing on their minds: marriage. At least Jinna M’Baki was too old to be looking for anything more than a teriya friendship. Why would a man want to marry when he could get a woman to cook for him and sleep with him without getting married? There must be some reason. Perhaps it was because it was only through marrying that a man could have sons. That was a good thing. But what would he have to teach those sons until he had lived long enough to learn something about the world—not just from his father, and from the arafang, and from the kintango, but also by exploring it for himself, as his uncles had done?
His uncles weren’t married even yet, though they were older than his father, and most men of their rains had already taken second wives by now. Was Omoro considering taking a second wife? Kunta was so startled at the thought that he sat up straight. And how would his mother feel about it? Well, at least Binta, as the senior wife, would be able to tell the second wife her duties, and make certain she worked hard and set her sleeping turns with Omoro. Would there be trouble between the two women? No, he was sure Binta wouldn’t be like the kintango’s senior wife, whom it was commonly known shouted so much abuse at his junior wives, keeping them in such a turmoil, that he rarely got any peace.
Kunta shifted the position of his legs to let them hang for a while over the edge of his small perch, to keep the muscles from cramping. His wuolo dog was curled on the ground below him, its smooth brown fur shining in the moonlight, but he knew that the dog only seemed to be dozing, and that his nose and ears were alertly twitching for the night air’s slightest smell or sound of warning to bound up racing and barking after the baboons that had lately been raiding the groundnut fields almost every night. During each long