Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [87]
Kunta was let alone the rest of the night. At dawn, he began to make out—tied to other bamboo trunks—the figures of the other captured people, eleven of them—six men, three girls, and two children—all guarded closely by armed slatees and toubob. The girls were naked; Kunta could only avert his eyes; he never had seen a woman naked before. The men, also naked, sat with murderous hatred etched in their faces, grimly silent and crusted with blood from whip cuts. But the girls were crying out, one about dead loved ones in a burned village, another, bitterly weeping, rocked back and forth cooing endearments to an imaginary infant in her cradled arms, and the third shrieked at intervals that she was going to Allah.
In wild fury, Kunta lunged back and forth trying to break his bonds. A heavy blow with a club again knocked him senseless. When he came to, he found that he too was naked, that all of their heads had been shaved and their bodies smeared with red palm oil. At around noonday, two new toubob entered the grove. The slatees, now all grins, quickly untied the captives from the bamboo trunks, shouting to them to stand in a line. Kunta’s muscles were knotted with rage and fear. One of the new toubob was short and stout and his hair was white. The other towered over him, tall and huge and scowling, with deep knife scars across his face, but it was the white-haired one before whom the slatees and the other toubob grinned and all but bowed.
Looking at them all, the white-haired one gestured for Kunta to step forward, and lurching backward in terror, Kunta screamed as a whip seared across his back. A slatee from behind grappled him downward to his knees, jerking his head backward. The white-haired toubob calmly spread Kunta’s trembling lips and studied his teeth. Kunta attempted to spring up, but after another blow of the whip, he stood as ordered, his body quivering as the toubob’s fingers explored his eyes, his chest, his belly. When the fingers grasped his foto, he lunged aside with a choked cry. Two slatees and more lashings were needed to force Kunta to bend over almost double, and in horror he felt his buttocks being spread wide apart. Then the white-haired toubob roughly shoved Kunta aside and, one by one, he similarly inspected the others, even the private parts of the wailing girls. Then whips and shouted commands sent the captives all dashing, around within the enclosure, and next springing up and down on their hauches.
After observing them, the white-haired toubob and the huge one with the knife-scarred face stepped a little distance away and spoke briefly in low tones. Stepping back, the white-haired one, beckoning another toubob, jabbed his finger at four men, one of them Kunta, and two of the girls. The toubob looked shocked, pointing at the others in a beseeching manner. But the white-haired one shook his head firmly. Kunta sat straining against his bonds, his head threatening to burst with rage, as the toubob argued heatedly. After a while, the white-haired one disgustedly wrote something on a piece of paper that the other toubob angrily accepted.
Kunta struggled and howled with fury as the slatees grabbed him again, wrestling him to a seated position with his back arched. Eyes wide with terror, he watched as a toubob withdrew from the fire a long, thin iron that the white-haired one had brought with him. Kunta was already thrashing and screaming as the iron exploded pain between his shoulders. The bamboo grove echoed with the screams of the others, one by one. Then red palm oil was rubbed over the peculiar LL shape Kunta saw on their backs.
Within the hour, they were hobbling in a line of clanking chains, with the slatees’ ready whips flailing down on anyone