Roots by Alex Haley Read Free Book Online Page B

new kafo would begin the next morning.
    Just after breakfast, the new herdsmen—each, with pride, carrying a cottonwood writing slate, a quill, and a section of bamboo cane containing soot to mix with water for ink—trooped anxiously into the schoolyard. Treating them as if they were even more stupid than their goats, the arafang ordered the boys to sit down. Hardly had he uttered the words when he began laying about among them with his limber stick, sending them scrambling—
their first obedience to his command not having come as quickly as he wanted. Scowling, he further warned them that for as long as they would attend his classes, anyone who made so much as a sound, unless asked to speak, would get more of the rod—he brandished it fiercely at them—and be sent home to his parents. And the same would be dealt out to any boy who was ever late for his classes, which would be held after breakfast and again just after their return with the goats.
    “You are no longer children, and you have responsibilities now,” said the arafang. “See to it that you fulfill them.” With these disciplines established, he announced that they would begin that evening’s class with his reading certain verses of the Koran, which they would be expected to memorize and recite before proceeding to other things. Then he excused them, as his older students, the former goatherds, began arriving. They looked even more nervous than Kunta’s kafo, for this was the day for their final examinations in Koranic recitations and in the writing of Arabic, the results of which would bear heavily upon their being formally advanced into the status of third kafo.
    That day, all on their own for the first time in their lives, Kunta’s kafo managed to get the goats unpenned and trotting in a ragged line along the trail out to the grazing area. For a good while to come, the goats probably got less to eat than usual, as Kunta and his mates chased and yelled at them every time they took a few steps to a new clump of grass. But Kunta felt even more hounded than his herd. Every time he sat down to sort out the meaning of these changes in his life, there seemed to be something he had to do, someplace he had to go. What with the goats all day, the arafang after breakfast and after herding, and then whatever slingshot practice he could fit in before darkness, he could never seem to find the time for any serious thinking any more.

CHAPTER 11
    T he harvesting of groundnuts and couscous was complete, and the women’s rice came next. No men helped their wives; even boys like Sitafa and Kunta didn’t help their mothers, for rice was women’s work alone. The first light of dawn found Binta with Jankay Touray and the other women bending in their ripe fields and chopping off the long golden stalks, which were left to dry for a few days on the walkway before being loaded into canoes and taken to the village, where the women and their daughters would stack their neat bundles in each family’s storehouse. But there was no rest for the women even when the rice harvesting was done, for then they had to help the men to pick the cotton, which had been left until last so that it would dry as long as possible under the hot sun and thus make better thread for the women’s sewing.
    With everyone looking forward to Juffure’s annual seven-day harvest festival, the women hurried now to make new clothes for their families. Though Kunta knew better than to show his irritation, he was forced for several evenings to tend his talky, pesty little brother Lamin while Binta spun her cotton. But Kunta was happy again when she took him with her to the village weaver, Dembo Dibba, whom Kunta watched in fascination as her rickety hand-and-foot loom wove the spindles of thread into strips of cotton cloth. Back at home, Binta let Kunta trickle water through
wood ashes to make the strong lye into which she mixed finely pounded indigo leaves to dye her cloth deep blue. All of Juffure’s women