Roots (34 page)

Stumbling back into motion, Kunta knew after only a little while that his muscles would not carry him much farther. He must retreat into the thickest part of the forest he could find and hide there. So he went clawing his way back, sometimes on all fours, his feet and arms and legs tangling in the vines, until at last he found
himself in a dense grove of trees. Though his lungs were threatening to burst, Kunta considered climbing one of them, but the softness of the thick carpeting of leaves under his feet told him that many of the trees’ leaves had fallen off, which could make him easily seen, so that his best concealment would be on the ground.

Crawling again, he settled finally—just as the sky began to lighten—in a place of deep undergrowth. Except for the wheeze of his own breath, everything was very still, and it reminded him of his long, lonely vigils guarding the groundnut fields with his faithful wuolo dog. It was just then that he heard in the distance the deep baying of a dog. Perhaps he had heard it only in his mind, he thought, snapping to alertness and straining his ears. But it came again—only now there were two of them. He didn’t have much time.

Kneeling toward the east, he prayed to Allah for deliverance, and just as he finished, the deep-throated baying came again, closer this time. Kunta decided it was best to stay hidden where he was, but when he heard the howling once again—closer still—just a few minutes later, it seemed that they knew exactly where he was and his limbs wouldn’t let him remain there a moment longer. Into the underbrush he crawled again, hunting for a deeper, even more secreted place. Every inch among the brambles raking at his hands and knees was torture, but with every cry from the dogs he scrambled faster and faster. Yet the barking grew ever louder and closer, and Kunta was sure that he could hear now the shouting of men behind the dogs.

He wasn’t moving fast enough; springing up, he began to run—stumbling through the brambles—as quickly and quietly as his exhaustion would permit. Almost immediately he heard an explosion, the shock buckled his knees and sent him sprawling into a tangle of briars.

The dogs were snarling at the very edge of the thicket now. Quivering in terror, Kunta could even smell them. A moment
later they were thrashing through the underbrush straight for him. Kunta made it up onto his knees just as the two dogs came crashing through the brush and leaped on him, yowling and slavering and snapping as they knocked him over, then sprang backward to lunge at him again. Snarling himself, Kunta fought wildly to fend them off, using his hands like claws while he tried to crab backward away from them. Then he heard the men shouting from the edge of the brush, and again there was an explosion, this time much louder. As the dogs relented somewhat in their attack, Kunta heard the men cursing and slashing through the brush with knives.

Behind the growling dogs, he saw first the black one he had choked. He held a huge knife in one hand, a short club and a rope in the other, and he looked murderous. Kunta lay bleeding on his back, jaws clenched to keep from screaming, expecting to be chopped into bits. Then Kunta saw the toubob who had brought him here appear behind the black one, his face reddish and sweating. Kunta waited for the flash and the explosion that he had learned on the big canoe could come from the firestick that a second toubob—one he hadn’t seen before—pointed at him now. But it was the black one who now rushed forward furiously, raising his club, when the chief toubob shouted.

The black one halted, and the toubob shouted at the dogs, who drew farther back. Then the toubob said something to the black one, who now moved forward uncoiling his rope. A heavy blow to Kunta’s head sent him into a merciful numbing shock. He was dimly aware of being trussed up so tightly that the rope bit into his already bleeding skin; then of being half lifted from among the brambles and made to walk. Whenever he lost his balance and fell down, a whip seared across his back. When they finally reached the forest’s edge, Kunta saw three of the donkeylike animals tied near several trees.

As they approached the animals, he tried to bolt away again, but a vicious yank on the free end of the rope sent him tumbling down—and earned him a kick in the ribs. Now the second toubob, holding the rope, moved ahead of Kunta, jerking him stumbling toward a tree near where the animals were tied. The rope’s free end was thrown over a lower limb, and the black one hauled on it until Kunta’s feet barely touched the ground.

The chief toubob’s whistling whip began to lash against Kunta’s back. He writhed under the pain, refusing to make any sound, but each blow felt as if it had torn him in half. Finally he began screaming, but the lashing went on.

Kunta was hardly conscious when at last the whip stopped falling. He sensed vaguely that he was being lowered and crumpling onto the ground; then that he was being lifted and draped across the back of one of the animals; then he was aware of movement.

The next thing Kunta knew—he had no idea how much time had passed—he was lying spread-eagled on his back in some kind of hut. A chain, he noticed, was attached to an iron cuff on each wrist and ankle, and the four chains were fixed to the base of four poles at the corners of the hut. Even the slightest movement brought such excruciating pain that for a long while he lay completely still, his face wet with sweat and his breath coming in quick, shallow gasps.

Without moving, he could see that a small, square, open space above him was admitting daylight. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a recessed place in the wall, and within it a mostly burned log and some ashes. On the other side of the hut, he saw a wide, flat, lumpy thing of cloth on the floor, with corn shucks showing through its holes; he guessed it might be used as a bed.

As dusk showed through the open space above him, Kunta heard—from very nearby—the blowing of a strange-sounding horn. And before much more time had passed, he heard the voices
of what he smelled were many black people passing near where he was. Then he smelled food cooking. As his spasms of hunger mingled with the pounding in his head and the stabbing pains in his back and his thorn-cut arms and legs, he berated himself for not having waited for a better time to escape, as a trapped animal would have done. He should have first observed and learned more of this strange place and its pagan people.

Kunta’s eyes were closed when the hut’s door squeaked open; he could smell the black one he had choked, who had helped to catch him. He lay still and pretended to be asleep—until a vicious kick in the ribs shot his eyes wide open. With a curse, the black one set something down just in front of Kunta’s face, dropped a covering over his body, and went back out, slamming the door behind him.

The smell of the food before him hurt Kunta’s stomach almost as much as the pain in his back. Finally, he opened his eyes. There was some kind of mush and some kind of meat piled upon a flat, round tin, and a squat, round gourd of water beside it. His spread-eagled wrists made it impossible to pick them up, but both were close enough for him to reach with his mouth. Just as he was about to take a bite, Kunta smelled that the meat was the filthy swine, and the bile from his stomach came spewing up and onto the tin plate.

Through the night, he lay drifting into and out of sleep and wondering about these black ones who looked like Africans but ate pig. It meant that they were all strangers—or traitors—to Allah. Silently he begged Allah’s forgiveness in advance if his lips would ever touch any swine without his realizing it, or even if he ever ate from any plate that any swine meat had ever been on.

Soon after the dawn showed again through the square opening, Kunta heard the strange horn blow once more; then came the smell of food cooking, and the voices of the black ones hurrying back and forth. Then the man he despised returned, bringing new
food and water. But when he saw that Kunta had vomited over the untouched plate that was already there, he bent down with a string of angry curses and rubbed the contents into Kunta’s face. Then he set the new food and water before him, and left.

Kunta told himself that he would choke the food down later; he was too sick even to think about it now. After a little while, he heard the door open again; this time he smelled the stench of toubob. Kunta kept his eyes clamped shut, but when the toubob muttered angrily, he feared another kick and opened them. He found himself staring up at the hated face of the toubob who had brought him here; it was flushed with rage. The toubob made cursing sounds and told him with threatening gestures that if he didn’t eat the food, he would get more beating. Then the toubob left.

Kunta managed to move his left hand far enough for the fingers to scratch up a small mound of the hard dirt where the toubob’s foot had been. Pulling the dirt closer, Kunta pressed his eyes shut and appealed to the spirits of evil to curse forever the womb of the toubob and his family.

K
unta had counted four days and three nights in the hut. And each night he had lain listening to the singing from the huts nearby—and feeling more African than he ever felt in his own village. What kind of black people they must be, he thought, to spend their time
singing
here in the land of the toubob. He wondered how many of these strange black ones there were in all of toubob land, those who didn’t seem to know or care who or what they were.

Kunta felt a special closeness to the sun each time it rose. He recalled what an old man who had been an alcala had said down in the darkness of the big canoe: “Each day’s new sun will remind us that it rose in our Africa, which is the navel of the earth.”

Although he was spread-eagled by four chains, he had practiced until he had learned a way to inch forward or backward on his back and buttocks to study more closely the small but thick iron rings, like bracelets, that fastened the chains to the four poles at the hut’s corners. The poles were about the size of his lower leg, and he knew there was no hope of his ever breaking one, or of pulling one from the hard-packed earth floor, for the upper ends went up through the hut’s roof. With his eyes and then his fingers, Kunta carefully examined the small holes in the thick metal rings; he had seen his captors insert a narrow metal thing into these
holes and turn them, making a
click
sound. When he shook one of the rings, it made the chain rattle—loud enough for someone to hear—so he gave that up. He tried putting one of the rings in his mouth and biting it as hard as he could; finally one of his teeth cracked, lancing pains through his head.

Seeking some dirt preferable to that of the floor in order to make a fetish to the spirits, Kunta scraped out with his fingers a piece of the reddish, hardened mud chinking between the logs. Seeing short, black bristles within the mud, he inspected one curiously; when he realized that it was a hair from the filthy swine, he flung it away—along with the dirt—and wiped off the hand that had held it.

On the fifth morning, the black one entered shortly after the wake-up horn had blown, and Kunta tautened when he saw that along with his usual short, flat club, the man carried two thick iron cuffs. Bending down, he locked each of Kunta’s ankles within the cuffs, which were connected by a heavy chain. Only then did he unlock the four chains, one by one, that had kept Kunta spread-eagled. Free to move at last, Kunta couldn’t stop himself from springing upward—only to be struck down by the black one’s waiting fist. As Kunta began pushing himself back upward, a booted foot dug viciously into his ribs. Stumbling upward once again in agony and rage, he was knocked down even harder. He hadn’t realized how much the days of lying on his back had sapped his strength, and he lay now fighting for breath as the black one stood over him with an expression that told Kunta he would keep knocking him down until he learned who was the master.

Now the black one gestured roughly for Kunta to get up. When he couldn’t raise his body even onto his hands and knees, the black one jerked him to his feet with a curse and shoved him forward, the ankle cuffs forcing Kunta to hobble awkwardly.

The full force of daylight in the doorway blinded him at first, but after a moment he began to make out a line of black people walking hastily nearby in single file, followed closely by a toubob riding a “hoss,” as he had heard that strange animal called. Kunta knew from his smell that he was the one who had held the rope after Kunta had been trapped by the dogs. There were about ten or twelve blacks—the women with red or white rags tied on their heads, most of the men and children wearing ragged straw hats; but a few were bare-headed, and as far as he could see, none of them wore a single saphie charm around their necks or arms. But some of the men carried what seemed to be long, stout knives, and the line seemed to be heading in the direction of the great fields. He thought that it must have been they whom he had heard at night doing all that singing. He felt nothing but contempt for them. Turning his blinking gaze, Kunta counted the huts they had come from: There were ten, including his own—all very small, like his, and they didn’t have the stout look of the mud huts of his village, with their roofs of sweet-smelling thatch. They were arranged in rows of five each—positioned, Kunta noticed, so that whatever went on among the blacks living there could be seen from the big white house.

Abruptly the black one began jabbing at Kunta’s chest with his finger, then exclaiming, “You—you Toby!” Kunta didn’t understand, and his face showed it, so the black one kept jabbing him and saying the same thing over and over. Slowly it dawned on Kunta that the black one was attempting to make him understand something he was saying in the strange toubob tongue.

When Kunta continued to stare at him dumbly, the black one began jabbing at his own chest. “Me Samson!” he exclaimed. “Samson!” He moved his jabbing finger again to Kunta. “You To-by! Toby. Massa say you name Toby!”

When what he meant began to sink in, it took all of Kunta’s self-control to grip his flooding rage without any facial sign of the
slightest understanding. He wanted to shout “I am Kunta Kinte, first son of Omoro, who is the son of the holy man Kairaba Kunta Kinte!”