Free Roots by Alex Haley Page A

their huts almost as much as they did in the fields. Before Kunta left home each morning for his goatherding, Binta saw that he protected his feet well with red palm oil, but each afternoon, when he returned to the village from the open bush, his lips were parched and the soles of his feet were dry and cracked by the baking earth beneath them. Some of the boys came home with bleeding feet, but out they would go again each morning—uncomplaining, like their fathers—into the fierce heat of the dry grazing land, which was even worse than in the village.
    By the time the sun reached its zenith, the boys and their dogs and the goats all lay panting in the shade of scrub trees, the boys too tired to hunt and roast the small game that had been their daily sport. Mostly, they just sat and chatted as cheerfully as they could, but somehow by this time the adventure of goatherding had lost some of its excitement.
    It didn’t seem possible that the sticks they gathered every day would be needed to keep them warm at night, but once the sun set, the air turned as cold as it had been hot. And after their evening meal, the people of Juffure huddled around their crackling
fires. Men of Omoro’s age sat talking around one fire, and a little distance away was the fire of the elders. Around still another sat the women and the unmarried girls, apart from the old grandmothers, who told their nightly stories to the little first-kafo children around a fourth fire.
    Kunta and the other second-kafo boys were too proud to sit with the naked first kafo of Lamin and his mates, so they squatted far enough away not to seem part of that noisy, giggling group—yet near enough to hear the old grandmother’s stories, which still thrilled them as much as ever. Sometimes Kunta and his mates eavesdropped on those at other fires; but the conversations were mostly about the heat. Kunta heard the old men recalling times when the sun had killed plants and burned crops; how it had made the well go stale, or dry, of times when the heat had dried the people out like husks. This hot season was bad, they said, but not as bad as many they could remember. It seemed to Kunta that older people always could remember something worse.
    Then, abruptly one day, breathing the air was like breathing flames, and that night the people shivered beneath their blankets with the cold creeping into their bones. Again the next morning, they were mopping their faces and trying to draw a full breath. That afternoon the harmattan wind began. It wasn’t a hard wind, nor even a gusty wind, either of which would have helped. Instead it blew softly and steadily, dusty and dry, day and night, for nearly half a moon. As it did each time it came, the constant blowing of the harmattan wore away slowly at the nerves of the people of Juffure. And soon parents were yelling more often than usual at their children, and whipping them for no good reason. And though bickering was unusual among the Mandinkas, hardly a daytime hour passed without loud shoutings between some adults, especially between younger husbands and wives like Omoro and Binta. Suddenly then nearby doorways would fill with people watching
as the couple’s mothers went rushing into that hut. A moment later the shouting would grow louder, and next a rain of sewing baskets, cooking pots, calabashes, stools, and clothes would be hurled out the door. Then, bursting out themselves, the wife and her mother would snatch up the possessions and go storming off to the mother’s hut.
    After about two moons, just as it had begun, the harmattan suddenly stopped. In less than a day, the air became still, the sky clear. Within one night, a parade of wives slipped back in with their husbands, and their mothers-in-law were exchanging small gifts and patching up arguments all over the village. But the five long moons of the dry season were only half over. Though food was still plentiful in the storehouses, the mothers only cooked small quantities,