Free Roots by Alex Haley Page B

for no one, not even the usually greedy children, felt like eating much. Everyone was sapped of strength by the sun’s heat, and the people talked less and went about doing only the things they had to do.
    The hides of the gaunt cattle in the village were broken by lumpy sores where biting flies had laid their eggs. A quietness had come upon the scrawny chickens that normally ran squawking around the village, and they lay in the dust on their sides, with their wings fanned out and their beaks open. Even the monkeys now were seldom seen or heard, for most of them had gone into the forest for more shade. And the goats, Kunta noticed, grazing less and less in the heat, had grown nervous and thin.
    For some reason—perhaps it was the heat, or perhaps simply because they were growing older—Kunta and his goatherding mates, who had spent every day together out in the bush for almost six moons, now began to drift off alone with their own small herds. It had happened for several days before Kunta realized that he had never before been completely away from other people for any real length of time. He looked across at other boys and their
goats in the distance, scattered across the silence of the sunbaked bush. Beyond them lay the fields where the farmers were chopping the weeds that had grown in the moons since the last harvest. The tall piles of weeds they raked to dry under the sun seemed to wave and shimmer in the heat.
    Wiping the sweat from his brow, it seemed to Kunta that his people were always enduring one hardship or another—something uncomfortable or difficult, or frightening, or threatening to life itself. He thought about the burning, hot days and the cold nights that followed them. And he thought about the rains that would come next, turning the village into a mudhole and finally submerging the walking paths until the people had to travel in their canoes from place to place where usually they walked. They needed the rain as they needed the sun, but there always seemed to be too much or too little. Even when the goats were fat and the trees were heavy with fruit and blossoms, he knew that would be the time when the last rain’s harvest would run out in the family storehouses and that this would bring the hungry season, with people starving and some even dying, like his own dearly remembered Grandma Yaisa.
    The harvest season was a happy one—and after that, the harvest festival—but it was over so soon, and then the long, hot dry season would come again, with its awful harmattan, when Binta kept shouting at him and beating on Lamin—until he almost felt sorry for his pest of a small brother. As he herded his goats back toward the village, Kunta remembered the stories he had heard so many times when he was as young as Lamin, about how the forefathers had always lived through great fears and dangers. As far back as time went, Kunta guessed, the lives of the people had been hard. Perhaps they always would be.
    Each evening in the village now, the alimamo led the prayers for Allah to send the rains. And then one day, excitement filled
Juffure when some gentle winds stirred up the dust—for those winds meant that the rains were soon to come. And the next morning, the people of the village gathered out in the fields, where the farmers set afire the tall piles of weeds they had raked up, and thick smoke coiled up over the fields. The heat was nearly unbearable, but the sweating people danced and cheered, and the first-kafo children went racing and whooping about, each trying to catch good-luck pieces of drifting, feathery flakes of ashes.
    The next day’s light winds began to sift the loose ashes over the fields, enriching the soil to grow yet another crop. The farmers now began chopping busily with their hoes, preparing the long rows to receive the seeds—in this seventh planting time through which Kunta had lived in the endless cycle of the seasons.

CHAPTER 15
    T wo rains had passed, and Binta’s belly was big