Roots Read Online Free

through the night. Between cloudbursts, they heard only the barking of the jackals, the howling of the hyenas, and the croaking of the frogs.
    The rains came again the next night, and the next—and the next—and only at night—flooding the lowlands near the river, turning their fields into a swamp and their village into a mudhole. Yet each morning before breakfast, all the farmers struggled through the mud to Juffure’s little mosque and implored Allah to send still more rain, for life itself depended upon enough water to soak deeply into the earth before the hot suns arrived, which would wither those crops whose roots could not find enough water to survive.
    In the damp nursery hut, dimly lighted and poorly heated by the burning dry sticks and cattle-dung patties in the earthen
floor’s shallow firehole, old Nyo Boto told Kunta and the other children of the terrible time she remembered when there were not enough big rains. No matter how bad anything was, Nyo Boto would always remember a time when it was worse. After two days of big rain, she told them, the burning suns had come. Although the people prayed very hard to Allah, and danced the ancestral rain dance, and sacrificed two goats and a bullock every day, still everything growing in the ground began to parch and die. Even the forest’s waterholes dried up, said Nyo Boto, and first wild fowl, and then the forest’s animals, sick from thirst, began to appear at the village well. In crystal-clear skies each night, thousands of bright stars shone, and a cold wind blew, and more and more people grew ill. Clearly, evil spirits were abroad in Juffure.
    Those who were able continued their prayers and their dances, and finally the last goat and bullock had been sacrificed. It was as if Allah had turned His back on Juffure. Some—the old and the weak and the sick—began to die. Others left town, seeking another village to beg someone who had food to accept them as slaves, just to get something into their bellies, and those who stayed behind lost their spirit and lay down in their huts. It was then, said Nyo Boto, that Allah had guided the steps of marabout Kairaba Kunta Kinte into the starving village of Juffure. Seeing the people’s plight, he kneeled down and prayed to Allah—almost without sleep and taking only a few sips of water as nourishment—for the next five days. And on the evening of the fifth day came a great rain, which fell like a flood, and saved Juffure.
    When she finished her story, the other children looked with new respect at Kunta, who bore the name of that distinguished grandfather, husband of Kunta’s Grandma Yaisa. Even before now, Kunta had seen how the parents of the other children acted toward Yaisa, and he had sensed that she was an important woman, just as old Nyo Boto surely was.

    The big rains continued to fall every night until Kunta and the other children began to see grown-ups wading across the village in mud up to their ankles and even to their knees, and even using canoes to paddle from place to place. Kunta had heard Binta tell Omoro that the rice fields were flooded in the bolong’s high waters. Cold and hungry, the children’s fathers sacrificed precious goats and bullocks to Allah almost every day, patched leaking roofs, shored up sagging huts—and prayed that their disappearing stock of rice and couscous would last until the harvest.
    But Kunta and the others, being yet little children, paid less attention to the hunger pangs in their bellies than to playing in the mud, wrestling each other and sliding on their naked bottoms. Yet in their longing to see the sun again, they would wave up at the slate-colored sky and shout—as they had seen their parents do—“Shine, sun, and I will kill you a goat!”
    The life-giving rain had made every growing thing fresh and luxuriant. Birds sang everywhere. The trees and plants were explosions of fragrant blossoms. The reddish-brown, clinging mud underfoot was newly carpeted each