Roots Read Online Free Page B

with his forehead bleeding. Since Binta and Omoro were away farming, they rushed him to the hut of Grandma Yaisa, who for a number of days now had not appeared in the nursery hut.
    She looked very weak, her black face gaunt and drawn, and she was sweating under her bullock hide on her bamboo pallet. But when she saw Kunta, she sprang up to wipe his bleeding forehead.
Embracing him tightly, she ordered the other children to run and bring her some kelelalu ants. When they returned, Grandma Yaisa tightly pressed together the skin’s split edges, then pressed one struggling driver ant after another against the wound. As each ant angrily clamped its strong pincers into the flesh on each side of the cut, she deftly snapped off its body, leaving the head in place, until the wound was stitched together.
    Dismissing the other children, she told Kunta to lie down and rest alongside her on the bed. He lay and listened to her labored breathing as she remained silent for some time. Then Grandma Yaisa’s hand gestured toward a pile of books on the shelf beside her bed. Speaking slowly and softly, she told Kunta more about his grandfather, whose books she said those were.
    In his native country of Mauretania, Kairaba Kunta Kinte had thirty-five rains of age when his teacher, a master marabout, gave him the blessing that made him a holy man, said Grandma Yaisa. Kunta’s grandfather had followed a family tradition of holy men that dated back many hundreds of rains into Old Mali. As a man of the fourth kafo, he had begged the old marabout to accept him as a student, and for the next fifteen rains had traveled with his party of wives, slaves, students, cattle and goats as he pilgrimaged from village to village in the service of Allah and his subjects. Over dusty foot trails and muddy creeks, under hot suns and cold rains, through green valleys and windy wastelands, said Grandma Yaisa, they had trekked southward from Mauretania.
    Upon receiving his ordination as a holy man, Kairaba Kunta Kinte had himself wandered for many moons alone, among places in Old Mali such as Keyla, Djeela, Kangaba, and Timbuktu, humbly prostrating himself before very great old holy men and imploring their blessings for his success, which they all freely gave. And Allah then guided the young holy man’s footsteps in a
southerly direction, finally to The Gambia, where he stopped first in the village of Pakali N’Ding.
    In a short while, the people of this village knew, by the quick results from his prayers, that this young holy man had upon him Allah’s special favor. Talking drums spread the news, and soon other villages tried to lure him away, sending messengers with offers of prime maidens for wives, and slaves and cattle and goats. And before long he did move, this time to the village of Jiffarong, but only because Allah had called him there, for the people of Jiffarong had little to offer him but their gratitude for his prayers. It was here that he heard of the village of Juffure, where people were sick and dying for lack of a big rain. And so at last he came to Juffure, said Grandma Yaisa, where for five days, ceaselessly, he had prayed until Allah sent down the big rain that saved the village.
    Learning of Kunta’s grandfather’s great deed, the King of Barra himself, who ruled this part of The Gambia, personally presented a choice virgin for the young holy man’s first wife, and her name was Sireng. By Sireng, Kairaba Kunta Kinte begot two sons—and he named them Janneh and Saloum.
    By now, Grandma Yaisa had sat up on her bamboo pallet. “It was then,” she said with shining eyes, “that he saw Yaisa, dancing the seoruba! My age was fifteen rains!” She smiled widely, showing her toothless gums. “He needed no king to choose his next wife!” She looked at Kunta. “It was from my belly that he begot your papa Omoro.”
    That night, back in his mother’s hut, Kunta lay awake for a long time, thinking of the things Grandma Yaisa had told him. Many