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tribe.
    But almost every night, Kunta got spanked for doing something bad to his baby brother—usually for frightening him by snarling fiercely, or by dropping on all fours like a baboon, rolling his eyes, and stomping his fists like forepaws upon the ground. “I will bring the toubob!” Binta would yell at Kunta when he had tried her patience to the breaking point, scaring Kunta most thoroughly, for the old grandmothers spoke often of the hairy, red-faced, strange-looking white men whose big canoes stole people away from their homes.

CHAPTER 8
    T hough Kunta and his mates were tired and hungry from play by the time of each day’s setting sun, they would still race one another to climb small trees and point at the sinking crimson ball. “He will be even lovelier tomorrow!” they would shout. And even Juffure’s adults ate dinner quickly so that they might congregate outside in the deepening dusk to shout and clap and pound on drums at the rising of the crescent moon, symbolic of Allah.
    But when clouds shrouded that new moon, as they did this night, the people dispersed, alarmed, and the men entered the mosque to pray for forgiveness, since a shrouded new moon meant that the heavenly spirits were displeased with the people of Juffure. After praying, the men led their frightened families to the baobab, where already on this night the jaliba squatted by a small fire, heating to its utmost tautness the goatskin head of his talking drum.
    Rubbing at his eyes, which smarted from the smoke of the fire, Kunta remembered the times that drums talking at night from different villages had troubled his sleep. Awakening, he would lie there, listening hard; the sounds and rhythms were so like those of speech that he would finally understand some of the words, telling of a famine or a plague, or of the raiding and burning of some village, with its people killed or stolen away.

    Hanging on a branch of the baobab, beside the jaliba, was a goatskin inscribed with the marks that talk, written there in Arabic by the arafang. In the flickering firelight, Kunta watched as the jaliba began to beat the knobby elbows of his crooked sticks very rapidly and sharply against different spots on the drumhead. It was an urgent message for the nearest magic man to come to Juffure and drive out evil spirits.
    Not daring to look up at the moon, the people hurried home and fearfully went to bed. But at intervals through the night, the talk of distant drums echoed the appeal of Juffure for a magic man in other villages as well. Shivering beneath his cowskin, Kunta guessed that their new moon was shrouded, too.
    The next day, the men of Omoro’s age had to help the younger men of the village to guard their nearly ripened fields against the seasonal plague of hungry baboons and birds. The second-kafo boys were told to be especially vigilant as they grazed the goats, and the mothers and grandmothers hovered closer than they normally would over the toddlers and the babies. The first kafo’s biggest children, those the size of Kunta and Sitafa, were instructed to play a little way out past the village’s tall fence, where they could keep a sharp lookout for any stranger approaching the travelers’ tree, not far distant. They did, but none came that day.
    He appeared on the second morning—a very old man, walking with the help of a wooden staff and bearing a large bundle on his bald head. Spotting him, the children raced shouting back through the village gate. Leaping up, old Nyo Boto hobbled over and began to beat on the big tobalo drum that brought the men rushing back to the village from their fields a moment before the magic man reached the gate and entered Juffure.
    As the villagers gathered around him, he walked over to the baobab and set down his bundle carefully on the ground. Abruptly squatting, he then shook from a wrinkled goatskin bag a heap of
dried objects—a small snake, a hyena’s jawbone, a monkey’s teeth, a pelican’s wingbone,