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root or snatch up groundnuts. With dirt clods and shouts, they routed whistling flocks of blackbirds as they wheeled low over the couscous, for the grandmothers’ stories had told of ripened fields ruined as quickly by hungry birds as by any animal. Collecting the handfuls of couscous and groundnuts that their fathers had cut or pulled up to test for ripeness, and carrying gourds of cool water for the men to
drink, they worked all through the day with a swiftness equaled only by their pride.
    Six days later, Allah decreed that the harvest should begin. After the dawn’s suba prayer, the farmers and their sons—some chosen few carrying small tan-tang and souraba drums—went out to the fields and waited with heads cocked, listening. Finally, the village’s great tobalo drum boomed and the farmers leaped to the harvesting. As the jaliba and the other drummers walked among them, beating out a rhythm to match their movements, everyone began to sing. In exhilaration now and then, a farmer would fling his hoe, whirling up on one drumbeat and catch it on the next.
    Kunta’s kafo sweated alongside their fathers, shaking the groundnut bushes free of dirt. Halfway through the morning came the first rest—and then, at midday, happy shouts of relief as the women and girls arrived with lunch. Walking in single file, also singing harvest songs, they took the pots from their heads, ladled the contents into calabashes, and served them to the drummers and harvesters, who ate and then napped until the tobalo sounded once again.
    Piles of the harvest dotted the fields at the end of that first day. Streaming sweat and mud, the farmers trudged wearily to the nearest stream, where they took off their clothes and leaped into the water, laughing and splashing to cool and clean themselves. Then they headed home, swatting at the biting flies that buzzed around their glistening bodies. The closer they came to the smoke that drifted toward them from the women’s kitchens, the more tantalizing were the smells of the roasted meats that would be served three times daily for however long it took to finish the harvest.
    After stuffing himself that night, Kunta noticed—as he had for several nights—that his mother was sewing something. She said nothing about it, nor did Kunta ask. But the next morning, as he
picked up his hoe and began to walk out the door, she looked at him and said gruffly, “Why don’t you put on your clothes?”
    Kunta jerked around. There, hanging from a peg, was a brand-new dundiko. Struggling to conceal his excitement, he matter-of-factly put it on and sauntered out the door—where he burst into a run. Others of his kafo were already outside—all of them, like him, dressed for the first time in their lives, all of them leaping, shouting, and laughing because their nakedness was covered at last. They were now officially of the second kafo. They were becoming men.

CHAPTER 10
    B y the time Kunta sauntered back into his mother’s hut that night, he had made sure that everyone in Juffure had seen him in his dundiko. Though he hadn’t stopped working all day, he wasn’t a bit tired, and he knew he’d never be able to go to sleep at his regular bedtime. Perhaps now that he was a grown-up, Binta would let him stay up later. But soon after Lamin was asleep, the same as always, she sent him to bed—with a reminder to hang up his dundiko.
    As he turned to go, sulking as conspicuously as he thought he could get away with, Binta called him back—probably to reprimand him for sulking, Kunta thought, or maybe she’d taken pity on him and changed her mind. “Your Fa wants to see you in the morning,” she said casually. Kunta knew better than to ask why, so just said, “Yes, Mama,” and wished her good night. It was just as well he wasn’t tired, because he couldn’t sleep now anyway, lying under his cowhide coverlet wondering what he had done now that was wrong, as it seemed he did so often. But racking his brain, he