Roots: The Saga of an American Family

by Alex Haley

valuable and brand-new. Unless the borrower had witnesses to disprove that, he was usually ordered to pay for or replace the article at the value of a new one. Kunta also saw furious people accusing others of inflicting bad fortune on them through evil magic. One man testified that another had touched him with a cock’s spur, making him violently ill. A young wife declared that her new mother-in-law had hidden some bourein shrub in the wife’s kitchen, causing whatever was cooked there to turn out badly. And a widow claimed that an old man whose advances she had spurned had sprinkled powdered eggshells in her path, making her walk into a long succession of troubles, which she proceeded to describe. If presented with enough impressive evidence of evil magic’s motives and results, the Council would command immediate corrective magic to be done by the nearest traveling magic man, whom a drumtalk message would summon to Juffure at the expense of the evildoer.