Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

"OWN UP AND PAY UP" 115
pat with expectancy, on a green grassy glade. You know
not what is ahead, nor do you want to. Here your " think-
ing black" negro moralises once more, and insists that
this track of ours is like the way and walk of life. The
veil that covers the face of futurity is woven by the hand
of mercy. If you knew a month's happening ahead, you
would grow grey in a single night. Day by day in this
same cart-wheel rut, however, has a curious eflfect on you
the traveller : it gets on your brain, precisely as this
sinuous trail has made an equally sinuous African. He
gets a twist too. With chameleon consistency the negro
has utterly become like his own zigzag path ; it is his
way of doing things as well as his way of walking. In
speaking—say—this slippery native can only twist in and
out of an idea precisely as he twists along his path :
" Going, I went, and speaking, I spoke, and doing, I did,"
being the average formula of your wriggly black. An
adjacent lion is called a *'dog," and a friend asking a
friend to drink beer is vaguely invited to drink " water."
Hence the famous fact that our son of Ham will never
come straight to the point, but hedges and temporises
" meandering to the point " he calls it. Depend upon it,
too, this gentleman has got to learn that a straight line
is the shortest in morals as in mathematics : is not their
twisted itinerary exactly like their twisted morals ? Why,
for example, is it that your savage prefers to take a long,
roundabout way in murdering his man, lingering and
lavishing the finest touches of the art of murder on him ?
Kound the corner of the cook-house you can catch Mr.