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

140 THINKING BLACK
of good old Scotland in my veins, it costs me quite a
patriotic pang to repeat this anti-Scotland slander, but
the words, false then, are true now when applied to the
Luvale— you literally smell your arrival. You smile,
too, at the crowd of women perfecting the work of nature
with dress and face smeared with red dye. Yet, after all,
what is the difference between these and an English lady,
who daubs two big spots of rouge on her cheeks ? How
true it is that the vices we laugh at in others, laugh at us
in ourselves. Ponder the whirligig of time. In the
Apostle Paul's day at Rome, was not this the very taunt
to restrain Roman ladies from dyeing their hair and
painting their faces, to wit, that they would become as
ugly as " the woad-stained Britons " ? Yes, we were the
"niggers" of those days. Did not Propertius try to
frighten Cynthia out of cosmetics by likening her to " the
coarse blue-eyed Britons"? And did not Cicero write
to his pal long ago : " Atticus ! . . . the stupidest and
ugliest slaves come from Britain " ?
In a second, with commendable promptitude, the busi-
ness begins, jabber, babble, twaddle, cackle!—all baiting you
like a bear. Then they break into a whirl of questions,
who ? why? when? where? whither?—and although once or
twice you make a wild dive for a probable answer, it ends
in your wearily resigning all pretensions to deal with them.
These Luvale ladies have a limited dress allowance
fancy one of these sable sisters of mine wearing a la mode
a mere four-inch ribbon of calico. Pointing her black-kid-
glove finger right in my eye, she called me '' Softie." It