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

174 THINKING BLACK
to that of the little girl who thinks that by pressing the
button she has thereby made the electric light. Pushing
investigations, it leaks out that the Arabs have for long
years juggled with the art of writing, this indeed being
their greatest asset among raw natives. It is magic or
nothing. Do they not believe that the most potent
medicine is simply a written line of the Koran, swallowed
by the sufferer? A literal use this of the prophet
Jeremiah's saying :
" Thy words were found, and I did eat
them." The leaves of the Tree of Life are medicinal, but
so, too, argues the Arab, are literal leaves of a book.
Little wonder, then, the African clutches at the new idea
of writing, for when he sees us reading he wakens as
from a nightmare to discover that the whole heap of the
past experiences of his race is lost to ken because of
this lack of a literature. Yes, all the accumulated negro
wisdom of centuries might have been his heritage if only
somebody had dreamed of writing them down. But as it
is, every black boy is thrown on the hard knocks of the
world as though he were living in the year after Adam
fell—no past treasure of written wisdom.
Probably, too, the negro vice of congenital lying flows
from this same source of booklessness. For they have
nothing down in black and white. Promises are merely
verbal, not written, therefore the hardest-mouthed negro
wins. Had he committed himself to writing, then, follow-
ing the Arab idea of masticating paper, a hundred liars
could be made literally to eat their written lies. Did not
Christ meet all the Devil's lies with the one silencing