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

THUS FAR AND NO FARTHEK 261
really dies " is the negro saying, so to him that white
skull is merely the last surviving wind-swept room of a
wrecked tenement. Now only a warrior's punch-bowl, the
very skull that
" was once ambition's airy hall,
The dome of thought, the palace of the soul."
Nevertheless, if you want to guess even faintly at the
curious convolutions of the black brain, you must seize
upon this great system of spirit-worship, which is one and
indivisible across Africa. The whole theory is merely the
solemn result of the negro as a race looking steadfastly
into the continents of death and eternity. What is this
fiction but a farrago of sense and nonsense ? The ardent
spirits of the living and the dead linked with these ardent
spirits—of beer. Worshipping by fits and starts and
sometimes only once per annum, the negro can only
cordially dispense with worship after he has dispensed
cordials. Do not they accuse us of the same thing when
we place wine on the Lord's Table ?
But there is more in it than mere tipple—tragedy, call
it. Watch this African's definition of spirit-worship, a
sorry enough solution of the problem. Here it is. Shut
up into one sentence the kernel idea is the negro attempt
to rob the awful and unknown spirit-world of its double
sting of loneliness and frowning distance. Does it not
envelop him, and out from the unseen depths thereof are
not daily darts showered against him ? Hence his solu-
tion in this bridging process, i.e, the boast that a de-