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

262 THINKING BLACK
ceased mother is still linked with her living children
by the very blood she has bequeathed them. That is to
say, yonder in that frowning lonely spirit-world, menacing
his life at every turn, he has actually a blood kinsman as
daysman and representative. She, too, was once hungry,
once weary, once jagged with earthly pains and penalties.
To prove this link as both intimate and dear I have
heard a man murmur in spirit-worship, " Oh, mother,
behold this blood now coursing in my body, thou didst
not merely bequeath it unto me, but it is thee !
" Here,
then, you find the tenacity of belief that he, the living
being, can bridge the awful gulf because the dead did
not entirely die—did they not leave some of their own
literal blood on this earthly side of the gulf as an in-
tentional link? There, then, is his bridge across the
chasm, and if you urge that it is not real, but merely his
own mad conjecture, he will retort that the bridging
initiative was not his at all, but rather that of his own
guardian spirit, who will not {because cannot) sever the
link between the living and the dead. Instance, even
a tiny boy, who, long ago in war, was swooped down
can he worship a
on in his natal village— query : How
mother he never knew ? The boy's retort is that, albeit
he was so torn away at birth from his unknown mother,
yet surely he, too, was born as much as everybody else.
That he never knew her is less than nothing at all to
him, for he has only to pinch his flesh to remind himself
that she gave him this body. So there he is, working
away at the building of his little temple to the " unknown