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

BLACK MAN = BLACK MANNERS 453
of thing really authentic ? The answer is that the best
sort of African proof is always that genuine thing you
yourself stumble over in the grass, accidentally. Here is
an instance. Down in the Sera plain I put up for the
night in a random hamlet on the edge of the bulrush-bog.
At sundown here come a crowd of merry bairns round
me, as happy with their white visitor as a cat in the
fender. But now for a change of metaphor. Then they
begin to prattle like starlings, putting many a poser to
poor me, big questions from little folks — why not ?
Should not a big horse take a big fence ? Next we
exchange names as per Luban courtesy. The first little
girl of my gossip is much more strikingly well dressed
than all the crowd, so much that one opines she is a
personality, the local magnate's daughter perhaps. But
when I probe inquisitively about her nice beads, nicer
calico, and fantastic hair-coiffure, it soon begins to dawn
on me that this really harmless interlocutor is painfully
embarrassing. Had village elders been around, of course,
^I would never have got wind of that tragedy at all, but
here are a dozen precocious little chatterers telling me
the tale. Describing, if you please, most graphically how
they killed this little mode de Paris girl's mother at the
last funeral. That she is no Chief's daughter at all at
all ; and that, in fact, she has only been paid so much
"hush-money" for her mother's death, witness these
blue beads and fancy calico. Mother had gone on the
long, lonely journey with the Chief, who had always an
escort in life, and must not be deprived of one in death.