Читать книгу Birthright онлайн

49 страница из 70

GO YE INTO ALL THE WORLD

Come hear Rev. E.B. Blackwater's great

Missionary Address on

CHRISTIANIZING AFRICA

ELOQUENT, PROFOUND, HEART-SEARCHING.

ILLUSTRATED WITH SLIDES.

Half a dozen negroes lounged in the sunshine on Hobbett's corner as Peter came up. They were amusing themselves after the fashion of blacks, with mock fights, feints, sudden wrestlings. They would seize one another by the head and grind their knuckles into one another's wool. Occasionally, one would leap up and fall into one of those grotesque shuffles called “breakdowns.” It all held a certain rawness, an irrepressible juvenility.

As Peter came up, Tump Pack detached himself from the group and gave a pantomime of thrusting. ​He was clearly reproducing the action which had won for him his military medal. Then suddenly he fell down in the dust and writhed. He was mimicking with a ghastly realism the death-throes of his four victims. His audience howled with mirth at this dumb show of the bayonet-fight and of killing four men. Tump himself got up out of the dust with tears of laughter in his eyes. Peter caught the end of his sentence, “Sho put it to 'em, black boy. Fo' white men—”