Up to the present two Messiahs and a Daniel have appeared, and
several human sacrifices have been offered up to these
incarnations. The Daniel managed to get three young men, who he
insisted were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, to walk into a
blast furnace, guaranteeing non-combustion. They did not return.
I have seen nothing of this kind, but I have attended a negro
church. They pray, or are caused to pray by themselves in this
country. The congregation were moved by the spirit to groans and
tears, and one of them danced up the aisle to the mourners'
bench. The motive may have been genuine. The movements of the
shaken body were those of a Zanzibar stick dance, such as you see
at Aden on the coal-boats, and even as I watched the people, the
links that bound them to the white man snapped one by one, and I
saw before me the hubshi (woolly hair) praying to a God he did
not understand. Those neatly dressed folk on the benches, and
the gray-headed elder by the window, were savages, neither more
nor less.
What will the American do with the negro? The South will not
consort with him. In some States miscegenation is a penal
offence. The North is every year less and less in need of his
services.
And he will not disappear. He will continue as a problem. His
friends will urge that he is as good as the white man. His
enemies - well, you can guess what his enemies will do from a
little incident that followed on a recent appointment by the
President. He made a negro an assistant in a post-office
where - think of it! - he had to work at the next desk to a white
girl, the daughter of a colonel, one of the first families of
Georgia's modern chivalry, and all the weary, weary rest of it.
The Southern chivalry howled, and hanged or burned some one in
effigy. Perhaps it was the President, and perhaps it was the
negro - but the principle remains the same. They said it was an
insult. It is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and
the home of the brave.
But this is nothing to do with San Francisco and her merry
maidens, her strong, swaggering men, and her wealth of gold and
pride. They bore me to a banquet in honor of a brave
lieutenant - Carlin, of the "Vandalia" - who stuck by his ship in
the great cyclone at Apia and comported himself as an officer
should. On that occasion - 'twas at the Bohemian Club - I heard
oratory with the roundest of o's, and devoured a dinner the
memory of which will descend with me into the hungry grave.
There were about forty speeches delivered, and not one of them
was average or ordinary.
