CHAPTER V
This trek to the Zambesi was the most extraordinary adventure of my life.
It altered my whole conception of life. Up to that year, about my fortieth, I had always tried to believe in a Divinity … that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.
Now I began to put the comma after 'rough' instead of after 'ends.'
As soon as we got into Bechuanaland to the north-east of the Transvaal, Negro tribes, men and women, came constantly to visit us; they begged bright cloths from us and knives, and naturally my Boers, who knew them intimately, had provided me with all sorts of things with which to barter for furs, etc. I soon found that the younger of the brothers was fond of gratifying his lust with any young Negro girl who took his fancy, and I had to acknowledge that the girls were anything but reserved. Karl was a fine, big man, fully six feet in height and perhaps thirty years of age, and his brother was even bigger and burlier, perhaps ten years older, and altogether more brutal: we always spoke of him as the 'Doctor.'
One morning, I remember, we were late in starting and some of the Negro leaders were laughing because Karl was not ready, having been occupied with a Negro girl in his tent. As soon as the 'Doctor' learned this, he strode to the tent, and tearing up the fastenings, overthrew it and exposed his brother, half-dressed, who was packing his valise. The young Negro girl who had been helping him started up when the tent fell, and smiling, held out her hands to the 'Doctor.' Red with rage, he caught her by the left breast and flung her from him. She shrieked and began to cry: Karl expostulated with him; but I was furious.
'I want you to know once for all,' I cried, 'that I won't have these colored people ill-treated.'
'Bestie!' he replied.
'They may be beasts, in your opinion,' I went on, 'but I insist that they shall be treated decently. To kiss a girl first and then maltreat her is shameful! And I won't stand for it!'
Karl nodded agreement with me while the 'Doctor' went off muttering and scowling.
It was Karl who gave me at our next stopping place a lesson in Negro morality. A small tribe had come to our camp to beg: he and I got out some colored stuffs and showed them to the women and girls, who went crazy with delight. One of the prettiest of them and best formed, a girl of perhaps fifteen, took up a piece of bright blue. She was, of course, naked, except the little apron that half-covered her nudity. Karl at once threw the cloth about her shoulders: she laughed gleefully and strutted about with it; he went over and kissed her, saying she could have it. At once she threw her arms about him and then, saying something, lifted her apron.
'What does she say?' I asked.
'That she's ready for a man!' said Karl.
'What does she mean?' I asked, and Karl set himself to explain to me a custom which I found was almost universal.
'As soon as half a dozen girls in a tribe reach puberty,' Karl said, 'they are taken by a couple of old women to the nearest stream. There the old crones, with great ceremony, break the girls' maidenheads and then declare them fit and ready, in a week or so, to give pleasure to men and bear children.'
The whole affair seemed astonishing to me: I had always imagined that the maidenhead was a result, or at least an indication, of the proprietary instinct of the male, and if it were thus gradually developed by natural selection, why do away with it in such a coarse way? But Karl assured me that the girls were all delighted to be rid of it and free to devote themselves to the higher uses of maturity.
After a month's trekking we were visited one evening by a tribe which possessed a young girl almost completely white. The heads of the tribe assured Karl that she was the product of a white missionary, who fifteen years ago had journeyed far, far to the north across the great river.
Some time later I told Stanley the story and wondered whether by a new sort of paper-chase, he had tracked Livingstone by parti-colored offspring across Africa. But Stanley had no sense of humor and seemed to resent the imputation. Still, I must record one fact in regard to this girl: she was extraordinarily proud of her white blood and begged Karl to find her some white man to whom she might give herself and so have done with colored men forever. Curiously enough, though of sufficient age, she had refused to submit to the ministry of the old colored women and therefore still preserved her maidenhead. She wanted white children, she declared, and would never yield herself to a Negro.
It was the Doctor who undertook to content her desire and was gratefully accepted, though I always thought there was more than a little Negro blood in his veins; still, he was at least half-white. In the course of the next month or so we came upon three similar instances, and in every case the same insensate pride in the mulatto. It grew to be a joke with us that we were following in the missionary's footsteps!
When we were nearing the Zambesi, we spent a whole day trekking through a dense forest, and there towards midday discovered a troop of baboons. The Doctor happened to be a little ahead of us, and almost at once a huge female baboon picked bun out and began, with unmistakable gestures, to show him that he had taken her fancy and that she was more than willing to be his love.
Naturally the incident amused me highly and I induced the brothers to let the game go on. To cut a long story short, that female kept close to the Doctor to the edge of the forest and beyond it. The grotesque obscenity of the exhibition, the unmistakable passion of the animal, gave me a new understanding of the intimate ties that bind us men to our simian ancestors.
However we brazen it out
We men are a little breed.
I never took any part in the nightly orgies that went on between the members of our caravan and the girls of the various tribes that visited us to beg and to barter. I was content with my Kodak to take snapshots of the prettiest girls and the finest young men, and here I made some remarkable discoveries.
None of the girls objected to stand for me, and not one hesitated to take off the little apron of hide they usually wore; but underneath the apron there was a small covering, perhaps two fingers broad, which they all objected to removing. They regarded their sex as ugly and would not willingly expose it.
Another curious fact: I soon found that these girls did not recognize themselves in their photos. One of our leaders was a Negro with perfectly white hair. When we showed the girls this Negro and his photoed likeness, they all exclaimed with delight: they could recognize him, but not themselves. I have often noticed that a dog does not recognize his likeness in a glass; perhaps it needs a certain amount of intelligence to know even what we look like.
Some of these young colored girls had very beautiful figures: it is usually thought that their calves are too thin and their breasts too flaccid. Naturally, taking into consideration their early maturity, they soon show these signs of age, but from ten to fifteen they are often perfectly made.
Why didn't they tempt me? I can't say; the half-white girls appealed to me much more; but the pure Negro type left me completely unmoved.
I loved to take their photographs in the most lascivious attitudes, enjoyed draping them in a pretty piece of stuff and thus bringing out their everpresent coquetry; but when they sought to excite me, I would slap their bottoms and turn away. I never could understand the attraction they possessed for most white men. I had known the fact from my varsity days in Lawrence, Kansas, where all my comrades used to hunt regularly in the Negro quarter; but even then I never went with them, not out of any moral scruple, but simply because the black girl, however well made, did not excite in me what Dr. Johnson called his 'amorous propensities.'
Yet I was told by Karl and the Doctor that the Negro girls were far more passionate than the white ones. 'There is no comparison,' Karl used to declare; 'Negro girls, and boys, too, feel the sex thrill far more intensely than any whites.'
It may be true. I have seen Parisian cocottes making heroes of Negro lovers; they have told me time and again just what Karl asserted; but it is not only the vigor of the Negro, but also the size of his sex which causes him to be so esteemed by the French prostitutes. On the other hand, the Negro girl, too, is far larger than the white and that certainly detracts from the man's pleasure.
Besides, the mousey smell is always present, and that was enough to choke my desire. But the want of intelligence is the chief deterrent; for Hindu girls are often very dark and have the mousey odor, yet their brains or
