Page:Nigger Heaven (1926).pdf/196

 I opened it to these words: There were only two women who loved Moses, and no men. The women were Jochebed, his mother, and the Ethiopian woman, his wife. . . . Say, that startled me and I went back and read from the beginning. I found the book to be a loving, skilful interpretation of the story of Moses, as related by Elisha to the Shunamite woman who was the namesake of Moses's mother. The book explains that it was through the aid of the Ethiopian woman, born near the springs of the Nile, that Moses was enabled to predict the plagues of Egypt, partly through her knowledge of voodoo, partly through advance information she secured from her tribe.

But that's fiction! It isn't in the Bible! Byron cried.

Isn't it just? Well, the first verse of the twelfth chapter of Numbers reads: And Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he married; for he had married an Ethiopian woman. . . . And because Miriam and Aaron objected to her, Dick continued, the Bible tells us that God turned them into lepers. That'll be news for some of these Southern fundamentalists. Apparently there's nothing against miscegenation in Holy Writ. What's more, I looked the lady up in Josephus, and found her there, too, together with her name. Tharbis.

And so you think. . . ?