Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/112

96 disgusting to her. But the husband knew there must be a cause for it, as he was present in the room when the black child was delivered, and quietly he went to work to investigate the wife's antecedents. After no end of trouble and expense, he finally ascertained that her great grandmother was a plantation slave who had borne several children to her master. It was in this stock, then, through crossing and recrossing with other whites, that this young wife saw her pedigree, and her first child was simply a reversion to the black ancestry on her maternal side, and had inherited the Ethiopian characters, and among them the black skin and kinky hair. I have heard of several other well-authenticated cases of this nature, and in one, after a most heart-rending experience, the couple were divorced.

All this is what is happening now, and what Thomas would have made general throughout the country — that the descendants of the civilized races of Europe and elsewhere point the finger at the descendants of the American of the present time, and say, " Go to, American, you have nigger in your blood, and you come from a mixed race, a large part of which were formerly eaters of human flesh, thievish liars, and slaves. You talk to hear yourselves talk." Those European descendants, moreover, could say to our descendants, and say with truth, the latter having Thomas's prescription of black blood in them,— "American, if you want to know something of your pedigree, your history, read J. Cameron Grant's The Ethiopian, and read the ceremonies attending the erection of the sacred Juju House in the kingdom of