The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1926, Sheet 92

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

cated affairs. Some people may almost be called
professional mourners. The reason is obvious.
A mourning does not consist solely in weeping, but
in feasting and dancing as well. From all accounts
the possessions of the deceased are used in provid-
ing the feast for the mourners. This lasts for days
and weeks. ‘The mourners decorate themselves by
wearing a wreath made of some sort of fern around
the head or by smearing their bodies with white
clay or some black material, and they refuse to

89

whose body his friends had propped up in a sort of
steamer chair on the porch in front of the house of
the deceased man’s brother. I called there in the
afternoon and found perhaps fifty or more people
gathered around to do honor to the dead. Most of
them were sitting around, and a few were lying
prone on the ground, fast asleep. On another occa-
sion Mrs. Anker and I stopped by the house of a
woman who had died apparently of pneumonia.
The corpse lay under a shed or incompleted ‘house,

_ AUT OF YOURSELVES;
Iris THER FT oF Cog,

Confirmation Class, Bethlehem, New Orleans.

Sitting, left to right: Irma Robinson, Mrs. Loretta Craig, Mrs. Perenita Brown, Rev. G. M. Kramer,
Mary Louise Tardief, Annie Bell Reed, Salina Allen.
Standing, left to right: John Albert Simpson, Bessie Smith, Alden Aaron Wiley, Carrie Lofton,
Joseph Johnson, Annie Bell Jones, Bernice Seraile.

attend church until the formal mourning is over.
Naturally such mournings become a nuisance; not
that true grief is to be condemned, but that such
activity as this is often a pretense and mockery.
Our chief evangelist in Wembo Nyama aptly de-
scribed it one Sunday morning following a death
in the village. He said words to this effect: “When
a person dies, the first day you weep, the second day
you dance, the third day you feast, and then you
forget.” :

After death the body lies or sits in state, as the
case may be. I remember the case of a certain man

and many women were seated around it on the
ground. The head was supported in the lap of one
woman, and at each knee, both of which were flexed,
sat another woman. The dead woman seemed only
asleep. Before I arrived, they had placed their
money ali over her face, but had removed it again
before I saw her. They explained that it was to
show that they did not love their money more than
they did her.

On June 17, 1923, I attended the funeral of one
of our native Christians by the name of Omadjela.
I had seen him when he was sick and had sent him