He is at the chiefs house;
He builds a fence;
I go help him;
He’s finished long ago.”
Then about guesses. I have tried to pick out one or two just to let you hear what like they are. Many of the answers to riddles I have heard seemed to me to have little or no point in them. So it is with the stories. But when I have failed to see the joke and have not laughed the black boys have not failed. They have their own funny stories and laugh at them heartily. But our jokes they do not understand, nor do they play pranks on one another as white boys do. Let me try to tell you how you can make black boys and girls roar with laughter, and yet to a white man there is nothing to laugh about. If you are telling them about people scattering helter-skelter and say that the people, “nalimenya,” which means go off helter-skelter, the boys will go into fits of laughter. Now I can see nothing to laugh at in this, and I am sure you can’t either, and, if another word had been used, neither would the black boy. But here is the peculiar thing. It is the “li” in the middle of the word that makes it funny to African children here.
“Menya” means “beat,” but “limenya” means “run off helter-skelter.” Again “Sesa” means “sweep,” but “lisesa” means “run off helter-skelter;” and so on with a lot of other words, the addition of the syllable “li” makes them change their meanings entirely, and become “run off helter-skelter,” and so very funny that black boys and girls cannot keep from laughing. Now for the guesses:—
“What is yonder and here at the same time?”
Answer—A shadow.
“I built a house with one post.”
Answer—A mushroom.