This paper presents an oral-historical narrative about a tribal raiding expedition undertaken by Thani al-Dhiyabat, a Hwetat slave from Transjordan of East African descent, in northern Nejd in the early 1920s. Thani’s son Sulayman told me the story, which I recorded, in summer 2018. Thani and his raiding party were captured by the Ikhwan, a fundamentalist Islamist movement that conquered territory for Ibn Saud. All of them were beheaded save Thani; the executioner, like Thani, was black and refused to execute another black man. Thani was transported to another city to be executed, but he escaped with the help of a black slave girl. Later he was recaptured and pardoned by the governor of Hayil, whereupon Thani returned to his tribe’s ancestral homeland in southern Jordan. Thani’s raid represents a number of “lasts” in modern Jordanian history: the last Bedouin raids and the last Jordanian slaves. Thani’s raid also anticipates the consolidation of the Emirate of Transjordan's power following the Arab Legion’s defeat of the Ikhwan in 1922-24. The story of Thani’s raid plays into a Jordanian master narrative insofar as it joins the glories of the Bedouin past with the anticipation of the modern state of Jordan. But the master narrative conceals a slave narrative in which Thani’s blackness and enslavement, central to the narrative’s flow, are conspicuously not discussed at length by his son Sulayman. This paper aims to accomplish the following: 1) recount the story of Thani’s raid, 2) analyze Sulayman’s narrative techniques in recounting Thani’s raid, 3) demonstrate how this story plays into a Jordanian master narrative of state formation, 4) explore the limits of discourse on race in modern Jordan, 5) argue that this suppression is a result of state-sponsored, ingroup/outgroup tribalism that envisions the state as the tribe (yet excludes black Jordanians from the modern Jordanian mainstream) and regards the discussion of anti-black racism in Jordan as an external imposition of Western identity politics designed to divide and weaken Jordan, and 6) discuss the difficulties in writing this tribal biography: understanding Sulayman’s Arabic, transcribing it, translating it; dealing with taboo issues such as blackness and slavery in modern Jordan; and questioning Sulayman’s reliability and his tendency to lionize his father.