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X

BANJO

BANJO

zA Story without a "Plot

BY CLAUDE McKAY

Author of

"HOME TO HARLEM"

HARPER 1$ BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK and LONDON

1929

BANJO

COPYRIGHT, I929, BY HARPER & BROTHERS PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

E-D

FIRST PRINTING, APRIL, 1 929 SECOND PRINTING, APRIL, 1 929

THIRD PRINTING, APRIL, 1 929

FOURTH PRINTING, APRIL, 1 929

FIFTH PRINTING, MAY, 1 929

For Ruthope

CONTENTS

FIRST PART

i The Bitch 3

11 The Breakwater 18

hi Malty Turned Down Tj

iv Hard Feeding 38

v "Jelly Roll" 45

SECOND PART

vi Meeting-up 61

vii The Flute-boy 83

viii A Carved Carrot 93

ix Taloufa*s Shirt-tail 101

x Story-telling 1 14

xi Everybody Doing It 133

xii Bugsy's Chinese Pie 148

xiii Bugsy Comes Back at Banjo 166

xiv Telling Jokes 177

xv White Terror 188

xvi The "Blue Cinema" 199

xvii Breaking-up 219

CONTENTS viii

THIRD PART

xviii Banjo's Return 227

xix Lonesome Blue Again 235

xx The Rock of Refuge 244

xxi Official Fists 256

xxii Reaction 269

xxiii Shake That Thing Again 280

xxiv The Chauffeur's Lot 285

xxv Banjo's Ace of Spades 301

FIRST PART

/. The Ditch

— — i— mmtttlllimllimmimm „

HEAVING along from side to side, like a sailor on the unsteady deck of a ship, Lincoln Agrippa Daily, familiarly known as Banjo, patrolled the mag- nificent length of the great breakwater of Marseilles, a banjo in his hand.

"It sure is some moh mahvelous job," he noted men- tally; "most wonderful bank in the ocean I evah did see."

It was afternoon. Banjo had walked the long distance of the breakwater and was returning to the Joliette end. He wore a cheap pair of slippers, suitable to the climate, a kind much used by the very poor of Provence. They were an ugly drab-brown color, which, however, was mitigated by the crimson socks and the yellow scarf with its elaborate pattern of black, yellow, and red at both ends, that was knotted around his neck and hung down the front of his blue-jean shirt.

Suddenly he stood still in his tracks as out of the bot- tom of one of the many freight cars along the quay he saw black bodies dropping. Banjo knew box cars. He had hoboed in America. But never had he come across a box car with a hole in the bottom. Had those black boys made it? He went down on the quay to see.

The fellows were brushing the hay off their clothes. There were four of them.

"Hello, there I" said Banjo.

"Hello, money!" replied the tallest of the four, who was just Banjo's build.

BANJO 4

"Good night, money. What I want to know is ef you-all made that theah hole in the bottom a that box car? I nevah yet seen no hole in the bottom of a box car, and IVe rode some rails back home in the States."

"P'raps not. They's things ovah heah diffarant from things ovah theah and they's things ovah theah diffarant from things ovah heah. Now the way things am setting with me, this heah hole-in-the-bottom box car is just the thing for us."

"You done deliver you'self of a mouthful that sure sounds perfect," responded Banjo.

"I always does. Got to use mah judgment all the time with these fellahs heah. And you? What you making foh you'self down here on the breakwater?"

"Ain't making a thing, but I know I'd sure love to make a meal."

"A meal! You broke already?"

"Broke already? Yes I is, but what do you know about it?" asked Banjo, sharply.

"Nothing in particular, ole spoht, cep'n' that I bummed you two times when you was strutting with that ofay broad and that Ise Malty Avis, the best drummer on the beach. Mah buddies heah bummed you, too, so if youse really broke and hungry as you say, which can be true, 'causen you' lips am as pale as the belly of a fish, just you come right along and eat ovah theah." He pointed to a ramshackle bistro-restaurant on the quay. "We got a little money between us. The bum- ming was good last night."

"This is going some, indeed. I gived you a raise yestidday and youse feeding me today," said Banjo as they all walked toward the bistro. "I don't even re- member none a you fellahs."

" 'Cause you was too swell dressed up and strutting

5 THE DITCH

fine with that broad to see anybody else," said the small- est of the group.

They were all hungry. The boys had been sleeping, and woke up with an appetite. Before them the woman of the bistro set five plates of vegetable soup, a long loaf of bread, followed by braised beef and plenty of white beans. Malty called for five bottles of red wine.

Banjo got acquainted over the mess. The shining black big-boned lad who bore such a contented expres- sion on his plump jolly face and announced himself as Malty Avis, was the leader and inspirer of the group. His full name was Buchanan Malt Avis. He was a West Indian. His mother had been a cook for a British mis- sionary and from the labels of his case goods, for which she had had a fondness, she had taken his Christian names. The villagers dropped Buchanan and took Malt, which they made Malty.

Malty's working life began as a small sailor boy on fishing-boats in the Caribbean. When he became a big boy he was taken by a cargo boat on his first real voyage to New Orleans. From there he had started in as a real seaman and had never returned home.

Sitting on Malty's right, the chestnut-skinned fellow with drab-brown curly hair was called Ginger, a tribute evidently, to the general impression of his make-up. Whether you thought of ginger as a tuber in reddish tropical soil, or as a preserved root, or as the Jamaica liquid, it reminded you oddly of him. Of all the Eng- lish-speaking Negro boys, Ginger held the long-term record of existence on the beach. He had lost his sea- man's papers. He had been in prison for vagabondage and served with a writ of expulsion. But he had de- stroyed the writ and swiped the papers of another seaman.

Opposite Ginger was Dengel, also tall, but thin. He

BANJO 6

was a Senegalese who spoke a little English and pre- ferred the company of Malty and his pals to that of his countrymen.

Beside Dengel was the small, wiry, dull-black boy who had sardonically reminded Banjo of his recent high-fly- ing. He was always aggressive of attitude. The fel- lows said that he was bughouse and he delighted in the name of Bugsy that they gave him.

They were all on the beach, and there were many others besides them — white men, brown men, black men. Finns, Poles, Italians, Slavs, Maltese, Indians, Negroids, African Negroes, West Indian Negroes — deportees from America for violation of the United States immi- gration laws — afraid and ashamed to go back to their own lands, all dumped down in the great Provengal port, bumming a day's work, a meal, a drink, existing from hand to mouth, anyhow any way, between box car, tramp ship, bistro, and bordel.

"But you ain't broke, man," Malty said, pointing to the banjo, uwhen you got that theah bit a business. Ain't a one of us here that totes around anything that can bring a little money outa this burg a peddlers."

Banjo caressed his instrument. "I nevah part with this, buddy. It is moh than a gal, moh than a pal; it's mahself."

"You don't have to go hungry round here, either, ef you c'n play a liT bit," drawled Ginger. "You c'n pick up enough change foh you'self even as much to buy us all a 11*1* red wine to wet our whistle when the stuff is scarce down the docks — jest by playing around in them bars in Joliette and uptown around the Bum Square."

"We'll see what this burg can stand," said Banjo. "It ain't one or two times, but plenty, that mah steady here did make me a raise when I was right down and out. Oncet away back in Montreal, after I done lost

7 THE DITCH

every cent to mah name on the racetracks, I went into one swell spohting-place and cleaned up twenty-five dol- lars playing. But the best of all was the bird uvva time I had in San Francisco with three buddies who hed a guitar and a ukulele and a tambourine between them. My stars ! I was living in clovah for six months."

"You'll make yours here, too," said Malty. "Al- though this heah burg is lousy with pifformers, doing their stuff in the cafes, it ain't often you come across one that can turn out a note to tickle a chord in you' apparatus. Play us a piece. Let us hear how you sound."

"Not now," said Banjo. "Better tonight in some cafe. Maybe they won't like it here."

"Sure they will. You c'n do any ole thing at any ole time in this country."

"That ain't a damn sight true," Bugsy jumped sharply in. "But you can play all the time," he said to Banjo. "People will sure come and listen and the boss will get rid a some moh of his rotten wine."

"This wine ain't so bad " Ginger began.

"It sure is," insisted Bugsy, whose palate had never grown agreeable to vin rouge ordinaire. He drank with the boys, as drinking played a big part in their group life, but he preferred syrups to wine, and he was the soberest among them.

"The wine outa them barrels we bung out on the docks is much better," he declared.

"Why, sure it's better, you black blubberhead," ex- claimed Ginger. "Tha's the real best stuff we make down there. Pure and strong, with no water in it. That's why we get soft on it quicker than when we drink in a cafe. In all them little cafes the stuff is doctored. That's the profit way."

Banjo played "Yes, sir, that's my baby." He said

BANJO 8

it was one of the pieces that were going wild in the States. The boys began humming and swaying. What Bugsy predicted happened. Some dockers who were not working were drawn to the bistro. They seated them- selves at a rough long table, across from the boys' by the other side of the door, listened approvingly to the music, drank wine, and spat pools.

Malty ordered more wine. Ginger and Bugsy stood up to each other and performed a strenuous movement of the "Black Bottom/' as they had learned it from Negro seamen of the American Export Line. The patrone came and stood in the door, very pleased, and exhibited a little English, uGood piece you very well play. . . ,»

Banjo played another piece, then suddenly stopped, stood up and stretched his arms.

"You finish' already?" demanded Malty.

"Sure; it was just a little exhibition of my accom- plishment foh your particular benefit."

"Youse as good a musician as a real artist."

"I is an artist."

The workmen regarded Banjo admiringly, drained their glasses, and sauntered off.

"Imagine those cheap skates coming here jest to listen to mah playing and not even offering a man a drink," Banjo sneered. "Why, ef I was in Hamburg or Genoa they woulda sure drownded me in liquor."

"The Froggies am all tight that way," said Malty. "They're a funny people. If you'd a taken up a collec- tion every jack man a them woulda gived you a copper, thinking that you make you' living that way "

"Hell with their coppers," said Banjo. "I expected them to stand a round just for expreciation only of a good thing."

"As for that, they ain't the treating kind a good fellahs

9 THE DITCH

that you and I am used to on the other side," said Malty. . . .

From the bistro on the breakwater, the boys rocked slowly along up to Joliette. Ginger had a favorite drink- ing-place on the Rue Forbin, a dingy tramps' den. They stopped there, drinking until twilight. Ginger and Dengel became so staggeringly soft that they decided to go back to the box car and sleep.

Malty said to Banjo and Bugsy, "Let's take our tail up to the Bum Square."

The Place Victor Gelu of the Vieux Port was called by the boys on the beach the "Bum Square" because it was there they gathered at night to bum or panhandle sea- men and voyagers who passed through to visit the Quar- tier Reserve. The Quartier Reserve they called "the Ditch" with the same rough affection with which they likened their ship to an easy woman by calling it the "broad."

Avoiding the populous Rue de la Republique, Malty, Banjo, and Bugsy followed the little-frequented Boule- vard de la Major, passing by the shadow of the big cathedral and the gate of the Central Police Building, to reach the Bum Square. They took two more rounds of red wine on the way, the last in a little cafe in the Place de Lenche before they descended to the Ditch.

Malty had a dinner engagement with a mulatto sea- man from a boat of the American Export Line, whom he was to meet in the Bum Square. The wine had worked so hard on their appetites that all three were hungry again. Malty looked in all the cafes of the square, but did not find his man. A big blond fellow, his clothes starched with dirt, was standing in the shadow of a palm, looking sharply out for customers. Malty asked him if he had seen his mulatto.

BANJO 10

"He went up that way with a tart," replied the blond, pointing toward the Canebiere.

"Let's go and eat, anyway," Malty said to Banjo and Bugsy. "I got some money yet."

"Latnah musta gived you an extry raise; she is always handing you something," said Bugsy.

"I ain't seen her for ovah three days," replied Malty.

"Oh, you got a sweet mamma helping you on the side?" Banjo asked, laughing.

"Not mine, boh," replied Malty. "Is jest a liT woman bumming like us on the beach. I don't know whether she is Arabian or Persian or Indian. She knows all landwidges. I stopped a p-i from treating her rough one day, and evah since she pals out with our gang, nevah passing us without speaking, no matter ef she even got a officer on the string, and always giving us English and American cigarettes and a little change when she got 'em. It's easy for her, you see, to penetrate any place on a ship, when we can't, 'cause she's a skirt with some legs all right, and her face ain't nothing that would scare you."

"And none a you fellahs can't make her?" cried Banjo. "Why you-all ain't the goods?"

"It ain't that, you strutting cock, but she treats us all like pals and don't leave no ways open for that. Ain't it better to have her as a pal than to lose out ovah a liT crazy craving that a few sous can settle up here?"

They went up one of the humid, somber alleys, thick with little eating-dens of all the Mediterranean peoples, Greek, Jugo-Slav, Neapolitan, Arab, Corsican, and Ar- menian, Czech and Russian.

When they had finished eating, Malty suggested that they might go up to the gayer part of the Ditch. Bugsy said he would go to the cinema to see Hoot Gibson in a Wild West picture. But Banjo accepted the invitation

ii THE DITCH

with alacrity. Every chord in him responded to the loose, bistro-love-life of the Ditch.

Banjo was a great vagabond of lowly life. He was a child of the Cotton Belt, but he had wandered all over America. His life was a dream of vagabondage that he was perpetually pursuing and realizing in odd ways, always incomplete but never unsatisfactory. He had worked at all the easily-picked-up jobs — longshoreman, porter, factory worker, farm hand, seaman.

He was in Canada when the Great War began and he enlisted in the Canadian army. That gave him a glimpse of London and Paris. He had seen a little of Europe before, having touched some of the big commercial ports when he was a husky fireman. But he had never arrived at the sailor's great port, Marseilles. Twice he had been to Genoa and once to Barcelona. Only those who know the high place that Marseilles holds in the imagination of seamen can get the feeling of his disappointment. All through his seafaring days Banjo had dreamed dreams of the seaman's dream port. And at last, because the opportunity that he had long hoped for did not come to take him there, he made it.

Banjo had been returned to Canada after the general demobilization. From there he crossed to the States, where he worked at several jobs. Seized by the old rest- lessness for a sea change while he was working in an industrial plant, he hit upon the unique plan of getting himself deported.

Some of his fellow workmen who had entered the United States illegally had been held for deportation, and they were all lamenting that fact. Banjo, with his unquenchable desire to be always going, must have thought them very poor snivelers. They had all been thunderstruck when he calmly announced that he was not an American. Everything about him — accent, atti-

BANJO 12

tude, and movement — shouted Dixie. But Banjo had insisted that his parentage was really foreign. He had served in the Canadian army. . . . His declaration had to be accepted by his bosses.

Banjo was a personality among the immigration offi- cers. They liked his presence, his voice, his language of rich Aframericanisms. They admired, too, the way he had chosen to go off wandering again. (It was nothing less than a deliberate joke to them, for Banjo could never convince any American, especially a Southern- knowing one, that he was not Aframerican.) It was singular enough to stir their imagination, so long insensi- ble to the old ways of ship desertion and stowing away. The officials teased Banjo, asking him what he would ever do in Europe when he spoke no other language than straight Yankee. However, their manner betrayed their feeling of confidence that Banjo would make his way anywhere. He was given a chance to earn some money across and they saw him go regretfully and hopefully, when he signed up on the tramp that would eventually land him at Marseilles.

Banjo's tramp was a casual one. So much so that it was four months and nineteen days after sailing down through the Panama Canal to New Zealand and Aus- tralia, cruising cargo around the island continent and up along the coast of Africa, before his dirty overworked "broad" reached the port of Marseilles.

Banjo had no plan, no set purpose, no single object in coming to Marseilles. It was the port that seamen talked about — the marvelous, dangerous, attractive, big, wide-open port. And he wanted only to get there.

Banjo was paid off in francs, and after changing a deck of dollars that he had saved in America, he possessed twelve thousand five hundred and twenty-five francs and

13 THE DITCH

some sous. He was spotted and beset by touting guides, white, brown, black, all of them ready to show and sell him everything for a trifle. He got rid of them all.

Banjo bought a new suit of clothes, fancy shoes, and a vivid cache-col. He had good American clothes, but he wanted to strut in Provencal style.

Instinctively he drifted to the Ditch, and as naturally he found a girl there. She found a room for both of them. Banjo's soul thrilled to the place — the whole life of it that milled around the ponderous, somber building of the Mairie, standing on the Quai du Port, where fish and vegetables and girls and youthful touts, cats, mon- grels, and a thousand second-hand things were all mingled together in a churning agglomeration of stench and slimi- ness.

His wonderful Marseilles! Even more wonderful to him than he had been told. Unstintingly Banjo gave of himself and his means to his girl and the life around him. And when he was all spent she left him.

Now he was very light of everything: light of pocket, light of clothing (having relieved himself at the hock shop), light of head, feeling and seeing everything lightly.

It was Banjo's way to take every new place and every new thing for the first time in a hot crazy-drunk manner. He was a type that was never sober, even when he was not drinking. And now the first delirious fever days of Marseilles were rehearsing themselves, wheeling round and round in his head. The crooked streets of dim lights, the gray damp houses bunched together and their rowdy signs of many colors. The mongrel-faced guides of shiny, beady eyes, patiently persuasive; the old hags at the portals, like skeletons presiding over an orgy, with skeleton smile and skeleton charm inviting in quavering

BANJO 14

accents those who hesitated to enter. Oh, his head was a circus where everything went circling round and round.

Banjo had never before been to that bistro where Malty was taking him. It had a player-piano and a place in the rear for dancing. It was a rendezvous for most of the English-speaking beach boys. If they were spend- ing a night in the Vieux Port, they went there (after pan- handling the Bum Square) for sausage sandwiches and red wine. And when all their appetites were appeased, they flopped together in a room upstairs.

The mulatto cook from the Export Line boat was there, sitting between a girl and an indefinite Negroid type of fellow. There were two bottles of wine and a bottle of beer before them. The cook called Malty and Banjo to his table and ordered more wine. There were many girls from the Ditch and young touts dancing. One of the girls asked Banjo to play. Another made the mulatto dance with her. Banjo played "Yes, sir, that's my baby." But as soon as he paused, a girl started the player-piano. The banjo was not loud enough for that close, noisy little market. Everybody was dancing.

Banjo put the instrument aside. It wasn't adequate for the occasion. It would need an orchestry to fix them right, he thought, good-humoredly. I wouldn't mind starting one going in this burg. Gee ! That's the idea. Tha's jest what Ise gwine to do. The American darky is the performing fool of the world today. He's de- manded everywhere. If I c'n only git some a these heah panhandling fellahs together, we'll show them some real nigger music. Then I'd be setting pretty in this heah sweet dump without worrying ovah mah wants. That's the stuff for a live nigger like me to put ovah, and no cheap playing from cafe to cafe and a handing out mah hat for a lousy sou.

i5 THE DITCH

He was so exhilarated with the thought of what he would do that he felt like dancing. At that moment the girl of his first Marseilles days came in with a young runt of a tout. Banjo looked up at her, smiling expectantly. She was still going round in his head with the rest of the Ditch. She had left him, of course, but he had accepted that as inevitable when he could no longer afford her. Yet, he had mused, she might have been a little extravagant and bestowed on him one spontaneous caress over all that was bought. She had not. Because she only knew one way — the way of the Ditch. She did not know the way of a brown girl back home who could say with sweet exaggeration: "Daddy, we two will go home and spread joy and not wake up till next week sometime and want nothing but loving."

Ah no ! Nothing so fancifully real. Nevertheless, she was the first playmate of his dream port.

The girl, seeing Banjo, turned her eyes casually away and went to sit where she could concentrate her charms on the mulatto. Banjo had no further interest for her. He had spent all his money and, like all the beach boys, would never have more for a wild fling as long as he remained in port. It was the mulatto that had brought her there. For as soon as a new arrival enters any of the dens of the Ditch, the girls are made aware of it by the touts, who are always on the lookout. Banjo was vexed. Hell! She might have been more cordial, he thought. The player-piano was rattling out "Fleur d'Amour." He would ask her to dance. Maybe her attitude was only an insolent little exhibition of cattish- iiess. He went over to her and asked, "Danser?"

"No," she said, disdainfully, and turned away. He touched her shoulder playfully.

"Laissez-moi tranquil, imbecile " She spat nastily on the floor.

BANJO 16

A rush of anger seized Banjo. "You pink sow!" he cried. His eyes caught the glint of the gold watch he had given to her, and wrenching it from her wrist, he smashed it on the red-tiled floor and stamped his heel upon it in a rage. The girl screamed agonizingly, wring- ing her hands, her wide eyes staring tragically at the remains of her watch. The little tout who had come in with her leaped over at Banjo. "What is it? What is it?" he cried, and hunching up his body and thrusting his head up and out like a comic actor, he began working his open hands up and down in Banjo's face, without touching him. Banjo looked down upon the boy con- temptuously and seized his left wrist, intending to twist it and push him outside, for he could not think of fighting with such an undersized antagonist. But in a flash the boy drew a knife across his wrist and, released, dashed through the door.

Banjo wrapped the cut in his handkerchief, but it was soon soaked with blood. It was late. The pharmacies were closed. The patrone of the bistro said that there were pharmacies open all night. Malty took Banjo to hunt for one.

As they were passing through the Bum Square a woman's voice called Malty. They stopped and she came up to them. She was a little olive-toned woman of an indefinable age, clean-faced, not young and far from old, with an amorous charm round her mouth. It was Latnah.

"Ain't gone to bed yet?" Malty said to her. "Ise got a case here." He exhibited Banjo's hand.

"It plenty bleed," she said. She looked at Banjo and said, "I see you before around here."

Banjo grinned. "Maybe I seen you, too."

"I no think. Pharmacie no open now," she answered Malty's question. Then she said to Banjo: "Come with

i7 THE DITCH

me. I see your hand. Tomorrow see you, Malty. Good iiight." She took Banjo away, while Malty's eyes fol- lowed them in a wistful, bewildered gaze.

She took Banjo back in the direction from which he had come, but by way of the Quai du Port. After a few minutes' walk they turned into one of the somber side streets. They went into a house a little southwest of the Ditch. Her room was on the top floor, a quaint, tiny thing, the only one up there, and opened right on the stairs. There was a little shutter-window, the size of a Saturday Evening Post, that gave a view of the Vieux Port, where the lights of the boats were twinkling. A bright, inexpensive Oriental shawl covered the cot- bed. On the table was a washbowl, two little jars of cosmetics, and packets of different brands of cigarettes.

There was no water in the room, and Latnah went down two flights of stairs to get a jugful. When she returned she washed Banjo's wound, then, getting a bot- tle of liquid from a basket against the foot of the cot, she anointed and bandaged it.

Banjo liked the woman's gentle fussing over him. He thanked her when she had finished. "Rien du tout," she replied. There was a little silence between them, slightly embarrassing but piquant.

Then Banjo said: "I wonder whereat I can find Malty now? I didn't have a room yet for tonight."

uYou sleep here," she said, simply.

He undressed while she found something to do — empty the washbowl, wipe the table, and when at last he caught a glimpse of her between her deshabille and the covers he murmured softly to himself: "Don't care how I falls, may be evah so long a drop, but it's always on mah feets."

II. The Breakwater

THE quarter of the old port exuded a nauseating odor of mass life congested, confused, moving round and round in a miserable suffocating circle. Yet everything there seemed to belong and fit naturally in place. Bistros and love shops and girls and touts and vagabonds and the troops of dogs and cats — all seemed to contribute so essentially and colorfully to that vague thing called atmosphere. No other setting could be more appropriate for the men on the beach. It was as if all the derelicts of all the seas had drifted up here to sprawl out the days in the sun.

The men on the beach spent the day between the break- water and the docks, and the night between the Bum Square and the Ditch. Most of the whites, especially the blond ones of northern countries, seemed to have gone down hopelessly under the strength of hard liquor, as if nothing mattered for them now but that. They were stinking-dirty, and lousy, without any apparent de- sire to clean themselves. With the black boys it was different. It was as if they were just taking a holiday. They were always in holiday spirit, and if they did not appear to be specially created for that circle, they did not spoil the picture, but rather brought to it a rich and careless tone that increased its interest. They drank wine to make them lively and not sodden, washed their bodies and their clothes on the breakwater, and some-

18

i9 THE BREAKWATER

times spent a panhandled ten-franc note to buy a second- hand pair of pants.

Banjo had become a permanent lodger at Latnah's. His wound was not serious, but it was painful and had given him a light fever. Latnah told him that when his wrist was well enough for him to play, she would go with him to perform in some of the bars of the quarter and take up a collection.

In the daytime Latnah went off by herself to her busi- ness, and sometimes the nature of it detained her over- night and she did not get back to her room. Banjo spent most of his time with Malty's gang. He was not alto- gether one of them, but rather a kind of honorary mem- ber, having inspired respect by his sudden conquest of Latnah and by being an American.

An American seaman (white or black) on the beach is always treated with a subtle difference by his beach fellows. He has a higher face value than the rest. His passport is worth a good price and is eagerly sought for by passport fabricators. And he has the assurance that, when he gets tired of beaching, his consulate will help him back to the fabulous land of wealth and opportunity.

Banjo dreamed constantly of forming an orchestra, and the boys listened incredulously when he talked about it. He had many ideas of beginning. If he could get two others besides himself he could arrange with the pro- prietor of some cafe to let them play at his place. That might bring in enough extra trade to pay them something. Or he might make one of the love shops of the Ditch unique and famous with a black orchestra.

One day he became very expansive about his schemes under the influence of wine-drinking on the docks. This was the great sport of the boys. They would steal a march on the watchmen or police, bung out one of the big

BANJO 20

casks, and suck up the wine through rubber tubes until they were sweetly soft.

Besides Banjo there were Malty, Ginger, and Bugsy. After they had finished with the wine, they raided a huge heap of peanuts, filled up their pockets, and straggled across the suspension bridge to lie in the sun on the breakwater.

"I could sure make one a them dumps look like a real spohting-place,', said Banjo, "with a few of us nig- gers piff orming in theah. Lawdy ! but the chances there is in a wide-open cat town like this ! But everybody is so hoggish after the sous they ain't got no imagination left to see big money in a big thing "

"It wasn't a big thing that dat was put ovah on you, eh?" sniggered Bugsy.

"Big you' crack," retorted Banjo. "That theah wasn't nothing at all. Ain't nobody don't put anything ovah on me that I didn't want in a bad way to put ovah mahself. I like the looks of a chicken-house, and I ain't nevah had no time foh the business end ovit. But when I see how these heah poah ole disabled hens am making a hash of a good thing with a gang a cheap no-'count p-i's, I just imagine what a high-yaller queen of a place could do ovah heah turned loose in this sweet clovah. Oh, boy, with a bunch a pinks and yallers and chocolates in between, what a show she could showem!"

"It's a tall lot easier talking than doing," said Bugsy. "Theyse some things jest right as they is and ain't nevah was made foh making better or worser. Now sup- posing you was given a present of it, what would you make outa one a them joints in Boody Lane?"

Boody Lane was the beach boys' name for the Rue de la Bouterie, the gut of the Ditch.

"Well, that's a forthrightly question and downrightly hard to answer," said Banjo. "For I wasn't inclosing

21 THE BREAKWATER

them in mah catalogory, becausen they ain't real places, brother; them's just stick-in-the-mud holes. Anyway, if one was gived to me I'd try everything doing excep'n' lighting it afire."

At this they all laughed. "Don't light it afire" was the new catch phrase among the beach boys and they passed it on to every new seaman that was introduced to the Ditch. When the new man, curious, asked the meaning, they replied, laughing mysteriously, "Because it is six months."

The phrase was the key to the story of an American brown boy who went on shore leave and would not keep company with any of his comrades. At the Vieux Port he was besieged by the black beach boys, but he refused to give them anything and told them that they ought to be ashamed to let down their race by scavengering on the beach. When he started to go up into the Ditch the boys warned him that it was dangerous to go alone. He went alone, replying that he did not want the advice or company of bums.

He went proud and straight into one of the stick-in- the-mud places of Boody Lane. And before he could get out, his pocketbook with his roll of dollars was missing. He accused the girl by signs. She replied by signs and insults that he had not brought the pocketbook there. She mentioned "police" and left the box. He thought she had gone to get the police to help him find his money. But he waited and waited, and when she did not return, realizing that he had been tricked, he struck a match and set the bed on fire. That not only brought him the police, but also the fire brigade and six months in prison, where he was now cooling himself.

Ginger said: "I ain't no innovation sort of a fellah. When I make a new beach all I want is to make mah way and not make no changes. Just make mah way

BANJO 22

somehow while everything is going on without me study- ing them or them studying me."

He was lying flat on his back on one of the huge stone blocks of the breakwater. The waves were lapping softly around it. He had no shirt on and, unfastening the pin at the collar of his old blue coat, he flung it back and exposed his brown belly to the sun. His trousers waist was pulled down below his navel. "Oh, Gawd, the sun is sweet I" he yawned and, pulling his cap over his eyes, went to sleep. The others also stretched themselves and slept.

Along the great length of the breakwater other care- less vagabonds were basking on the blocks. The day was cooling off and the sun shed down a warm, shimmering glow where the light fell full on the water. Over by l'Estaque, where they were extending the port, a P. L. M. coal ship stood black upon the blue surface. The fac- tories loomed on the long slope like a rusty-black mass of shapes strung together, and over them the bluish- gray hills were bathed in a fine, delicate mist, and further beyond an immense phalanx of gray rocks, the inex- haustible source of the cement industry, ran sharply down into the sea.

Sundown found the boys in the Place de la Joliette. In one of the cafes they found a seaman from Zanzibar among some Maltese, from whom they took him away.

"Wese just in time for you," Malty declared. "What youse looking for is us. Fellahs who speak the same as you speak and not them as you kain't trust who mix up the speech with a mess of Arabese. Them's a sort of bastard Arabs, them Maltese, and none of us likes them, much less trusts them."

The new man was very pleased to fall in with fellows as friendly as Banjo and Malty. He was on a coal boat from South Shields and had a few pounds on him. He

23 THE BREAKWATER

was generous and stood drinks in several cafes. From the Place de la Joliette, they took the quiet way of the Boulevard de la Major to reach the Ditch. It was the best way for the beach boys. Some of them had not the proper papers to get by the police and tried to evade them always. By way of the main Rue de la Republique they were more likely to be stopped, questioned, searched, and taken to the police station. Sometimes they were told that their papers were not in order, but they were only locked up for a night and let out the next morning. Some of them complained of being beaten by the police. Ginger thought the police were getting more brutal and strict, quite different from what they were like when he first landed on the beach. Then they could bung out a cask of wine in any daring old way and drink without being bothered. Now it was different. It was not very long since two fellows from the group had got two months each for wine-stealing. Happily for them, Malty, Ginger, and Bugsy all had passable papers.

On the way to the Ditch they stopped in different bistros to empty in each a bottle of red wine. These fellows, who were used to rum in the West Indies, gin and corn liquor in the States, and whisky in England, took to the red wine of France like ducks to water. They never had that terribly vicious gin or whisky drunk. They seemed to have lost all desire for hard liquor. When they were drunk it was always a sweetly-soft good-natured wine drunk.

They had a big feed in one of the Chinese restaurants of the Rue Torte. The new man insisted on paying for it all. After dinner they went to a little cafe on the Quai du Port for coffee-and-rum. The newcomer took a mouth organ from his pocket and began playing. This stimu- lated Banjo, who said, "I guess mah hand c'n do its

BANJO 24

stuff again," and so he went up to Latnah's room and got his banjo.

They went playing from little bistro to bistro in the small streets between the fish market and the Bum Square. They were joined by others — a couple of Senegalese and some British West Africans and soon the company was more than a dozen. They were picturesquely conspicuous as they loitered along, talking in a confused lingo of Eng- lish, French, and native African. And in the cafes the bottles of beer and wine that they ordered and drank indiscriminately increased as their number increased. Cus- tomers were attracted by the music, and the girls, too, who were envious and used all their wiles to get away the newly arrived seaman from the beach boys. . . .

"Hot damn!" cried Banjo. "What a town this heah is to spread joy in!"

"And you sure did spread yours all at once," retorted Bugsy. "Burn it up in one throw and finish, you did."

"Muzzle you' mouf, nigger," replied Banjo. "The joy stuff a life ain't nevah finished for this heah strutter. When I turn mahself loose for a big wild joyful jazz a life, you can bet you' sweet life I ain't gwine nevah regretting it. Ise got moh joy stuff in mah whistle than you're got in you' whole meager-dawg body."

"And I wouldn't want to know," said Bugsy.

At midnight they were playing in one of the cafes of the Bum Square, when an oldish man came in wearing faded green trousers, a yellowy black-bordered jacket, with a wreath of flowers around his neck and began to dance. He manipulated a stick with such dexterity that it seemed as if his wrist was moving round like a wheel, and he jigged and hopped from side to side with amaz- ing agility while Banjo and the seaman played.

When they stopped, the garlanded dancer said he would bet anybody a bottle of vin blanc superieur that

25 THE BREAKWATER

he could stand on his head on a table. A youngster in proletarian blue made a sign against his head and said of the old fellow, "// est fada" And the old man did in- deed look a little mad in his strange costume and graying hair, and it seemed unlikely that his bones could support him in the feat that he proclaimed he could perform. But nobody took up the bet.

Somebody translated what was what to the new sea- man, who said, carelessly, "May as well bet and have a little fun outa him."

"Tres bien," said the old man. He made several at- tempts at getting headdown upon the table and failed funnily, like professional acrobats in their first trials on the stage, and the cafe resounded with peals of laughter and quickly filled up. Suddenly the old fellow cried: "Ca v est!" and spread his hands out, balancing himself straight up on his head on the table. In a moment he jumped down and, twisting his stick and executing some steps, went round with his hat and took up a collection before the crowd diminished. The beach boys threw in their share of sous and the seaman promptly paid for the bottle of white wine. The old man took it and left the cafe, followed by a woman.

Latnah, passing through the Bum Square and seeing Banjo playing, had entered the cafe just when the old man stopped dancing and asked who would take up his bet. The good collection he took up and the bottle of wine in addition awakened all her instincts of acquisitive- ness and envious rivalry. She turned on Banjo.

"All that money man take and gone is you' money. You play and he take money. You too proud to ask money and you no have nothing. You feel rich, maybe."

"Leave me be, woman," said Banjo.

"And you make friend pay wine for man. Man make

BANJO ib

nothing but bluff. You colored make the white fool you all time "

"I didn't tell him to bet nothing. But even then, what is a little lousy bet? Gawd bless mah soul! The money I done bet in my life and all foh big stakes on them race tracks in Montreal. What do you-all know about life and big stakes?" Banjo waved his hand in a tipsy sweep as if he saw the old world of race-track bettors before him.

"This no Montreal; this Marseilles, " replied Latnah, "and you very fool to play for nothing. You need money, you bitch-commer "

"Now quit you' noise. Ise going with you, but I ain't gwine let you ride me. Get me? No woman nevah ride me yet and you ain't gwine to ride me, neither."

He stood up, resting the banjo on a table.

"And it not me doing the riding, I'm sure," said Latnah.

"Come on, fellahs; let's get outa this. Let's take our hump away from here," said Banjo.

III. Malty Turned Down

BANJO had taken Latnah as she came, easily. It seemed the natural thing to him to fall on his feet, that Latnah should take the place of the other girl to help him now that he needed help. What- ever happened, happened. Life for him was just one different thing of a sort following the other.

Malty was more emotional and amorously gentle than Banjo. He was big, strong, and jolly-natured, and every- body pronounced him a good fellow. He had made it easy for the gang to accept Latnah, when she came to them different from the girls of the Ditch. But there was just the shadow of a change in the manner of the gang toward her since she had taken up steadily with Banjo.

"Some of us nevah know when wese got a good thing," said Malty to Banjo as they sat up on the breakwater, waiting to be signaled to lunch on a ship. "I think youse the kind a man that don't appreciate a fust-rate thing because he done got it too easy."

"Ise a gone-fool nigger with any honey-sweet mamma," replied Banjo, "but I ain't gwina bury mah head under no woman's skirt and let her cackle ovah me."

"All that bellyaching about a skirt," retorted Malty. "We was all made and bohn under it."

Banjo laughed and said: "Easy come, easy go. Tha's the life-living way. We got met up easy and she's taking it easy, and Ise taking it easy, too."

27

BANJO 28

A black seaman came on deck and signaled them. They hurried down from the breakwater and up the gangway.

Latnah was the first woman that Malty and his pals had ever met actually on the beach. Malty first became aware of her one day on the deck of a ship from which he and Bugsy and Ginger had been driven by a Negro steward.

"G'way from here, you lazy no-'count bums," the steward had said. "I wouldn't even give you-all a bone to chew on. Instead a gwine along back to work, you lay down on the beach a bumming mens who am trying to make a raspactable living. You think if you-all lay down sweet and lazy in you' skin while we others am wrastling with salt water, wese gwine to fatten you moh in you' laziness? G'way from this heah white man's broad nigger bums."

The boys were very hungry. For some days they had been eating off a coal boat with a very friendly crew. But it had left the moorings and anchored out in the bay, and now they could not get to it. Irritated, but rather amused by the steward's onslaught, they shuffled off from the ship a little down the quay. But Malty happened to look behind him and see Latnah waving. He went back with his pals and they found a mess of good food waiting for them. Latnah had spoken in their behalf, and one of the mates had told the chief steward to feed them.

The boys saw her often after that. They met her at irregular intervals in the Bum Square and down the docks. One day on the docks she got into a row with one of the women who sold fancy goods on the boats. The woman was trying to tempt one of the mates into buying a fine piece of Chinese silk, but the mate was more tempted by Latnah.

29 MALTY TURNED DOWN

"Go away from me," the mate said. "I don't want a bloody thing you've got."

The woman was angry, but such rebuffs were not strange to her. To carry on her business successfully she had to put up with them. She had seen at once that the officer was interested in Latnah, and in passing she swung her valise against Latnah's side.

"Oh, you stupid woman!" cried Latnah, holding her side.

"You dirty black whore," returned the woman.

"You bigger white whore," retorted Latnah. "I know you sell everything you've got. I see you on ship." And Latnah pulled open her eye at the woman and made a face.

Later, when Latnah left the ship, she again met the woman with her man on the dock. The man was a slim tout-like type, and he tried to rough-handle Latnah. But Malty happened along then and bounced the fellow with his elbow and said, "Now what you trying to do with this woman?" The man muttered something in a language unfamiliar to Malty and slunk off with his woman. He hadn't understood what Malty had said, either, but his bounce and menacing tone had been clear enough.

"I glad you come," said Latnah to Malty. "I thank you plenty, plenty, for if you no come I would been in big risk. I would stick him."

She slipped from her bosom a tiny argent-headed dagger, exquisitely sharp-pointed, and showed it to Malty. He recoiled with fear and Latnah laughed. A razor or a knife would not have touched him strangely. But a dagger! It was as if Latnah had produced a serpent from her bosom. It was not an instrument familiar to his world, his people, his life. It reminded him of the

BANJO 30

strange, fierce, fascinating tales he had heard of Oriental strife and daggers dealing swift death.

Suddenly another side of Latnah was revealed to him and she stood out more clearly, different from the strange creature of quick gestures and nimble body who pan- handled the boats and brought them gifts of costly cigarettes. She was different from the women of his race. She laughed differently, quietly, subtly. The women of his race could throw laughter like a clap of thunder. And their style, the movement of their hips, was like that of fine, vigorous, four-footed animals. Lat- nah's was gliding like a serpent. But she stirred up a powerfully sweet and strange desire in him.

She made him remember the Indian coolies that he had known in his West Indian Island when he was a boy. They were imported indentured laborers and worked on the big sugar plantation that bordered on his seaside village. The novelty of their strangeness never palled on the village. The men with their turbans and the loin-cloths that the villagers called coolie-wrapper. The women weighted down with heavy silver bracelets on arms, neck and ankles, their long glossy hair half hidden by the cloth that the natives called coolie-red. Perhaps they had unconsciously influenced the Negroes to retain their taste for bright color and ornaments that the Protestant missionaries were trying to destroy.

Every 1st of August, the great native holiday, anni- versary of the emancipation of the British West Indian slaves in 1834, the Negroes were joined by some Indians in their sports on the playground. The Indians did ath- letic stunts and sleight-of-hand tricks, such as unwinding yards of ribbon out of their mouths, cleverly making coins disappear and finding them in the pockets of the natives, and fire-eating.

Some of the Indians were regarded as great workers

31 MALTY TURNED DOWN

in magic. The Negroes believed that Indian magic was more powerful than their Obeah. Certain Indians had given up the laborious hoeing and digging of plantation work to practice the black art among the natives. And they were much more influential and prosperous than the Negro doctors of Obeah.

The two peoples did not mix in spite of the friendly contact. There were, however, rare instances of Indians who detached themselves from their people and became of the native community by marrying Negro women. But the Indian women remained more conservative. Malty remembered one striking exception of a beautiful Indian girl. She went to the Sunday-evening class that was conducted by the wife of the Scotch missionary. And she became a convert to Christianity and was married to the Negro schoolmaster.

He also remembered a little Indian girl who was for some time in his class at grade school. Her skin was velvet, smooth and dark like mahogany. She was the cleverest child in the class, but always silent, unsmiling, and mysterious. He had never forgotten her.

Malty' s boyhood memories undoubtedly played a part in his conduct toward Latnah. He could not think of her as he did about the women of the Ditch. He felt as if he had long lost sight of his exotic, almost forgot- ten schoolmate, to find her become a woman on the cos- mopolitan shore of Marseilles.

After her encounter with the peddling woman, Latnah attached herself more closely to the beach boys. Maybe (not being a woman of the Ditch, with a tout to fight for her) she felt insecure and wanted to belong to a group or maybe it was just her woman's instinct to be under the protection of man. She was accepted. With their wide experience and passive philosophy of life,

BANJO 32

beach boys are adepts at meeting, understanding, and ac- cepting everything.

Latnah was following precisely the same line of living as they. She came as a pal. She was made one of them. Whatever personal art she might use as a woman to increase her chances was her own affair. Their luck also depended primarily on personality. Often they trav- eled devious and separate routes in pursuit of a ''hand- out," and sometimes had to wander into strange culs-de- sac to obtain it. It did not matter if Latnah was not inclined to be amorous with any of them. Perhaps it was better so. She was more useful to them as a pal. Love was cheap in the Ditch. It cost only the price of a bottle of red wine among the "leetah" girls, as the beach boys called the girls of Boody Lane, because their short-time value was fixed at about the price of a liter of cheap red wine.

Malty had wanted Latnah for himself. But she had never given him any chance. She remained just one of the gang.

The boys were rather flattered that she stayed with them and shunned the Arab-speaking men, with whom she was identified by language and features. When Banjo arrived at Marseilles, Latnah's place on her own terms among the boys was a settled thing. But when, falling in love with Banjo at first sight, she took him as her lover, they were all surprised and a little piqued. And the latent desire in Malty was stirred afresh.

After their lunch, Banjo and Malty went across the suspension bridge to the docks on the other side. They were joined by Dengel, who approached them rocking rhythmically, now pausing a moment to balance himself in his tracks. He was much blacker than Malty, a shining anthracite. And his face was moist and his large eyes soft with liquor.

33 MALTY TURNED DOWN

Dengel was always in a state of heavenly inebriety; sauntering along in a soft mist of liquor. He was never worried about food. The joy of his being was the wine of the docks. He always knew of some barrel conveniently placed that could be raided without trouble.

"Come drink wine," he said, "if you like sweet wine. We find one barrel, good, good, very sweet."

Banjo and Malty followed him. In a rather obscure position against a freight car they found Ginger and Bugsy and three Senegalese armed with rubber tubes and swilling and swaying over a barrel of sweet wine. Malty got his tube out of the knapsack that he always toted with him, and Ginger handed Banjo his. Banjo bent over the barrel, spreading his feet away the better to imbibe. He was a long time sucking up the stuff. And when he removed his mouth from the tube, he brought up a long rich and ripe sound from belly to throat, smacked his lips, and droned, "Gawd in glory, ef this baby ain't some sweet boozing !"

"Tell it to Uncle Sam," said Bugsy.

"Tell it and shout nevah no moh," added Ginger.

"Nevah no moh is indeed mah middle name," said Banjo, "but brown me ef I'm a telling-it-too-much kind a darky. I ain't got no head for remembering too much back, nor no tongue for long-suffering delivery. I'm just a right-there, right-here baby, yestiday and today and tomorraw and forevah. All right-there right-here for me now."

"Hallelujah! Lemme crown you. You done said a mou'ful a nigger stuff," said Ginger.

After they had quenched their craving they returned to the far, little-frequented end of the breakwater and lay lazily in the sun. There Latnah, her morning's hustling finished, found them. Her yellow blouse was soiled and she slipped it off and began washing it. That

BANJO 34

was a sign for the boys to clean up. All except Deng^l, the only Senegalese that had crossed over to the break- water; he was feeling too sweet in his skin for any exertion. The boys stripped to the waist and began to wash their shirts. Bugsy went down between two cement blocks and brought up a can he had secreted there with a hunk of white soap. Finished washing, they spread the clothes on the blocks. Soon the vertical burning rays of the sun would suck them dry.

Malty suggested that they should swim. The beach boys often bathed down the docks, making bathing-suits of their drawers. And sometimes, when they had the extreme end of the breakwater to themselves, they went in naked. They did this time, cautioning Dengel to keep watch for them.

Latnah went in too. Malty was the best swimmer. He made strong crawl strokes. He was also an excellent diver. When he was a boy in the West Indies, he used to dive from the high deck railings for the coins that the tourists threw into the water. When he got going about wharf life in the West Indian ports of Kingston, Santi- ago, Port of Spain, he told stories of winning dollar bills in competition with other boys diving for coins from the bridges of ships. Of how he would struggle under water against another boy while the coin was whirling down away from them. How the cleverest boy would get it or both lose it when they could not stay down under any longer and came up breathless, blowing a multitude of bubbles.

Latnah was a beautiful diver and shot graceful like a serpent through the water. A thrill shivered through Malty's blood. He had never dreamed that her body was so lovely, limber, and sinewy. He dived down un- der her and playfully caught at her feet. She kicked him in the mouth, and it was like the shock of a kiss

35 MALTY TURNED DOWN

wrestled for and stolen, flooding his being with a rush of sweetly-warm sensation.

Latnah swam away and, hoisting herself upon a block, she gamboled about like a gazelle. Malty and Banjo started to swim round to her, bantering and beating up heaps of water, with Malty leading, when Dengel called: "Attention! Police!" His sharp native eye had dis- cerned two policemen far away up the eastern side of the breakwater, cycling toward them. The swimmers dashed for their clothes.

In a few moments the policemen rode down and, throwing a perfunctory glance at the half-dressed bath- ers, they circled round and went off again. "Salauds!" Dengel said. "Always after us, but scared of the real criminals."

For the rest of the afternoon they basked in the sun on the breakwater. With its cooling they returned to the Place de la Joliette, where the group broke up to forage separately for food.

They came together again in the evening in a rendez- vous bar of a somber alley, just a little bit out of the heart of the Ditch. Banjo had his instrument and was playing a little saccharine tune that he had brought over from America :

"I wanna go where you go, do what you do, Love when you love, then I'll be happy. . . ."

The souvenir of Latnah's foot in his mouth was a warm fever in Malty's flesh. And the red wine that he was drinking turned the fever sweet. It was a big night. The barkeeper, a thin Spanish woman, was busy setting up quart bottles of wine on the tables. Only black drinkers filled the little bar, and their wide-open, humor- ous, frank white eyes lighted up the place more glow- ingly than the dirty dim electric flare.

BANJO 36

Senegalese, Sudanese, Somalese, Nigerians, West In- dians, Americans, blacks from everywhere, crowded to- gether, talking strange dialects, but, brought together, understanding one another by the language of wine.

"I'll follow you, sweetheart, and share your little love-nest. I wanna go where you go . . ."

Malty had managed to get next to Latnah, and put his arm round her waist so quietly that it was some mo- ments before she became aware of it. Then she tried to remove his arm and ease away, but he pressed against her thigh.

"Don't," she said. "I no like."

"What's the matter?" murmured Malty, thickly. "Kaint you like a fellah a liT bit?"

He pressed closer against her and said, "Gimmie a kiss."

She felt his strong desire. "Cochon, no. Go away from me." She dug him sharply in the side with her elbow.

"You' mout' it stink. I wouldn't kiss a slut like you," said Malty, and he got up and gave Latnah a hard push.

She fell off the bench and picked herself up, crying. She was not hurt by the fall, but by Malty's sudden change of attitude. Malty glowered at her boozily. Banjo stopped playing, went up to him, and shook his fist in his face.

"Wha's matter you messing around mah woman?"

"Go chase you'self. I knowed her long before you did, when she was running after me."

"You're a dawggone liar!"

"And youse another!"

"Ef it's a fight youse looking for, come on outside."

Banjo and Malty staggered off. At the door, Malty stumbled and nearly fell, and Banjo caught his arm and

37 MALTY TURNED DOWN

helped him into the street. All the boys crowded to the door and flowed out into the alley, to watch. The antagonists sparred. Malty hiccoughed ominously, swayed forward, and, falling into Banjo's arms, they both went down heavily, in a helpless embrace, on the paving-stones.

IV. Hard Feeding

THE boys had a canny ear for the sounds of "good" ships. They knew them by the note of the horns. They might be bunging out a barrel of wine, or pick- ing up peanuts, or lying on the breakwater when one of the good ships (ships whose crews were friendly and gave the beach boys food) signaled its coming in. One would shout, tossing his cap into the air, "Oh, boy! That theah's a regular broad coming in !" And it would surely be one of their ships.

Sometimes it would be a ship that one of them saw last in Pernambuco, or the ship that another had allowed to leave him in Casablanca. Three months, six months, a year, two years since any of the crew had met this beach boy. Indescribably happy surprise reunions, and stories reminiscent of how they got messed up with wine, girls, and police and missed their ships.

Ginger's little story was brought out by one of these meetings. And for a while it made him "Lights-out" Ginger and the butt of the boys until another incident superseded it. Ginger had often mentioned that he had lost quite a bit of money in Marseilles in one night, but nobody knew just how. Then he met the pal who had been with him on the boat he had left and it all came out. In a bistro by the breakwater, over a table loaded with red wine, the story was told of Ginger's going into one of the little houses of amusement in the Ditch. He was boozy and very happy, singing and swaying. He

38

29 HARD FEEDING

sang, "Money is no object. I'll pay for anything in the place." And he paid. He did it with great gusto, was really amusing, and all the girls and touts and the other customers were delighted.

There was a little mangy-faced white there who could make himself intelligible in English. And he said to Ginger, "The whole house is yours."

"I know it," Ginger grinned back, "and I'll show it. I'll give this here money to the boss ef she puts the lights out for five minutes." And he waved a thousand- franc note. The patrone's eyes popped fire.

"Why, you big stiff," said the boy who told the story and who had been with Ginger, "that's a whole lot a money and tha's all youse got."

"Don't I know what Ise doing?" cried Ginger. "Ise one commanding nigger who'll always pay for a show."

"You can have you' show, but Ise sure gwine away from here, leaving you." And he left.

Ginger paid for his five-minute show and got all of it. Nor did he rejoin his pal, but remained on the beach to become a bum and a philosopher. Bantered as a scholar by the boys, Ginger always had a special opinion, a little ponderous, to give on topics arising among them. And whenever they were up against any trouble, he al- ways advised taking the line of least resistance.

Ginger laughed with the rest when his story was told, and said: "There ain't a jack man of us that ain't got a history to him as good as any that evah was printed. And Ise one that ain't got no case against life."

Ginger's former pal was now again in Marseilles, for the third time since Ginger had fallen for the beach. And the beach boys were invited to his ship to lunch. The galley of that ship was Negro and it was one of the best of "good" ships.

Banjo went along with Malty and company. He

BANJO 4o

was not a regular panhandler like the other boys. He could not make a happy business of it like them. Be- cause sometimes they were savagely turned down and insulted and he was not the type to stand that. He would have gone to work on the docks, as he had in- tended at first when he went broke, if his personality and his banjo had not fixed him in a situation more favorable than that of his mates. There was always a pillow for his head at Latnah's, and when he played in any of the bistros of the quarter and she was there, she always took up a collection. Indeed, she collected every time Banjo finished a set of tunes. That was the way the white itinerants did it, she said. They never played for fun as Banjo was prone to do. They played in a hard, un- smiling, funereal way and only for sous. Which was doubtless why their playing in general was so execrable. When Banjo turned himself loose and wild playing, he never remembered sous. Perhaps he could afford to forget, however, with Latnah looking out for him and always ready with a ten-franc note whenever his palm was itching for small change.

The ship of Ginger's pal had such a beach-known repu- tation for handing out the eats that, besides Malty and company, other men of the beach, white and colored, had assembled down by it to feed. Some dozen of them.

When the officers and men had finished eating, Ginger's old friend brought out what was left to the hungry group waiting on the deck. Good food and plenty of it in two pans. Thick, long slices of boiled beef, immense whole boiled potatoes, pork and beans, and lettuce.

All the men rushed the food like swine, each roughly elbowing and snapping at the other to get his hand in first. While they were stuffing themselves, smacking, grunting, and blowing with the disgusting noises of

4i HARD FEEDING

brutes, the food all over their faces, a mess boy brought out a large broad pan half filled with sweet porridge and set it down on the deck. Immediately the porridge was stormed. A huge blond Nordic, who looked like a polar bear that had been rolling in mud, was tripped up by an Armenian and fell sprawling, his lousy white head flop- ping in the pan of porridge. The blond picked him- self up and, burying his greasy-black hand in the por- ridge, he brought up a palmful and dashed it in the face of the Armenian. That started a free fight in which the pan of porridge was kicked over, whole boiled potatoes went flying across the deck, and Bugsy seized the mo- ment to slap in the face with a slice of beef a boy from Benin whom he hated.

"Goodoh Bugsy!" cried Malty. "Tha's sho some moh feeding his face."

Banjo was standing a little way off, watching the melee in anger and contempt. A lanky, prematurely- wrinkle-faced officer passed by with a sneering glance at the beach fellows and went to the galley. The cook, a well-fleshed broad-chested brown Negro, came out on the deck.

"You fellahs am sure a bum lot," he said. "The vict- uals I done give you is too good foh you-all. The gar- bage even is too good. You ain't no good foh nothing at all."

But the boys were again eating, picking up potatoes and scraps of meat from the deck and scooping up what was left of the porridge.

Banjo had started for the gangway, and Bugsy called to him, "Hi, nigger, ain't you gwine put away some a this heah stuff under you' shirt?"

"The mess you jest fight and trample ovah?" retorted Banjo. "You c'n stuff you' guts tell youse all winded, but

BANJO 42

my belly kain't accommodate none a that theah stuff, for that is too hard feeding for mine."

Having finished eating, the men came off the deck, all friendly vagabonds again. Squabbling and scuffling came natural to them, like eating and drinking, dancing and bawdying, and did not have any bad effect upon the general spirit of their comradeship.

Malty's group picked up Banjo on the dock and sep- arated from the others. Their next objective was to find some conveniently situated barrel of wine that they could bung out and guzzle without trouble.

"It's all the same in the life of the beach," Malty said to Banjo. "Once you get used to it, you kain't feel you'- self too good for anything!"

"Theah's some things that this heah boy won't evah get used to," said Banjo. "I heah that officer call you all 'a damned lot a disgusting niggers,' and I don't want no gitting used to that. You fellahs know what the white man think about niggers and you-all ought to do better than you done when he 'low you on his ship to eat that dawggone grub. I take life easy like you-all, but I ain't nevah gwine to lay mahself wide open to any insulting cracker of a white man. For I'll let a white man mobi- lize mah black moon for a whupping, ef he can, foh calling me a nigger."

"Nix on the insults when a man is on the beach," said Malty. "Gimme a bellyful a good grub and some wine to wash it down is all I ask for."

"You ain't got no self-respecting in you, then," said Banjo. "Youse just a bum and no moh. I ain't a big- headed nigger, but a white man has got to respect me, for when I address myself to him the vibration of brain magic that I turn loose on him is like an electric shock on the spring of his cranium."

"Attaboy!" applauded Ginger, who loved big words

43 HARD FEEDING

with a philosophical flavor. "You done deliver a declara- tion of principle, but a declaration of principle is a de- pendant usynimous with the decision of the destiny of the individual in the general."

" 'Gawd is the first principle/ I done heard that said," declared Malty.

Bugsy grinned, saying, "And Gawd is in Boody Lane."

"Youse a nut!" said Malty. "Don't be calling up Gawd's name as if he was a nigger."

"I seen him there, I tell you," laughed Bugsy, "the day of the big church fete. I seen that there blond broad burning her candle before his image."

"It was nothing," said Ginger, "but the eternal visible of imagination."

No barrel was found in a position favorable for a raid, and so the boys filled their pockets with peanuts and walked across the suspension bridge toward the breakwater. Banjo was in a discontented mood and did not join in the jests. At the end of the breakwater a small boat was letting off passengers. Banjo went up to it and said, "Bon]our" to the patron, who greeted him with a smile.

Banjo stepped into the boat and, waving his hand airily at his pals, said: "Good by!" The patron started the motor and the boat went sheering off against the breakwater toward the direction of the Vieux Port.

The boys gazed after him pop-eyed and gaping. What a fellow Banjo was to put himself over ! None of them knew that when Banjo's pockets were bulging with real money that very boat had taken him and his girl on two excursions, one to the Chateau d'lf and another to the Canal du Rove at l'Estaque. The boat was just then returning from a trip to the canal, and had stopped to let off passengers who wanted to see the breakwater.

BANJO 44

Banjo had merely struck, accidentally, a pretty thing again, but it seemed very wonderful to his pals, as if a special pilot had appeared for him and he had walked away from them into a boat that was conveying him to some perfect paradise.

V. "Jelly Roll

>>

SHAKE That Thing. The opening of the Cafe Afri- can by a Senegalese had brought all the joy-lovers of darkest color together. Never was there such a big black-throated guzzling of red wine, white wine, and close, indiscriminate jazzing of all the Negroes of Mar- seilles.

For the Negro-Negroid population of the town divides sharply into groups. The Martiniquans and Guadeloup- ans, regarding themselves as constituting the dark flower of all Marianne's blacks, make a little aristocracy of themselves. The Madagascans with their cousins from the little dots of islands around their big island and the North African Negroes, whom the pure Arabs despise, fall somewhere between the Martiniquans and the Senegalese, who are the savages. Senegalese is the geo- graphically inaccurate term generally used to designate all the Negroes from the different parts of French West Africa.

The magic thing had brought all shades and grades of Negroes together. Money. A Senegalese had emi- grated to the United States, and after some years had returned with a few thousand dollars. And he had bought a cafe on the quay. It was a big cafe, the first that any Negro in the town ever owned.

The tiny group of handsomely-clothed Senegalese were politely proud of the bar, and all the blue overall boys

45

BANJO 46

of the docks and the ships were boisterously glad of a spacious place to spread joy in.

All shades of Negroes came together there. Even the mulattoes took a step down from their perch to mix in. For, as in the British West Indies and South Africa, the mulattoes of the French colonies do not usually inter- mingle with the blacks.

But the magic had brought them all together to jazz and drink red wine, white wine, sweet wine. All the British West African blacks, Portuguese blacks, Ameri- can blacks, all who had drifted into this port that the world goes through.

A great event ! And to Banjo it had brought a unique feeling of satisfaction. He did not miss it, as he never missed anything rich that came within his line of living. There was music at the bar and Banjo made much of it. He got a little acquainted with the patron, who often chatted with him. The patron was proud of his English and liked to display it when there was any distinguished- appearing person at the cafe.

"Shake That Thing!" That was the version of the "Jelly-Roll Blues" that Banjo loved and always played. And the Senegalese boys loved to shake to it. Banjo was treated to plenty of red wine and white wine when he played that tune. And he would not think of collecting sous. Latnah had gone about once and collected sous in her tiny jade tray. But she never went again. She loved Banjo, but she could not enter into the spirit of that all-Negro-atmosphere of the bar. Banjo was glad she stayed away. He did not want to collect sous from a crowd of fellows just like himself. He preferred to play for them and be treated to wine. Sous! How could he respect sous? He who had burnt up dollars.

47 "JELLY ROLL"

Why should he care, with a free bed, free love, and wine?

His plan of an orchestra filled his imagination now. Maybe he could use the Cafe African as a base to get some fellows together. Malty could play the guitar right splendid, but he had no instrument. If that Sene- galese patron had a little imagination, he might buy Malty a guitar and they would start a little orchestra that would make the bar unique and popular.

Many big things started in just such a little way. Only give him a chance and he would make this dump sit up and take notice — show it how to be sporty and game. How he would love to see a couple of brown chippies from Gawd's own show this Ditch some decent movement — turn themselves jazzing loose in a back-home, brown- skin Harlem way. Oh, Banjo's skin was itching to make some romantic thing.

And one afternoon he walked straight into a dream — a cargo boat with a crew of four music-making colored boys, with banjo, ukelele, mandolin, guitar, and horn. That evening Banjo and Malty, mad with enthusiasm, literally carried the little band to the Vieux Port. It was the biggest evening ever at the Senegalese bar. They played several lively popular tunes, but the Sene- galese boys yelled for uShake That Thing." Banjo picked it off and the boys from the boat quickly got it. Then Banjo keyed himself up and began playing in his own wonderful wild way.

It roused an Arab-black girl from Algeria into a shak- ing-mad mood. And she jazzed right out into the center of the floor and shook herself in a low-down African shimmying way. The mandolin player, a stocky, cocky lad of brown-paper complexion, the lightest-skinned of

BANJO 48

the playing boys, had his eyes glued on her. Her hair was cropped and stood up shiny, crinkly like a curiously- wrought bird's nest. She was big-boned and well-fleshed and her full lips were a savage challenge.

"Cointreau!" The Negroid girl called when, the mu- sic ceasing, the paper-brown boy asked her to take a drink.

"That yaller nigger's sure gone on her," Malty said to Banjo.

"And she knows he's got a roll can reach right up to her figure," said Banjo. "Looka them eyes she shines on him ! Oh, boy ! it was the same for you and I when we first landed — every kind of eyes in the chippies' world shining for us!"

"Yes, but you ain't got nothing to kick about. The goodest eyes in this burg ain't shining for anybody else but you."

"Hheh-hheh," Banjo giggled. "I'll be dawggone, Malty, ef I don't think sometimes youse getting soft. Takem as they come, easy and jolly, ole boh."

He poured out a glass of red wine, chinked his glass against Malty's, and toasted, "Oh, you Dixieland, here's praying for you' soul salvation."

"And here is joining you," said Malty.

"Dry land will nevah be my land, Gimme a wet wide-open land for mine."

Handsome, happy brutes. The music is on again. The Senegalese boys crowd the floor, dancing with one another. They dance better male with male or individu- ally, than with the girls, putting more power in their feet, dancing more wildly, more natively, more savagely. Senegalese in blue overalls, Madagascan soldiers in

49 "JELLY ROLL"

khaki, dancing together. A Martiniquan with his mulat- tress flashing her gold teeth. A Senegalese sergeant goes round with his fair blonde. A Congo boxer struts it with his Marguerite. And Banjo, grinning, singing, white teeth, great mouth, leads the band. . . .

The banjo dominates the other instruments; the charm- ing, pretty sound of the ukelele, the filigree notes of the mandolin, the sensuous color of the guitar. And Banjo's face shows that he feels that his instrument is first. The Negroes and Spanish Negroids of the evenly-warm, ever- green and ever-flowering Antilles may love the rich chords of the guitar, but the banjo is preeminently the musical instrument of the American Negro. The sharp, noisy notes of the banjo belong to the American Negro's loud music of life — an affirmation of his hardy existence in the midst of the biggest, the most tumultuous civiliza- tion of modern life.

Sing, Banjo! Play, Banjo! Here I is, Big Boss, keeping step, sure step, right long with you in some sort a ways. He-ho, Banjo! Play that thing!

A little flock of pinks from the Ditch floated into the bar. Seamen from Senegal. Soldiers from Madagascar. Pimps from Martinique. Pimps from everywhere. Pimps from Africa. Seamen fed up with the sea. Young men weary of the work of the docks, scornful of the meager reward — doing that now. Black youth close to the bush and the roots of jungle trees, trying to live the precarious life of the poisonous orchids of civilization.

The slim, slate-colored Martiniquan dances with a gold-brown Arab girl in a purely sensual way. His dog's mouth shows a tiny, protruding bit of pink tongue. Oh, he jazzes like a lizard with his girl. A dark-brown lizard and a gold-brown lizard. . . .

BANJO 50

A coffee-black boy from Cameroon and a chocolate- brown from Dakar stand up to each other to dance a native sex-symbol dance. Bending knee and nodding head, they dance up to each other. As they almost touch, the smaller boy spins suddenly round and dances away. Oh, exquisite movement ! Like a ram goat and a ram kid. Hands and feet!

Black skin itching, black flesh warm with the wine of life, the music of life, the love and deep meaning of life. Strong smell of healthy black bodies in a close atmosphere, generating sweat and waves of heat.

Suddenly in the thick joy of it there was a roar and a rush and sheering apart as a Senegalese leaped like a leopard bounding through the jazzers, and, gripping an antagonist, butted him clean on the forehead once, twice, and again, and turned him loose to fall heavily on the floor like a felled tree.

The patron dashed from behind the bar. A babel of different dialects broke forth. Policemen appeared and the musicians slipped outside, followed by most of the Martiniquans.

"Hheh-hheh," Banjo laughed. "The music so good it put them French fellahs in a fighting mood."

"Niggers is niggers all ovah the wul\" said the tall, long-faced chocolate who played the guitar. "Always spoil a good thing. Always the same no matter what color their hide is or what langwidge they talk."

"And I was fixing for that fair brown. I wonder where at she is?" said the mandolin-player.

"Don't worry," said Banjo. "Theah's always some'n' better or as good as what you miss. You should do like me whenevah you hit a new port. Always try to

51 "JELLY ROLL"

make something as different from what you know as a Leghorn is from a Plymouth Rock."

"Hi-ee! But youse one chicken-knowing fool," said Malty.

Banjo did a little strut-jig. "You got mah number all right, boh. And what wese gwine to do now? The night ain't begin yet at all foh mine. I want to do some moh playing and do some moh wine and what not do?"

A Martinique guide, who had had them under sur- veillance for a long while, now stepped up and said that he knew of a love shop where they could play music and have some real fun.

"You sure?" asked Banjo. "Don't fool us now, for I lives right down here in this dump and know most a them. And if that joint you know ain't a place that we can lay around in for a while, nothing doing I tell you straight. I'll just take all mah buddies right outa there."

The guide assured the boys that his place was all right. They all went into another bar on the quay and the gui- tar-player paid for a round of drinks. From there they turned up the Rue de la Mairie and west along the Rue de la Loge to find the Martiniquan's rendezvous.

They went by the Rue de la Reynarde, where a loud jarring cluster of colored lights was shouting its trade. Standing in the slimy litter of a narrow turning, an emaciated, middle-aged, watery-eyed woman was doing a sort of dance and singing in a thin streaky voice. She was advertising the house in whose shadow she danced, and was much like a poorly-feathered hen pecking and clucking on a dunghill.

The boys hesitated a little before the appearance of the drab-fronted building that their escort indicated.

BANJO 52

Then they entered and were surprised at finding them- selves in a showy love shop of methodically assorted things. It was very international. European, African, Asiatic. Contemporary feminine styles competed with old and forgotten. Rose-petal pajamas, knee-length frocks, silken shifts, the nude, the boyish bob contrasted with shimmering princess gowns, country-girl dresses of striking freshness, severe glove-fitting black setting off a demure lady with Italian-rich, thick, long hair, the piquant semi-nude and Spanish-shawled shoulders.

Banjo saw his first flame of the Ditch between two sailors with batik-like kerchiefs curiously knotted on their heads. They were Malay, perhaps. This time he was not aroused. The Martiniquan talked to a strangely attractive girl. She had almond eyes that were painted in a unique manner to emphasize their exotic effect. Evi- dently she was not pure Mongolian, but perhaps some casual crossing of Occident and Orient, commerce- spanned, dropped on the shore of the wonderful sea of the world.

There were half a dozen touts. One seemed a per- son of authority in the place. He was this side of forty, above average height, of meager form, Spanish type, with a face rather disgusting, because, although dark, it was sallow and deep-sunken under the cheek bones. He wore a blue suit, white scarf, heavy gold chain, and patent-leather shoes. The other five were youths. Three sported bright suits and fancy shoes of two and three colors, and two were in ordinary proletarian blue. The proletarian suits among all the striking feminine finery gave a certain elusive tone of distinction to the at- mosphere, and one dressed thus was particularly con-

S3 "JELLY ROLL"

spicuous, reclining on a red-cushioned seat, under the lavish and intimate caresses of a Negress from the An- tilles. Her face was like that of a Pekinese. She wore a bit of orange chiffon and had a green fan, which she opened at intervals against her mouth as she grinned deliciously.

Sitting like a queen in prim fatness, quite high up against a desk near the staircase that led to the regions above, a lady ruled over the scene with smiling business efficiency. When the Martiniquan spoke to her, intro- ducing his evening's catch by a wave of the hand toward where the boys had seated themselves, and explaining that they wanted to play their own music, she smiled a gay acquiescence.

When Banjo and his fellows entered, many eyes had followed them. And now as they played and hummed and swayed, all eyes were fixed on them, and soon the whole shop was right out on the floor.

The little black girl was all in a wild heat of move- ment as she went rearing up and down with her young Provengal. But he seemed unequal to catch and keep up with her motion, so she exchanged him for the Mar- tiniquan, who went prancing into it. And round and round they went, bounding in and out among the jazzers, rearing and riding together with the speed and freedom of two wild goats.

The players paused and some girls tried to order champagne on them, but the Martiniquan intervened and demanded wine and spirits.

"He knows his business," the mandolin-player said to Banjo.

"He's gotta," Banjo replied, "because he's got him- self to look out for and me to reckin with."

BANJO 54

Suddenly the air was full of a terrible tenseness and gravity as an altercation between the lady at the desk and the meager, sallow-faced man seemed at the point of developing into a fateful affair. The man was leaning against the desk, looking into the woman's face with cold, ghastly earnestness, his hand resting a little in his hip pocket. The woman's face fell flat like paste and all the girls stood tiptoe in silence and trembling excite- ment. Abruptly, without a word, the man turned and left the room with murder in his stride.

"That must be the boss-man," the mandolin-player said.

"And he looks like a mean mastiff," said the guitar- player.

"Sure seems lak he's just that thing," agreed Banjo.

Tern, tern, ti-tum, tim ti-tim, turn, tern. Banjo and the boys were chording up. Back . . . thing . . . bed . . . black . . . dead. . . . Jelly-r-o-o-o-o-oll ! Again all the shop was out on the floor. No graceful sliding and gliding, but strutting, jigging, shimmying, shuffling, humping, standing-swaying, dogging. The girls were now tiptoeing to another kind of excitement. Blood had crept back up into the face of the woman at the desk. . . .

The sallow-faced man appeared in the entrance and strode through the midst of it to the desk. Bomb ! The fearful report snuffed out the revel and the dame tum- bled fatly to the floor. The murderer gloated over the sad mess of flesh for an instant, then with a wild leap he lanced himself like a rat through the paralyzed revelers and disappeared.

The bewildered music-makers halted hesitantly at the foot of the alley.

s$ "JELLY ROLL"

"Let's all go in here and take a stiff drink." Banjo indicated a little bistro at the corner.

"Better let's leg it a HT ways longer," said the ukelele- player, "so the police won't come fooling around us now that wese good and well away outa there. I don't wanta have no truck with the police."

"And they ain't gwineta mess around us, pardner," said Malty. "We don't speak that there lingo a theirn and they ain't studying us. Ise been in on a dozen shoot- ing-ups in this here Ditch, ef Ise been in on one, with the bullets them jest burning pass mah black buttum, and Ise nevah been asked by the police, 'What did you miss ?' nor 'What did you see?' "

"Did you say a dozen?" cried the ukelele-player.

"Just that I did, boh, which was what I was pussonally attached to. But that ain't nothing at all, for theah's a shooting-up or a cutting-up — and sometimes moh — every day in this here burg."

"Malty," said Banjo, "youse sure one eggsigirating spade."

"Doughnuts on that there eggsigirating. It's the same crap to me whether there was a dozen or a thousand. They ain't nevah made a hole in me, for Ise got magic in mah skin foh protection, when you done got you sou- venir there on you' wrist, Banjo boy."

"Gawd! But it was a bloody affair, all right," said the guitar-player. "I was so frightened I didn't really know what was happening. Bam ! Biff ! And the big boss-lady was undertaker's business before you could squint."

"Jest spoiled the whole sport," said the ukelele-player, "I kinda liked the nifty dump. It was the goods, al] right."

BANJO 56

"You said it, boh," the mandolin-player grinned, scratching his person. "It was some moh collection. All the same, I gotta plug."

"With you, buddy," cried Banjo. "Right there with you I sure indeed is."

"Let's go back to the African Bar," suggested the man- dolin-player. The picture of the North African girl shaking that jelly-roll thing was still warmly working in his blood.

They found the African Bar closed. Again they left the quay, and Banjo took them up one of the somber, rub- bish-strewn alleys of the Ditch. On both sides of the alley were the dingy cubicles whose only lights were the occupants who filled the fronts, gesturing and calling in ludicrous tones: "Viens ici, viens ici," and repeating pridefully the raw expressions of the low love shops that they had learned from English-speaking seamen.

Out of a drinking hole-in-the-wall came the creaky jangling notes of a small, upright and ancient pianola. The place was chock-full of a mixed crowd of girls, sea- men, and dockers, with two man-of-war sailors and three soldiers among them.

"What about this here dump?" asked Banjo.

The mandolin-player looked lustfully up and down the alley and into the bistro, where wreaths of smoke settled heavily upon the frowsy air. "Suits me all right," he drawled. "What about you fellows?"

"Well, I hope it won't turn into another bloody mess of a riot this time," said the ukelele-player.

"Here youse just like you would be at home. This is my street," said Banjo. A girl came up and, patting him on the shoulder with a familiar phrase, she pushed him into the bistro.

57 "JELLY ROLL"

As they entered a Senegalese who had been dancing to their voluptuous playing at the African Bar, exclaimed: "Here they are! Now we're going to hear some real music — something ravishing." And he begged Banjo to play the "Jelly-Roll."

One of the soldiers was evidently "slumming." There was a neat elegance about his uniform and shoes that set him apart from the ambiguous dandies of military serv- ice, the habituees of shady places. His features and his manner betrayed class distinction. He offered Banjo and his companions a round of drinks, saying in slow English: "Please play. You American? I like much les Negres play the jazz American. I hear them in Paris. Epatant!"

Banjo grinned and tossed off his Cap Corse. "All right, fellows. Let's play them that thing first."

"And then the once-over," said the mandolin-player.

Shake to the loud music of life playing to the primeval round of life. Rough rhythm of darkly-carnal life. Strong surging flux of profound currents forced into shallow channels. Play that thing! One movement of the thousand movements of the eternal life-flow. Shake that thing! In the face of the shadow of Death. Treacherous hand of murderous Death, lurking in sin- ister alleys, where the shadows of life dance, nevertheless, to their music of life. Death over there! Life over here! Shake down Death and forget his commerce, his purpose, his haunting presence in a great shaking orgy. Dance down the Death of these days, the Death of these ways in jungle jazzing, Orient wriggling, civilized step- ping. Sweet dancing thing of primitive joy, perverse

BANJO 58

pleasure, prostitute ways, many-colored variations of the rhythm, savage, barbaric, refined — eternal rhythm of the mysterious, magical, magnificent — the dance divine of life.

SECOND PART

VI. Meeting-up

BANJO'S place at Latnah's was empty for many days, for he was deep down in the Ditch again. He was even scarce with Malty and the other boys, and they did not know where he was lying low. Malty, Bugsy, and Ginger had the run of a ship, where they ate, did a little galley work, and could even sleep when they wanted to, and Banjo was supposed to eat there, too. But only once had he honored the beach boys' new mess with his presence. He did, however, send down some dozen white and colored fellows to bum off Malty. For on that ship there was always enough left-over food to feed a regiment of men.

Banjo did not go to the boat to feed because he was having a jolly fat time of it. While his pals had felt quite satisfied with the big treat of eats and drinks and a few francs in coins from the musical seamen, Banjo's infectious spirit had touched his fellow artistes for over two hundred francs, which they considered nothing at all for the time and freedom of the Ditch that he had so generously given to them.

Latnah was not fretful about his absence. He would come again when he wanted to, just as casually as when they had first met. She had no jealous feeling of pos- session about him. She was Oriental and her mind was not alien to the idea of man's insistence on freedom of desire for himself. Perhaps she liked Banjo more be- cause he was vagabond.

61

BANJO 62

Banjo arose from his close corner in the Ditch, yawned, stretched, and proceeded with the necessity of toilet. This was always an irksome affair to him when he was not dressing to strut. And he had nothing now worth showing off except an American silk shirt with blue and mauve stripes, and, jauntily over his ear, a fine bluish felt that the mandolin-player had forced on him.

He was bidding good-by to the heart of the Ditch for the present, because he had only ten negotiable francs for the moment. He was going to feed himself and he felt that he could feed heavily, for the final exhaustion of his long spell of voluptuous excitement had left him with a feeling of intense natural thirst and hunger. In America, after such a prolonged, exquisite excess, he al- ways experienced a particular craving for swine — pig's tail, pig's snout, pig's ears, pig's feet, and chittlings.

Banjo smacked his lips recalling and anticipating the delicious taste of pig stuff. He had a special fancy for gras double and pie ds paquet Marseillaise. Banjo nosed through the dirty alleys of wine shops and cook shops, hunting for a chittlings joint. He did not want to go through the embarrassing business of entering and sitting down in an eating-place and then having to leave because what he wanted was not there. At last he stood before a long, low, oblong box, the only window of which was packed with a multitude of pink pigs' feet, while over them stretched an enormous maw of the color of sea- weed. In the center of the low ceiling an electric bulb shed a soiled light. On a slate was chalked : Repas, prix fixe: fs. 4 vin compris.

The place was full. Banjo found an end seat not far from the window. A big slovenly woman brought him knife, fork, spoon, a half-pint of red wine, a length of bread, and a plate of soup. Following the soup he had a large plate of chittlings with a good mess of potatoes.

63 MEETING-UP

Lastly a tiny triangular cut of Holland cheese. It was a remarkably good meal indeed for the price charged, and quite sufficient for an ordinary stomach. But Ban- jo's stomach was not in an ordinary state. So he set his bit of cheese aside and asked for a second helping of chittlings and another pint bottle of red wine.

By the time he had finished his supplementary portion the place was three-quarters empty and he was the only person left at his table. Banjo patted his belly and a contented, drowsy noise way down from it escaped from his mouth. He took the folded ten-franc note from his breast pocket, opened it out, and laid it on the table. The woman, instead of picking it up, presented a dirty scrap of bill for fs. 12.50.

"Dawg bite me !" Banjo threw up his hands. He had been expecting change out of which he could get his cafe-au-rhum. How could an extra plate play him such a dirty trick? He turned out his pockets and said: "No more money, nix money, no plus billet."

The woman thrust the bill under his nose, gesticu- lated like a true Provengale and cried with all the trum- pets of her body: "Payez! Payez! II faut payer" Ban- jo's tongue turned loose a rich assortment of Yankee swear words. . . . "God-damned frog robbers. I eat prix fixe. I pay moh'n enough. Moi paye rien plus. Hey! Ain't nobody in this tripe-stinking dump can help a man with this heah dawggone lingo?"

A black young man who had been sitting quietly in the back went over to Banjo and asked what he could help about.

"Can you get a meaning, boh, out a this musical racket?" Banjo asked.

"I guess I can."

"Well, you jest tell this jabberway lady for me to go right clear where she get off at and come back treating

BANJO 64

me square. I done eat prix fixe as I often does, and jest because I had a li'l moh place in mah stimach I could fill up and ask for an extry plate, she come asking for as much money as I could eat swell on in Paree itself."

The intermediary turned to argue with the woman. She said Banjo had not asked for the table d'hote meal. But it was pointed out to her that she had not served him a la carte. However, there was a slate over the de- crepit desk scrawled with a la carte prices, and according to it, and by the most liberal calculation, she seemed to have made the mistake of overcharging Banjo. The woman had been hiding her discomfiture behind a bar- rage of noise and gesticulation, but suddenly she said, "Voila," and threw down a two-franc piece on the table.

Banjo picked it up and said: "Dawgs mah tail! You done talk her into handing me back change? I be fiddled if you don't handle this lingo same as I does American."

As they departed the woman vehemently bade them good-by, a la Provencale, with a swishing stream of saliva sent sharply after them, crying, "Je suis frangais, moi"

Je suis frangais. . . . Ray (it was he who had inter- vened) smiled. No doubt the woman thought there could be no more stinging insult than making them sensi- ble of being Strangers. Thought, too, perhaps, that that gave her a moral right to cheat them.

"Le's blow this heah two francs to good friendship be- ginning," said Banjo. "My twinkling stars, but this Marcelles is a most wonderful place foh meeting-up."

Ray laughed. Banjo's rich Dixie accent went to his head like old wine and reminded him happily of Jake. He had seen Banjo before with Malty and company on the breakwater, but had not yet made contact with any of them.

6$ MEETING-UP

Since he had turned his back on Harlem he had done much voyaging, sometimes making a prolonged stay in a port whose aspect had taken his imagination. He had not renounced his dream of self-expression. And some- times when he was down and out of money, desperate in the dumps of deep problematic thinking, unable to find a shore job, he would be cheered up by a little cheque from America for a slight sketch or by a letter of encourage- ment with a banknote from a friend.

He was up against the fact that a Negro in Europe could not pick up casual work as he could in America. The long-well-tilled, overworked Old World lacked the background that rough young America offered to a ro- mantic black youth to indulge his froward instincts. In America he had lived like a vagabond poet, erect in the racket and rush and terror of that stupendous young creation of cement and steel, determined, courageous, and proud in his swarthy skin, quitting jobs when he wanted to go on a dream wish or a love drunk, without being beholden to anybody.

Now he was always beholden. If he was not bold enough, when he was broke and famishing, to be a bum like Malty in the square, he was always writing panhan- dling letters to his friends, and naturally he began to feel himself lacking in the free splendid spirit of his American days. More and more the urge to write was holding him with an enslaving grip and he was begin- ning to feel that any means of achieving self-expression was justifiable. Not without compunction. For Tolstoy was his ideal of the artist as a man and remained for him the most wonderful example of one who balanced his creative work by a life lived out to its full illogical end.

It was strange to Ray himself that he should be so powerfully pulled toward Tolstoy when his nature, his outlook, his attitude to life, were entirely turned away

BANJO 66

from the ideals of the great Russian. Strange that he who was so heathen and carnal, should feel and be respon- sive to the intellectual superiority of a fanatic moralist.

But it was not by Tolstoy's doctrines that he was touched. It was depressing to him that the energy of so many great intellects of the modern world had been, like Tolstoy's, vitiated in futile endeavor to make the mysticism of Jesus serve the spiritual needs of a world- conquering and leveling machine civilization.

What lifted him up and carried him away, after Tolstoy's mighty art was his equally mighty life of rest- less searching within and without, and energetic living to find himself until the very end. Rimbaud moved him with the same sympathy, but Tolstoy's appeal was stronger, because he lived longer and was the greater creator.

Drifting by chance into the harbor of Marseilles, Ray had fallen for its strange enticement just as the beach boys had. He had struck the town in one of those violent periods of agitation when he had worked himself up to the pitch of feeling that if he could not give vent to his thoughts he would break up into a thousand ar- ticulate bits. And the Vieux Port had offered him a haven in its frowsy, thickly-peopled heart where he could exist en pension proletarian of a sort and try to create around him the necessary solitude to work with pencil and scraps of paper.

He too was touched by the magic of the Mediter- ranean, sprayed by its foamy fascination. Of all the seas he had crossed there was none like it. He was ever reminiscent of his own Caribbean, the first salty water he had dipped his swarthy boy's body in, but its dreamy, trade-wind, cooling charm could not be compared with this gorgeous bowl of blue water unrestingly agi- tated by the great commerce of all the continents. He

67 MEETING-UP

loved the docks. If the aspect of the town itself was harsh and forbidding, the docks were of inexhaustible interest. There any day he might meet with picturesque proletarians from far waters whose names were warm with romance: the Caribbean, the Gulf of Guinea, the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal, the China Seas, the Indian Archipelago. And, oh, the earthy mingled smells of the docks! Grain from Canada, rice from India, rubber from the Congo, tea from China, brown sugar from Cuba, bananas from Guinea, lumber from the Soudan, coffee from Brazil, skins from the Argentine, palm-oil from Nigeria, pimento from Jamaica, wool from Australia, oranges from Spain and oranges from Jeru- salem. In piled-up boxes, bags, and barrels, some broken, dropping their stuff on the docks, reposing in the warm odor of their rich perfumes — the fine harvest of all the lands of the earth.

Barrels, bags, boxes, bearing from land to land the primitive garner of man's hands. Sweat-dripping bodies of black men naked under the equatorial sun, threading a caravan way through the time-old jungles, carrying loads steadied and unsupported on kink-thick heads hardened and trained to bear their burdens. Brown men half- clothed, with baskets on their backs, bending low down to the ancient tilled fields under the tropical sun. Eter- nal creatures of the warm soil, digging, plucking for the Occident world its exotic nourishment of life, under the whip, under the terror. Barrels . . . bags . . . boxes. . . . Full of the wonderful things of life.

Ray loved the life of the docks more than the life of the sea. He had never learned to love the deep sea. Out there on a boat he always felt like a reluctant prisoner among prisoners cast out upon a menacing dreariness of deep water. He had never known a seaman who really loved the deep sea. . . . He knew of fellows who could

BANJO 68

love an old freighter as a man might love a woman. Nearly all the colored seamen he knew affectionately called their ship the old "broad." The real lure of the sea was beyond in the port of call. And of all the great ports there was none so appealing to seamen as Marseilles in its cruel beauty.

The port was a fine big wide-open hole and the docks were wide open too. Ray loved the piquant variety of the things of the docks as much as he loved their colorful human interest. And the highest to him was the Negroes of the port. In no other port had he ever seen congre- gated such a picturesque variety of Negroes. Negroes speaking the civilized tongues, Negroes speaking all the African dialects, black Negroes, brown Negroes, yellow Negroes. It was as if every country of the world where Negroes lived had sent representatives drifting in to Marseilles. A great vagabond host of jungle-like Ne- groes trying to scrape a temporary existence from the macadamized surface of this great Provencal port.

Here for Ray was the veritable romance of Europe. This Europe that he had felt through the splendid glamour of history. When at last he did touch it, its effect on him had been a negative reaction. He had to go to books and museums and sacredly-preserved sites to find the romance of it. Often in conversation he had politely pretended to a romance that he felt not. For it was America that was for him the living, hot-breathing land of romance. Its mighty business palaces, vast depots receiving and discharging hurrying hordes of humanity, immense cathedrals of pleasure, far-flung spans of steel roads and tumultuous traffic — the terrible buffalo-tramping crush of life, the raucous vaudeville mob-shouting of a newly-arrived nation of white throats, the clamor and clash of races and the grim-grubbing posi- tion of his race among them — all was a great fever in

69 MEETING-UP

his brain, a rhythm of a pattern with the time-beat of his life, a burning, throbbing romance in his blood.

There was a barbarous international romance in the ways of Marseilles that was vividly significant of the great modern movement of life. Small, with a popula- tion apparently too great for it, Europe's best back door, discharging and receiving its traffic to the Orient and Africa, favorite port of seamen on French leave, in- fested with the ratty beings of the Mediterranean coun- tries, overrun with guides, cocottes, procurers, repelling and attracting in its white-fanged vileness under its pic- turesqueness, the town seemed to proclaim to the world that the grandest thing about modern life was that it was bawdy.

Banjo wanted to see what Ray's work was like and Ray took him up to his place, which was a little up beyond the Bum Square. Banjo had been interested in Ray's talking about his work, but when he saw the sheets of ordinary composition paper, a little soiled, and the shabby collection of books, he quickly lost interest and changed the conversation to the hazards of the vagabond pan- handling life.

Ray suggested taking a turn along the Corniche. Banjo had never been on the Corniche. Ray said it was one of the three interesting things of the town from a pic- torial point of view — the Ditch, the Breakwater and the Corniche. He liked the Corniche in a special way, when he was in one of those oft-recurring solitary, idly- brooding moods. Then he would watch the ships com- ing in from the east, coming in from the west, and specu- late about making a move to some other place.

They went by the Quai de Rive Neuve toward Catalan.

BANJO 70

At a unique point beyond the baths of that name Ray waved back toward the breakwater.

"Hot damn! What a mahvelous sight!" exclaimed Banjo. "I been in Marcelles all this time and ain't never come this heah side."

Two ships were going down the Mediterranean out to the East, and another by the side of l'Estaque out to the Atlantic. A big Peninsular and Orient liner with three yellow-and-black funnels was coming in. The fishing- boats were little colored dots sailing into the long veil of the marge. A swarm of sea gulls gathered where one of the ships had passed, dipping suddenly down, shooting up and circling around joyously as if some prize had been thrown there to them. In the basin of Joliette the ships' funnels were vivid little splashes of many colors bunched together, and, close to them in perspective, an aggregate of gray factory chimneys spouted from their black mouths great columns of red-brown smoke into the indigo skies. Abruptly, as if it rose out of the heart of the .town, a range of hills ran out in a gradual slope like a strong argent arm protecting the harbor, and merged its point in the far-away churning mist of sea and sky.

"It's an eyeful all right," said Banjo.

Ray said nothing. He was so happily moved. A delicious symphony was playing on the tendrils that linked his inner being to the world without, and he was afraid to break the spell. They walked the whole length of the Corniche down to the big park by the sea. fThey leaped over a wall and a murky stream, crossed the race track, and came to rest and doze in the shade of a magnolia.

It was nightfall when they got back to town, return- ing by the splendid avenue called the Prado. The Bum Square was full of animation. All the life of the dark

7i MEETING-UP

alleys around it — clients of little hotels and restaurants, bistros, cabarets, love shops, fish shops, meat shops — poured into the square to take the early evening air. A few fishermen were gathered round a table on a cafe terrace, and fisher-girls promenaded arm in arm, their wooden shoes sounding heavily in the square. The Arab- black girl who had danced so amorously at the Senegalese cafe was parading with a white girl companion. Five touts, one of whom was a mulatto, stood conversing with a sniffing, expectant air near the urinal. The dogs at their old tricks gamboled about in groups among the playing children. A band of Senegalese, nearly all wear- ing proletarian blue, were hanging round the entrance of a little cafe in striking, insouciant ease, talking noisily and laughing in their rich-sounding language. A stumpy fat cocotte and a tall one entered the Monkey Bar, and the loud voice of the pianola kicking out a popular trot rushed across the square.

Suddenly the square emptied before an onrushing com- pany of white laborers, led by a stout, bull-bodied man, heading for the little group of Senegalese. The group of Senegalese broke up and scattered, leaving two of their number knocked down, and one of the white at- tackers who had caught a clout in the head. At that moment, Bugsy and Dengel, coming from the docks, appeared at the southwest corner of the square, just as one of the blacks was felled.

"He — ey! You see that theah! You see that!" Bugsy cried, and to his amazement the big white man, followed by his gang, came charging toward him. Mili- tant by nature and always ready to defend himself, Bugsy exclaimed : "Hey — hey! Now what they coming to mess with me for?" And he stood his ground, on guard. But when he saw the whole gang coming unswervingly down

BANJO 72

upon him, he wavered, backed a few steps, then turned and ran nimbly like a rat up one of the dark alleys.

Dengel was soft with the wine of the docks and, com- prehending nothing of what was in the air, stood sway- ing in his tracks where he was struck a vicious blow in the face that felled him.

As suddenly as it had commenced, the onslaught was ended. Bugsy and Dengel went to the African cafe where some of the Senegalese had gathered. Banjo and Ray also went there. They had seen the eruption from a cafe in the square.

Dengel's nose was bleeding badly.

"It's sure counta you always getting in a fight that Dengel he got hit," said Banjo to Bugsy.

"Me! It wasn't no fault a mine. What was I to do, pardner?"

"Jest keep you' mouth shut and do what you done did at the critical moment — run ! What else was there to do when the whole damn ditch a white mens is after one nigger?"

"If them Senegalese had done stand up to it "

Bugsy began.

"They tried to, but what could five men do against an army?"

"But Gawd in heah'n!" exclaimed Bugsy. "I almost got like feeling I was in Dixie with the fire under mah tail."

"H'm. If it was in Dixie, you wouldn't be sitting there now, blowing a whole lot a nonsense off'n you' liver lips."

Ray was talking to the proprietor of the bar and a Senegalese, who was explaining that the trouble arose out of differences between the Italian dock workers and the Senegalese. There was much jealousy between the rival groups and the Senegalese aggressively reminded

73 MEETING-UP

the Italians that they were French and possessed the rights of citizens.

"There is no difference between Italians and French- men," said the barkeeper. "They are all the same white and prejudiced against black skin."

"Cy est pas vraly pas vrai," a tall Senegalese seaman jumped to his feet. "Ca ri existe pas en France**

"It exists, it exists all right," insisted the patron. He was small and eager and wore glasses and a melancholy aspect. "France is no better than America. In fact, America is better every time for a colored man."

Upon that a clamorous dispute broke out in Senegalese and French, interspersed with scraps of English. Ray sat back, swallowing all of it that he could understand. The proprietor was a fervid apostle of Americanism and he warmed up to defend his position. He praised Amer- ican industry, business, houses, theaters, popular music, and progress and opportunity for everybody — even Negroes. He said the Negroes knew how they stood among the Americans, but the French were hypocrites. They had a whole lot of say, which had nothing to do with reality.

At this the Senegalese seaman bellowed another pro- test, punctuated with swearing merde on the Anglo-Saxons and all those who liked their civilization, and the pro- prietor invited him to leave his cafe if he could not be polite to him. The seaman told the proprietor that even though he had been to the United States and made money enough to return to Marseilles and buy a bar, he should not forget that he was only a common blackamoor of the Dakar streets, while he (the seaman) was a fils des nobles, belonging to an old aristocratic Senegambian family. The proprietor retorted that there was nothing left to the African nobility but "bull." Ask Europe about

BANJO 74

that, especially France, which was the biggest white hog in Africa.

The Senegalese started again, as if he had been pinched behind, to the defense of the protectress of his country. But the proprietor brought down La Race Negre on him. This was a journal for the uDefense de la race Negre" published by a group of French West Africans in Paris. The journal was displayed conspicu- ously for sale in the cafe, although some colored visi- tors had told the proprietor they did not think it was good for his business to sell it there.

But the proprietor had a willful way. He was rather piqued that the cafe was not doing so well since the first opening days. Before he bought it the clients were all white, and now no whites went there except the broken- down girls of the Ditch. He remarked white people peeping in at the door and not entering when they saw the black boys. The handful of well-dressed Senegalese who went there said they were sure the whites did not enter not because of prejudice, but because the black boys lounging all over the cafe were dirty, ragged, and smelly. The proprietor stressed his feeling that it was all a mat- ter of prejudice. White people, no matter of what nation, did not want to see colored people prosper.

Also, the proprietor was intransigant about La Race Negre because he had been rebuked for selling it by a flabby bulk of a man who had once been an official out in one of the colonies, and who now had something to do with the welfare of the indigenes in Marseilles. The white gentleman had told the proprietor that the Negroes who published La Race Negre were working against France and such a journal should be suppressed and its editors trapped and thrown into jail as criminals. The proprietor of the bar replied that he was not in West Africa, where he had heard the local authorities had

75 MEETING-UP

forbidden the circulation of the Negro World, but in Marseilles, where he hoped to remain master in his own cafe. As the proprietor said that the gentleman from the colonies left the cafe brusquely and unceremoniously without saying good-by. The patron exploded: "He thought he was in Africa. He wanted to know every- thing about me. Wanted to see my papers. Like a policeman. If it wasn't on account of my business I would have shown him my black block. Even wanted to know how I made my money in America. I told him I would never have made it in France.

"That was like a cracker now," he continued. "I never had a white man nosing into my business like that in America. But these French people are just like de- tectives. They want to know everything about you, espe- cially if you're a black. I'm going to let them see I'm not a fool."

Some time later the barkeeper learned from an indigene employed by his gentleman visitor that that personage had been very offended by the barkeeper's use of the word "master," that he had not remained uncovered when talking to him, and that the Senegalese lounging in the cafe had not saluted when he entered.

The barkeeper spread out the copy of La Race Negre and began reading, while the Senegalese crowded around him with murmurs of approval and that attitude of credulity held by ignorant people toward the printed word.

He read a list of items:

Of forced conscription and young Negroes running

away from their homes to escape into British African

territory.

Of native officials paid less than whites for the same

work.

BANJO 76

Of forced native labor, because the natives preferred to live lazily their own lives, rather than labor for the miserable pittance of daily wages. Of native women insulted and their husbands humili- ated before them. Of flagellation.

Of youths castrated for theft. Of native chiefs punished by mutilation. Of the scourge of depopulation. . . .

"That's how the Europeans treat Negroes in the colo- nies," said the barkeeper. The protesting seaman ap- peared crushed under the printed accounts. The bar- keeper launched a discourse about Africa for the Africans and the rights of Negroes, from which he suddenly shot off into a panegyric of American culture. He had returned from America inspired by two strangely juxtaposed ideals: the Marcus Garvey Back-to-Africa movement and the grandeur of American progress. He finished up in English, turning toward the English-speaking boys :

"Negroes in America have a chance to do things. That's what Marcus Garvey was trying to drive into their heads, but they wouldn't support him "

"Ain't no such thing!" exclaimed Banjo. "Marcus Garvey was one nigger who had a chance to make his and hulp other folks make, and he took it and landed himself in prison. That theah Garvey had a white man's chance and he done nigger it away. The white man gived him plenty a rope to live, and all he done do with it was to make a noose to hang himse'f. When a ofay give an- other ofay the run of a place he sure means him to make good like a Governor or a President, and when a darky

gets a chance I tell you, boss, Garvey wasn't worth

no more than the good boot in his bahind that he done got."

77 MEETING-UP

"Garvey was good for all Negroes," the barkeeper turned upon Banjo, — "Negroes in America and in Europe and in Africa. You don't know what you're talking about. Why, the French and the British were keeping the Negro World, Garvey's newspaper, out of Africa. It was because Garvey was getting too big that they got him."

"There was nothing big left to him, if you ask me," said Banjo. "I guess he thought like you, that he was Moses or Napoleon or Frederick Douglass, but he was nothing but a fool, big-mouf nigger."

"It's fellahs like you that make it so hard for the race," replied the barkeeper. "You have no respect for those who're trying to do something to lift the race higher. American Negroes have the biggest chance that black people ever had in the world, but most of them don't grab hold of it, but are just trifling and no-'count like you."

Banjo made a kissing noise with his lips and looked cross-eyed at the barkeeper. "Come on, pard, let's beat it," he said to Ray. Outside he remarked: "He grabbed his, all right, and growed thin like a mosquito doing it. Look how his cheeks am sunkin' ! I guess he's even too cheap to pay the price of a li'l' pot a honey. Why didn't you say some'n', Ray? I guess you got more brains in you' finger nail than in twenty nigger haids like his'n jest rising up outa the bush of Africa."

"I always prefer to listen," replied Ray. "You know when he was reading that paper it was just as if I was hearing about Texas and Georgia in French."

"But, oh, you kink-no-more!" laughed Bugsy. "Did you notice his hair? It's all nice and straightened out."

"You don't have to look two time to decipher an African nigger in him, all the same," said Banjo, con-

BANJO 78

temptuously. "A really and truly down-there Bungo- Congo."

"Get out!" said Ray. "You're a mean hater, Banjo. He's just like other Negroes from the States and the West Indies."

"Not from the States, pard. Maybe the monkeys them "

"Monkey you' grandmother's blue yaller outa the red a you' charcoal-black split coon of a baboon moon!" cried Bugsy, shaking off his rag of a coat. "I'll fight any nigger foh monkeying me."

" 'Scuse me, buddy, I thought you said you was Amer- ican. I didn't know you come from them Wesht Indies country. Put you' coat on. You and me and Ginger and Malty am just like we come from the same home town. We ain't nevah agwine to fight against one an- other."

"But you' friend there, he's West Indian, too." The little wiry belligerent Bugsy was cooling down as quickly as he had warmed up.

Banjo waved his hand deprecatingly : "He ain't in that class. You know that."

In the Bum Square they met Latnah and Malty. From the Indian steward of a ship from Bombay, Latnah had gotten a little bag of curry powder and a great choice chunk of mutton, and she was preparing to make a feast.

"Hi, but everything is setting jest as pretty as pretty could be I" cried Banjo. "I been thinking about you, Latnah."

"Me too think," said Latnah. "Long time you no come."

"The fellahs them, you know how it is when we get tight. All night boozing and swapping stories."

79 MEETING-UP

"Stray cock done chased off a neighbor's lot going strutting back home to his roost," added Malty.

Banjo kicked him on the heel.

Ray was going off to a little alley restaurant, but Banjo would not hear of that. Latnah supported him.

"Sure, you-all come my place," she said.

She cooked the food on the step just outside the door. The wood coal that she took from a bright-covered box and lit with a wad of paper, crackled tinnily in the stove, which was the bottom part of some throw-away preserve can, such as tramps use to warm themselves in winter.

The cooking touched pungently the boys' nostrils and made Ray remember the Indian restaurant in New York where sometimes he used to go for curry food.

"Oh, the wine!" cried Latnah. "Who got money?"

Banjo shrugged, Malty grinned, and Ray said, "I got a couple a francs."

"No, no you, camarade," she christened Ray.

"Who's to have money ef you no got?" Bugsy asked her. She fussed for a while about her waist and ex- tracted a note, which she handed to Banjo. She made Ray shift his position where he was sitting on the box from which she had taken the coal, and got out two quart bottles.

"You get one extra bottle vin blanc," she said.

"What for vin blanc?" demanded Banjo. "It's dearer."

"Mebbeyou' friend "

"No, I always prefer red," said Ray.

"All right, get three bottles vin rouge" said Latnah, counting over her guests with a quick birdlike nodding.

"No forget change," she called after Banjo, tramp- ing heavily down the stairs.

BANJO 80

"Not much change coming outa ten francs," he flung back.

"It's no ten; it's twenty," she said. "Don't let the whites rob you."

"Sweet nuts, ef it ain't!" exclaimed Banjo. "All right, mamma. I got you."

When Banjo returned with the wine he forgot to hand over the change. Latnah drew the cot into the middle of the little room and, spreading newspapers, she served the feast on it. The boys ranged themselves on each side of the cot, Latnah sitting where she could lean a little against Banjo. Ginger came in when they were in the middle of the feast.

"Whar you been? We been looking for you all over," said Malty.

"I was cruising around," said Ginger, "but Ise right here with you, all right. What it takes to find you when there's a high feeding going on Ise got right here." He pointed to his nose.

"Sure, youse got a combination of color there," said Banjo, "that oughta smell out lots a things in this heah white man's wul'."

"Chuts, combination!" said Bugsy. "You got to show me that there's any more to it than there is to naturaliza- tion, that you and me and Malty is. Ginger here ain't nothing from combination but a mistake."

"What's that, you Bugsyboo?" said Ginger.

"You heared me, Lights-out," replied Bugsy.

Latnah rolled up the newspapers in a bundle and put them in a corner. They smoked cigarettes. Banjo fell into a talking mood and gave a highly extravagant ac- count of how he met Ray. The proprietress of the restaurant became a terrifying virago who would have him arrested by the police, if Ray had not intervened. And when he threatened to call in the police against her,

81 MEETING-UP

she begged him not to and handed over the change in tears.

"I got something for you," Latnah said to Banjo. "Bet you no guess."

"American cigarettes — or English?" asked Banjo.

"No."

"Oh, I can't guess. What is it?"

Latnah took a paper packet out of a cardboard suit box and gave it to Banjo. It contained a pair of pyjamas all bright yellow and blue and black.

"Oh, Lawdy! Lemme see you in them, Banjo!" cried Malty, who jumped up and made a few fairy motions.

"What you want waste money on these heah things for?" demanded Banjo.

"A man had plenty of them selling cheap," said Lat- nah. "Ten francs. I think he steal them. They good for you."

"You evah hear a seaman fooling with pyjamas?" said Banjo.

"Sure," said Ginger. "I used to wear pyjamas mah- self one time. It's good for a change. You' hide will feel better in them tonight."

Latnah tried to hide her coy little smile behind her hand.

"Plugging home, plugging home," chanted Malty to the air of the "West Indies Blues."

They were short of cigarettes and Banjo went off to get some. Banjo remained so long Bugsy and Ginger left to look for him. Ginger returned after a while, stuck his head through the door, and tossed a packet of yellow French cigarettes at Latnah. "Can't find that nigger Banjo anywheres," he said. "He done vanish like a spook."

"Like a rat into one a them holes, you mean," said Malty.

BANJO 82

Latnah became fidgety and melancholy. She tossed a cigarette at Ray. "Banjo is one big dirty man," she said.

"Oh, he'll come all right," said Malty. "He's broke."

"He no broke," said Latnah. "He got change of the twenty francs."

"Oh!" exclaimed Malty. And he slightly shifted his position where he was squatting on an old cushion, so that his feet could touch Latnah's. "Gee! Latnah, you' cooking was so mahvelous it makes me feel sweet and drowsy all over."

"You good friend, Malty, very good friend." And she did not change her position. "You more appreciate than Banjo."

"Oh, he's all right, though; but you know his way. . . . I ain't got the price of a room to stay up this end tonight, and I feels too good and tired to walk way back to the box car. I wish you'd let me sleep on the floor here."

Latnah gave no reply. Ray slipped out, saying he would see them tomorrow.

VII. The Flute-boy

A POTATO-SKINNED youth posed nonchalantly in the Bum Square, a flute in his hand, his features distinguished by a big beatific grin.

Banjo, passing through with Ray, saw him and re- marked, "He's a back-home, sure thing."

"You think so?" replied Ray.

"Sure. Jest look at the pose he's putting on. He's South Carolina so sure as corn pone is Dixie. Watch me pick him up. . . . Hello, Home town !"

"Hello, you there !" The three came together.

"Jes' arrive?" asked Banjo. "Youse sure looking hallelujah happy like a man jest made a fortune."

"Fortune is me in a bad way," said the flute-holder, "I've just gotten rid of all that I had." And he turned his trousers pockets out.

"You mean they just done rid you," laughed Banjo.

The flute-boy told his story. He had fine white teeth and red gums, and contentedly displaying them, he told his story of the "broad" and the Ditch, told it heartily as many other colored boys before him had done.

He began with how he had quit the "broad" after disputing with an officer. The "broad" was something like the one that brought Banjo to Marseilles. One of those rare slow-cruising American tramps that sometimes look in on Marseilles. The galley crew was Negro, with the flute-boy the only "blond" among them. Another of the crew was a West African deportee named Taloufa,

83

BANJO 84

who, slated to be paid off at a European port, had chosen Marseilles as the least troublesome.

The flute-boy and Taloufa were great chums. They were the most interesting persons of the ship. Taloufa Came from a colony of British West Africa, had attended a mission school there, and was intelligent. The flute- boy came from the Cotton Belt country, but his people had moved to New Jersey when he was a kid. He went to school in New Jersey and had finished with a high- school diploma. It was his first trip away from the States. Before he had sailed only coastwise, between New York and New England and New York and the South.

In high school he had learned a little composition French. He was enchanted to reach Marseilles, having heard about its marvels from older seamen. He wished to have a good spell of the town, but his ship was stay- ing just three days. He was serving in the officers' mess and he maneuvered himself into getting a reprimand from one of the officers.

"I told him off," the flute-boy said. "He called me a damned yaller nigger and I gave him a standing invi- tation to go chase himself."

For this offense the captain had the flute-boy up before the American consulate, but there he was not granted the permission to finish with the boy's services.

"American consul don't want no seamen hanging around this heah sweet wide-open dump," Banjo giggled, voluptuously.

"You bet he don't," agreed the flute-boy. "He told the captain to take me back to the ship and that I should watch my step. I told him I'd rather be paid off. But he said, 'Not on your life, mah boy. You go back home to your sweet 'taters and wat'melon. Gee ! I wish I was

85 THE FLUTE-BOY

back home now biting into one mahself.' He spoke that common darky language, kidding me, I guess."

The flute-boy returned with the captain to the ship and was put in the crew's mess. But before he had been given anything to do he was disputing with the donkeyman.

"I'm going to quit this dirty broad," he cried, and the captain was delighted to see the flute-boy go down the gangway with his suitcase. Taloufa was still aboard, waiting to be paid off the next day. The flute-boy had ten dollars, which he changed into francs. He took a room in a hotel in Joliette and went from there straight to the Ditch.

The flute-boy loitered, fascinated, around the mar- velous fish market of the place. Red fish and blue, silver, gold, emerald, topaz, amethyst, brown-black, steel-gray, striped fish, scaly fish, big-bellied fish, and curs and cats growling and spitting over the bowels of gutted fish. A great fish town, Marseilles, and here was the big central market which supplies (for nourishment and lotteries and what not) the little markets and sheds and bistros that stink all over the city, the slimy, scaly, cold-blooded things.

Fresh catches from the bay and fish transported from other ports. The fishermen tramped in in their long felt boots. The fish-women spread themselves broadly behind their stalls. And in bright frocks and thick mauve socks and wooden shoes, the fish-girls pattered noisily about with charming insouciant ease, two be- tween them bearing a basket, buxom and attractive and beautiful in their environment, like lush water-lilies in a lagoon.

The stuff of the groceries thick around the fish market was exposed on the sidewalk: piles of cheeses, blocks of

BANJO 86

butter, dried fish, salt herrings, sauerkraut, ham, saus- ages, salt pork, rice, meal, beans, garlic. Stray dogs nosing by stopped near the boxes. Cats prowled around. A sleek black one leaped upon a keg of green olives, sniffing and humping up his back. A laughing boy grab- bing at its tail; the cat leaped down, shooting into a dark doorway. A pregnant woman passing popped one of the olives into her mouth, smacked her lips with fine relish, and called the grocery boy to give her one hecto.

The flute-boy wandered among the mixed conglomera- tion of people, domestic beasts, and things. He had an air about him that, even amid that humid bustle, invited attention enough.

A roving-eyed fish youth, wearing proletarian blue, spotted him. He had an odd little stock of English words, just enough to serve the purpose of soliciting, but the flute-boy responded in French, happily proud to try out his high-school acquirement.

"Tu parle frangais tres bien," said the fish boy.

"Fraiment?"

"Mais out. Tu a un bon accent, camarade."

The flute-boy was overwhelmed with a peacock feel- ing. They were just a step from Boody Lane, which led inevitably into the fish market. A painted old girl, a fish in her hand, elbowed them purposely and went shaking herself mournfully into the alley.

"Ici on nique-nique beaucoup," said the fishy white with a nasty smirk, bringing palm and fist together in a disgusting manner to emphasize his words. And he showed his find into Boody Lane.

It was a few yards of alleyway with a couple of drinking-dens, a butcher shop, and hole-in-the-wall rooms where the used-up carnivora of the city find their final shelter. Dismal, humid rooming-houses inhabitated by

87 THE FLUTE-BOY

youthful scavengers of proletarian life — Provengales, Greeks, Arabs, Italians, Maltese, Spaniards, and Cor- sicans.

A slimy garbage-strewn little space of hopeless hags, hussies, touts, and cats and dogs forever chasing one another about in nasty imitation of the residents. The hub of low-down proletarian love, stinking, hard, cruel. A ditch abandoned by the city to pernicious manure, harmless-appearing on the surface. Yet ignorant sea- men tumbling into it had been relieved of hundreds and thousands of francs, and many of the stupid, cold-blooded murders of the quarter might be traced there. The little trick of hat-snatching was practiced there and the uninitiate, fancying a bawdy joke, might follow that gesture to the loss of his money or his life.

The white boy conducted the yellow toward one of the drinking-places where a pianola was rapidly hammering out a popular song. Near by were two policemen. One stood on the corner and the other paced slowly along the alley, eating peanuts. A young male, wearing rosy pyjamas and painted like a scarecrow, came smirking out of the bar and minced along beside the policeman.

"Ou tu vas?" asked a sloven woman, standing broadly in the door of the bar.

"Coucher" the policeman flung back at her.

The woman cackled with the full volume of her rau- cous voice digging her hands into her flabby sides and agitating her clothes so that she displayed all of her naked discolored pillars of legs. "Peut-etre, peuU etre, . . . On ne salt jamais." And she cackled again.

When the flute-boy entered the bar he ordered beer for himself and beer for his guide. The woman who served wanted a small bottle of lemonade-like drink for herself, and all the old girls of the place, crowding around

BANJO 88

the flute-boy, took the same drink. The flute-boy thought the stuff was cheaper than beer and said, with a grin, "Go ahead;'

But when he was ready to leave he received a bill for four hundred and seventy-five francs. He cried out that he would not pay. It was too much. The patrone showed him her price list. Forty francs a bottle for the lemonade-like drink. The flute-boy said he could not pay. They tried to take his purse. He hugged the pocket. They called the police. The two policemen that he had seen outside the place came in and told him he had to pay. They told him that if he was not satis- fied he could lodge a complaint at the police station — afterward. The flute-boy showed his pocketbook. It contained three hundred and fifty francs only. The patrone took that and told him to return with the balance when he got more money. The policemen turned him loose, one of them exchanging a sly wink with the patrone as they walked away.

While the flute-boy was telling his story to Banjo and Ray, Bugsy and Dengel came surreptitiously up behind them in the shadow of the little palm tree. Bugsy made a sharp noise with his mouth and snapped his fingers, and the flute-boy started apprehensively.

"Hi, but you sure is goosey," laughed Banjo. And right there and thenceforth the flute-boy was dubbed "Goosey."

"I wish the fire that was lit by that fellow that got six months for it had burned the damned Ditch down," said Ray.

"Why, whatsmat pardner?" said Banjo. "The Ditch is all right. Nobody don't have to go rooting in Boody Lane unless you want to. Let everything take its chance, says I."

"Chance! What good is it, then, Banjo, when the

89 THE FLUTE-BOY

people who should get some fun out of it — the seamen — are always the victims? Think of the police making this boy pay. It's a crime and graft all round."

"All the policemen in this Ditch are in league with the women and the maqnereaux" said Dengel. "Some of the police have women in the boxons."

"Not possible!'' exclaimed Ray.

"What will you?" responded Dengel. "The police are just like everybody else, except that they are perhaps the bigger hogs. Their pay is twenty-five francs a day. What will you?"

"We should worry, pardner," said Banjo. "Look at Goosey. He's happy about it."

Goosey's grin gave an ineffable expression to his fea- tures.

"D'you blow the flute?" Banjo asked.

"I sure think that I do."

"If you blow it real good I can use you."

"In what way?"

"It's like this."

Banjo explained his intention to form an orchestra. There was one thing that he was sure of about this town, and that was that the people loved music. All over the Ditch you never heard anything but bad music. If we could get a set of fellows together to turn out some good music we would sure make a success of the thing. But it was a hard job getting them. The fellows with instruments never stay long in port. Malty could play the guitar, but he had no instrument.

"He would put it in hock if he had one," said Bugsy.

"If I get him one I'd sure see that he didn't, though," returned Banjo.

Goosey said that his friend Taloufa had a fine guitar.

"Oh, does he do? Jest lead me along to that darky. Where is he burying his head now?"

BANJO 90

"He's still on the ship," Goosey replied, "going to be paid off tomorrow. Hell fix me up so I don't have to worry."

"He's a sucker, eh?" said Bugsy. "That's why you done dumped all you hed in Boody Lane."

"Lay off the kid, Bugsy," said Banjo. "You got too much lip."

"As much as a baboon," added Goosey, laughing. "But where you get that 'kid' from?" he asked Banjo. "I don't see my daddy in you."

"Nevah mind, but youse a green kid, all the same," replied Banjo. "Anyway, I think we c'n do some busi- ness together, you and the flute, you' friend and the guitar "

"He's got a little horn, too," said Goosey.

"Sure enough? That's the ticket and me and mah banjo."

"Banjo! That's what you play?" exclaimed Goosey.

"Sure that's what I play," replied Banjo. "Don't you like it?"

"No. Banjo is bondage. It's the instrument of slav- ery. Banjo is Dixie. The Dixie of the land of cotton and massa and missus and black mammy. We colored folks have got to get away from all that in these enlight- ened progressive days. Let us play piano and violin, harp and flute. Let the white folks play the banjo if they want to keep on remembering all the Black Joes singing and the hell they made them live in."

"That ain't got nothing to do with me, nigger," re- plied Banjo. "I play that theah instrument becaz I likes it. I don't play no Black Joe hymns. I play lively tunes. All that you talking about slavery and bondage ain't got nothing to do with our starting up a liT or- chestry."

"It sure has, though, if you want me and my friend

91 THE FLUTE-BOY

Taloufa in with you. We aren't going to do any of that black-face coon stuff."

"Nuts on that black-face. Tha's time-past stuff. But wha' you call coon stuff is the money stuff today. That saxophone-jazzing is sure coon stuff and the American darky sure knows how to makem wheedle-whine them 'blues.' He's sure-enough the one go-getting musical fool today, yaller, and demanded all ovah the wul'."

"Hm." Goosey reflected a little. "I'm a race man and Taloufa is race crazy. Pity he isn't more educated. It's a new day for the colored race. Up the new race man and finish the good nigger. I as much as told that captain that when he tried to monkey with me. I told him I was in France and not in the United States."

"You were very foolish," said Ray. "That wasn't helping your race any."

"That's what you think, but I know I was right. France isn't like the United States nor Africa "

"And what's wrong with Africa?" demanded Dengel.

"Africa is benighted. My mother always advised me when I was a kid to get away as far as farthest from Africa. 'Africa is jungleland,' she used to say; 'there's nothing to learn from it but dark and dirty doings.' That's where I don't go with my friend Taloufa. He's gone Back-to-Africa. He thinks colored people scat- tered all over the world should come together and go Back-to-Africa. He bought a hundred dollars of Black Star Line shares."

"He did!" exclaimed Banjo. "And what does he think now they got the fat block a that black swindler in the jail-house?"

"Taloufa thinks better of him," said Goosey. "Gar- vey is a bigger man among colored people since they jailed him. Taloufa was at Liberty Hall for the big manifestation. And all the speakers said that the British

BANJO 92

were back of Garvey catching jail. They were scared of him in Africa and wouldn't let the Negro World through the mails. Taloufa can tell you all about it tomorrow. I don't know much. I am no Back-to-Africa business. That's a big-fool idea. But I'm a race man."

' 'If you think about you' race as much as you do about Boody Lane you'd be better off, maybe," said Bugsy.

They all laughed heartily.

"Chuts! All that race talking," continued Bugsy, "is jest a mess a nothing. That saloon-keeper is race talk- ing all the time, and he is robbing his countrymen them, too, giving them more rotten stuff to drink than the white man. He's wearing gold spectacles with a gold chain, and looking so like he can't see natural ; but mark me, when the white man done get through with him, he'll sure enough find his own eyesight and be walking around here like any other nigger."

More laughter, and Banjo asked: "Where do we go from here? The Ditch is getting ready to eat, and I feel like heavy loading. Whose the money guy tonight?"

"I got a little money today," Ray said. "You can all come up to my dump."

"Tha's the ticket!" Banjo applauded. "There's mah pardner for you, Goosey. Guess he could clean you up on that race stuff. Yet he ain't nevah hunting down no coon nor bellyaching race on me."

"But you're interested in race — I mean race advance- ment, aren't you?" Goosey asked Ray.

"Sure, but right now there's nothing in the world so interesting to me as Banjo and his orchestra."

Fill. A Carved Carrot

BANJO had the freedom of the Ditch and, as his pal, Ray shared some of it and was introduced to the real depths of the greater Ditch beyond his alley at the extreme end. Banjo had the right of way through Boody Lane and Ray could go through it now without his hat being snatched, as Banjo had a speaking acquaint- ance with all the occupants of the boxes.

One afternoon Banjo and Ray were playing checkers in a little cafe of the quarter, with a bottle of wine be- tween them. A demi-crone of the hole came in with a ready-made gladness which seemed as if it might change at any moment into something poisonous. She asked Ray to pay for a drink, calling the patrone of the bistro, who was in the kitchen. Ray agreed and she took a camou- flage absinthe. After drinking it, she leaned over Ray's chair, caressing him. Her touch imparted to him an unbearable sensation as of a loathsome white worm wriggling down his spine. And mingled with that was the smell of the absinthe on her breath. He detested the nauseating sweet-garlicky odor of absinthe. In the thing bending over him he felt an obscene bird, like the pink-headed white buzzard of the Caribbean lands that also exuded an odor like absinthe-and-garlic.

Abruptly Ray shifted away from the creature, who fell awkwardly over the back of the chair.

"I pay you a drink, but I don't want you to touch

me.

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BANJO 94

"Merde alorsl Why? I am not rotten."

"I didn't say you were. Maybe I am. All the same, it is finished. We won't talk about it any more."

"Gee, pardner, why you so hard on the old thing?" demanded Banjo.

"To protect myself, Banjo. You've got your way with the Ditch and I've got mine."

Banjo laughed. "Youse right, pardner. Gotta meet them as they come — rough. Talk rough, handle them rough, everything make rough. For way down heah is rough-house way and there ain't no other way get- ting by."

UI don't mind the roughness at all," replied Ray. "I like it. I prefer it to the nice pretensions of the upstage places. What gets me down here is the sliminess and rattiness. The only thing rough and real down here is the seamen and the Senegalese."

"And the onliest thing is the one thing, pardner, that we know."

"I wouldn't know if that's the whole truth."

" 'Cause youse tight-wad business. You know that Algerian brown gal got a scrunch on you?"

"I know it, but I'm scared of her."

"Why is you?"

"Because of her mouth. What a marvelous piece of business it is. But she'd just make tiger's feed of me. Anyhow, I am safe. She thinks I have the change to take her on because I have one good suit of clothes and keep clean. As I haven't, there's nothing doing. She isn't like Latnah."

"Latnah is all right, eh?" Banjo said, carelessly.

"Sure. She's the only thing down here I can see," said Ray.

"Oh, you done fall for her, too?" Banjo chuckled.

95 A CARVED CARROT

It was dinner time. They went to a Chinese restau- rant in the Rue Torte to feed for four francs each.

After dinner the boys came together in a cafe that they called Banjo's hang-out. Dengel, Goosey, Taloufa, Bugsy, Ginger, and Latnah, with Malty fooling near her, quite funny, grinning and gesturing like an overgrown pickaninny in amorous play.

Ray and Banjo came in and, relishing the situation, Banjo smacked his lips aloud and grinned so contagiously that all the beach boys, following his lead, imitated him. Malty became a little embarrassed, and Banjo said: "Go right on with you, buddy. Git that theah honey while the honeycomb is sweet foh you."

Vexed momentarily, Latnah turned away, humping up her back like a little brown cat against Malty. Although under the reaction of resentment she had loaned those fancy pyjamas to decorate Malty's limbs first, it had been no real conquest for Malty at all, for when Banjo did at last decide to take a turn in the pretty things, she felt the second-hand wear incomparably better than the first, and realized that for her Malty would never be able to hold a candle to the intractable Banjo.

The patrone of the cafe was quite taken by Banjo and his hearty-drinking friends, and she had given them a free option on the comfortable space at the rear for the use of their orchestra.

Taloufa had taught them a rollicking West African song, whose music was altogether more insinuating than that of "Shake That Thing."

"Stay, Carolina, stay, Oh, stay, Carolina, stay!"

That was the refrain, and all the verses were a repe- tition, with very slight variations, of the first verse.

BANJO 96

Taloufa had a voluptuous voice, richly colored like the sound of water lapping against a bank. And he chanted as he strummed the guitar:

"Stay, Carolina, stay. ..."

The whole song — the words of it, the lilt, the pat- tern, the color of it — seemed to be built up from that one word, Stay! When Taloufa sang, "Stay," his eyes grew bigger and whiter in his charmingly carnal coun- tenance, the sound came from his mouth like a caressing, appealing command and reminded one of a beautiful, rearing young filly of the pasture that a trainer is break- ing in. Stay!

"Stay, Carolina, stay. . . ."

"There isn't much to it," said Goosey: "it's so easy and the tune is so slight, just one bar repeating itself."

"Why, it's splendid, you boob!" said Ray. "It's got more real stuff in it than a music-hall full of American songs. The words are so wonderful."

"I took her on a swim and she swim more than me, I took her on a swim and she swim more than me, I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,

Stay, Carolina, stay,

Stay, Carolina, stay. . . ."

"Don't blow on the flute so hard; you kinder kill the sound a the banjo," said Banjo to Goosey.

"I can't do it any other way. A flute is a flute. It mounts high every time above everything else."

"I tell you what, Banjo," said Ray. "Let Goosey play solo on the flute, and you fellows join in the chorus. The chorus is the big thing, anyway."

"Tha's the ticket," agreed Malty, who was blowing the tiny tin horn and looked very comical at it, as he was the heftiest of the bunch.

97 A CARVED CARROT

So Goosey played the solo. And when Banjo, Talouf a, and Malty took up the refrain, Bugsy, stepping with Dengel, led the boys dancing. Bugsy was wiry and long- handed. Dengel, wiry, long-handed, and long-legged. And they made a striking pair as abruptly Dengel turned his back on Bugsy and started round the room in a bird- hopping step, nodding his head and working his hands held against his sides, fists doubled, as if he were holding a guard. Bugsy and all the boys imitated him, forming a unique ring, doing the same simple thing, startlingly fresh in that atmosphere, with clacking of heels on the floor.

It was, perhaps, the nearest that Banjo, quite uncon- scious of it, ever came to an aesthetic realization of his orchestra. If it had been possible to transfer him and his playing pals and dancing boys just as they were to some Metropolitan stage, he might have made a bigger thing than any of his dreams.

"I took her on a ride and she rode more than me, I took her on a ride and she rode more than me, Oh, I took her on a ride and she rode more than me, Stay, Carolina, stay, Stay, Carolina, stay. . . ."

Five men finishing a round of drinks at the bar went and sat at a table among the beach boys. They wore Basque caps. They applauded the playing. One of them was fat and round with a kind of rump round- ness all over, but it was the compact fatness of muscle and blood and not of some pulpy fruit. He bought wine for the players and asked Banjo to play more. Glasses chinked. Goosey shook his flute, wiped the mouth of it, and started.

A troop of girls filed in from the boxes, led by Ray's absinthe lady. They broke in among the boys and began dancing with them in their loud self-conscious way.

BANJO 98

But as soon as the music stopped they turned to the newcomers. Like sea gulls following a ship, the girls were always after the beach boys, whenever the boys had some paying business in hand. Between the sorority and the fraternity down there in the Ditch the competi- tion was keen. The girls amused themselves with the beach boys when the beach boys had paying guests that they wanted to get at, but when the beach boys, having no money nor any potential catch, attempted, with mas- culine vanity, to make jolly with the girls, they were ruthlessly given a very contemptuous shoulder — espe- cially if there were any possibility of a "prize" in sight — some white thing prejudiced against the proximity of black beach boys and envious of their joy.

The girls obtained drinks from the white seamen — enough to warm them up to work for more substantial favors. But on this occasion the seamen were limiting themselves to wine and song. However, after a little well-managed, persistent persuasion, one of them, a swarthy, thin-faced, middling type, was carried off.

His remaining companions called for more wine for Banjo and his boys. The girls, all but one, gave them their backs and went off shaking themselves disdainfully. The one who remained was the absinthe lady. Guzzling down his wine, Goosey fondled his flute again.

"I took her on a jig and she jigged more than me, I took her on a jig and she jigged more than me, Oh, I took her on a jig and she jigged more than me! Stay, Carolina, stay. . . ."

The playing was so good that it stirred the very round sailor to get a little nearer to the musicians. And when the music stopped he put a fraternal arm round Goosey's shoulder. Banjo grinned at them comically and drawled in rough-ripe accents: "I'm a rooting hog!"

99 A CARVED CARROT

"And I'm a dog," said Goosey in a giggling fit, and he chanted the little fairy song:

"List to me while I sing to you Of the Spaniard that ruined my life. . . ."

"Come on, git on to that theah flute, " said Banjo, affecting a rough manner with him.

"What about the 'West Indies Blues'?" suggested Goosey.

"Why no play 'Shake That Thing'?" said Dengel.

" 'Carolina' once again," decided Banjo. "We'll do the whole show from start to finish and Ray'll tell us how it was. Eh, pardner?"

Goosey took up his flute and the round sailor sat down with his forefinger posed on his lip. The tout of the absinthe girl, an undersized, mangy-faced man of dead glassy eyes, and wearing proletarian blue, looked in at the bistro and beckoned to her. She went to the entrance and he handed her something and slunk off. It was an enormous carrot, out of the fertile peasant soil of Provence, crudely carved.

The girl went back to the rear and thrust the carrot under the nose of the tight-round sailor. He reddened and, crying, "Slut!" cuffed the girl full in the face, and as she fell he drove a kick at her. The girl shrieked.

The patrone rushed quickly to the door and locked out the crowd that was gathering. In a moment the girl picked herself up and the patrone's man, a docker who had come in during the evening, let her out and closed the door again. The crowd dispersed.

"Stay, Carolina, stay. . . ."

The sailor who had slapped the girl stood the beach boys some more wine.

BANJO ioo

"It's a rough life, pardner," Banjo said to Ray. "Got to treat 'em rough, all right, or they'll walk all ovah you."

"I woulda choked her to death with these black hands of mine," said Ray.

The swarthy sailor who had gone out returned with his girl and bought her a liqueur — a Cointreau. Soon after the five men left. They had gone a few paces only up the alley when two shots barked out, precipitat- ing the beach boys to the door of the bistro. The plump round sailor came running back.

"They have killed my comrade! They have killed my comrade!" he cried. Two bicycle policemen came sprinting from the waterfront. From out of the sinister houses and bistros the same curious crowd was gathering again, but there was not a witness who had seen the murderer nor could tell whence the shots came. The four sailors stood over their prostrate comrade, the swarthy one who had bought the girl the Cointreau. The bullets, really intended for the round one, had clean finished him.

IX. Taloufa's Shirt-tail

TALOUFA came from the Nigerian bush. He had attended a mission school where he learned reading, arithmetic, and writing. He was taken to Lagos by a minor British official. And when the Englishman was returning to England he took Taloufa along as a "boy." Taloufa was thirteen years old at that time. For nearly three years he served his master in a Midland town. Then he got tired of it, full fed up of seeing white faces only. He ran away to Cardiff, where he found more contentment among the hundreds of colored seamen who live in that port. And young, fresh, and naive, he be- came a great favorite among the port girls. He shipped to sea as a "boy," making Cardiff his home. He was there during the riots of 19 19 between colored and whites, and he got a brick wound in the head.

He went to America after the riots and jumped his ship there. He lived in the United States until after the passing of the new quota immigration laws, when, the fact of his entering the country illegally getting known, he was arrested and deported. In America he had joined the Back-to-Africa crusade and was a faithful believer in the Black Star Line bubble, the great dream of 7 commerce that was to link Negroes of the New World J with those of Africa. He bought shares in it and, al- though the bubble burst with the conviction and imprison- ment of the leader for fraudulent dealings, Taloufa still believed in him and his ideas of Back-to-Africa.

101

BANJO 102

Taloufa maintained that the Back-to-Africa propa- ganda had worked wonders among the African natives. He told Ray that all throughout West Africa the natives were meeting to discuss their future, and in the ports they were no longer docile, but restive, forming groups, and waiting for the Black Deliverer, so that, becoming aroused, the colonial governments had acted to keep out all propaganda, especially the Negro World, the chief organ of the Back-to-Africa movement.

"The Black Deliverer has delivered himself to the ofays' jail-house," said Ray.

"It's the damned English that got him there," said Taloufa.

Taloufa firmly believed the rumor, current among Negroes, that representatives of the British Intelligence Service had instigated the prosecution and conviction of Marcus Garvey in the United States.

However, Taloufa had no immediate intention of re- turning to West Africa. It was his first trip to this great Provengal port of which he also had heard and dreamed much. And after tasting it for a while he ex- pected to go on to England.

He had at once fallen in with the idea of Banjo's orchestra. Unlike Goosey, he was not squeamish about the choice of music. He loved all music with a lilt, and especially music that was heady with sensuousness. Banjo found it easy to work along with him. If Taloufa had a little word to say about Back-to-Africa, Banjo would listen deferentially, and for his answer refer him to Ray.

"I ain't edjucated, buddy. Ask mah pardner, Ray."

The day following their big musical night, Banjo took Taloufa down to look the breakwater over. Returning from Joliette to the Vieux Port in the afternoon, they stopped in a bistro of the Place de Lenche for a cool guzzle of wine. The Place de Lenche is midway be-

103 TALOUFA'S SHIRT-TAIL

tween Joliette and the Bum Square. The Quartier Reserve slopes up a somber crisscross of alleys to its edge, where it ends.

Finishing their bottle, the boys started down one of the alleys into the Ditch, when they were attracted by a striking girl framed in front of a bistro. She was straight, boyish, and carrot-headed. And she stood right- arm akimbo and the left up against the jamb of the door, between her fingers a cigarette at which she whiffed with an infinitely bored mechanical manner. A young Chinese, leaning against a lamppost a little farther down on the opposite side of the alley, was beckoning to her. Lizard-like, excessively slim and hipless, his smooth buff- yellow countenance was rigidly immobile, but the balls of his eyes behind the curious little slits were burning with rage.

"Gawd on his golden moon! What a saucy-looking doll that one is!" Banjo exclaimed.

"I ain't studying any kelts," replied Taloufa.

"Watch her and that sweet chink. She's scared a him."

Not a muscle of the Chinese youth's face twitched as the girl went slowly, reluctantly toward him. He stood fixed in his tracks until she came to him, her toes up to his toes, her face almost touching his face. Then he said something to her, his lips barely moving, and as she opened her mouth to reply he lifted his knee and drove a terrific kick into her belly. The girl fell back- ward with a shriek on the cobblestones.

A policeman then coming down from the Place de Lenche, bicycle in hand, rushed over, and apprehended the Chinese. Immediately the girl picked herself up and grabbed the arm of the youth, crying to the police- man: "Leave him alone! Leave him alone!" The policeman left them a little shamefacedly as the gang

BANJO 104

of spectators that had quickly gathered laughed de- risively.

"Sale vache au roulette" said the Chinese boy, and putting the girl before him he said, "Go on," and began kicking her all the way down into the Ditch. And sub- dued, without a whine, she went. A little knot of pasty- faced kids frisked about and, laughing, cried: "Chinois! Chinois!"

"She honors and obeys her boss all right," Taloufa remarked, dryly.

"They're the only real sweetbacks in this Ditch, them Chinese," said Banjo. "The only ones kain bring you a decent change a suit and strut the stuff like a fellow back home."

Taloufa went to the Antilles Restaurant for dinner. Banjo had taken a dislike for that restaurant and would not go there. Taloufa promised to meet him after din- ner at the beach boys' cafe on the other side of the Bum Square, where they would play.

Taloufa had not gone Back-to-Africa in ideas only, but also in principle . . . and nature. He put up at the Antilles because it was a hotel primarily for Negroes (although it did not at all exclude the little pinks of the Ditch who went there for chocolate trade and brought in business), owned by a Negro couple.

The Antilles Restaurant was right off the Bum Square. It was situated in one of the narrowest, dampest, and most rubbishy of the alleys, but as you entered it you were stirred by the warm cheerfulness of the little oblong place. With its high narrow benches and painted walls it had something of the aspect of a Greenwich Village den. And, if you knew anything of the cooking of the West Indies with its rice-and-Congo-peas dishes, fish fried in cocoanut oil and annatto-colored sauces, you

105 TALOUFA'S SHIRT-TAIL

would be charmed by the pepper-pot flavor of the place. . . .

The customers were colored seamen, soldiers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, a few from Madagascar, and three brown girls. During the dinner a brown, jolly- faced soldier played an accordion while a Martinique guide and sweetman, who was sweet in the Ditch for every purchasable thing, was shaking a steel pipe, about the size of a rolling-pin, containing something like beans or sand grains. The curious thing went beautifully with the accordion.

They played the "beguin," which was just a Martinique variant of the "jelly-roll" or the Jamaican "burru" or the Senegalese "bombe." The tall, big-boned patrone started the dancing. She radiated energy like a boiler giving off steam. She danced with a whopping sergeant, talking all the time the Martinique dialect in a deep voice of the color and flavor of unrefined cane sugar. She was easily the central figure, making the girls look like dancing attendants. It was an eye-filling ensemble of delicious jazzing, and the rhythm of it went tickling through the warm blood of Taloufa, who was still smack- ing his lips over his sausage-and-rice, tempered with a bottle of old Bordeaux.

"Beguin," "jelly-roll," "burru," "bombe," no matter what the name may be, Negroes are never so beautiful and magical as when they do that gorgeous sublimation of the primitive African sex feeling. In its thousand varied patterns, depending so much on individual rhythm, so little on formal movement, this dance is the key to the African rhythm of life. . . .

In company with a pretty Provengale, the Arab-black girl came in. Her hair stood up stiff, thick and exciting. Her mouth was like a full-blown bluebell with a bee on its rim, and her eyes were everywhere at once, roving

BANJO 106

round as only Arab eyes can. She had disappeared since the night of her glorious performance at the "Shake- That-Thing" festival and was just this day returned to Marseilles again.

Taloufa saw her for the first time and fell for her. Their eyes met, his a question, hers a swift affirmative, and he went to dance with her. There was no common language between them, but what did that matter? Ta- loufa's swelling emotion was eloquent enough. And mingled with that emotion was the patriotic feeling of kinship with his pick-up that made him do the "begum'* with a royal African strut.

After that dance they sat together, the girl choosing a bottle of mousseux for the treat. . . . Taloufa was filling the glasses from a second bottle when Banjo en- tered in search of him.

"For the love of a liT piece!" Banjo cried. "Ain't you coming to play noneatall tonight, buddy?"

Not understanding, but guessing that Banjo wanted to get Taloufa away, the girl looked at him in a hostile manner. She knew, of course, that Banjo was on the beach.

"You gotta carry on without me tonight," Taloufa said in a thick, ripe-brown voice, slowly, pointlessly fingering his guitar.

"Get outa that," said Banjo. "You ain'ta gwine to drop a fellah flat like that. Come and give us a hand. You got all the balance a the night foh sweet flopping. Ray's got two ofays with him and I wanta turn loose some'n' splendacious foh them. Them's English and might hulp us some. A fellah nevah know his luck. Theyse done some moh running around the wuf jest lak you and me and Malty, and they knows every knowingest place in this white man's Europe."

107 TALOUFA'S SHIRT-TAIL

"But IVe got this sweet business with me," objected Taloufa.

"Man, tell her you'll see it later. I'll fix it up with her. This is Marcelles. Everything wait on you down to Time himse'f when youse gotta roll on you."

It was not so easy to get Taloufa away from the girl, but Banjo managed it, making eloquent promises of re- turning him to the Antilles.

"You come back without fail," said the girl as Banjo opened the door.

"Youse clean gone on her, eh?" remarked Banjo as they went along the Bum Square.

"She's a bird of a brown," was Taloufa's response.

"Watch out! Our own color is the most expensive business in this sweet burg. Ise one spade can live with- out prunes when I ain't in chocolate country. You see Latnah. I got her all going mah own way becazen Ise one independent strutter."

"I've noticed all right you aren't foolish about her," agreed Taloufa. "Malty's more that way. But I'm different from you. I haven't got any appreciation at all for the kelts."

"You're joking," exclaimed Banjo, laughing. "You ain't telling me that you done gone all the way back home to Africa even by that most narrow and straitest road that a human mortal was nevah made to trod?"

"I'm not kidding at all," responded Taloufa. "I'm foursquare one hundred per cent African."

At the hangout Bugsy, Goosey, Ginger, Dengel, Malty, and Ray with his two guests were waiting. They were two Britishers who lived uptown, but were frequently down in the Ditch. Ray had met them by one of the tourist bureaus of the Cannebiere. Like himself, they were always traveling. But they had been staying for some length of time in Marseilles. Ray knew nothing

BANJO 108

about them yet — what hobby they pursued and what they were doing in Marseilles. They spoke cultivated English and the taller of the two had a colonial accent that Ray could not place. At the hangout they treated the beach boys, and the girls that their presence attracted there, to the best liqueurs and fines in the place.

"He was just falling down for a wonderful brown," cried Banjo as he entered with Taloufa, "but I carried him right off away from it."

The old bistro shook with everybody's laughter.

"Which one a them was it?" demanded Malty.

"That saucy-lipped, shakem-shimmying sweet mam-ma."

"The dawggonest, hardest, and dearest piece a brownness in this bum hussy," said Bugsy.

"Now Ise got mah man, we'll play 'Carolina' for yo- all," Banjo announced.

"I took her on a jig and she jigged more than me. . . ."

Lustily Goosey fluted it and the boys charged mightily into the chorus.

"Stay, Carolina, stay. . . ."

The Britishers demanded champagne for the boys. The bistro-keeper had only vins mousseux, Clairette, and Royal Provence. They made her send her husband out for champagne. He returned with four bottles of white- label Mercier.

"That's better," said the taller white. "I hate the vile taste of those sickly-sweetish mousseux wines."

Between intervals of champagne-swilling the boys played and danced. "Carolina," "Mammy-Daddy," "That's My Baby," "Shake That Thing," "The Garvey Blues," and all the "blues" that Banjo's memory could rake up.

lop TALOUFA'S SHIRT-TAIL

When the Britishers left the bistro there was still champagne in the bottles, and by the time the boys were finished, they were all posing in attitudes of soft ecstasy.

In the Bum Square, Latnah appeared and hung on to Banjo. The group began to break up, every man to his own dream! Taloufa was all in a haze of intoxica- tion, but he remembered his rendezvous with the girl at the Antilles bar. Latnah and Banjo went along with him, but when they got there the Antilles was closed.

Returning to the Bum Square, they found Malty, Bugsy, and Ginger, undecided about their aims, swaying softly in their tracks.

"Let's all have a chaser of some'n'," suggested Banjo.

"No, no," protested Latnah. "It too late and you-all saoul."

"Shut up," said Banjo. "This is a man's show."

They walked a little along the quay and into a cafe. And there was Taloufa's girl disdainfully drinking beer with a white corporal, who seemed broke and quite fed up with the business of life, because a common soldier could not enjoy its pleasures when he was far away from pay day.

The girl brightened' up with a smile and brusquely left the soldier to take charge of Taloufa, whose legs were like reeds under him. She had been much put out that he had not returned to the Antilles. She had even changed for the occasion and was wearing a wine-colored frock, all soft and gleaming. Her crinkly hair was done up in the shape of a bowl, and in her buxom beauty and the magnetic aura of fascination around her she looked like some perfect marvel of mating between amber- skinned Egypt and black Sudan.

Malty took Taloufa's guitar. "I wanta play some moh," he droned in a singsong. "I ain't noways sleepy."

BANJO no

The girl went off with Taloufa.

Outside, Latnah said to Banjo : "She no good girl for your friend. I know her. She very wicked."

"Oh ... she can't kill him," he replied. "Let's allez to turn the spread back."

Malty had reached that delightful attitude of inebria- tion when a man feels like staying the night through, tippling and fooling with boon companions. Bugsy, who had contrived to pass many of his glasses over to the other boys, was quite aware of what was happening, but Ginger was all enveloped in a brown fog.

"Let's carry on, fellahs," said Malty, "till the stars them fade out."

He had some money and they went into a little open- all-night cafe. Malty strummed softly on the guitar and hummed snatches of West Indian "shay-shay" and

"jamma."

"When you feel a funny feel, When you feel a funny feel, When you feel a funny feel, Get in the middle of the wheel.

"The daughter of Cordelia is going round the town — Sailor men in George's Lane after the sun gone down, Going round, going round Cordelia Brown. . . ."

"I love her oh, oh, oh. . . . I love her so, so, so. . . . I love the little-brown soul of her, I love the classy-town stroll of her. And every move she makes is like a picture to me, I love her to mah haht and I love her on mah knee."

They had finished four bottles of white wine tempered with lemonade when Taloufa came rushing in in shirt sleeves, his shirt-tail flying.

in TALOUFA'S SHIRT-TAIL

"She gypped me ! She gypped me I" he cried. "Took every cent I had and beat it."

"All you' money? Banjo said you had about three thousand francs !" cried Malty.

"How you mean rob you?" from Bugsy.

"Rob you — rob you . . ." Ginger singsonged.

All three of them spoke together.

"Cleaned you outa all that money?" Malty questioned.

Taloufa explained that he had been long-headed enough to leave two thousand five hundred francs at his hotel, but the girl had got away with all he had — over three hundred francs. Bugsy, scornful of his incompe- tence, interrupted him while he was talking :

"Git you' shirt in you' pants, mon, git it in. You ain't in the African jungle with the monkeys in the trees now. Youse on the sidewalk of the white man's big city. Git it in, I say."

Taloufa was too agitated to pay any attention. Gin- ger reached over and arranged his clothes for him.

"I was so boozy and all in I fell asleep," Taloufa said, "and when I woke up she was gone. I thought of my pocketbook right away, and looked in my coat pocket, but every nickel was clean gone."

"So you done got rooked foh nothing at all!" ex- claimed Bugsy. "My Gawd! The baboons them in the bush where you come from has got moh sense than you. And what youse gwine do about it?"

"I don't know," replied Taloufa.

"Don't know?" repeated Bugsy. "Why, lock her up, man ! Lock her up ! You ain't gwine a let that black slut pass all that buck to her white p-i, when we fellahs am hungry on the beach. Lock her up, I say."

Taloufa hesitated about the police. Malty was indif- ferent, but Ginger was flatly for letting the matter rest.

"You shoulda leave the money with us. Now she done

BANJO 112

had it I wouldn't mess with no police. Just as cheap be magnamisuch."

"Crap on that magnamisuch !" retorted Bugsy. " 'Causen you done make the same fool a you'self, you think everybody is a sucker like you.'*

"I don't want to arrest a girl of my own race," said Taloufa.

"In the can with race!" cried Bugsy. "A slut is a slut, whether she is pink or blue. You don't have to arrest her nohow. Jest get a policeman to get back that good money and let him turn her loose after you get it."

But Ginger, who was the only one who could make himself intelligible in French, refused to budge in search of a policeman.

"Let the blighting thing be," he said. "It'll soon turn sewer stuff. When the maquereaux in the Ditch finish with it, they pass it to them cousins in the sea."

Bugsy induced Taloufa to go with him to find a police- man. "You don't have to lock her up. Jest get you' money back."

They found a policeman and brought him back for Ginger to explain. Ginger explained, but he and Malty refused to go along to search out the girl.

"You scared a them lousy maquereaux" Bugsy taunted.

"Not a damn sight," declared Malty. "I ain't study- ing them babies. I was thinking personally of the prin- ciple of this heah algebra."

"That's some'n' sure said," Ginger applauded. "The principle of the thing is the supposition of its circum- ference. Now you, Bugsy, ef you was in that gal's place "

"You fiddling, low-down, wut'less yaller nigger!" swore Bugsy. "What you think I is to put myself in her

ii3 TALOUFA'S SHIRT-TAIL

place? You think Ise gwine be everything like you be- cause Ise on the beach? Not on you' crack!"

He went off with Taloufa and the policeman. He knew the house where the Algerian girl lived in an alley above the Bum Square. They routed her out of bed. They searched her room thoroughly. They found noth- ing. She pretended to vexed amazement that they should molest her. She had left Taloufa, she said, simply be- cause he had gone to sleep ! Bugsy urged Taloufa to jail the girl, but Taloufa refused and told the policeman to turn her loose.

When they returned empty-handed to Ginger and Malty on the quay, Ginger sat right down on the pave- ment and gurgled.

"I knowed you wouldn't find a dimmity dime," he droned. "When one a them gals make a getaway she pass that dough tutswit to her p-i, and he transfer it to a safe spot."

"I'm going back to the hotel," said Taloufa. "I am tired."

Dawn was just lifting the shroud of night from the face of the Ditch, turning silver-blue the shadows, lighting the somber fronts of love shops and bistros, the gray granite of the Mairie, the fish market, the fishing-boats, and the excursion boats in faint motion. Toward the Catalan baths the horizon was suffused by a russet flush. A soft breeze floated gracefully like a sloping wave of sea gulls into the walled squareness of the calm Vieux Port.

"Let's go down to the breakwater and sleep," Ginger yawned.

X. Story-telling

THE beach boys were at the Senegalese cafe. It was afternoon of a rainy day. Ray was trying to get some of the Senegalese to tell stories like the Brer Rabbit kind or the African animal fables of the West Indies. But the Senegalese were not willing to talk. Banjo had said openly that Ray was a writing black, for Banjo felt proud of that. The Senegalese got the infor- mation from Dengel and became a little suspicious of Ray, imagining, perhaps, that he would write something funny or caustic of their life that would make them ap- pear "uncivilized" or inferior to American Negroes.

Ray himself hadn't the habit of exhibiting his un- profitable literary talent in the workaday world that he loved to breathe in, for experience had taught him that many common people, like many uncommon people, fear- ing or hoping to be used in a story, are always unnatural and apt to pose in the presence of a writer. And, apart from modesty, he enjoyed life better without wearing the badge. That the badge, indeed, might be useful he was too often made aware, in a world of impressive appearances. But that was another matter. If, when alone, writing, he lived in an unconsciously happy state, he was also inexpressibly happy when he was just one of the boys cruising the docks or in a drinking revel.

Banjo had thought that the boys would take Ray's writing as naturally as he took it and everything else. But Goosey, for one, didn't.

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ii5 STORY-TELLING

"You mean to say you'd write about how these race boys live in the Ditch here and publish it?" he asked Ray. In speaking of Negro people Goosey always avoided the word "Negro" and "black" and used, in- stead, "race men," "race women," or "race."

"Sure I would," answered Ray. "How the black boys live is the most interesting thing in the Ditch."

"But the crackers will use what you write against the race!"

"Let the crackers go fiddle themselves, and you, too. I think about my race as much as you. I hate to see it kicked around and spat on by the whites, because it is a good earth-loving race. I'll fight with it if there's a fight on, but if I am writing a story — well, it's like all of us in this place here, black and brown and white, and I telling a story for the love of it. # Some of you will listen, and some won't. "-If I am a real story-teller, I / won't worry about the differences in complexion of those who listen and those who don't, I'll just identify myself with those who are really listening and tell my story.* You see, Goosey, a good story, in spite of those who tell it and those who hear it, is like good ore that you might j find in any soil — Europe, Asia, Africa, America. The/ world wants the ore and gets it by a thousand men scram- bling and fighting, digging and dying for it. The world gets its story the same way."

"That's all right. But what do you find good in the Ditch to write about?"

"Plenty. I'm here, and mean to make a practical thing of the white proverb, 'Let down your bucket where you are.' "

"You might bring up a lot of dirt." Goosey turned up his nose in a tickling, funny, disdainful way.

"Many fine things come out of dirt — steel and gold,

vj

BANJO 116

pearls and all the rare stones that your nice women must have to be happy."

"Why don't you write about the race men and women who are making good in Paris ?"

"I'm not a reporter for the Negro press. Besides, I can't afford to keep up with the Negroes of Paris. And as they are society folk, they might prefer to have a society writer do them, like Monsieur Paul Morand, perhaps."

"You don't have to sneer at race society because you are out of it. It's a good thing. Our society folks are setting a fine example of a high standard of living for the race."

"I can't see that. They say you find the best Negro society in Washington. When I was there the govern- ment cvlerks and school-teachers and the wives of the few professional men formed a group and called themselves the 'upper classes.' They were nearly all between your complexion and near-white. The women wore rich clothes and I don't know whether it was that or their complexions or their teaching or clerking ability that put them in the 'upper class.' In my home we had an upper class of Negroes, but it had big money and property and power. It wasn't just a moving-picture imitation. School-teachers and clerks didn't make any ridiculous pretenses of belong- ing to it. ... I could write about the society of Negroes you mean if I wrote a farce.

"Gee ! I remember when I was in college in America how those Negroes getting an education could make me tired talking class and class all the time. It was funny and it was sad. There was hardly one of them with the upper-class bug on the brain who didn't have a near relative — a brother or sister who was an ignorant chauffeur, butler, or maid, or a mother paying their way through college with her washtub.

ii7 STORY-TELLING

"If you think it's fine for the society Negroes to fool themselves on the cheapest of imitations, I don't. I am fed up with class. The white world is stinking rotten and going to hell on it."

"But since you're a Negro, wouldn't it be a good thing for the race if the best Negroes appreciate what you write?"

"The best Negroes are not the society Negroes. I am not writing for them, nor the poke-chop-abstaining Negroes, nor the Puritan Friends of Color, nor the Negrophobes nor the Negrophiles. I am writing for people who can stand a real story no matter where it comes from."

"I don't care what you do, brother," said Goosey. "I was talking for the race and not for myself, for I am never going back to those United Snakes."

"What's that you call 'em?" Banjo filled the bar with a roar of rich laughter.

"You heard me." Goosey was grinning and shaking all over at his witty turn.

"Why, Goosey, you're all right!" cried Ray. "Where did you hear that? You didn't invent it, did you?"

"Sure I made it up myself," Goosey replied, proudly.

United Snakes. The simile struck Ray's imagination, giving him a terrible vision of the stripes of Old Glory transformed into wriggling snakes and the stars poison- ous heads lifted to strike at an agonized black man writh- ing in the midst of them.

"Now that one theah is a new exploitation in geog- raphy that will sure stand remembering," commented Ginger.

"What about this story business?" demanded Banjo. "Ain't noneathem cannibals gwine tell anything?"

Ray kicked his shins and whispered: "Watch out the patron doesn't hear you. It'll start a roughhouse and

BANJO 118

spoil everything and you know he hasn't much time for you."

Banjo growled a low-down defiance. "Well, I don't care a raw damn who don't want to tell anything, pardner. I gotta personal piece to tell without any trimmings atall and I don't care ef you publish it in the Book of Life itself and hand it to Big Massa as a prayer."

"You ain't got any shame, not to mention race pride, for you don't understand that," said Goosey.

A discharged Senegalese sergeant told a weird tale of his shooting up a barracks in Syria, killing a white private and an adjutant and escaping on an officer's mount into Turkey. From there he negotiated with his captain, who permitted him to return without standing trial or punishment.

A smiling scepticism greeting him blandly from all faces, he glanced round humorously, remarking: "You don't believe me, eh ? You don't believe." And he burst into laughter.

"I'll tell one of the African folk tales we know at home," said Ray. . . .

"Once upon a time there was a woman who lived in a pretty house in the midst of a blooming garden. It was the prettiest house and the best garden in the land. The woman was very old, unmarried, but she was stout and fresh. She had a stunted little girl in the house waiting on her. People said the girl was her grandniece. They said the grandaunt had bewitched the girl and taken her growth and youth for herself.

"The little girl's mother had died when she was a child and left her to her grandaunt to bring up. The girl had had a tiny, tiny red mole on her throat, which her mother had tattooed on it as a charm. The mole was made of blood that came from the heart of a crocodile, and so long as it was on the girl's throat she would be

u9 STORY-TELLING

happy and young and beautiful and never want for any- thing. But when the girl's mother died the grandaunt hoodooed the mole away and fixed it on her own throat.

"Before the girl's mother died she had pledged her to be married to the son of a chief in another land. And when the son reached marrying age, the dead mother appeared to him in a dream and told him what the grand- aunt had done.

"The great Witch God gave back to the spirit of the dead mother the power that she had had on earth. And she transformed the young chief into a beautiful bird of many colors, and he flew to the pretty house in the blooming garden. He flew three times around the house and pecked on the door, and, the little girl opening it, he flew into the room where the old aunt was sleeping, and pecked the red mole from her throat and flew right out.

"And when the grandaunt woke she was frightened to see herself all shriveled up, wrinkled, and gray-haired. She looked at her throat and the mole was gone. She accused the little girl of taking it. The girl said she had not touched the mole.

"The grandaunt said she would put her through the trial by water. And she took the girl down to the Dry River. She put the girl in the middle of the river bed while she stood on the bank and worked her magic.

"And the girl sang, wailing:

" 'Aunty I didn't do it, Aunty I didn't do it, Aunty I didn't do it oh. . . . Water, stay, oh!'

"The grandaunt replied:

" 'My pickney, I never say't was you, My pickney, I never say't was you, My pickney I never say't was you oh. . . . Water, come, oh!'

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"The river rose to the girl's ankles. She sang again and her aunt replied. The water rose to her knees. The singing continued. The water rose to her waist. The girl's singing grew weaker. The grandaunt's reply grew stronger. The water was at the girl's breast. She sang faintly:

" 'Aunty I didn't do it. . . . Water, stay, oh!'

"The grandaunt replied fiercely: "'Water, come, oh!'

"Now the water was at the girl's throat and the grandaunt shrieked aloud, writhing her shriveled body like a black serpent:

"'Water, come, oh!'

"And the river roared, flooding over the girl and sweeping her away. Far down its course the grandaunt saw a crocodile slip from the bank and gobble up the girl. And the grandaunt's bones rattled with her thin witch laughter of joy.

" 'She stole the crocodile's blood and the crocodile swallowed her up.'

"But when the grandaunt returned to her home, the house and the garden had disappeared and the people called her a bad witch and drove her from the land. She went wandering far away. And one beautiful sky- blue day the old withered thing came into a new country, and suddenly she found herself before the old garden with the pretty house. And standing at the gate was her grandniece, now a beautiful black princess, with the young chief, her husband, beside her.

"Hardly could the grandaunt recognize the stunted girl in the woman before her. But the princess said:

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'Aunt, you thought I was dead, but the crocodile was my husband.'

"The old thing fell on her knees and cried: 'Give me to the leopards, my child, for I was a bad relative to you/

"The princess replied: 'No, aunt, we're flesh and blood of the same family and you will come and live in this house and garden all the rest of your days.' "

When Ray had finished, nearly all the Senegalese wanted to tell a native story.

"We have the same kind of stories," said the ser- geant. "We have the trial by water and fire. . . . Let me tell a story."

The sergeant said:

"Leopard was a terror all over the land. He was always setting traps for the other animals and getting the best of them. And the other animals were so afraid of him, they couldn't move about with any freedom. They called secret meetings to make plans to get rid of leopard, but they were no match for him.

"One day leopard was trotting proudly along over the country when, passing under a tree, he heard a sweet musical sound above. Leopard stopped and looked up. He scrambled up the tree and found a hole out in the main limb from which the sound was coming. He put his hand in the hole and something grabbed it.

" 'Who's holding me?' leopard cried.

" 'Me, spinner,' a voice replied from the hole.

" 'All right, spin let me see.'

"And suddenly leopard felt himself going round and round, round and round, until he was almost out of breath when he was let go hurtling through the air, to fall yards away in a clump of bushes. There leopard lay stunned for some time. When he was revived he

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carefully marked the exact spot where he had fallen. Then he went off to a blacksmith and ordered six steel prongs, stout and sharp.

"Leopard returned to the place to which he had been hurled and set up the steel prongs there. He went back under the tree and waited for the animals that passed by singly. First came bear. Leopard told bear that there was sweet stuff up there in the tree, and sent him up after it. When bear's hand got caught, leopard told him to say just what he had said. And bear was spun round and round and sent whirling through the air to drop bellyways upon the steel prongs, and was in- stantly killed. Leopard ran to pick up the carcass and hide it away in the bushes.

"Cow passed by and also met his doom. Dog, pig, goat, rabbit, donkey, cat, gazelle — a troop of animals — all went the way of bear and cow. Then monkey came strutting along. Monkey had watched the whole affair from his perch in a treetop, and monkey was known as the one animal that could outwit leopard.

"When he came up to leopard he greeted him casually and was going by. But leopard stopped him.

" 'Hi, monkey, there's sweet stuff up there !'

" 'Where?' monkey asked.

" 'Up there in the tree. Don't you hear the music? Go on up and see. There's a hole full of sweet stuff. I tasted it.'

"Monkey ran nimbly up the tree and, leaping from branch to branch and looking round him, he declared he could not find any hole. Impatiently leopard climbed the tree and pointed to the hole. 'It is there!'

"Monkey turned backsideway and curled up his tail against the hole. 'I don't see it.'

"Leopard leaped over by monkey, shoved him aside, and pointing in the hole said, 'There it is !'

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"Monkey gave leopard a hard push. Leopard's hand went way down deep in the hole and was grabbed. Monkey ran cackling down the tree, his tail high in the air.

" 'Oh, my good monkey,' leopard wailed, 'something got me.'

" 'What thing?' monkey demanded.

" 'Oh, I don't know. Some terrible thing. Some evil thing.'

" 'What is the name of the thing?'

" 'I don't know.'

"The conversation stopped and monkey frisked around the tree, striking his face with his hand in mimic mood. At last leopard spoke again:

" 'Oh, good monkey, out yonder in that clump of bush there are some prongs set up. Won't you go out there and pull them up for me ?'

"Monkey went and fixed the prongs more securely in their place. Leopard saw them gleaming sharply out there in the sun and he groaned.

"At last monkey ran up the tree and bawled, 'Who's holding me?'

"Leopard began to howl.

" 'Me, spinner,' replied the voice from the hole.

" 'Spin let me see !' monkey bawled.

"And leopard was whirled round and round and sent flying through the air to land on the steel prongs. Monkey uncovered the pile of dead victims and called all the other animals for a big feast. Leopard they skinned, and kept the hide as a trophy. And all the animals made monkey king over them and the land was happy again."

"Now lemme tell you-all one story," said Bugsy. "One time down home in Alabam' there was a white

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man's nigger whose name was Sam. He was a house darky and he was right there on the right side a the boss and the missus. But Sam wasn't noneatall satisfied to be the bestest darky foh the boss folks. He aimed to be the biggest darky ovah all the rest a darkies. So Sam started in to profitsy and done claimed he could throw the fust light on anything that was going to happen.

"Sam had some sort of a way-back befoh-slavery con- nection with thunder and lightning and he could predick when it was gwine to rain. But all the same he couldn't put himself ovah the field niggers, 'causen there was a confidential fellah among them who was doing a wonder- ful business in hoodoo stuff. That other conjure man had Sam going something crazy.

"And so, to make the biggest impression on the boss folks and the plantation folks Sam started in hiding things all ovah the place and then challenge the other conjure man to find them. And when the other fellah couldn't find the things Sam would predick where they was.

"He found the guinea pig in the baby's cradle. He found the buck rabbit eating cheese in the pantry. The cock was missing from the hencoop and he found him scratching with the cat in the barn. Ole Mammy Joan lost her bandanna and Sam found it in the buggy house under the coachman's seat. She couldn't noneatall sleep a nights, and he found a big rat done made a nest in her; rush baid.

"Sam's fohsightedness made him the biggest darky evah with the boss folks and the black folks, and the news about him spread all ovah the country. And one day a big boss of another plantation corned to visit the boss. And the boss bet the other a bale of cotton that his nigger Sam could find anything that he hid away.

i25 STORY-TELLING

"The other boss took up the bet and had Sam blind- folded and shut up in one a the outhouses, and he made the darkies bring out one a them great big ole-time plan- tation pot. And he caught a coon and put it under the pot. And then they let Sam out and the boss asks him to tell what was under the pot.

" 'I feel a presumonition not to predick today, boss/ Sam said.

" 'But you gotta/ the boss said. 'I done put a bet on you and I know you can tell anything.*

Sam shook his head and, looking at the pot, said, 'This coon is caught today/

" 'Hurrah !' the boss cried. 'I knowed mah nigger could tell anything.' And he let the coon out from under the pot.

"At first Sam was kinder downhearted and scared. But soon as he saw the coon he got his head up and chested himself and started to strut off just so big and just that proud.

"And from that time the American darky started in playing coon and the white man is paying him for it."

"And who is paying the Wesht Indian foh playing monkey-chaser ?" Banjo asked.

"Hi, nigger, what you come picking me up for? I thought you said you was francais!"

"That's a white man's story," was Goosey's comment.

"I don't care a black damn whose it is. It's a fine story," said Ray.

"I'll tell you a real man story, pardner," said Banjo, "that ain't no monkey-coon affair."

"Shoot," said Ray.

Banjo said: "It's about a cracker that I runned into in Paree when I was in the Kenadian army and I was there on leave. He runned into me in a cafe on the Grands Boulevards. He looked mah uniform ovah, and

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although he seed what it was he asked me what I was, and I said, 'Kenadian soldier.'

"He ups and asks me ef I would have a drink and I did. And then he invited me ef I didn't feel any per- sonal objection to take a turn round gay Paree with him. I told that cracker that I was nevah yet objection- able to a good thing. Man, he was a money cracker as sure as gold ain't no darky's color, and he was no emancipated Yankee but a way-back-down-home-in-Dixie peck. That baby took me into the swellest cafes in Paree and wouldn't order nothing but the dearest drinks. And when we had drink and drunk and was one sure- enough pair a drinking fools, he said to me says he: 'Bud, we'll stick the whole day and night out together and if we c'n find any place in this damn city of the frogs that won't serve you-all, we'll wreck it together and I'll pay the damages and give you a thousand-franc note.'"

"The ole bugger! He said that?" cried Goosey.

"He said nothing else, believe me."

Banjo continued: "That young cracker was jest lousy with money. When he started to pay the first drinks he pulled