It was high, hot, golden noon. Blackened from head to foot, clothes, hands, neck, face, a stream of men from the coal dock filed along the Quai des Anglais, across the suspension bridge, and into the Place de la Joliette. There was no telling blond from dark, yellow or brown from black.

The men were half-day workers. They circled round the fountain in the square, stripped to the waist, and splashed water over their bodies. From the cleansing process emerged two black busts, and one was Banjo’s.

He was remarked by Ray, who had returned with Malty and Latnah from the vintage and were seated at a table on a café terrace across from the fountain, drinking tumblers of beer.

“There’s ole Banjo working in coal,” said Ray.

“Whar?” asked Malty. “Oh, he done find the Ditch again, eh? Couldn’t banjo it enough foh them ofays. He musta come back jim-clean and broke-up foh gone working in coal.”

“Something musta happened to him,” said Ray.

Latnah gave a cattish giggle. “Coal good for him,” she said. “He very good look working in coal.” She giggled again.

“What’s matter with coal, Latnah?” asked Ray. “I’ve worked in it, too, and I’m not ashamed, for it’s better than bumming if you can stand it.”

Banjo was passing without seeing them, on his way to a little tramp bistro. His air was rather melancholy. Ray called to him, and immediately he brightened up and came swaggering up to them.

“So you’re back here again,” said Ray. “I told you you wouldn’t like it. What was the matter you quit?”

“Because I wasn’t any monkey business,” replied Banjo.

“What do you mean, monkey business?” asked Ray.

“Just what I done said and no moh. I was tiahed of it befoh stahting in. It wasn’t no real man’s fun with them people like it was with that cracker that done blow me to such a swell time in Paree. It was like a ole conjure-woman business with debbil fooling in hell that didn’t hit mah fancy right noneatall, so I jest haul plug outa it and here I is. If Ise gwine to be monkey business it sure is moh nacheral foh mine in the Ditch.”

Banjo had returned to the Vieux Port about a fortnight after he had left it, to find the group dispersed.

One evening when he was playing at the Rendezvous Bar, he fell in with two Senegalese whom he had not known before. They invited him to a bistro in a narrow, shady lane near the St. Charles Railroad Station, where many Arabs and Negroes and white touts lived. The Senegalese ordered plenty of wine and expensive cognacs and liqueurs. They treated some bistro girls to drinks. They danced while Banjo played.

After midnight one of the Senegalese left the bistro⁠—to arrange a little affair, he said. When he did not return in half an hour the other Senegalese went in search of him. None of them ever returned. The patronne of the bistro said Banjo would have to pay for the drinks, and the amount was a hundred and ten francs. He had on the suit that Taloufa had redeemed for him and looked prosperous, but he had only two francs in money.

The woman seized his instrument and thus Banjo lost his magic companion.

“Imagine them two cannibals playing me a cheap trick like that,” commented Banjo. And he laughed. “The cannibals them learning the dirty li’l’ ofay tricks quick enough. I’ve been made a fool of by many a skirt, but it’s the first time a mother-plugger done got me like this and, by Gawd! they had to come black like the monkey them is to do it. Yessah-boy.”

With the loss of his musical instrument, Banjo determined to get himself a job. He went hustling, and far down the docks toward Madrague he found Dengel, who had shifted his hangout to a freighter that was undergoing repairs and manned by Senegalese. Dengel was in his usual state and looked as if liquor was oozing from his skin in a soft moisture of perspiration. Banjo learned from him that a crew of black men, some of whom knew Ginger when he was an able seaman who never funked any work, had got him drunk and stowed him away with them. That was the only way of getting Ginger to leave his beloved breakwater.

Banjo told Dengel he was hunting for a job and wanted him to help.

“What for a job?” demanded Dengel.

“Because I’ve got to work. I ain’t got no money. I done lost mah banjo. I ain’t got nothing left, so I jest nacherally gotta find anything that looks some’n’ like that hard-boil’ ugly-mug baby they calls a job.”

“Job no good. Good job no easy find,” said Dengel. “Why you no keep on as you use to?”

“Kain’t no moh. Gang’s all broke up and gone the cardinal ways that every good thing dead must go.”

There were two Senegalese section bosses on the docks who hired the majority of the Senegalese when there was work for them. One of them was always in a boisterous semi-drunken state. The other was a fine, upstanding specimen of black man with strong white teeth and clear eyes, a full, gorgeously-carved mouth, and smooth-shining ebony skin. His name was Sarka. Banjo had seen him a couple of times at the African bar. But he did not often frequent the Vieux Port quarter. He was married and lived in a more respectable proletarian district of the town. Banjo got Dengel to arrange a meeting between him and Sarka at the Rendezvous Bar.

Banjo took with him to the bistro his suitcase with a few chic articles of toilet in it. He had heard that the boys who had jobs often had to grease the palm of the section boss. Having been used to that in the United States, he was prepared to meet it. He had a few sous for wine and he relied on Dengel to help out his sparse French vocabulary.

With an apologetic gesture Sarka turned up his palms in reply to Banjo’s demand for work. He didn’t think it was possible. Work! It was difficult nowadays. There was a new law passed about strangers working in France. Banjo didn’t know that, eh! The hectic postwar period when there was more work than men to do it was passing now. Strangers who wanted work had to show a special permit.

The new law did not in any way affect those dock workers who were strangers. The majority of the little bosses were Italians and when men were wanted to load and unload ships, they took the men that were at hand. When work was scarce the strangers yielded place to the favorite sons, of course. And the favorite sons were naturally Italians, who were strangers in the unnaturalized sense, but not foreigners in the generally accepted sense.

Banjo chinked glasses with Sarka and Dengel, gulped down some red wine, and turned to occupy himself with his suitcase. He fished up a striped silk shirt and handed it to Sarka. Sarka’s eyes gleamed bigger and whiter in his jolly, handsome face. He had seen American seamen with those shirts that opened all the way down, just like the B.V.D.’s that one could put on without ruffling the kinks in the hair after combing them. He was eager to possess one. Now it was his without cost⁠—a silk one!

“Pour moi?” asked Sarka.

“Oui, vous,” responded Banjo, his forefinger punching Sarka’s heart. And then he nearly knocked him over with a gorgeous oblique-striped necktie, of the kind that college boys flaunt in America.

“Mais non!” exclaimed Sarka, and affectionately his hand sought Banjo’s shoulder.

“Oui, oui, vous take,” Banjo grinned. “Vous, moi, amis, bons amis.”

“Toujours amis,” agreed Sarka. “Demain, vous venez me chercher aux docks. Travail.”

Thus Banjo opened a way to work on the docks. And Sarka, who hoped to go to America some day, began learning English words from him. Some British West Africans of the Ditch asked Banjo to introduce them to Sarka. He did, and they, too, got work. Soon Sarka’s gang was English-speaking and he was saying to his men: “Get down,” “Come up,” “Time to begin,” “Stop,” and a few more boss words.

At the African Bar it was gossiped that Sarka had taken on the English-speaking hands in place of the Senegalese because he touched a five-franc graft every day from each of them. Besides, they were always swilling wine together in the evenings and it was the gang that paid. Banjo was Sarka’s friend and chief man, of course, and the gossip excluded him from the daily graft, but it was well known that he had given a bribe of fancy stuff to gain Sarka’s good will.

Dengel told Banjo all about the gossip and Banjo replied: “I ain’t worrying about them niggers’ evil lip. They c’n talk their jawbone loose. Ise used to niggers talking. What’s giving a man a shiert? Back home wese every jackman used to scrambling foh buying jobs. Peckawoods and niggers. It’s all the same. A shiert! Five francs! That ain’t no money. I done buy moh jobs than I can count up in the States. I buy them offn white mens and I buy them offn niggers. Them was big-money days when every man was after the other fellah’s skin. Oh, Lawdy! Life is a game a skin; black skin, white skin, sweet skin and all skin and selling one another is living it.”

Sarka did not boss his new gang very long. There were crosscurrents of rivalry and jealousy on the docks between Italians, Arabs, Maltese, and Negroes. Sarka got into a knife fight with two Italians, and when they were separated, he and one of his opponents had to be rushed to the hospital, dangerously wounded and streaming blood. It was that that sent Banjo down to working in coal.

The coal worker is a grim, special type of being, whether he is underground or under water or above ground. On the docks there was always an easy chance to work in coal. But the jolly beach boys never turned to coal when poor panhandling and hunger obliged them to think of a temporary job. Coal that made them blacker than they were and the flesh-eating sulphur were the two principal commodities they avoided. A cargo of grain or fruit was preferable when an overflow of cargoes in port gave them a chance. Coal was not in the line of the regular dock workers either. And so this general aversion saved derelict foreign drifters who wanted to work from starving on the docks.

The irresponsible, carefree Banjo became a steady worker in coal. Every morning he roused at five o’clock, got into his coal rags, and hustled down to Joliette to get into the first line of workers. Sometimes he had a full day’s work, sometimes a morning’s work, sometimes an afternoon’s work, sometimes no work at all. Days when he did nothing he sat drinking in a little bistro near Chère Blanche’s box in the Ditch. Reacting against the trick of the Senegalese that cost him his instrument, Banjo had made up with her again. So much messy fuss about skin color, he reasoned, and this life business ain’t nothing but a skin game with all the skins doing it⁠—black, yaller, white⁠ ⁠… what’s the difference!

Even the wine he drank afforded him little pleasure. He never got tipsy now in the exciting, guzzling manner of the free banjo-playing, panhandling days. As casually as ever he had returned to hard labor again and remained doggedly at it. Thirty and odd francs a day. Food, wine, a pillow at Chère Blanche’s. He existed now as if those glad camaraderie days had never been.

Ray found Banjo’s new condition exasperatingly melancholy and tried to talk him out of it. Days of drifting without purpose, not knowing what tomorrow might bring them, were altogether better, Ray argued, than the dirty-drab contentment in which Banjo was now burying himself. But Banjo had undergone a complete metamorphosis.

“The gang’s done broke up, pardner, and I done lose mah instrument. Good fun like that kain’t last forevah. Everything works out to a change.”

“But Malty and I are here. We can get together again.”

“I don’t think. I don’t feel habitually ambitious and musical no moh.”

“But you used to be so different. Why, the way you used to talk and act, living the way you talked! When I had the blues so bad and felt like chucking everything, it was you who made me screw up the courage to keep plugging on. The way you were your own big strutting self and to hell with hard life and hard knocks and one hard hussy in the Ditch. Now you’re nothing but a poor slave nigger in coal for une putaine blanche.”

“I was fed up with everything and just had to have some human pusson close to me, pardner. I ain’t back home where I could find a honey-sweet mamma, so I just had to take what was ready and willing. Life is a rectangular crossways affair and the only thing to do is to take it nacheral.”