In his little chambre noire in a lodging-house of the Ditch Banjo was bearing his pain. His kidneys were not functioning and his belly was as tight as a drum and hard as a rock. He sat on the little bed, hunched up in a clenched resistance, as if trying to hold the pain back from laying his body out. Sometimes he would lie down on his side, his back, his belly, sometimes slide to the floor, but always in that hard, huddled posture. Sometimes in his shiftings he could not repress a deep-down groan, but he bore his punishment bravely like a man⁠—one who knows that he must take the consequences of spurning the sheltered, cramping ways of respectability to live like a reckless vagabond, who burns up his numbered days gloriously and dies blazing.

“We got to get him into hospital,” Ray said to Malty.

He rushed out to find a taxicab. He found one in the Rue de la Loge whose chauffeur he knew. He had once been a sailor at Toulon and Ray had become acquainted with him during a winter he spent there. He had been of service to Ray in giving him the low-down in that interesting sailor town, and Ray had returned it by teaching him the right English phrases for his frequent picking up trips to Nice and Marseilles, where he met the right sort of tourists that helped eke out his wage pittance.

He had finished his compulsory service and was now, among other things, a chauffeur at Marseilles, where his English was invaluable to him as a chauffeur-guide on the docks and in the town. He greeted Ray familiarly when they met, but they were no longer friends. For Ray was always with the beach boys and the Senegalese and the chauffeur belonged to the touting set of the Ditch who hated the beach boys and the Senegalese, especially as their special field was being invaded and disorganized by the blacks.

Ray and Malty helped Banjo from the third floor down the dim, narrow, frowsy staircase and into the taxicab. The hospital was near a church on the hill above the Ditch. Ray left Banjo in the taxicab and entered the admission bureau. At the desk was a pale, thin woman with a nose sharp-pointing upwards. She was eating a sandwich. Ray told her about Banjo’s illness and that he would like to get him into the hospital. She replied in a familiar, condescending way and asked where Banjo came from. Banjo had declared that he was French, but as he had nothing to prove that and as his accent was so unmistakably Dixie, Ray said that he came from the United States. She asked Ray if he had a paper from the American consul sending Banjo there. Ray said no. She told him that Banjo could be admitted only by an order from the consul or the local police. Ray thought it was better to go to the police. He had had enough of the consulate with Lonesome Blue’s case.

But at the police station they wanted proof of Banjo’s residence in Marseilles. Banjo had nothing to show but a dirty picture card that a stowaway pal had sent him from Egypt. What the police wanted was an identity card and that no beach boy could get.

“The man is dying for want of medical attention,” said Ray to the police officer. “You won’t let him die because he hasn’t got an identity card.”

The police officer reddened and gave Ray a permit for Banjo’s admittance to the hospital.

When they returned the lady of the admission bureau had something more to say before she passed Banjo in. “You know, Sidi,” she said to Ray, “our hospitals here are all filled up with strangers, so that there is little place for French citizens. The consuls send us patients, but the foreign governments never pay for them. It is the French taxpayer who must pay.”

The boys had helped Banjo into the entrance and he was sitting patiently and silently on the lower step. While the woman was talking and before she had made out the necessary paper, a medical student came down the stairs and spoke to Ray. They had met in a café frequented by students. He was attracted to Ray, as he also wrote a little.

The woman, seeing that Ray was acquainted with a superior of the hospital, completed the formality of Banjo’s admittance with dispatch and politeness.

The student was going home, but he turned back and conducted Ray and Banjo to the emergency ward, into an atmosphere so full of kindliness, courtesy, and solicitous attention that the irritation of getting there was immediately wiped off the boys’ minds. There were two nurses, an intern, and another medical student. Banjo was put on an operating table and given first aid, which relieved him a little. The student stayed until that was finished. Afterward Banjo was conducted to a regular ward. The doctor said he would have to undergo a real operation.

Ray stayed with him until he was settled. As soon as Banjo was relieved, a little of the old vagabond color came back to him and he said, “I thought I was Canaan bound by a hellova way.”

“You thought right, maybe,” said Ray. “The little street leading up here is called Montée du Saint Esprit, which means Going up to the Holy Ghost.”

“Don’t mention that theah haunsting name, pardner, because I ain’t noneatall ready for him yet.”

Ray told Banjo about Lonesome Blue.

“That haunts back in this sweet poht again!” he exclaimed. “No wonder I done fallen ill, foh that nigger is hard luck. Don’t ask me how, but I know he ain’t nothing else.”

Banjo, like the other beach boys, was superstitious. Things they saw and people they met and shook hands with. The food they ate. They could tell on getting up of a morning whether their day would be lucky or unlucky, by the kind of thing or person they first met. Certain types of people, like Lonesome Blue, always brought trouble. Their superstitions were logical reactions.

As for Lonesome Blue, Ray fully sympathized with Banjo’s belief that he was a bringer of bad luck.

When Ray left the ward the chauffeur was gone, although he had not been paid. A couple of days later Ray saw him and asked how much was owed. The chauffeur replied: “Nothing at all. You were my good comrade once and now you help a comrade who is sick and you are poor. I don’t demand anything for the taxi.”

He invited Ray into a café for a drink and told him that he was going to get married in a short time. The chauffeur had a girl in Boody Lane from whom he got money, and he mentioned another in one of the maisons fermés. The girl he was going to marry came from the country. He boasted that she wore her hair long and did not use rouge.

One day Ray saw them on a café terrace in the Rue de la République and he was introduced. The girl was all the chauffeur had said besides being heavy, simple and possessed of no noticeable charm. Ray supposed that the chauffeur after dealing so much in ready-made attractive girls desired for a wife a type that was radically different. He was buying a piece of ground and a cottage in one of the suburbs and wanted Ray to ride out with him and his fiancée to see it, but Ray declined, pleading a rendezvous.

The chauffeur told Ray with the frankest gusto that, besides his legitimate trade, he had an interest in Boody Lane and a Maison Fermé and that he was employing all the tricks he knew to obtain his cottage and lot and settle down to a respectable married life.

He was merely one illustration of the sound business sense inherent in the life of the Ditch.

There was no mistaking the scheme of life of the Ditch, that bawdiness was only a means toward the ultimate purpose of respectability. And that was why it was so hard on simple seamen and beach boys who came to it with romantic ideas as a place of loose pleasure.

Ray decided that he could not think of going away without seeing Banjo through his operation. He had shared the boys’ pleasures and it was merely decent for him to share their troubles and do what he was individually capable of doing to help.

He had wanted very much to leave taking intact the rough, joyous, free picture of the beach boys’ life in the regimented rhythm of the Ditch. He felt that time, circumstance, and chance had contributed to fill it full of a special and unique interest that he would never find there again, and he wanted the scene to remain always in his mind as he had reacted to it.

But life is so artistically uncompromising, it does not care a rap about putting a hard fist through a splendid plan and destroying our dearest artifice. So the unwelcome reappearance of Lonesome Blue was the beginning of a series of events that enlarged and altered greatly the impression of the Ditch that Ray had hoped to preserve.

“As them doctors am gwina cut me up, pardner,” said Banjo, “I guess you’d better write back home foh me.” Facing the prospect of an operation, with, on one hand, his Canadian army discharge certificate which made him in a sense British, and, on the other, the fact of his deportation to France as a French citizen, Banjo’s thoughts at last reluctantly turned to America as home. His parents were long ago dead. He had only an aunt in a Cotton-Belt town. She had raised him and a brother who had died in adolescence. Banjo gave Ray that aunt’s address. He had last seen her in 1913 and did not know whether she had moved or was dead or alive.

Banjo also asked Ray to let Chère Blanche know that he was in the hospital. Ray did so, but Chère Blanche never stirred from her post to visit him. Latnah would not go to see him, either. She swore that she was finished with him because he was a man who had no race pride. But Malty got money from her with which good things were bought for Banjo.

The boys kept him supplied with cigarettes and sweets, although the beach was not a place of plenty now. Wine was not allowed. Ships were few and they were having the most difficult of panhandling times. But Ray was in good luck. He had sold a poem, and a friend of poets had liked it so much that she had sent him a gift of money.

One Sunday, a week after Banjo had been admitted to hospital, Ray and Malty took him a chicken dinner. Ray had bought the chicken and Latnah had cooked it. She protested weakly when Ray said he was taking a part of the dinner to Banjo, but she did not try to prevent him, and it was she who provided a bowl.

The Hôtel Dieu (so the hospital is named) presented the aspect of a gloriously macabre picnic on this Sunday noon. It loomed like a great gray Rock of Refuge on the hill above the Ditch. The ultimate hope of salvation for the afflicted. Below it was a church with a wooden Christ nailed to a cross in the yard. Across the street opposite the church was the police force. Patients who were not bedridden flocked out on the two tiers of verandas. Girls of the Ditch with bandaged eyes and broken mouths and noses, and touts with knife wounds and arms in slings, hobbling on crutches, all victims of the bawdy riot; hollow-cheeked youths limping by; poor pimply children of leaky, squinting eyes; ulcerous middle-aged men and women, and old ones learning to creep again. From the beds against the windows, red naked stumps of arms and legs were stuck up like grotesqueries. Into this scene entire proletarian and bawdy families, as well as friends, had come to share the sacred Sunday dinner with the patients. Their children were with them and each group gathered around the bed of the patient to gorge and guzzle red wine amid the odors of ether and iodine.

Banjo enjoyed his chicken feed and asked what was new in the Ditch. Malty told of some Indian seamen (coolies, he called them) who had come straggling down to the African Café from one of the love shops the night before. They complained that all their money was taken away from them and that they were turned out of the place. They had approached the police in the street, who pretended they could not understand them. So they had gone to the African Bar to ask if any of the blacks would interpret for them.

“I acks them,” said Malty, “why they ’lowed them kelts to get holt a that good money a theirs. And the best explanation one (they all speaks a turr’ble jabberway) he says because the kelts was such good spohts, kidding and laughing with them.”

“Laugh,” said Ray. “Nobody in this Ditch knows how to laugh. These people can’t laugh. They smirk at the color of money and the fools think that is laughing. They can’t laugh, for their mouths are too tight and their lips too thin. We Negroes can throw a real laugh because we have big mouths.”

“That can be true,” said Malty, “but them Indians ain’t much different to me. When they show their teeth
it’s like a razor blade. I don’t like it noneatall and I don’t trust no coolie laughing.”

Malty’s metaphor was striking. He had often felt even more physically uncomfortable among Indians.
Next to Negroes, the Asiatic people with whom he always felt at ease and among whom he always loved to be, were the Chinese.

“I can’t forgive the mean cruelty of this Ditch,” continued Ray. “Why the licensed houses with the police marching up and down before them if the seamen can’t have any protection? Are the places licensed for the benefit of the touts or the clients? Men coming off a ship after days and weeks at sea must need women. And the Ditch is the most natural place for the average seaman. I can understand a man getting in a pickle by a bad pickup on the street. But when he is robbed in the licensed places I ask what’s the good of them? You might as well have no licensed place at all, as in John Bull’s and God’s own, so that if you get caught in a sex trap you could take it as a private affair and not blame it on the authorities, as the fellows do that get bitten here.”

“Ain’t all the fellahs blaming nobody, pardner?” laughed Banjo. “This heah Lincoln Agrippa, otherwise Banjo, is one no-blame business. Of cohse, someathem houses is jest a trap-hole and them pohlice no better’n a gang a cut thwoat p.i.’s. But it’s the mens them that make the stuff such hard business. I know more about it than you does, pardner, ’cause Ise been moh low-down roughhouse than you. And you don’t know nothing of all what a pants-wearing bastard will do between welching on a bargain and running off and not coming across. Tha’s why the womens carry guns in them ahmpits and keep a lot a touts foh protecting them. You mustn’t fohget that their business ain’t no picnic. It is hard labor.”

Ray could not reply to this. He felt that there was something fundamentally cruel about sex which, being alien to his nature, was somehow incomprehensible, and that the more civilized humanity became the more cruel was sex. It really seemed sometimes as if there were a war joined between civilization and sex.

And it also seemed to him that Negroes under civilization were helplessly caught between the two forces. There was an idea current among the whites that the blacks were oversexed. He had heard it coarsely from ordinary whites and he had spoken frankly with intelligent-minded ones about it. He had also got it from things written by white people about the black.

But from his experience and close observation of Negro sex life in its simplicity in the West Indies and in its more complex forms in American and European cities, Ray had never felt that Negroes were oversexed in an offensive way and he was peculiarly sensitive to that. What he inferred was that white people had developed sex complexes that Negroes had not. Negroes were freer and simpler in their sex urge, and, as white people on the whole were not, they naturally attributed oversexed emotions to Negroes. The Negroes’ attitude toward sex was as much removed from the English-American hypocritical position as it was from the naughty-boy exhibition manner of the Continent.

Even among rough proletarians Ray never noticed in black men those expressions of vicious contempt for sex that generally came from the mouths of white workers. It was as if the white man considered sex a nasty, irritating thing, while a Negro accepted it with primitive joy. And maybe that vastly big difference of attitude was a fundamental, unconscious cause of the antagonism between white and black brought together by civilization.

The beginning of the cold season brought the boys straggling back to Marseilles. Ginger had made his way back from Cardiff to Rouen, from Rouen to Bordeaux, and he had taken ten days, he said, to walk from Bordeaux to Marseilles. Goosey left Bugsy at the factory, going away with a white fellow. He had wanted to go to Paris. He got as far as a town near Lyon, where he found a job as kitchen man in a hotel. But under the new law the proprietor could not keep him unless he could obtain French papers. There was an American consul in the town and Goosey went and asked his help in procuring the necessary papers. The consul was a colored man, but Goosey did not know it, because he was so near white. (It was Ray who told Goosey when he returned to Marseilles that the consul was Negroid, for he had read about him and seen his photograph in an American Negro publication.) The consul could not get the coveted papers for Goosey, and, faced with the fact that he could get nowhere without them, he returned to Marseilles. He was discouraged and became ill on the way back. Arriving at Marseilles, he had just enough strength to drag himself to the American consulate, from which he was sent to the hospital. He was placed in a ward below Banjo.

The turning of the weather was detrimental to the boys, whose scanty clothing was suitable for summer only. It also dampened their ever-bubbling gayety. But they all agreed that Marseilles was the most convenient port for them. The only one missing from the group was Bugsy. Nobody knew whether he had left the factory or was still there.

One Saturday, when Ray went to the hospital, Banjo told him that he expected to be operated on the next week. As Ray was leaving, Banjo asked him almost casually if he ever saw Chère Blanche. Ray said he had not seen her since he took her his message, because he did not pass frequently through Boody Lane, but he had heard that she was still in her box.

“What do you expect, Banjo? I told you to lay off her, because I knew she would treat you a second time just as she did the first. Those people in the Ditch⁠—they can’t afford to have a heart.”

“I knowed she was no angel,” said Banjo. “But as she done come and made up with me without me chasing after her a second time, she coulda leastways come and see me once. Is that theah Latnah still hanging around?”

“Yes, she is,” said Ray, “but everything is different, you know. The gang doesn’t hang together as we used to. And you know Latnah is mad at you. Would you like to see her?”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind befoh fixing mahself foh that cold steel business,” said Banjo.

“I’ll tell her,” Ray said.

Latnah went to see Banjo with flowers.

“Now ain’t this showing some’n’!” exclaimed Banjo. “The whole ward’ll think wese crazy. Everything comes heah. Eats and drink and the whole shooting family, but it’s the first time this place got gifted with flowers.”

They made up to each other.

“Quand on est malade, on ne garde pas la rancune,” said Latnah.

Banjo assented. “It’s a sure thing I ain’t making no preparation for the boneyard, for I jest ain’ta gwina die. But being as Ise gwineta get down and under the knife, it does make me feel better for all of us to be as we uster befoh. It was a bum business we getting mad at each other ovah a no-’count kelt.”

“It was no that made me angry,” said Latnah, “no she herself. I was mad when Bugsy tell me you like white more than colored and that you were so lucky getting money, and every time you get it you waste all with the white and don’t remember friends. And she after you again jest because you make a big raise⁠—”

“That Bugsy is the meanest monkey-chaser I evah seen,” cried Banjo. “Bugsy hate white folks like p’ison and all a them look the same to him without any difference. He got mad at me ’causen I done gived five francs to a poah hungry white kid. But all the stuff he been handing out about me is bull. Of cohse I know mah limentations and I know I kain’t nevah wear that there crown of glory as a pure-and-holy race saint. But I know what I is, what I feel, and what I loves, and I ain’t nevah yet foheget that Ise cullud and that cullud is cullud and white is some’n’ else.”

“I no could imagine you really love the white more than the colored,” said Latnah.

“Chuh! How could I evah love white moh’n colored?” cried Banjo. “White folks smell like laundry soap.”

And Banjo and Latnah laughed so contagiously that all the white patients in the ward joined them without suspecting in the least that they were laughing at themselves.